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In recognition of the third anniversary of the establishment of the NIH Public Access Policy on April 7, 2008, I've sent letters to John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Francis Collins., Director of the National Institutes of Health; and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services. The letter to Dr. Holdren is duplicated below; the others are substantially similar. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access provides further background.
April 13, 2011
John Holdren
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology
Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President
New Executive Office Building
725 - 17th Street NW
Washington, DC 20502
Dear Dr. Holdren:
I write to you in my role as the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University, where I lead efforts to broaden access to the research and scholarly results of our university. I and others at Harvard working towards these goals so central to the university's mission have been inspired by the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, now celebrating its third anniversary. The NIH policy has had an enormous impact in increasing availability of government-funded research to the citizens that have supported it through their tax dollars. Every day nearly half a million people access the over two million articles that the NIH policy makes available through the PubMed Central repository. I am especially proud that Harvard affiliates have contributed over thirty thousand of these articles.
The NIH should be applauded for these efforts to bring the fruits of scientific research to the public, and should be encouraged to provide even more timely access by shortening the embargo period in the policy. I believe that the NIH example should be broadly followed by all government agencies engaged in substantial research funding, as envisioned in the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) that has several times been introduced in Congress, and encourage you to extend this kind of policy to other science and technology funding agencies as soon as possible.
The tremendous success of the NIH policy should be celebrated. It provides a sterling example of government acting in the public interest, leading to broader access to the important scientific results that inform researchers and lay citizens alike.
Sincerely,
Stuart M. Shieber
Welch Professor of Computer Science, and
Director, Office for Scholarly Communication
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| Hubble's Dark Matter Map from flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video, used by permission |
The Harvard repository, DASH, comprises several thousand articles in all fields of scholarship. These articles are stored and advertised through an item page providing metadata — such as title, author, citation, abstract, and link to the definitive version of record — which typically allows downloading of the article as well. But not all articles are distributed. On some of the item pages, the articles themselves can't be downloaded; they are "dark". The decision whether or not to allow for dark articles in a repository comes up sufficiently often that it is worth rehearsing the several reasons to allow it.
For all these reasons, I believe that it is important to allow for dark items in an article repository. Better dark than missing.
[Hat tip to Sue Kriegsman for discussions on this issue.]
Some open-access publishers offer institutional memberships, whereby a fixed annual fee, often based on the size of faculty or expected number of submitted articles, covers all or a percentage of article-processing fees for the institution for the year.
The issue of OA publisher memberships is interesting and fraught. Harvard University is not currently a member of any of the major OA publishers—BioMed Central, Hindawi, or Public Library of Science. (Actually, Harvard Medical School is a PLoS member.) I’m not involved in Harvard’s decisions about institutional memberships, although I am not a fan of memberships in general, as you will see. I’ll explain my own view of the difficulty with memberships in terms of the market design for publisher services, and then talk about what alternatives there are.
There are a variety of different kinds of membership models but I will start by discussing the basic kind, where a fixed annual institutional fee is charged to reduce the per-article fee for articles emanating from that institution to zero, that is, a 100% reduction. This kind of membership is now rare—most memberships reduce fees by a smaller fraction, say 15%—but it is useful to examine as a thought experiment. There are other sorts of membership based on prepayment or cost sharing, which I’ll come back to.
The problem with institutional memberships (and here I mean the 100% reduction model for the moment) is that they have the potential to create the same moral hazard in the publication-fee revenue model that institutional subscriptions do in the subscription-fee business model. Institutional subscriptions hide the cost of a journal from the readers, leading to overconsumption, inelasticity of demand, and knock-on hyperinflation that is called, somewhat inaccurately, the “serials crisis”. Institutional memberships potentially have the same effect for authors, hiding the cost of the journal fees from the authors, presumably leading to overconsumption and raising the specter of hyperinflation of publication fees and membership fees down the line.
What does “overconsumption” of an OA journal mean? It means that authors publish in that journal more than they should given the relative tradeoff of fee for services. Imagine a university is a PLoS member but not a BMC member (and let’s imagine, contrary to fact, that the PLoS membership uses the 100% reduction model). Authors will see a fee of $0 for PLoS but $1500 (say) for BMC, leading them to preferentially publish in PLoS over BMC journals, even though the true cost to the university is well over $0 for PLoS publication. The result, ceteris paribus, will be that the numbers of PLoS articles will go up at that university, leading PLoS to raise the membership fee for the university over time.
Who benefits from the institutional membership at a COPE-compliant university? Whether there is an institutional membership or not, an author pays no fee; either the grant does or, if there is no grant, the university’s COPE fund does. If the article is grant funded, however, the author doesn’t need to use grant funds if there’s a membership. So authors benefit from memberships a bit by husbanding grant resources. But the major beneficiary of a university membership is the funding agency, which no longer needs to fund the publisher’s fee. Institutional memberships are essentially a transfer payment from universities to funding agencies.
The whole premise of COPE is that each stakeholder in the scholarly publishing milieu needs to do its fair share, no less and no more. Funders need to fund the fees for articles they support. Universities need to fund the fees for articles written under their auspices (but not those under a funder’s auspices). Memberships break this model.
I know what you’re thinking. Memberships mean that overall less money is being sent to the publisher. Isn’t that cost savings a good thing? If the university typically publishes 20 BMC articles a year at $1,500 ($30,000 total) and the membership is $20,000, someone or other has just saved $10,000. It’s not likely to be the university, but someone.
