After the great success of supporting more than 35,000 articles Open Access, SCOAP3 is expanding the scope of the initiative to include books.
Since its start in 2014, SCOAP3 has successfully supported the publication of more than 35,000 articles open access across 11 of the world’s leading journals in the discipline. Thanks to the support from more than 3,000 partner libraries, research institutes and funding agencies from 43 countries, SCOAP3, has largely met its primary objective to convert all of the scientific articles in High-Energy Physics to OA.
Similar to the journal initiative, the partnership now wants to use the collective power of the SCOAP3 community to decrease the costs incurred by the key users of these texts by transitioning the content to open and enabling global free accessibility.
After a thorough analysis performed by a community working group, established by the SCOAP3 Governing Council, a pilot was initiated for the transition of an initial set of existing books and monographs to open access.
The SCOAP3 for Books pilot aims to facilitate the conversion to open access of relevant existing books and monographs, such as university-level textbooks in HEP and related disciplines like instrumentation, detector engineering and accelerator physics. Open availability of these books will empower students, researchers, and faculty members at institutions across the world (including members of the general public) to benefit from full access to these important texts.
The SCOAP3 Open Books Working Group has identified a list of 78 relevant titles and has tasked CERN with the procurement process to identify a service provider that can facilitate the conversion of these books to Open Access. Titles, that are not yet available in a electronic format, will be digitized as part of this initiative. The results of the procurement process are expected to be available later in summer 2020 and the first books are expected to be available open access at the beginning of 2021.