The Governing Council (GC) of the SCOAP3 Collaboration–the world’s largest disciplinary open access initiative—held its annual meeting on November 09th-10th 2022.
The hybrid meeting included a total of 48 participants (representing around 95% of eligible voting members) from across the collaboration, who met over the course of two days to discuss major strategic issues for SCOAP3 as it seeks to advance its mission to provide open access to the research literature in particle physics, at no financial burden to authors.
The meeting of the 2022 GC was focused on reviewing and discussing proposals from the two Working Groups tasked with developing strategies around two core activities for the Consortium, namely: the proposed strategy for Phase 4 of the program as presented by the Second SCOAP3 Tender Working Group (2STWG); and the plan to establish a regular annual books program by the Open Books Working Group (OBWG).
Throughout the year 2022, the 2STWG has been working on developing a strategy for a future 4th phase of SCOAP3. A particular focus of this group has been to bring about improvements in the services delivered by publishers to the High Energy Particle Physics research community, as well as supporting innovation in scholarly communication in the discipline. The related motions of the 2STWG were unanimously approved by the SCOAP3 Governing Council.
The OBWG reported on the progress of the SCOAP3 for Books pilot program, which is in the process of converting 113 books (monographs and textbooks) in High Energy Particle Physics to Open Access, supported by voluntary contributions from SCOAP3 members. The books are systematically made available through both the publisher platforms, as well as through a dedicated collection on the OAPEN library. The success of the pilot was demonstrated by a preliminary usage analysis indicating an increase of book downloads by a factor of 13, while the geographical usage also increased dramatically, with readers accessing content in 48 countries (compared to in 26 prior to conversion). Building on this, the OBWG recommended that SCOAP3 for Books be established as a recurring annual activity of the SCOAP3 collaboration. Moving forward, this program would prioritize frontlist titles selected through a rigorous selection process. The proposal by the OBWG was also approved by the SCOAP3 GC.
During the 2022 meeting specific motions were voted upon relating to the governing entities of SCOAP3. Judith Ludwig from the Technische Informationsbibliothek (Germany) was elected for her second 2-year term, and Yan Zhao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences elected to her third 2-year term, as members of the SCOAP3 Executive Committee. The Chair of the SCOAP3 Governing Council, Clare Appavoo of CRKN (Canada) thanked Matt Marsteller from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) who completed three full terms as ExCo member, for his strong and enthusiastic engagement and ambassadorship from which the SCOAP3 collaboration benefited immensely since his election in 2017. Mary Schlembach from the University of Illinois (USA) was appointed as replacement for Matt and is warmly welcomed as a member of the SCOAP3 Executive Committee for a 2-year term.