The SCOAP3 initiative and the Open Access Article-Processing-Charge market: global partnership and competition improve value in the dissemination of science

The SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) initiative is an international partnership to convert to Open Access the published literature in the field of High-Energy Physics (HEP). It has been in operation since January 2014, and covers more than 4’000 articles/year. Originally initiated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and now counting partners representing 41 countries and 3 intergovernmental organizations, SCOAP3 has successfully converted to Open Access all, or part of, 6 HEP journals previously restricted to subscribers. It is also supporting publication of articles in 4 existing Open Access journals. As a “Gold” Open Access initiative, SCOAP3 pays Article Processing Charges (APCs), as publishers’ source of revenue for the publication service. Differentiating itself from other Open Access initiatives, SCOAP3 set APCs through a tendering process, correlating quality and price, at consistent conditions across participating publishers. The APCs determined by the SCOAP3 tendering process are compared with those charged in both Gold Open Access and hybrid markets, the latter referring to the piecemeal conversion to Open Access of individual articles in subscription journals. If the journals’ “Impact Factor” is used as a proxy for quality, the results indicate that the SCOAP3 APCs align with, or slightly improve upon, those of the service-based Gold Open Access journals. The SCOAP3 APCs vastly improve upon the price levels of what appears to be a less-functional hybrid publication market, in general and for the field of Physics in particular. The SCOAP3 tendering process included mechanisms to cap yearly expenditures in any single publishing outlet. By analysing the number of articles published in 2014-2015 (8,725 articles), the average APC effectively paid by SCOAP3 through its first two years is €1,100.