SCOAP3

A new publishing model for High-Energy

Physics

Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, Jens Vigen

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research

scoap3.org

•About (scholarly communication in) HEP•The SCOAP3 model•Things are moving forward•What happens next?

High-Energy Physics (or Particle Physics)

High-Energy Physics (or Particle Physics)

Job description for 20’000-30’000 scientists:"What is the world made of?” & "What holds it

together?” HEP aims to understand how our Universe works:— discover the constituents of matter and energy— understand their interactions— unveil the ultimate texture of space and timeExperimental HEP builds the largest scientific instruments ever to reach energy densities close to the Big Bang (Half of the community, 20% of literature)

Theoretical HEP predicts and interprets the observed phenomena

(Half of the community, 80% of literature)

CERN: European Organization for Nuclear Research (since

1954)

CERN: European Organization for Nuclear Research (since

1954)• The world leading HEP laboratory, Geneva (CH)• 2500 staff (mostly engineers,administrators/services)

• 9000 users (physicists from 580 institutes in 85 countries)

• 3 Nobel prizes (Accelerators, Detectors, Discoveries)• Invented the web• Sept. 10, 2008: switched-on the 27-km (6bn€) LHC

accelerator, “the big-bang machine” (First articles in 2009)

• Director General and Director General Designate strong advocates of Open Access

• Runs a 1-million objects Digital Library

CERN Convention (1953): ante-litteram Open Access manifesto“… the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available”

Open Access:Open Access:Grant anybody, anywhere and Grant anybody, anywhere and

anytimeanytimeaccess to the (peer-reviewed)access to the (peer-reviewed)

results of (publicly-funded) results of (publicly-funded) researchresearch

arXiv, the archetypal subject repository

Discovery and first plateaus

Steady state & constant output

(Green) Open Access, second nature: posting to arXiv before even submitting to a journal is common practice

–No mandate, no debate, no advocacy. Author-benefit driven–Author-formatted peer-reviewed revisions routinely uploaded–All publishers allow self-archiving. APS hosts an arXiv mirror!

Conference contributions

Information discovery in HEPUser survey with over 2000 answers

91 % Community services 9% Google <0.1% Commercial services• 40 % Subject repositories• 51 % Lab-supported databases

Which HEP Information Systemdo you use the most?

6% for scholars > 6 career years22% for scholars < 2 career years

Gentil-Beccot et al. arxiv:0804.2701

Catalogue ofpreprints andpublished material.Given a choicebetween an arXivlink and a publisherwebsite, 80-90%of the times usersgo to arXiv.

HEP and its journals• Journals are on the way to lose (lost?) a century-old role as vehicles of

scholarly communication.• Still, evaluation of institutes and (young) researchers is based on high-

quality peer-reviewed journals.• The main role of journals is to assure high-quality peer-review and act as

keepers-of-the-records• The HEP community needs high-quality journals, our “interface with

officialdom”• Implicitly, the HEP community supports this role by purchasing

subscriptions, as ~80-90% reads only arXiv• Some subscription prices make the current model unsustainable, in HEP

and elsewhere • As an “all-arXiv discipline” HEP is at high risk to see its journal canceled

by large multidisciplinary university libraries (when not already happened)

The HEP publishing landscape

•5000-7000 HEP articles/year, according to definition of HEP•Practically all articles are available as arXiv OA pre/post-prints•90% of articles are in theory •80% of articles published in 6 leading journals by 4 publishers•62% of articles by not-for-profit (nor-for-loss) publishers

SCOAP3 is not limited to any set of journals but open to all high-quality HEP journals!

Source: SPIRES, 2006

US and European HEP journals

Study of 11326 HEP articles published in 2005-2006 in PRD,JHEP,PLB,NPB,EPJC,PRL and NIMA

Krause et al. CERN-OPEN-2007-014

OA solutions in HEP must be geographically global, as HEP research is a global endeavor

Evolving publication habits Source: SPIRES

Phases of stability alternated with fast growth/decline

N.B. Only articles which appeared in the six largest HEP journals are considered.

