“SCOAP3, [is] the CERN based project to transition the main
scientific journals in the field of high energy physics to a sustainable gold
open access (OA) business model.”
My question then is … why should
libraries contribute all of the publication costs required for gold open access?
Especially since high energy physicists (HEP) have a very long
history of freely providing access to their work, historically through paper
preprints and currently though the online arXiv preprint server. The
subsequent, and seemingly redundant, publication of ‘Gold
Open Access’ articles then becomes, what appears to be, an
expensive affectation … especially since arXiv is THE working platform for high
energy physics research.
The concept of SCOAP3 also seems especially ironic in that
libraries have already paid, over the years, a small fortune
to commercial journal publishers … largely
because of HEP author's desire to avoid society-published
journals’ very reasonable page charges. Now,
desirous of providing Gold Open Access, at the time of
publication, CERN expects library subscription funds to cover the expense
of peer-review, copy editing and electronic storage/distribution.
The fundamental flaw in
the SCOAP3 proposal is that subscription pricing of commercial journals seems to
bear little relationship to the cost of publication. This is exemplified by the following
comparison between two major HEP journals:
Journal --
2013 price – 2013 articles – 5 year Impact Factor
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Review D
(APS) -- $7,695 – 3,317 – 4.2
Nuclear Physics B
(Elsevier) -- $4,745
– 335 -- 3.7
========================================
Journal - 2013
Price/Article – 2013 Price/Article/IF
----------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Review D
(APS) -- $2.32 -- $0.55
Nuclear Physics B
(Elsevier) -- $14.16 -- $3.83
On the basis of the
price/article data… a reasonable subscription price (based on APS pricing) for
Elsevier’s Nuclear Physics B should be ~$777
Assuming that Elsevier’s
publication process is as efficient as that of the ACS … Elsevier is garnering
an excess profit of over 500% on this title.
Some additional thoughts ... from colleagues that are
familiar with the HEP community:
1. "The eprint is considered as the primary means of
scientific communication. Some senior scientists don't even seem to publish
their papers in journals anymore, they just leave them as eprints."
In this example, of papers in arXiv authored by Edward Whitten, 5
of the 9 papers dated 2011 and 2010 have not appeared as journal articles.
2. “Sometimes publishers replace citations to eprints with
citations to the published version of the paper, for completeness, but
scientists see them as interchangeable. Often-times the final version posted to
arXiv is the published version (at least as far as content goes)."
3. "I've seen enough Physics and Astrophysics seminars
to know that faculty provide links in their powerpoints to arXiv URL's and not
to the peer reviewed journal."
