The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html Something like this

The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see, ten years from now, whether this model continues to be viable or whether the field will have adopted some entirely different mechanism for peer review. It appears that the articles will be published under CC-BY licenses. The definition of the affected articles is quite broad, too: "SCOAP^3 Articles are defined as either all articles appearing in journals mostly carrying High-Energy Physics content, or articles appearing in “broad band” journals which have been submitted by researchers to arXiv.org under the corresponding categories." The close integration with arXiv.org is pretty much essential for this to work, but I was still a bit surprised to see that arXiv categories are used as the defining feature of "particle physics content". (For those in the know, those categories are hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, and hep-lat.)