High-energy physics to become open access in three APS journals

High-energy physics continues to lead the physical sciences’ charge into open access. Beginning next year, high-energy-physics papers will be freely available, at no cost to authors, in three American Physical Society (APS) journals, including Physical Review Letters. The policy change is the result of a 27 April agreement between APS and the CERN-hosted Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³ ), which subsidizes publishing costs to make as much high-energy research as possible freely available.

SCOAP³ estimates that by adding Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C, and Physical Review D to its list of participating journals, nearly 90% of new peer-reviewed high-energy-physics literature will be open access through at least 2019. For its part, APS hopes that more authors will choose to submit their high-impact research to the Physical Review trio and that the open-access material will garner high numbers of reads, downloads, and citations. (See Physics Today, May 2017, page 24 .) “More people reading research is a good thing for the physics community and APS journals,” says APS publisher Matthew Salter. (APS is a member society of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today.)

Formally launched in 2014, SCOAP³ secures funding from CERN, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, and more than 3000 libraries, research institutions, and funding agencies in 44 countries. It strives to make publishing and data sharing easier for high-energy-physics researchers while also making papers more accessible to those who want to mine data or just keep up with the field. The consortium pays the author’s processing fee associated with any study that qualifies for the arXiv eprint server’s high-energy-physics (hep) subject area, whether theory, phenomenology, lattice, or experiment. Researchers submitted nearly 10 000 hep eprints to arXiv last year.

The new agreement was about five years in the making. APS had expressed interest in participating in the initial phase of SCOAP³ but withdrew its proposal in June 2013, just months before the launch of the initiative. “It’s been a goal to cover APS journals since the very beginning,” says Ivy Anderson, who chairs the SCOAP³ Governing Council. The ultimately successful round of negotiations took about eight months, Salter says; the financial details won’t be made public until the agreement takes effect on 1 January. The deal will be valid for the period covered by the current round of SCOAP³ funding, which runs through 2019. “Beyond that, we’ll be looking to see how it turns out for us,” Salter says.

Prior to the APS deal, SCOAP³ had agreements with Elsevier, Springer, and other publishers to subsidize open-access papers in eight journals , amounting to about 53% of high-energy-physics literature. The consortium had estimated it would spend €14.7 million (roughly $16 million) from 2017 to 2019 to publish 15 400 articles. That translates to about €950 per paper, although the deals vary in terms: SCOAP³ budgets about €1500 per study to publish 4200 papers in Elsevier’s Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B but only €765 per study to publish 9800 papers in Springer’s European Physical Journal C and Journal of High Energy Physics. The three newly covered APS journals publish about 2800 high-energy-physics papers per year, mostly in Physical Review D.

APS had previously at least partially embraced a foray into open-access publishing (see Physics Today, August 2007, page 29 ). It owns three fully open-access (or “gold,” in publishing lingo) journals: Physical Review X, Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, and Physical Review Physics Education Research. The society charges authors a $2900 article-processing fee for Physical Review X and $1900 for the education journal; industrial and institution sponsors prop up the accelerator journal. Authors can pay an additional fee to make their papers freely available in APS subscription journals—for Physical Review Letters, it’s $2900 on top of the standard $765 publication charge.

Now that it has finally reeled in the big fish, SCOAP³ is looking to secure a framework for keeping its open-access model humming in the long term, Anderson says. The consortium is also looking at expanding into related subfields such as instrumentation.