[BOAI] American Physical Society to Adopt Creative Commons Licensing

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from the American Physical Society.  --Peter Suber.]


American Physical Society to Adopt Creative Commons Licensing
and Publish Open Access Articles and Journals

Ridge, NY, 15 February 2011---As of 15 February 2011, authors
in most Physical Review journals have a new alternative: to pay
an article-processing charge whereby their accepted manuscripts
will be available barrier-free and open access on publication.
These manuscripts will be published under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY),
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, the most permissive of
the CC licenses, granting authors and others the right to copy,
distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper
credit is given. This new alternative is in addition to traditional
subscription-funded publication; authors may choose one or the
other for their accepted papers.

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs
and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700
for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical
Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear
alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting
these journals into 'hybrid' open access journals.

"The most selective of our journals must have higher article-processing
charges for their open access articles," said Gene Sprouse,
APS Editor in Chief. "Physical Review accepts about 60% of articles
submitted and Physical Review Letters roughly 25%, so the costs
are higher than in less selective journals."

Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need
for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription
price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals. "We'd
like to reduce the pressure on library subscriptions, while opening
access more widely. Article-processing charges are a means to accomplish
both," said Joseph Serene, APS Treasurer/Publisher.

Also as of 15 February, Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators
and Beams (PRST-AB) and Physical Review Special Topics - Physics
Education Research (PRST-PER) will have their full archives and all
future papers made available under the CC-BY license, thereby converting
both of these journals to 'gold' open access journals. PRST-PER's
publication-charge scheme has been realigned with the new program.
PRST-AB will continue to be funded by its sponsors. Finally, APS's
Free to Read program, http://publish.aps.org/FREETOREAD_FAQ.html,
will be phased out, and all of these papers covered by the CC-BY license.

These developments for existing APS journals follow the announcement
in January of a new journal, Physical Review X (PRX) http://prx.aps.org/,
an online-only, fully open access, primary research journal covering all of
physics
and its applications to related fields. As a .gold. open access journal,
PRX opened its doors wide to all fields of physics, including those that
have not conveniently fitted within the scope of our existing journals.

Contact: James W. Taylor, American Physical Society
james at aps.org, 631-591-4221


About APS: The American Physical Society (www.aps.org) is a non-profit
membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of
physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings,
and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities.  APS
represents 48,000 members, including physicists in academia, national
laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.
Society offices are located in College Park, MD (Headquarters),
Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC.
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