HEP and Open Access

After preprints, arXiv and the web,

Open Access journalsare the natural evolution of

HEP scholarly communication

A strong request from the scientists"We strongly encourage the usage of electronic publishing methods for our publications and support the principles of Open Access Publishing, which includes granting free access of our publications to all. Furthermore, we encourage all our members to publish papers in easily accessible journals, following the principles of the Open Access Paradigm."

ATLAS; approved on 23rd February 2007CMS; approved on 2nd March 2007ALICE; approved on 9th March 2007LHCb; approved on 12th March 2007

4 experimental groups

7000 scientistsfrom 54 countries

Open Access business models in HEP

Hybrid model: Per-article OA fee on top of subscriptions– Negligible success in HEP. Author FAQ: why pay something (peer-

review) you can get for free (the library pays subscriptions)

SPONSOREDARTICLE

Author-pays: No subscriptions. Authors (institutions) pay per-article journals processing fees– Model in its infancy in HEP. Author FAQ: why pay something you

can get for free elsewhere (the library pays subscriptions)

Institutional membership: for a (small) fee in addition to subscriptions, all articles with at least one author from the institution are OA– Leading laboratories (LHC) and the entire France trying this scheme.– Authors like OA without financial barriers in high-IF journals

(<<1%)

(<<1%)

(~4%)

(and percentage of HEP literature)

The SCOAP3 modelSponsoring Consortium for Open Access

Publishing in Particle Physics

Going beyond current experiments

http://scoap3.org/files/Scoap3ExecutiveSummary.pdf http://scoap3.org/files/Scoap3WPReport.pdf

scoap3.org

The SCOAP3 ModelA consortium sponsors HEP publications and makes

them Open Access by re-directing subscription money.

• Five “core” journals: PRD, JHEP, PLB, NPB, EPJC–Carry a majority of HEP content: aim to convert entirely to Open Access

• Two “broadband” journal: PRL, NIM –10% & 25% HEP: conversion to Open Access of this fraction

• Other, lower-volume, high-quality HEP journals–conversion to Open Access of the HEP content

Today: (funding bodies through) libraries purchase journal subscriptions to (indirectly) support the peer-review service and to allow their users to read articles.

Tomorrow: funding bodies and libraries contribute to the SCOAP3 consortium, which pays centrally for the organization of the peer-review service, through a call for tender. Articles are free to read for everyone.

SCOAP3 is not limited to any set of journals but open to all high-quality HEP journals!

Novelties of the SCOAP3 model• A sustainable alternative to the subscription model meeting

the expectations of researchers, funding agencies, libraries and publishers.

• Link, through its call for tender, price and quality. Correlate through its contracts volume and price. This is not the case in the subscription model.

• Eliminate author-pays fees, in competition with research funds which appear as a barrier for Open Access in HEP. There is no such competition in the SCOAP3 model based on re-direction of subscriptions.

• Experiment for journal-administered peer-review services against a unique background of complete self-archiving of research articles.

Guesstimating the budget envelope

• Physical Review D (APS) income of 2.7M€/year (31% of arXiv:hep)

• Journal of High Energy Physics (SISSA/IOP) needs ~1M€/year (19% of arXiv:hep)

HEP Open Access price tag: 10M€/year

Other ways to estimate the budget envelope• A published PRD article costs APS ~1500€ • Volume of “HEP” articles: 5000-7000/year

(data and exchange rate of April ‘07)

The final price-tag for SCOAP3 will be known after a call for tender for the peer-review and other editorial services will be placed with

publishers

SCOAP3 financingSCOAP3 to be funded through a “fair-share” model based on the fraction of HEP articles per country: the more a country uses the system the larger its share. Figures are very stable over time.

Allowing only SCOAP3 partners to publish Open Access would replicate the subscription scheme and not solve

the problems.

Make a 10% allowance for developing countries who at the beginning might not contribute to the scheme.

The model is viable only if every country is on board!

