SCOAP3 Governing Council meeting December 11th 2015
The SCOAP3 Governing Council held its fifth meeting at CERN on December 11th 2015 attended by 34 delegates (and 5 observers) representing all geographical regions.
The Governing Council heard reports from the Operations team and all committees, and in particular took note of the publication of ~8,500 articles in the first two years of SCOAP3, by 20,000 authors from 95 countries, for an average cost-per-article of 1,103 Euros. The majority of the meeting was dedicated to the preparation of the continuation of SCOAP3 for its second 3-year cycle (2017-2019).
Following the mandate from the fourth SCOAP3 Governing Council of June 2015, and after having sought and received approval by the CERN Finance Committee, the CERN SCOAP3 team with the support of the SCOAP3 Executive Committee entered into discussions with all participating publishers to mutually agree on the conditions for three-year contract extensions.
The SCOAP3 Governing Council reviewed all of the financial conditions and unanimously agreed on the outcome of all but one of the publisher discussions. The Governing Council mandated CERN, in its role as the SCOAP3 host organization, to prepare contracts with those publishers with which agreement had been reached. After a careful analysis of possible consequences, the Governing Council tasked CERN to conclude the last open discussion in a timely manner.
After a review of budget scenarios, all SCOAP3 partners reaffirmed their commitment in principle to the continuation of SCOAP3 for its second 3-year cycle through 2019 and agreed on the next steps for the detailed determination of the financial envelope and individual contributions of partners.
Additional matters such as exploring opportunities to extent SCOAP3 to other journals and publishers were deferred until after the completion of the contractual formalities for the extension of the present contracts.
