Open Access

(from one librarian’s

perspective)

@OpenResLDN – 19 January 2015

Chris Banks

@chrisbanks

Director of Library Services

Imperial College London

A note about this presentation

This is generalised and personalised view formed through experience

working at two UK HEIs, through involvement in national and international

discussions, and from my readings of a tiny fraction of the OA literature

out there

The presentation attempts to look at things in the round: from the policy

perspective, that of academics in different disciplines, from the institutional

perspective (everything from operational to academic reward systems),

from the perspectives of publishers and learned societies. It also looks

briefly at standards and systems developments

Today’s focus is on the publication research findings. We can cover

research data another time!

The traditional funding / finding / publishing / using cycle

• Funder/institution funds research

• Researcher writes up findings of research

• Researcher chooses best journal to publish

• (other) researchers undertake (free) peer review of article

• Journal editor says “yes, we’ll publish”

• Researcher says “yippee”

• Publisher says “sign this before we publish”

• Researcher says “Oh, all right then” and all too frequently signs away ©

• Publisher publishes research

• Publisher sells research to institutions, funders, and to other academics

• Researcher cannot (legally)

• Make research available on their website or through their repository

• Distribute copies to class

• Etc.

• Research is not openly available. Top publishers (and shareholders) benefit and also further exploit rights obtained through © assignation

Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make

possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the

willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their

research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry

and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good

they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-

reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access

to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious

minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate

research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor

and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be,

and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual

conversation and quest for knowledge”

http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Definition of Open Access

• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free

of most copyright and licensing restrictions

• OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view

fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing

restrictions)

Peter Suber, Open Access Overview http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

OA is not new – it is 20 years old

Open access is usually described by colour

Gold

• Open access immediately

on publication

• Publisher’s version via the

publisher’s website

• May be a hybrid journal or

a wholly “Pure Gold” OA

journal

• A payment normally is

made – APC (article

processing charge)

Green

• Author’s version (should be

the final peer reviewed

text)

• Published in a disciplinary

or institutional repository

• Time elapse between

publication of publisher

version & OA version

anything up to 36 months

Many journals have gold and green options

Gold = immediate availability to the world,

easily found via publisher/journal website.

Hybrid Gold = subscription journal with both

Green and Gold (APC) options

Green = (potentially) delayed publication to the

world and not (currently) always easy to find.

Normally not the publisher’s version

POLICY ENVIRONMENT

Research Councils UK (RCUK) Policy

• From 2005 RCUK sought to encourage open access

publishing

• The focus was on the academic

• Article Processing Charges could be paid from

grants

• But

• Low take up by academics.

Wellcome Trust and Open Access

• From 2006 Wellcome fund APCs

• Also mandate deposit in PubMedCentral

• Currently compliance sits at around 70% (only)

• Wellcome are now implementing sanctions for those

non compliant academics seeking further grants

Accelerating OA in the UK: the Finch Report

• 2011: Dame Janet Finch was commissioned to lead a group to explore

how to accelerate the adoption of Open Access to publicly funded

research

• Summer 2012 “the Finch Report” Published

• Author-pays model preferred and Publication Fund set up to

encourage adoption of OA by explicitly funding APCs for immediate

CC-BY publication where possible

• September 2012: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)

endorses the report (and allocates £10m pump prime funding)

• Autumn 2012 RCUK announces new policy to take effect April 2013

• Institutions awarded funding on the basis of Research Council grant

income to support the payment of APCs on journal articles and

conference proceedings where RCUK acknowledged as funder

• Target 45% in the first year- assumed APC £2000

Followed swiftly by: HEFCE policy for post REF2014

• HEFCE REF policy published on 31st March 2014

states that for any journal article or conference

proceeding accepted for publication in a volume with

an ISSN from 1 April 2016 to be eligible for the next

REF [REF2020?] the Final Author Version/Accepted

Author Manuscript must have been deposited in an

institutional or subject repository and made

discoverable within three months of acceptance

for publication.

HEFCE policy eclipses all other policies for UK academics

Image courtesy of John Norman, CUL

There is good news (HEFCE)

• Repositories can respect embargo periods – academics can create a

compliant “closed deposit” on acceptance.

• “Closed deposits must be discoverable” – i.e. the metadata must be

discoverable

• “Closed deposits will be admissible to the REF”

HEFCE and RCUK policies seen together

• From 2016, for a Journal/Conference proceeding publication to be

eligible for submission to the next REF it must meet the following

minimum criteria:

• Have a discoverable metadata record in a repository within 3 months

of acceptance for publication

• Have a closed deposit FAV/AAM in the repository within 3 months of

acceptance for publication

• BUT if the research was funded by RCUK/Wellcome/Horizon2020 then

the following criteria must also be met:

• Output must be available as an Open Access publication (either

Gold or Green).

