Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2010

In brief

The growth rate of open access is robust and growing. DOAJ added 312 titles this quarter (more than 3 per day), for a total of 5,452. There are now more than 6,600 journals using OJS. The number of journals fully participating in PMC continues to grow, while the NIH Public Access Policy compliance rate is about 60%, indicating significant progress but still room for improvement. BASE now searches more than 25 million documents. Hindawi's monthly submissions have grown to over 2,000 this quarter. The dare to compare section below asks the evocative question of whether the open access sector is, or soon will be, ready for serious comparison with the subscription sector. There are at least four major free or open access journal collections that are more than twice the size of the largest commercial publisher, Elsevier, in terms of number of titles. For example, DOAJ, with over 5,000 titles, has more than twice as many titles than Elsevier. While there is some comparison of apples and oranges here, one conclusion seems reasonable - open access publishing is already comparable to subscription publishing, in terms of capacity if not yet by size. There are also at least two open access metasearch services that may rival, in size, Science Direct. Again, too early for conclusions, but enough to suggest that serious research may be warranted in the not too distant future. Full data are available for download or viewing. Previous editions are available.


Open Access Status as of September 30, 2010

• Directory of Open Access Journals: 5,452 journals
  
  • DOAJ growth rate: 3 titles per day
    
  • # journals searchable at article level: 2,288 (growing at 2 titles per day)
    
  • # articles searchable at article level: 447,657 (growing at 362 articles per day)
    
  
  
• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE): over 25.5 million documents
  
  • BASE growth rate: 8,000 documents per day
  
  
• REPEC fulltext: 825,000 (growing at over 400 documents per day)
  
  
• arXiv: 629,806 (growing at over 185 documents per day)
  
  
• Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP): 230 (growth rate: 2 per week)
  
  • Institutional Policies: 96 (growth rate: 1 per week)
  
  
• PubMedCentral
  
  • # journals actively participating: 960 (growing at 1 title / day
    
  • # journals with immediate free access: 556 (growing at 10 titles / month)
    
  • # journals with all articles open access: 480 (growing at 9 titles / month)
    
  • estimated NIH Public Access Policy compliance rate: 60%
    
  • % of articles published within the last 2 years with free fulltext: 19%
    

Dare we compare?

The following figures are deliberately intended to be evocative, if not provocative. It is acknowledged that there is some comparison of apples and oranges here. The key point is that there are an awful lot of open access apples - or oranges, as you prefer - enough so that comparisons with the subscription based sector either are, or soon will, be worthy of serious research.

There are at least 4 large collections of free and/or open access scholarly journals that are more than double the size of the world's largest scholarly publisher, Elsevier, by number of titles. Even when we limit to peer-reviewed collections alone, DOAJ now includes more than twice the number of titles in Science Direct. The chart above shows just a few of these large collections for comparison purposes. Electronic Journals Library, with over 26,000 titles, has been omitted from the chart to better illustrate the differences in size of the collections included. This does not mean that open access publishing exceeds subscription-based publishing at this time. However, it is reasonable to draw the conclusion that the capacity of the open access sector already rivals that of the subscription-based sector.

Similarly, there are at least two major metasearch services, Scientific Commons and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), where searches encompass more than twice the number of documents available through Elsevier's Science Direct. While it is not possible to draw any conclusions about the relative number of articles available from each search (both BASE and Scientific Commons will draw on many more types of items than just articles, and duplication due to multiple deposits is likely), it is reasonable to conclude that the relative amount of articles available open access and through major publishers either is, or soon will be, worthy of comparison through serious research.

Milestones this quarter

Hindawi's monthly submissions grow to over 2,000 September 7, 2010 announcement from Hindawi's Paul Peters

More than 25 million records in BASE August 3, 2010 announcement, Dirk Pieper, BASE

Comments

The NIH Public Access policy compliance rate of 60%, not too far different from the 44% compliance rate reported by Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust for their policy earlier this year, is both a sign of progress and an indication that there is still a great deal of work to do to make works publicly or openly accessible, even with these strong mandates. The continuing strong growth of open access both overall and in the PubMed context, as illustrated by the growing list of journals participating fully in PMC far beyond the mandates, contrasts with this lagging compliance rate, and suggests ongoing polarization within the publishing community.

Methodology notes

Growth rates are calculated on the basis of growth over the past year divided by the relevant time-metric (365 for daily, 12 for monthly, 52 for weekly), and rounded.

Full open access to articles - with library savings of over 70%

Update October 5, 2010: the currency reported in the STM report was USD, not UK pounds sterling. Thanks to Mark Ware, author of the STM report, for this information - and interesting example of open peer review in action! The USD currency is reflected in the STM report v1.1 on the STM website.

What this means is that my original figure (based on an assumption of US currency) of 64% savings is more accurate. I will rework the spreadsheet and re-release in the near future. Additional open peer review is welcome.

At the PLoS average article processing fee of $1,649 U.S. per article, or BMC average article processing charge of $1,560 U.S., libraries worldwide could fund full open access to the world's estimated 1.5 million scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles produced every year at less than 30% of current annual global academic library journal expenditures.

The purpose of this broad-brush, macroeconomic analysis is to sweep aside the complexities of transitioning to open access, to view just how achievable open access is from an economic standpoint.

The method for calculating these savings involves:

STM Revenue

• Take the total STM annual journal revenue as reported by Mark Ware for STM of 8 billion pounds sterling and convert to about 12.6 billion U.S.

• Divide by .7 (approx. 70% of STM journal revenue is from academic libraries according to Ware)

• This gives $8.8 billion USD annual revenue to STM from academic libraries alone

Full open access at PLoS or BMC rates

• PLoS average rate: multiply # of articles / PLoS journal by article processing fee for that journal, add and calculate average

• BMC standard rate is from BMC webpage

• Multiply by approx. 1.5 million scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles per year as discovered by Björk et al

Calculate the ratio and voila! Libraries CAN have our cake and eat it too - full open access with cost savings.

One key point: the average cost per article matters. To keep things simple, this macroanalysis only considers one business model for open access, and only two publishers.

Data Sources

BioMedCentral standard article processing charge - from BMC website http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq Sept. 27, 2010.

Björk, Bo-Christer; Roosr, Annikki; Lauri, Mari. (2008). Global annual volume of peer reviewed scholarly articles and the share available via different open access options. ELPUB2008. Open Scholarship: Authority, Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June 2008 / Edited by: Leslie Chan and Susanna Mornati.

PLoS average publication fee (2010): http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action#pubfee

Research Information Network (RIN). (2008). Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK Retrieved from http://is.gd/3Q7cm

Universal Currency Converter. Retrieved from http://www.xe.com/ucc/ September 27, 2010

Ware, Mark. (2009) The stm report: An overview of scientific and scholarly
journals publishing 2009. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Retrieved from http://www.stm-assoc.org/ February 2010

To download a spreadsheet with calculations, go to the Economics of Scholarly Communication Dataverse.

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access and Economics 101 series, and is an update and correction of a post from 2009.

Wiley open access moves: scholarly societies pushing for OA?

Wiley just announced the hiring of a Senior Open Access Marketing Manager.

What's up? Perhaps this is a clue, from the press release: "About Open Access and Wiley-Blackwell

Wiley-Blackwell supports any business model that is financially sustainable and scalable, and is able to maintain quality and the stewardship of the authoritative version of record. Together with a number of our society partners, we are experimenting with alternative models. In addition, several of our journals offer free access to older content and to certain types of material, such as review articles."

Comment: way to go, scholarly societies!!!

Note that scholarly societies could likely go for full open access at much lower rates for article processing fees on their own. With full OA, dissemination is as simple as registering with DOAJ and making the journal web-accessible. These are established journals which are already well-indexed, a factor that would not be impacted with the switch to OA. Editors should check with their local libraries, as many have free or very low cost journal hosting services. It is probably more than worthwhile to check rates with other OA publishers, such as CO-ACTION publishing, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi.

Almost half (47%) of Wiley's journal revenue financial report (detailed report - downloadable from http://www.wiley.com/legacy/annual_reports/ar_2010/index.html), p. 13.

