The path to peace is through hearts and minds

Proposal for round table on The University in Crisis: Tradition, innovation, and employment in Communications departments, Emerging Scholars Network, International Association of Media Communication Researchers (IAMCR) 2011 conference

The purpose of this presentation is to explore options for humanities & social sciences in general, and communication in particular, to advocate for support and growth by articulating our value to the world. What counts is not always what can be counted. In a post-9/11 world, where our emphasis seems to increasingly be narrowing on science, technology, and commerce, we (humankind) should be asking ourselves whether the road to lasting peace could ever come through science & technology, or whether this is a matter of hearts and minds. To avoid the immanent catastrophe of global warming requires nothing less than a global change in behavior. Fixing a global financial system that is prone to the kind of crisis we saw in 2008 will take some creative thinking, not only about economics, but politics, too. The arts and culture are among the very best of what we humans do; they make life worthwhile. My thesis is that it is worthwhile for some of us scholars to spend some time analyzing and explaining why it is that humanities and social sciences in general, and communication studies in particular, matter, because when we do, our societies will soon understand the importance of supporting our work. I will draw on theories of rationalization and commodification (e.g. Weber, Marx, Lukacs) and alternatives, including values rationality (Weber), the commons (e.g. Lessig, Boyle, Ostrom), and transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink). I will further draw on my background as an open access advocate to provide some examples of how to effectively advocate in this area, and explain why providing open access to our own scholarly work can help us make the case.

Proposal submitted March 5, 2011. I am posting the proposal on submission because the work of advocating for humanities and social sciences is urgent.

Illustrating of the potential for savings with a global shift to open access

This chart, Global library cost comparison with OA options, illustrates the potential for cost savings with a full flip to open access if we look for efficiencies along the way.

On the left, we see the $8 billion U.S. in revenue from journals received by the scholarly publishing industry. Of this, about $5.6 billion is revenue from academic library subscriptions. Compare this to the $2.5 billion it would cost to publish every one of the world's estimated 1.5 million scholarly articles produced annually on a worldwide basis at the BioMedCentral standard fee of $1,680, for a total of $2.5 billion. This would be full global open access to scholarly articles at less than half of what academic libraries are contributing to the system now. The savings would be even greater at average PLoS ONE fee of $1,350. On the right hand side, we see what would if happen the current $188 average per-article revenue for journals using OJS were to apply across the board, the global total of $.2 billion would be a tiny fraction of the current spend - less than 3%.

The next chart, Comparison of per-article revenue, illustrates what to me is a central point is considering the economics of transition to open access, that is: as we shift the economics from purchase to production, the cost per article is critical in determining the feasibility and sustainability of the system. On the left, we see the average per-article revenue received in the current system of over $5,000. This is compared with the BioMedCentral standard article processing fee and PLoS ONE, about a third of the current per-article revenue. Since both BMC and PLoS ONE are doing well financially, this illustrates that high quality publishing is possible at less than a third of the present revenue. On the right hand side, we see the average revenue for an OJS journal of $188, illustrating that the traditional scholarly gift economy can manage essentially the same work for about 3 percent of the current average revenue.

These numbers are meant to be suggestive only, one guideline to consider in the transition to open access.

Recommendations
If the goal is an affordable open access scholarly publishing system, it makes sense to support scholar-publishers of the type included in the OJS survey, and it makes sense to support cost-effective charges like the BMC standard and PLoS ONE.

Sources
The $8 billion U.S. annually for scholarly journals revenue is from the Research Information Network (2008)Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, retrieved from http://is.gd/3Q7cm as cited in the STM report. 2009. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Retrieved from: http://www.stm-assoc.org/

Global annual scholarly peer-reviewed articles is estimated at 1.5 million per year, as reported by Björk et al, Global annual volume of peer reviewed scholarly articles and the share available via different open access options, ELPUB 2008, retrieved from http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/presentations.html

The PLoS ONE and BMC article processing fees are from the respective websites as of March 1, 2011.

The $188 average revenue per OJS journal is from a survey by Edgar, Brian & John Willinsky. A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems. 2011. In press. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

This post is an update and elaboration of earlier charts I developed for IJPE and various presentations.

Typo correction March 5: number of peer-reviewed articles per year is 1.5 million, not 1.5 billion. Thanks to Douglas Carnall for spotting the error.

