Demystifying Open Access

Salvatore Mele

CERN

The tenets of Open Access are to grant anyone, anywhere and anytime free access to the results of scientific research.  HEP spearheaded the Open Access dissemination of scientific results with the mass mailing of preprints in the pre-WWW era and with the launch of the arXiv preprint system at the dawn of the '90s. The HEP community is now ready for a further push to Open Access which retains all the advantages of the peer-review system and, at the same time, brings the spiraling cost of journal subscriptions under control.  I will present a possible plan for the conversion to Open Access of  HEP peer-reviewed journals, through a consortium of HEP funding agencies, laboratories and libraries: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics).  SCOAP3 will engage with scientific publishers towards building a sustainable model for Open Access publishing, which is as transparent as possible for HEP authors.  In this talk I will present a short overview of the history of Open Access in HEP, the details of the SCOAP3 model and the outlook for its implementation.