SCOAP3 and Access to Scientific Literature
Posted: December 8th, 2007, by Joseph J. EspositoI have been following the developments of SCOAP3 , which is one of the more enterprising organizations in the Open Access world. SCOAP3, an acronym for Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (which actually presents the “3″ as an exponent; very clever), is attempting to make all research publishing Open Access by switching from a user-pays to an author-pays model. But see SCOAP3’s claims for yourself at the link above.
I was somewhat startled, however, to stumble upon this comment in support of SCOAP3, which appeared on the popular liblicense listserv:
Of course SCOAP3 would also benefit non-contributing institutions and the general public.
As a member of the general public, I want to thank the people and institutions behind SCOAP3 for working to make research articles in high energy physics available to me. I look forward to similar initiatives from the brain surgeons and rocket scientists.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
As I understand it, it’s not actually an “author pays” model (which *is* the model that some open access and pay-to-access journals use) but a “major library consortia and funders pay” model. After one of the SCOAP3 folks visited our library, I wrote up a post with more details on the funding scheme as I understood it. You can find it at
http://everybodyslibraries.com/2007/11/29/turning-an-entire-field-open-access/
As another member of the general public who’s also not a high energy physicist but who is scientifically literate, I’d add that I do expect to see some benefit for these papers. To take one example, I often find that reports of scientific papers in the press and other popular media are often rather different from what the papers actually say. Being able to look at the actual papers can make it easier for me and others to determine the actual nature, reliability and impact of the research featured in the media stories.