Open Access and new forms of publishing in Economics, Social Sciences and the Humanities
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Information Event organised by D-MTEC, D-GESS & ETH Bibliothek. ETH Zurich, 25 Nov 2013
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Open Access and new forms of publishing in Economics, Social Sciences and the Humanities
- 1. Information event organised by D-MTEC, D-GESS & ETH-Bibliothek ETH Zurich, 25 November 2013 Barbara Hirschmann, E-Publishing Office, ETH-Bibliothek 1 OPEN ACCESS AND NEW FORMS OF PUBLISHING IN ECONOMICS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
- 2. With open access copyright is in danger. Who is responsible for quality control in open access publications? 2 OPEN ACCESS: STATEMENTS, QUESTIONS AND FEARS «We are in the hands of the publishers.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) Why should I publish open access? Who pays for an open access publication? «Ein Artikel muss im Web of Science zitiert werden, sonst ist es verlorene Literatur.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) «Es darf nicht zum Zwang werden, man sollte die Wahl haben.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) How does peer review go together with open access? How can an open access publications reach a good reputation?
- 3. What is Open Access? 3 OPEN ACCESS accessible without costs for the reader «Open access […] literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.» (Peter Suber, 2012) possibility to reuse • Download • Copy • Distribute • Print • Search • …
- 4. 4 TRADITIONAL PUBLICATION CYCLE Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library
- 5. 5 TRADITIONAL PUBLICATION CYCLE Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library peer review layout, copy-editing distribution delivery selection & acquistion Paid by taxpayer Paid by taxpayer
- 6. 6 THE SERIALS CRISIS Annual US journal price increases compared to Consumer Price Index (CPI). Source: http://allenpress.com/system/files/pdfs/library/2012_AP_JPS.pdf
- 7. 7 JOURNAL PRICES Journal of applied polymer science $ $ Science Impact Factor: 1.54 $ = $ Impact Factor: 1.3 = Journal of non-crystalline solids $ Impact Factor: 31,2 $
- 8. 8 JOURNAL PRICES Source: Bosch, Stephen and Kittie Henderson. «The Winds of Change. Periodicals Price Survey 2013.» Library Journal 21 July 2013. URL: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/publishing/the-winds-of-change-periodicals-price-survey- 2013 [18.11.2013]
- 9. 9 PROFIT MARGINS IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING 40.00% 35.00% 30.00% 25.00% 20.00% 15.00% 10.00% 5.00% 0.00% Source: http://de.slideshare.net/cirasella/open-access-which-side-are-you-on-oa-week-2013 [22.11.2013]
- 10. RESOURCES AND DOCUMENTS HELD BY THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK Journals electronic format 11 current, printed format 14 600 5 380 Databases 145 Books, reference works e-Books printed papers (monographs and bound volumes) 105 000 2 887 000 Dissertations, reports documents ETH E-Collection reports and microfiches 28 000 2 213 000 Maps incl. plans 403 000 … … …
- 11. 4,000,000 3,750,000 3,500,000 3,250,000 3,000,000 2,750,000 2,500,000 2,250,000 2,000,000 1,750,000 1,500,000 1,250,000 1,000,000 12 USAGE OF PRODUCTS OF THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK 750,000 500,000 250,000 0 Usage of products ETH-Bibliothek 2001 – 2012 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Loans (printed documents) Document delivery subito, FIZ Accesses library website Accesses databases Accesses licensed electronic journals Accesses ETH E-Collection (PDF downloads) Accesses e-books
- 12. 13 ACQUISITIONS BUDGET OF THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK 60% 14% 13% 9% 3% journals (online and print) databases e-books monographs and serials other
- 13. 14 OPEN ACCESS • A way out of the serials crisis? • A way out of library budget problems? • Solve copyright restriction problems?
- 14. 15 OPEN ACCESS • Increased visibility and higher citation rates • Fast, toll-free access to information • Good findability via search engines • All the benefits of digital documents • Promotes international and inter-disciplinary cooperation • Greater research efficiency through early discussion of results • Authors retain copyright • Open access to publicly-funded research results • Long-term document availability • Benefits in networked, IT-supported work environments
- 15. Open Access – The Green Road 16 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) delivery Publication in Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library Peer Review layout, copy-editing distribution selection & acquistion Repository
- 16. 4,000,000 3,750,000 3,500,000 3,250,000 3,000,000 2,750,000 2,500,000 2,250,000 2,000,000 1,750,000 1,500,000 1,250,000 1,000,000 17 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD 750,000 500,000 250,000 0 Usage of products ETH-Bibliothek 2001 – 2012 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Loans (printed documents) Document delivery subito, FIZ Accesses library website Accesses databases Accesses licensed electronic journals Accesses ETH E-Collection (PDF downloads) Accesses e-books
- 17. Self-Archiving in Open Access repositories 18 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Institutional Repository Disciplinary Repository OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)
- 18. 19 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD
- 19. 20 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD
- 20. 21 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Persistent Identifier Free of charge Disciplinary collection
- 21. 22 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Persistent Identifier (DOI) Long term archiving Free of charge Up-to-date download statistics Metadata transfer to E-Citations When publishing in ETH E-Collection you comply with Open Access mandates of ETH Zurich, SNSF, and the European Commission!