Of downloads and lemmings

Following is my contribution to a recent discussion on the American Scientist Open Access Forum on the topic of downloads:

What the institutional repository does with respect to download counts, is to direct traffic to the university's site. This will increase the university's web presence and hence emerging institutional web impact assessments, likely to be of increasing importance in years to come.

Having said that, I would also like to point out that there are serious dangers to scholarship that come with over-emphasis on the numbers. What is popular from a scholarly perspective at one point in time is not necessarily what is important.

One way to think of this: imagine that we humans are like a group of lemmings rushing madly towards a cliff (given the climate crisis and our limited attention to this, I would argue that this is a reasonable comparison). Any lemming that says (or writes) about - how to get to the cliff even faster - is likely to be well-heeded (and cited, if it is an academic lemming). On the other hand, the scholar who looks ahead and sees the cliff and shouts off (or writes up for a peer-reviewed lemming paper): "Hey! Cliff ahead! Should be change direction? " may not get much attention immediately. (Later on, after the early birds have gone over the cliff, could be a different story).

Another important point: one real danger of usage statistics is the potential for usage-based pricing. If we go this route, it is just a matter of time before some of us impose limits on reading. If the undergraduate research project becomes a cost item, there will be a strong incentive to limit research and/or eliminate research projects. When one copy of an article can easily serve anyone, anywhere, it would be a shame to go this route. (Thanks to Andrew Odlyzko for pointing to this danger).

For a more in-depth look at this topic, please see my book chapter, "The implications of usage statistics as an economic factor in scholarly communications", OA copy in the SFU IR at:
http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/1639

Comment: if there is one single possibility that tipped the balance for me to become an open access advocate, it is the spectre of usage-based pricing and the evil that this entails, at least for scholarship.

Wanted: a don't-be-evil online music store

Update August 23: http://www.emusic.com/ has been suggested. Interesting - DRM-free music, but on the other hand an ongoing monthly financial commitment, which I don't like, with emusic reserving the right to change the terms and conditions at any time. Not sure about this, but definitely much better than itunes.

Much as I like the idea of the convenience of buying music online (whether for download or CDs), I can't bring myself to sign the itunes agreement. This agreement says that I can only use what I buy in Canada, and apple reserves the right to use spy technology to enforce this. Nor am I keen on purchasing through Amazon, since I don't see an easy way to filter out music produced by companies that employ evil sue-their-customers-even-kids techniques and/or who advocate for evil copyright protection. Perhaps an Amazon "no-RIAA members" button would suffice?

Given the popularity of the international Pirate Parties, maybe it's not just me?

On the other hand, maybe I should just create my own music.

Open access advocacy for the procrastinator

Best excuse for procastinating I've come up with in a long time: what do you mean, this won't be open access? Suitable for authors of all toll access publishers.

Worlds of differences between publishers (economics 101)

Many librarians have never studied economics. Now that we are playing a key role in transforming scholarly communication, we need to know a little about the topic, at least as it applies to the stuff we work with. This is true whether we're in library management, collections, or at the front lines working with faculty on scholarly communication issues. This post is the first in a series designed to provide an easy reading introduction to librarians on this topic and for this purpose, called Economics 101.

Today's topic introduces the concept of the worlds of differences that exist between publishers. I will be using one of my favorite examples - since it is both so extreme, and from LIS. Emerald's Library Management, with a subscription price of Euro 11819 according to Ulrich's (that's 15,138 USD by today's conversion rate), costs about 190 times as much as ACRL's College and Research Libraries (similar in number of peer-reviewed articles per year), at a maximum non-member non-US rate of 80 USD. While this is an extreme example, it nonetheless illustrates an important point: the journals of the for-profit commercial sector can cost not only more than the not-for-profits, the commercials often cost a very great deal more.

This is important, because if we would like to see a healthy, affordable future for scholarly communication, we need to understand and support the often small, not-for-profit publishers, whether they are our own, as in the case of C&RL, or help our faculty members to see the importance of supporting such journals in their own disciplines.

Following are a few ways to think about this:

• When it comes time for renewal, budgets are tight, and of course we want publishers to keep their prices down. But does it make sense to ask the same sacrifices of a publisher of a journal that costs only $80 and another very similar journal that costs more than $15,000?

• If we thought about the important work that ACRL does and how low that $80 subscription ($70 in the U.S., by the way) is, and asked ACRL to double the price for C&RL, and negotiated with Emerald for a 1% decrease in the cost for Library Management, we would save money (1% of $15,000 is $150 - $80 for doubling the cost of C&RL). We would save $70.

• Or, why not ask Emerald to be just a bit more reasonable, and halve the price of Library Management to just $7,500 U.S.? This would save us enough money to pay for subscriptions to 94 journals like C&RL.

The irony is, that when we explain the dire straights of library budgets to publishers, it is the ACRLs of this world who are the first to step up and assure us that they will keep prices flat.

A simple way to keep this difference in mind in the field: when comparing journals or publishers and their pricing changes over the years, keep in mind the actual price - not just the percentage of increase or decrease. A 1% increase to C&RL is $.80; a 1% increase to Library Management is $150, almost double the full subscription cost of C&RL.

This post is the first in the series Economics 101. While the examples here are subscription-based journals, overall the purpose of understanding the economics is transitioning to open access. What's the connection? Publishers that have never gouged anyone, but have rather always kept their prices reasonable, often (like C&RL) have a well-deserved reputation for high quality. If they depend on library subscription dollars - let's help them to make the transition to open access. When I talk to people involved with many of these journals, what I hear is that many of them would love to make such a transition - they just need a little help, and if librarians step up to help them, many would welcome the help.

Cultural Studies: for-profit journals cost up to 10 times more than not-for-profit

Striphas analyzes the relative costs of journals from different publishers in cultural studies, and finds that the journals produced by commercial publishers cost from 50% to 1000% more (10 times the cost) than the not-for-profit university press journals, with the average price at Sage the highest at $853. Striphas' analysis on why addresses added value to the publisher databases (bells and whistles for searching), but notes that the main reason is because publishers can charge this much, because of the inelastic market. The section on alienation in this article is useful for those working on author's rights.

Citation: Striphas, T. (2010). Acknowledged goods: Cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(1), 3.

LIBER Keynote: The role of the research library in an emerging global public sphere (LIBER keynote)

The webcast of my keynote speech at the LIBER 2010 Conference, The role of the research library in an emerging public sphere, is now available.

Open Access for Canada - for Canadian impact

As librarians across the country know, it is not easy for searchers to find information about Canada. Recently, in a discussion about the Canadian Census, someone pointed out how much more open and useful the U.S. Census data is. Have a look - it is impressive indeed. The point was, that this Canadian admitted to doing research using U.S. Census data rather than Canadian data for their grad thesis, just because it was too hard to find Canadian data. A story that reference librarians are all too familiar with. Update August 7: Allison Martell explains why she used American census data rather than Canadian for her undergraduate project, because the Canadian data were not usable.

When American information is easy to find, and Canadian information almost impossible to find, what ends up happening is that Canadian researchers end up helping Americans with their problems, even if they want to help us with ours. If Americans thought about this and wanted to reciprocate, they'd have a hard time finding our information and probably give up.

The U.S. already has a strong mandatory open access law with the National Institutes of Health, and discussions are well underway to extend this to all U.S. federal funding agencies. Canada had better get going on our own OA mandates and make our work visible, quick, or we'll end up becoming even more marginalized from a knowledge standpoint. This anecdotal view is a good fit with the author impact advantage illustrated in Steve Hitchcock's excellent bibliography of studies on this topic.

Canadians who are advocating for the return of the mandatory long form of the census: why not add to the list of the demands that the data be made just as open and usable as the U.S. Census data is?

If we don't need to read the research results for a while - why not redirect the research funding?

One of the more puzzling arguments made by publishers lobbying against open access is the notion that in some areas, there is a long lag between publication and reading, so a lengthy embargo of multiple years is needed.

If this is the case, it seems obvious to me that if there are other areas - such as keeping up with the latest in my own field of communication, advancing medical research, or finding environmentally sustainable energy solutions - where the needs are more urgent, instead of protecting the publishers of the less-pressing research, why not redirect the research funding?

Not that I am advocating such a step be taken - but doesn't it seem logical?

