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Richard [email protected]
Introduction & disclosure
• Publisher at John Wiley & Sons, Oxford
• Run a list of medical journals
• Conflicts of interest– employee and stock holder at Wiley
– Wiley publishes ~2,000 journals under various business models
Overview
• About you?
• Some context…– The functions of research journals
– The role of journal publishers
– The economics of journal publishing
• The open access paradigm– Drivers of change
– Open access models
– Arguments for and against
– Funders’ mandates and policies
• What does this mean for me?
About you?
Since January 2011, how many journal articles have you authored/co-authored and had published?
a) None
b) 1
c) 2
d) 3–5
e) >5
About you?
How often do you access the journal literature?
a) Daily
b) Weekly
c) Monthly
d) Annually
e) Never
About you?
Getting access to the literature that I need is:
a) Challenging
b) Frustrating from time-to-time
c) Straightforward
Why do journals still exist?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665
The functions of research journals
1. Dissemination mechanism for sharing new information
2. Registration mechanism for registering credit for discoveries
3. Filtration filter good research from bad
4. Validation validate research through quality control
5. Designation publication bestows professional credit
“Just as a washing machine has a quality kite-mark, peer review is a kind of quality mark for science. It tells you that the research has been conducted and presented to a standard that other scientists accept. At the same time, it is not saying that the research is perfect (nor that a washing machine will never break down).”Sense About Science
“Authorship is the foundation of our system for judging academic value and assigning reward. Citation provides the intellectual credit that fuels promotion and career success; it gives an independent estimate of a researcher’s contribution to science.” Richard Horton, The Lancet
Growth in article output
Annual growth article output (1996–2008)
The role of journal publishers
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The journal operation
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The traditional economic model
• No charges levied on authors
• Content behind a paywall
• ‘Reader-pays’
• Customer segments– institutional libraries: subscriptions, site licenses
– individuals: subscriptions, pay-per-view
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Drivers of change
Economy?
growing mismatch between rates of
investment in research compared
with information budgets
Internet?
infrastructure for instantaneous, broad
and low-cost distribution of content
Open access?
denying access to information at a
time when technology has
made the notion of almost unlimited
access a real possibility
What is open access?
• Unrestricted online access to journal content
• Open access content is freely available online:– without payment or access barriers such as registration
– immediately on publication
– in perpetuity
– without restrictions on its (reasonable) reuse
• An attribute of individual articles not necessarily journals
Why should I care about open access?
• You believe it will benefit you through greater visibility and use of your work leading to more citations and increased reputation
• You believe it will benefit others and/or society at large
• You are required by your research funder or employer to engage with open access
Two varieties of open access
• Open access publications
• Hybrid/partial open access publications
• Self-archiving
GOLD GREEN
Fully open access journals
• Do not rely on subscriptions or other kinds of payments by readers/libraries to cover operational costs and can thus make their content freely available
• ‘Author-pays’– revenue source is to levy a per-article publication charge (APC)
• APCs typically range from $1000 to $3000
• DOAJ lists 8300 journals
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GOLD
Hybrid and partially open access journals
• Hybrid open access– Subscription journals that allow authors to make individual articles
OA in return for an APC
• Partial open access– Journals in which research articles are open access whilst access to
other types of content (e.g., review articles or journalistic content) requires a subscription
• Delayed open access– Subscription journals that make their content open access after a set
period (usually 12 months)
GOLD
Self-archiving
• Publish in traditional journal and deposit a version of article in an open repository
• Subject-based repositories– arXiv
– PubMed Central
• Institutional repositories– Warwick Research Archive Portal
• Usually embargo periods
• What version?– Post-print
– Pre-print
– SHERPA RoMEO website—http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
GREEN
Arguments in favour of open access
• Greater accessibility > greater visibility > increased impact of research– Correlation between open access and number of times an article is
downloaded and cited
• Accelerate progress of research > industrial innovation > national competitiveness
• The public should have right to access outputs of research funded by taxpayer
• Open access allows machine-read data and text mining
Arguments against open access
• Sustainability of business model?
• Irresponsible to promote a move from a working system to an unproven model
• Self-archiving– parasitic on existing subscription journals
– when archiving reaches a critical point, libraries abandon paid subscriptions in favour of free versions
– version control issues
• Open access publication– APCs discriminate against those without research funding or at
poorer institutions
– financial incentive to accept poor quality work—the more articles published the more revenue collected
Open access policies & mandates
• Adopted by HEIs, research funding agencies or governments
• Requires faculty or grant recipients to adopt some form of open access– NIH Public Access Policy (2008)
– The Wellcome Trust
RCUK policy
• Research Councils UK – April 2013
– All grantees must publish open access
– Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)
• Block grants to eligible UK HEIs to support payment of the APCs
• Some details yet to be hammered out
HEFCE
• Distributes public money to HEIs
• Assesses quality of research in UK universities– uses publication output/prestige as a quantitative measure
• Results inform allocation of funds
• Open access policy forthcoming
• Suggestion that future REF exercise will only assess open access articles
How do I obtain APC funds?
• Most funders who mandate gold open access publication will support APCs
• Academics claim grants directly from funding body
• Funders provide block grants to HEIs > academics claim grants from employer
Some unintended consequences
• Redirects funders’ budgets from research grants to publishing costs
• Increased costs for UK HEIs vs European/US competitors
• Increased costs for most research intensive HEIs (Russell Group)
• Block grant model may cause institutions to ration absolute publication numbers causing competition amongst colleagues for access to publishing funds
• Impact on learned associations/societies
Questions
