SCOAP3

Quoting from a recent interview [ SCOAP3 Lifts Off: An Interview with Ann Okerson)  http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/02/14/scoap3-lifts-off-an-interview-with-ann-okerson/  ]:

“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

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Physical Review D (APS)   --  $7,695 – 3,317 – 4.2

Nuclear Physics B (Elsevier)   --  $4,745   –  335  -- 3.7

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Journal  -  2013 Price/Article – 2013 Price/Article/IF

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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." 

See: https://inspirehep.net/search?p=exactauthor%3AE.Witten.1

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."