Here’s why it’s not the university that saves money: Imagine that 15 of the 20 articles were grant funded. (For science journals, this is a conservative estimate.) Then without the membership, grants would have paid for 15 of the articles, for $22,500, and the university just 5, for an OA fund cost of $7,500. So the university pays $12,500 more with a membership than without. But the funder pays $22,500 less. Together, funder and university pay $10,000 less, but the university is still paying much more. In essence, the university pays $12,500 for the privilege of saving the funders $22,500.
So university memberships have the effect of saving funding agencies some money and authors some grant funds, at the cost of skewing author behavior toward the particular publisher. When you buy a membership, you tilt the playing field toward that publisher; you are playing favorites. I suppose in the short term, there’s probably nothing wrong with playing favorites towards PLoS and BMC. They are nice folks, and maybe a little thumb on the scale isn’t a bad thing. But in the long run, it’s not the recipe for an efficient market.
Note that this effect holds even if the membership doesn’t reduce the fee to zero. A membership that reduces the fee by 15% still hides 15% of the true cost from the author, so it has a smaller but still non-zero skewing effect. And the cost savings issue is the same as well. With a 15% membership, the university is still paying (though less) to save the funding agencies (though commensurately less).
There may be a way of making memberships consistent with an efficient market, namely, by transferring some portion of the cost of publishing back to the authors even where a membership is in place. When an article is published, the author’s funder could be charged their share of the membership fee. If the article is not grant-funded but there is a COPE-compliant OA fund where (as in the Harvard and Cornell funds, and perhaps others’ as well) there is an annual per-author cap on fund reimbursements, the author’s cap would be charged against. If the cap is maxed out, the author would be charged for the remainder. Moral hazard eliminated. The bookkeeping is daunting, and the whole thing is cumbersome, but in theory at least it would work.
To my mind, the right thing is just not to pay for (these kinds of) memberships. Let the publishers charge what they think is an appropriate fee, and let them have to worry about whether the fee is so high they will scare off authors. If, in the short run, an institution wants to put a thumb on the scale for certain OA publishers (say because they think that in these early days OA publishers need special help—affirmative action so to speak), then buying a membership may be a good idea, but I’d hope they would realize that that’s what you’re doing, and plan on dropping the memberships once OA publishing is fully robust and can stand on its own.
Now, what about two different membership models: (i) BMC’s prepayment model in which the university prepays funds in return for a discount on processing fees, and (ii) BMC’s shared support model in which the university prepays funds to be used to cover a fixed percentage (say 50%) of each processing fee, again in return for a discount on processing fees.
In the prepayment model, there is still a per-article fee directly attributable to a given author (even if it has been prepaid), and the author—or the author’s funder if grant-funded, or the author’s OA fund cap—can be charged that fee. In the first two cases, the mechanism for doing so may be problematic. You’d have to invoice the funder for the article fee even though it was prepaid perhaps a year before. I’m not sure how the accounting would work. Similarly for charging the author if he or she had used up the annual allotment of OA funds. But assuming you could make that work, the prepayment model at least doesn’t have the moral hazard problems of the institutional membership. Given all the accounting and logistics difficulties of the prepayment model and given that almost all of the savings from prepayment is being recouped by the funders and not the university, I wonder if it is worth the trouble.
The shared support model only makes sense if you are not planning on charging back the university’s prepaid share of the fee, in which case it has all the same moral hazard and funder-gift problems as the institutional memberships.
There is something simple—and, if I say so myself, elegant—about the bare COPE model without memberships. The journal charges the author a fee. The author charges it off to the funder if there is one, or, if there isn’t, to the OA fund up to the capped limit. Done. The university supports the OA publishers (like it does the subscription publishers) without a major moral hazard or transfer payments to funders. I’d hope that universities considering OA publisher memberships would consider COPE-compliant OA funds instead.
[For my non-computer-scientist readers, the title of this post is a reference to a famous phrase used in the title of this classic CS article.]
Update June 21, 2013: The Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association has posted a response to a request for input on the Finch report, in which they pick up on many of the same themes:
However, OASPA also recognizes the possibility that such schemes could lead to a lack of transparency regarding the cost of publication in different Open Access outlets, particularly if the terms of these deals are not publicly disclosed, which could be detrimental to the functioning of the market. Moreover, OASPA feels that membership schemes that are based on up-front commitments for a university to publish a particular volume of content with a given publisher can potentially reduce competition within the Open Access ecosystem, making it difficult for smaller publishers to compete on a level playing field with larger publishers, who are inherently better positioned to negotiate individual deals with universities.
It's good to see that OA publishers recognize the incentive problems with membership arrangements.
I spoke at a panel last month at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association devoted to the question of electronic dissertations and intellectual property rights entitled "When Universities Put Dissertations on the Internet: New Practice; New Problem?" My co-panelists included Edward Fox, professor of computer science at Virginia Tech and director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and Susan Ferber, history editor at Oxford University Press, with moderation by Sarah Maza, professor of history at Northwestern University. I have to believe that this was the only AHA panel ever with two computer scientists on it.
The panel was precipitated by a particular complaint about online distribution by then PhD candidate Ulrich Groetsch against his alma mater, Rutgers. Dr. Groetsch was initially supposed to be on the panel as well, but unfortunately was not able to attend. Dr. Maza read a statement that he had prepared outlining his concerns.