- 22. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Publishing in Open Access Journals • Quality Control (Peer Review) • Different funding mechanisms 23 • Article Processing Charges • Author retains Copyright (standard licence: CC-BY)
- 23. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Open Access – The Golden Road 1. Choose a Journal 24 List of OA Journals with impact factor: http://labs.biblioteca.uoc.edu/test/doaj/ 2. Avoid publishing with predatory OA Publishers: – Beall’s List: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ – OASPA: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
- 24. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Funding $ 0,- 1140,- • Research Funds • ETH Zurich memberships $ 2500,- $ • Open Access Option («Hybrid Journals»): Not financed by ETH 25 Zurich! e.g. Springer Open Choice, Elsevier Sponsored Articles, Wiley Online Open, ….
- 25. 26 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Correlation of APCs with Journal’s Impact Factor Source: Theo Andrew (2012): Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/andrew.
- 26. 27 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 27. 28 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD 18.00% 16.00% 14.00% 12.00% 10.00% 8.00% 6.00% 4.00% 2.00% 0.00% 2008 2009 2010 2011 Delayed OA Hybrid OA In full immediate OA journals Source: based on Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 28. 29 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 29. New Publishing Models: Megajournals 30 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: Davis, Phil: The Rise and Fall of PLOS ONE’s Impact Factor (2012 = 3.730). The scholarly kitchen. URL: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/20/the-rise-and-fall- of-plos-ones-impact-factor-2012-3-730/
- 30. New Publishing Models 31 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD
- 31. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD • Publication of the submitted version as “Discussion Paper” 32 within 3 weeks • Review by • invited referees (classic peer review) • Registered readers (open assessment) • Published or rejected as “Journal Article” • Discussion Paper with all comments remains accessible to the public • Journal included in SSCI since 2012
- 32. OPEN ACCESS IN THE HUMANITIES • «Delayed Open Access»: 33 Open Access to Publisher Backlists (books / journals) e.g. retro.seals.ch • Pilot projects with Open Access Book Publishing • Research funder initiatives (DFG, Wellcome Trust, Austrian Science Fund)
- 33. OPEN ACCESS @ ETH ZURICH The Open Access Movement & ETH 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to 34 Scientific Knowledge 2006 ETH Zurich signs Berlin Declaration 2008 ETH Zurich adopts Open Access Policy
- 34. ETH Zurich Open Access Policy (2008) 35 OPEN ACCESS @ ETH ZURICH “The ETH Zurich requires of staff and postgraduate students to post electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (post-prints), theses and other scientific research output (monographs, reports, proceedings, videos etc.), to be made freely available as soon as possible into the institutional repository ETH E-Collection, if there are no legal objections. The ETH Zurich expects authors where possible, to retain their copyright. For detailed information see the rules of the ETH E-Collection.” “The ETH Zurich encourages their researchers to publish in a suitable Open Access journal where one exists and will cover a part of the publication costs.” www.library.ethz.ch/open-access
- 35. OPEN ACCESS IN THE EU Open Access in FP 7 • FP7: Open-Access pilot • Grant agreements in seven areas contain special clause 39 36 «Open Access» • Articles originating from these projects must be deposited to an online repository latest 6 / 12 months after publication (sciences / social sciences & humanities) • Article Processing Charges are eligible (limited to duration of project) Open Access in Horizon 2020 • From OA pilot in FP7 to OA mandate in Horizon 2020 • Possibility for funding of Article Processing Charges after project ends • Pilot for Open Research Data
- 36. OPEN ACCESS @ SNSF Swiss National Science Foundation • requires its grant recipients to self-archive their 37 publications in peer-reviewed journals on an open-access repository • offers researchers the opportunity to claim publication fees for articles in open-access journals of up to CHF 3’000 as project costs
- 37. International Developments Great Britain 38 • Research Councils UK: direct funding to Universities for financing APCs from 2013 United States: • NIH to withhold grant money to enforce OA policy OPEN ACCESS MANDATES
- 38. 39 OPEN ACCESS MANDATES Quelle: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/news/2012-12-12-JULIET-Upgrade.html [17.12.2012]
- 39. COPYRIGHT – SELF-ARCHIVING • Self-Archiving 40 • What is allowed? • How do I retain my rights?
- 40. COPYRIGHT – SELF-ARCHIVING “ETH Zurich requires of staff and postgraduate students to post electronic copies of any research papers [¨…] into the institutional repository ETH E-Collection, if there are no legal objections.” • Publishers usually allow some sort of 41 self-archiving • Where to look it up? • Copyright Transfer Agreement • SHERPA/RoMEO Database
- 41. 42 Which format? • Usually Postprint (= author’s manuscript after peer review) When? • Possible embargos between 2 and 24 months Where? • Author’s website • Institutional repository • Disciplinary repository
- 42. What does this mean? • Read the publication agreement with great care • Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing • Publishing agreements are negotiable • Use the SPARC author addendum 43 COPYRIGHT- SELF-ARCHIVING “The ETH Zurich expects authors where possible, to retain their copyright.”