Addition August 1st: this argument is a part of a larger argument, that is, if there is no compelling public interest in viewing the results of publicly funded research - then why is the public funding the research in the first place?

American Psychological Association claims to pay for peer review. Should we send them a bill?

According to this nextgov article, Steven Breckler, executive director for science at the American Psychological Association, says, "One of the major concerns publishers raised is federal funds do not cover the costs of peer review, which is a service the APA journal provides to readers by coordinating a panel of experts to vet a prospective author's research before publishing it".

The reality: publishers do not pay for peer review; this is provided on a voluntary basis by the academic community itself.

This is an argument that keeps coming up over and over again, and I am wondering how to get the point across that it is foolish to claim to pay for valuable services that you are getting for free?

In today's fiscal environment, universities everywhere and certainly universities in the U.S., are dealing with some very tough budget situations. If publishers are claiming to pay for peer review, hey, why not send them a bill?

Update August 1: this should be considered as a (fully justified) educational exercise for the publishing community; for the university sector, it would be folly to pay for peer review. The Research Information Network conducted a scenario exercise which illustrates the considerable economic benefits to the university sector of the current gift economy for peer review: Research Information Network (RIN). (2008). Activities, costs and funding flows in the
scholarly communications system in the UK. Retrieved July 27, 2010 from
http://is.gd/3Q7cm

The dinosaurs roar, or, does the U.S. need an Outmoded Lab Equipment law?

The publishing dinosaurs, predictably, are predicting that dire things will happen if the U.S. enacts strong public access legislation.

The simple fact is that in the day of the Internet, open access publication is a very great deal more efficient and effective than what was possible with print. One online copy is readily available to anyone, anywhere; plus with full libre open access, allowing for re-use, it is possible to use data mining techniques to much more rapidly advance research.

If the arguments that publishers have invested in this system make sense, here is a thought: why doesn't the U.S. enact a law protecting manufacturers of outmoded lab equipment? These people have invested in technology, products, and services, and every time a better technology comes along, they need to come up with new and better technology, or go the way of the dinosaurs. If the arguments of the publishing community make sense, so do this.

The role of the research library in an emerging global public sphere (LIBER keynote)

The text and powerpoint of my keynote at the 39th annual LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) Conference is now available.

Abstract

Presents a vision of a potential future global public sphere, why it is needed and signs of emergence, and the role of the research library in this global public sphere, as provider of a distributed knowledge commons, preserver of scholarly information, and source of specialized expertise. Key short-term transitional steps are covered, particularly transition to a fully open access scholarly publishing system.

Note: I'll post a link to the webcast once this is available.

Good works (social housing) in progress in Vancouver

Observed in a completely non-scientific way in my last foray into the heart of the City of Vancouver: construction work underway on 3 sizable housing projects targeted to people in need of support as well as housing. Kudos to the Province of BC and the City of Vancouver for this work, especially during tough fiscal times.

Those of us who advocate for the public good should try to remember to notice and say thank you when our politicians are doing things right, not just critique when they aren't. It is not likely that these few projects will solve the problems of homelessness or lack of support for the mentally ill in Canada, but they are a step in the right direction. If this is what my tax dollars are going to support, that's a good thing, and I for one would like to see more along these lines.

Support for open access policy in Denmark

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, or STM - the body that represents primarily the highly profitable sector of scholarly publishing - has issued the "STM submission on “Recommendations for implementation of Open Access in Denmark”. Following are some comments on this submission.

Highlights

In brief: STM makes a case for a EU benefiting from balance of trade. Denmark may wish to consider whether it is a supplier to other countries of this balance, and whether this situation risks loss of Danish-funded research. This is the situation for the vast majority of countries in the world. STM greatly overstates their contributions to scholarly publishing, for example claiming to "underwrite the creation" of scientific information. This is patent nonsense; for a publicly funded research article, it is the public funder, university and scholarly researcher / author who create the information. STM claims to have taken on the role of preservation; it would be bizarre indeed for the private sector to take on this role. STM bases their economic case on the high cost of moving to the online environment in the 1990's. Any industry that has not noticed the tremendous decrease in costs of information technology in the last two decades is rather obviously out of touch. Speaking of out of touch, STM claims to have been involved with scholarly publishing for 350 years. In reality, almost all scholarly publishing was in the hands of the not-for-profit sector until after the second world war, and today, the open access publishing community, not at all mentioned in this letter, is sizable and growing, with over 5,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in DOAJ, which is growing by more than 2 titles per day.

Details

STM:
STM makes a "Euro 3 billion contribution to the EU’s balance of trade".

Comments:
While I cannot comment on the overall balance of trade, I would suggest it worthwhile for Denmark to consider the Denmark-specific situation. The number of very large, highly profitable STM publishers in the world is very small, and I don't think any of them are centered in Denmark - which makes it highly likely that Denmark, like the vast majorities of countries in the world, is on the supply side of this balance of trade, i.e. like Canada, in Denmark the cash flow is likely very much from Denmark outwards. Another similarity is that Denmark, like Canada, in giving away the results of Danish-funded research to highly profitable publishers in other countries, risks losing access to the results of the research that it has funded, should Denmark be in a position to not be able to afford the pricey packages of these publishers.

STM:

STM publishers recognize and applaud the efforts of private sector organizations and government institutions to supply funds to support scholarly research activity. These funding activities are an essential component of today’s well-functioning and interdependent system of scholarly scientific communication that relies on each of its major stakeholders (e.g. authors, researchers, primary and secondary publishers, libraries, universities, federal government) to perform a key role in the development and dissemination of peer-reviewed papers. The essential role that publishers play in this system is to underwrite the creation, registration, certification, formalization,
improvement, dissemination, preservation and use of scientific information.

Comments:
It is misleading to include the efforts of private sector organizations in this response; a government mandate for government-funded research will obviously not include privately funded research. Also, STM is greatly exaggerating the role of the publisher. STM does not "underwrite the creation" of scientific information, for example. With publicly funded research, it is the public funder, the university, and the scholarly author(s) who create the information. It is voluntary peer-reviewers and often semi-voluntary editors who are responsible for peer review (registration and certification).

Preservation: it makes no sense to ask the private sector to take on the role of long-term preservation. Any private organization has a right to change its focus of operation, or cease to exist, at any time. The role of preservation should be undertaken by the public sector; this has long been the role of libraries, and should continue to be so.

Consider how ludicrous it would be to mandate that private publishers undertake the role of preservation - a policy that would say something like, "if you undertake to publish scholarly information, it shall be thy responsibility to maintain it, for all eternity!" Now THAT would be an unfunded and unsustainable mandate, wouldn't it?

STM:
"STM publishers support the maximum sustainable dissemination of the published record of science and for 350 years we have helped create, disseminate and (now) preserve the world’s body of knowledge".

Comment:
The commercial sector in scholarly publishing emerged after the Second World War. Up until this point in time, scholarly publishing was conducted almost exclusively by not-for-profit scholarly publishers, and the not-for-profit sector continues to produce a very large portion of scholarly publishing. Far from supporting the maximum sustainable dissemination of the published record of science, STM has taken advantage of an inelastic market to consistently raise prices above inflationary levels, creating a serials crisis.

STM:
Today over 2,000 scientific and scholarly publishers worldwide (including large and small commercial, university presses and learned societies) manage and fund the processing of some 2-3 million manuscripts submitted from researchers and finally produce annually in excess of 1.5 million peer-reviewed published journal articles in some 25,000 journals.

Comments:
STM neglects to mention that today, a large and growing share of these publishers are either fully open access publishers (the vetted Directory of Open Access Journals now lists more than 5,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and is adding titles at the rate of more than 2 per day), or publishers who provide open access after a temporary embargo period (often 6 months to a year) on a voluntary basis. A majority of publishers allow for author self-archiving, as listed on the SHERPA RomEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving site. In other words, the number of publishers who would have to change current policies and practices to conform to a public open access policy mandate is small, and shrinking.

On the funding: it would be more accurate to say that the highly profitable publishers are FUNDED BY the system, rather than that they fund it. It is understandable if their view is different, however, scholarly publishing is different from a typical business, as it is the scholars themselves who are the largest group by far of readers as well as authors. It is more accurate to say that libraries, acting of behalf of their scholar reader/authors, who fund the system, indirectly through publishers.

