The Information Futures Commission raised lots of questions about how the University of Melbourne wants to engage in public action and advocacy about Open Access and intellectual property.
Partly as a result of contacts we made via the boss’s US study tour, we can now announce that Australia has joined the SCOAP3 Open Access initiative that aims to make the top refereed journals of high-energy (particle) physics freely available to anybody who wants to read them.
Six of the Group of Eight universities have agreed to participate in the consortium: Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian National University. The Australian partnership will be coordinated by the University of Melbourne.
SCOAP3 members are high-energy physics funding agencies and laboratories, leading national and international libraries and library consortiums. They represent the USA, more than a dozen countries in Europe and the multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) — and, now, Australia.
With the accession of Australia, SCOAP3 has received pledges for one-third of its budget. Once it is fully subscribed, SCOAP3will make a tender offer to the current publishers of high-energy physics journals. The publishers would be guaranteed operating money to cover the cost of editorial work. In return, the publishers would make the journals freely available to the entire world.
With increasingly powerful IT and communication technologies, the pace of discovery in high-energy physics has increased immensely. Communication among researchers occurs mainly through arXiv.org, an Open Access repository of working papers and pre-print versions of articles. With arXiv, researchers can learn about new discoveries within 24 hours.
However, the top refereed journals remain essential to the scholarly communication process. The peer-review process helps to ensure the quality of published scholarly work. A small number of the journals are used in measuring research performance.
The SCOAP3 partners hope to ensure that the top peer-reviewed journals maintain their integrity while remaining financially viable.
Allowances are made for developing countries that are unable to pay their share.
Australia produces 0.6 per cent of high-energy physics articles, an amount that will be covered by the contributions of the six participating universities.
(This is a shortened version of the media release, which I also wrote. Thanks to media officer Rebecca Scott for helping to spread the word.)
- PhysOrg.com published the full article on 7 July 2008.
- Eigenfactor.org list of top physics journals, based on 2006 citation data.
