May Festival of Open Access

Never mind May Day. This month it's more like 'OA Day' for me.

Open Access continues to be one of the foremost issues when we think about scholarly communication. While policy developments continue to set the framework within which researchers, institutions, societies and publishers operate, myriad practical issues are also paramount in everyone's mind.

Perhaps this is why May is turning into a bit of an 'Open Access Month'. It's an unofficial festival of talks, seminars and fact finding events that will support us in our quest for successful Open Access publishing.

Here's a round-up of events we are aware of. Have we missed anything? Just comment below and let us know. You can also add your event to the ALPSP website. Complete this simple online form.

Clear your diaries and brace yourself for the May Festival of Open Access!

14 May
The Mechanics and Reality of Open Access 
An ALPSP seminar in London
A packed day that will focus on providing best practice tips and experience to meet the practical needs of publisher teams when providing green, gold and hybrid Open Access options.

19 May
Open Access and Society: Impact and Engagement
A Taylor & Francis Seminar, in association with ALPSP and the Academy of Social Sciences to be held in London
An overview of the latest results from the OA author and societies surveys with policy updates on Horizon 2020, RCUK mandate, HEFCE, REF2020 and beyond. This free seminar also includes discussion on impact and engagement.

20 May
UKSG Managing Open Access London
A UKSG seminar from the library perspective to be held in London
Overview of OA workflows and case studies from the library perspective.

22 May 
Implementing Creative Commons Licenses
An ALPSP webinar to be held online
Brief, practical overview of what CC licenses are, how they can be implemented by publishers, and how authors are likely to respond to them. Drawing on real experiences of publishers and on a recent large-scale author survey. It will also look at how CC licenses can be used with third-party material, such as images and figures that the author is reusing from another source.

17 June (OK, I'm sneaking this in to May...)
Open Access and Society: Impact and Engagement

A Taylor & Francis Seminar, in association with ALPSP and the Academy of Social Sciences to be held in Brussels
A re-run of the May seminar in London for European colleagues. An overview of the latest results from the OA author and societies surveys with policy updates from Europe, funders and internationally. This free seminar also includes discussion on impact and engagement. 

Turpin Distribution – Open Access Services

6th August 2013
PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -

Turpin Distribution is delighted to announce the introduction of its new Open
Access service for managing Article Processing Charges (APCs).

A major vendor in the journal fulfilment market for over 40 years Turpin has
supported its scholarly publishing clients with new services as the journal market
has evolved, embracing new technologies.

The Turpin system can manage all the complex administration surrounding
processing charges and payment collection including; single author; multiple
authors with allocations; third party advanced payment reconciliation; and
copyright status sharing to identify just some of the major servicing capabilities.
All transactional information is reported back to the publisher via the Turpin Web
Reports Portal providing up to date information 24/7.

Lorna Summers, Managing Director of Turpin said “I’m extremely pleased that we
are able to continue supporting our client publishers with new services to meet
the changing demands of the market. We are already working closely with our
clients to provide solutions for the efficient management of Article Processing
Charges (APCs). Turpin looks forward to assisting publishers in controlling their
OA administrative burdens such as billing and reporting so clients can continue to
focus on the creation and dissemination of intellectual property.”

About Turpin Distribution
Turpin Distribution is an International fulfilment and distribution company
providing services to the academic, scholarly and professional publishing
industry. It provides custom solutions for print and digital publishers handling
both books and journals worldwide.

For further information contact:
Neil Castle
Operations Director
neil.castle@turpin-distribution.com
T: +44 (0) 1767 604 868
www.turpin-distribution.com

Planning for the unknowable: Sue Thorn gets to grips with scenario planning and the future of journals

Sue was CEO of the Society for Endocrinology for 20 years and set up its trading subsidiary, BioScientifica, which provided secretariat and publishing services for a range of other societies in the UK, Europe and USA.

She has been using her combined publishing and society management experience to identify the key variables that will affect journal income and sustainability in the future, and to establish a range of potential scenarios, which can then be modelled quantitatively and followed over time.

Sue says:

“I've been using scenario planning techniques for many years to aid strategic planning by quantifying uncertain variables. The advent of the financial crisis led me to use the technique to develop a spreadsheet to track the effects of changes in key financial variables at the touch of a key. So, if the value of the society’s investments went down, or journal attrition varied from budget, I could put this in the spreadsheet and immediately see the effect on the society’s surplus and total value over a two-year period.  It became clear that only a relatively small number of variables really made a difference, and I am now using a similar technique to model society publishing incomes for STM and AHSS journals. 

The results are really interesting and occasionally counter-intuitive. Some scenarios that seem quite worrying actually make little difference to net income, although most of these scenarios are likely to represent an interim point, not an endpoint, so this apparent steady state may well be illusory. Changing one variable can then make a difference of 20%.”

ALPSP is delighted to be working with Sue Thorn Consulting on the Open Access: Scenario Planning for Societies seminar on 20 March at the Royal College of Pathologists in London. It is an opportunity for our society members to share in Sue's expertise as she introduces delegates to the concept of using scenario planning to model potential changes to journal income.

