Scoap3 and open access publishing

Over the last twenty years, scientific publishing has been transformed from an academic enterprise-- one conducted more as a philanthropic and social endeavour-- into a lucrative business. Along the way, however, subscription costs have skyrocketed, and nearly everyone agrees that between the high cost of journals and the growth of online self-publishing, scientific publishing has to be reformed. Scoap3 is an experiment led by physicists to develop new methods of funding academic publishing. In Scoap3, rather than subscribe to journals individually, libraries pay into a nonprofit fund, which then redistributes the money to publishers who make journals available for free.

Several factors make high-energy physics an ideal field for this experiment. For one thing, it is a relatively small and tight-knit research area, where almost all major papers appear in just six journals. And the scientists are accustomed to teaming up on big projects and sharing facilities, like the Large Hadron Collider, the $10-billion atom smasher that recently opened at CERN.

 

High-energy physicists also boast a history of innovation in scholarly communications. It was a researcher at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web back in the 1990s as a way for colleagues to collaborate....

And for years, physics researchers have posted rough drafts of their papers in digital archives to quickly share their findings with colleagues. In that sense, they were pioneers of open access.

The popularity of those free drafts, called preprints, raises the question of whether the scientists need old-fashioned journals at all. An estimated 90 percent of findings in high-energy physics appear in digital preprint repositories like arXiv, a major international collection hosted by Cornell University. Some journals in the field even allow authors to post their final, edited papers in the archives free of charge.

But Mr. [Salvatore] Mele says journals still play a crucial role in the professional life of scientists, even though readership has declined. "We do not buy journals to read them, we buy journals to support them," he said. "They do something crucial, which is peer review."

Without journals, he asks, how would colleges evaluate the work of scientists to know whom to hire or whom to promote? And how would other scientists know which of the thousands of preprints contain the most important findings?

"What we are really paying for here is for a service of peer review," he said.

Both publishers and advocates of open access have expressed some skepticism at the plan, but its notable for two things: its effort to involve publishers in the development of a more sustainable system, and its incrementalism-- its willingess to build on the existing system of scientific publishing, rather than abandon the industry in favor of something completely new.