Reciprocal Space

A committee set up by government was never going to foment a revolution. And so it has proved to be. The recommendations of the Finch Report released today mark a cautious, measured step in the right direction, but it is nevertheless a significant one.

The Finch committee was set up by science minister David Willetts at the end of 2011 and charged with examining “how to expand access to the peer-reviewed publications that arise from research undertaken both in the UK and in the rest of the world; and to propose a programme of action to that end.”

I have had sight of the report for the past few hours on a busy day and so have only been able to quickly digest the executive summary. It may give you some idea of the complexity of the issues considered if I tell you that the summary runs to nine closely typed pages.

It starts out promisingly, recognising that although established modes of publishing have served science well for a long time, “the internet has brought profound change across all sectors of society and the economy, transforming interactions and relationships, reducing costs, sparking innovation, and overturning established modes of business.” This, the committee recognises, has wrought a cultural change in scientist’s relationship with information. Simply put, we want better and faster access. And the public deserves better access too. Perhaps the most important statement in the summary enshrines the key to the ongoing debate:

“The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.”

That sounds like an excellent starting point. But the committee has had to grapple with the complexities of the associated issues, which have been rehearsed here and elsewhere in recent months. Their summary is worth quoting in full (with my emphases in bold):

First, there are tensions between the interests of key stakeholders in the research communications system. Publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit, wish to sustain high-quality services, and the revenues that enable them to do so. Funders wish to secure maximum impact for the research they fund, plus value for money. Universities wish to maximise their research income and performance, while bearing down on costs. Researchers themselves wish to see speedy and effective publication and dissemination of research results, but also to secure high impact and credit for the work they have done.

Second, there are potential risks to each of the key groups of players in the transition to open access: rising costs or shrinking revenues, and inability to sustain high-quality services to authors and readers. Most important, there are risks to the intricate ecology of research and communication, and the support that is provided to researchers, enabling them to perform to best standards, under established publishing regimes. Concern about these risks may restrain the development of wider access if it is not managed in a measured way.

Third, research and its communication is a global endeavour. Measures to promote open access need to be similarly international in scope if they are to deliver their full potential. The UK has played a leading role in promoting open access, but there are limits to what the UK can achieve alone. Although researchers in the UK are among the best and most productive in the world, they produce only 6% of the research papers published in journals each year.

Fourth, is the question of cost. Current funding regimes focus on providing access to research literature through libraries, via payments for subscription-based journals. Arrangements to meet the costs of APCs for open access publishing tend to be ad hoc and unsystematic. In the period of transition there are bound to be additional costs as both systems exist side by side.

Some of these points may rankle with those in the vanguard of open access but they seem to me to reflect important concerns of the wider scientific community, especially those embedded in scientific societies.  I remain hopeful that some of the difficulties on the issue of cost can be be addressed by the advent of innovative and nimble publishing solutions, but we shall see.

The committee’s understanding of the nature of the problem has clearly informed its recommendations. They are a mixed bag (see below for commentary):

i. a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded;

ii. the Research Councils and other public sector bodies funding research in the UK should – following the Wellcome Trust’s initiative in this area but recognizing the specific natures of different funding streams – establish more effective and flexible arrangements to meet the costs of publishing in open access and hybrid journals;

iii. support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non- commercial purposes, and on the ability to use the latest tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content;

iv. during the period of transition to open access publishing worldwide, in order to maximise access in the HE and health sectors to journals and articles produced by authors in the UK and from across the world that are not accessible on open access terms, funds should be found to extend and rationalise current licences to cover all the institutions in those sectors;

v. the current discussions on how to implement the proposal for walk-in access to the majority of journals to be provided in public libraries across the UK should be pursued with vigour, along with an effective publicity and marketing campaign;

vi. representative bodies for key sectors including central and local Government, voluntary organisations, and businesses, should work together with publishers, learned societies, libraries and others with relevant expertise to consider the terms and costs of licences to provide access to a broad range of relevant content for the benefit of consortia of organisations within their sectors; and how such licences might be funded;

vii. future discussions and negotiations between universities and publishers (including learned societies) on the pricing of big deals and other subscriptions should take into account the financial implications of the shift to publication in open access and hybrid journals, of extensions to licensing, and the resultant changes in revenues provided to publishers;

viii. universities, funders, publishers, and learned societies should continue to work together to promote further experimentation in open access publishing for scholarly monographs;

ix. the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should be developed so that they play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation;.

x. funders’ limitations on the length of embargo periods, and on any other restrictions on access to content not published on open access terms, should be considered carefully, to avoid undue risk to valuable journals that are not funded in the main by APCs. Rules should be kept under review in the light of the available evidence as to their likely impact on such journals.

Points i-iii look good: clear support for gold open access with proper funding mechanisms (following the Wellcome model) via — if I have understood correctly — modes that permit text-mining.

Point v, on walk-in access journals in libraries for the general public continues to make no sense to me in the age of the internet (now concurrent with an age of austerity that is seeing the closure of libraries across the UK).

