Outcome of the SCOAP3 for Books working group meeting

  • The original plan to find a single supplier for the transfer of all 78 selected books to OA was not successful.

  • The reason was the requirement of many of the contacted publishers to negotiate directly with CERN and not through intermediaries. The OBWG (Open Books Working Group) ran a second attempt in the form of the direct negotiations individual publishers.

  • Large publishers offered extensive lists of their e-books, while with regard to the small ones, it was only possible to negotiate with World Scientific.
     

The result is a list of 102 books at a promised price (meaning 24 additional titles) with an average price of EUR 3,583 per book permanently under an open license. Of these, 27 are from the original list and another 75 are different. We also enclose a summary report dated 3/5/2021 on the work done by the OBWG and the negotiating team at CERN.