Nearly All Particle Physics Research To Be Open Access 27
ananyo writes with great news for particle physicists and those interested in the field everywhere: "The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers. Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles. After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access and the contracts will be renegotiated in 2016. The idea of all this maneuvering is to minimize the hassle for the scientists themselves and ensure that every paper is open access. The alternative is the 'author pays' model, where the researchers pay to publish. But that would require all authors to comply — a difficult rule to enforce. The new deal, however, also preserves publishers' profits — for now."
All in all this is a good thing, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
... it strikes me as unnecessarily playing ball with the journal publishers. I'd rather see OA simply enforced by the funding agencies. In my field, bioinformatics, the bulk of the funding in the US and UK comes from four sources: NIH (US government), MRC (UK government), HHMI (US private foundation), and Wellcome Trust (UK private foundation). All of them have open access policies for publications prepared with their money, and they don't much care how you do it: you can post the article in a public repository regardless of how it was published, publish in an OA journal--for which the funding agency will generally pay the publication fee--or publish in a traditional journal and make sure the publisher makes a copy freely available. You can bet the publishers grumble about that last one, but they've mostly gone along with the requirement, because the alternative is saying "we won't publish papers describing research funded by ___," and if they did that they'd cease to exist.
They don't have to give up profit (Score:4, Informative)
Open access journals like BioMed Central, PLoS, Oxford's OA journals, etc. all prove a OA business model can be successful (and profitable) if structured well.
Also by charging authors ~$1k per publication. But keep in mind that subscription fee journals typically charge hundreds of dollars for color and extra pages (e.g. most IEEE Transactions journals charges $300 per page over 8).