The APS Board of Directors voted on April 23 to enter into an agreement with the European high-energy physics laboratory CERN to participate in the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3).

Convened and managed by CERN, the SCOAP3 consortium was launched in 2014 and pools journal subscription fees for high-energy physics papers and then pays publishers to make articles open access at no cost to authors.

APS is the world’s largest publisher of peer-reviewed high-energy physics articles and the arrangement will greatly expand the content available through the SCOAP3 initiative.

“APS has long supported the principles of open access to the benefit of the scientific enterprise,” said APS CEO Kate Kirby in a joint statement released by APS and CERN. “As a nonprofit society publisher and the largest international publisher of high-energy physics content, APS has chosen to participate in the SCOAP3 initiative in support of this community.”

The agreement covers three journals published by APS – Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Physical Review C. Under this agreement, which starts January 1, 2018, authors of articles will bear no direct cost to publish articles open access with the Creative Commons CC-BY license in these APS journals.

“APS is happy that joining the SCOAP3 consortium will make APS’s high-quality articles in high-energy physics available to an even wider audience and marks an important step forward in open access publishing at APS” said APS Publisher Matthew Salter.

"I welcome this new partnership between APS and CERN as a timely and significant step that will greatly benefit scientific communication,” said APS Editor in Chief Pierre Meystre. “And on a personal level, I am also thrilled that this agreement is between two world-class organizations, one based in my country of origin and the other in my adopted country."

The SCOAP3 consortium includes over 3,000 libraries and research institutes. In the traditional model, libraries and other subscribers pay publishers for access to journal articles. Under the SCOAP3 system, the consortium would collect funds directly from subscriber institutions and then make payments to publishers based on number of articles published as open access papers. This allows high-energy physics papers to be published open access at no direct cost to authors.

“We at APS are delighted to have entered into the SCOAP3 agreement,” said 2017 APS President Laura Greene. “As open access is certainly the wave of the future, it is exciting to join in with CERN in leading the way.“

Read the associated APS press release