The Reckoning: analysis of Wellcome Trust OA spend 2013-14

How much does it cost session?SSP meeting

29th May 2015

Robert KileyWellcome Trust

r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk@robertkiley

Slides made available underhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Agenda

• Wellcome experience in paying OA APCs

• Look at costs• Are we getting what we pay for?

• Consider options for making the marketplace less dysfunctional

APC spend: 2012-13 & 2013-142012-13 2013-14

Number of articles for which an APC was paid: 2126 2556

Total spend: £3.9m £4.4m

Average APC: £1821 £1837

Median APC: £1837 £1800

Takeaways: i) 20% increase (over the past 12 months) in number of Trust-funded

articles being published via an OA APC route

ii) APC prices are static – 0.8% increase in this period

Breakdown of APC spend by journal type

Fully OA titles

Hybrid Unknown Total

No. of articles published in:

607 (24%) 1894 (74%) 55 (2%) 2556

Average APC: £1241 £2030 £1763

Takeaways: i) 24% of Trust funded research is published in fully OA journals; 74%

published in hybrid titles

ii) The average APC levied by hybrid titles is 64% higher than the average APC levied by fully OA titles

APC spend by publisher – top 5 by volume

Takeaways: i) 40% of our spend goes to Elsevier and Wiley

ii) Average APCs of fully OA titles are more expensive when published by Elsevier and Wiley

Compliant with Trust OA policy?

Takeaways: i) 13% of content not available in EuropePMC – very disappointing; ii) Even if we remove the “ahead of print” papers from this cohort, there

were still 227 papers not available in EPMC, which equates to £461k spend

iii) Licence data – also very disappointing

Basic compliance Number %

Articles for which an APC has been paid 2556 100%

Number of these articles available from Europe PMC 2221 87%

Number of articles NOT available from Europe PMC 335 13%

Licence compliance

Number of articles with CC-BY (or CC0) licence 1679 66%

Number of articles with other licence (or no licence) 877 34%

Full compliance

Total number of articles in EPMC with CC-BY licence: 1565 61%

Total number of articles non-compliant 991 39%

Types of problem

• Timing issues• Papers submitted before 1st April 13 and the CC-BY requirement

• Papers still not formally published (oldest had an AoP date of October ’13)

• Process issues• Mismatch between an institution thinking they have paid APC;

publisher having no record

• Publisher believing they have submitted to PMC; PMC have no record

• No licence data in article

• Contradictory licence data

• These problems were almost exclusively related to hybrid articles.

Licence issues: a single example

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/PMC3742142/fullTextXML

Human readable licence looks good…machine readable licence less good…

http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3742142

What to do with hybrids: options (easy-ish)

• They are expensive and (some) do not provide the quality of service we expect.

• Option 1: Do nothing • Trust the market

• Option 2: Do not fund hybrids• Could adopt the policy of the Norwegian Research Council DFG

and simply say that paying hybrid fees are an illegible use of Trust funds

• Option 3: Implement a funding cap• Could impose a single APC cap (e.g. €1k) – in line with the

approach adopted by FWF

What to do with hybrids: options (harder)

• Option 4: Introduce a “poor service cap”• If publisher fails to provide core services, withhold part of the APC until

paid-for service levels are delivered

• Option 5: Develop a journal scorecard• No single metric - more akin to a Trip Advisor for journals• Allow others to combine the “scores” to determine value• Maybe provide a “minimum data set” of core services

• Option 6: Set cap…based on value of services a journal offers• Develop a metric for assessing value• Journals which score higher on service delivery (speed of peer review;

image manipulation checking; rejection rate; deposition in PMC; machine readable licences; source data etc. etc.) would enjoy a higher APC cap

Further information

• Blog posthttp://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/03/03/the-reckoning-an-analysis-of-wellcome-trust-open-access-spend-2013-14/

• APC datahttp://figshare.com/articles/Wellcome_Trust_open_access_OA_spend_and_compliance_monitoring_2013_14/1321361

• Slides available at Slidesharehttps://www.slideshare.net/rkiley100/how-much-does-it-cost-sspmeeting-may2015kiley

• Contact:r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk @robertkiley