- 43. Creative Commons Licences 44 COPYRIGHT - LICENSING CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY NC: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence
- 44. A Vision for the future? 45 THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING Björn Brembs, Professor of Neurobiology, University of Regensburg Source: http://de.slideshare.net/brembs/some-technical-hurdles-towards-open-science Is a publishing system without journals feasible? • Peer Review? • Prestige? • Impact Factor?
- 45. CHALLENGES REMAIN… • Open Access publishing is developing steadily, but 46 slowly • The financial aspects of Gold Open Access are not solved • Can financial savings be achieved? • Who will finance additional costs during the “transition period” • Can the power of the big publishers be cut down? • Green Open Access probably not to become a standard if it does not come with strong enforcement mechanisms
- 46. 47 CONTACTS www.library.ethz.ch/open-access http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch e-publishing@library.ethz.ch
Editor's Notes
- My name is Barbara Hirschmann an I work for the E-Publishing Office at the ETH Library. One of our tasks there is to implement the Open Access Policy of ETH Zurich which means to provide enough information on this topic so that ETH researchers can make their own informed decision when it comes to publishing and providing open access. This is what I am trying to do in my presentation today: To give you some basic information about the open access movement, explain ETH Zurichs OA policy and explain what kind of support you can expect from the ETH library.
- The statements mentioned in this slide are some very common statements that we hear when we talk to scientists about open access. Some of them have been mentioned during our last large patron survey in 2012. These statements really reflect very well that there is a large amount of uncertainty around the topic of open access. But they also reflect that it is a hotly debated topic. For many questions regarding open access there is not one easy solution or answer – however what is true is that as a scientist you do have a lot of possibilities at your hand to make science more open and accessible for all. So, I hope that after this event you will be able to take part in the discussion about open access. Because at the library we are mainly a facilitator and a service provider – and we would really like to see more researchers engaged in the discussion.
- So what are we talking about when we talk about Open Access? Definitions of Open Access usually highlight three aspects: Open Access literature is freely accessible over the internet It is free of charge – which does not mean that it comes without any costs, but it comes without costs for the reader And Open Access literature can be reused, because it is – or it should be – free of most copyright restrictions. This last point is important because if you have access to a work for reading but you want to translate it to another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining it with special software and so forth, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. However, if the copyright holder has used an open content licence – like for example a creative commons licence – when publishing his work, you are free to copy, distribute or even adapt the work – the only condition being that you correctly attribute the work to its author. So, removing copyright restrictions is an import part of Open Access publishing and open licences play an important role in this process.
- To understand how different models of Open Access Publishing work, we will first have a quick look at the traditional publication model in scholarly publishing and then see how different kinds of Open Access Publishing models have emerged as alternatives to this model.
- Traditionally, the scientific publication cycle is determined by four main actors: authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries. The publication cycle that you see here has essentially been the same for hundreds of years. Even with the advent of the internet and electronic publishing the underlying mechanisms didn’t change. Now, as you all know, this whole process from submitting a manuscript to the final publication can be quite time-consuming. First, the Peer Review process – the evaluation of an article by scientists from the same field - has to be organised and implemented. Then, the articles are typeset for a specific journal. The journals are distributed as bundles via a Library Supplier who arranges the licencing contracts with individual libraries or library consortia. And in the end, the article that you published might not even be accessible for everybody. Apart from the time aspect, there is also a financial aspect to be considered in this model: the authors of scientific articles are usually employed by public institutions. Their research output is therefore funded by taxpayers money. On the other hand, the library is forced to buy back this research output from publishers so that other scientists might read what their colleagues have written. So there is considerable investment of taxpayers money involved in this model. On the other hand the profit that publishers can raise from this model have increased significantly over the last decades and this increase has led to the so-called serials crisis in scientific publishing.
- What is this serials crisis? The term bascically refers to the fact that the annual increase of journal prices in scientific publishing have been above average compared to the consumer price index for more than two decades. At the same time libraries all over the world, especially in the United States, have been confronted with shrinking library budgets.
- What does this mean in real money? Well, for exemple there is one journal published by Wiley which will cost us as much as a nice car for a one year subscription. Other journals come for the price of a pair of diamond earrings or a motor bike.
- Prices are not the same for all disciplines however. You have certainly noticed that all the examples were journals from STM disciplines. And indeed we can see that the STM disciplines are those that have the most expensive journals. Interestingly these are also the disciplines where the Open Access movement has had the most impact in the last years.
- Generally speaking scientific journal publishing is a very profitable business: The most important publishers like Elsevier or Springer operate with a profit margin that is comparable to those of Google and Microsoft. So if libraries invests a significant amount of money in journal subsriptions we have to be aware that basically one third of this money will be redirected to shareholders. The numbers are from 2007/2008, Elsevier has reached already a profit margin of 38%.
