Resources for Gold Open Access for Learned Societies

Abstract: The economic modelling work we have carried out over the past few years has been referred to and cited a number of times in the discussions of the Finch Report and subsequent policy developments in the UK. We are concerned that there may be some misinterpretation of this work. This short paper sets out the main conclusions of our work, which was designed to explore the overall costs and benefits of Open Access (OA), as well as identify the most cost-effective policy basis for transitioning to OA at national and institutional levels. The main findings are that disseminating research results via OA would be more cost-effective than subscription publishing. If OA were adopted worldwide, the net benefits of Gold OA would exceed those of Green OA. However, we are not yet anywhere near having reached an OA world. At the institutional level, during a transitional period when subscriptions are maintained, the cost of unilaterally adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of unilaterally adopting Gold OA - with Green OA self-archiving costing average institutions sampled around one-fifth the amount that Gold OA might cost, and as little as one-tenth as much for the most research intensive university. Hence, we conclude that the most affordable and cost-effective means of moving towards OA is through Green OA, which can be adopted unilaterally at the funder, institutional, sectoral and national levels at relatively little cost.

A Harvard Berkman Centre project to track and tag all things Open Access (and not just OA scholarly publishing) with Peter Suber the "ideas guy". Uses TagTeam, an open-source RSS (and atom) aggregator.

Science blog post in The Guardian by Mike Taylor which responds to the the arguments that are used to justify the conventional publishing model, under the strap-line "As a scientist you job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal's paywall is unacceptable"

But if the sciences can do it, why not also the humanities and social sciences? Long, enthusiastic but basically exhortatory piece by Gary F Daught promoting "bright and energetic young scholar" Martin Eve's idea.

Ross Mounce is a final year PhD Student at the University of Bath & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow. His well-linked response to the Inquiry has a pragmatic and sensible feel, though he down-plays the impact on learned societies of loss of income, and wrongly reduces their outreach work to "perks".

Piece in Nature about the "Episciences Project" which, with money from the French Government aims to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. See also Tim Gowers on the subject: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/

Tony moved from a senior role in the University of Southampton to a senior role in Microsoft in 2005. Prior to moving he'd presciently coined the memorable term Data Deluge. Over the last few weeks he's been writing a lucid mutli-part series about the journey to open access - essentially from Arxiv, via ePrints and Dspace to Green to..... We do not know yet. This is a link to Part 3.

Scroll down to get to this letter (it is #4) from several heavyweight academics all or all but one of whom are very heavyweight historians including the current and past presidents of the Royal Historical Society. Starts and ends with statements in favour of Open Access. Three features of the Finch recommendations as acted on by the Government are summarised: 1. inadequate monies for APCs leading to administrators having to create rationing systems; 2. researchers publishing in non-compliant international journals being excluded from REF 2020; 3. short para asserting that CC-BY would seriously undermine the integrity of the work scholars produce.

RLUK's response is forcefully supportive of the current policy, and firmly dismissive of HSS objections to short embargo periods. But does it sidestep the longer term concerns of learned societies?

Media release that starts as follows: Jisc Collections, the UK academic community's shared service for content licensing and administration, has entered into an agreement with Open Access Key (OAK), the online payment platform for open access publishing, to run a 12 month pilot project, Jisc APC, to test its role in managing and processing Gold OA article payment charges made by its member institutions.

Joseph Esposito writes in the "The Scholarly Kitchen" about what he sees as an O'Reilly shaped (dominated) ecosystem in which the Safari Books approach to online publishing and all that it entails becomes an important model, that will spread into journal publishing too (PeerJ will be built on Safari, according to Esposito.

Key points: * OASPA recognizes the interests of funders in seeking to maximize access to the results of research funded under their programmes. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy support for gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available. * OASPA supports the RCUK policy requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee. * The APC levels per article that are assumed by the RCUK policy following the Report by the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, are reasonable and in line with the experiences of open access publishers. * Infrastructural challenges exist (e.g. payment mechanisms), and are being addressed by the necessary stakeholders. OASPA is committed to engaging actively with stakeholders to resolve these.

Broad mix of people on the Open Library of Humanities Academic Steering and Advocacy Committee, including Michael Eisen, who co-founded PLOS; and Peter Suber.

Interesting post on the LSE "Impact of Social Sciences" blog by Glasgow University's Roderic D. M. Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderic_D.M._Page mainly about how Elsevier might develop Mendeley. Four options put forward:Mendeley becomes iTunes for papers; Mendeley becomes the de facto measure of research impact; Mendeley becomes an authoring tool; Mendeley becomes the focus of post-publicaton peer review.

300 page PDF on the Parliament web site, with nearly 70 responses including from Government (David Willetts), funders, publishers, individuals with knowledge of the field, learned societies, universities.

An edited transcript of a talk by Shieber, who is Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. Provides an economic analysis of journal access as "complementary good", and argues that an APC based system is more efficient (from a market economics point of view) that a subscription based system.

Abstract of 'field report' in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog : "The Open Library of Humanities is a newly-launched project aiming to provide an ethically sound and sustainable open access model for humanities research. By coordinating the discussion and implementation of a community-grounded approach to academic publishing, OLH aims to create an outlet better able to serve academics, libraries, and the wider research community. Co-founder Martin Eve describes the current "ideas phase" of the project and outlines his vision of where it will go from here."

Open Access Research and the Future for Academic Publishing. PDF of PPT used by Martin Hall, VC of the University of Salford, Chair of OAIG, and member of the Finch Group at 5/2/2013 Westminster Higher Education Forum

Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toront writes about the "Big Deal" packages in publishing, drawing on "Open Access, Library and Publisher Competition, and the Evolution of General Commerce" by Andrew Odlyzko - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2211874

Open letter from the editors of over 110 French language journals in the humanities and social sciences to the Minister of Higher Education and Research, the Minister of Culture and Communication, the presidents of universities and grandes écoles, and heads of major research institutions. Opening and closing paras: "We are calling for the urgent opening of dialogue on the issues associated with open access in the humanities and the social sciences. The definition of sufficiently long periods of embargo, allowing journals to choose their economic model (balancing what they offer for free and what they offer for payment), is the only way to guarantee diversity and independence in academic research and public debate." "Consequently, we urgently call for an independent impact assessment to be carried out on these matters. This study should take into account the specificities of the humanities and social sciences and of publications in French. We also expect without delay the opening of a genuine dialogue on these issues between the above-mentioned state actors, researcher organizations, scholarly organizations, the heads of journals in the humanities and social sciences, and editors."