Tetrahedron article processing fee: overpriced. very.

This post is from a Liblicense message and forms part of a February 2011 discussion revolving around Tetrahedron and Harvard's open access fund.

One point that I have not yet seen in this discussion: is Tetrahedron's article processing fee overpriced? I would argue yes, very.

If Tetrahedron is charging $3,000 per article, while the American Physical Society is charging $1,500 for their new OA journal Physical Review X, and Nature is charging $1,350 for their forthcoming OA journal Scientific Reports, and both Springer and Wiley have announced competitive lower prices on their new OA journal suites (compared to their hybrid journal prices), then perhaps Tetrahedron has priced themselves out of the emerging OA market - which in the long run does not bode well either for Tetrahedron or its publisher.

I would recommend that Harvard researchers take advantage of the opportunity to self-archive Tetrahedron articles in DASH, and NOT consider paying the Tetrahedron APF, on the grounds that the cost is excessive.

To speculate a little: is it possible that this trend toward more affordable article processing fees is an early indication of the success of COPE (Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity)? Restricting COPE funding to fully OA journals appears (to me) to be helping to inspire the creation of new affordable OA journals. In the long run, this is what will create the new, affordable OA system of which Darnton speaks.

Some of the present players in the scholarly publishing system are obviously leading in the transition, while (not too surprisingly) some may be lagging behind.

Core Values of Librarianship

Thanks to the American Library Association for articulating these 11 Core Values of Librarianship. I'm repeating the full list here - for convenience as I've had trouble finding these on the ALA website before - and also because they are worth repeating. This is what librarianship is all about!

The foundation of modern librarianship rests on an essential set of core values, which define, inform, and guide all professional practice. These values reflect the history and ongoing development of the profession and have been advanced, expanded, and refined by numerous policy statements of the American Library Association. Among these are:

• Access
• Confidentiality/Privacy
• Democracy
• Diversity
• Education and Lifelong Learning
• Intellectual Freedom
• Preservation
• The Public Good
• Professionalism
• Service
• Social Responsibility

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to express our values more eloquently than ALA already has in the Freedom to Read statement, the Library Bill of Rights, the ALA Mission Statement, Libraries: an American Value and other documents. These policies have been carefully thought out, articulated, debated, and approved by the ALA Council. They are interpreted, revised, or expanded when necessary. Over time, the values embodied in these statements have been embraced by the majority of librarians as the foundations of their practice. Adopted, 2004.

Thanks to Al Kagan for the pointer.

Bill C-32 (Canada's copyright reform act) - response from an open access advocate

This is a copy of my response to the consultation on Bill C-32, Canada's copyright reform act. Details and links to other responses can be found on Michael Geist's blog. Comments are due by January 31.

Speaking as a scholarly author/creator, student, teacher, and librarian, here are my comments on what I see as the most critical aspects to consider with Bill C-32.

DIGITAL LOCKS AND PROTECTION OF DIGITAL LOCKS SHOULD BE LIMITED TO PREVENTING ILLEGAL USE OF MATERIAL

As Bill C-32 stands, circumvention of digital locks would be illegal, even if the use of the material is perfectly legal (e.g., private copying, making works accessible to the print disabled). This is a deeply troubling provision. There is no protection at all for authors such as myself who share our work freely on the Internet. What is to stop someone from putting a lock in between my work and those who would like to read it? My point is that if there are to be any provisions regarding digital locks, these should limit placing locks which circumvent legal use. If anyone places a lock on work that I have made freely available, the law should protect my right to share, and my reader's right to have the lock removed.

Facilitating legal use should be REQUIRED, not just permitted. Selling digitally locked down materials that effectively prevent use by the print disabled is a practice that deserves to be outlawed, not protected!

FAIR DEALING FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES JUST MAKES SENSE

Canada is far behind other countries such as the U.S. when it comes to sharing material for educational purposes. Canada's educational systems spend a great deal of money on materials covered by copyright, and this will not change with expanded fair dealing. It is in the best interests of creators to support education; without basic literacy, for example, there would be little need for written material of any kind.

