Unearthing Gold: Hard Labour for Publishers and Institutions?

Paul Harwood, UKSG Briefing Session, April 2014

Context:

The Finch Report: ‘Expanding Access to Published Research Findings’

The introduction of the RCUK Policy in the UK in April 2013

Activity:

Survey of RLUK members in January 2014

Face-to-face Interviews with 7 publishers in March 2014

Telephone interviews with representatives from 4 European countries

Output:

A ‘quick and dirty’ insight into what has been happening since last April and how it is being perceived

“This is a journey not an event..............”(Various RCUK representatives, January-April 2013)

Research Councils UK

The Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of AberdeenUniversity of Birmingham Library ServicesUniversity of Bristol LibraryBritish LibraryCambridge University LibraryCardiff University Information ServicesDurham University LibraryThe University of Edinburgh Information ServicesUniversity of ExeterUniversity of Glasgow LibraryImperial College London LibraryKing’s College London Library ServicesUniversity of Leeds LibraryUniversity of Liverpool LibraryUniversity of London Senate House LibrariesLSE LibraryUniversity of Manchester LibraryNational Library of ScotlandLlyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of WalesNewcastle University LibraryThe University of Nottingham Information ServicesUniversity of Oxford LibrariesQueen Mary, University of LondonQueen’s University Belfast Information ServicesSOAS, University of LondonThe University of Sheffield LibraryUniversity of Southampton LibraryUniversity of St Andrews LibraryTrinity College Library DublinUniversity College London Library ServicesVictoria and Albert Museum National Art LibraryUniversity of Warwick LibraryWellcome LibraryThe University of York Library & Archives

34 members

(and growing)

The Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of AberdeenUniversity of Birmingham Library ServicesUniversity of Bristol LibraryCambridge University LibraryCardiff University Information ServicesDurham University LibraryThe University of Edinburgh Information ServicesUniversity of ExeterUniversity of Glasgow LibraryImperial College London LibraryKing’s College London Library ServicesUniversity of Leeds LibraryUniversity of Liverpool LibraryUniversity of London Senate House LibrariesLSE LibraryUniversity of Manchester LibraryNewcastle University LibraryThe University of Nottingham Information ServicesUniversity of Oxford LibrariesQueen Mary, University of LondonQueen’s University Belfast Information ServicesSOAS, University of LondonThe University of Sheffield LibraryUniversity of Southampton LibraryUniversity of St Andrews LibraryUniversity College London Library ServicesUniversity of Warwick LibraryThe University of York Library & Archives

28 members are in receipt

of RCUK funding

University of Birmingham Library ServicesUniversity of Bristol LibraryCardiff University Information ServicesThe University of Edinburgh Information ServicesUniversity of ExeterUniversity of Glasgow LibraryImperial College London LibraryKing’s College London Library ServicesUniversity of Leeds LibraryUniversity of Liverpool LibraryLSE LibraryUniversity of Manchester LibraryThe University of Nottingham Information ServicesUniversity of Oxford LibrariesQueen’s University Belfast Information ServicesThe University of Sheffield LibraryUniversity of Southampton LibraryUniversity College London Library ServicesUniversity of Warwick LibraryThe University of York Library & Archives

20 responses (71% of eligible

institutions)

6

12

1. Does your institution have a mandate for author’s depositing their research outputs in the institutional

repository?

YesNo

“No, but there is a proposed policy which we hope to introduce soon”

“Not a mandate but “Recommended” and “Encouraged” from 2006”

“Yes, 2012”

“2006, revised in 2008”

“2013”

“2009”

“2013”

“We have a policy and there is debate across the sector to whether things are mandates if they are policies. We say it is a policy and not strictly a mandate”.

“We have an Open Access policy, but it is not strictly a mandate”.

4

16

2. Did your institution have an institutional fund for paying Gold OA APC’s prior to the new RCUK

regime in April 2013?

