Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 31, 2013: first open source edition

Happy 2014 to everyone involved in making open access happen!!!

Correction Jan. 10:  the 2013 number is 365,000, not 265,000. Thanks to Miguel Navas for spotting the error.

Update Jan. 7th: thanks to Wouter Gerritsma via the GOAL open access list for info on the healthy growth of OA in the Netherlands, from 270 thousand OA publications in Narcis in 2011 to 365 thousand in 2013. Congratulations to Narcis and Netherlands OA!

Back to everyone involved in making open access happen:
That's a lot of people. As this chart illustrating the growth of authors participating in the Social Sciences Research Network shows, there are now close to a quarter of a million authors participating in just this one open access initiative, with 66,000 authors signing on in the past two years. 

The Directory of Open Access Journals continues to add titles at the remarkable rate of 3.5 journals per day, a feat made all the more remarkable by the DOAJ's vigorous weeding project which leaves the total about 200 titles less than on Dec. 11th!

DOAJ is about more than a vetted title list, though; it's also a search engine for articles in the repositories. This chart shows that the growth in the fully open access journals listed in DOAJ is at the article level, not just the journal level, with the number of searchable articles growing from under 200,000 in 2004 to close to 1.6 million today. 

Every day repository services OpenDOAR and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) add a new repository, and BASE grows by about 45,000 documents per day. The Internet Archive (IA) continues to amaze, with over 374 billion webpages archived - and it's good to see that IA is over the top for their fundraising to replace a server destroyed by fire (but more donations to this and many other OA services are always welcome, of course).

This is the first open source issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access. To facilitate re-use of the data source files by anyone:

• the data files are available in open document and csv format (proprietary software not required for downloading). The table below illustrates the show growth file.
•  the license has been removed, and replaced by some notes are appropriate attribution and "licensing" for this kind of work, as follows:

To attribute or not to attribute?
If you are using the data for scholarly purposes, you should cite your source. This is not a copyright issue, it's a question of appropriate scholarly practice. Using this data in a scholarly work without citing the source would constitute plagiarism, a serious offense in academia which can cost students their degrees and scholars their jobs. Aside from the question of plagiarism, when writing scholarly works you should point to your sources so that readers can look up the data themselves. There is no need for copyright! If you are using the data for the purposes of promoting open access, attribution is welcome and encouraged, but please use your judgement. If you're using a few figures on an open access poster or presentation, don't let attribution take away from the effectiveness of your presentation.

My hope is that this small step will encourage all of us in the open access movement to move away from our hard critical approaches to move to a new era of open discussion on the nuances of best practices to transition to open access.  While I remain firmly opposed to what I consider the overly simplistic and dangerous perspective equating the Creative Commons CC-BY license with open access, I see the value of open sharing of data and would welcome a discussion about how to make this happen.

Data files
(In google docs for now, will be posted to my institutional repository when this service is available):

2013 dramatic growth.ods: figures and annual growth (as shown below)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5n66wofwO7abkxJTVdSLU4xdjg/edit?usp=sharing
csv format: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5n66wofwO7aQWNMMndQb1k1dG8/edit?usp=sharing

Full data edition
Open document format https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5n66wofwO7aTUhvYkVwcTJxTFU/edit?usp=sharing
csv format https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5n66wofwO7aYm81b2hPSGxZVWM/edit?usp=sharing

