Research Councils UK draft new open access policy: my comments

Following are my comments to the Research Councils U.K. on the their proposed new open access policy

Dear RCUK Open Access Policy group,

First of all let me say congratulations and thank you to RCUK for your continuing inspiring leadership on open access policy. Following are my comments, based on many years of experience in open access policy advocacy, my work as a professional librarian and adjunct faculty at the University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, where I have developed and taught courses on scholarly communication, and my doctoral studies (communications, in progress) in the area of scholarly communication and open access.

Overall, from my perspective this draft policy introduces two important innovations: reducing the permitted embargo period, and pushing towards libre open access (e.g. allowing use for data and text-mining). In brief, I recommend strengthening the language on shortening embargo periods, and eliminating reference to CC-BY in favor of broader language against restrictions and requiring formats usable for text and data-mining purposes. Also, I recommend that the policy specify immediate deposit, with optional delayed release to accommodate the permitted embargoes.
With respect to the embargo period, I recommend strengthening the language indicating that any permitted embargo periods are designed as a temporary measure to give publishers time to adjust to an open access environment, with a view to eventually requiring open access immediately on publication. This language can be found on page 4, I recommend including this in the introductory language to underscore this point.

Kudos to RCUK for adopting a leadership position on libre open access.  However, I would recommend against specifying the Creative Commons CC-BY license. While many open access advocates understandably see CC-BY as the expression of the BOAI definition of open access, my considered opinion is that CC-BY is a weak license for libre OA which fails to protect OA downstream and will not accomplish the Budapest vision of open access,. My perspective is that the best license for libre open access is Creative Commons - Attribution - Noncommercial - Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA), as this protects OA downstream (recognizing that the current CC NC definition is problematic, and noting that commercial rights should be retained by authors, not publishers). As one example of where open access might need such protection, because CC-BY allows for resale of open access materials: if all of PubMedCentral were CC-BY, a commercial company could copy the whole thing, perhaps add some value, and sell their version of PMC. They could not legally stop PMC from providing free access. However, I very much doubt that CC-BY could prevent such a company from lobbying to remove funding for the public version. If this sounds ludicrous and unconscionable, may I present as evidence that just such a scenario is realistic: 1) the efforts a few years ago by the American Chemical Society to prevent the U.S. government from providing PubChem on the grounds that this was competition with a private entity; 2) the Research Works Act, and 3) the current anti-FRPAA lobbying in the U.S., which, similarly to the Research Works Act, claims that published research funded by the public is "private research works" which should belong solely to the publisher.

Another reason for avoiding CC-BY is that while the contributions of funders are very important, so are the contributions of scholar authors. Many scholars do not wish to see others who have contributed nothing to a scholarly work sell their work and pocket the money; I certainly don't. For example, Peter Suber recently posted this note to the SPARC Open Access Forum which expresses the distress of an author who published CC-BY in a BMC journal and then found a bogus publisher selling her article for $3. https://groups.google.com/a/arl.org/group/sparc-oaforum/browse_thread/thread/fc977cabd0d59bcc#.  The more work that is published CC-BY, the more I believe we can expect to see this kind of scam, and this risks turning researchers off OA. Also, when faculty members develop their own open access policies (e.g. Harvard, MIT), they insist that articles not be sold for a profit. Links to these and other institutional repositories are available through the Registry of Open Access Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) at http://roarmap.eprints.org/.

To illustrate how CC-BY does not necessarily result in the Budapest open access initative's vision of "sharing of the poor with the rich and the rich with the poor": those who give away their work for commercial purposes may not be able to afford the results. For example, if a scholar from a poorer area gives away their medical articles as CC-BY, images and other elements from these articles could be used to develop point-of-care tools that could be sold at prices that the health care professionals serving the scholar and their families could not afford. That is, despite the best of intentions, CC-BY could easily result in a one-way sharing of the poor with the rich. This is one of the reasons why I strongly recommend that the developing world avoid CC-BY.

I cover this topic in more depth in the third chapter of my draft thesis - from the link below, search for open access and creative commons:
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-3-open-access-as-solution-to-the-enclosure-of-knowledge/

For practical reasons, to further text and data-mining I would suggest that the article format is more to the point than licensing. An author's final manuscript may be more likely to meet this requirement than the so-called "Article of Record". For example, an author's own version in an open format that allows for text and data-mining, with no licensing language, is much better for text and data-mining purposes than a publisher's "Article of Record" in a locked-down PDF format with a CC-BY license. My recommendation is to specify useable format rather than license. Also, I would recommend against encouraging deposit of the "Article of Record", as scholarly communication needs to evolve beyond the print-based journal article format, and this specification may tend to further entrench a system that needs some shaking up.

