ARL Releases "The Audacity of SCOAP3" Preprint

The Association of Research Libraries has released a preprint of Ivy Anderson's article "The Audacity of SCOAP³." Anderson is the Director of Collections, California Digital Library.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SCOAP³ is a new model for scholarly communication proposed by a community of scientists. Physicists interested in expanding access to their literature have designed a novel approach to garner support from individual libraries, library consortia, research institutions, and even nation states to turn a core set of journals in the high energy physics discipline into open access publications.

The project principals have estimated that the total amount of money currently spent by the library community on these titles worldwide is about $15M US. They estimate that the US commitment to make the publications open access would be $4.5M. The plan involves providing a financial base of support by creating a consortium of institutions that would “redirect” the money they currently pay for subscription access to support open access publication.

On February 29, 2008, the University of California, Berkeley, hosted a meeting for the US community during which the SCOAP³ model was described and organizers reported on financial commitments received to date. Anderson’s essay was inspired largely by the discussions at that meeting.

In her essay, Anderson discusses three key elements that distinguish SCOAP³ from other open access initiatives:

• SCOAP³ is a funding consortium that seeks to mediate between author and publisher, while still conceiving of payment as a supply-side activity.

• SCOAP³ is non-disruptive to authors—and to a substantial degree, to publishers and societies.

• SCOAP³ has the potential to fundamentally alter the role of libraries in the publishing process.

Anderson encourages “everyone interested in the grand experiment of open access [OA] publishing, whether pro or con, [to] sit up and take notice of this audacious new OA accelerator that is SCOAP³.” She also calls for “all libraries who envision a future in which academic libraries assume new roles in building and supporting the research cyberinfrastructure, or who seek to advance the convergence of libraries and academic publishing, [to] join the experiment and boldly accelerate its findings.”

Accompanying Anderson’s essay is a brief article by Julia Blixrud, Assistant Executive Director, External Relations, ARL, and Assistant Director, Public Programs, SPARC, presenting four steps that libraries and consortia can take to move SCOAP³ forward.

See the ARL Web site for the preprint essay by Ivy Anderson, “The Audacity of SCOAP³,” and article by Julia Blixrud, “Taking Action on SCOAP³,” ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 257 (April 2008), http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br257.shtml. This issue of the Bimonthly Report will be in print by mid-April.

Slides and videos of the presentations given at the February 29 meeting in Berkeley are available on the SCOAP³ Web site http://www.scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html.