SCOAP3 Open Access Initiative kicks off in January 2014

On December 5, CERN confirmed the launch of the SCOAP3 Open Access initiative on January 1, 2014. A vast number of scientific articles in the field of particle physics will be made available on an open access basis, at no cost to the authors: everyone will be able to access these articles; the authors will have reserved their copyright and licenses will be applied that will allow the wide reuse of all the information. SCOAP is the result of intensive preparations and consensus-building with the support of partners in 24 countries, including Portugal, represented by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

Based at CERN, this is the largest open access initiative ever created on a global scale and involves international collaboration between more than a thousand libraries, library consortia and research organizations. The SCOAP3 project has the support of funding agencies and was established in cooperation with the main scientific publishers, namely Elsevier, IOP Publishing and Springer. In order to boost results, subscription fees have been reduced for thousands of participating libraries around the world, making it possible to provide funds for these libraries to support SCOAP3.

Portugal is represented in the SCOAP3 consortium by the FCCN, the FCT unit responsible for two national initiatives in the field of scientific information, the Portuguese Open Access Scientific Repository - RCAAP and the Online Knowledge Library - b-on.

The main objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles published in scientific journals, which until now would only have been accessible to scientists, in certain university libraries and, in general, not available to the general public. For two decades, the open dissemination of preliminary information, in the form ofpeer-reviewed published articles, has been the norm in High Energy Physics and other related fields. The SCOAP3 project extends this sharing opportunity and makes it possible to extend a high-quality peer-review service, making it possible to make the final version of articles available, within the principles of Open Access and the free dissemination of science, without neglecting authors' intellectual property rights, as well as general access for the reuse of content. In the SCOAP3 model, adhering libraries and funding agencies pool resources currently used to underwrite scientific journals to directly support the peer review system, in cooperation with publishers.

The SCOAP3 initiative hopes to establish new partnerships in the Asia-Pacific, Americas, Europe, Africa and Middle East regions, where scientists will certainly be able to enjoy the advantages of Open Access and many libraries and library consortia will be able to benefit from reductions in subscription costs.