Resources for Gold Open Access for Learned Societies

The session starts at 11.40 and lasts for just under 1 hour. In his introduction, the Chair John Krebs says "We are not here to question the whole Open Access agenda. We take that as a given. We are not questioning the recommendations of the report. We are very much focused on the current plans for implementation and on the concerns that have been raised with us by various stake-holders which allude to in your written evidence." During the session 4 or 5 peers spoke in addition to Krebs - Rees, Sharpe, Broers, and Winston. All seemed variously well informed, not least Rees who looks to be aware of the concerns of Humanities and Social Sciences societies. Finch gave a confident and calm account of herself and in some ways this 1 hour session in which the ideas of a clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced person are developed under questioning by other clever, knowledgeable and research-experienced people. The full session on 29 January (when RCUK, HEFCE, and David Willetts will give evidence) will be interesting.

Tony Hey, now with Microsoft, was in the thick of things in the UK when the original push for (repository based) OA began, so his very balanced observations on Finch and the RCUK OA policy are particularly germane. Key paragraph: "What should RCUK do now? In my opinion, RCUK could make a very small but significant change in its open access policy and adopt a rights-retention green OA mandate that requires 'RCUK-funded authors to retain certain non-exclusive rights and use them to authorize green OA'. In the words of Peter Suber, this would 'create a standing green option regardless of what publishers decide to offer on their own.' In addition, RCUK should recommend that universities follow the Open Access Policy Guidelines of Harvard, set out by their Office of Scholarly Communication. Under this policy, Harvard authors are required to deposit a full text version of their paper in DASH, the Harvard Open Access Repository even in the case where the publisher does not permit open access and the author has been unable to obtain a waiver from the publisher."

Key passage: "But, achieving open access is not easy. Professional maintenance and distribution of large digital archives, guaranteed for the long term, does incur significant cost. The most promising model for recovering such costs under an open-access regime is an author-pays (or, in effect, a funding institution pays) model. Such a scheme introduces issues of its own. If publishers generate revenue by producing more content (paid for by authors) rather than quality content (paid for by subscribers), then the natural tendency in the system will be for the generation of large quantities of low-quality content. Indeed, we have seen the rise of predatory publishers, actively seeking authors to pay for publication in venues devoid of the exacting scrutiny of conscientious peer review. The result is a glut of third-rate publications that add noise rather than insight to the scientific enterprise. The important question is: Can we establish a sustainable economic model for publication that serves the interest of both authors and the reading public? We submit that non-profit professional societies must play a critical role in this regard. They are the hallmark of quality in publications, and must remain so to serve the interests of the reading public. But, how do we transition from the current subscription model to a new financial model enabling open access in a way that does not bankrupt the organization in the process? This question has occupied the attention of the ACM Publications Board for several years. Because the stakes are high, the Board has chosen to move with caution."

"It is a costly process, and the leading journals can be quite expensive for libraries to buy, but at least the research that does get published is reasonably reliable." writes Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute, in this critique of Government policy on OA, ignoring, it seems to me, the extent of market failure in scholarly publishing.

New (January 2013, but undated) policy from the MS Society is an interesting variation on the central theme. Excerpts: 3.1. It is a condition of grant award that peer reviewed research papers resulting from research funded, in whole or in part, by the MS Society are published in an Open Access environment and made available through Europe PMC. 3.2. Such papers must become Open Access as soon as possible following publication, and in all cases within 6 months of the publication date. 3.3. Where authors are required to pay an open access fee, the MS Society regretfully cannot cover these costs. == 4.2. In order to self-archive authors must ensure certain rights are reserved in any agreement with the publisher. Specifically, authors will need the right to deposit peer-reviewed manuscripts in Europe PMC immediately upon its acceptance for publication and to make it publicly available within 6 months after publication. == 5.1. In exceptional circumstances authors can publish in journals that are noncompliant with the MS Society's open access policy if it is considered to be the most appropriate journal to publish in. 5.2. In the event that authors decide to publish in a journal that is not compliant with MS Society's open access policy, authors should notify the MS Society of this when a manuscript is submitted, providing justification for the decision.

One interesting conclusion from the PEER project: "The author deposit rate in the PEER Project was exceptionally low. This unwillingness to deposit, even when the author explicitly is invited by the publisher, suggests that author selfarchiving will not generate a critical mass of Green OA content."

The interesting thing about this Times Higher piece is the number of comments and (at the time of posting) the coherence of the comments that counter the main line in the piece.

The URL points to a DOC file that is the SLSA's thoughtful though slightly "plague on both green and gold" evidence to the House of Commons Select BIS Committee Inquiry into Open Access, written from the perspectives of a learned society that does not publish a journal.

Blog post with dialogue in the comments section between the author and Stevan Harnad. Concluding para: "Open Access publishing is itself a complex, and currently controversial, issue. The "Green" versus "Gold" debate, though, is misleading. The imperative is to get to a point where all the costs of publishing, whether negligible or requiring developed mechanisms for meeting Article Processing Charges (APCs), are fully met up front so that copies-of-record can be made freely available under arrangements such as the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC licence. This was our key argument in the Finch Group report, and the case has been remade in a recent - excellent - posting by Stuart Shieber, Harvard's Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication."

