Unintended consequences of RCUK policy mean that if academics want open access publishing, publishers are happy to sell it to them, writes Stevan Harnad. He argues that researchers should not have to choose gold publishing when green open access is available.

Suppose you’re a subscription journal publisher. Offering a Hybrid (Subscription/Gold) Open Access (OA) option means you keep selling subscriptions just as before, but, on top of that, you charge (whatever you like) as an extra fee for selling Gold OA, for a single article, to any author who agrees to pay extra for it.

How much do you charge for this option? It’s up to you. For example, if you publish 100 articles per year and your total annual revenue is £X, you can charge 1 per cent of £X per article for hybrid Gold OA . Once you’ve got that for 1per cent of your articles (plus your unaltered subscription revenue of £X) you’ve earned £X + 1per cent for that year. Good business. 

And now –  thanks to the Finch committee recommendations and the revised RCUK OA policy – in the UK, which publishes 6 per cent of the world’s research yearly, 6 per cent of journal articles will be fee-based hybrid Gold OA. That means that worldwide publisher revenue – let’s say it’s £XXX per year – will increase: from £XXX per year to £XXX + 6 per cent per year at the UK tax-payers’ (and UK research’s) expense. Not bad.

Publishers are not too dense to do the above arithmetic. They’ve already done it. That is what hybrid Gold is predicated upon. And that is why publishers are so pleased with Finch/RCUK: “The world purports to want OA? Fine. We’re ready to sell it to them – on top of what we’re selling them already.” 

In the UK, Finch and RCUK have obligingly eliminated hybrid Gold OA’s only real competition: Green OA self-archiving, in which authors make their final, peer-reviewed drafts OA by depositing them in their own institution’s repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. Finch has done so by downgrading self-archiving to digital preservation rather than access provision and diverting scarce research funds to paying publishers for Gold. And RCUK has proposed to require its fundees to pay for Gold –  rather than to provide cost-free Green – whenever their publisher has the sense to offer hybrid Gold.

Of course, publishers will say (and sometimes even mean it) that they are not really trying to inflate their already ample income even further. As the uptake of hybrid Gold increases, they will proportionately lower the cost of subscriptions – until subscriptions are gone, and all that’s left, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, is Gold OA revenue (now no longer hybrid but “pure”) – and at the same bloated payment levels as today’s subscriptions.

So what? The goal, after all, was always OA, not Green OA or Gold OA or saving money on subscriptions. Who cares if all that money is being wasted? I don’t. 

I care about all the time (and with it all the OA usage and impact and research progress) that has been lost for so many years already, and that will continue to be lost, if the ill-informed, short-sighted and profligate Finch/RCUK policy prevails instead of being (easily) corrected.

Uncorrected, both global OA growth and precious time will continue to be wasted. The joint thrall of Gold Fever (the belief that “OA” means “Gold OA,” together with an irresistible desire to have Gold OA now, no matter what the cost, come what may) and Rights Rapture (the irresistible desire for certain further re-use rights, over and above free online access, even though only a few fields need them, whereas all fields urgently need — and lack — free online access) keeps the research community from mandating the cost-free Green OA that is already fully within their reach and would bring them 100 per cent OA globally in next to no time. Instead, they are left chasing along the CC-BY ways after gold dust year upon year, at unaffordable, unnecessary, unsustainable and unscalable extra cost.

How to rescue RCUK.
There is still hope that RCUK will have the sense and integrity to recognize its mistake, once the unintended negative consequences are pointed out, and will promptly correct it. The current RCUK policy can still be made workable with two simple patches, to prevent publisher-imposed embargoes on Green OA from being used to force authors to pay for hybrid Gold OA. 

RCUK should:
(1) Drop the implication that if a journal offers both Green and Gold, then RCUK fundees must pick Gold
and
(2) Urge but do not require that the Green option must fall within the allowable embargo interval. (The deposit of the refereed final draft would still have to be done immediately upon publication, but the repository’s “email-eprint-request” Button could be used to tide over user needs by providing “Almost-OA” during the embargo.)

That way RCUK fundees (i) must all deposit immediately (no exceptions), (ii) must make the deposit Green OA immediately or as soon as possible and (not or) (iii) may pay for Gold OA (if the money is available and the author wishes).

 

Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

Related posts:

1. What about the authors who can’t pay? Why the government’s embrace of gold open access isn’t something to celebrate
2. The Finch Report illustrates the new strategy wars of open access
3. Elsevier, the Research Works Act and Open Access: where to now?
4. The Finch Report on open access: it’s complicated
5. Digital visibility is king but what colour is our Open Access future?

