APS to Join Phase III of SCOAP3 in 2020

The SCOAP³ consortium was first launched in 2014 and pools journal subscription fees for high-energy physics papers, then compensates publishers to make articles open access at no cost to authors. APS joined SCOAP³ in January 2018, and to date over 4,400 HEP articles have already been published in APS journals under the initiative.

The new agreement signed earlier this year extends APS’s commitment to the SCOAP³ initiative for a further three years covering the period from 2020–2022. This means that all HEP papers published in three APS journals—Physical Review Letters, Physical Review C, and Physical Review D—will continue to be made available open access with a CC-BY license immediately upon publication without the need for authors to pay any costs.

In order to qualify for publication under the SCOAP³ initiative, articles appearing in one of the three participating APS journals must have been posted as a preprint on arXiv in one of the four primary 'hep' categories at the time of publication.

Announcing the Society’s commitment to a further three years scheduled participation in the scheme, APS Publisher Matthew Salter said “APS's continued involvement in the SCOAP³ initiative aligns with our objective of thriving in an increasingly open access environment as outlined in the APS Strategic Plan 2019 and reaffirms our commitment to offering a range of publishing options for the research community in the Physical Review journals."

APS Editor in Chief Michael Thoennessen also expressed his approval of the development. "This is very good news for the Physical Review journals and the high-energy physics community. Participating in Phase III of SCOAP³ demonstrates APS's ongoing commitment to this community and to our mission to support the research community and advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," he said.

2019 APS President David Gross, a world leading theoretical physicist and 2004 Physics Nobel Laureate, welcomed the announcement. “I am delighted that APS will be continuing its participation in SCOAP³ as it moves into its next phase,” he said. “APS is the largest international publisher of high-energy physics research and this move is a strong signal of APS’s support for this community and also for the principles of open access.”

For more information on the APS journals, visit journals.aps.org. Additional information about SCOAP³ can be found at scoap3.org.