PeerJ's first clutch of 30 articles have been published. One interesting feature is the DOI which is of the form 10.7717/peerj.nn (maybe I should have put in 6 or 7 "n"s......). The PeerJ site is elegantly designed, and the images are of very high quality e.g. https://dfzljdn9uc3pi.cloudfront.net/2013/36/1/fig-9-2x.jpg. If PeerJ had not restricted itself to STEM (and how long would that last) I could see it "sweeping all before it".

Abstract: "Irrespective of what funds the UK elects to spend on paying pre-emptively for Gold OA while subscriptions still need to be paid, and independent of embargo policy, the UK should (1) mandate and enforce immediate deposit of the author's peer-reviewed final draft of every journal article in the author's institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication and (2) designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for performance review and research assessment."

"Research results published through Open Access on the Internet are available for anyone to read and download. Researchers who receive funding from Formas from 2010 and onwards must guarantee that their research findings will be available through Open Access within six months of publication. Researchers may either publish in journals with an Open Access practice or those that archive published articles in large public access databases. The Open Access regulations currently only apply to scientifically peer-reviewed text published in scientific journals and conference reports. The regulations do not currently apply to monographs or book chapters. Funding to cover publication costs in Open Access journals can be included in research project applications as a direct cost."

Long feature by Paul Jump (with surprisingly few comments) summarising the UK situation from the standpoint of a well-briefed (and possibly thoroughly lobbied) journalist. Has an OA timeline from 2002, and a section about the Open Library of the Humanities.

"Now before both the House of Representatives and the Senate, FASTR would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for public accessibility and productive reuse of digital articles, and have provisions for interoperability and long-term archiving. The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. FASTR reflects the growing trend among funding agencies - and college and university campuses - to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results. It follows the successful path forged by the NIH's Public Access Policy, as well as the growing trend in adoption of similar policies by international funders such as the Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK), private funders such as the Wellcome Trust, dozens of U.S. Institutions, such as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Kansas."

Peter Suber's overview of the FASTR is clear and to the point. One key clause: "The NIH budget alone is more than six times larger than the budgets of all seven of the UK research councils put together. Hence, it's significant that FASTR disregards or repudiates the gold-oriented RCUK/Finch policy in the UK, and sticks to the FRPAA model of a pure green mandate. For some of the reasons why I think OA mandates should be green and not gold, or green first, see my critique of the RCUK/Finch policy from September 2012. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9723075"

Somewhat ill informed attack on "the historians" asserting that the latter's hostility to Finch involved fear of "casting pearls before proles", and that it is the "cost of checking and editing" that has stopped the Internet bringing down the costs of scholarly publishing. [Some of the comments on the piece are interesting.]

Extract. Applicable across all fields: "The project leader must guarantee that the research findings are accessible to everyone (Open Access) within six months of publication. In cases where publishing involves parallel publication in open institutional archives, arrangements should be made at the time of publication for open accessibility within six months. The Council may prolong the allowed time period until Open Access or parallel publishing up to 12 months, provided that the project leader can present a clear documentation stating that all possible effort has been made to reach the six-month limit. Until further notice, the Open Access rules apply only to peer-reviewed texts in journals and conference reports, not to monographs and book chapters."

A tersely expressed rationale for the "Green first, Gold next" approach. Excerpt: "...once OA becomes universally mandatory, Green OA will make subscriptions unsustainable, and journals will have to cut costs, downsize, and find another source of revenue to cover the remaining costs -- and that other source of revenue will be Gold OA APCs, per paper submitted for peer review, at a fair, affordable, sustainable price, paid out of portion of each institution's annual windfall savings from the subscription-cancellations induced by universal Green OA. That will be affordable, sustainable Fair-Gold OA (as compared to today's Fool's Gold OA, double-paid alongside subscriptions at an absurdly inflated price)."

Yesterday, Research Councils UK confirmed it would back down to the government's view, at least for the next half-decade. Although its policy - to go into effect from 1 April - says 6 and 12 months, in practice RCUK (the umbrella body for the UK's seven funding agencies) would not enforce those embargoes, and would permit 12 and 24 month delays - so long as publishers also offered researchers the option of paying up-front to make their work free immediately, an alternative open-access model ....... In the end, it will be the level of enforcement - rather than the policies themselves - that will drive an open access shift.

Editorial in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research charting progress over the two years since JHR switched to Gold OA supported by modest APCs (Open Access Publication Fee (per page): EURO 15.00 (for members of the International Society of Hymenopterists); EURO 22.00 (for non-members), with a minimum fee of EURO 150 (EURO 220 for non-members) for papers smaller than 10 printed pages. Larger papers will be charged according to the following rates: 1-10 printed pages - EUR 150 (220 for non-members of ISH) 11-100 printed pages - EUR 150 (220 for non-members of ISH) + EUR 15 (22 for non-members of ISH) per page for the number of pages above 10.