Success through consensus and unanimity,

not majority. Not a weakness: a

strength!

Krause et al. CERN-OPEN-2007-014

SCOAP3 funding mechanisms• Funding partners identify country-by-country

schemes to re-direct journal subscriptions to SCOAP3

• Countries pledge their contribution to SCOAP3

— Countries with centralised structures for licensing join through their national consortium

— Countries where subscriptions are paid by HEP funding agencies join through these agencies

— In the decentralised U.S. scenario single institutional and consortial partners join SCOAP3 directly

• Pledges conditional to contractual conditions with publishers in line with the SCOAP3 objectives (unbundling, Open Access, author rights...)

• Broad worldwide consensus, signified by the pledges, indispensable before the next phase can commence

Status of the SCOAP3 fund-raising56% of funds have been or are about to be pledged

by library consortia, HEP funding agencies, national

libraries

2020

Discussions and negotiations in progress with all countries not yet in the list, in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

AustriaBelgiumCERNDenmarkFranceGermanyGreeceHungary

ItalyNetherlandsNorwayRomaniaSlovakiaSwedenSwitzerlandJISC (UK)

47 US partners (>50%)

-consortia(NERL,CDL,GWLA,OhioLink...)-laboratories-individual libraries

TurkeyAustralia

0.8M€

4.8M€

4.4M€

A slide from Berlin5, Sept. ‘07

In one year...•From 4 to 18 countries•From 1/4 to 1/2 of the budget envelope•From Europe to America, Australasia and Middle East

Meanwhile, other things happened• While waiting for SCOAP3 to become operational publishers offer free OA!

– Springer: experimental HEP articles in Eur. Phys. Jour. C– EPS: HEP articles in Europhys. Lett.– Elsevier: HEP articles from the LHC– (In addition, SISSA/IOPp institutional membership implies 20% HEP is OA)

• Seminal articles describing construction of LHC are published OA in SISSA/IOPp Journal of Instrumentation– 7 articles/1600 pages/8000 authors. Large-scale OA publishing operation– 60’000+ downloads from journal site in two months!

• 3000-scientists CMS collaboration at LHC votes to “privilege SCOAP3-friendly journals” for its articles

• European Commission negotiating SOAP (Study of OA Publishing)

– CERN, Max Planck Digital Library, UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, BioMed Central, Sage, Springer

– Study OA business models and perform a comprehensive survey of OA attitudes of researchers across all disciplines.

– Understand potential of sustainable forms of OA Publishing– (Job opening at http://tinyurl.com/SOAP-CERN)

SCOAP3 timeline• Funding partners identify country-by-country schemes to re-

direct journal subscriptions to SCOAP3 and pledge their contribution to SCOAP3

• Once a sizeable fraction of budget is pledged, reflecting the worldwide character of HEP and SCOAP3:

— SCOAP3 will be formally established, with international governance

— SCOAP3 can issue a tender to publishers

• Publishers answer the tender agreeing to:— Journal licence packages are un-bundled, the OA titles are removed and

subscription prices are reduced accordingly— In the case of long-term subscription contracts, publishers will be

required to reimburse subscription costs pertaining to OA journals

• SCOAP3 international governing board adjudicates contracts, taking into account journal quality and prices

• Contracts with publisher are signed and funds are transferred to SCOAP3 which then pays publishers.

• Aim to 3-year tendering cycle, with funding commitments in sliding windows

Thank you!

Salvatore.Mele@cern.chscoap3.org

Additional resources:Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party

http://scoap3.org/files/Scoap3WPReport.pdf

R. Heuer et al. Innovation in Scholarly Communication: Vision and Projects from High-Energy Physics

http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.2739

R. Aymar, Scholarly communication in High-Energy Physicshttp://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1115073

A. Gentil-Beccot et al. Information Resources in High-Energy Physics: Surveying the Present Landscape and Charting the Future Course

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2701

Job opening: Study of Open Access Publishing http://tinyurl.com/SOAP-CERN