Since its start in 2014, SCOAP3 has supported the Open Access publication of almost 13,000 articles in 10 journals. With the first three-years cycle of SCOAP3 drawing to an end, and the successful extension of the initiative for at least three more years, we can now start assessing the impact and the longer-term trends.
The four largest journals participating in SCOAP3, two published by Elsevier and two by SpringerNature in partnership with the Italian Physical Society (SIF), and the Italian Institute for Advanced Studies (SISSA) have now analysed their logs to understand the impact of SCOAP3.
Elsevier announced that downloads to their two journals, Physics Letters B and Nuclear Physics B have doubled since they became Open Access at the start of SCOAP3 in January 2014. This increase is remarkable as SCOAP3 covers the most recent 3,500 articles in the journals, while most of the historic content of over 77,000 articles, is available to subscribers.
SpringerNature announced that since January 2014 they have observed a doubling of downloads across their two learned-society journals participating in SCOAP3: European Physical Journal C and the Journal of High Energy Physics.
SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics, comprises 3’000 libraries, funding agencies and research organisations from 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organizations. In cooperation with leading scientific publishers and learned societies, the initiative has supported the transition to Open Access of key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics. 20,000 scientists from 100 countries benefit from this opportunity to publish Open Access articles free of charge. Anyone, anywhere, can access the final version of these articles, both on the publisher’s’ web sites, or on repositories which, thanks to permissive CC-BY licenses, host copies and allow text and data-mining. Hosted at CERN under the oversight of a worldwide participative governance, SCOAP3 is mostly financed by libraries which re-direct funds previously used for subscriptions to support Open Access, in partnership with some funding agencies in research-intensive countries.