2014 is the year for open access - 10 peer-reviewed journals opening their doors

12/05/2013 - 00:00

At the start of the new year, about 60 percent of the scientific articles in the field of high-energy physics will become freely available online as part of the largest-scale global open-access initiative ever built.

Thanks to a CERN-based publishing initiative called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, or SCOAP3, articles from 10 peer-reviewed journals will be available online; authors will retain their copyrights; and new licenses will enable wide re-use of content.

Before SCOAP3, peer-reviewed articles published in these scientific journals were available to scientists only through certain university libraries, which paid for the privilege of providing them. These articles were generally unavailable to the wider public—though websites like Cornell University’s arXiv.org provided the public access to preprints, versions of the articles completed before peer review.