SCOAP3 Open Access Initiative launched at CERN
Geneva 1 October 2012. Representatives from the science funding agencies and library communities of 29 countries are meeting at CERN today to launch the SCOAP32 Open Access initiative. Open Access revolutionizes the traditional scientific publishing model with scientific papers being made freely available to all, and publishers paid directly for their indispensable peer-review services to the community. "It is gratifying to see how the model of international collaboration in particle physics has been applied to addressing the important societal issue of open access to scientific information," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "I am proud that CERN has contributed to exploring win-win solutions to this issue, which is important to both scientists and science policy makers the world over." "It has been very much like working on a CERN experiment," added Salvatore Mele, head of Open Access at CERN, who has coordinated the initiative so far, "amazing collaboration from experts from all over the world, both volunteers from libraries and partners in the publishing industry, bringing together their different expertise and working together to build something never tried before." The objective of SCOAP3 is to grant unrestricted access to scientific articles appearing in scientific journals in the field of particle physics, which so far have only been available to scientists through certain university libraries, and generally unavailable to a wider public.