STM:
Since the early 1990s, STM publishers have invested heavily in the migration from print based products into electronic, digital versions, with the result that 96% of scientific, technical and medical journals1 and 87% journals in arts, humanities and social sciences are available electronically, fully searchable, and accessible on the world wide web.

Comment:
In the early 1990's, it was indeed expensive to move into the online environment. However, technology has evolved, as has publishing software, and the costs of computing have decreased - very dramatically so. Nowadays, using freely available open source software such as Open Journal Systems, the technology requirements of scholarly publishing are a very great deal less than was the case in the 1990's. It makes no sense at all to base the economic present and future on the basis of one time-limited expense.

For more background, please see my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians. Links to two open access chapters can be found from the main page of my blog. Requests for clarification about any of the details of this post are most welcome.

Canada's Digital Economy Consultation: deadline extended to July 13th

The deadline for Canada's Digital Economy Consultation has been extended to July 13. Please take a few moments to register and vote for open access policy for Canadian funded research (under Canada's Digital Content in the Ideas Forum), and many other fine Ideas such as open data, net neutrality, and support for the Community Access Program.

The July 9 updated version of the open access submission (with added names) has been submitted today.

OA Mandate at Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation

Kudos to the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation on their OA mandate!

July 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the July 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: California vs. Nature.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: June 30, 2010 (brief version)

The June 30, 2010 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available for viewing or open data download.

Highlights this quarter:

Open access policy continues to be the headline growth story, particularly institutional OA mandates and total OA mandates, both of which have more than doubled over the past year. There are now a total of 220 mandates.

DOAJ is now over 5,000 journals - congratulations, DOAJ!! By my calculations, this means that about 20% of the world's peer-reviewed journals are now open access*. DOAJ title growth was particularly strong this quarter, 277 titles or an average of 3 titles per day (over the past year, 888 titles added, over 2 titles per day). In addition to title growth, DOAJ is showing growth in the number of titles and articles searchable at article level - the latter is now over 400,000.

BASE added about 1.5 million documents this quarter, or about half a million documents per month.

As reported by Bjork et al in PLoS One, about 1 in 5 articles published in 2009 are now freely available.

This is a brief version of DGOA so that I can get back to the LIBER 2010 Conference in beautiful Aarhus, Denmark as quickly as possible. For more, please see my Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series, where I often include links to highlights to other milestones and indicators of growth.

* Note that both traditional measures of peer-reviewed journals and OA counts are missing important data, such as numbers of journals from China. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has ideas on how to address this.

Open Access Journals Support in Canada

Preliminary results of the Open Access Journals Support in Canada research project, as presented by myself and Brian Owen on behalf of research team members including Donald Taylor, Andrew Waller, and Kumiko Vezina at the June 1, 2010 Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) Annual General Meeting, part of the Congress conference, are now available in the SFU D-Space and E-LIS.

Abstract

Describes preliminary results of the pan-Canadian Open Access Journals Support in Canada survey of university libraries and presses conducted in spring 2010. The majority of respondents are involved in scholarly journal publishing, with more planning to get involved. There is strong trend towards preferential support for open access publishing. Responses to questions about support for a variety of open access models indicated that any model for OA transition would received some level of support from a majority of libraries.

On the wide disparity in publisher cost-efficiency

Libraries and librarians are continuing to cope with the impact of the global financial crisis, and I understand that some of us are beginning to wonder why our libraries are facing deep budget cuts and staff furloughs while a few of the largest commercial publishers are boasting record profits.

Understandable, some are beginning to look for a better deal, and personally I think this is a very good thing. However, this might be a good time to highlight that there is a very wide discrepancy in the cost-effectiveness of different types of publishers. It it not fair, IMHO, to treat the mission-oriented publisher that has never charged more than they needed to survive, as if they were the same as the highly for-profit publishers. By all means, let's look for deals - but let's not forget that a 3% increase to a $100 subscription is only $3, while a 3% increase to a $1 million subscription is $30,000 - and the $3 increase might mean the difference to survival for the efficient publisher, while the for-profit would have to give up more than $30,000 to even begin to have something resembling a revenue cut of a much smaller order of magnitude than what is faced by many a library.

One extreme example from our own profession:

As of today, the subscription list price for the for-profit Library Management (Emerald) is EUR 11,819 (Ulrich's). That's $14,600 US (Bank of Canada currency conversion service, June 18, 2010). Compare this with the MAXIMUM institutional cost for ACRL's College and Research Libraries at $80 US for non-member institutions outside of the US and Canada. This is a difference of well over a hundred fold in subscription cost for these two journals, and I would argue that of the two, it is ACRL's College and Research Libraries that is the more prestigious. I do acknowledge that single subscription costs are of limited applicability in the world of bundled and largely consortial pricing. Also, this is an extreme example. Cost differentials in the range of 4 to 10-fold appear to be much more common (that is, the cost of one journal on a per-article basis can be a four to 10 times as much for another journal of similar or every higher quality. Imperfect though this example is, it is illustrative of the wide difference in costs between different publishers which does not necessarily correlate in a positive manner with quality.

The original analysis for this example is from my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, Chandos Publishing: Oxford, 2009. The cost differential has increased since the time the book was written; the ACRL cost is stable, while the Emerald cost has risen considerably.

[Disclosure: I am co-coordinator of the ARL and ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute webinar series, Building Strength through Collaboration, however this has nothing to do with ACRL publications or membership].

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

This post was distributed to a number of listservs on Thursday, June 17, 2010

Update June 17, 2010 - this post by Bernd-Christoph Kaemper to Scholcomm and Liblicense-l is worth repeating in full:

Oh, well, Emerald again ...

Emerald (formerly MCB) has received its fair share of criticism in the past (including some from me, back in those days of the newsletter of serials pricing issues), but I've learned since then, that Emerald is an extreme example of pricing policies that appear to address the bold and adventurous among us, those that have no fear to apply all the techniques learned on the bazaar, rather than the timid, who ask for the list price and turn pale in horror.

To put it simple and bluntly, if you actually have a few Emerald titles in your collection that you pay at list price instead of a bundle, you or your predecessors in your job probably made a terrible mistake, or your institution has/had too much money to spend. Just cancel and start anew.

For some historical reason, that eludes my comprehension (although I'd love to hear explanations), single title prices with Emerald are fantasy prices. If you actually start talking to Emerald (and they really have friendly and competent staff), you'll be surprised to learn that it can be possible to get a package of titles for less than the list price of the most expensive title(s) in it, and that you actually might be able to get a rather decent offer for your campus or consortium. (Disclosure: my perspective and experience is that of a large technical university with comparatively small business and social sciences, but I have also talked to colleagues from other universities.)

Essentially, you buy Emerald as a full text database (various sizes and collections available) and have to judge its efficiency on that basis (i.e. on an aggregated cost per use base), not any individual titles a la carte which would be terribly expensive.

With respect to transparency and investigations of publisher cost efficiency and value for money on the basis of various possible metrics: I guess this is a prime example of why Ted Bergstrom, Paul Courant and Preston McAfee were right to ask libraries and consortia to disclose the actual terms of their bundle deals (under a public-records request) rather to rely on list prices, cf. e.g. the ARL press release Elsevier Motion to Block License Release Denied in Open-Records Decision, http://www.arl.org/news/pr/elsevier-wsu-23jun09.shtml
and Ted Bergstroms Journal Pricing page,
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

I'll leave it to others who are in a better position to do this to possibly comment on the actual cost efficiency of Emerald compared to other publishers in economics on an aggregate basis, but my understanding is that this was also not the focus or intention of your actual message (to look at any particular publisher). I only wanted to give a little warning that individual title list prices have very little meaning here. (And please take also the bazaar analogy above with a grain of salt. The positive message here is: the publisher might be more responsive to your needs and constraints then you would have assumed.)

I'd also question your placative and simplistic contrasting of the (efficient) "mission-oriented publisher that has never charged more than they needed to survive" with the (inefficient) "highly for-profit publishers".

That's a poetic notion not one that adequately matches today's complex business realities for scholarly publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit.

