Open Access Publishing – What You Need to Know

The Great GigaScience and Galaxy (G3) WorkshopSeptember 19, 2014

Dr Nicole NogoyCommissioning Editor, GigaScience

Nicole@gigasciencejournal.com

Summary

•What is Open Access?

•Challenges

•Mandates & Current Issues

•The Solution

What is Open Access?

What is Open Access (OA)?

It is a step toward changing how we communicate science — from start to finish

Defined by two fundamental criteria:• Price barriers (e.g., subscription fees) are removed

• Permission barriers (e.g., copyright restrictions) are removed

What Does OA Mean ForScientific Research?

• Universally available via the internet, no barriers to access

• Licensed so as to allow for redistribution and reuse as long as attribution given

• Permanently archived in an internationally recognized repository (e.g., PubMed Central)

Problems With the Current System?

• Library budgets are shrinking - subscription-based access to research is a legacy of print-based economics and makes no sense in an online environment

• The intellectual effort that goes into a research article comes from the research community (authors, peer reviewers, academic editors), but they lose control of it

• Tax payers and double pay – the cost of doing research and the cost of subscribing to that research

Challenges

Biggest Challenge: Closed Access

• Handful of closed access STM publishers control market

• Force libraries to buy “bundles”

• Revenue >$9B

• Average cost /article >$5000 USD

• Publishers retain copyright

• Prevent data mining of content

• Withhold information from 99.9% who need it!

Biggest Challenge: Closed Access

Publishing: Better Than a Gold Mine

See: http://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/scholarly-publishers-and-their-high-profits/

Increasing Strain on Library Budgets

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

-50%

0%

50%

100%

150%

200%

250%

300%

350%

400%

MIT library purchases v inflation 1986-2006

Consumer Price Index % + Serial Expenditures % + # Serials Purchased % +

# Books Purchased % + Book Expenditures % +

Year

Perc

enta

ge C

hange

Journal expenditure

Inflation

Too Expensive For Harvard…

Benefits of Publishing in an OA Journal

Benefits for OA readers

• Removal of subscription barriers allows immediate online access to peer-reviewed articles

• Easy-to-search articles of interest – can you Google as well as traditional indexing services (e.g. PubMed)

• Allow to copy, distribute an reuse content as long as original article is correctly attributed

Benefits for OA authors

• High visibility and maximum exposure of articles – increase chances of article being noticed, read or cited

• No limits on article length or the number of figures and tables

• No additional charges for inclusion of colour figures, videos or large datasets

• Retain copyright of published content

Article-Processing Charges

• Editorial: handling of manuscripts• Technical: development, maintenance and operation of online journal

platforms and manuscript handling systems• Production: copy editing, formatting and mark up of articles, inclusion in

indexing services• Marketing: making sure readers know about the journal• Customer service: responding to authors/readers

No extra charge for inclusion of colour figures, videos/animations or large datasets (no limits on article length)

Who Pays?

• Author may pay out of grant funds

• Some funders provide a central fund for OA publishing costs

• Institutions may cover costs centrally on behalf of their authors e.g., through membership schemes with OA publishers

• Some titles cover costs themselves

Models of OA Publishing

“Gold” Open Access:

• Article is freely available from the publisher’s website

“Green” Open Access:• Self-archiving of author

manuscript on author website, institutional or subject-based repositories

“Full” Open Access

• Whole journal is OA

“Hybrid” Open Access

• Selected articles are OA within a subscription journal

Some Truths About OA Publishing

• OA journals have some of the highest impact factors in their fields

• OA journals have some of the most prestigious academics as Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Board members

• OA publishing is identical to subscription publishing, but content is distributed differently

Open Access is Growing

Laakso M and Björk B-C: Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124.

