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An interesting alternative model for open access publishing for the High Energy Physics journals has emerged in the past years in a project led by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) that attempts to make the current research openly accessible in this field.

CERN was the leader since the 50s, when the first pre-print repository was established at the headquarters of the European organisation. The repository gathered working papers and reports submitted to CERN by authors from institutions across the world.

Now, a new project, called SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is trying to come up with a new model for the entire High Energy Physics (HEP) literature to open access. The model might be easier to implement taking into consideration that basically just six peer-reviewed journals publish the majority of HEP articles. In this new model the publisher's subscription income from multiple institutions would be replaced by income from a single financial partner the SCOAP3 . Each SCOAP partner will finance its contribution by cancelling journal subscriptions and each country will contribute according to its share of HEP publishing.

SCOAP3 is a consortium composed of high-energy physics funding agencies, high-energy physics laboratories and leading national and international libraries and library consortia. In the beginning of 2009 SCOAP3 announced that the major part of the European countries have agreed to participate, so did 44 US partners, Turkey, Israel and Australia. In less than one year and a half, SCOAP3 has received pledges for 49.5% of its budget.

Formal discussion with the publishers have not officially started, but all major publishers show a pro-active attitude of great support to Open Access in HEP.

Project Underway To Convert High Energy Physics Literature To Open Access (5.01.2009)
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1388

SCOAP3 Funding status report (12.12.2008)
http://www.scoap3.org/news/news54.html

SCOAP3: Funding status report for ICOLC Munich (11.2008)
http://www.charlestonco.com/index.php?do=Press+Room&pg=pr_details&...

About SCOAP3
http://www.scoap3.org/about.html

Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics (3.06.2007)
http://www.scoap3.org/files/Scoap3ExecutiveSummary.pdf