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

The numbers

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	Dec. 31, 2013	Annual growth (number)	Annual growth (percentage)	Plain language growth explanation
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)  http://www.doaj.org/
# of DOAJ journals	9,804	1,285	15%	3.5 journals per day
# of titles added last 30 days (DOAJ)
# of countries (added March 31, 2013) (DOAJ)	124	124
# of journals searchable at article level (DOAJ)	5,636	1,389	33%
# of articles searchable at article level (DOAJ)	1,573,847	618,127	65%	1,700 articles per day
Directory of Open Access Books http://www.doabooks.org/
# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB)	1,619	360	29%	1 book per day
# publishers (DOAB)	54	19	54%	1.5 publishers per month
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek - Electronic Journals Library  # journals that can be read free of charge http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en	43,498	5,693	15%	16 journals per day
Highwire Press Free Online Fulltext Articles  http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
# free articles (Highwire)	2,328,293	176,873	8%	485 articles per day
total # articles (Highwire)	7,251,816	512,693	8%
Highwire Completely Free Sites	89	26	41%
Sites with free back issues (Highwire)	279	-7	-2%
Open DOAR  http://www.opendoar.org/
OpenDOAR # repositories	2,553	300	13%	1 repository per day
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)  http://roar.eprints.org/ # repositories	3,565	225	7%
BASE:  Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/
# of documents (BASE)	56,716,421	16,209,516	40%	45,000 documents per day
# of content providers (BASE)	2,788	371	15%	1 new content provider per day
PubMedCentral  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
# items Dec. 2011 - posted on PMC website(from ROAR) 100% fulltext - for historical purposes - for more accurate data, see PMC Free tab	2,900,000	300,000	12%	over 800 items per day
# journals actively participating in PMC (total minus predecessor minus no new content)	1,690	226	15%
# journals in PMC with immediate free access	1,188	162	16%
# journals in PMC with all articles open access	1,021	128	14%
# journals in PMC with some articles open access	287	40	16%
# journals that deposit ALL articles in PMC (from PMC website - full participation journals)	1,394	195	16%
# journals that deposit NIH-funded articles in PMC (from PMC website - NIH portfolio journals)	273	28	11%
# journals that deposit selected articles in PMC (from PMC website)	2,414	496	26%
arXiv  http://arxiv.org/	902,669	92,820	11%	250 items per day
RePEC http://repec.org/ total items (from LogEC as of March 2012) (Sept. 2013 note)	1,481,968
RePEC online (fulltext) (downloadable as of March 2012)	1,341,432
Social Sciences Research Network http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayAbstractSearch.cfm
Abstracts (SSRN)	522,846	63,371	14%
Full text papers (SSRN)	428,336	55,564	15%	150 papers per day
Authors (SSRN)	242,808	28,849	13%
Papers received in last 12 months (SSRN)	66,368	-1,399	-2%
Paper downloads - to date (SSRN)	71,902,968	10,911,825	18%
Paper downloads - last 12 months (SSRN)	10,910,691	143,001	1%
Paper downloads - last 30 days (SSRN)	778,301	-63,098	-7%
Open Access Mandate Policies ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Sub-Institutional (was Departmental) Policies (ROARMAP)	43	9	26%
Funder Policies (ROARMAP)	83	29	54%
Institutional Policies (ROARMAP)	191	28	17%
Multi-institutional Policies (ROARMAP)	5	1	25%
Thesis Policies (ROARMAP)	107	9	9%
Total Policies (ROARMAP)	429	76	22%	1.5 policies per week
Proposed Mandates Policies (ROARMAP)	27	4	17%
Internet Archive http://archive.org/index.php
Webpages (Internet Archive)	374,000,000	374,000,000
Moving images (movies)  (Internet Archive)	1,499,311	388,433	35%
Live music archive (concerts) (Internet Archive)	123,522	13,074	12%
Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive)	1,818,913	344,157	23%
Texts  (Internet Archive)	5,668,948	1,887,806	50%	5,000 texts per day

An open access New Year's wish

Being a professor comes with a few perks - for example, for me, having an office in a prominent spot on a floor of the Desmarais Building at the University of Ottawa that houses the Information Studies and Communication departments.

There is space to post things on the outside of my door. Many professors have posters about conferences that they are involved with, for example. Which gets me to my New Year's wish - an open source poster to promote open access in these disciplines. It should be possible to build on some of the excellent work on promotional materials such as open access logos developed for open access week. How about a link to the DOAJ subject lists for these areas, the Social Sciences Research Network, E-LIS and PubMed (all relevant to faculty members in these areas).

A customizable poster would be optimal. For example, the institutional repository could be an example, for everyone to look up and substitute their own. People in different disciplines could switch to more relevant DOAJ lists and subject repositories.

If the poster were manipulable, then people could add information of local interest, such as journals we or our colleagues are involved in. A list of bullet points on why open access could be provided, with individuals selecting what is most likely to speak to people locally.

This is just a wish! Given the time of year, projects for next year's OA Week may be more feasible.

Elsevier boycott: the cost of knowledge

Please join us in boycotting Elsevier at The Cost of Knowledge website. Thanks to Tyler Nelson for creating and updating the site.

Elsevier has bought two publishers of my works, including the publisher of my book (Chandos / Woodhead). I'm debating adding a clause to future publishing contracts that states no selling my work to Elsevier.

If anyone from Elsevier is reading this, please remove me from your Elsevier "Author Connect" list. I an not an Elsevier author, and I do not wish to connect.