Regarding p. 5 - working with individual institutions to develop open access funds from indirect costs - good!!! I recommend looking at the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity http://www.oacompact.org/compact/ for guidance, and for institutions to join. When such funds are developed, it is very important to build in efficiencies to prevent against double dipping, avoid paying excessive costs, and planning for education about the growing pool of open access scam companies is an area that is growing in importance. I differ from some of my colleagues in recommending against funding agencies paying OA article processing fees.

What RCUK might want to consider if, similar to North America, some of the publishers experiencing difficulty transitioning are the smaller society publishers, is a journal subsidy program. Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has such a program, called Aid to Scholarly Journals. If RCUK does not yet have such a program, that would make it much easier to start up with stronger OA expectations than SSHRC has been able to do to date. Canada also has a program to help scholarly journals transition to the online environment called Synergies which is a good model. In North America, most academic libraries nowadays are providing journal hosting and support services. This sector is by far the most efficient in scholarly publishing, with costs on average less than 10% of the current system. See chapter 4 of my draft thesis for details http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/chapter-4-economics-of-scholarly-communication-in-transition/).

Finally, a minor point: the introductory paragraph, talking about benefits of open access, appears to prioritize business interest. I fully agree that scholarship and open access to scholarship is a huge potential benefit to business, but would submit that this is not, nor should it be, the main point of scholarship and research. May I suggest that the final sentence of the first paragraph refer to the public first and foremost, and then perhaps speak to business benefits?

Many thanks for the opportunity to comment, and best wishes to RCUK in the next stage of your leadership on OA policy.

Heather Morrison
Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

Will Elsevier accidentally unite the open access movement?

We open access advocates are unanimous in the goal of universal open access to the world's scholarly knowledge (at least in its peer-reviewed journal article form, for now). However, at times we differ about the means. Some of us favor a focus on rapid transition to a fully open access, more efficient and effective scholarly communication system - what some call the gold road of open access publishing, and Harnad refers to as the premature gold rush.  Others, like Harnad himself, favor beginning with the traditional scholarly publishing system as it is, with authors self-archiving in open access archives to expand open access beyond what is provided by library subscriptions.  (I fully agree with both positions!).

So what does this have to do with Elsevier? Simple: Elsevier is "green" on open access and hence the darling of the green roaders. As long as Elsevier supports this approach, the open access archives first supporters are likely to support Elsevier. However, as we saw recently with the Research Works Act, Elsevier is quite capable of doing its best to attack the open access mandates that are critical to the green road. If Elsevier keeps up this attack on open access mandates, it's a matter of time the green roaders become gold and join us in the Elsevier boycott - where they will be most welcome!

So what are the options for Elsevier? They can either support - or at least not attack - the open access mandates that are coming, particularly the U.S.' FRPAA and the growing institutional open access mandates movement, and keep the support of the green roaders - or they can attack the mandates, and face a much more united open access movement. I think that this is what people like to call "between a rock and a hard place".

Of course, Elsevier could follow the lead of other major commercial scholarly publishers such as Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, and others, and aim to compete in the obviously emerging open access marketplace.  This growing tendency towards OA competition is a topic that I speak to in a bit more depth in the 4th chapter of my draft dissertation, open access as solution to the enclosure of knowledge.

Elsevier numbers illustrate - once again - just how much more sense open access makes!

Elsevier today wrote a letter to the mathematics community, hoping to woo scholars away from the still-growing boycott, The Cost of Knowledge, now that Elsevier has publicly disavowed its support for the Research Works Act which would have forbidden the U.S. government from requiring public access to the results of research it pays for. In its letter, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematics journals to at or below $11 US per article. This sounds like a pretty reasonable step when you consider that this is just over a quarter of what Elsevier currently charges. However, when you compare this with the potential of open access, you can see how ludicrous this model really is today. If every research library in North America were to purchase a copy of an Elsevier article at $11, this would add up to $1,386 - more than it would cost to pay the PLoS ONE article processing fee for full open access to everyone, everywhere. Or, if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to purchase this article to read for class on a pay-per-use basis, the total would come to $1,650 - that's $300 more than what is needed to pay for the article to be fully open access through PLoS ONE - for access to just one class. In summary, this move by Elsevier just shows how ludicrous the current model is. Plus - why just math, Elsevier? There are many of us who signed the boycott who are not mathematicians!

Details

In the section on pricing, Elsevier commits to lowering the costs of articles in its mathematical journals to at or below $11 US per article or 50-60 cents per page. 