By way of background, Dr. Groetsch was basically concerned that the online availability of his dissertation from Rutgers' open-access repository RUcore would affect his later ability to publish a book based on the dissertation. The details of the case, when embargoes were granted or expired, whether proper notifications were sent or received, and so forth, are disputed, and in any case not particularly relevant, as the particular case is of interest because it raises more general issues of under what conditions and on what basis dissertation distribution should be controlled.
On the assumption that someone or other might be interested, I've paraphrased my comments on the issue here. Much of my thinking is based on nascent efforts I've been making at Harvard to provide for open online distribution of theses and dissertations at Harvard, which is an ongoing effort. Here's what I said:
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Phil Davis's recent post over at The Scholarly Kitchen on whether open access might save the academic world some money misses the point of the COPE initiative and Harvard's open-access fund (HOPE). Davis speculates that for the case of one set of journals that happened to be mentioned in my colleague Bob Darnton's recent NYRB piece, HOPE would cost the university more than its current subscriptions, echoing a more general claim he has made in previous work that OA article processing charges (APCs) will cost many universities more than they now pay in subscription fees. In particular, with regard to Tetrahedron's $39,082 price tag, he says "Of the nearly 6,000 articles in the Tetrahedron bundle, Harvard researchers authored 22 of them in 2010. Given that COPE will pay $3,000 for each article out of this fund, paying for open access would cost Harvard $66K in 2010, $27K more than its subscription price."
Harvard's HOPE fund, like all COPE-responsive funds, is intended to cover Harvard's fair share of OA article processing fees. Harvard is dedicated to doing its part to underwrite OA fees — but not others' parts. For that reason, it does not cover articles based on grant-funded research; the granting agency should cover that. (The same is true of the open-access funds at many other COPE-signatory institutions.)
For the particular case at hand, I found 24 articles from 2010 in the Tetrahedron bundle with Harvard affiliations using a Scirus search. All of the articles were grant-funded (16 by NIH, 11 by one or more other foundations, 5 by companies; the sum is greater than 24 as some articles had more than one funder). Thus none of them would have been eligible for HOPE funding; the HOPE fund cost to Harvard would have been $0.
But even if none of them had been grant-funded, HOPE covers fees prorated based on Harvard authorship. Since only 65 of the 144 authors on these 24 articles were Harvard affiliated, it would have covered only 65/144 (about 45%) of the fees. The cost would be (65/144)×$3000×24 = $32,500. Further, it covers only authors at schools with open-access policies. Of the 65 Harvard affiliates, only 22 were at schools with OA policies, so payment would be restricted to 22/144 (about 15%), so the cost would be (22/144)×$3000×24 = $11,000.
Of course, BioMed Central journals with similar impact factors to the Tetrahedron journals charge publication fees of $1820. (PLoS journals with considerably higher impact factors charge $1350 or $2250.) Presumably, if the Tetrahedron journals were open-access journals, as hypothesized in the thought experiment Davis is implicitly undertaking, they would have to compete for authors with other open-access journals and would need to charge similar rates (just as Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports is doing relative to PLoS ONE). Redoing the calculation with the BMC rate gives (22/144)×$1820×24 ≈ $6,700. Even covering authors at ineligible schools, the cost would only be (65/144)×$1820×24 ≈ $20,000.
Two of the five bundled journals — accounting for all but 5 of the 24 articles — are "Letters" journals publishing quite short articles of a couple of pages. Presumably, they should require even lower APCs, reducing the likely cost further.
So, the upshot is that the cost to the HOPE fund for all of the Tetrahedron journals would be $0, and even if it were to cover the fees for grant-funded articles, the cost would be $32,500. Or $20,000. Or $11,000. Or $6,700. Or less.
The truth is that no one knows how much costs would be in a counterfactual open-access world with competitive APC fees. The kinds of calculations in Davis's post (and this one and other previous work) are a kind of silly game. But given that the highest APC for an OA journal ($2,900 for PLoS Biology) is far less than the average revenue per article for a subscription journal ($5,000 according to the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable), it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the overall costs would be higher. And we'd drop all of the access restrictions as a nice side effect. Seems like a bargain to me.
But the most important point is that the idea behind COPE and the HOPE fund is not to save an individual institution money. If in the long term COPE has the intended effect of shifting journals such as Tetrahedron to an OA model within a journal ecology based on an efficient market — a situation that we manifestly do not now have — and if under those conditions Harvard ends up paying a bit more, well, then the market has spoken.
By the way, the Tetrahedron bundle price is now up to $41,361.
I had an interesting discussion over coffee at the recent SOAP Symposium about the question of whether the article processing fee revenue model for open-access journals disenfranchises authors with fewer financial resources. It prompted me to write up a fuller explanation of why this worry is misplaced.
Opportunity for full participation in research by as wide a range of scholars as possible is, of course, central to our meritocratic notion of the scholarly endeavor. Perhaps the biggest impediment to such full participation — to getting to the point where one has a scholarly result to present to the world — is gaining access to the facilities for carrying out research in the first place, including access to the published literature. It makes little sense to worry about disenfranchisement from publishing research results if the alternative is disenfranchisement from the reading that would allow generating the results in the first place. For that reason, open access to the scholarly literature is inherently an enfranchising program.
It also bears mentioning that it is not only open-access journals that charge author-side fees, the kinds of fees that critics complain are disenfranchising. Many subscription journals charge quite substantial fees as well. For NIH-funded research, the average is $1250 per article, which is plenty big enough to give your average developing-country scientist pause. One would be hard-pressed to impugn open-access journals on these grounds without roping in many subscription journals as well.