Point ix on institutional repositories will represent a significant advance only if they can be properly linked and indexed via the web. It remains to be seen if publishers will comply with this; at present they resist such added value.

And finally, point x appears to suggest that the committee has shied away from laying down a recommendation on the embargo period for papers published via green open access (where no Author Processing Charge is paid). The committee expand on this in a later paragraph where they state that institutional repositories should:

“Consider carefully the balance between the aims of, on the one hand, increasing access, and on the other of avoiding undue risks to the sustainability of subscription-based journals during what is likely to be a lengthy transition to open access. Particular care should be taken about rules relating to embargo periods. Where an appropriate level of dedicated funding is not provided to meet the costs of open access publishing, we believe that it would be unreasonable to require embargo periods of less than twelve months.“

Is this a sop to publishers or a reasonable compromise? I think the key will be how research councils respond to the report and what conditions they will lay down on their funded scientists. There is no mention in the summary of ‘mandates’ but I wonder if the committee is banking that its report, while lacking in some specifics, nevertheless marks an important cultural shift.

I think — and hope it is not wishful thinking — that the committee has been wily enough to read the runes and push just hard enough at a door that is opening. I was struck by their analysis of the cost implications:

“…one of the advantages of open access publishing is that it brings greater transparency about the costs, and the price, of publication and dissemination. The measures we recommend will bring greater competition on price as well as the status of the journals in which researchers wish to publish. We therefore expect market competition to intensify, and that universities and funders should be able to use their power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them both of APCs and of subscriptions.”

These are arguments that have appeared more than once on this blog so it was heartening to see them echoed in the report.

The step forward is smaller than many might have hoped for but all in all the report represents a positive move towards the goal of full open access. There is the realistic appreciation that a shift to open access will not happen overnight, even now. But it is coming:

“Implementation of the balanced programme we recommend will mean that more people and organisations in the UK have access to more of the published findings of research than ever before. More research will be accessible immediately upon publication, and free at the point of use. Our recommended programme will accelerate the progress towards a fully open access environment in the UK, and we hope that it will contribute to similar acceleration in the rest of the world.”

For me, one of the more appealing aspects of open access publishing is that by making costs transparent it could stimulate competition between publishers and generate innovative solutions to drive down prices.

Today sees the launch of one such innovation: a new open access platform for life and medical sciences called PeerJ.

It is a fascinating gamble that may well pay off. According to the minimal information that has been available until now, PeerJ offers open access publishing at ‘$99 for life’, a price point that has intrigued onlookers. It seemed too good to be true, never mind economically viable. But in Peter Binfield, formerly of PLoS ONE, and Jason Hoyt, until recently a VP of R&D at Mendeley, the venture has co-founders who are deeply rooted in internet publishing and give every appearance of knowing what they are doing.

PeerJ Co-Founders (Binfield and Hoyt)

The details published today reveal that the reality of pricing is more complex and, in most cases, will work out to be more expensive than the trailed $99 figure. Nevertheless PeerJ is shaping up to be a highly competitive entrant in the burgeoning field of open access publishers.

The catches are three-fold. First, for your $99 you get lifetime membership that entitles you to publish just one paper per year. $169 gets you two papers per year but if you can stump up $259, then there will be no limit on the number of papers you can publish in PeerJ. It will only depend on how hard you work.

The second catch is that all authors (up to 12) need to be paid-up members for any paper that is accepted by PeerJ. So to begin with, the cost of publishing a paper with 10 or so authors won’t be significantly cheaper than going for PLoS ONE, which currently charges $1350. However, if you stick with the system — and I guess this is what Binfield and Hoyt are counting on — the longer-term costs will be minimal.

Sticking with the system is the way to avoid the third catch, which is that your membership will lapse if you don’t contribute at least one review per year. This can be a full peer review of a submitted manuscript or simply an informal comment on a paper in PeerJ (or one deposited with their planned preprint server). To my mind this condition isn’t much of a catch and is in fact a nice way of encouraging authors to participate in pre- and post-publication review. It gives PIs an incentive to get their students and postdocs involved in reviewing the literature.

For sustainability, PeerJ is looking to capture some of the megajournal market; clearly modelled along the lines of PLoS ONE, it will judge papers only on “scientific and methodological soundness”.

Will it work? I, for one, certainly won’t bet against them. Too many things are shifting in the publishing world right now for anyone to be sure about what lies ahead but it looks like Binfield and Hoyt have thought through many of the likely pitfalls.

There is perhaps a question mark about the capacity of the scientific community to support the volume of peer reviewing engendered by new open access journals — a strain that PLoS ONE already seems to be experiencing — but that is a difficulty that we will have to face together. For now I salute the innovation represented by PeerJ. The academic publishing industry just got more interesting.

One of these days — I promise — I will get back to writing about science. But a conjunction of tweets today brought to me three articles on open access that were interesting in different ways but curiously all seemed to point in a similar direction.