COPYRIGHT LAW SHOULD RECOGNIZE AND SUPPORT THE EXPANDING NUMBERS OF CREATORS WHO PREFER TO SHARE WORKS FREELY
As a typical scholarly author, I write works in order to contribute to advancing the world's knowledge, and the ideal for me is to share my works freely, for example through my institutional repository:
http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/79/items-by-author?author=Morrison%2C+Heather
and my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Like many in today's society, I have contributed Creative Commons licensed photos for free sharing to flickr, and occasionally participate in free collaborative services such as the Open Access Directory and Wikipedia.

As a prolific author / creator, what I would like to see is:

• a guarantee that works which I have made freely available will remain freely available
• elimination of automatic copyright (no copyright without registration)
• elimination of Crown Copyright; replace this with a requirement for open access to government-funded work
• shorter copyright periods, e.g. 14 years with one extension (and this not automatic)
• make it possible to place work directly into the public domain
  

Many thanks for the opportunity to participate. I will post a copy of this response to my blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

best,

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

Access Copyright Insanity - Possible Solutions?

Access Copyright, Canada's copyright collective, is asking for an absolutely ludicrous tariff increase (about a tenfold increase from about $3.5 to $35 per post-secondary student), at the same time that they are looking for increased restrictions (no linking please!) and paperwork (e.g. having students sign a form saying that they are in fact a student, and using the work for their studies). This is all on top of libraries paying top dollar for the content, by the way.

Some possible solutions that libraries might want to consider:

• Ask Access Copyright for a complete list of members / works covered. Don't buy any of their stuff. Who doesn't have way too much to read as it is? Besides, this will filter out anyone so out of touch that they think forbidding hyperlinking on the internet makes sense.
  
• If you MUST buy their stuff, set up a separate site on your website for this material, appropriately labelled - perhaps with an icon including a hefty lock and chain and/or wording to the effect, USE THIS LOCKED DOWN MATERIAL AT YOUR OWN LEGAL PERIL.
• Send Access Copyright a bill for about 10 times what they think you should pay them. This actually does make sense for a university library; think of how many faculty and students are creators, particularly of works in the academic library. Why are WE paying THEM at all, anyway?

Another thought: if Access Copyright members have issues with people reading and citing their work, what will this do to the Open Access Citation Impact Advantage? My prediction is that this will increase the difference.

On the plus side, we should all be grateful to Access Copyright for demands that so obviously show the lunacy of lock-down in academia that faculty members are now flocking to solutions such as Open Educational Resources.

Nature Publishing Group and Scientific Reports: getting serious about OA competition

Kudos to Nature Publishing Group on their announcement of their forthcoming open access publication Scientific Reports. Priced at $1,350 US per accepted manuscript and using Creative Commons licensing shows that Nature is finally getting serious about competing in the open access arena. Also of significance is that Nature is providing ethical leadership in this area by contributing support to Creative Commons in the form of $20 per article, as well as supporting broader author's rights than many OA publications by offering two CC license options.

This can be seen as a qualitative sign of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, as it is clear that the commercial sector is seeing the growth and deciding that open access is where the market is likely to be going. In my opinion, this is also a harbinger of future OA growth, as the reasonable article processing fee is likely to attract greater uptake than many earlier OA experiments by traditional publishers. This is also a welcome sign that some of the traditional quality publishers are likely to have the flexibility to transition to and thrive in the open access environment.

Welcome to Nature's Scientific Reports! Nature is not on the list of Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) members - at least, not yet! Perhaps they are on the waiting list mentioned by OASPA President Caroline Sutton at the ACRL SPARC Forum at ALA Midwinter this weekend?

Hindawi's 40% growth in submissions in 2010

Paul Peters of Hindawi reports that Hindawi exceeded 3,000 monthly submissions for the first time in December 2010, up from reaching 2,000 monthly submissions for the first time in August 2010. Overall, growth in submissions for Hindawi was 40% in 2010.

Congratulations to Hindawi for yet another indication of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access!

PLoS ONE: now the world's largest journal?

This post explores data strongly suggesting that open access journal PLoS ONE is now the world's largest journal. According to Pete Binfield (personal correspondence), in 2010 PLoS One published 6,749 articles. Based on listserv discussions in 2008, the world's largest journals at that date were PHYS REV B (5782 articles) and APPL PHYS LETT (5449 articles). As of today, a search for 2010 articles at the APS website yields 6,206 articles. A search for 2010 articles for APPL PHYS LETT in IEEE's xPLore service yields 4,381 articles.

