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Australia has joined SCOAP3, an international consortium that aims to provide free access to major particle physics journals world-wide.
Six of the Group of Eight universities in Australia have agreed to participate in the consortium: Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian National University. The Australian partnership will be coordinated by the University of Melbourne.
"Australian universities have a long history of collaboration to provide the advanced scholarly information infrastructure required to support research and innovation," said Melbourne's Vice-Principal (Information) and CIO, Linda O'Brien.
SCOAP3 members are high-energy physics funding agencies and laboratories, leading national and international libraries and library consortiums. They represent the USA, 12 countries in Europe and the multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) -- and, now, Australia.
With increasingly powerful IT and communication technologies, the pace of discovery in high-energy physics has increased immensely. Communication among researchers occurs mainly through arXiv.org, an Open Access repository of working papers and pre-print versions of articles. With arXiv, researchers can learn about new discoveries within 24 hours.

However, the top refereed journals remain essential to the scholarly communication process. The peer-review process helps to ensure the quality of published scholarly work. A small number of the journals are used in measuring research performance.
The SCOAP3partners hope to ensure that the top peer-reviewed journals maintain their integrity while remaining financially viable.