Second update: ownership of a work by a publisher that I am on the record as boycotting is in fundamental conflict with my moral rights as an author. Chandos published a number of books on open access, and other authors may have the same perspective.

Update December 22: my original blogpost on joining the Cost of Knowledge boycott can be found here. 

One upside of this sale is that it provides an excellent example of how copyright ownership can be completely divorced from, and often counter to, creativity. My book Scholarly Communication for Librarians is the result of a great deal of hard work on my part and inspiration and comments from many others, who are listed in the acknowledgements. The contributions of Glyn Jones and the staff at Chandos were significant. Elsevier contributed absolutely nothing to the creative work involved with this book; this company simply holds the ownership to extract rent from sale of the book. This method of dissemination - no dissemination without paying a toll to this company - impedes the dissemination that is necessary to advance scholarly knowledge. Elsevier's ownership of the IP for this book is an impediment to updating it.

If instead of writing a book in this way I had created a wiki, I would have had a tool that anyone, anywhere could access, one that I could update easily. I would have had a textbook that I could have asked my students to read (I never required this for the published version as the price to me was outrageoues). No worries, dear reader - as you probably realize, a book a scholarly communication dated 2009 is substantially out of date. Next book I write will be much more like a wiki than a traditional book.

Open access mandate from the European Union

Thanks to Peter Suber - major and most welcome OA news from the EU!

Responses to Canada's Tri-Agency Draft Open Access Policy

From the Canadian Association of Research Libraries
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/uploads/SCC/CARL_response_Tri_C_harmonized_OA_policy_Dec_10_2013.pdf
Noteworthy: 8 university libraries across will welcome articles from researchers at other universities to facilitate adoption of this policy!

ACOA / APLAC Response (submitted December 12)
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/10/acoa-et-aplac-premiere-reponse.html
Noteworthy: ACOA / APLAC's final recommendation is to eliminate the open access publishing option as part of the policy. Researchers should deposit in a Canadian-based open access archive whether they publish with an open access or toll access journal.

My response (submitted October 16):
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/10/canadas-tricouncil-draft-open-access.html

The unstoppable growth of high quality open access resources (December 2013 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access)

As shown in this chart (thanks to César Villamizar), the number of articles indexed in PubMed for which free fulltext is available within 3 years of publication is now over 800,000, or 28% of the articles indexed.  This growth is an important indication of the dramatic growth of high quality open access resources. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, responsible for the PubMed index, does not index junk!

Recently Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society wrote about the unstoppable rise of open access. The 2013 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access confirms this unstoppable rise, featuring a number of notable areas of growth and important milestones, with a focus on numbers that are indicators of growth of high quality open access resources.

Congratulations are due to the Public Library of Science as recently PLoS celebrated a milestone of its 100,000th article. The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral continues to rise. In the past year, the number of journals actively participating in PMC increased by 215 - about one title per working day. There are now more than 1,000 journals in PMC with all articles open access.

The number of research funding agencies and institutions with open access mandates continues to rise. 12 more institutional open access mandates have been added to ROARMAP since September 30th! Mandates by funding agencies and prestigious research institutions and universities ensure that the growth of open access features high quality articles, due to the vetting processes involved in assessing funding grant requests and institutional hiring, tenure and promotion practices. 

Congratulations to the Directory of Open Access Journals for passing another very recent milestone of 10 thousand titles!  Due to continuous improvement DOAJ was deleting as many titles as it was adding earlier this year - for this reason, the growth in DOAJ reflects not only quantity but quality as poorer journals have been weeded. Dramatic as the growth of open access has been to date, it looks like we can count on a ramping up of growth in 2014, when the first discipline-wide transition to open access, in particle physics, is implemented as SCOAP3 is set to begin January 1, 2014. 

Internet Archive continues to amaze, having added 1.8 million texts this past year for a total of more than 5 million texts!

A special thank you to César Villamizar, a student in our School of Information Studies and research assistant, for help with this issue's data and charts - and a well-deserved Happy Holidays and New Year to everyone in the open access movement!

The full data and chart are available to download from uO recherche. This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Call for participation: resource requirements for small scholar-led not-for-profit open access scholarly publishing

Français

Are you are a scholar involved in small not-for-profit open access publishing (from one to three journals, occasional conference proceedings, or small-scale monograph publishing)? Or, would your small not-for-profit publishing operation  like to switch to open access if the economic logistics can be worked out? If so, you are invited to participate in an interview (half hour to an hour) designed to further flesh out the resource requirements needed to sustain this kind of open access publishing.