So it is timely to raise the question: is the world's largest scholarly journal now an open access journal, PLoS One? If anyone has data that can help to illuminate this issue, please join the conversation started by Daniel Mietchen at Friend Feed, or send me an e-mail at hgmorris at sfu dot ca.

Update January 21, 2012: since this post was written, in 2011 PLoS ONE growth doubled, to just under 14,000 articles published in 2011 alone. Details and chart available in the December 31, 2012 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access. 

Methodology Note: this post is an informal brief research project, based on consultation with library and publisher experts on the size of the world's largest journals, presented for informal peer collaboration and academic critique. It is also an update of this post from 2009 projecting PLoS ONE as the world's largest journal in 2010. The number of articles published in 2010 in PLoS ONE is less than projected, but still apparently more than enough to make PLoS ONE the world's largest research journal. This post forms part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far. In 2010, 1,401 journals were added to DOAJ for a total of 5,936 journals. The Electronic Journals Library now records over 27,000 journals that can be read free of charge; over 3,500 were added in 2010. 1,037 journals actively participate in PubMedCentral, an increase of 313 over the past year, and more than half of these journals contribute all articles as open access. PMC now provides access to over 3.2 million free articles, an increase of over 300,000 this year. OpenDOAR lists 1,817 repositories, having added 257 this year. A Scientific Commons search encompasses 38 million items, an increase of over 6 million since last year. There are 261 open access mandate policies, an increase of 83 this year.

Open access mandate policies showed the strongest growth in percentage terms, with a 90% increase in thesis mandates and a 61% increase in departmental mandates, 47% growth in total mandates, and 41% growth in institutional mandates. For links to full details and charts on OA mandate growth, see this post by Alma Swan. A total of 7 measures showed growth of 40% or better, including DOAJ's journals and articles searchable at article level. 7 measures showed growth of 30% or better, including the number of journals in PMC with immediate free access (37%) and the number of journals in PMC with all articles open access (34%), the number of peer-reviewed journals included in Open J-Gate (36%), and the total number of journals included in Open J-Gate (31%), the number of repositories listed in ROAR (34%), and the number of proposed open access mandates (33%). A further 11 measures were 10% or better, including BASE content providers, RePEC (both total items and items available online), and the number of documents in E-LIS and arXiv.

New this issue: historical data has been added to the full data edition (see the DGOA Dataverse to download), thanks to Tim Gray of Homerton College Library) and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The show growth issue focuses on 2010 growth, and includes columns for average daily, weekly, and monthly growth for illustration purposes. New additions include Mendeley and the open data journal policies list at the Open Access Directory (the latter as a first foray into tracking the dramatic growth of open data). A first edition of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Rationale and Methodology is now available for download from the DGOA Dataverse or for viewing as a Google Doc. For full data that is downloadable as the Dec 31 2010 full data edition or the Dec 31 2010 show growth edition, see the DGOA Dataverse at Harvard; for quick web viewing of the latest data, see the Google Docs Show Growth version. For links to all versions and commentary, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

This post was updated Jan. 1, 2010, adding links to Alma Swan's post and the services listed below, and on Jan. 2, 2010, adding links to the Polish version created by E-LIS Editor Bożena Bednarek-Michalska, which can be found here and here. Updated again Jan. 4, adding this link to MIT stats showing the popularity of open educational resources.

A Happy New Year to everyone in the open access movement!

The numbers: open access status and growth in 2010

DOAJ (peer-reviewed, active, open access journals)

• 5,936 journals (1,401 journals added in 2010, growth rate 4 titles per day) 31% growth
  
• 2,494 journals searchable at article level (735 added in 2010, growth rate 2 per day) 42% growth
  
• 490,411 articles searchable at article level (154,912 added in 2010, growth rate 424 per day) 46% growth
  

Open J-Gate

• 8,105 journals (1,907 added in 2010, growth rate 5 titles per day) 31% growth
  
• 4,877 peer-reviewed journals (1,297 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 titles per day) 36% growth
  

Electronic Journals Library (journals that can be read free of charge)

• 27,030 journals (3,591 added in 2010, growth rate 10 titles per day) 15% growth

Open Journal Systems Journals: 7,500 (about 1,500 growth in 2010)

PubMedCentral Journals

• 1,037 journals actively participating (313 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 title per day) 43% growth
  
• 622 journals provide immediate free access (169 more than a year ago) 37% growth
  