In the art world, the dealer’s brand often becomes a substitute for aesthetic judgement. Mark Carrigan wonders if it the same could be said of academia; does inclusion in a prestigious journal become a substitute for, and act as a reinforcement of, intellectual judgement?  

In a recent book economist Don Thompson explores the crucial role that branding has in the contemporary art market. With the market skewed by an influx of the ultra-rich seeking something to do with their money, a strange dynamic emerges. As the author was told by a former specialist at Sotheby’s auction house, you should;

“never underestimate how insecure buyers are about contemporary art, and how much they always need reassurance”.

This widely recognised, though little discussed, characteristic of the contemporary art world massively expands the power of brand name auction house, galleries and collectors. The obscenely wealthy but time-poor rely on such brands to guarantee the virtues of the art they invest in, assuaging the insecurities about their purchases which are only sustained because “they are not willing to spend the time required to educate themselves to the point of overcoming insecurity”.

For instance, as the author observes, “Larry Gagosian’s clients can simply substitute his judgement or that of his gallery for their own, and purchase whatever is being shown”.

How different is this from the prestige conferred upon an academic publication by its inclusion within a well-respected journal? Simply denigrating the lack of taste shown by ultra-wealthy art collectors misses the point. Unless one wishes to descend into facile subjectivism (or conversely argue that his corporate operation indelibly corrupts his aesthetic judgements) it stands to reason that Gagosian’s judgements do function, as well as pretty much anyone’s could, as a cypher for distinction. It’s perfectly possible some complete crap occasionally finds its way into his galleries but, in terms of the unavoidably intersubjective normative standards which prevail at a given point in time (and which everyone must engage with even if they reject them) his judgements will tend to point to high quality work. Similarly, rigorous blind peer-review, conducted by a pool of top academics, within the traditions of a long-standing and well respected journal will tend to identify high quality papers. In both cases the additional competition which prestige generates, as many try to occupy a space which can only hold a few, entrenches this capacity to bestow a perceived distinction.

In both cases the task of filtering, sorting a range of cultural products in terms of their quality, takes place through bureaucratic processes. Particular institutions become able to invest cultural products with the feel of quality, a process which sits elusively between genuine normativity and contingent power, tending towards success in its aims but also shaping the wider social context within which such ‘success’ can be judged. Within the art world ”the dealer brand often becomes a substitute for, and certainly is a reinforcement of, aesthetic judgement“.

Is it the case that within the academic world, inclusion in a prestigious journal becomes a substitute for, and certainly is a reinforcement of, intellectual judgement? As a thought-experiment: how would academic life differ if these status hierarchies weren’t available to help us navigate the knowledge system? How would we respond? I suspect that activities which are already everyday features of the academic world (particularly dialogue and debate within communities of practice) would take on a newfound importance. What else would be different? Answers on the back of a postcard please.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

This blog was originally posted on Mark Carrigan’s personal blog, Sociological Imagination. Readers can now find the first part of this discussion on the Sociology @Warwick blog.

Related posts:

1. There is a pathetic lack of functionality in scholarly publishing. We must end for-profit publishing and allow libraries to make available the works of their scholars for all
2. Open educational resources such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare are changing the way universities make impact and engage with the world
3. Open access is not enough; we must learn how to communicate our research to make it truly accessible
4. Neither our current publishing models nor reliance on the tooth fairy will support academia in the digital world: we must consider logical solutions to fund digital scholarship
5. Continual publishing across journals, blogs and social media maximises impact by increasing the size of the ‘academic footprint’.

Open access publishing is growing increasinly important so the Peer Project has built an observatory to investigate potential effects of a major switch to open access models. Julia Wallace finds that the scholarly web is a complex environment where author self-deposit rates are likely to be low and usage scenarios for green open access are more complex than generally acknowledged.  

Supported by the EC eContentplus programme, the PEER project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) built an observatory to investigate the potential effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts, so called Green Open Access. Over 18,000 manuscripts were made available in participating repositories, matching with the versions of records on the publisher platforms. Earlier this week, the final reports from the PEER Project were made publicly available.

The experience of building the infrastructure for the project was instructive in highlighting technical challenges and resulted in the creation of the PEER Depot, a central processing hub and ‘dark archive’ to help resolve many issue including:  

• The non-uniformity of publisher outputs at acceptance stage and the varying requirements of repositories (file formats / metadata schemas/ metadata elements)
• The filtering of content for EU authors and research articles
• The lack of accurate embargo management mechanisms at repositories (embargoes were managed at the PEER Depot)

The challenges of author authentication of non-local authors by repositories also led to the creation of a centralised author deposit system linked to the PEER Depot. Despite explicit invitations to deposit, author self-deposit rates were very low within PEER (<2% response), so the project relied on obtaining the critical mass of accepted manuscripts needed via participating publishers. 