The question of cost-efficiency is a complex one, cf. for a starter the the JISC Report

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits (Jan 2009)

and the Feedback on it provided by STM and ALPSP, as discussed under
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx

Best regards,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

Comment

This is very helpful information, thank you Bernd-Christoph. I should clarify that I do not mean to paint Emerald as a "bad guy" at all; in fact, Emerald has a very enlightened approach to green OA self-archiving policies. Nevertheless, I think that this fantasy price model - which I suspect is not unique to Emerald - bears further investigation. I plan to mull this over a little. On the other hand, ACRL and College and Research Libraries, producing top quality scholarly publishing at rock-bottom prices and making good efforts towards open access by supporting author self-archiving, and making many articles fully open access, is, in my mind, a clear-cut good guy.

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access series. From my perspective, a healthy open access future for scholarly communication should be built on sustainable business models.

Update July 4: for commentary on the fantasy pricing model, see Barbara Fister at Library Journal.

Open Access submission to Canada's Digital Economy Consultation

On behalf of a group of Canadian and international open access advocates, I have just contributed a submission to Canada's Digital Economy Consultation. It may be a few days before this appears on the government web site. The text of the submission can be viewed here. Update June 19: the submission is now available on the Industry Canada site.

The brief Executive Summary as posted to the government website is as follows:

We recommend that Canada develop a policy requiring open access to federally funded Canadian scholarship, i.e. research funded by the research granting councils CIHR, SSHRC, NSERC, and NRC. This policy would ensure taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research, maximum impact of taxpayer-funded research, bring Canadian policy into line with international policy developments, and appropriately secure a place for Canada as a leader in this important area of innovation.

The policy needed is for researchers funded by federal granting agencies to be required to deposit, in their institution’s open access repository, a copy of the author’s final manuscript of all published peer-reviewed articles arising from federally funded research, immediately on acceptance for publication, with access to the deposit set as open access immediately, or after a minimum delay to accommodate publishers. The locus of deposit should be an appropriate open access repository; by default, the author’s institutional repository. Cross-deposits from institutional to central repositories (such as PubMedCentral Canada, as mandated by CIHR) can then be done automatically by software.

In 2008, CIHR adopted a Policy on Access to Research Outputs, which is in many ways an exemplary policy, although there is a loophole to be addressed, as it allows for opt-out based on publisher copyright policies. This is neither justified nor necessary. While the contributions of professional publishers are very valuable, the published article reflects the contributions of many parties, including the Canadian taxpayer, the authors, their institutions, the voluntary peer reviewers, and often human subjects as well. No one contributor to the process should have exclusive rights to the final report; an open access requirement is reasonable and fair to all.

In addition, researchers should be encouraged to do the same with their research data (while ensuring that confidentiality / anonymity of research subjects is maintained), as well as with other works, such as monographs and creative works, wherever possible.

The simple no-cost step of requiring open access deposit would have tremendous impact in advancing the effectiveness and dissemination of Canadian research.

Update June 16: if you would like to add your (or your organization's) name, please let me know at hgmorris at sfu dot ca, and I will submit a revised version on July 9.

Anti-OA spin on Inside Higher Ed

Update June 15, 2010: Oxford University Press has issued a revised press release, which clarifies that the spin is indeed coming from OUP.

Excerpt

Through the Oxford Open initiative, launched in July 2005, Oxford University Press (OUP) has experimented with open access models and has been carefully monitoring and sharing results. Today, six Oxford journals are fully open access and over 90 are hybrid open access, where authors of accepted papers are given the option of paying an open access publication charge to make their paper freely available online immediately.

In 2009 the average uptake of the open access option for participating journals fell to 5.9%, compared with 6.7% in 2008. This reduction was due to a lower uptake amongst 11 new titles joining Oxford Open in 2009. On a like-for-like basis, the average uptake in 2009 for journals which entered the scheme prior to 2008 was stable (6.7%, compared with 6.8% in 2008).

Comment

From 2005 to 2010, based on this information, OUP has transitioned from a fully subscription model to a point where 6 OUP journals are fully open access, and 90 are hybrid open access. The Oxford Open option greatly understates open access, as it does not take into account author self-archiving, as explained in detail by Stevan Harnad at Open Access Archivangelism. From this press release, it appears that journals that have been participating for some time have a stable participation rate. OUP could be reporting open access success, but has chosen to focus on the negative.

In addition to what is obviously some success in moving towards OA at OUP, supplemented by author self-archiving, another factor to take into account is that authors desiring full open access might be choosing different journals. OUP charges article processing fees, while the vast majority of OA journals do not use this business model. Of the journals that do charge APFs, OUP may not be competitive on a cost per quality basis. Then, too, libraries that are supporting OA via APFs are often refusing to support hybrid journals.

I am not sure why OUP has chosen to focus on the negative. Their academic library customers are eager for change, and it appears that OUP is in a great position to take advantage of this desire. Why not market OUP as an alternative OA solution?

Here is Quick Take from today's Inside Higher Ed, repeated in full for purposes of scholarly critique:

Academics remain reluctant to allow their journal articles to be deposited in open-access repositories, according to the Oxford University Press. The press announced Thursday that the percentage of Oxford Press articles authorized for re-publication in its open-access repository decreased overall from 6.7 to 5.9 percent between 2008 and 2009. Officials attributed the decrease to a relatively low rate of opt-ins from 11 new journals to which the option was extended in 2009; putting those new titles aside, the proportion of authors allowing their work to be made freely available stayed roughly the same. Still, the stagnation of that rate indicates that researchers are still wary of endorsing an open-access model, Oxford officials said in a release. Humanities scholars were the least willing to participate in Oxford Open, the press's open-access initiative, opting in at a rate of 2.5 percent. Life sciences scholars were the most generous with their work, with 11.4 percent allowing their papers to be freely accessible.

Comment

Why the spin? According to this information, OUP has a stable rate of participation in Oxford Open for journals that have been participating for a while, and a lower rate of participation for journals that have just joined the program - hardly surprising, as the journals that were most keen to participate were likely part of the original group. Why add the numbers and spin this as if it were decreasing participation? If a statement like this were made in an article submitted to a journal for peer review, any journal worth its salt would refuse to publish the article unless the statement were revised. Note that I cannot find any such press release on the Oxford University Press site. My comment on the Inside Higher Ed site requests the original release to which this Quick Take is referring.

The latest open access controversy: are we in the age of open access, or just on the verge?

Debate in scholarship is a healthy sign - and this new debate amongst open access advocates, as recently emerged in the national meeting of Canada's Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities, is most welcome! It seems that there is a divergence of opinion amongst open access advocates, as to whether we are already in the age of open access, or just on the verge. I must admit to being on the fence on this debate myself; while the momentum of the OA movement does seem to be unstoppable at the moment, it is, from my perspective, prudent for OA activists to continue full steam - not to mention fun to be at the crest of such a successful movement!

Other aspects of recent debates are also very welcome; the days of questioning whether or not OA is a good thing are long past, with the current focus being very appropriately best practices for OA implementation.

Open Access Policies in Europe: David Prosser article

Enabling Open Scholarship has just released David Prosser's Open Access Policies in Europe. This succinct overview by one of open access' most noteworthy champions is a must-read for anyone involved in OA policy development or advocacy.

The journals of unfunded research

Recently in the Liblicense list, the idea came up that publishers could simply refuse to publish works by authors covered by open access policies. Of course, this is their right!

Publishers who share such view might wish to get together and form a new association, to plan their futures together. Here is my suggestion for a title for the association: The Journals for Strictly Limited Dissemination of the Works of Unfunded and Unemployed Researchers. Since this title is rather long, I suspect the abbreviation The Journals of Unfunded Research could quickly become popular.

The membership list of this association could be most helpful to librarians, in these difficult financial times when we need really good information about what to cut. And frankly, if journals are refusing articles written by the likes of authors at Harvard, MIT, as well as a large and growing list of other institutions, or funded by a growing list of the world's major research funders - it seems reasonable to ask what exactly they will be publishing in the near to medium term future.

For a list of the 220 open access mandate policies to date, see ROARMAP.

Food for all: letter to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) urging open access

Indian open access advocate Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) has sent a letter to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) urging that CGIAR require open access to CGIAR-funded research.

Following is the full text of the letter:

“Dear Dr Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr Kathy Sierra:

About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a Memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."

ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the National Institute of Technology-Rourkela (http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/). ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.

Since then is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.

We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over 2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.

As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. To see the full list of ~220 mandates worldwide, see ROARMAP.

We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.

Sincerely,
- Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]
- Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]
- Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]
- Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]
- Jean-Claude Guédon [University of Montreal, Canada]
- Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]
- Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]
- Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]
- Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]
- Heather Morrison [Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada]
- Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]
- T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]
- Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]
- Alma Swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]
- John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative commons]
- John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]”

Comment: bravo to Arun, our tireless defender of open access around the world! Let us hope that CGIAR heeds this message. What could possibly be more fair than ensuring that those who cannot always be sure to be able to afford quality food supplies, at the very least have guaranteed free access to the very research that is meant to help them?

Springer (owner of BMC) did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter

This correction to an earlier post bears repeating! According to Wim van der Stelt, Springer, EVP Business Development, Springer, owner of BioMedCentral, did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter of the AAP/PSP; Springer is currently not even a member! In fact, as reported in full here, Springer, owner of BMC, has quite an enlightened approach to open access.

It is my delight to profusely apologize to Springer (owner of BMC) for the mix-up.

Canada's Digital Economy Consultation: help vote up Open Access to Canadian Research

Update May 18: OA to Canadian Research is now at the top of the Canada's Digital Content section - just 13 votes from the top overall! Please register and vote today - and consider asking your organization to make a formal submission.

Please register for Canada's Digital Economy Consultation and vote for Open Access to Canadian Research under Canada's Digital Content. Currently OA is at 8 votes, just 2 behind the lead suggestion in this section of the Ideas Forum.

Private sector and long term responsibility for scholarly work? Nonsense!

In a recent letter opposing the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), Martin Frank writes: "Copyright is essential to protecting these works and to preserving incentives for the private sector to continue to invest in peer review, editing, publishing, and maintaining the electronic record of vetted scientific journal articles".

One issue with this sentence that I would like to highlight, for now: it is nonsense to suggest that the private sector has a meaningful role in long-term maintenance of scholarly articles.

A private sector publisher is completely within its rights to cease to exist, or change business operations, at any time. The public has no rights to ask a private sector entity to undertake a responsibility with an infinite time span. Has anyone asked publishers to undertake this role? If so, what were they thinking? This is not the traditional role of publishers, but rather the traditional role of libraries as a memory institution.

One of the benefits of the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy is that it moves the traditional role of the U.S. National Library of Medicine in preserving the medical research literature into the internet age, as well as sharing the burden globally through the developing PubMedCentral International network (with the UK and Canada up and running already). Academic libraries everywhere are busy ensuring the preservation of electronic collections, just as they have preserved print collections in the past (and present, of course).

On behalf of many: division within traditional publishers re anti-FRPAA lobbying

Correction May 20, 2010: I am delighted to report that Springer, owner of BioMedCentral, did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter and I originally reported. Rather, the letter was signed by Springer Publishing Company, a medical publishing company that has nothing to do with Springer/BMC.

Thanks to Wim van der Stelt, Springer, EVP Business Development, for this most helpful clarification:

"Your blogpost dated 05/12 about publishers anti frpaa letter contains a mistake that I’d really like to be corrected.

Springer is no signatory of the letter, we currently are even not a member of AAP/PSP. The Springer mentioned in the list of signatories is “Springer publishing company”, a medical publisher that is in no way related to Springer, let alone to BioMed Central.

I’d like to stress that Springer’s policy is to cooperate with customers and other stakeholders to further develop scholarly communication and that we are willing to experiment and develop new business models in case there is a need for that. That is the reason for our ongoing OA development activities, including the acquisition of BioMed Central".

Heather again:

My profuse apologies to Springer / BioMedCentral, and thanks very much to Wim van der Stelt and Springer for this most welcome feedback - and enlightened viewpoint.

This correction supports the major point of my blogpost, that there is division within traditional publishers regarding anti-FRPAA lobbying.

Original post, omitting the error:

A recent letter lobbying against FRPAA starts with: on behalf of many publisher members.

Interesting word, many. I have no doubt that the writer would have preferred to use words like "all", "almost all", or "most".

My take on this is that this is an indication of struggle within the anti-FRPAA lobbying group, which makes one wonder: just how strong is the opposition? For example, the letter refers to university presses; but only 3 presses are signatories, and only one of these is based in the U.S. (University of Chicago Press). According to the American Association of University Presses membership page, AAUP has over 130 members worldwide. If only 1 American University Press has signed this letter - this is less than 1% of the membership for this group.

It is curious that two UK university presses (Oxford and Cambridge) have signed, given that FRPAA is predated by OA policies at all of the UK Research Councils.

Even looking at the signatories, it is clear that there is internal struggle at these organizations as well. For example, Oxford University Press is a signatory, even though OUP has some innovative OA experiments in progress.

The letter can be downloaded from here.

Housekeeping: e-mail down on Sunday, May 16

Friends please note: my work e-mail will be down on Sunday, May 16, due to a major power shutdown on SFU Burnaby mountain campus. If you need to get in touch that day, try hgmorris at gmail dot com.

Canada's Digital Economy Consultation: preliminary thoughts

Tony Clement has opened up a consultation on Canada's Digital Economy - note that comments are due July 9th.

Preliminary thoughts:

Canada's Digital Economy strategy should reflect Canadian values, of universal rights to access and participation. Every Canadian, whether urban, rural, and including every First Nations community, should be able to participate in the digital economy. This means ubiquitous broadband access, and equity in access to education from kindergarten to post-secondary.

There is some welcome, but very weak support for open access in this report. This would be a good time for Canada to get up to speed on open access developments in other countries, notably the UK where all research councils require open access to the research that they fund, and the US Federal Research Public Access Act which is in progress.

As reported earlier on IJPE, the U.S. Communication and Computer Industries have recently released a report indicating the importance of industries relying on fair use. The Consultation document for Canada's Digital Economy strategy mentions that ICT accounts for 5% of GDP, and is rapidly growing, in comparison with the copyright-based industries that account for 3.8% GDP. This adds economic weight to fairness arguments for fair use / fair dealing. If we want the economy to flourish, we need LESS IP, not MORE. This would be a good time for leadership in demanding lowering copyright terms (perhaps to 14 years), and eliminating Crown copyright.

Creativity is important both to the economy, as mentioned in this report, and more importantly, to society. Welcome academic support for science is mentioned in this report; however, if the concern is with supporting the development of creativity, isn't the answer strong educational support for the arts and humanities, from kindergarten to post-secondary? Shouldn't we be supporting arts and culture in Canadian communities, so that they will be places where creative people want to live - and anyone would want to visit?

Over 20% of the world's scholarly journals now open access! (Kudos to DOAJ)

Update May 13: the current Ulrich's total for academic, refereed, active journals is just over 27,000, which makes the DOAJ 5,000 only 18.5%, not over 20% of the world's journals as measured by Ulrich's. It is likely that both Ulrich's and DOAJ seriously underrepresent academic journals in China. Thanks to Stian Haklev for the figures.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has just announced a list of milestones, including exceeding 5,000 journals. This is more than 20% of the world's scholarly peer reviewed journals, estimated at ~ 23,000 according to Ulrich's.

This is a conservative estimate. DOAJ is doing great work, but they are a small group, and kvetches from the open access community tend to center around the lag time it takes for new or converted journals to get through the DOAJ vetting process and be included in DOAJ.

If this is a concern for you - ask whether your local library, library consortia, or vendor who benefits from OA journals - is a member or supporter of DOAJ. As the notice points out, this support would be helpful to DOAJ to increase the services that people want of this popular site.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has just released a report, Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use.

In brief, using economic analysis developed by WIPO to assess the contribution of copyright industries, this report finds that the industries relying on fair use contribute trillions to the U.S. economy, employ millions, and that this sector is growing much faster than the economy as a whole.

Full citation: Thomas Rogers & Andrew Szamosszegi, Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use (CCIA: 2010) available online at ccianet.org.

