Barbara Ancarani(Production Editor) et al 2008 EPL 81 20000 doi:10.1209/0295-5075/81/20000
and Barbara Ancarani(Production Editor) and Catherine Brassac(Production Editor) and Frédéric Burr(Acting Staff Editor) and Volker Dose(Editor-in-Chief) and Caroline King(Product Manager) and Graeme Watt(Executive Editor)
In May 2007 the EPLA Board of Directors welcomed the CERN initiative for the creation of a Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) and agreed to enter into negotiations to enable high energy physics papers to be published in EPL with selective open access.
At a subsequent meeting in August 2007, the Board decided to offer substantial initial discount while open access remained a small fraction of the content of EPL. A necessary precursor to negotiation with SCOAP3 is a general open access policy. The Directors agreed that this policy should offer a free-to-read option for all authors in all sections of EPL and so provide fair opportunities across the broad range of physics covered by EPL. The policy for the journal should allow individual authors, their institutions, funding agencies or sponsoring consortia to pay for published articles to be freely available to all, permanently.
The Board stressed the importance of maintaining EPL as a refereed journal with robust and reliable content, in contrast to a repository or preprint server. EPL would remain a subscription journal for content that is not free to read and authors, institutions or funding agencies may choose to pay for their articles to be open access.
As an initial step in this open access venture, a single-article fee of € 1000 ($ 1330) can now be paid by individuals who choose to have their article published free to all. This pricing, which is substantially discounted, ensures that EPL remains competitive with other similar journals. EPL will continue to ensure this policy is sustainable although the journal must remain financially viable and the pricing scheme will be under continual review.
At this stage we welcome enquires concerning an institutional membership fee that would allow that institute to pay in advance for open access publications in EPL for authors from that institute. The fee would follow a band structure, based on the number of articles that institute expects to publish over the coming year.
Meanwhile we would like to thank all Authors for their submissions, all Referees for their reviews, all Co-Editors for their editorial processing throughout 2007 and we look forward to developing and expanding EPL activities during 2008.
Please visit the website regularly (http://www.epljournal.org) to remain up-to-date with the latest developments with EPL and to read the most recently published articles. Remember all articles are already free to read for 30 days from their online publication date.
If you have comments or questions about changes taking place in 2008, please e-mail us at info@epljournal.org or editorial.office@epletters.net.
With our best wishes for 2008!
Issue 2 ( 1 January 2008)
Received 19 December 2007, accepted for publication 19 December 2007
Published 21 December 2007
Barbara Ancarani(Production Editor) et al 2008 EPL 81 20000
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M. Siarkowski et al 2009 ApJ 705 L143
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