• 532 journals provide OA to all articles (136 more than a year ago) 34% growth
  

PubMedCentral Articles

• 3.2 million articles (314,422 added in 2010) (see PMC Free tab) (11% growth)
  
• CIHR-funded articles freely available: 4,464 (new to DGOA)
  
• Wellcome Trust funded articles freely available: 27,572 (new to DGOA)
  

OpenDOAR (vetted list of repositories)

• 1,817 repositories (259 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 17% growth

Registry of Open Access Repositories

• 2,090 repositories (533 added in 2010, growth rate about 2 repositories per day) 34% growth
  

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

• 25.5 million documents (3.5 million added in 2010, growth rate about 10,000 per day) 16% growth
  
• 1,727 content providers (323 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 23% growth
  
• IS BASE's number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

Scientific Commons

• 38 million publications (6 million added in 2010, growth rate about 16,000 per day) 19% growth
  
• 1,269 repositories (111 added in 2010) 10% growth
  
• IS Scientific Commons' number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

arXiv

• 650,000 thousand documents (70,092 added in 2010, growth rate about 200 per day) 12% growth
  

RePEc

• 860,000 fulltext online (160,000 added in 2010, growth rate over 400 per day) 23% growth
  

E-LIS

• 11,420 documents (1,308 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 documents per day) 13% growth
  

Mendeley

• 56 million metadata records; 297,189 articles freely available (new to DGOA)
  

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP)

• Departmental: 29 (11 added in 2010) 61% growth
  
• Funder: 46 (4 added in 2010) 10% growth
  
• Institutional: 111 (36 added in 2010) 41% growth
  
• Multi-institutional: 1 (1 added in 2010)
  
• Thesis: 74 (35 added in 2010) 90% growth
  
• Total: 261 (83 added in 2010) 47% growth
• Proposed mandates: 20 (up 5 from 2010) 33% growth
  

Open Data Policies: 14 (new to DGOA) (from Open Access Directory journals with open data policies, proposed list)

Highwire Free

• 2.1 million free articles (161,030 added in 2010) 8% growth
• 47 completely free sites (1 added in 2010) 2% growth
• 284 sites with free back issues (1 added in 2010) less than 1% growth

WANTED: macro-level metrics for open data

The open data movement is closely related to the open access movement, and of great interest and use to scholars. It is obvious that there is a lot happening; currently one of my best sources of information is Tracey Lauriault of civicaccess.ca and datalibre.ca fame. As an aside, it is a little ironic that data phenomenon / statistician Tracey is the source par excellence for qualitative information on this matter, whilst I, the critical scholar rather inclined to look with scepticism at purely quantitative research, am apparently the volunteer keeper of the quarterly statistics for the open access movement. Glen Newton points to the 70 online databases that define our planet, from Technology Review, the arXiv physics blog, as further qualitative evidence that there is a lot of quantitative data out there already.

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

Dramatic Growth of Open Access brief update: chart showing gold growth

Revised and updated Dec. 23, 2010

This chart by Peter Hendrik, President, Springer STM Publishing, from Hendrik's presentation at the 2010 Berlin Open Access Conference in Beijing, (based on information from Thompson-Reuters) predicting possible OA article growth at 20% compared to total article growth of 3.5% by 2020 is well worth noting.

Why is this worth noting? Interesting as this projection is per se, the reason that this is important is because it reflects two players very much from the commercial traditional subscription journal market predicting stronger growth of open access articles than overall article growth. The two players are Springer and Thompson-Reuters. Such predictions are not new, of course; I have been making similar predictions for years. So what is new is not the prediction, but who is making the prediction. To the best of my knowledge, this is new; but if I am wrong, please correct me.

Other interesting aspects of Hendrik's presentation: the fact that a senior Springer Executive is presenting at an open access conference, highlighting what Springer has to offer in this area; a chart showing hybrid OA update by disciplines (not surprisingly, biology and medicine show higher update); a slide on price adjustments for hybrid journals (no figures - if anyone has figures, let me know); a slide (# 13) on gold OA growth - selected details:

From Hendrik's slide 13 - 'Gold' Open Access is growing fast

• approx. 4% of ISI-indexed articles in 2009 are gold OA
• BMC - 18,000 articles in 2009; 21% growth
• PLoS - 6,000 articles in 2009, 50% growth
• Hindawi - 4,000 articles in 2009, 75% growth
  