YesNo

14

6

3. Does your institution have an institutional fund for paying Gold OA APC’s now?

YesNo

19

1

4. Was your institution in receipt of funding from BIS to help manage the transition to Gold OA under

the new RCUK regime?

YesNo

9

5

1

5. If yes, please indicate how it was used

Prepayments to pub-lishers

Staff resource

Infrastructure

Prepayments to publishers, some retrospective articles madeGold, some staff resources for awareness raisingPrepayments and staff resourcePrepayments, APCs, staff resource, awareness raising events and advocacyStaff, infrastructure, APC costsPrepayments, APCsSome retrospective APCs to pilot workflowsMostly on prepayments with a small amount on staffCovered payment of APCs, staff resources and infrastructurePre-payments to publishersInfrastructureStaff resourceStaff resourcePrepayments to publishers and Retrospective ‘golding’ of REF papersThe majority on individual APC's, some prepayments, small increase in some staff hours see http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/86332/Staff resource and APCsPrepayments to publishersPrepayments/Gold APC payments

Library ServicesResearch and Graduate ServicesResearch Office and the LibraryLibrary ServicesLibraryLibrary and Research and Innovation Office jointlyResearch ServicesLibrary Services (new Open Access funding team)LibraryScholarly Communications Team, Library & University Collections.Library but shared with othersLibraryLibrary/Research MgtLibrary/Research Policy DivisionLibraryLibrary services

Can you confirm how many APC’s have been published under the RCUK mandate YTD?

6; 19, 23; 44; 70; 73; 74; 75; 76; 89; 97; 100; 110; 143; 167;260; 566

An average of 117............

17 responses saying:

Based on the above, how many do you anticipate will be published in the first year of operation? Based on the above, how many do you anticipate will be published in the first year of operation?

30; 30; 31; 70; 90; 90; 100; 100; 100; 100; 130; 130-150; 150; 166; 167; 170; 200; 400; 590

with an average of 150

19 responses saying:

2,216 articles £3.9m spent on APCs (incl VAT)Ave APC price: £1,800

15 institutions responded offering either a % amount or an actual figure:

Approximately how much of your allocated funding for expenditure on APCs has the institution spent on Gold APCs (YTD)?

10%25%30%33%33%50%50%53%70%90%

£30k; £86k; £213k; £220k; £456k

Can you state which is the most expensive and cheapest APC you have paid under the RCUK regime YTD?

£3,120; £3,800; £2067; £3,950; £3,780; £3,780; $4,000; £3,780; £3947 including VAT, plus £1028 for page charges £5942; $5,000; £3,287; $6,000; £3,200; £3,780; £2557; £3750; £3,000; £4,400; £2,145

Euro 840, £660, £845, £200; £405; £324; £99; £788; £240; £248; £200; £97.64; £300; £900; £550; €384; £780

19 responses saying:

17 responses saying:

131

6

9. How is your Institution managing APC transac-tions?

Own system

OAK

Jisc APC

16

3

11. Is your institution monitoring whether or not articles funded have indeed been made available as

Open Access articles?

YesNo

How are you doing this?

“At a point after we have paid for publication (usually about 2 weeks) we manually check the article availability andLicensing”

“Not centrally but we would expect authors to do this”.

“When reconciling accounts, a member of the repository team checks the status and licence”

“Post-publication checking, linked with depositing published PDFs in our institutional repository”.

“The only certain way is manually for now”

How are you doing this?

.

“By checking publisher web sites, this has been a big problem - publishers failing to make papers open access, then making them open access and trying to charge us again...”

“Our repository staff look for the gold articles to add to our repository. There may be a lag so we do have to chase up some publishers. We'd like to be more proactive at this or be more confident that publishers would actually make articles OA as sometimes we need to chase up publishers.”

“This is the most difficult aspect of supporting RCUK the policy. We have contacted all authors in receipt of RCUK funding to inform them about Library support for complying, the existence of the institutional publication fund. We have also run various database searches to identify RCUK funded papers. Without a central CRIS system, however, it is difficult to identify all RCUK funded papers without the author informing us directly.”