Results of these interviews will form the basis for further research, including case studies and focus groups, in preparation for a larger project on the economics of global transition to open access. It is anticipated that results of this study will be useful in the development of business practices for open access publishing, and inform open access policy. Participants can choose whether their contributions will be anonymous and confidential or open and acknowledged.

To volunteer or for further information, please contact Heather Morrison re: study title: resource requirements for small scholar-led not-for-profit open access

Best,

Dr. Heather Morrison

Assistant Professor

École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies

University of Ottawa

http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html

Heather dot Morrison at uottawa dot ca

Appel de participation : Ressources nécessaires pour le libre accès pour les revues savantes à but non lucratif

L’anglais

Vous œuvrez dans une université et êtes impliqué dans la publication (sans but lucratif) d’une à trois revue(s) savantes, d’actes de conférence occasionnels, ou la publication de monographies à plus petite échelle en libre accès? Ou est-ce que votre petite maison d’édition aimerait se convertir en libre accès si un plan d’affaires peut être élaboré? Si la réponse est oui, je vous invite à participer à un entretien (entre une demi-heure et une heure) conçu pour déterminer les ressources nécessaires pour soutenir ce type de publication libre accès.

Le résultat des entrevues servira de base d'une recherche plus poussée, y compris des études de cas et groupes de discussion, dans la préparation d’un vaste projet sur l’économie d’une transition globale vers le libre accès. Il est probable que les résultats de cette recherche soient utiles dans le développement de pratiques d’affaires pour la publication en libre accès et qu’ils éclairent la politique de libre accès. Les participants peuvent choisir de soumettre leurs commentaires anonymement et confidentiellement ou qu’ils leur soient attribués publiquement.

Pour se porter volontaire ou pour toute autre question, veuillez communiquer avec Heather Morrison, Objet : Ressources nécessaires pour le libre accès pour les revues savantes à but non lucratif

Cordialement,

Dr. Heather Morrison

Professeure Adjointe

École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies

University of Ottawa

http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html

Heather dot Morrison at uottawa dot ca

Open access publishing by APC: dominated by the commercial sector

To put this post in context: Beall just published an article in Triple C claiming, among other things, that "the open access movement is an anti-corporatist movement". This just doesn't make sense. Beall's focus is on the subset of the OA movement that uses open access article processing fees. This segment of open access journal publishing is actually heavily dominated by the commercial sector. For example, based on our research-in-progress, the 14 largest publishers in DOAJ "with article processing charge" (publishers with 20 or more journals) appear to be all commercial companies. (If this is not correct please let me know).

Update December 10th: I'd like to note that the number of journals published is not necessarily the same as the size or importance of an open access publisher using this particular business model. For example, while Public Library of Science publishes a relatively small number of journals, PLoS ONE is the world's largest scholarly journal in terms of number of articles published, and that by a wide margin. Also if the full impact of a publisher including qualitative measures is taken into account, PLoS' essential role in advocacy would arguably make it the most notable publisher in this category, at least in my opinion. ~ Heather 

Data thanks to César Villamizar

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Publisher Using OA APCs	# journals
Hindawi Publishing Corporation	430
BioMed Central	235
Scientific Research Publishing	119
Bentham open	106
Dove Medical Press	91
Libertas Academica	61
Springer	60
MDPI AG	46
Internet Scientific Publications, LLC	45
Canadian Center of Science and Education	34
Frontiers Media	30
Hans Publishers	25
Asian Network for Scientific Information	23
Co-Action Publishing	21
Total	1,326

In total, these publishers account for 1,326 of the 2,637journals listed in DOAJ "with article processing charge". The total percentage of journals using APCs that are commercial in nature has not been calculated, but will be more than 50% as many of the smaller publishers are also commercial in nature. Note that these 2,637 journals "with article processing charge" represent only 26% of the close to 10 thousand journals listed in DOAJ - and open access journal publishing is only one of the means of providing open access, along with open access archiving.

Scholarly journal article publishing: profits at below 30% of current revenues

Thanks to Mark Ware, Michael Mabe and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) for releasing the 2012 STM report as open access.

Based on data from the Executive Summary, we can calculate that the current average revenue per scholarly journal article published globally is approximately $5,000 US. BMC is making a profit charging an average APC that is 37% of this amount, and PLoS is bringing in a 23% surplus at less than 30% of this amount.

