More on the CERN plan to convert physics journals to OA

Jocelyn Kaiser, Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access, Science Magazine, September 1, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt:

Particle physicists have come up with a novel way to promote free, immediate access to journal articles. Led by CERN, the giant lab near Geneva, Switzerland, they want to raise at least $6 million a year to begin buying open access to all published papers in their field....

Some private biomedical funding groups, such as the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust, now pay the author fees required for their grantees to publish in open-access journals. CERN's announcement goes further, say observers. "Across a discipline is new," says Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, who closely follows open-access developments for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition....

To accomplish this goal, the [CERN] task force proposed that a consortium of labs and funding agencies pay publication costs for particle physics papers. It would cost $6 million or more a year to include all the journals willing to offer an open-access option, the group estimated. That would cover up to half of the 6000 or so original theory and experimental papers published each year.

The task force hopes to start with $3 million to implement the policy at a few major journals. The practice would begin with the first LHC [Large Hadron Collider] technical papers next year, says CERN's Rüdiger Voss.

Last week, the American Physical Society announced that a $975 to $1300 payment to its two main journals would make an article available to all readers (Science, 25 August, p. 1031). Elsevier, the other major particle physics publisher, recently announced an open-access option for $3000, an amount not included in the task force's cost estimate. CERN's plan to sponsor journals would not be permanent: "We see it primarily as a transition scenario," Voss says, after which funders would pay author fees for individual grantees.

Nearly all particle physicists already share preprints of their articles on free servers such as arXiv.org at Cornell University Library. Voss, however, argues that the final, vetted article is still what academia values most and that physicists are losing access as budget-strapped libraries cut back on journal subscriptions. Paul Ginsparg, who runs arXiv.org, adds that journals serve as stable, long-term archives and offer extras such as searching for related papers in other journals.

PS: See my blog comments on the CERN task force report.