Sue will be joined on the day by ALPSP Chief Executive, Audrey McCulloch, Caroline Black from The Biochemical Society at Portland Press, Victoria Gardner from Taylor & Francis, Judith Willetts, CEO of the British Society of Immunology, and Jane Winters from the Institute for Historical Research, for panel discussions that will explore what societies may be able to do to deal with any potential drop in their income.

The day will be held under Chatham House rules and will be interactive, with delegates encouraged to bring forward particular issues for discussion. Book now on the ALPSP website where full details are available.

Is the journal brand dead? Marketing in an open access world

Tim Redding, Nature Publishing, talks journal brands

In November, ALPSP held one of our most successful seminars in 2012 - Beyond the Rhetoric: New opportunities in open access. Tim Redding, Head of Marketing for BioPharma, Life and Physical Sciences at Nature Publishing provided some insights into branding.

He articulated access to research is universal  and it is the top tier journals with large circulations that have lost out. With all journals, whatever their tier, you now have to woo authors. The circulation argument no longer works. There are a number of factors that need to be taken care of when considering your organisation or journal brand.

Article level metrics are vital. Ideally you will have a metrics button on each article. You need to focus on service: from time to publication through to ease of submission and discoverability. Reviewers and editorial boards are advocates for the journal. They are just as key as authors, so treat them accordingly. Happy reviewers are needed for rapid publication and to meet authors' service level expectations. Deal with them fairly and efficiently and consider recognition of their contribution. Frontiers puts reviewer names on papers giving more credit to what the reviewers are contributing to the scientific process. Common courtesy doesn't go amiss: send thank you letters and acknowledgements.

Redding also outlined the difficulties with hybrid titles. You have to consider transparency of amount of content that is paid for and ensure you have fair pricing. On the flip side, you need to be clear about cost per download or cost per local citation. Ensure your business model is more fluid than before and consultation and transparency with libraries is paramount.

There are particular challenges with visibility. How can you get papers seen in mega journals? How do you ensure standout and how do authors reach outside their niche? Papers are seen if there is a network for them, regardless of how interesting or quirky they are.

Tools to use for visibility should include email. It is still powerful, if used wisely. Content marketing is good for authors and helps define the journal. Give authors tools to help themselves e.g. sharing boxes and social tools. Empower the author to promote their paper. Give them an email template and make it easy for them to share.

Unsurprisingly, Redding is a big advocate of using social media.  They have the following number of accounts for science engagement at Nature:

• 40 Twitter
• 24 Facebook
• 8 blogs
• 6 MySpace
• 8 LinkedIn

Social media provides tools for visibility. They received 120,000 'Likes' on Facebook for nature.com. As a network, Facebook can be the second largest referrer after Google. While it is a forum for engagement and comment, you need to keep an eye on it and actally engage, so don't just pop it up there and forget about it.

Social media works best when marketing (key messages, sales) and editorial (credibility) work together. It allows you to gain feedback and insight into your authors and readers. While audience can be vocal, you can turn this to your advantage by embracing it, and not ignoring it. With Twitter, autofeeds work, but nothing compares to editorial engagement.

Infographics: here's one he prepared earlier

But what kind of content works best? Pictures and video can help you and increase interaction on Facebook. This type of content encourages sharing which can go viral. Infographics can help to explain complex information and can help your content standout from the clutter. Good content can act as a talking point.

Paid search is worth considering as it is useful to grow audience quickly and cost effectively - particularly before indexing. Facebook drives page likes, Google AdWords is good for directing traffic and StumbleUpon is less than $0.10 per click. Also consider Reddit, Digg and LinkedIn.

Tracking can be difficult as there is no direct correlation, unlike subscriptions. But by tracking submission rate against marketing campaigns, you can show trends, albeit with a time lag. A guide to authors page views is also a good indicator of interest.

All these techniques form part of a long game. Build your brand and build your registrations; build web traffic and submissions will come. Use author marketing to full effect: survey all authors to find out why they submitted to your journal. This will not only help you define your brand, but will also provide good insight into your service levels as they are part of the author/academic/research community's most critical touch point with your brand.

Walter Landor, the father of modern branding, stated that brand is not just a name and logo, it has evolved. It is not just company telling you what the product is. Customers define brand just as much as company. Is the journal brand dead? Are journal brands still relevant? Why don't researchers just publish on WordPress? Redding believes it is about trust, reach and discoverability:

• brands give trust and authority and quickly allow you to identify content you need
• brands help authors ensure that the audience reading their research is the right one and valued
• brands give papers Google juice and discoverability.

He closed by saying in an online open access world, brands are still critical and far from dead. Long live the journal brand.

Is there a role for libraries in open access?

Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services at Imperial College, provided an illuminating overview of the impact of open access developments on the library at the recent Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar. Current challenges for the library community are manifold. There is an evolving role for libraries. Looking ahead, does open access offer a dead end or an open road for libraries?

At Imperial, their collection is 98% digital due to the subjects taught at the university. They unashamedly have very few books left in the collection. They have fantastic feedback in the student survey and from the institution, yet they don't 'own' anything in a traditional sense. Shorley even went so far as to propose that the concept of libraries and collections has gone. A move away from big deals and the demise of print, combined with the development of powerful discovery tools, is shrinking the traditional role of libraries.