This is based on Ware and Mabe's report of:

9.4 billion in revenue for english-language STM journal publishing
1.8 - 1.9 million articles published per year in 28,100 actively scholarly journals
=  approximately $5,000 in average revenue

BioMedCentral average of $1,874 is based on data downloaded from the BMC website as part of the open access article processing fee research project. 

The average article processing fee for an article in the profitable BioMedCentral journals is $1,874 US - that's profit-making at an average of 37% of the current average revenue. PLoS is now enjoying a 23% profit rate, charging $1,350 per article for PLoS ONE - that's a high profit rate at 27% of the revenue of the current average.

It should be noted that PLoS was not originally designed to be a model of publishing efficiency, but rather a combined advocacy and publishing organization meant to compete primarily at the high end of the scholarly publishing market. PLoS' costs reflect this original mission: well-paid professional staff and headquarters in one of the world's costliest real estate markets, San Francisco. 

This is yet an another indication, as I have argued elsewhere, that high quality scholarly publishing can be accomplished for a small fraction of existing spend - something that every faculty member and university administrator in today's tough economic times ought to know.

Make my collection open access!

I just sent this message to my library to tell them how much I want to support Knowledge Unlatched - let's make open access to scholarly monographs a reality!

I would like to dedicate up to the remainder of my new faculty start-up fund to support this project (capped maximum of US $1,680). For the future, I would wholly support dropping the big deals of every large publisher and re-directing funding to support works like this.

As a bit of context, at the University of Ottawa we new faculty members have the good fortune of having a $2,000 start-up fund to build the collection.

Open access legislation in the US and Canada looks to prioritize post-publication archiving, not publishers' profits

My open access policy post has just been published in the London School of Economics Impact Blog.

The text follows. Note that this was written before the Canadian tri-agency draft open access policy was released on October 15, but correctly predicts expansion of the CIHR policy basics across the funding agencies. My comments on the tri-agency policy are posted here.  The ACOA / APLAC response draft is posted here.

Providing further context on open access policy, Heather Morrison presents cases from the U.S. and Canada, where each are also grappling with how to provide wider access to publicly funded research. If passed, the U.S.’s FASTR Act would require ‘green’ archiving and a focus on interoperability of local repositories. Across North America, faculty-led institutional policy has also been instrumental in administering access whilst preserving university autonomy.

What do UK academics and policy-makers need to know about open access policy across the pond? This is a call for UK academics to join us in calling for public policies that prioritize the needs of scholars and the public interest, not the profits of a handful of publishers. U.S. leaders have developed approaches to policy that are good models for any country! The U.S. Free Access to Research Act (FASTR), if passed, would require the archiving of peer-reviewed results of research funded by federal agencies for public access with a maximum six month embargo. A White House directive in response to a public call for open access is calling for much the same approach, with implementation details anticipated at any moment.

Image credit: Berkeley Lab (CC-BY-NC-SA)

A six month embargo is more than generous considering that scholarly publishers have had over a decade to transition to open access. There are more than ten thousand fully open access peer reviewed journals successfully employing a variety of business models listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. By insisting on deposit in repositories for public access with long-term preservation addressed, FASTR ensures ongoing access to these works for the U.S. public. FASTR addresses the technical requirements for re-use much more directly than the RCUK’s indirect and insufficient preference for a particular license. Research funders in the U.S. and Canada fund research rather than targeting funding to open access article processing fees. The faculty permissions approach, developed by academics for academics, pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT is the optimal model for institutional open access policy from the scholar’s point of view. Perhaps a topic for another day: throughout the U.S. and Canada, university libraries provide hosting and support services for faculty-led publishing.


The Free Access to Research Act (FASTR) in the U.S., if passed, would require free public access to federally funded research for departments with research budgets of $100 million or more. Unlike the UK, FASTR does not ask authors to publish in open access journals, nor does it provide funding for open access article processing fees. FASTR’s call for examination of open licensing is very similar to the recent advice from the UK’s Business, Innovation and Skills Committee for further research on this point.

FASTR is a superior policy to the UK’s RCUK policy from a number of perspectives. First, demanding deposit in repositories designed for long-term preservation for free public access assures that U.S. citizens will have access to these works in perpetuity. The UK’s push for gold open access policy leaves works funded by the UK at the mercy of publishers and journals that could fold, be owned or controlled by organizations outside the political influence of the UK, or that could change their business model in future.