“We are now beginning to check all journal articles for funder acknowledgements added to our institutional repository but this is a time-consuming process”.

11

7

14. Are you maintaining a record of which licence published articles are available under?

YesNo

Can you provide a breakdown?

“No, but we check for CC-BY availability before paying the APC”“All CC-BY, we don't accept any others as these are noncompliant”“18 = CC-BY; 1 = CC-BY-NC-ND”“CC-BY = 84 CC-BY-NC = 5 CC-BY-NC-ND =6 CC-BY-NC-SA = 3 Not CC = 10 Not yet published = 35”“Only in the sense that we request a copy of the CC BY licence to be sent to us when applying for RCUK funds - I don't currently have figures.”“We are checking this - they should all be CC-BY but there is lack of clarity about several and we query these with publishers”“We plan to do this retrospectively”“We are only allowing CCBY licences as per the RCUK guidelines.”“We try to include this information in the metadata of articles in our repository, it's not always easy to track down”“To a certain extent yes. We are currently working on the report and I was quite surprised that most of the RCUK articles I extracted did actually have a licence type on our system”“Of those that are now published OA, I know around 80-85% have the CC-BY licence, and the others I am currently chasing and have been for some time with the publishers”“We have assumed that to use RCUK money they must have a CC-BY licence. If don't offer this, don't pay the APC charge”

17

3

17. Have you made pre-payments to publishers in respect of APC’s funded under the RCUK regime?

YesNo

How many publishers? An average of 5, with a highest of 16

2

17

18. How well do you think publishers have communic-ated with your authors regarding the new RCUK regime?

Very well

Quite well

Not very well

4

15

19. How well do you think RCUK has communicated with your authors regarding their new regime?

Very well

Quite well

Not very well

1

11

7

7. How would you characterise your Institution’s re-sponse to the Finch Report and the subsequent RCUK

funding regime?

Wholly supportive

Supportive but with reservations about the costs

Supportive but with reservations about the strategic direction

4

13

8. How would you characterise your Institution’s direc-tion to its authors in terms of following RCUK policy?

Along the lines of the RCUK policy (with a preference for Gold OA)

Expressing institutional preference for achieving RCUK objectives via the Green route

Publishers: How has it been for you?..........

A journey or an event?

Some emerging themes from Face-to-face interviews with 7 publishers in February and March 2014

For one, the RCUK policy represented “a seismic shift” in their thinking and approach to OA.

For others, it had “a big impact” and saw OA become “mainstream”

For one, it led to “an acceleration of activity rather than a sea change”

For another, it instigated their institutional membership programme

“ A game changer”....

In practice, it has meant.......

Creation of new roles

Staff training: ‘authors as customers’

Using “existing systems and spreadsheets”...........although one ‘home grown’ system built in 2011

Creation of a new author licencing service..............

“Muddling through and workarounds”........

A recognition that “The training activity is big!”

Reporting/Standards

Working with FundRef and RInggold

“Can track Funder information but..................”

“Don’t track RCUK specifically.....”

“We’ve implemented FundRef and do ask for grant Ids...we support the development of industry standards”

“We did attempt to encourage authors to say who was funding them but we got some push back”

“Not our strongest point and plan to incorporate FundRef into our submission system”

Reporting/Standards: Latest report from Research Information Network

1. There should be an annual exercise to assess the numbers – and the proportions of the overall totals – of all articles and of those with a UK author that are accessible free of charge from: a. fully OA journals b. hybrid journals

c. journals that provide free access on their platforms after an embargo period

d. repositories and other websites

Reporting/Standards

2. The counts of articles should distinguish between pre-prints, authors’ accepted manuscripts, and published versions of record 3. The counts should include all articles found to be accessible free of charge, whether they have been posted illicitly or not; but an estimate – based on checking a sub-sample of them – should be produced of the numbers of illicitly-posted articles 4. The counts should be based on automated searches for samples of the articles recorded in either the SCOPUS or CrossRef databases, plus a full census of those published in fully-OA journals 5. Searches should be made for at least four global and UK-authored samples of articles: those published 1,7, 13 and 25 months earlier. 6. For pragmatic reasons, the date of publication should be taken as the date of the relevant issue of the journal; but we recommend that all publishers should include the date of publication in the metadata for all articles. 7. The results of the counts should be broken down in accordance with the four subject panels established for the REF; but there should be no other breakdown