That being said, of course we want everyone to have the opportunity to publish in the scholarly literature, even those with lesser means. And there is a simple mechanism to allow for this with open-access journals that charge article processing fees. Journals can, should, and commonly do waive fees for necessitous authors. The details of these waiver policies differ. (See here for the PLoS policy or here for BioMed Central.) But the effect is the same: authors unable to afford the fees can still publish in these journals. More importantly, they can read the articles published in the journals too.
Some worry that authors requiring fee waivers may be discriminated against in the editorial process. Editorial processes must, of course, be kept separate from the financial processes. Different groups separated by a Chinese wall can handle the two issues. Indeed, the question of whether a waiver will be requested needn't even be raised until an editorial decision on a paper is finalized, eliminating any possibility of a conflict of interest. PLoS has an especially simple method for handling waivers. After a paper is accepted for publication, authors can request a waiver of the fee, which is always granted.
Of course, the waiver idea can't possibly be controversial. It is the same approach that subscription journal publishers use to address the reader-side disenfranchisement argument. They point out that the World Health Organization's Hinari program provides subsidized access to journals for scholars in a specified set of countries that have been deemed sufficiently impoverished. A similar eligibility criterion could be used for processing fee waivers. But an approach based on targeting individuals rather than countries has much to recommend it. It can be much better focused on the real problem. For instance, it can address authors in needy cohorts who happen to live in a country not on the approved list. There are unemployed scholars in first-world countries or faculty at small schools in developing countries, for example, for whom Hinari is no help, whereas a fee waiver allows them to fully participate in the open-access publishing milieu on both the reading and writing side.
[UPDATE 1/21/11: The recent news that publishers have withdrawn Bangladesh's access through the HINARI program (because Bangladesh is "start[ing] to secure active sales") makes regrettably clear the problem with this approach. Just because some researchers in Bangladesh may now fall within the scope of an institutional subscription, all are deprived access.]
The issue of fee waivers is important, and we should actively promote their availability. By way of example, many COPE-compliant open-access funds — including those at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and Columbia — will only cover fees for journals that have a waiver policy. Hopefully, this will provide some impetus for OA journals to institute reasonable waiver policies.
Ironically, Nature Publishing Group is entering the OA arena with Scientific Reports, a PLoS ONE competitor. Phil Davis reports that they are apparently not allowing for fee waivers, and points out that this could lead to a problem of adverse selection, where PLoS ONE ends up handling all of the fee-waived articles to their competitive disadvantage. On the other hand, if this turns out to be true, Scientific Reports will not be eligible for support from the COPE-compliant open-access funds as discussed above. There thus may be ways to mitigate the adverse selection problem.
With open access, we can enfranchise both the readers and the writers of the scholarly literature. We can, and we should.
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| Used by permission of PLoS |
I'm flying back from Berlin, where I gave talks at the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) Conference and the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP) Symposium. Karmically, the SOAP Symposium was held in the very room, in Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society, where the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was drafted in 2003. I'll post links to those talks at this site when they become available. [Update 1/31/11: Links to the talks are now available at right.]
These several days of listening to presentations and talking with publishers, academics, and librarians have left me, I have to say, more optimistic about the potential future of open-access publishing than I've been in many years, maybe ever. Of course, that may not be saying much; I've never been very sanguine. But at the moment I'm marginally positive.
Over the past years, a transition path to relatively widespread open-access publishing has been obscure at best, and progress has been slow to nonexistent. Uptake, however measured, has been grudging, and author apathy overwhelming.
Especially problematic, but completely understandable, is the relatively slow uptake of authors in publishing in OA journals. Part, of course, is a numbers game: there are very few open-access journals of sufficient quality to provide more than a tiny fraction of the needed capacity, and little hope at the moment of remedying that situation given the lack of a viable revenue model for OA journals; it's hard to imagine publishers starting a whole lot of OA journals if there's no revenue model to keep them going in a sustainable, scalable manner. That's the problem that COPE is attempting to address. In fact, that was the topic of my SOAP Symposium keynote.
Another contributing factor to authors' ambivalence is their need to chase journal brand. Indeed, this is the main reason academics publish in journals — to get the imprimatur of the journal on their paper, since for better or worse (and, to my mind, mostly worse) that's often what affects their career trajectory.
For a long time, I've assumed that a transition to a sizable role for OA publishing will require existing publishers to switch their existing journals to an OA publication-fee revenue model in order to cover enough of the scholarly fields, because the founding of enough new journals, whether by existing publishers or new ones, is a long and unlikely process, and won't be able to address the brand development problem for even longer.
But recent developments may indicate a breakthrough from a surprising direction: PLoS ONE, a new kind of open-access mega-journal. This journal has a set of interlocking characteristics: broad scope ("primary research from any scientific discipline"), focused peer review for validity and soundness (but not field or predicted impact), reasonable publication fees, and post-publication article metrics and other services. Surprisingly (to me at least; I was frankly skeptical when PLoS ONE was launched) this model has shown tremendous popularity; submission growth has been geometric. Evidently, PLoS is able to provide a venue for verifying scientific validity over a huge range of fields and a huge number of articles, and make money doing it. PLoS One has become the largest peer-reviewed journal on earth, publishing almost 7,000 articles last year. It is single-handedly allowing PLoS to break even, subsidizing its higher-selectivity and field-focused journals.