- For library budgets on the other hand the expenditures for journal subscriptions are taking a significant part of the acquisitions budget. At the ETH library for example we currently hold subscriptions to around 15’000 journals in electronic form and 5000 journals in printed format.
- As we can see in our usage statistics, electronic journals are the most accessed ressource that we offer. Access to licensed electronic journals is the red line in this chart and you can see how it developed between 2001 and 2012.
- So for our main customers – researchers from ETH – it is really important that we keep these journal subscriptions. At the moment we have to use 60 % of our acquisitions budget for journals, but this percentage could be even more in the years to come.
- So – it is probably a logical question to ask if Open Access can be the solution for library budget problems or a way out of the serials crisis. Another hope that has come up is that Open Access can be a solution for the complicated copyright situation in scientific publishing where authors usually have to sign away their copyright to a publisher.
- Generally speaking the idea of Open Access to research literature is backed up by a lot of good arguments. I just mentioned some of them here. Literature that is openly available is easier to find and reuse it can promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation it gives taxpayers access to publicly funded research results. But can Open Access really solve problems that are deeply rooted within the scholarly communication system? To get a little bit closer to an answer to this question, lets have a look at the different models of OA publishing.
- We usually distinguish between the Green Road and the Golden Road of OA publishing. When an author publishes an article via the Green Road, this means that he bypasses publishers and booksellers because he submits his paper directly to a library’s repository. In the last 10 – 15 years, many institutions and libraries have built such repositories. This kind of publishing is done in parallel to publishing via the traditional model – in some disciplines authors submit their papers to a repository BEFORE publishing it with a scientific journal in others they submit it afterwards. But still – publishing your paper in a repository usually accelerates the publishing, dissemination and reception process AND it can give you a much wider audience for your research since anybody who has an internet connection can access your paper.
- Just have a look at the access statistics for our Open Access repository. The dark green line in this chart shows you how access to our repository ETH E-Collection has developed over the last decade.
- There are two possibilities for a researcher to submit a paper to a repository: He can either choose an institutional repository or a disciplinary repository (which by the way are very often also run by libraries or consortia of libraries). In the case of ETH Zurich there is our Institutional Repository – the ETH E-Collection – where every scientist that is affiliated to ETH Zurich can publish his papers. And there are quite a few disciplinary repositories, for example Econstor for Economics or the Social Science Open Access Repository. There is also a registry of all institutional and disciplinary repositories on a website called OpenDOAR.
- You might even publish your paper in an Institutional AND a Disciplinary Repository: For example the working paper series of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute is published in E-Collection as well as in Econstor. When you publish your articles in a repository there are some important copyright issues that you have to keep in mind – I will come back to this later in the presentation.
- When we talk about the «green road» to Open Access Publishing – why don’t we take into consideration the many papers that scientists publish on their websites and that are also openly available to everybody? Of course, publishing your paper on your personal website is better than nothing. But there are some problems attached to it: One of them is citability and long term access. These publications do no usually have a persistent identifier and too often sites migrate to another place and links vanish. So if you cite such an article in your paper, there is no way you can assure your readers can have access to it to verify its content.
- On the other hand in a repository like the Social Science Open Access Repository every article that you upload is assigned a Persistent Identifier – which means that even if the site migrates to another server with new URLs – you and your readers will be able to locate the article. Disciplinary repositories might offer some additional services like version control, download statistics or forwarding of records to disciplinary databases. E.g if you upload your paper in Econstor it can be indexed in RePEc as well.
- Publishing in ETH E-Collection also gives you a handful of advantages compared to other sites. Every publication is assigned a DOI, we store all publications not only in E-Collection but also transfer them to a long term archive; publication is free of charge; you can get up-date download statistics for your papers AND there is the possibility of automatically transferring the metadata of your publication to ETH E-Citations – which means you don’t have to enter them again there. Maybe most importantly for the future: When publishing in ETH E-Collection you fully comply with the Open Access mandates of your home institution, namely ETH Zurich, and the mandates of two important research funders, namely the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the European Commission. I will come back to this point later in the presentation.
- First, I would like to detail some points about the so-called «Golden Road» of Open Access Publishing. When you publish on the «Golden Road», this means that the first place to publish your work is an Open Access Publisher. When we talk about Open Access Publishers we usually mean scientific publishers, that do have a Peer Review system in place. They can have different revenues and funding mechanisms. Some OA Journals are supported by universities, scholarly societies or other institutions and don’t charges any fees. But many, especially the ones owned be scientific publishers like Springer or Elsevier, do charge so called Article Processing Charges to authors to finance their enterprise. Usually, when you publish with an Open Access Journal, you retain the full copyright to your article, which means that you can without problem publish it again in another place – something that might be problematic when you publish with a conventional subscription publisher.
