The Head of Open Science at CERN reflects on the first 10 years of the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics and unveils their latest innovation.
The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)—a collective action of over 3,000 libraries, funding agencies, and international organizations—marked its 10th consecutive year of operations in 2024. SCOAP3 works by pooling resources from participating institutions to pay publishers directly for making scientific articles freely available online. In its first decade, SCOAP3 funded the open publishing of over 70,000 research articles across 11 of the leading journals in high energy physics, the field that studies the fundamental particles and forces of our universe.
What makes this initiative remarkable, including its size and exceptional global scope, is that it has avoided the pitfalls of charging authors a fee to publish their work, known as an Article Processing Charge (APC). While APCs have driven much of the growth of open access publishing in the scholarship of the Global North, they have also created new financial barriers for researchers in under-resourced communities worldwide.
Instead, SCOAP3 is one of the few open access initiatives that has embodied the founding principles of the movement, and has transitioned research publishing across the discipline of high energy physics into a true global public good, eliminating financial barriers for readers and authors alike.
In 2025, this unique collective action is introducing another unprecedented innovation by placing participating journal publishers in competition with one another to deliver on key technical aspects that enable open science practices through financial incentives. As SCOAP3 embarks on its next phase, more than 20 years since the launch of the open access movement, this latest innovation has exciting potential to help shape a more equitable future for the communication of scientific results across disciplines.
Origins of the open access movement
Although the movement for free online scholarship emerged from a variety of grassroots efforts across the academic community (including arXiv), a 20-month period in 2002 and 2003 formalized the structure of the open access movement, with the launch of three initiatives and their related policy declarations. The “three Bs,” as they came to be known—Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin—all called for free and immediate access to the results of scholarly works.
The opening paragraph of the Budapest Open Access declaration, published in early 2002, powerfully invokes the potential of the world wide web (first conceived at CERN in 1989 and released into the public domain in 1993) to disrupt the commodified nature of scholarly publishing:
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds.
The notion that scholarly publishing would be commercialized would perhaps seem counterintuitive, or even distasteful, to those who are aware of the age-old mandate of academia to promote knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Indeed, the Mertonian norms of science would consider the monetizing of knowledge or its treatment as private property as being fundamentally at odds with the ethos of science, limiting the scientific enterprise and its potential contribution to society.
Yet the ‘3B’ declarations were a direct response to the alarming degree of commercialization of scholarly publishing that had become a dominant feature of scientific communication since the 1950s. While scientists conducted the research and their fellow scientists reviewed their manuscripts for free, they could not access the published articles unless their institution paid the journal’s subscription fees.
The age-old scholarly values of academia—that knowledge belongs in an intellectual commons—had become co-opted by a handful of commercial publishing houses whose excessive market power and strategies of corporate consolidation resulted in oligopolistic conditions, and reaped some of the highest profit margins across all industries. The profit-maximizing practices of commercial publishers resulted in a vicious cycle of increasing prices for academic institutions, straining library budgets and resulting in a ‘serials crisis.’
Recognizing an opportunity: The origins of SCOAP3
“Authors want the widest possible audience for their scientific publications,” explained Robert Aymar, CERN’s Director General from 2004 to 2008, while reflecting on the state of affairs at the time of the Budapest declaration. “To enable this, a global transition of the scholarly publishing model was needed and CERN was the only institution in our field to initiate such a change.”
Aymar was motivated, in part by the unprecedented opportunity recognized by open access advocates, to advance the fundamental principle enshrined in the CERN Convention that “the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.” This was particularly resonant in light of the massive public investments being made into CERN’s flagship instrument, the Large Hadron Collider. His vision was to leverage the international nature and collaborative spirit of experimental high energy physics to fundamentally transform publishing in the discipline.
Aymar provided the leadership and direction to develop a global collective action to achieve this goal and assembled a task force in 2006 consisting of experts, librarians, key disciplinary stakeholders, and open access advocates from across the world to devise and implement this envisioned transformation. The outcome of these deliberations marked the origins of SCOAP3 as the key implementing mechanism.
The fundamental premise of the program proposed by the task force was simple: redirect existing funds that libraries spent on subscriptions to key journals, channelling them into a central fund hosted by CERN that would pay publishers for open access publishing services. Libraries would no longer need to pay subscriptions, freeing up funds for continued reinvestment into the initiative’s central budget.
Simple as the premise was, the road to the launch of SCOAP3 was long and challenging. The strength of the model, built on large-scale international collaboration, required sustained investment and significant efforts from CERN staff (most notably the remarkably compelling physicist Salvatore Mele). They spent many years working to convince a sufficiently large number of participating institutions to divest from their subscriptions and invest instead in SCOAP3 to make its collective action economically viable.
The first 10 years: SCOAP3's launch, growth, and impact
Finally launched in 2014 with a group of institutions representing 22 countries, SCOAP3 has grown to include participants from over 45 countries.
