The relatively small and specialized international scholarly community of high energy physics (HEP) is leading the way to the ‘gold’ model of open access (OA). With the leadership and substantial support of CERN, the community's Geneva-based hub, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) has created an innovative model for OA publishing. Whereas the journal subscriptions of today implicitly support the important process of peer review, the new model federates funding agencies and libraries to cover journals' professional publication costs explicitly, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their articles OA. Each SCOAP3 partner will finance its contribution by canceling journal subscriptions, and each country will contribute according to its share of HEP publishing. The project is now embarked on a complex finessing process on the route to the projected 2014 launch.