The University of Münster joined the SCOAP3 consortium [de] (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) at the beginning of 2014. This is a worldwide association of libraries and scientists with the aim of making scientific publications in high-energy physics (HEP) freely accessible. The project is coordinated by CERN.

All articles in ten high-energy physics journals are freely available under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) as of publication. Authors of the University of Münster do not pay publication fees for articles in these journals.

Flat rate assumption of costs

For subsequent journals, the SCOAP3 Consortium will cover article processing fees:

• Advances in High Energy Physics (Hindawi)
• European Physical Journal C (Springer / Società Italiana di Fisica)
• Journal of High Energy Physics (Springer / SISSA)
• Nuclear Physics B (Elsevier)
• Physics Letters B  (Elsevier)

Conditional coverage of costs

Publication fees for the following journals, that are only proportionately articles from the HEP category, will be covered if the following requirements are met:

• Acta Physica Polonica B  (Jagiellonian University)
• Chinese Physics C (Institute of Physics Publishing / Chinese Academy of Sciences)
• Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics  (Institute of Physics Publishing / SISSA)
• New Journal of Physics  (Institute of Physics Publishing / Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft)
• Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Oxford University Press / Physical Society of Japan)

Requirements

SCOAP3 will only cover costs if the article is posted to arXiv in the main "HEP" category before it is submitted to the publisher, which means:

• before the articles (to be covered by SCOAP3) are sent to the journals/publishers, they must be uploaded in one of the arXiv categories mentioned below, otherwise they cannot be paid by SCOAP3
  • High Energy Physics - Experiment
  • High Energy Physics - Theory
  • High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
  • High Energy Physics - Lattice
• it must be the main category "HEP"; cross-references are not sufficient