KEK, the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, has issued a statement of support for SCOAP3:

KEK strongly supports the spirit of the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing) project for its comprehensive approach to Open Access, taking into considerations that the price of journals has been rising and stays at the very expensive standard, so that the universities and institutes face difficulty to secure the budget for subscriptions. KEK endorses the role of journals as the possible place of the publication for variety of researchers in many areas of the world, various generations of researchers and variety of scientific ideas.

Based on this course, KEK has been striving to consolidate the publication system of the Japanese physical journals toward the full open access. It is crucial for KEK to make an alliance with CERN for paving the way of new paradigms for the distribution of the knowledge of physics, and for opening to the SCOAP3 initiative.

The support of the Japanese physics community for SCOAP3 is very important, giving the initiative a truly global flavour across Asia, America and Europe.

Researchers worldwide support this initiative, and the first results of the LHC experiments are already appearing Open Access and under Creative Common licenses in leading journals in the field (see here and here).