Open Access Publishing in High-Energy Physics: the SCOAP$^{3}$ model

The Open Access (OA) movement is gaining an increasing momentum: its goal is to grant anyone, anywhere and anytime free access to the results of publicly funded scientific research. The High- Energy Physics (HEP) community has pioneered OA for decades, through its widespread “pre-print culture”. After almost half a century of worldwide dissemination of pre-prints, in paper first and electronically later, OA journals are becoming the natural evolution of scholarly communication in HEP. Among other OA business models, the one based on a sponsoring consortium appears as the most viable option for a transition of the HEP peer-reviewed literature to OA. The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is proposed as a central body to remunerate publishers for their peer-review service, effectively replacing the “reader-pays” model of traditional subscriptions with an “author-side” funding, without any direct financial burden on individual authors and research groups. Sustainable funding to SCOAP3 would come from libraries, library consortia and HEP funding agencies through a re-direction of funds currently, and traditionally, spent for subscription to HEP journals. This article discusses the SCOAP3 model in details, from its origins in an analysis of the HEP publishing landscape to its current implementation.