Mandates

Mandates

• University mandates:• Students and/or staff are required to…• Almost 150 mandatory institution-wide open access policies worldwide

e.g., Harvard University (Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity)

• Funder mandates:• Recipients of grants are required to publish under green, gold or both• Wellcome Trust, RCUK, US National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes

Medical Institute, and the European Research Council are just a few

http://www.nature.com/news/funders-punish-open-access-dodgers-1.15007

http://www.nature.com/news/funders-punish-open-access-dodgers-1.15007

Good News: The Fight Back Has Begun

Follow-On Work: Freedom of Information Request

1. How willing would researchers be to do without the services provided by Elsevier?

2. How easy is it on average to find on the web copies of Elsevier articles that can be read legally and free of charge?

3. To what extent are libraries actually suffering as a result of high journal prices?

4. What effect are Elsevier’s Gold Open Access articles having on their subscription prices?

5. How much are our universities paying for Elsevier journals?

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/

Subscribing Costs

• Gower released data acquired from FOI requests:• 19 UK universities (from the Russell Group) spent £14.4 million on

subscription fees to Elsevier alone• Imperial College also released data - £1,340,213 million on subs to Elsevier

• Total UK expenditure as of April 2014 - £15.7 million • Huge variation in subscription costs e.g.,

http://access.okfn.org/2014/04/24/the-cost-of-academic-publishing/

Cost of Subscription £ No. of Students

Imperial College 1,340,213 16,000

University College London 1,381,380 25,525

University of Exeter 234,126 18,720

http://neurodojo.blogspot.hk/2014/04/cost-of-elsevier-journals-by-university.html

http://neurodojo.blogspot.hk/2014/04/cost-of-elsevier-journals-by-university.html

AU Efforts

http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/elsevier-in-australia/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/research-australia.doc

Steven Harnard (OA advocate) estimated overall loss of productivity due to not publishing in OA journals:• If Australian Research Councils spend ~$1 billion dollars –

32,000 research articles• BUT Losing about ~$425 million dollars worth of potential return on its public

investment in research each year

NZ Efforts

http://mcw.wordpress.fos.auckland.ac.nz/2014/06/05/official-information-act-requests-in-the-style-of-tim-gowers/

Victoria University of WellingtonTaylor & Francis $484,000 NZD and Wiley $542,856 NZD (2013)

University of CanterburyA reasonable estimate of ongoing journal purchases would be $4.6M

University of OtagoBudget for print journals and eResources - $9,031,438 NZD

Auckland UniversityTaylor/Francis USD $413,715 NZD + $20,292 AUD and Wiley $891,067 USD

The Solution

The Solution: Ability to Mine & Reuse Content

=

=

Needs to be:

NC, ND clauses put unnecessary restrictions and are “Pseudo OA”

CC0 better than CC-BY for datasets to prevent “attribution stacking”

Budapest Open Access Initiative:• Maximizes reuse and access• Gives authors control over the integrity of their work and

the right to be properly acknowledged and cited• DOES NOT consider OA licenses with an NC clause to be

open access

=

Prevents translations, incompatibility issues mixing other licenses, some combinations illegal (e.g. CC-NC-SA & CC-BY-SA), hinders non-profits and mixed-collaborations, practically unenforceable, and dealing with requests more trouble than its worth.

Further reading:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.htmlhttp://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/29/scientists-should-never-use-cc-nc-this-explains-why/

Use of NON CC-BY by publishers = “double dipping” (selling content, reprints, etc.)

• Gives authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

• Does not grant publicity rights, and attribution can be used to clearly disclaim endorsement

• Restrictive licenses rarely benefit author, and inhibit reuse

Text Mining & The Commons

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Budapest Open Access Initiative:

Proposed Science, Technical & Medical (STM) Model Licenses will:• Reduce benefits of standardization incompatible with CC licenses

(impact on Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia & OA publishing all using CC licenses)

STM NEW MODEL LICENSES

Further reading:http://www.authorsalliance.org/2014/08/18/stms-open-access-licenses-extend-embrace-and-extinguish/

http://www.plos.org/global-coalition-of-access-to-research-science-and-education-organizations-calls-on-stm-to-withdraw-new-model-licenses/

The Next Battle

Good News For Australia

Recommendation research section page 32: http://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/FINAL_STEMAUSTRALIASFUTURE_WEB.pdf

What Can You Do To Help?

• Publish open access

• Know your licenses

• CHOOSE TO PUBLISH UNDER CC-BY

THANK YOU!

Email: Nicole@gigasciencejournal.com

Thanks to team Giga

Editor in Chief - Laurie Goodman PhDExecutive Editor - Scott Edmunds PhDLead Data Manager - Peter Li PhDLead Biocurator - Chris Hunter PhDData Scientist – Rob Davidson PhDDatabase Developer - Xiao Si ZheJournal Development Manager - Amye Kenall (BMC)