Bulgaria is the latest country to join the world’s largest disciplinary open access (OA) program, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). With the inclusion of Bulgaria, the SCOAP3 partnership now includes 45 countries, which through concerted collective action, have achieved full and equitable open access to research in particle physics.
Prof. D.Sc. Habil Georgi Rainovski, the Dean of the Faculty of Physics from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, expressed the importance of Bulgaria’s inclusion in SCOAP3:
The Bulgarian particle and nuclear physics community is relatively small but active and vital. To keep this vitality, open access to top journals is of utmost importance. I still remember the past times when getting access to the most recent publications required a real effort. By joining SCOAP3, we hope that young Bulgarian physicists will never face such problems and will be the main beneficiaries of open access.
The accession of Bulgaria into the SCOAP3 community was warmly welcomed by Joachim Mnich, Director for Research and Computing at CERN:
Using the model of a strong international partnership, SCOAP3 has effectively removed barriers in scholarly communication for particle physicists from around the world. The accession of Bulgaria as the 45th country supporting SCOAP3 demonstrates that the values of SCOAP3 are appealing, and the international collaboration continues to grow for the benefit of particle physics.
3,000 libraries, funding agencies, and research organizations from 45 nations and 3 international organizations now comprise the 2014-founded collaboration known as SCOAP3. More than 20,000 scientists from 120 nations have published more than 53,000 publications fully open access and without any author-facing charges since the start of SCOAP3.
The program has served as an inspiration for a variety of initiatives aimed at converting traditional scholarly publishing to open access and illustrating the potential of collective action for attaining equitable and long-term OA. 90% of the yearly high-energy physics research output is converted to permanent open access, thanks to the combined efforts of SCOAP3‘s members from all over the world and partnerships with publishers of the field’s top journals.
Launched in 2014 and hosted at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), SCOAP3 centrally funds OA for articles across 11 journals, enabling free global readership and re-use for high energy physics research and barrier-free publishing (i.e. without Author Processing Charges, APCs) for authors from around the globe.