The US focus on interoperability and local repositories meeting technical requirements directly addresses requirements for data and text-mining. This is likely to be far more effective than the UK’s attempt to achieve this indirectly through CC-BY (attribution only) licensing. CC-BY is not necessary for data and text mining of freely available works as these are essentially automated forms of reading materials. CC-BY is not sufficient for data and text mining because a CC-BY license can be placed on works that are not technically suited for these tasks, such as a locked-down PDF.
Both the UK and the FASTR approaches are designed to accommodate publishers in the transition process. The FASTR maximum six-month embargo on green open access archiving is appropriate given that scholarly publishing has now had more than a decade of experience with open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals which use a variety of business models. This is a strong indicator of the ability of scholarly publishers to transition to open access, given good public policy which prioritizes scholarship and the public interest while giving scholarly publishers a lengthy period of time to adjust. The goal for open access policy should be to gradually decrease embargo periods to zero, reflecting that the public interest is and should be the priority of government, not protecting outmoded business models.

Other North American funding agencies are largely following this U.S. model. For example, Canada’s first federal funding agency to adopt an open access policy, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), adopted a policy fairly similar to the public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Canada’s tricouncil funding agencies are currently undergoing discussions with a view to standardizing open access policies across the agencies, with CIHR’s policy most likely to serve as the model.  It should be acknowledged that the UK’s early lead in green open access policy and repository development was a major influence in the direction of U.S. and Canadian policy.

While U.S. and Canadian research funders allow for researchers to apply for open access article processing fees in research grant applications, it is unlikely that either the U.S. or Canada would follow the lead of providing targeted funding for this purpose, particularly in the current lean economic environment. Even in better economic times, in North America there is far more university autonomy and less central direction than is the case in the UK.

A great model for institutional policy from the scholar’s point of view is the faculty-led open access permissions policy pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT. Shieber and Suber have developed a webpage dedicated to what they call “good practices” for this kind of policy.  The basic idea is that faculty give their university permission to post their peer-reviewed articles for open access in their local repository, with a waiver option available to authors on request. This approach gives a university all the permissions needed to make the work of its faculty open access, while at the same time asserting the rights of faculty to their own work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

ACOA et APLAC: premiere reponse à politique libre accès de NSERC, CIHR et SSHRC

Advocates for Canadian Open Access (ACOA)Draft response to Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

Les avocats pour libre accès canadien (APLAC):Réponse préliminaire a la version préliminaire de la Politique de libre accès des trois organismes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C4HksXi399pqUNitVy0eEcIn0cTC9hU1g5tmUYA4OQI/edit?usp=sharing

Les membres fondateurs d'ACOA / APLAC voudraient vous inviter à joindre une réponse commune a la version préliminaire de la Politique de libre accès des trois organismes.

The founding members of ACOA / APLAC invite you to join in a common response to the tri-agency open access policy.

Canada's tricouncil draft open access policy: my comments

Canada's tricouncil funding agencies (NSERC, CIHR and SSHRC) have posted a consultation on their draft open access policy. Comments are due by December 13, 2013. Following are my comments.

Kudos to the tricouncil for an overall sensible draft open access policy that in many respects can serve as a model for other funding agencies.

Overall

One of the strengths of the policy is that open access publishing is an option, not a requirement, with use of grant funds allowed for this purpose. The reason this is a strength is that this permits market forces to operate. This is important to address a long-term market dysfunction in which a few large commercial scholarly publishers enjoy hefty profit margins in the range of 30-40% in an inelastic market that does not respond to market signals such as deep cuts to universities and research budgets, while on the other hand a significant portion of scholarly journal and monograph publishing requires subsidy. Today's technology makes it possible to conduct high quality scholarly publishing (peer review coordination and editing) at a fraction of the costs of some of the large commercial publishers, suggesting that it is very much worthwhile pursuing a competitive market so that funding can be re-directed from paying for publication to more money for research per se, as well as new needs such as research data retention, management and preservation. See the Appendix to this letter for more detail.

3.1 Option #1: Grant recipients submit their manuscript to a journal that offers immediate open access to published articles, or offers open access to published articles within 12 months.

Suggested change - add: and deposit a copy of the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a Canadian open access archive on acceptance for publication, with open access delayed if necessary. 