First, a post on the Scholarly Kitchen blog (h/t Alicia Wise) from Rick Anderson, who is the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collection at the University of Utah. His post was a critique of the ‘Big Deals’, bundled or grouped  journal subscriptions that large publishers sell to university libraries. They may have low ‘per article’ costs but inevitably mean that libraries have to subscribe to journal titles they don’t want. Big deals consume very large fractions of library budgets and restrict flexibility for changing subscriptions.

But the more interesting point was that the ‘big deal’ was a larger version of a long-standing practice of ‘Medium Deals’ by which he meant ‘journals’. To get access to an article of interest you have to subscribe to the whole journal. Anderson argues that this made sense when the literature had to be printed to be distributed; but this is no longer the case now that distribution is online. He doesn’t quite come out and say it, but are we on a trajectory that leads to the abandonment of the journal form?

There seems no immediate danger; even relatively new and online-only journals, such as PLoS ONE, have a journal identity. But what does that mean in the absence of a physical object that looks like a printed journal? I suspect the dissociation of the concept from the thing itself may weaken people’s habituation to the form.

There is some evidence for this from the second interesting article I came across today, a recent preprint in the ArXiv (h/t @figshare) that claims to detect a “weakening relationship” between journal Impact Factors and individual papers’ citations. To quote the abstract:

Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal’s physical availability, reputation, or Impact Factor. We compare the strength of the relationship between journals’ Impact Factors and the actual citations received by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th century, papers’ citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective journals’ Impact Factors. However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age, the strength of the relation between Impact Factors and paper citations has been decreasing. This decrease began sooner in physics, a field that was quicker to make the transition into the electronic domain. Furthermore, since 1990, the proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals has been decreasing, and accordingly, the proportion of highly cited papers not coming from highly cited journals has also been increasing. Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the Impact Factor as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers and researchers.

This doesn’t amount to a prediction of the end of the journal, (though there is some prospect of reducing the disturbing hold of the Impact Factor over academic careers). But it does suggest that it is the paper and not the journal that may be the focus of interest in future.

Traditions, like familiar coastlines, are slowly being eroded. The standard journal faces new competition from the disruptive impact of the web. And it is not just the advocates of open access who are saying that. The third piece flagged up to me on Twitter today (h/t @GaviaLib) is a sober analysis by Jared Woodard, a financial analyst, of how the rise of viable open access options is presenting real challenges to Elsevier.

His analysis is worth reading in full but to pick out just a few quotations:

Elsevier’s upside potential looks capped, since there is no room for top-line expansion given tight university library budgets, and no room for cost-cutting in an industry where the labor of academic researchers, editors, and peer reviewers is provided, literally, for free.

Social media and improving technology have allowed opposition to rent-seeking by publishers to become more coordinated and widespread. The public relations disaster and boycott triggered by the Research Works Act (RWA) provides an excellent example.

The best argument that the company has put forward to defend their business model is that, in exchange for all of the free labor that makes the business so profitable, Elsevier provides academics with the “high-impact” journal brands that committees want to see on the CVs of tenure applicants. Until recently, the only response from the open access movement was to point out that rentier capitalism is unjust. Today, the best response is that high-impact open access journals exist as a viable alternative to the old model.

These are uncertain times for publishers — and academics. Change is coming, and perhaps more than any of us is bargaining for.

And to help push things along, I have signed the White House petition on open access. Come on in; the water’s intriguing.

It has been quite a year so far for open access. And the momentum is still building.

First came the Elsevier Boycott, triggered by an angry reaction to the publisher’s support for the US Research Works Act, which would have undermined the open access policy of the National Institutes of Health.

The Act has been withdrawn but the debate stirred up by the boycott continues to play out in the blogosphere and the press.

Then, at the beginning of this month, David Willetts declared that the UK government is committed to the “principle of public access to publicly-funded research results”. We await the report of the Finch committee which is has been charged with figuring out how this is to be achieved.

Willetts acknowledged that the UK cannot go it alone on open access so it was heartening to read last week that the European Union is likely to require researchers that it funds in future to make their results freely available.

And today sees the launch of a new campaign that is petitioning the Obama administration to extend open access mandates beyond the NIH to all large federal funders of research.

The petition reads:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Require free, timely access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

This could make a real difference. If the campaign gets 25,000 signatures in 30 days, the Administration has to issue an official response. The campaign organisers are keen to surpass this target quickly because they sense they may be pushing at an open door.

And you can help. It is hoped that most signatories will be US citizens (those are the political realities) but foreigners can also sign.

Please do. It is only by concerted world-wide action that open access can be made to work.

Please note: to sign the petition, you much first create an account, click on the link in the verification email that you will receive (which contains your password), and then sign in to the web-site to finally add your signature to the petition. (I missed the last step first time round.) When you’re done, you will see your first name and the initial of your surname appear in one of the signatory boxes.

For more information please consult the access2research website or the campaign Facebook page. If you would like to tweet support, please use the #OAMonday hashtag.