Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#2They should drop the "Consortium" from the name. It's cleaner.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#3It seems to be a really good step towards breaking away from the current journal publishing monopoly which makes access to cutting edge research so expensive. I hope other branches of science adopt this as well.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#4It seems to be a really good step towards breaking away from the current journal publishing monopoly which makes access to cutting edge research so expensive. I hope other branches of science adopt this as well.
Not just science, it would be good to see open-access across all fields.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#5I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system?
I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#6The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html
Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see, ten years from now, whether this model continues to be viable or whether the field will have adopted some entirely different mechanism for peer review.
It appears that the articles will be published under CC-BY licenses. The definition of the affected articles is quite broad, too: "SCOAP^3 Articles are defined as either all articles appearing in journals mostly carrying High-Energy Physics content, or articles appearing in “broad band” journals which have been submitted by researchers to arXiv.org under the corresponding categories."
The close integration with arXiv.org is pretty much essential for this to work, but I was still a bit surprised to see that arXiv categories are used as the defining feature of "particle physics content". (For those in the know, those categories are hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, and hep-lat.)
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#7I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system? I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
The value in this sort of compromise is that it's relatively painless to existing systems. You won't need to explain a whole new peer review system to a tenure committee, you won't need to radically restructure your grant spending, libraries pay more or less the same costs, and the journals get more or less the same revenue. The only difference is that now, your results are free for everyone to read (and not just in preprint form).
We'll have to wait and see whether this model turns out to be the first step in a gradual transition or a stopgap solution until a radically different approach to peer review becomes accepted. I for one am excited to find out.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#8I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system? I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send out submissions for peer review as usual.
Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees, existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#9The hacker way extends beyond computing.
Re: Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing
#10The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see, ten years from…
If the openness is increasing the number of citations of the articles in open journals it will affect the impact factors of the other journals and may force them to switch to open access later. I am really interested in the results as I have strictly now ideas in which way it will go. Are the non open high impact journals going to stay at the top?