Running in parallel with the creation of the infrastructure, three separate research studies were commissioned:

• Behavioural Research: Investigation of authors’ attitudes towards Green OA and user behaviour, undertaken by Loughborough University, Department of Information Science and LISU.
• Economics Research: Case studies of cost drivers and costs structures at publishers and repositories, undertaken by Bocconi University, Centre for Arts, Science and Culture,
• Usage Research: Examination of logfiles at publishers and repositories for usage trends, based on a critical mass of Green OA content , undertaken by CIBER Research Ltd.

Among the findings reported by the Behavioural research team was that ‘academic researchers do not desire fundamental changes in the way research is currently disseminated and published.’
Researchers who associated Open Access with ‘self-archiving’ were in the minority (although this varies by discipline) and while the team found that authors tended to be favourable to Open Access, they do not want the pivotal role of the published journal article to be compromised. Readers have concerns about the authority of article content and citability when the version they have accessed is not the published final version. Overall, repositories are perceived by researchers as complementary to, rather than replacing, current forums for disseminating and publishing research.

Through a series of case studies, the Economics team explored costs drivers for publishers and repositories.
Cost ranges for peer review (which has no economies of scale); production activities and platform maintenance costs were obtained for publishers. They also found that repositories may have large sunk costs that are not accounted. They also anticipate that publishers (subscription and Open Access) and repositories will increasingly be affected by ‘sustainability and competition for resources and reputation’.

The Usage Research within PEER also provided a number of interesting observations, but since the PEER Observatory was at an early stage when the usage logfiles were obtained, the results are likely to be atypical of many longer established green repositories:

• During the period 1 March – 31 Aug 2011 measured usage at PEER repositories was 11.5 per cent of publisher use (but varies between publishers in the range 2 per cent to 24 per cent).
• A Randomised Controlled Trial indicates that making preprints visible in PEER repositories is associated with more traffic to the publisher sites at the aggregate level, but this varies by publisher and subject. Overall, PEER is associated with a significant, if relatively modest, increase in publisher downloads, in the confidence range 7.5 per cent to 15.5 per cent.
• The likely mechanism is that PEER offers high quality metadata, allows a wider range of search engine robots to index its content than the typical publisher, and thus helps to raise the digital visibility of scholarly content. There are variations as we zoom in on the detail and the jury is still out in medicine, the social sciences and humanities, and for smaller publishers, for reasons we do not understand yet.
• Publisher downloads are growing at a faster rate than PEER repository downloads and unless there is a step change, PEER’s share of the market is likely to decline gradually over time.

What this (usage) research tells us is that the scholarly web is a complex environment, one in which digital visibility is king. Researchers make little use of the search facilities on repository or publisher sites, relying heavily instead on third-party gateways and general search engines.

The PEER Executive Partners provided End of Project Statements, in which they reviewed their position on Green Open access, their experiences of PEER and described what the future may look like for Green Open access.  They also highlighted a number of Points of Agreement including:

• Building a large-scale infrastructure is organizationally and technically challenging 
• Building a clearing-house with automated workflows is helpful
• Author self-archiving is unlikely to generate a critical mass of Green OA content.
• Stage II (accepted manuscript) archiving requires manual oversight and intervention
• Scholars prefer the Version of Record (indicated by the behavioural research as well as usage log analysis)
• Usage scenarios for Green Open Access are more complex than generally acknowledged 
•  The acceptance and utility of open access publishing has increased rapidly

The last point here carries a key message in that Open Access publishing (Gold OA) is increasingly important for publishers, repositories and the research community. Any discussion of future Green OA scenarios therefore must take account of this development.

The project relied heavily on the collaboration of representatives from key stakeholder communities: publishers, repositories / libraries, funders and researchers, with each of these groups represented at the executive level within the project:

• International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM)
• European Science Foundation (ESF)
• Göttingen State and University Library (SUB)
• Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)
• Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique)

 All reports from the project, including End of Project Statements from the Executive Partners are available at www.peerproject.eu/reports, with presentations made during the PEER End of Project Conference in Brussels on 29 May 2012 also available here.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics. 

Related posts:

1. What comes after the Elsevier boycott? The answer might be found by following the ‘Green’ road to open access.
2. The Finch Report on open access: it’s complicated
3. Restricting online access: what evidence do publishers have to support their claims that open access negatively affects sales?
4. Elsevier, the Research Works Act and Open Access: where to now?
5. Open access is not enough; we must learn how to communicate our research to make it truly accessible

University e-presses might be small and underfunded, but Agata Mrva-Montoya argues that with innovative technology and an understanding of the scholarly ecosystem, they ensure that important, publically-funded research is distributed among the population who fund it.