Publishers have not failed to notice the dramatic success of PLoS ONE, and they are jumping on the bandwagon. SAGE announced SAGE Open, a mega-journal for "the social and behavioral sciences and humanities", Nature Publishing Group is rolling out Scientific Reports (“all areas of the natural sciences— biology, chemistry, physics, and earth sciences”), and there's BMJ Open (“medical research”), AIP Advances (“applied research in the physical sciences”), Genetics Society of America’s G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics (“high-quality foundational research, particularly research that generates large-scale datasets”). As Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing for PLoS, pointed out in his talk at APE, all of these journals take up the PLoS ONE approach: broad scope, open access with an article-processing-fee revenue model, peer review for validity but not predicted importance or impact, post-publication article metrics and services, scalability, and a strong brand.
(NPG has decided not to use their trademark Nature in the name of their mega-journal, presumably out of fear that they would dilute the brand of their other journals. I think they are missing a strategic opportunity to strongly brand the new journal, based on a misapprehension that people primarily associate brand imprimatur with publisher journal collections rather than individual journals. PLoS ONE has shown that a publisher with an excellent high-quality brand association can run a mega-journal without diluting the brand signal of its flagship journals. I'd guess that sooner or later, we'll start seeing the journal referred to as Nature Scientific Reports, even if the name doesn't officially change.)
It seems extraordinarily likely that other major publishers will move in this direction as well. (You heard it here first.) [Update 5/25/11: Elsevier is now advertising for a Scientific Editor for a journal called Cell Reports from Cell Press, which “will publish high quality papers across the broadest possible range of disciplines in biology. It is an open access, online-only journal with continuous publication.” Sounds like PLoS ONE and Scientific Reports to me.] [Update 7/7/11: Bloomsbury has announced yet another new megajournal QScience Connect under sponsorship of the Qatar Science Foundation “for all research that is considered to be valid, ethical and correct”. Notably, they claim to cover “all fields”, including the traditional physical and life sciences, but also, math, computer science, law, the humanities, the social sciences, etc., etc.] [Update 1/12/12: Joining the other major scholarly publishers, Springer has launched SpringerPlus, covering "all disciplines of Science" with review based on scientific soundness alone.] [Update 1/17/12: I missed the December announcement of FEBS Open Bio, an OA megajournal published by Elsevier on behalf of the Federation of Biochemical Societies. The journal covers “the molecular and cellular life sciences in both health and disease” and reviews based on “soundness”, not “eventual importance”. Interestingly, this new journal would seem to compete directly with Elsevier's other OA megajournal, Cell Reports. How they'll handle that remains to be seen.]
The mega-journal trend means that strong traditional publishers with name recognition are entering open-access publishing in a big way. They'll be hard pressed to trot out their hackneyed canards (vanity press, disenfranchisement). And these journals will provide coverage of a huge swathe of academic fields. Between SAGE Open, PLoS ONE, and Scientific Reports, essentially all of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences are covered. In addition, the breadth of these journals means that they will be competing for the same pool of articles. Authors will have a choice between submitting papers in genetics, say, to PLoS One or G3, in physics to AIP Advances or Scientific Reports, and so forth. Publishers will have to compete in order to attract authors, either on price or publisher services or both. They'll have to market these journals to authors, using their intellectual capital to convince authors that OA journals (at least their OA journals) are a Good Thing. As authors and promotion committees get used to using the new article-level metrics (as they already increasingly are, with download counts and h-index), journal brand name — whether of these mega-journals or traditional journals — will become less important, and authors will feel freer to publish in these and other OA journals, again based on publisher services rather than journal brand name.
As an aside, I note that PLoS has another nascent service, PLoS Hubs, that could interact synergistically with the mega-journal trend as well. Hubs provide the ability to build subcollections of articles from PLoS ONE or other journals based on various selection criteria. At the moment, the hubs are specified and curated by PLoS editors, but you could imagine opening up the service to hubs based on whatever selection criteria a self-proclaimed editor chooses. For instance, I could put together a subcollection of articles in my own field, computational linguistics, essentially generating a bespoke computational linguistics journal of articles already vetted for validity by PLoS reviewers, and for field by me, and perhaps by predicted impact by a cohort of post-reviewers I assemble. It provides a platform for the kind of ecology of overlay journals that has been talked about for many years, but with little in the way of success. (Faculty of 1000 is a notable case for the life sciences, but hasn't been replicated elsewhere.) The ability to have their articles participate in such hubs would provide mega-journal authors with the ability to generate cachet from imprimatur without the access limitations of traditional field-focused journals.
Mega-journals could be the new new thing that makes open-access publishing viable at scope. If so, Public Library of Science would have cracked it — not through its flagship but self-consciously retro journals but through its unlikely innovation PLoS ONE.
[Thanks to Mark Patterson for his APE talk and for providing me copies of his slides. And for publishing the PLoS journals.]
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| University of Chicago Library, from Carlos Jimenez via flickr, used by permission |
Who knew? The Chicago Manual of Style's current edition (the 16th) includes for the first time a stance on open-access (Section 4.62), and on Harvard-style OA policies in particular (Section 4.63).
Written by copyright lawyer William S. Strong of Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP, the chapter comes down hard on academics' attempts to use their own writings.
Section 4.62 on "Authors’ electronic use of their own works" claims that open access to articles in institutional repositories is "likely to diminish licensing revenues" (despite all evidence to the contrary). It concludes that "The fact that licensing revenue helps support the publication of important scholarly work seems to have escaped general notice." As if.
