SCOAP3 Focal Meeting at UC Berkeley

["Ivy Anderson" <Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu>]

Colleagues,

This message has been posted to multiple lists - please excuse 
any duplication.

The University of California at Berkeley and the California 
Digital Library are co-hosting a meeting on SCOAP3 at Berkeley on 
February 29th, 2008.  We hope that many of our U.S. colleagues 
will be able to attend to discuss this burgeoning initiative in 
greater depth.  We look forward to seeing you there!

Best,

Ivy Anderson
Director of Collections
California Digital Library


SCOAP3 US Focal Meeting: Making Open Access happen.
February 29th 2008 (9am-4pm)
University of California at Berkeley
Register at:  http://scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html
Contact for more information:  focalmeeting@scoap3.org

The debate on Open Access raves on but stays, in many quarters, 
just a debate. The High-Energy Physics community, which gave us 
the web and arXiv, is now pushing forward with an Open Access 
model that goes beyond the present, controversial, proposals. 
This new model is called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open 
Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). In the SCOAP3 
model, libraries federate to explicitly cover the costs of 
peer-review, through a re-direction of their current 
subscriptions, rather than implicitly supporting peer- review via 
journal subscriptions, as in the present system.  Rather than 
selling subscriptions, journals will then charge for the peer- 
review service and make the electronic versions of their journals 
free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their 
articles Open Access. SCOAP3 will negotiate with major publishers 
in the field the price of their peer review services through a 
tendering process. Journals converted to Open Access will be 
decoupled from package licenses.

A report describing the SCOAP3 initiative is available at 
http://www.scoap3.org/files/Scoap3WPReport.pdf and an executive 
summary is at 
http://www.scoap3.org/files/Scoap3ExecutiveSummary.pdf. Further 
details on the initiative are also available at http://scoap3.org

SCOAP3 has the potential to enable medium-and long-term cost 
savings for research universities and laboratories. The 
consortium is rapidly gaining momentum: in a few months, many 
European countries have expressed their interest in joining and 
many more are expected to follow suit in the coming months, with 
more and more awareness rising in Asia. About a third of the 
required budget envelope has already been pledged. But without 
broad consensus and involvement from the leading US libraries and 
library consortia, SCOAP3 cannot happen.

Therefore, we would like to invite you to a US SCOAP3 focal 
meeting at the University of California at Berkeley on February 
29, 2008.

This is an opportunity for individual libraries and library 
consortia to learn more about this unique initiative.  The goal 
of this event is to explain the SCOAP3 model objectives and 
implementation and to bring together our insight and experience 
to understand how a re- direction of subscriptions toward SCOAP3 
might be achieved.

The FAQ at http://scoap3.org/us_faq.html is a good place to start 
to learn more about SCOAP3. A list of libraries in the U.S. that 
have already pledged to re-direct their subscription funds can be 
found http://scoap3.org/scoap3us.html.

The program of the event and related information are posted at 
http:// scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html

The workshop will run on a single day, February 29th 2008, from 
9am to 4pm

- Morning:

     o Welcome
     o What is Open Access, anyhow
     o A voice from a scientist
     o The SCOAP3 model

     Coffee break

     o Recent developments:
       * Collecting European funds for SCOAP3
       * US consortia in SCOAP3
       * Individual US libraries and SCOAP3

     o OA synergies: Repositories for High Energy Physics

- Lunch break

- Afternoon:

    o Breakout sessions:
       * Breakout session I : US consortia and SCOAP3
       * Breakout session II : US individual libraries and SCOAP3

    Coffee break

    o Making SCOAP3 happen: reports from breakout sessions, charting the
way

Register online at: http://scoap3.org/focalmeeting.html and 
contact focalmeeting@scoap3.org for further information.

***