As a for-profit corporation reporting to shareholders, I think it is reasonable to assume that Elsevier would not make such a commitment unless this cost was sufficient to not only cover costs, but return a profit. Does this mean that the current $37.95 charged for one article in Elsevier's Advances in Applied Mathematics is close to 4 times more than what Elsevier itself feels is necessary to recoup costs and make a profit? This does seem consistent with Elsevier's high profit rates.

If every one of the 126 members of the Association of Research Libraries were to pay $11 for an article in mathematics, the total would be $1,386. That's higher than the article processing fee for a fully open access article at PLoS ONE at $1,350 per article. In other words, a high quality, U.S.-based publisher working out of San Francisco (not a cheap place to live or work, I hear), can provide full open access for everyone in the world at less than it would cost to have one copy of an article at every large North American research library, at Elsevier's proposed reduced rate which is just over a quarter of what they currently charge. This is yet more proof that this old school business model of Elsevier's just doesn't make any sense any more, not even with this little modicum of tweaking after significant pressure from mathematicians like Timothy Gowers.

Another scenario: if an undergrad class of 150 students were required to buy a $11 mathematics article to read for class on a pay-to-read basis, the cost would be $1,650. In other words, the pay-per-view costs for just one class to read an article would exceed the PLoS ONE article processing fee by $300. Multiply that by all the millions of students in the world, and it's easy to see how the Elsevier model means either outrageous costs or needless barriers to mathematical knowledge, or, more likely (as things stand now) some of both.

The section from the Elsevier letter on pricing:

Pricing
Mathematics journals published by Elsevier tend to be larger than those of other publishers. On a price-per-article, or price-per-page level, our prices are typically, but not always, lower than those of other mathematics publishers.
 
Our target is for all of our core mathematics titles to be priced at or below US$11 per article (equivalent to 50-60 cents per normal typeset page) by next year, placing us below most University presses, some societies and other commercial competitors. Where journals are more expensive than this, we will lower our prices, as we already have in recent years for journals such as the Journal of Algebra and Topology and its Applications, among others.

We realize that this is just part of the concerns about pricing -and we will seek to address concerns about the nature and composition of the large discounted agreements, through which most Universities now access journals - but addressing the base line pricing is a necessary first step.

Darkroom and open disclosure: two library solutions for dealing with copyright extremists

Elsevier, the scholarly publisher currently being boycotted by close to 7,000 researchers, does not appear on the exclusions list of the copyright extremist group Access Copyright. To me, this raises the question: are Elsevier and ilk receiving monies from Access Copyright in addition to the substantial fees paid by libraries for subscriptions, and if so, is this a breach of the typical "entire agreement" clause in a library license? Since Access Copyright does not tell us who they are giving money to, why not ask when we purchase? We could call this an "open disclosure" policy. Whenever libraries are purchasing or subscribing to resources, let's ask - IS this really the entire agreement, or are you looking for money from copyright collectives, too?

Of course, open disclosure would be most effective if it were practiced by Access Copyright. If people knew who they are representing (rather than who is excluded), then we could take appropriate actions. Such actions could include:

• not buying their stuff
• buying their stuff if we must, but putting it away in the most dark, remote corner we can find, in a separate room covered with stern warnings like: "These materials are covered by Access Copyright". Don't even THINK about copying!
• set up a bank of computers that people pass by on their way to the dark room featuring open access resources

Another thought: if Access Copyright and those represented by Access Copyright don't want to participate in open disclosure, then let's start by encouraging those who aren't members of Access Copyright to openly proclaim their non-membership. This could be a selling point! Come of think of it, I wonder if anyone is using that Access Copyright exclusions list as an acquisitions tool?

Could the University of Iowa Libraries save over $2 million from their subscriptions budget with a flip to open access?

Thanks to Wendy Robertson at the University of Iowa Libraries for posting some very useful information about their library's expenditures on journals.

This post is an informal research collaboration designed to build on Robertson's work, explore the cost of a full flip to open access for this particular university and some of other not yet quantified possibilities that may be of interest along with a flip to open access.

By my calculations, the University of Iowa Libraries could save over $2 million dollars or 60% of the expenditures for journals listed on this web page with a full flip to open access, paid for entirely out of the library budget, assuming a mixed model composed of half of the articles published in the scholar-led publishing sector as illustrated by OJS (Edgar & Willinsky), with an average per-article cost of $188; and the other half published using an article processing fee with the PLoS ONE fee of $1,350 as an average. It is assumed that 1,960 articles were published by the University of Iowa Libraries in 2010, based on a Google Scholar Advanced Search.

More information would be most helpful to refine my calculations. In particular, it would be really helpful to have a better estimate of the number of journal articles published by the University of Iowa faculty in a given year.  If anyone has data to help with this project, please share! In order to facilitate this sharing, I plan to turn on the comment feature on my blog. For calculations, download the data. Method note: the reason I used the 2008 google scholar article numbers is because this was the highest count in recent, i.e. to obtain a conservative figure.