The initial phases of SCOAP3 functioned on a ‘redirection of funds’ business model, as a collaboration between libraries, national funding agencies, and publishers of some of the leading high energy physics journals. Selected through a competitive tender process, this group represented the diversity of publishing outlets, including journals owned and operated by commercial publishers, scientific societies, university presses, and even born-open access journals.
By centrally paying these publishers for open access publishing services, SCOAP3 removed subscription fees for individual journals, enabled the free and open distribution of articles with the permissive licenses (CC-BY), and eliminated any expenses scientists might otherwise have incurred to publish their articles openly. This way, authors from anywhere in the world were able to publish in these journals without any financial burden and retain the copyright of their work.
In the years that followed, SCOAP3 evolved its contribution model, in part due to the growth of the collaboration and also the shifting dynamics of publishing in the field. Financial contributions to the SCOAP3 fund are now calculated using a ‘fair share’ principle, based on the proportional use of the SCOAP3 journals by a country’s authors as a vehicle for publishing their research.
In the 10 years since its launch, SCOAP3 effectively delivered on the promise of the open access movement. It covers over 90% of scientific articles in high energy physics and has transformed publishing in the field into a global public good. Within this field, a student in Nigeria, a professor in Peru, or an engineer in Vietnam now has similar access to cutting-edge physics research as someone at Harvard or Oxford—and researchers from less wealthy institutions can publish their findings without worrying about expensive fees.
Lingering obstacles to open access
Despite 20 years of efforts from research funders, libraries, international initiatives, and a handful of progressive non-profit publishers, open access publishing across disciplines has struggled to advance beyond 50% of new research articles.
The likely obstacle to further adoption remains the excessive market control exercised by commercial publishers. Indeed, closer examination of the open access market demonstrates that the commercial strategy of shifting fees from readers to authors through the charging of APCs (and treating research papers as commodities) dominates open access publishing.
Despite the laudable outcome of increased global dissemination of research, it is ironic that much of the progress of open access has been achieved through commodified approaches that arguably violate the fundamental premise of the movement itself.
Recent studies have found that the adoption of open access has not led to the predicted reduction in the overall cost of knowledge dissemination, as APC-based approaches have merely shifted the financial burden from readers to authors. Similar to the old subscription model, these approaches have been characterized by hyperinflationary pressures which effectively constitute a continued crisis of affordability for research libraries and academic institutions. For example, between 1984 and 2010, the US national inflation rate was 110 percent, while the average price of US academic journals increased by more than 700 percent.
A decade into its operations, despite being confined by its principal mission to ensure ongoing open access to research in high energy physics, the impacts of the SCOAP3 model have motivated experimentation in collective action for open access. It has been cited as the inspiration for numerous new collective endeavors, including the funder-led Plan S initiative, the Subscribe to Open model (premised on the repurposing of subscription relationships between libraries and publishers to pay for sustained open access publishing), and the Community Action Publishing Model of PLOS, amongst others.
SCOAP3’s latest innovation in open science
Not content to rest on its laurels, the SCOAP3 community is eager to demonstrate further innovation in scholarly publishing. As it had delivered on the open access transition for over a decade, the focus of the consortium shifted towards the broader movement of open science.
Recognizing the potential role that publishers could play in mediating and encouraging open science practices by researchers, SCOAP3 has introduced a revolutionary mechanism to financially incentivize participating publishers in the direction of broader open science adoption.
Commencing in 2025, SCOAP3’s new contracts include a financial incentive system in which participating publishers can earn up to 15% more—or lose up to 10% of their funding—based on how well they implement key open science practices. These annual assessments are designed to motivate publishers to improve the quality of the publishing service they provide to authors, and together to positively impact the adoption and ultimate transformation of research practice towards open science.
Publishers will be assessed on practices which include: using digital IDs for authors (ORCIDs) and institutions (RORs) to better track research contributions; enriched metadata delivery through Crossref; making the data and software behind publications available for verification; ensuring articles conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; and opening up the peer review process.
These largely technical elements will further be complemented by the SCOAP3 Community Values disclosures, which will score publishers on their open disclosure of core business practices related to activities including: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (across employees, editors, and authors); sustainability; data privacy; financial and publication transparency; and referee recognition.
As SCOAP3 looks to the future of scholarly publishing, it is committed to its mission of ensuring sustainable and equitable open access to research, and advancing the broader disciplinary goal of transforming to open science.
Although the model has admittedly failed to be replicated across disciplines—likely due to the lack of a single institution willing to invest in the organizing costs of building such a collective action as CERN did for SCOAP3—its impact in shaping the open access landscape remains undoubted. For instance, some governments are now starting to require that the research they fund be made open access. SCOAP3 intends to continue to apply its principal strength—the shared values of members of the collaboration—to positively impact the future of scholarly communications and to accelerate scientific progress, for the benefit of all.
Kamran Naim is Head of Open Science at CERN and a Director of the EOSC Association. A global expert in policy and practice, he's known for developing equitable open access models, managing international initiatives at CERN, and driving innovation at the intersection of science, education, and technology.