As elsewhere in the world Australian academics are not free from the pressure to ‘publish or perish’ and they rely on scholarly publishing to report and disseminate research results and advance their careers. The specific guidelines are defined by the requirements of HERDC (Higher Education Research Data Collection) and ERA (Excellence of Research for Australia). To be recognised, books or journal articles need to demonstrate ‘substantial scholarly activity’ and contribute to the advancement of knowledge; they need to be original, reviewed by peers, and published by a commercial publisher.

This is problematic as Australia’s market for scholarly monographs, that is books aimed primarily at other scholars, is too small to support commercially based operations. With close to 40 universities with centralised libraries and very efficient interlibrary loan systems, there are simply not enough institutional or individual customers to sustain traditional publishing process without major subsidies.

Australian scholarly publishing

While Australian scholars working in the field of science, medicine and technology tend to publish journal articles and have always been able to find international publishers for their research output, those working in the humanities and social sciences (the disciplines where the monograph is the primary method of scholarly communication) and specialising in Australian topics, have been less likely to attract publishing contracts overseas.

To support these scholars several universities opened presses specialising in humanities and social sciences. During the 20th century Melbourne University Press (MUP) opened alongside University of Western Australia Press (UWAP),University of Queensland Press (UQP), UNSW Press and Sydney University Press (SUP), and Australian National University Press. Other universities followed.

The golden era of monograph publishing did not last long. The 1970s brought the reduction in higher education funding, which affected university presses and libraries in Australia. Cuts in library budgets, combined with significant price increases of journal subscriptions, started a decline in the purchasing of scholarly monographs, particularly in the humanities and social sciences; a decline that continues to the present owing to the ever-growing cost of journal subscriptions, the impact of the global financial crisis and vagaries of government funding.

With declining monographs sales and diminishing financial support from host universities, presses were forced to look for new sources of revenue or be closed down, which was the fate of presses at ANU, Sydney, Deakin and La Trobe for example. Other presses expanded their publishing operation to include new, money-generating markets of textbook, professional and trade publishing.

Four university presses (MUP, UNSW Press, UWAP and UQP) were restructured with a more commercial focus at the cost of their scholarly publishing programs. The management of these four presses reduced or stopped altogether the loss-making academic monograph publishing in an attempt to make the presses commercially viable and save them from closures. Instead they focused on books for the general readership including fiction, general non-fiction, children’s books, illustrated reference books or textbooks.

Over the years the four presses have become established cultural institutions that contribute greatly to the intellectual and political life of Australia launching the careers of celebrated authors such as David Malouf, Peter Carey and Kate Grenville (UQP), as well as publishing headline-grabbing biographies and memoirs of top politicians (MUP). These contributions, however, rarely fit in the category of scholarly publishing as defined by HERDC and ERA.

Apart from the four university presses, there are very few conventional publishing houses that publish monographs in Australia such as CSIRO Publishing in Melbourne (science), Australian Scholarly Publishing in Melbourne (social sciences and humanities), Federation Press in Sydney (law and government), Academic Press in Brisbane (psychology) and Crossing Press in Adelaide (histories of Australian minorities).

The new generation of university presses

Responding to the need for new outlets for scholarly research, over the last 10 years several universities (for example, ANU, the University of Sydney, Monash University, the University of Adelaide) have reopened or established innovative publishing programs based on new communication technologies, XML-driven digital workflows, open systems and softwares, cost-effective processes and new business models.

The new presses are based in or closely collaborate with university libraries and combine an established publishing knowledge with the expertise of the library staff in areas such as digitisation, data management, archiving, preservation and faculty relationships. The close association between library and university press, or indeed the integration of the press into the library structure is not limited to Australia. Many university libraries in the US provide publishing services exploring the increasingly convergent roles that libraries and publishers play in scholarly communication practices.

The degree of institutional support that the e-presses receive varies and they rely on grants and subsidies, and experiment with different combinations of paid and free access to content in print and digital environments. They also operate on a not-for-profit basis.

In comparison with the traditional university presses, the e-presses are small, underfunded and perceived as relatively invisible, since their books are rarely stocked in chain bookshops or reviewed in mass media. I agree that they lack well-established marketing and distribution processes, but they make up for it with innovative solutions and a thorough understanding of the scholarly ecosystem.

In reality, the e-presses punch well above their weight in terms of publishing output, scholarly impact and capacity to innovate. ANU ePress, Sydney University Press and Monash University Publishing (active since 2003) between them publish close to 100 scholarly books a year and have an active backlist of over 700 titles.