Section 4.63 on "University licenses" seems to be particularly aimed at Harvard-style open-access policies, "under which they presumptively receive nonexclusive licenses of journal articles written by their faculty, with the right to post those articles on the Internet and to make and license 'noncommercial' uses. (Commonly, faculty are permitted but not encouraged to opt out of this arrangement on a case-by-case basis.)" He lists as faults the claim that addenda "do[] not make clear what the author can, and cannot, do with derivative works that he or she creates" (because there is no limitation); that they "do[] not make clear whether what the author can distribute, display, and otherwise use is the author’s own manuscript or the finished, published work" (even though the Harvard addendum [paragraph 4a] is explicit about not distributing publishers' versions); and that they "do[] not prevent the author from licensing the article to a competing journal" (except that journals won't publish already published articles anyway). He frets about the vagueness of the term "noncommercial", though the Harvard policies are explicit in stating that articles "are not sold for a profit" and agreements with publishers have further clarified the university's intention not to sell the articles at all.
The Manual makes a recommendation to publishers to generate their own addenda "to use when presented with author requests for nonexclusive rights." But why make the addendum conditions available only upon request? If the addendum-specified activities are allowable, why not just allow them in the publisher's agreement from the get-go? In particular, how about a recommendation that publisher agreements allow authors of scholarly articles to post their final manuscript versions at their discretion, that is, allowing green OA?
Section 4.64 on "The NIH Public Access Policy" recommends that publishers "push for the maximum delay (i.e., twelve months) on public posting" if concerned about maximizing their revenues.
The most surprising thing about the new Manual sections is that a style manual is taking a stance on these intellectual property issues in the first place. The issues are obviously considerably more nuanced than Mr. Strong's RIAA-like stance makes clear. Given that stance, you'd hardly know that the book is owned by a university (The University of Chicago, as stated in three copyright notices on each page) filled with faculty and students whose interests are not best served by this kind of short-term profit-maximizing attitude. Perhaps the editors might solicit a broader range of informed advice ahead of their next edition.
[Hat tip to Tom Dodson for bringing these sections to my attention.]
As I get a hang of the medium, I've been tweeting on a wider range of topics than covered by the Pamphlet, but still hope this will be of interest to those of you who read the blog. So feel free to follow me (pmphlt) on twitter, and urge your friends, acquaintances, family members, pets, and hangers on to follow as well. And while you're at it, a plug for the Pamphlet would be most welcome too.
Here's a clever way for a journal to efficiently and cost-effectively provide open access to its articles (at least in the life sciences): Use PubMed Central as the journal's article repository. This expedient has all kinds of advantages:
I first heard about this idea a while ago at a PMC meeting in a discussion referring to Journal of Biomolecular Techniques, which uses this approach. It seemed like an awfully good idea to me, and still does. Almost a thousand journals submit all of their final published articles to PMC, but I'm not sure how many do so without embargo and as the sole and definitive version of record.
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| Tightrope walker, sculpture, Berlin, 2008. Photo from beezerella at flickr.com. Used by permission. |
The short answer? Almost nothing.
The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity is a statement of commitment to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds." Some institutions who were considering signing on to the compact at its launch held off because of a worry that it might cost a lot of money at a time when library budgets are under phenomenal pressure. I had predicted that the costs would be minimal in my PLoS Biology paper proposing the compact. There, I said
By design, the overall cost to a university of implementing the compact, in the short term, would be quite small. Hybrid open-access fees are explicitly eschewed, and true open-access fees tend to be found at present in just those areas of scholarship where grant support is most prevalent, reducing the underwriting load on the university substantially. Rough estimates based on the experience of the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative fall in the range of tens of dollars per faculty member per year.
But I can understand that some universities might have wanted to wait until there is some empirical evidence of this claim. That evidence is now available. Barbara DeFelice, Director of the Digital Resources Program at Dartmouth Library has compiled some statistics from the COPE signatory institutions about their OA fund expenditures, which she discussed at a recent ARL talk. I used her statistics to calculate approximate costs per faculty member per year. The numbers reveal that the outlays are even more manageable than even I had estimated, perhaps by an order of magnitude. (I've made these numbers quite conservative by counting faculty conservatively and estimating that each article funded cost $1,500 dollars. The actual average seems to be somewhat less. As more data is collected, I'll try to make it available.)
| Institution | Months | # Funded | Funded/year | Faculty size | $/faculty/year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berkeley | 31 | 92 | 35.61 | 1582 | $33.77 |
| Columbia | 7 | 2 | 3.43 | 1377 | $3.73 |
| Cornell | 11 | 3 | 3.27 | 1594 | $3.08 |
| Dartmouth | 11 | 1 | 1.09 | 450 | $3.64 |
| Harvard | 11 | 1 | 1.09 | 1633 | $1.00 |
| MSKCC | 5 | 0 | 0.00 | 560 | $0.00 |
| MIT | 2 | 0 | 0.00 | 1025 | $0.00 |
| Ottawa | 8 | 25 | 37.50 | 1257 | $44.75 |
For universities that run their OA funds in accordance with COPE recommendations (that is, no hybrid fees, no grant-funded articles), the costs come to not tens of dollars per faculty member per year, but single digit dollars. The outliers are Berkeley and Ottawa, both of which will cover hybrid fees (though Berkeley places tighter caps on fee per article) and will cover grant-funded articles (though they ask for grant funds to be used first).
