ASERL Supports SCOAP3

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (of which UK is a member) has passed a resolution supporting SCOAP3. SCOAP3 is a consortium supporting the open access of publishing in particle physics. SCOAP3 is an initiative by the high energy physicists themselves (HEP) to change the way scholarly information is made available. Here’s a brief excerpt from their web site at http://scoap3.org/

To address this situation for HEP and, as an experiment, Science at large, a new model for OA publishing has emerged: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). In this model, HEP funding agencies and libraries, which today purchase journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, federate to explicitly cover its cost, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their articles OA.

You can see the ASERL resolution on the ASERL web site at http://www.aserl.org/documents/2008_Spring_Mtg/SCOAP3_Resolution.pdf