- There are some helpful websites and databases that you can you use, when you are not already familiar with the Open Access Publishers in your discipline. The most comprehensive database of Open Access Journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals. It currently lists more than 8500 journals. It can be difficult however to choose a journal from this huge database if you don’t know what you are looking for. So a better way to find a journal might still be to ask your colleagues about renowned journals in your field and have thorough look at where the papers that are most relevant to your work have been published. Of course, like with conventional journals, the impact factor might also be an important criteria. One thing that emerged only recently and that has to do with the Open Access business model – which is based on charging Article Processing Charges to scientists – is the emergence of predatory Open Access publishers. I cannot elaborate on this here but there is an excellent blog on this topic by an American librarian called Jeffrey Beall and he has a list of potentially predatory publishers – which basically exist only for making profit from Article Charges. So a good thing, before you publish in any Open Access Journal, would be to check your journal against Beall’s list. Or, you can also have a look at the website of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which has a high quality standard for publishers to become members.
- In economics and the social sciences OA journals are not very common compared to other disciplines until now, especially not among the high impact journals. But to give you an overview of how much it can cost and what funding options you have, here are some examples for Article Processing Charges: The journal Economics that is published by the Kiel Institute of World Economics doesn’t charge any publication fees. SpringerOpen charges 1140 Dollars for publishing in the Journal “Decision Analytics”. And Wiley charges 2500 Dollars for an article in “Brain and Behavior”. This money is usually taken from research funds. At ETH Zurich we do not have a central fund for paying Open Access fees. However, as part of a trial project the ETH-Bibliothek has signed membership agreements with the Open Access publishers Springer Open, BioMed Central and PLOS. So, currently, if you publish with either one of these publishers and the first author of the article is affiliated with ETH, you will not have to pay any charges. However, we also have to say that we don’t really see how this publishing and funding model could become a standard model for the future: Because every OA membership comes with additional expenses for the library - but at the same time we cannot cancel any of the existing journal subscriptions. Another topic are the so-called hybrid journals: Springer, and also other publishers like Elsevier or Wiley, also have an Open Access publishing option called «Open Choice» or «Sponsored Articles» or something similar. This option is offered for subscription based journals: You can pay an Open Access charge for your article – then only this one article will be freely available while the other articles in the journal are still behind the pay-wall. For the library this means, that we still have to pay the subscription to this journal. So in the end, OA publishing in hybrid journals will always lead to higher total costs for institutions and libraries. That is why ETH does not support these kind of OA articles.
- Another point why hybrid journals are to be seen critically is because they usually charge even higher article charges than fully Open Access journals. This chart shows the correlation between Article Processing Charges and the Journal’s Impact Factor. The red ones are hybrid journals, the green ones are Open Access Journals. We can see two things here: The most expensive journals are hybrid journals There is a correlation between Article Processing Charges and Impact Factor Some critics of the Golden Road of Open Access publishing have argued that if this model of OA publishing will be the norm, in the future there might be something like a luxury segment of Open Access Publishing, where only researchers from the best – say the richest – institutions can afford to publish in the most important journals.
- We don’t know if this will happen, but we do know that Open Access Journals that charge an article-processing charge are the ones that have grown most in the last years. In this chart green is the number of articles published in hybrid journals or journals with delayed open access, dark blue are articles in Open Access Journals without an article processing charge, and light blue are articles in Open Access Journals with article processing charge. If the trend shown in this chart continues, the question “Who pays for Article Processing Charges” will become even more urgent to answer in the coming years.
- In general, compared to the total number of articles published in scientific journals, the proportion of Open Access articles has increased – although not rapidly - over the last years. A 2012 study which used data from Scopus and the Web of Science, says that the proportion of articles published in full immediate Open Access journals has grown from around 6 percent in 2008 to around 8 percent in 2011. These are the red parts in the columns. The orange parts are articles in subscription journals that give Open Access to their content after a certain period of time.
- We also should keep clearly in mind that gold Open Access publishing is more common in some fields than it others. Even within STM disciplines there is a big difference in the number of articles published in gold Open Access Journals from field to field, with Biomedicine being at the forefront of all other disciplines. And in the humanities the situation differs even more: because until now there are only very few successful models for Open Access publishing of books. So, will Gold Open Access Publishing be the model of the future? There are some stakeholders who certainly think that it will. Of course to publishers the gold Open Access model seams much more appealing than the green model. Gold Open Access Publishing does not actually change the role of the publisher in the publication cycle. It only means switching from a subscription based pricing model to a business model based on article processing charges.
- Within the so-called golden model of Open Access publishing, some interesting trends have emerged in the last years. On of these is the appearance and success of the so-called megajournals. Megajournals differ from other journals in that they publish articles from large disciplines or a group of disciplines rather than only highly specialised content. They are not as selective – which means they still review submitted articles for scientific rigour but they don’t select on the basis of potential impact or the size of the audience. It is usually cheaper to publish in megajournals. The first publisher to launch such a journal in 2006 was the Open Access publisher PLOS with its megajournal PLOS One which publishes content from Biomedicine and the Life Sciences. As you can see in the chart the number of articles published in PLOS One has increased rapidly since 2010. It took not very long for other publishers to recognize this trend and create their own megajournals. Springer has created one, Nature has its Scientific Reports and Sage recently announced its new megajournal Sage Open. We can certainly assume that this trend will spread to disciplines outside of the sciences as well, an especially promising initiative actually emerged in the Humanities: it’s a project called “Open Library of Humanities” which tries to bring a PLOS-style model of non-profit-publishing to the Humanities.