Many thanks to Hendrik for this presentation, and to A. Ben Wagner for pointing to the citation. This originally came to my attention through Stevan Harnad at the American Scientist Open Access Forum, who posted the chart linked to above in order to critique it. Harnad has posted to the effect that he thinks my brief interpretation of the chart he posted (i.e. much higher OA article growth than total article growth predicted) is full of errors. My perspective on this is that Harnad is missing the forest (the fact that it is now traditional commercial subscription publishers seeing and predicting strong open access, an excellent omen for future OA growth - if these folks are seeing the potential of OA, they have the ability to push it further forward and the incentive to do so) for the trees (the details of the numbers - from my point of view, this is forecasting and I have no concern with whether the forecast is correct or not. My perspective is that there is sufficient open access out there - archives, journals publishers - to prove the concept. The Springers of the world may need to forecast due to their commercial nature, but for most of us this is not necessary - what we need to do is not to forecast, but rather to adopt and implement strong open access policy, infrastructure for OA publishing and archives, and shift the economics to OA, to make it happen).

Libraries: is this YOUR free cash? informa (Taylor & Francis) glowing picture for investors

While libraries are reeling from severe budget cuts due to the financial crisis, how are the commercial publishers that rely on us doing? Hurting too? Not really, it seems. Here is what informa (Taylor & Francis) is telling investors today:

The strong portfolio of products within the Informa stable allows the group highly favourable valuation characteristics including:

* Excellent free cash generation
* High return on capital employed
* Excellent quality of earnings - significant subscription revenues with high renewal rates
* High margins especially on data and subscription products
* High operational gearing and cost flexibility
* Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends

From: informa / Investor Relations

What does this mean?

Excellent free cash generation = when we send in our subscription payments, they have tons of cash on hand. In ordinary household terms: when you get your paycheque, the money is not all going to pay the bills right away, you pay these off and have lots of spending money.

High return on capital employed = for what they spend on getting the journals, they get way more money back.

High margins especially on data and subscription revenues with high renewal rates = high profits. Does it mean that they could afford to give your library a MUCH bigger discount - say 30 to 40 % more - and still more than cover their costs? Yes, it does. I don't have enough detail to specify the amount, but this does seem reasonable to ask.

High operational gearing and cost flexibility = even though they are making way more than it costs to produce the journals, they are finding ways to cut corners and make even more profits. If they are passing on some of the savings to your library, please let me know!

Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends = they think no matter what happens, they will just keep on making more and more money.

This post is part of the economics 101 series.

Dramatic Growth honoured by Intech's Katarina Lovrecic

The Dec. 11, 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access has been highlighted in Katarina Lovrecic's End of the year open access highlights. Well worth a read - thanks, Katarina!

Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 11, 2010 comment and reply

Revised Dec. 17, 2010 - comment on renaissance of the scholar / publisher from Willinsky & Edgar added.

Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen has posted the comment, For Open Access Journals, the Size does Matter, as a comment on my Dec. 11, 2010 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Comment

In brief

The growth of open access is particularly amazing given how little economic support has been made available so far. The economic target that I would suggest is high-quality, fully open access publishing that is economically sustainable or cost-effective. The number of open access journal titles is an indirect indication of the growth of open access publishing per se, which would ideally be measured by the number of articles published open access. As the DOAJ search by article service grows, this measure may become more feasible over time. Nevertheless, the number of titles per se is important as an indication of OA infrastructure, that is, the ability of open access to grow rapidly, given a little support. Behind the many fairly new, relatively small journals listed in DOAJ is a substantial new publishing system which can support many more titles; and small journals with relatively few articles could easily grow with even a little redirection of funding. These are just a few of the reasons why it makes a lot of sense for libraries to join the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. Online-only, open access journals are not the same as print or subscription-based journals, and so it does not make sense to apply the same measures to assess the success of these journals - for example, the need to bundle a certain amount of articles for a print artefact, or to justify subscriptions has implications for the number of articles needed for a successful print and/or subscription-based journal that does not necessarily apply to an online open access journal. Willinsky & Edgar, reporting on a major survey of journals using OJS, describe the current situation as a renaissance of the scholar publisher.