• If Gold: immediately upon publication, and with the relevant

license (e.g. CC-BY)

• If Green: within the embargo period set by the funder

INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

• Senior academic leadership is essential to effect behavioural change

• High level committees drawn from Research VP, Research Office,

Policy, Strategy, Library, ICT + relevant academic representation

• Advocacy, Advocacy, Advocacy – the message is still not widely

understood

• Challenges with multiple policies which are not wholly aligned,

particularly cross-border policies

Many Universities have established OA mandates

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/library/subjectsandsupport/spiral/oamandate

ACADEMIC RESPONSES

Responses vary by discipline but broadly speaking look like this:

• Sciences & Medicine likely most engaged

• Engineering and Maths less so

• Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – even less so

Individual responses

• On a spectrum between passionately engaged and

unaware/disinterested/opposed

• Academics are still rewarded by publication in high impact journals, so

minimal motivation to change behaviours

• Academics (and their institutions) like the elitism of publishing in high

impact journals

• Beleaguered: yet more constraints, more reporting requirements,

perceived less time for research, perceived less funding for research

PUBLISHER RESPONSES

A different (and threatening?) business model

• Even with the

development of the

technology, the journal

publishing model has

evolved relatively little in

the last 350 years!

Anxious to protect and grow revenue streams

• UK funding is “transitional” but some evidence suggests publishers are

welcoming a growth in hybrid gold

• Challenge with license applications – some publishers will accept APC

payments but allow the academic to choose a non compliant license

• New publishing business models are emerging = exciting as well as

temporarily disruptive

• “Pure Gold” does not necessarily mean low impact factor (e.g. PLoS)

• New government-led research into monograph publishing

• Some quality monograph publishers actively engaging in OA schemes

(e.g. Knowledge Unlatched)

LIBRARY ACTIVITIES

Library roles to support OA

• Contributing to the work of institutional implementation groups

• Awareness raising amongst colleagues

• Awareness raising amongst academics and students

• Working with other departments, including ICT and Research Office,

on the requirements for management of the process

• Maintenance of web pages, FAQs and links

• Running the service to manage the payment of Article Processing

Charges (and learning from that process)

• Working collectively to influence publishers

• Working collectively to develop shared resources

• Working collectively to develop/ implement standards (e.g. ORCID,

FundRef, DataCite, RIOXX)

• Working with systems developers to simplify and integrate processes

Open Access Funds managed at Imperial 2013-14

• Wellcome £216,000

• RCUK fund: £1,150,458

• Imperial College Fund: £650,000

Library support by type of OA

Gold• Management and allocation

of the publication funds

• Supporting academics to ensure funder compliance

• Record keeping and reporting

• Working with colleagues on workflows and systems to manage many transactions

• Checking whether the publisher has published OA and attached correct license

Green

• Support for self-archiving

in the institutional

repository

• Repository developments

to ensure metadata is

discoverable

• Metrics (downloads,

altmetrics, etc)

• “request” button for closed

deposits

Open Access workflow: a pre-HEFCE example

Metrics and the demonstration of the impact of OA

Article level metrics

The Library goal: making it as easy and attractive as

possible for authors to comply, deposit and get cited

People• Be more pro-active about collecting

author versions of papers (e.g. at time of request of APC)

• Consider a mediated service Engage via Symplectic notifications

• Encourage academics to challenge publishers about the green options

• Consider in-house publishing options

• Institutional subscription to ORCID –making automation of processes much simpler - now rolled out to all Imperial researchers

• Consider which licensing options might increase flexibility of deposit

Systems• Consider making Symplectic Elements

the single point of deposit, and simplify the interface

• Automated population of SPIRAL with metadata and harvested articles

• Development of SPIRAL to support the next REF (e.g. working with publishers)

• Develop and visualise metrics and bibliometrics

• Interoperability between systems is necessary, as are version control tools

• Upgrade Sherpa Romeo to:

• Standardise publishers’ license texts to deliver meaning

• Develop a Institutional Repository Specific API

Challenges

• Scalability of processing, both for gold and to support

green self-deposit

• Creating a touch point with the repository for

FAV/AAM to meet the new HEFCE requirements –

easy for those applying for APCs but challenging for

those with no intention to publish Gold OA

• Working with publishers to achieve “offsetting” deals

• Enduring hybrid gold – affordability question

• Academic reward systems not contributing to

behaviour change

Picture sources

Slide 1: Having the cake too soon? slubdresden, CC BY

Slide 14: John Norman, Cambridge University Library. Used with

permission.

Slide 24: Le Blog du Bibliophile, des Bibliophiles, de la Bibliophilie et des

Livres Anciens