(Monitoring Progress In The Transition to Open Access, March 2014)

Double dipping/Offsetting

“We review OA content with a two year time lag”

“We will be talking with Jisc about local offsets but high administrative overhead and the principle doesn’t make sense”

“We try to keep OA separate from subs in our discussions”

“We have a public policy, but not included in sales deals negotiations as yet. Institutional offsets will be impossible for admin”

Intermediaries

“Not yet clear”

“Get regular calls but up to customer to use”

“CCC very active.......”

“We’re not actively sampling services”

“Popping-up left, right and centre”Some concerns about SHERPA/FACT

“Inevitable, but so far they seem to be bits and pieces rather than a full end-to-end system”

Watching and waiting?- What 4 other European countries had to say.....

Telephone interviews with stakeholders from The Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Germany in March 2014

Denmark

• Consortium body and librarians following the UK development; little awareness amongst academics

• Progress towards OA in ‘fits and starts’ since 2000• Current Minister is pro OA and work will start this Spring on

a National initiative• Believe that most publishers don’t want to pursue OA• Will need policy from government and pressure from EU to

push the situation in Denmark forward • Green preferred over Gold, but if Green seen not to work, a

case will have to be made for more funding

Austria

• Librarians and Funders very aware of UK development; not so academics

• Austrian policy revised (Feb 2014) following RCUK policy announcement and very similar

• Commitment from funding bodies but no quick transition• Concerns about administration and management• Smaller publishers more willing to embrace, larger ones

less inclined ....”scared”.....• Still not enough communication with academics• Will publish results of their offset pilot with IoP

The Netherlands

• Secretary of State for Education letter of October 2013: all articles OA by 2024 and 60% by 2018 BUT no extra money being made available

• Funders very in tune with RCUK policy; not so academics• Perception that publishers ‘took over’ the Finch work• A view that Green is not working; a talking shop for years

but no success in engaging academics• Librarians and funders should be stronger and negotiate

more firmly• A belief that the larger publishers are actively delaying

progress• Mandates are essential for progress• Research evaluation needs to change

Having made these considerations. My estimate is that in 2014 some 40,000 articles and reviews will be published by Dutch researchers. Applying the average APC of € 1087,- I arrive at an estimated € 43,500,000,- for the Netherlands if all Dutch research would be published in Gold Open Access journals. That figure should be compared to the current spending on journal subscriptions in the Netherlands by Dutch Universities, which is about € 34 million per year Euro at the moment. Going for gold will cost therefore € 10.5 million. That is a lot of money.

Germany• Drive for change coming from research community BUT not currently supported by

government; hope that pressure from EU and The Netherlands will change things

• RCUK policy recognised as welcome development but flawed:- should not accept hybrid option AND should not be putting more money

into the system

• Delay tactics from big publishers who will certainly make less money in a fully OA world

• Librarians are too conservative and cut OA budgets when under pressure instead of subs budget

• A big bang moment is required as further incremental growth is painful and funding funds for two models is not sustainable

Can a body like this one be the game changer?

...Or, will it take one of these by a publisher somewhere?

....and no matter what happens, and when.......

There are going to be lots more reports like this one.....

Thank you for your attention

All pictures from Old Pictures (www.old-picture.com)

...and thanks to:

David ProsserAnn LawsonLibrarians who completed the surveyPublishers for their timeOur European colleagues for their insights