Food for thought

I argue that we need to look for savings in the process of transition to open access, because libraries have many new areas where funding is needed, such as services to support research data, preserving electronic information, research commons type services and embedded librarianship.

One of the reasons why the scholar-led publishers that are the primary users of Open Journal Systems have such a low per-average article cost is that many are built on efficient, not-for-profit library publishing services. Perhaps the transition to full open access will open up opportunities for our librarian colleagues? For example, I hear that there are (understandably) many concerns about potential layoffs at Harvard's libraries. Getting into publishing could be a great freelance opportunity for some of these highly qualified people - after all, who better to help libraries make the transition to OA than our own professional colleagues? Or, I wonder if Harvard has considered that this might be a good time to grow their own publishing services? Then they could simply transition acquisitions budgets into funding for new opportunities to retain their own great staff.

Speaking of job opportunities, growth in the not-for-profit publishing sector could open up many a part-time or full-time opportunity for some of our faculty members, too - no doubt this would be very welcome considering the impact of the financial crisis on university professors. I wonder if even those who have secure jobs themselves might like the idea of transitioning high profits for commercial publishers into more and/or better job opportunities for their colleagues and graduating students? We could spend a lot more than that average $188 per article and still save a bundle, too!

For more of my writing on the economics of scholarly communication in transition to open access, please see this draft chapter of my open thesis.  

Reference

Edgar, B. D., & Willinsky, J. (2010) (In press). A survey of the scholarly journals using

open journal systems. Scholarly and Research Communication, Retrieved August

 27, 2011 from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773  

A way of saying "this is open access"

In honour of the 10th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 14), here is a way of saying "this is open access" based on BOAI. I am hoping that this kind of approach can lend clarity and avoid some of the complexities that come with Creative Commons licensing. In brief, the basic idea is to make a statement that a work is made open access in accord with the definition and the spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. People can link to BOAI, or copy the text; and add specific permissions if these apply.

Here is an attempt at such a license for my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:

This blog is open access in the definition and spirit of the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Note that sometimes I copy bits from other peoples' works, so please watch for this as my permissions apply only to my own work. What the definition and spirit of BOAI means to me is that you are free to take my work and reuse it, with attribution, as long as you make any copies or derivatives freely available and with the caveat that you may not sell my work, or place it behind a paywall.

Following are the relevant excerpts from BOAI -

Statement of spirit (intent)

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

Definition of open access

By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

This statement does not (yet) replace my CC-BY-NC-SA license for IJPE, but is rather presented as one idea to help in the struggle to Articulate the Commons.  Comments are welcome - join me in Google G+ for discussion.

PLoS ONE is in the lead...but could a well thought out noncommercial approach give a competitor an edge?

PLoS ONE has often been the source of attention on IJPE and elsewhere, becoming in 2010 the world's largest journal then doubling in size in 2011, publishing close to 14,000 articles that year.  No wonder PLoS ONE is leading the new tendency to competition in open access, attracting a number of clones.

No doubt many a competitor is wondering how they'll ever get a edge when PLoS ONE is so far ahead - that's my guess as to why Mary Anne Liebert is starting out by providing free publishing services. 

So here is a thought - could  a well thought out noncommercial approach give a publisher an edge over PLoS ONE, with its insistence that all authors accept the CC-BY license? There just might be something to this. My own perspective is that as an open access advocate of course I want to freely share my work - but not for sale! My preference for including the noncommercial element in a CC license is by no means unusual - my understanding is that NC is the most popular of the CC elements. I've even been thinking that when I next get around to doing some writing to submit for publication, I just might go for Nature's Scientific Reports rather than PLoS ONE - much as I like PLoS and PLoS ONE, Nature will let me have my preferred NC license, and PLoS ONE won't.

When we scholars come up with our own open access mandates, sharing our work, "but not for a profit" is part of the deal, as illustrated by the leader with this approach, Harvard, and MIT. This kind of suggests that scholars don't want to give away their work to just anyone to sell for a profit, doesn't it?

So what would a good noncommercial policy look like? First of all, if authors are paying to make their work open access, then it should be open access, and the copyright (including any reserved commercial rights) should belong to the author. This would protect the publisher from having a competitor take their whole journal and use it for commercial purposes that would undermine the working publisher's revenue streams, while making it clear to authors and funders alike that the purpose is not to sneak in other enclosures for the purpose of making more profits.

This is a concept I am just starting to explore. Comments are welcome, via email at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. This post is part of the Articulating the Commons series.