On Wednesday afternoon I attended a meeting about SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). The event was mainly attended by librarians, although there were a couple of real researchers present as well (this was a shame – it would have been nice to see more people from the HEP research community there.

SCOAP3 is an attempt to experiment with an alternative model for peer-reviewed publication, specifically in the area of High Energy Physics (HEP). Essentially the core of the model is that we (the community) should pay for the ‘value added’ parts of the publication process – specifically the peer-review service, while dispenses with the traditional model of ‘journal subscriptions. The idea is that publishers could tender for the business of supplying the peer-review service, and that the money currently spent on subscriptions would be redirected via SCOAP3 to pay for this.

The reason for choosing HEP as a starting point is that it is a small community, already much given to collaboration, and 80% of HEP research is published in just 6 journals – so only a very small set of publications to deal with. Also, 90% of HEP research is already available OA via repositories (mainly arXiv I guess), and this is how most researchers access the research. Finally, HEP has a long history of depending on pre-prints – circulating printed copies of pre-prints at the expense of the community well before OA (or possibly even the Internet) was thought of. So in fact, the existing journals really are basically a way of ensuring peer-review still happens, much more than being a primary means of distributing research.

The meeting was essentially a set of presentations from those involved in SCOAP3 (including Prof. Ken Peach, Jens Vigen and Salvatore Mele) – all the presenters came across as enthusiastic and committed.

At the moment what SCOAP3 is looking for is ‘expressions of interest’ from the libraries/institutions who currently subscribe to the relevant HEP publications. In the longer term, these libraries/institutions will be asked to redirect their expenditure from the journal subs, to SCOAP3, who will in turn pay the relevant publishers to provide the peer review service. This is all hung round with caveats – it has to be affordable (i.e. not cost more than the current model), libraries would have to get money back where HEP journals are part of ‘big deals’ so that they can redirect the expenditure etc.

The presentations were followed by some discussion, but this was a bit circular because essentially I think everyone can see there are all kinds of potential problems and what-ifs, but all SCOAP3 are looking for at the moment is for the interested parties to say ‘hmm, sounds interesting, and if you can pull it off we’ll give it a go’

Probably the main concern raised in the discussion was sustainability. Specifically, if you don’t charge for either publication or access, what is to stop institutions deciding that they don’t want to contribute to the peer-review costs? There was definite feeling from some present that the libraries would find themselves pressured into cutting these payments to save money – essentially leaving a smaller pool of institutions to cover the costs of the peer-review process. To be honest it seems to me that they could almost certainly already do this (and maybe some places have?), as with 90% of the research in arXiv or other repositories, and the claims that this is how most researchers access it, paying for a subscription to the journal is actually just a way of keeping the whole thing going. However, there is no doubt that making this explicit raises the likelihood that someone will say ‘why are we paying for this’?

The next stage is for SCOAP3 to contact the librarians at the relevant institutions with a request they sign an ‘expression of interest’ – I suspect this is really not an issue. Despite the fact there were many questions about the model and how it would work at the moment the level of committment SCOAP3 is looking for is really very low.

Imperial College is very interested, and there is no doubt we will be signing an ‘expression of interest’. We’ll just have to see what happens after that. Once SCOAP3 has managed to get expressions of interest from the relevant parties (and they still have a little way to go on this – the biggest thing being the meeting in the USA next month), it can start the process of issuing a tender to publishers – this is the only way the actual cost can be established.

Overall SCOAP3 is an exciting initiative – it was referred to several times during the day as an ‘experiment’ – and I think this is right. Of course, experiments don’t always turn out how you hope – but you always learn something…