- While the megajournals that have been set up until now are all run by one of the already established big publishers, recently we also see some new independent publishers emerging on the scene with interesting new business models. There is PeerJ, a publishing platform that started in 2012 and is now inviting article submissions. They have a peer-reviewed scientific journal (PeerJ) and a preprint server (PeerJ PrePrints). They don’t charge article processing charges, but offer a lifetime membership for 99/199 or 299 Dollars. With these memberships you are entitled to publish a certain number of articles per year – on the condition that you also review at least one paper per year. Then there is F1000 Research: This new publisher stands apart from others because it offers immediate publication of your article followed by an open post-publication peer review process. The don’t only publish full articles but also null or negative findings, case reports or data sets. Interestingly these and a number of other new publishing endeavors all emerged from Biomedicine and Life Sciences.
- But there are also some interesting initiatives in Economics. The Kiel Institute of World Economics publishes an innovative journal called «Economics». Like F1000research the journals implements an open post-publication peer review process. The submitted paper will be checked against basic editorial and scientific standards. If it is accepted it will be published online as a discussion paper within less than 3 weeks. During the next 8 weeks the paper will be refereed by two invited referees plus there is an open discussion platform where registered readers can upload their comments to the paper. Readers and authors can also comment on the referees’ reports. After these 8 weeks one of the editors decides wheter the paper is accepted or rejected for publication in the journal «Economics». In any case, the discussion paper will remain accessible with all published comments. This journal has been included in the Social Sciences Citation Index since 2012.
- So what happens in the humanities and those branches of the social sciences where book publishing is the main way to communicate research results? Well we see that the uptake of open access publishing in these disciplines has been much slower, especially in the arts and humanities, and if we talk about contemporary research literature. However, there are quite a few cooperation projects between publishers and libraries that aim at making books and journal articles from the 20th century available. For example at the ETH library we host a platform called retro.seals where we make journals from Switzerland openly accessible – usually in cooperation with the publisher and usually with a so-called moving-wall: This means that the most current volumes are often not available but will be in the future. Then there have been some initiatives from publishers to experiment with business models for Open Access books. Because until now there are no clearly established business models for open access monograph publishing. Some of these pilot projects ask authors to pay a fee as do OA journals, some operate with a fee that has to be paid once by a library to make a book Open Access. Many University Publishers – including the ETH Zurich VDF Hochschulverlag - have a hybrid publishing model where they publish books in Open Access but also sell printed copies. The few studies that have been undertaken in this area actually show that this kind of hybrid publishing does not have a negative effect on sales, but acutally has a very positive effect on discoverability and online usage. Some research funding institutions have started to activly promote OA monograph publishing by providing funds for OA books.
- I will now move to the next topic: Open Access Policies and Open Access Mandates In the last couple of years, more and more universities, research institutions and research funders have decided to demand that research output financed by these institutions, shall be made openly accessible. What I will show you here, is a quick summary of the events that led to the adoption of an Open Access Policy at ETH Zurich. The first prominent initiative that emerged from the so-called Open Access movement was the Budapest Open Access Initiative. This is a declaration on Open Access that was drafted and adopted at an event organised by the Open Society Institute in 2002. In 2003 another declaration was issued at a meeting in Berlin. This so-called Berlin declaration on Open Access is often cited as the most important milestone of the Open Access movement. It has been signed until now by over 400 research institutions. ETH Zurich signed it in 2006 and two years later, in 2008, it adopted its own Open Access policy.
- In this policy it is explicitly stated that ETH requires all their staff to publish copies of their peer-reviewed articles, theses and other research output in E-Collection, the only constraint being that “there are no legal objections”. Also, you are required to retain your copyright where possible. In the second paragraph of the policy, ETH researchers are encouraged to publish in Open Access Journals. There is a small but important difference here that you need to notice for understanding the ETH open access strategy: You are REQUIRED to deposit your papers in ETH E-Collection. You are ENCOURAGED to publish in OA journals. In other words: ETH strongly supports the Green Road to OA publishing and the E-Collection has been chosen as the implementation instrument for its Open Access strategy.