Details

This is a welcome discussion of this important topic. Phil's main point seems to be that OA publishing is not yet a clear-cut success, particularly from an economic viewpoint. I would agree with this point. What is amazing to me is how much OA has grown with so little funding made available. To create further growth and to transition scholarly communication as a whole to open access, what libraries need to do is to transition funding to OA support. A good first step, one that does not require tough budgetary decisions, is simply joining the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity - highly recommended as an OA New Year's Resolution.

Phil's first question, with respect to the dramatic growth of DOAJ is: "But does this type of growth really indicate economic success in open access publishing?". My comment: there is an assumption in this question, that the purpose of open access is economic success. From my perspective, this is worth querying. Why success rather than sustainability or cost-effectiveness? What kind of success is Phil looking for? High profits? Why not fully open access, high quality publishing at sustainable or cost-effective rates? - this is what I recommend.

Phil goes on to cover an article in First Monday by Frantsvåg which takes issue with the size of publishers in DOAJ, noting that most (90%) are publishers of single journals. One of Frantsvåg's key points is that small publishers lack economies of scale. From an economic perspective, I would first like to note that due to an inelastic market, mega-publishers with large portfolios of journals and fat profit margins are part of the problem, not part of the solution (a topic I deal with at length in my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, unfortunately not OA).

Next, I would like to point out that small publishing is typical of scholarly publishers, as Raym Crow points out in his paper on Publishing Cooperatives, downloadable from the SPARC Papers and Guides website. The dramatic growth of open access journals may reflect a renewal of scholarly leadership in this area. Publishing cooperatives is one of the solutions to creating economies of scale for smaller publishers.

Also, with modern publishing software, such as the free, open source Open Journal Systems, it is quite feasible for a single scholarly journal to manage on its own with modest support services provided by a university library or service such as Scholarly Exchange.

Another important point is that the early proliferation of many small publishing outfits likely reflects the growth in publishing support services, particularly new scholarly publishing services at university libraries. That is, behind a great many of these small publishers stands a very new publishing service representing a significant infrastructure ready to take off - just one of the reasons that I very much look forward to future editions of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Edgar and Willinsky describe the flourishing growth of journals using OJS (over 7,500 journals worldwide) as a renaissance of the scholar publisher, in their report of a major survey of OJS journals.

Excerpt:
"In marked contrast to the findings of other studies, only 6 percent of these journals are
published by commercial houses, compared to the 64 percent reported by Ware and Mabe (2009) and Crow (2005). Scholarly societies published 32 percent of the titles in this sample, exceeding the 23 percent that Crow found scholarly societies “self-publishing” in his study of journals as a whole (with societies having turned over 17 percent of the journals being published to commercial publishers to publish on the society’s behalf). This leaves the vast majority of the journals in this sample as published or sponsored by an academic department (51 percent), a non-profit publisher (16 percent), research unit (10 percent) and independent group (10 percent), although these percentages cannot be added up, as respondents could choose more than one sponsor (Table 2). As well, it needs to be allowed that commercially published journals would be less likely to complete such a survey, given a noted reluctance among this constituency to share information about publishing practices (Houghton et al., 2009). Still, these results suggest that the majority of these journals fall into what can be identified as the independent or scholar-publisher titles." AND "Yet this sample also stands apart from the majority of journals. Where a small number of large commercial publishers now dominate journal publishing (Crow, 2005), this study found that commercial entities formed the smallest category of publisher. The scholar-publisher – or more accurately the group-of-scholars-as-publisher – is responsible for the majority of journals in this study, constituting a type that dates back to the earliest days of the journal, when Henry Oldenburg launched the Philosophical Transactions as an independent, albeit commercial, venture. The scholarpublisher is now experiencing, this study suggests, a certain renaissance, facilitated by online, open access."

Phil goes on to comment on an article by Walters forthcoming in College and Research Libraries, Characteristics of Open Access Journals in Six Subject Areas. Walters notes the wide variety in open access journals in publishers, with one journal publishing more than 2,700 articles in a year, while many others publish less than 25 articles per year.

Phil seems to think that journals must be of a certain size to be successful. With electronic-only, online open access publishing, I would challenge this view. A print-based journal needs to have a certain quantity of articles for regular mailings to make sense; generally somewhat the same quantity for consistency. This is not the case with online journals at all; there is no a priori reason why an online journal needs to have a particular number of articles to be a success.