Elsevier 2009 $2 billion profits could fund worldwide OA at $1,383 per article

Update November 29, 2011:  Thanks to a comment on Sauropod Vertebra of the Week, I realized that my calculations were off by a bit - thanks to commenter Jeff Hecht at http://svpow.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/economics-of-open-source-publishing/According to Jeff's calculations, dividing Elsevier profit among all 1.5 million articles per year yields only $730 for OA article processing fees, not $1,383 as I had calculated. Nevertheless, this still supports my main point, that this system is not connecting with fiscal reality - the profits of one publisher could support a fully open access system, albeit at a more modest rate than my original calculation.

The original post follows:


Elsevier's Annual Report, reports "robust financial performance in unprecedented global recession", with operating profits up.

Elsevier per se and Lexis-Nexis each earned over $1 billion US IN PROFIT in 2009, for a profit rate of 35% (Elsevier) and 26% (Reed Elsevier). Together, this is MORE THAN $2 billion in profit from scholarly publishing in 2009.

If the total profit from Elsevier and Lexis-Nexis is added together and converted to U.S. dollars, the total is $2,075m. Divided by the estimated worldwide scholarly article output of 1.5 million articles per year (Björk et al, 2008), this comes out to $1,383 U.S.

In other words, the profits of this one company alone could fund a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system, at a rate of $1,383 U.S. per article.

A minority of open access journals charge article processing fees. Of those that do have such charges, some charge more than this amount; however, others charge less.

In other words, the world's scholarly journal article output could be published as fully open access with the funding that currently goes to the profits of just one company in this field.

Calculations are available here. Note currency conversion from GBP April 27, 2010


References

Björk, B., Roosr, A., & Lauri, M. (2008). Global annual volume of scholarly peer reviewed journal articles and the share available via different open access options. Paper presented at the ELPUB2008. Open Scholarship: Authority, Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing Held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June 2008. Edited by: Leslie Chan and Susanna Mornati. Retrieved from http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?178_elpub2008

Reed Elsevier 2009 Annual Report

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access series.

Wiley STM: 3rd quarter profits up 18%

From John Wiley and Sons announces Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2010 Results:

"Global STMS revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 rose 13% to $228 million"

"Direct contribution to profit for the third quarter increased 18% to $89 million"

Comment: this is a 39% profit rate, at a time when library customers are hit hard by the effects of the Global Economic Crisis. Some of the profits are coming from outsourcing from high cost regions to low-cost regions. The U.S. is losing jobs in spite of all these profits.

Informa (Taylor & Francis etc.): profits up, majority renewing at previous high rates

According to the Informa 2009 Annual Report, the Adjusted Operating Margin (profit) is up to 25.3% in 2009 from 2008's 23.9%. From Highlights, Summaries, and Outlook: "the majority of subscriptions are renewing in line with previous high rates". As Executive Director Peter Rigby puts it, "”During a period of sustained economic decline across the world, our Publishing assets have performed exceptionally well". Publishing is now responsible for 72% of that 25.3% operating profit.

When the majority of customers worldwide are reeling from severe cutbacks from the global economic crisis, this is an excellent example of an inelastic market, not at all responsive to customers.

Concordia University's open access mandate

Congratulations to Concordia!!

Concordia University recently passed an open access mandate. As pointed out in the press released, this is great timing, as next month Concordia will host the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

[I will be at Congress this year - co-presenting with Brian Owen at the Canadian Association of Learned Journals AGM on the Open Access Journals Support in Canada research project, and at the Canadian Communication Association meeting, launching my book Scholarly Communication for Librarians and presenting on the Open Content Alliance and the Google Books Settlement].

This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access movement series.

The direct and indirect benefits of open access for the public

With the Federal Research Public Access Act under discussion in the U.S., it may be timely to review the direct and indirect benefits of open access for the public. Following is an excerpt from an article that Andrew Waller & I wrote for the Library Association of Alberta newsletter in 2004.

Benefits of Open Access

So, what benefits does Open Access bring? For the academic world, as noted, it
could help libraries better cope with subscription costs and provide more stability to budgeting, give researchers more control over their works, and also allow for wider distribution of those works, something most academics desire. What about the “general public”? There are both direct and indirect benefits for the general public.

Direct benefits occur when the public reads the primary research literature. At first glance, it might not seem intuitive that the public would be interested in reading this material. Perhaps this is because there is a tendency to view “the general public” as if it were some homogenous, average group of people. In reality, “the general public” is all of us. Here in Western Canada, “the public” includes a significant percentage of the population with university degrees; graduate degrees are not uncommon. Even academic researchers are members of “the public” outside of their areas of specialty.

The most popular notion of the direct benefits to the general public, and an important one, is the ability of patients and families to directly read the literature relating to medical conditions. The need for this access is perhaps most poignantly felt when someone is diagnosed with a rare, genetic condition, one that doctors know little about, and which might well affect many members of a family.

Another example of a direct benefit is the ability of students outside the research universities to read the primary research literature. Students who begin their studies at smaller colleges or university colleges, and high school students, could have the same access to the literature as students at research universities. This, in turn, would make it easier for educators and librarians at these institutions to help these students develop information literacy skills.

There are also people who are serious hobbyists who are quite capable of following the scholarly literature, and, in some cases, these people are assisting in the advancement of scientific knowledge. One example is astronomy; apparently there are so many serious amateur astronomers in the world, that whenever a new event in the heavens occurs, it is more likely to be reported by an amateur first, rather than a professional.

Indirect benefits to the public could come through the mediation of others. In an OA world, journalists and freelance writers would have ready access to the latest in the research literature. As one example, it could be easier for a journalist to investigate an environmental problem, as well as possible solutions. It could be easier for journalists to translate the latest medical discoveries, to help “the public” understand issues like SARS and AIDS, what causes common diseases (and how they might be prevented), what kinds of treatments might someday be available when we, or our loved ones, need it, and so on.

Finally, the increased exposure to results of the research of our universities can only enhance the value of the universities themselves in the eyes of the public and politicians. Scholars giving away the fruits of their labours can only result in greater support (definitely moral and hopefully financial) for future endeavours.

From: Morrison, Heather and Waller, Andrew Open access : basics and benefits., 2004. Available through E-LIS.

The global scope of the open access movement

This post includes a few small points of clarification in response to one point made in a recent letter by publishers to JISC, as follows:

"It is misleading not to explain to UK universities that the hypothesized “savings” require the rest of the world to support open access. The rest of the world accounts for 93.4% of published articles, only 1-2% of which are ‘gold’ and only 7% of which are ‘green’ today. Until the rest of the world follows UK universities, which would likely take decades based on the current pace of change, UK universities would pay significantly more with no extra benefit". from: letter to M. Read, JISC, from G. Taylor (the Publishers Association), I. Russell (ALPSP) and M. Mabe (STM), March 15, 2010, downloadable from here.

Comment:

The Houghton report does not assume that the whole world needs to move to open access; the cost savings quoted are based on a scenario of a unilateral move to OA by the UK. While this makes sense for a UK-based economic analysis (the UK Higher Education system cannot require changes elsewhere), the open access movement is actually global in scope. One way to view the UK in the global picture is to look at the Directory of Open Access Journals' statistics by country. Here we see that 406 OA journals are published in the UK, just under 10% of the total number of OA journals listed in DOAJ. The long list of countries publishing OA journals illustrates the global diversity of the movement.

Similarly, the global diversity of the open access repository (green) movement can be easily seen by a search of OpenDOAR "by country". Open access repositories are spread throughout Africa, Australia, North, South, and Central America, as well as Europe.

A global analysis of cost savings from a full switch to open access is likely to show far greater savings for the UK (and every other country) than a unilateral shift. My own macro-level estimate of library savings from a full shift to open access at top-quality PLoS rates is about 2.5 billion USD, or about 56% of current expenditures, as reported in my presentation, Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age. This is a conservative estimate in many respects.

This letter understates the current extent of open access. Bjork et al., based on 2006 data, reported that 4.6% of the world's scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles were published open access, with more made freely available by publishers after a delay period, resulting in over 8% of articles made freely available by publishers within a year of publication. Factoring in green self-archiving, the total of freely available fulltext after 2 years was close to 20%. Since 2006, open access has continued to grow dramatically, as I report regularly in my series, The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Please note that my focus on this one bullet point does not imply my agreement with the remainder of the letter; rather I thought it important to highlight this particular issue.