- As I mentioned before, not only universities, but also research funders, have issued recommendations on Open Access. One of these funders is the European Commission. The European Union does not show a direct preference for either the Golden or the Green Road of Open Access Publishing, but generally supports the idea of Open Access because free access to research results is seen as a driver for innovation and economic development. The framework program under which current EU-funded research projects are sponsored is the so called FP7, the seventh Framework Program. Under this program the Commission launched in 2008 an «Open Access Pilot», which means that they determined seven areas or disciplines where Open Access Publishing had already reached a certain point of acceptance and included a special clause in the grant agreements for projects in these areas. This special clause states that articles or other publications originating from theses projects must either be published in a peer-reviewed Open Access Journal or be deposited to an online repository not later than 6 months after publication (or 12 months if it is in the social sciences and humanities). When you publish in an OA journal, Article Processing Charges are eligible for funding. Now there is a new Framework Program for research and innovation under way –it is called Horizon 2020 and will be in place from 2014 to 2020. In Horizon 2020 the European Commission will move from its pilot project to a real Open Access mandate for all EU-funded projects. The actual terms for this are not yet published, but the new mandate will certainly be more comprehensive and targeted. For example, Article Processing Charges for publishing in Open Access Journals will be eligible for funding even after the project has ended. Also, while in FP7 researchers were required to make their «best effort» to publish Open Access, in Horizon 2020 there will be an OBLIGATION to provide Open Access. This obligation will be valid for all peer-reviewed publications in all areas of research, and the accepted embargo for publication will remain at 6 or 12 months. Additionally the Commission will launch a pilot for Open Access to research data – so, depending on the research field, projects might also be obligated to publish datasets in openly accessible repositories. The new EU mandate in Horizon 2020 is at the moment probably the most interesting development to watch concerning Open Access mandates in Europe.
- In Switzerland the Swiss National Science Foundation has been promoting the Green Road to Open Access since 2007. Like ETH Zurich they require their grant recipients to self-archive peer-reviewed publications on an OA repository. Then since last month – from the beginning of october – they expanded their open access policy. They now will also allow you to claim publication fees for Open Access journals as project costs.
- If we look at other countries we can see that policies on Open Access are quite diverse. In the UK, an intensive discussion on Gold and Green Open Access Publishing was generated last year. This was because Research Councils UK, the Umbrella organisation for many research funding organisations, released its Open Access policy which states a clear preference for Gold Open Access Publishing over the Green Road. They also announced that they would give direct funding to universities to cover Article Processing Charges, so that authors could comply with their policy. This announcement has led to a lot of critique, especially from libraries and universities who think that this policy is the result of lobbying by publishers. In the United States, some research funders have made a strong effort to enforce compliance with their OA mandates. The NIH – the National Institutes of Health – have already had a quite strong Open Access mandate in place since 2008 demanding of researchers to deposit all their published articles in PubMed Central. But still, the compliance rate with their mandate stagnated at around 75 percent. So, in November 2012 NIH announced that they will start enforcing compliance with its Open Access mandate by withholding grant money.
- This step has not been made by other institutions. In fact, compliance with Open Access mandates in many institutions and research projects is quite low. But this is maybe going to change: When other research funders follow the example of NIH and put in place strong enforcement mechanisms, compliance rates and therefore Open Access to research results will obviously increase. What is already quite obvious from the chart you can see here, is that more and more institutions and funders are issueing mandates or policies on Open Access every year. I believe that the policy decisions that research funders are going to take will be very important for the future development of Open Access publishing.
- In the next part of the presentation we will touch on some copyright issues that are associated with Open Access publishing. Two questions that often arise in this context are: Am I allowed to self-archive my paper after publishing it in a journal? What can I do to retain my right to self-archiving when signing a publishing contract?
- The answer to the first question: «Am I allowed to self-archive my paper?» is usually yes. In fact, if you are employed by ETH you are even required to do so. Of course, there are some exceptions: The ETH Open Access Policy states, that you are exempted from the requirement of self-archiving when there are «legal objections». A «legal objection» is for example the fact, that you don’t own the copyright of your article any more because you gave it to a journal publisher. But, and this is the important part, even in the case that you signed away your copyright to a publisher, you usually still have the possibility to self-archive your paper in a repository because most scientific publishers explicitly allow some sort of self-archiving. The best source, where you can look up which sort of self-archiving is allowed by your publisher, is the copyright transfer agreement, sometimes also called “licence to publish”. This document clearly states which sort of self-archiving is allowed by your publisher. There is also a very helpful database of publishers’ policies on self-archiving, called the “Sherpa/Romeo”- Database where you can search for publishers or certain journals and find out about their self-archiving guidelines.
- This is an example of an entry in the Sherpa/Romeo Database for a Journal from Oxford University Press. The entry gives you information on which format of your article you are allowed to self-archive. The most common thing is that publishers allow you to publish a post-print of your article. A post-print is the final manuscript version of your article after peer-review, but before it is typeset by the publisher. Some journals, like the Quarterly Journal of Economics in this example, also allow publishing a pre-print, which would be the manuscript version before peer-review. Most publishers however do not allow self-archiving the publisher’s version of the article. The entry also contains information on possible embargos. Some publishers allow self-archiving only after a certain period of time after the original publication in their journal. Embargoes can be somewhere between 2 and 24 months. The database also gives you information on where you are allowed to self-archive your paper. This can be either on your website, or in a repository. The conclusion that you should draw from all this is: Never delete the manuscript version of your article. If you only keep the publisher’s PDF, you will most certainly not be able to publish it Open Access.
