SCOAP3 at ten: from open access to open science

A flagship CERN open science programme - the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) - celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024. It is a one-of-a-kind partnership between CERN and more than 3000 libraries, funding bodies, research institutes and intergovernmental organisations from across the world who, through collective action, have transformed research publishing in the discipline to make it open access, without any fees for readers or authors.

Having sustained this service as a global public good for a decade, SCOAP³ now aims to foster the general advancement of open science. To this end, it has introduced a new Open Science Mechanism, which will financially incentivise participating publishers based on their adoption of open-science practices. The mechanism will begin in January 2025, coinciding with the start of the fourth phase of SCOAP³.

"By incentivising publishers, who play a key role in interfacing with researchers, we aim not only to improve the quality of their publishing services, but also to advance the community's adoption of open-science practices," says Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science at CERN. "This will help foster accelerated, efficient, reproducible and transparent research in particle physics."

The Open Science Mechanism will assess the performance of publishers in delivering certain open-science-related elements in their publishing workflows, such as adopting persistent identifiers (ORCiDs and RORs) for authors and institutions; improving the availability of linked data and software related to research articles; enriching article metadata for enhanced discoverability; improving accessibility and encouraging the adoption of open peer review practices. Publishers will further be incentivised to disclose their efforts on matters related to sustainability, data privacy, financial transparency and diversity, equity and inclusion. These will be made publicly available on the SCOAP³ website.

Over the last ten years, SCOAP³ has established barrier-free open-access publishing as the disciplinary norm, and has almost doubled in size to include supporters from almost fifty countries. It has centrally funded the open-access publishing of more than 70 000 articles across 11 leading particle physics journals, and is also the principal mechanism by means of which CERN's researchers comply with the CERN Open Access Policy, automatically funding around 50% of the Organization's research publications.

In recent years, SCOAP³ has expanded the scope of its efforts to support the availability of more than 100 relevant open-access textbooks and monographs through an ongoing books initiative. "SCOAP³ has grown significantly in both size and scope over the past decade," continues Naim. "As any collective action is only as strong as its base of support, we hope to see the SCOAP³ community grow further in the coming years with the addition of new members across non-participating CERN Member States, Associate Member States and beyond."

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