DOAJ Media and Communication list: open data / open knowledge

This DOAJ Media and Communication list for research purposes is released as open data, or more accurately ~

International Communication Association on Open Access

Update April 24: I just realized that the ICA's Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is open access (on the Wiley site).

Quotable from Wolfgang Donsbach, Finance Committee Report, International Communication Association 2007 Annual Report (downloadable from the ICA website):

"Publications...yield a surplus of between $500,000 - $600,000 because expenses for the editors' offices stay far below the income." (The ICA journals are published by Wiley Blackwell). Note that this is just the surplus returned to ICA; the profits retained by Wiley Blackwell are another matter.

According to Donsbach, "ICA's budget requires a close look at developments in the business of academic publications." The remainder of the paragraph talks about open access and federal funding agency policies.

Comment: ICA should definitely have a close look at its budget. According to my rough calculations, if the 541 articles published in ICA's 5 journals in 2009 had all been published as OA using the average PLoS article processing fee of $1,600, the total expenditure would have been about $132,000. In other words, ICA's entire publication program could be open access at top quality for less than a quarter of the present surplus.

Members of the International Communication Association should demand change. If we are wondering why our libraries cannot afford all of the books and journals that we would like to have in our libraries - this is why.

The ICA Mission, from the ICA website, is:

The International Communication Association aims to advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide. The purposes of the Association are (1) to provide an international forum to enable the development, conduct, and critical evaluation of communication research; (2) to sustain a program of high quality scholarly publication and knowledge exchange; (3) to facilitate inclusiveness and debate among scholars from diverse national and cultural backgrounds and from multi-disciplinary perspectives on communication-related issues; and (4) to promote a wider public interest in, and visibility of, the theories, methods, findings and applications generated by research in communication and allied fields.

There is nothing in this mission statement about profiteering from publication - or about purchasing real estate in Washington, DC, another prominent feature in the Financial Report. Every single element of the ICA mission would be advanced by open access.

Methodological note: to calculate the PLoS average article processing fee, I counted all the articles in each of the PLoS journals for several months, multiplied by the APF for each journal, then divided by the total number of articles, earlier this year. Since the lowest-cost PLoS One is the fastest-growing of the PLoS journals, I would anticipate that the average APF will decrease over time.

Another reason why the world needs librarians

There are people out there - including people with PhDs, and judges - who do not understand that internet linking is basically a form of citation. It is ridiculous to think that people should ask permission to link to someone's work on the web, or that the linker is somehow responsible to what they have linked to.

There is a huge learning curve for many people here, and isn't it grand that we have librarians like Devon Greyson on Social Justice Librarian to begin the task of overcoming the curve? This is just one small example of the tremendous need for information literacy. Librarians, I think we will have our work cut out for us, for some time to come.

WorldCat rights and responsibilites for the OCLC Cooperative: comments

OCLC has released a next draft of their WorldCat rights and responsibilities for the OCLC Cooperative. Following are my comments.

First, kudos to OCLC for a more transparent process and providing the opportunity to comment. That said, while this draft is an improvement over the first one, it is nevertheless going in the wrong direction altogether. Library bibliographic records belong in the public domain.

Most elements of a library bibliographic record are simply facts. Since I am an author, for example, WorldCat contains my name, the title of my works, as well as publication details - the name of my publisher, date, and place of publication. OCLC does not own my name, or the titles of my works, and it is not appropriate to brand bibliographic records for my works with either OCLC or WorldCat.

WorldCat also contains subject headings for my work. This is the creative work of librarians; however, if attribution makes sense, it is the cataloguer who should sign the work, not WorldCat.

What I have described above is the relatively simple situation of straightforward library catalogue records. The situation becomes much more complex as libraries, and WorldCat, increasingly add other resources. For example, when records from the local institutional repository are added, they will often include metadata that is contributed by the author, and an abstract. Again, if attribution is important, then what should happen is that the person who contributed this work should be cited - not OCLC.

For example, at times I have, as an E-LIS editor, served as an editor for an entire conference, adding in all of the metadata, and not infrequently reading the works and writing abstracts when these were not supplied. I have also occasionally translated abstracts into english from other languages. This is substantive work - much more substantive work than the automated technical gathering of metadata involved in WorldCat. If it makes no sense to attribute my contributions (and I agree that it does not), then how could it make sense to credit WorldCat for relatively trivial sharing of my work?

This is a very important point. Libraries and library associations are very appropriately involved as experts in evolving public policy consultations. We need to be able to effectively advocate for the concept that those who gather and redistribute content gain no intellectual property rights, moral or otherwise, in the process. This is a part of the key battles taking place right now for public space in the realm of knowledge; what is potentially at stake is the whole of the public domain in electronic form. We should take care that do not ourselves develop policies that could be used as examples, to work against the interests of libraries and the public.

Finally, this policy appears to me to suggest that WorldCat is a global resource. From where I sit, a few minutes north of the border, it is not. OCLC is largely a U.S. organization, albeit with important partnerships outside the U.S. Have a look at the Record Use Policy Council membership to see what I mean. Of the 12 members on the Council, 10 are based in the U.S.A. This would be a representative international council only if about 90% of the world's population was based in the U.S.

In many parts of the world, libraries are few and far between, and they have little money. (This is true of many parts of the U.S., too). A library with little money could go a long way with free access to bibliographic materials for freely accessible materials. Many of the records in WorldCat were created by national libraries or public universities, with a mandate to serve the public good. It is a disservice to unnecessarily restrict these records. When the material is freely available, it is a disservice to the authors and those who make the works freely available to restrict access to the bibliographic records.

I question this statement: "As a union of union catalogs, WorldCat enables routing of requests on behalf of not just OCLC member libraries, but any organizations (e.g., Google) or end users who want to interact with participating WorldCat libraries." What does this mean? Can I, as a member of the public, or of any organization Google a book held by an OCLC library and have it sent directly to me? I suspect this is not what is meant, but that is how this statement reads to me.

In summary: my recommendation to the OCLC Record Use Policy Council is to scrap this draft policy, and start fresh with a vision of what a worldwide library catalogue should look like in a world with an internet that is as open as it possibly can be. From my perspective, this means library records that are freely and openly available for use and re-use, as part of a robust and growing public domain. If this is inconsistent with OCLC's current business model - then it is timely for OCLC for rethink their business model.

Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009: can a mail-based survey capture faculty leadership in adopting new models of scholarly communication?

Ithaka has just released their Faculty Survey 2009. In brief, results suggest that faculty are ready for the shift from print to electronic for journals for new issues, but are concerned about preservation. Results also indicate a growing appreciation for the library's role as buyer and archiving, with a decreasing appreciation of the library's role as gatekeeper. Teaching and research support are valued, particularly for faculty who are "more of a teacher".

Following is a brief methodological critique. In summary, a mail-based survey like this likely understates faculty comfort with, and interest in, new online communication channels; usage of repositories is likely under-reported, based on answers to another question from this survey; and the 2006 survey data, which might yield the answer to the problem with the repositories question, is unfortunately locked up. Hopefully, the 2009 dataset will be released as open data.

Critique

This is a mail-based survey, with a response rate of 8.6%. There are several indications of low findings on areas relating to new technologies, most significantly including limited use of new online communication channels, and a conclusion that faculty are not likely to lead in transformation of scholarly communication. It would be interesting to see whether the same results would have been found with a web-based survey. That is to say, faculty whose primary means of communication is new online channels might be less likely to return a mail-based survey.

Some of the findings with respect to usage of open access archives (which the report refers to as institutional and disciplinary repositories) are inconsistent. For example, only about 10% of faculty in any discipline report making use of such repositories. However, over 30% of faculty in physics, math, and economics, report that they continue to use preprints and working papers, even after the published version is available. Since these preprints and working papers are in the repositories, it is clear that usage of repositories is underreported.

It would be very helpful to be able to view the actual question. However, while Ithaka has deposited the data from the 2006 survey, it is not freely accessible. Perhaps the 2009 data will be made openly accessible?

Ithaka study citation: Schonfeld, R. C., & Housewright, R. (2010). Faculty survey 2009: Key strategic insights for libraries, publishers, and societiesIthaka. Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/faculty-survey-2009