Rationale: option #1 is not sufficient to ensure ongoing open access. The policy applies to grantees, not to journals. If a grantee meets the requirements by publishing in a journal that fits the criteria for this option, there is nothing to stop the journal from subsequently changing journal policy, for example changing its business model to toll access or extending the embargo period. This is true even for journals that use Creative Commons licenses; these extend and clarify permissions downstream but pose no obligations on the original copyright holder.

Option #2: Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a digital archive where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

Suggested change to:

Option #2: Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a Canadian-based digital archive on acceptance for publication where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to ensure that they retain rights to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

Rationale:

Ensuring ongoing open access to Canadian works is best served through archives based in Canada. Archives based elsewhere are subject to funding contingencies that are not under the control of Canada and access to archives outside of the country could be impacted by forces not under the control of Canada or Canadians. For example, if a grantee fulfills the requirement of this policy by depositing a copy of a work into an archive in a foreign country, it is within the realm of the possible that the foreign archive could be under the control of a country with which Canada is at war or in a trade dispute.

To facilitate compliance, authors should be required to deposit a copy of their post-peer-reviewed manuscript on acceptance for publication, with delay in open access if necessary. This greatly simplifies the process of accountability.

The original statement places more emphasis on publisher rights than is warranted. Research funding agencies have the right to set policies with which grantees must comply, and copyright begins with the author. Authors should insist on rights retention rather than passively complying with publisher policy.

Requiring deposit in a local open access archive is not an onerous burden, and is much less of a burden today than it was a few years ago. The majority of Canada's universities already have institutional repositories in place, and all Canadian research institutions will need to develop repository services in the near future, whether for this policy or for other purposes. For example, every institution with graduate students either has, or will soon need, a repository for electronic deposit of theses. Every institution with researchers will soon need one or more repositories for storing research data. A few years ago development of an institutional repository required local expertise and considerable investment, but today hosted solutions are available and affordable, and smaller institutions can share repositories and save quite a bit on the costs.

Embargo period (option # 1 and option # 2): suggest 6 months, not 12

The embargo period of 12 months is, in my opinion, far too generous. Scholarly publishers have had more than a decade to adjust to open access. The purpose of scholarly research is to advance our knowledge and serve the public interest; any financial benefits to scholarly publishers is incidental and should be given an accordingly lower priority. The embargo period should be shortened to 6 months, with an indication of review with a view to eventually eliminating the embargo period.

Another suggestion

One suggestion to facilitate both acceptance and compliance would be for the tricouncil to accept URLs to works in institutional repositories in CVs for grant application purposes. This would mean that the small steps needed to make works open access would also free up time for researchers.

Thank you for a good model for open access policy and for the opportunity to participate in this consultation.

Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
University of Ottawa School of Information Studies


Appendix: how researchers can save money when open access publishing is a choice

Researchers can save money by selecting more cost effective options such as publishing in one of the majority of open access journals that do not charge article processing fees. Of the close to 10,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, 6,555 or approximately two-thirds have "no article processing charge" (DOAJ, 2013). Researchers considering open access journals that do charge article processing fees have an incentive to prioritize journals equivalent in scholarly value but lower in cost where possible, as seeking lower costs means more research funds can go to other priorities such as support for student training and purchase of necessary equipment. Today's technology has made it possible to complete the important scholarly work of coordinating peer review and editing at a very high level of quality at a fraction of the cost associated with some of the large commercial scholarly publishers. According to my analysis (Morrison, 2013), the average global expenditure by university libraries for each peer-reviewed scholarly article is approximately $4,500. To illustrate the potential for savings, note (merely as one of many examples) that the profitable Hindawi manages the process charging article processing fees as little as a tenth of this amount.

References

DOAJ (2013). Browse by publication charges. Retrieved October 16, 2013 from http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=byPublicationFee&uiLanguage=en

MORRISON, Heather. Economics of scholarly communication in transition. First Monday, [S.l.], may. 2013. ISSN 13960466. Available at: <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4370/3685>. Date accessed: 16 Oct. 2013. doi:10.5210/fm.v18i6.4370.

September 30 2013 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is dedicated to the hard-working staff at the US PubMedCentral who have done so much to make open access happen and are now on furlough.

These charts show the steady increase in numbers and percentages of articles funded by NIH that are freely available within 3 years of publication. Since 2008, the percentage has increased from 35% to 64%.