One of Phil's points, that the growth of gold OA is better measured by articles than by journal titles, is something that I very much agree with (and the reason I always include the number of articles available through a DOAJ search). On the other hand, the number of journal titles is an important indication of infrastructure for OA. That is to say - if there are many OA journals that are currently publishing relatively few articles, it is highly likely that these journals could easily accomodate tremendous growth in demand for OA publishing - particularly if this transition were accompanied by a redirection of funding from subscriptions to open access. This is an indication of readiness for further growth, which is important to know!

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 11, 2010 early year-end edition

In brief: the Directory of Open Access Journals now lists 5,864 titles, having added more than 1,300 over the past year, or close to 4 titles per day (a growing growth rate!). OA is growing fast in the medical area; more than half the research funded by NIH indexed in PubMed is now freely available, regardless of publication. The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral is growing - now over 1,000 titles; over half provide OA to all articles, and nearly 60% provide immediate free access. Percentage-wise, OA mandates continue to lead in growth, with a total of 24 mandates added to ROARMAP this quarter, with the eprints OA Week Mandate Challenge a likely contributing factor. This fall's OA Week was the biggest ever. A unique OA milestone this quarter was Jan Szczepanski's personal OA title collection exceeding 10,000 titles. Looking forward to 2011 and beyond, clearly this is just the beginning! Suggested OA New Years' Resolutions: adopt and implement an open access mandate policy, join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or both - or just keep up the good work and know that the small efforts the many thousands of us are making are adding up to all the difference in the world.

Downloadable data is available at the DGOA Dataverse, or go to Google Docs to view the full data edition, or the show growth edition which highlights quarterly and annual growth. Previous editions of Dramatic Growth can be found here.


Details

Selected numbers

DOAJ: 5,864 titles
412 added this quarter (nearly 6 per day!)
1,374 added this year (about 4 per day)
2,435 journals searchable at article level
485,034 articles searchable at article level

Open J-Gate (portal to english-language OA journals): 7,921 titles (1,796 added this year
of these, 4,721 are peer reviewed (1,211 added this year)

PubMedCentral:
1,009 journals actively participating (49 added this quarter)
596 journals with immediate free access (40 added this quarter)
515 journals will all articles open access (35 added this quarter)

# of repositories:
OpenDOAR: 1,815 (78 added this quarter)
Registry of Open Access Repositories: 2,049 (180 added this quarter)

# of documents in repositories: ?? Normally, I rely on totals at the meta-search engines for repositories. This quarter, Scientific Commons shows no difference from the previous quarter, while the Bielefed Academic Search Engine is down one service provide, and up less than a thousand documents. This makes no sense at all - RePEC alone added 35,000 documents. OAIster has noted an increase of 2 million documents since the last report (some time ago), up to 25 million. Does anyone know what is happening with the meta search tools? Maintenance perhaps? If so, a quick note on the website for the benefit of those of us looking at the numbers would be helpful.

Open Journal Systems: 7,500 journals are using OJS.

Why am I optimistic that this is just the beginning? Thanks to many conversations with librarians (and publishers) at library and academic conferences this year, I know that there are a great many activists in scholarly, library, and publishing circle, working hard to make open access happen and how to transition the system as a whole, to make it easier to make OA happen. Because of my work co-coordinating the ARL ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication webinar series this year, I know that there are many people in libraries across North America that have already developed significant expertise in this area, others are working to get up to speed, and many libraries are in the process of moving from a step-by-step to a comprehensive programming approach to open access.

Update December 15, 2010: in case it is not obvious, the charts in this post are all mine, created from data that I have collected over the years. Please feel free to re-use the charts according to the IJPE CC-BY-NC-SA license - but be sure to attribute me and IJPE! ~ Heather Morrison

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: brief update

Noteworthy in October: Open Access Week extends its reach with broader participation than ever before, as noted by SPARC's Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan, with one of the results being the most prolific month ever (to date) for open access mandates as recorded by Peter Suber in the November 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Results of the Open Access Week Mandate Challenge, thanks to Les Carr on OASIS: During the Challenge, 14 new mandates were adopted. Of these, 7 wereinstitutional, 3 were departmental and 3 were mandates on theses. In addition, one was a multi-institutional mandate, the first ever, covering the 29 research institutes of the EUR-OCEANS consortium.

The next full edition of Dramatic Growth is the early year-end edition, to be released by mid-December. If your OA initiative reaches an important milestone, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

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

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.