The bottom line is that the direct costs of running a COPE-compliant open-access fund are trivial, and the administrative costs of dealing with handfuls of requests are trivial as well. Cost should not be an impediment to setting up an open-access fund in this way. In particular, harangues about open-access funds amounting to throwing away large quantities of valuable dollars can please stop now. For instance, Stevan Harnad likes to say things like "COPE is based on the illusion that there is enough money available in institutions today to pay for OA publication in all the must-have journals — Nature, Science, the American Physical Society journals, and all the other top journals — while continuing to subscribe to those journals (and we don't as yet have OA for their contents, so it's premature to cancel)." He either misunderstands the compact or willfully misrepresents it, since COPE-compliant funds need not, should not, and generally do not pay publication fees for the subscription journals he lists. COPE does not support "double-dipping".
The reason that the costs of COPE-compliant open-access funds are so low is because demand for the funds is low because, in turn, there are very few quality OA journals charging publication fees, because, finally, to do so would be to put the journals at a systematic disadvantage in getting authors as compared to subscription journals that don't charge fees. (This disadvantage is exactly what COPE is trying to remedy.) Here is how the numbers break down. Of the 5,000 or so open-access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals, only a hundred or two are of the character that these universities' researchers are likely to publish in them. For example, only a hundred or so are indexed by Thomson ISI for impact factors. Of these, the majority don't charge publication fees, so can't contribute to OA fund demand. Those that do charge a fee are overwhelmingly in the life sciences where grant funding is widespread, hence they also don't generate demand on the OA fund.
If there is so little demand for an OA fund, why have it at all? The goal of a COPE-compliant OA fund is not short term maximization of access to an institution's output. (If it were, then hybrid fees would be appropriate to underwrite. But that goal can be accomplished much more cost-effectively by establishing good green open-access policies.) Rather, the goal of COPE is to provide the basis for an alternative business model, should a large number of institutions similarly commit. If a large number of institutions were to commit to the compact, publishers would have a viable business model through charging publication fees in a way that they do not now have.
In essence, COPE is trying to establish a kind of safety net. Safety nets are useful even when they are not used. Safety nets allow people to take risks that we want to promote. A publisher changing its business model is incurring such a risk. We, the universities and research funders, may need collectively to build a very big safety net (university by university, funder by funder) to convince a publisher to take that risk. But given that the cost of each of our pieces of the safety net is so incredibly low, it is worth keeping our pieces up and encouraging others to add their pieces, in the hope that a big enough net will encourage the publishers to take the risk to walk the tightrope from the subscription model to the publication fee model. If we are successful, demand for the OA funds will grow as publishers will flip business model to an OA publication fee basis, thereby freeing up funds to pay those fees. If we are not successful, at least the costs are negligible.
(Thanks to Barbara DeFelice for collecting the data and making it available.)
[Update 11/16/2011: I've added a post on how funding agencies might best set up their part of the safety net.]
I recently had a conversation with someone (I'll call him D) whose opinion I greatly respect, a staunch supporter of broadening access to the scholarly literature, who expressed a view I was quite surprised about. D is of the opinion that the publication fee business model for open access journals is economically flawed, so flawed that he thinks it is not worthy of support, for instance through university and funder commitment to underwrite publication fees as envisioned here and here and in nascent implementation.
D thinks that the only worthy alternative is what is sometimes called the "public access" business model, in which access is limited to subscribers but only for a short embargo period of, say, six months or a year. This model can effectively be mandated by having funders require public access for articles they fund. The NIH policy is an example of a public access mandate, and the pending FRPAA legislation would broaden the mandate to essentially all US-government-funded research.
Certainly, I am a staunch supporter of public access mandates, and the shorter the embargo period the better. Harvard University is on record supporting the approach, as am I. But I also think that the publication fee model is viable, and indeed preferable in the long term. Thinking about D's argument has led me to write this post explaining my contrary view.
The University of North Texas is engaged in a laudable process of designing an open-access policy for their community. Draft language for their policy is now available at their site on open access; the most recent version is as of June 7.
They are pursuing a Harnad-style ID/OA policy, requiring deposit of articles but pursuing distribution only to the extent that publishers' agreements allow. Although I prefer a Harvard-style approach, this is also quite a good and reasonable approach. I have some concerns though about the details of the UNT working out of the policy. In particular, they have incorporated into the statement of the policy some language from the Harvard-style policies, which doesn't sit comfortably with the basic approach they have taken. Below, I argue that the intention of their policy can be more consistently specified, and in the process greatly simplified.
Here is the operative language in the current policy draft. (There is much more to the policy document, but the core is described in these paragraphs.)
In support of greater access to scholarly works, the UNT Community Members agree to the following for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication journal articles:
The first paragraph mandates deposit of the manuscript. The second specifies distribution consistent with publishers' policies. So far, this is the ID/OA policy.
The third paragraph seems to specify rights retention à la a Harvard-style policy. In fact, a policy consisting of just paragraphs 1 and 3 would more or less constitute the Harvard policy. But why would broad rights need to be retained (paragraph 3) if no distribution beyond what publishers will allow (paragraph 2) is envisioned? Indeed, such broad rights retention may well lead to the possibility that the policy would inherit the problematic aspects of the Harvard-style policy (occasional requirements by publishers to get waivers of the license), without its advantages (wholesale rights retention for a broad swath of articles independent of publishers' policies). There is an inherent tension between the second and third paragraphs that acts to the detriment of the policy. In summary, if you're not going to use rights beyond what publishers allow, don't retain them. It just muddies the water.