- Now we come to the second question: How do I retain my copyright? This is also a requirement that follows from the ETH Open Access policy. But what does it mean? First of all it means, that you should read your publication agreement with great care. If you don’t fully understand what it means as for your copyright, feel free to mail us a copy and we will be happy to have a look at it. Then remember that transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing: In the copyright transfer agreement you usually transfer either the exclusive rights to publication or a non-exclusive right to publication to the publisher. This little difference is most important. To retain your copyright means granting the publisher only a non-exclusive licence to publication. Of course the publishers also know this little difference and therefore usually you are asked to sign away all your rights. This means you will not be able to publish your text again somewhere else, except for self-archiving, as specified by the publisher. You should however remember that every agreement is negotiable. One possibility of negotiating your agreement is attaching an author addendum to it which states that you retain copyright even if stated otherwise in the publishing agreement. You can download such an addendum from the website of the American Association of Research Libraries. Of course it depends on you if you want to make the effort of maybe entering into lengthy negotiations about copyright issues with the publisher. Unluckily I cannot tell you any stories about authors that successfully and systematically negotiated their publishing agreements. It might be difficult because as an author who wants to publish in a certain journal you are not in the best negotiating position. But this is also about raising awareness. So if you really want to publish in a journal with very restrictive copyright principles, you could for example write an e-mail to a member of the editorial board. Very often they are not even aware of the restrictive copyright policy the publisher is employing. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, many publishers do allow you to deposit your manuscript in an Open Access repository. This option is still not used as much as it could by scientists. So maybe even more important than entering into negotiations with restrictive publishers would be to use all the possibilities that you have for depositing manuscripts in repositories.
- Another copyright issue that usually comes up in the context of Open Access are the so-called Open Content Licences. I already mentioned in the beginning of the presentation that Open Access literature should not only be freely available but also re-usable. If you find a freely available paper on the internet however and there is no specific licence attached to it, you must assume that the copyright lies with the author or the publisher and you are not free to distribute it to colleagues, re-publish it in another place etc. This is why it is best practice with OA publishers, that they let you choose from a set of so-called Open Content Licences for your work, most commonly they use Creative Commons licences. Using such a licence with your work gives you a simple, standardised method to tell readers what they can do with your work. The most common licence among OA publishers is the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY). It allows for unrestricted reuse of content, with the only requirement that the work is appropriately attributed to its original author. Articles published under this licence can be redistributed, republished, translated etc. without asking the author. However some authors do not feel comfortable allowing commercial reuse of their work. This is why some Open Access publishers let you choose between a CC BY and a CC BY NC licence, NC meaning Non-Commercial. If you choose a CC-BY-NC licence, this means that you do not allow commercial re-use of your article. However, you should be aware that this licence does not comply with the definition of Open Access as laid down in the Berlin Declaration, because it does put reuse restrictions on your content. The thing is that when you use a non-commerical licence, this might have some unintended consequences For exampel you prevent reuse of your work in non-commercial services (e.g. Wikipedia) because they require a more liberal licence. Also your work might not be usable for innovative scientific technologies like text- or data mining if the software used for this is a commerical product
- I have almost come to the end of my talk now. But I would like to make some final remarks on the challenges we see for any future publishing system based on Open Access. As one German Neurobiology Professor has recently pointed out, a scientific publishing system run by the scientific community itself, without any corporate publishers, is already technically feasible today. Technically, we can imagine that every research paper from a certain discipline is published in a specific disciplinary repository or that institutional repositories publish their institution’s entire research output. But then, scientific publishing is not only a technical process. It also entails other factors like the peer review process or the prestige gained from publishing in a specific journal. Also, will there be an evaluation and impact measuring system that can replace the impact factor in the foreseeable future? The roles that journals play in the scientific communication process can not easily be replaced even if at first sight they seem to be an unnecessary remainder from the age of print.
- As we have seen there are a lot of promising initiatives in scientific publishing even in those disciplines that have not been at the forefront of the Open Access movement. However, we also see that a lot of challenges remain for the future: First, we have been talking about Open Access for more than ten years now. We can see that OA publishing is gaining ground, but the pace of change it quite slow. Secondly, we have to state that the financial aspects of OA publishing are not solved at all. Gold Open Access journals do not automatically come with lower total costs than subscription journals. In fact, especially in a transition period from subscription to OA publishing, they are an additional financial burden for university libraries, since we cannot cancel any subscriptions in exchange. And even if we assume that all subscription journals will be converted to gold Open Access in the future, a simple calculation for ETH Zurich shows that the costs for Article Processing Charges could easily add up to 10 million Euro a year. The Green Road to Open Access on the other hand could be a much more cost-effective way of making scholarly research output openly accessible. However, from the experience of the last years, we can see that it is very difficult to motivate researches to make their manuscripts openly accessible if they are not forced to by their funders – the complicated copyright restrictions being only one reason for this. So, in the end, it is in your hands, the hands of the scientists, to use more actively the possibilities for Open Access publishing that are already at your disposal. As for the different models of Open Access publishing that I have talked about today, it seems very likely that there is not one model that will win over the others in the coming years. Instead, it seems much more likely that we will have a complex situation with diverse publishing models that will continue to coexist well into the future.