With the participation of IReL, Ireland now becomes the 44th country in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), the world’s largest disciplinary open access (OA) initiative. Membership of the nationally funded e-resource licensing consortium in Ireland in SCOAP3 is welcome news for all high-energy physics researchers in Ireland, as it allows them to continue to publish OA in the sponsored journals, regardless of their institutional affiliation.
Professor Denjoe O’Connor, Director of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS), expressed the importance of Ireland’s inclusion in SCOAP3:
“DIAS is a strong supporter of open access to research. As one of the main Irish beneficiaries from open access publication in journals supported by SCOAP3 we welcome this support from IReL which complements our own institutional repository, DAIR, and our support for the preprint server arXiv.”
The inclusion of IReL into the SCOAP3 community was warmly welcomed by Alexander Kohls, Group Leader of the Scientific Information Service at CERN and member of the SCOAP3 Executive Committee:
“The foundation of the success of SCOAP3 is its collaborative approach. By working together with thousands of institutions across the globe the collaboration was able to flip almost all the journal literature in particle physics to Open Access. Having Irish institutions joining the collaboration strengthens further our partnership to address new challenges in a changing world of scholarly communication.”
Established in 2014, SCOAP3 is a partnership of 3,000 libraries, funding agencies, and research organizations from 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organizations. Since the outset of SCOAP3, over 20,000 scientists from 120 countries have benefited from the opportunity to publish more than 39,000 open access articles free of charge. The program has been cited as an inspiration for a range of efforts aiming to transition traditional scholarly publishing to OA, and in demonstrating the viability of collective approaches for achieving equitable and sustainable OA publishing. Through the collective effort of its members from around the world, and in partnership with publishers of the leading journals in the discipline, SCOAP3 has transitioned 90% of the research output in high-energy physics since 2014 to perpetual OA. 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 across the world.