Aside from thanking the researchers, the reason that I have selected this as an issue to highlight is to point out that the U.S. government shutdown is a major concern for scholarship as a whole, not just open access scholarship. When the world's largest medical research funding agency is shut down, research funds do not flow. Equipment cannot be bought or research assistants hired. When the total quantity of research decreases, there will be less need for publication, whether toll or open access. For anyone with a genuine concern to advance knowledge, this should be the focus. This is incidentally intended to add to my critical comments on the Bohannon / Science article focusing on poor peer review at a few new journals. I argue that the fact that Science would choose this as a focus at this moment in time suggests a publisher out of touch with the realities of the research communities. If the U.S. government shutdown continues, I predict a drop in scholarly research outputs.

Highlights this quarter

The open access journals listed in DOAJ are growing significantly in number of journals and article searchable at article level. The number of journals searchable at the article level grew this quarter grew by 660 to a total of 5,597, a total of 7 new journals searchable per day. The number of articles searchable via DOAJ at article level is now 1.5 million, a growth of 386,000 this quarter. DOAJ now has a browse by publication charge feature which makes it easy to illustrate that about two-thirds of the journals listed in DOAJ do NOT charge article processing fees. Internet Archive continues to amaze, adding 10 billion webpages this quarter for a total of 357 billion webpages. The number of texts freely available through the Internet Archive is over 5 million, with half a million added this quarter. 

Items of interest since June 30, 2013

• Times Higher Education article - Open access gains ground (based on EU Commission below)
• BASE hits the 50 million record mark!
• European Commission: Open access to research publications reaching 'tipping point'

• Cool stats about CanLII, Canada's legal scholarship open access initiative: http://www.nationalmagazine.ca/Blog/July-2013/15-things-you-didn-t-know-about-CanLII.aspx [Disclosure: the École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa is one of the sponsors of the CanLII Hackathon this September]

• SpringerPlus Journal (a new PLoS ONE clone) announced a milestone of over 1,000 articles   (Comment - this tends to support my hypothesis of 2011 that open access has moved into an age of competition). 

The numbers: September 30, 2013

Directory of Open Access Journals
9,944 journals. Growth this quarter: 185 journals (2 per day)
121 countries. Growth this quarter: 1 country.
5,597 journals searchable at article level. Growth this quarter: 660 journals (7 per day).
1,517,338 articles searchable at article level. Growth this quarter: 386,957 articles (over 4,000 per day). 34% growth this quarter.
New: browse by publication fee. This browse feature demonstrates that the vast majority of OA journals do not use article processing charges.
Data as of October 12, 2013:

• No article processing charge - 6,557 journals
• With article processing charge - 2,687 journals
• Conditional article processing charge - 498 journals
• No information re article processing charge - 199 journals

Directory of Open Access Books
1,566 academic peer-reviewed books. Growth this quarter: 113 books
54 publishers. Growth this quarter: 5 publishers.

Electronic Journals Library
# of journals that can be read free of charge:  42,115 journals. Growth this quarter: 1,487 journals. 

Highwire Press
# free fulltext articles: 2,288,352. Decrease of 31,907 articles.
total # of articles: 7,114,008. Decrease of 9,063 articles.
completely free sites:  84. Growth of 11 sites this quarter.
Sites with free back issues: 279. Growth of 1 this quarter.

OpenDOAR
# open access repositories: 2,452. Growth of 130 this quarter.

Registry of Open Access Repositories
# open access repositories: 3,511. Growth of 130 this quarter.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
# of documents: 50,063,294. Growth this quarter: 2,915,212.
# of content providers: 2,690. Growth this quarter: 83.

PubMedCentral
# of freely available items: 2.8 million (from PubMedCentral website)
journals actively participating in PMC: 1,647. Growth this quarter: 91 journals.
# journals in PMC with immediate free access: 1,133. Growth this quarter: 32 journals.
# journals with all articles open access: 996. Growth this quarter: 36 journals.

arXiv
878,022 documents. Growth this quarter: 22,640

Social Sciences Research Network
Full text papers: 414,100. Growth this quarter: 13,859

Open access mandate policies (ROARMAP)
Total: 415. Growth this quarter: 16

Internet archive
Webpages: 357 billion. Growth this quarter: 10 billion.
Moving images (movies): 1,396,202. Growth this quarter: 87,925
Live music archive (concerts): 120,782. Growth this quarter: 3,319
Audio (recordings): 1,724,574. Growth this quarter: 82,528
Texts: 5,104,988. Growth this quarter: 500,828

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.
Rationale and method.
Full data edition.