As the traditional methods of mass printing and distribution are not suitable for scholarly books that tend to have specialist and limited audiences, the new presses release their titles as free-to-download digital files or as print-on-demand books. In this way, the presses ensure that the important and publicly funded research is available to the general public and never goes out of print.

 

Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

Related posts:

1. Exclusive: figshare a new open data project that wants to change the future of scholarly publishing
2. There is a pathetic lack of functionality in scholarly publishing. We must end for-profit publishing and allow libraries to make available the works of their scholars for all
3. Academics must be applauded for making a stand by boycotting Elsevier. It’s time for librarians to join the conversation on the future of dissemination, but not join the boycott.
4. The ghosts of Christmases past, present and future come bearing lessons of academic publishing.
5. Five minutes with Conor Gearty: “It is very frustrating that my online project The Rights’ Future counts for nothing in my professional life. It is not teaching; it is not scholarly research; and it does not have impact”.

Commercial publishers appear to have conceded defeat but Bjoern Brembs wonders if their new strategy is to delay the inevitable transition to Open Access publishing for as long as possible, and to charge as much as possible when OA publishing does become the norm.

The recent “Finch Report” on Open Access has generated a shower of online commentary both from the mainstream media and from activists. I’ve only linked to a few recent one’s to outline the current discussion on how to best move towards universal Open Access to taxpayer-funded research results. The most important (and maybe also most predictable) piece of information is a change in strategy by the commercial publishers. After the recent RWA debacle, the ensuing Cost of Knowledge coverage and the successful petition to the US White House for open access, it appears as if the commercial publishers have conceded defeat and now accept that their subscription model is not supported anymore. That’s a clear win for the Open Access movement and should be celebrated.

The Finch report, however, as pointed out by early commenters, shows clear signs of publishing industry lobbying in emphasizing that the main strategy towards OA should be via journals (read: published by commercial publishers). The way I read it, the new strategy of the commercial publishers is to delay the transition towards OA for as long as possible and charge as much as possible for it, complemented by threats of job loss (see response). Given the utter defeat in their previous tactics, this stalling and harassment strategy is a reasonable fall-back position for the publishing industry and, given their deep pockets, one that could, in principle, work for at least another decade or two.
I’ve pointed out before that I have yet to hear any convincing arguments for why we should outsource scholarly communication to commercial entities to begin with. (University) libraries are perfectly capable of providing better services to the scholarly community, at a lower cost, than corporate publishers. Apparently, as recently pointed out, the commercial publishers also agree that they provide little added value, or they would not lobby so hard for their commercial journals to provide these services, instead of libraries – this is the ‘green’ vs. ‘gold’ debate in the struggle for the best way to universal Open Access. Now, publishers push for ‘Gold OA’, i.e. to secure their market via lobbying for industry-friendly legislation/policy, while the OA movement is still divided and debates the respective values of gold vs. green. To me, the data that is starting to come in that a hierarchy of journals in general is bad for science, together with the unreasonable profits by commercial publishers off of taxpayer funds (i.e. subsidies), I see a library-based, modern, hi-tech, IT-assisted scholarly communication system as a win/win/win strategy: less counter-productive incentives due to a article-based assessment system, less costly and benefiting science.

The question thus arises, how to convince politicians and administrators at funding agencies that corporate publishers do not have science, but profit at their core interest? Stevan Harnad has been arguing for the longest time for green OA (I agree in principle, but disagree quite strongly on some significant specifics). If these Tweets are any indication, the way Steven argues, may not be very effective:

Due to the brevity of Twitter, it wasn’t reasonable to ask or argue with Stephen Curry what exactly he meant, but I can only guess that he felt politicians won’t be persuaded by Steven’s arguments, at least not the way he put them. So how do we best convey the message that commercial publishing of scientific papers is the dinosaur in scholarly communication? How do we effectively communicate that around four billion (EUR, USD) could be saved annually if libraries were instead hosting our communications in a modern, effective and technically savvy way? How do we let them know that peer-review is not an issue and that jobs most likely will be created rather than lost? How can we most effectively communicate that further subsidy of a dead industry is not in the interest of the taxpayer?

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics. 

This blog was originally published on Bjoern Brembs’ personal blog, which you can read here.

Related posts:

1. The Finch Report on open access: it’s complicated
2. Digital visibility is king but what colour is our Open Access future?
3. Restricting online access: what evidence do publishers have to support their claims that open access negatively affects sales?
4. What comes after the Elsevier boycott? The answer might be found by following the ‘Green’ road to open access.
5. Elsevier, the Research Works Act and Open Access: where to now?