This might argue for merely dropping paragraph 3 and going for a straight ID/OA policy, and that would be one reasonable approach. (Another reasonable approach would be to drop paragraph 2 and go for a Harvard-style policy, but this is clearly not UNT's intention.) However, there is one advantage to the rights retention aspect, namely that once the policy is enacted, no further effort will be needed for the university to acquire by default whichever rights the publishers do allow. But this advantage can be maintained without the broad language of the third paragraph, and in so doing, the entire policy can be simplified considerably.
My recommendation would be to simplify the third paragraph to grant only those rights needed to do what the policy envisions. Something along the following lines would work:
Licensing: Each UNT Community Member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries Scholarly Works Repository for the purpose of open dissemination and preservation subject to publishers' restrictions. In legal terms, each UNT community member grants to UNT for each of his or her scholarly articles a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise those rights under copyright that the author retains in any agreements with the article's publishers. The Provost or Provost's designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a community member.
Once this restricted license is in force, UNT would have rights to distribute as widely as the publisher allows but no more, as is clearly the policy's original intent. At that point, the second paragraph (encouraging the author to allow distribution as broadly as possible) would no longer be needed. The university could already do so based on the license it was granted. If an author didn't want the university to distribute the article for any reason (as envisioned in the second paragraph phrase "to align with the UNT Community Member’s request"), the waiver aspect of the licensing clause would already allow for this.
Presumably, the number of waivers generated under this approach would be minuscule, as publishers would have no incentive whatsoever to require a waiver for publication; the policy involves no license to the university beyond what a publisher would already allow.
While we're adjusting language, I'd also recommend dropping the sentence providing motivation for deposit, which is appropriate for the explanatory material about the policy, but not its formal statement.
With these changes, the UNT policy becomes much simpler, more consistent, and would be what it was presumably envisioned as, an ID/OA policy with a built-in license to make sure that the university could distribute articles to the extent publishers allowed. This approach is an interesting variant open-access policy to be considered by other institutions in addition to the original ID/OA and Harvard-style approaches.
For completeness, the language I would propose (at least while hewing as close to the original UNT language as possible) would be something like the following:
In support of greater access to scholarly works, the UNT Community Members agree to the following for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication journal articles:
I must mention that I am not a lawyer, and have not vetted my proposal with any lawyers, and am not making any claims about the legal force or appropriateness of the original or modified language. That is the job for the UNT General Counsel's Office.
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Sandy Thatcher feels "very uneasy about the massive postings of Green OA articles at sites like Harvard’s, which given that university’s great prestige may well lead to the widespread appropriation of those versions by scholars who find it easier to access them OA than to hunt down (and perhaps pay for) the final versions." He should rest assured that we make every effort to make clear what version we are providing and where the version of record resides. We provide links to the version of record (when available) on the metadata page for each article (see here for a sample), and have even modified the DSpace software that runs our repository so that it provides users with links to the version of record on search results pages (like this) before they even get to the metadata page for the article. We provide citation information and links to the definitive version on the metadata page as well as on a front page added to the PDF for downloaded articles (for instance, this PDF). The PDF link is even clickable to go to the publisher's site for the version of record. In short, we try to make it as easy as possible to "hunt down" the version of record.
Calling the mere use of an article in the repository an "appropriation" seems tendentious. To appropriate is "to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself, often without permission." But in this case, there is nothing exclusive about the use of the articles, and permission is provided for. There is no inappropriate taking going on in DASH, or even in the Harvard OA policy, which allows for waivers of the license to Harvard. Publishers can feel free to institute and enforce policies to require waivers of the license for articles they publish if they fear that it might harm their business model -- though few have done so. I expect many publishers appreciate that Green OA is not really the big problem for their business model.
On the other hand, I second the sentiment expressed by Dr. Thatcher that he "look[s] forward eagerly to the day when OA fully takes over the dissemination of scholarship...partly because it will solve the problem I have with Green OA now." I agree that Green OA is a short term mitigation of an underlying problem that needs a fuller solution involving modifying the scholarly communication system in general.
Could this be the world's most excruciatingly ironic conference? The Second International Symposium on Peer Reviewing (ISPR 2010) is soliciting papers. Their call for papers emphasizes the sorry state of peer-review, calling for "more research and reflections [that] are urgently needed on research quality assurance and, specifically, on Peer Review." What could be more reasonable than a conference to improve the quality of peer review and the standards of research dissemination?
The conference itself is part of the 14th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2010, and organized by the same institution, the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS). Here's the irony: IIIS and the WMSCI conferences are notorious for their lax standards for paper acceptance, as a cursory web search testifies. For example, Justin Zobel has described his experience in submitting three papers to the 2002 WMSCI conference, all three completely unsuitable for publication in any venue whatsoever. (One, for instance, consisted of alternating sentences from two other papers on different topics. Zobel's excerpts of the papers form very entertaining reading.) All three were accepted for publication with no reviews or comments provided, even after repeated prompting. The WMSCI 2005 conference even accepted a computer-generated paper without review.
More suspicious signs: The conference charges a registration fee per accepted paper, not per participant. And presentation of the paper, even attendance at the conference, seems to be optional (but you still have to pay the registration fee). WMSCI's hounding of researchers for papers is also legendary. It led to David Mazières, a computer science professor at Stanford, submitting a paper to WMSCI 2005 entitled "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List", complete with topic-appropriate charts and graphs.
Clearly, the organizers of the WMSCI conference and its many satellite conferences are not too concerned with optimizing peer review and solving problems with "research quality assurance". Yet these are the very organizers of the 2010 International Symposium on Peer Reviewing. The cynicism undergirding this "symposium" is truly jaw-dropping.
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