With green open access, there is a rise in institutional repositories. This in turn creates a sophisticated metadata demand and the need for expert data management. Shorley pointed out that librarians are quite good at metadata. If they are sensible, they will grasp it, do it better and in new ways. With more journals saying they won't publish unless underlying data is open, there is an opportunity for librarians to help make sense of this.

With gold open access, there may be a role for librarians managing article processing charges (APCs). They are in a good position to give advice to researchers and understand budgetary constraints. At Imperial, they have a small budget - they are going to manage the transitional funding of c.£700k from RCUK - to facilitate the transition.

Is this a role that librarians could adopt in future? At Imperial, they have two people advising the researchers and administering the cash. This is something they are keen to keep: after all, librarians tend to be very good at processes, systems and being honest! Based on these insights, in an open access world, new responsibilities for libraries might focus around advocacy, bibliometrics, and in-house publishing. New skills will be critical to this approach.

For Shorley, the Finch report is fine as far as it goes: it has encouraged librarians to think about things differently, and has spurred RCUK to put its money where its mouth is. But she doesn't see how APCs solve anything. They put the money in the same hands, but in a different place. There must be a different way for universities to invest their money and what they do with how they publish their research.

Shorley closed with a note of caution: in the years of transition, it will be expensive, uncertain, disruptive, but well worth the pain. Science makes things better and this is a better way of doing science. Publishing skills are publishing skills. It's where they sit that's interesting. Whatever happens, they should be used to publish well.

Open Access eBooks: the next big thing?

Open access ebooks have historically been overlooked in favour of their journal big brother. But as Eelco Ferwerda, Director at Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN), made clear in his morning session at Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar last week, they are a growing part of the publishing family and could well be the next big thing.

There is potential to explore open access for monographs to improve discoverability, usage and impact, while reducing costs through shared infrastructure and digital formats. And the provisional findings form OAPEN-NL, one of the pilot projects researching OA monographs, indicate this is only just starting, but enough is happening to take note.

Recent open access developments in books include some emerging business models such as the Open Access Publishing in European Networks Library which aims to 'improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed open access publications from across Europe'.

Other developments in 2012 include the Directory of Open Access Books which now has over 1250 books from 35 publishers listed.

The Public Knowledge Project has set up a beta software Open Monograph Press project. This is being piloted by a number of presses including Athabasca University Press, Open Humanities Press and the University of Murcia Publications in Spain, amongst others. This project is designed to facilitate uptake of OA software and could work for smaller publishers who need to start this kind of activity.

In August, SpringerOpen Books was launched at the Beijing International Book Fair. This provides authors with the opportunity to publish a book in the sciences that is fully open access immediately, making it freely accessible to anyone online via SpringerLink. Ferwerda pointed out the significance of OA books if a company like Springer is doing it

There is increasing discussion of and development of resources on OA books: at September's Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association conference in Budapest, there was an afternoon dedicated to OA books. Other useful resources include the Open Access Directory: a list of information, terms and resources, including books and OA publishers.

Jeffrey Beal has established Beall’s List. This highlights predatory, open-access publishers looking for APCs to make a quick buck and 'unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit.' At the moment there are approximately 200 of them. This is a real concern for the industry.

Ferwerda provided a sobering reminder of why open access books should be considered: scholarly monographs have lost sustainability and relevance between 1980 and 2000 with sales to US libraries dropping, on average, from 2000 to 500. Publishers need for a new publishing model for academic books.

He profiled the publishers that are trying open access book publishing. They include large and small publishers in academic and non-academic disciplines, the latter comprising the largest part of the market with a lot of self-publishing. They are commercial and not-for-profit, from established organisations to start-ups, with institutional and professional markets that are professional and ‘scholar led’.

There are several models: from free to read (all rights reserved); to free to use and reuse (CC-BY); to non commercial and/or no derivatives. In terms of formats, it's a case of online versus downloads. From online reading only (HTML, e-reader formats) to PDF (personal copy) or both. OA book publishing motives range from front list publishing to a back list long tail approach. Some have a dedicated OA programme or service traditional monographs.

The business models include:

• hybrid and dual edition publishing: OA and print/PoD - all from the publisher - probably not enough in itself
• institutional subsidies
• library-press collaboration (e.g. Mpublishing/Michigan UP, Göttingen University Press)
• author-side publication fee (Springer, Amsterdam University Press, some research councils: FWF, NWO)
• library licensing/consortium (e.g. OpenEdition Freemium, Knowledge Unlatched).

Examples of institutional subsidies include the Australian National University Press which has an E-press publishing OA monographs with the costs covered by ANU’s information budget. In Canada, Athabasca University Press receives support from government grants and from Athabasca University which together provide 80% of their budget. It was interesting to note that 1% of the overall university budget is allocated to the press for scholarly communication.

OA publication funds in the UK will be provided by the Research Councils to pay for the OA processing fee and it is likely that Germany will have something like this as well. New models are being explored such as OpenEdition Freemium which is a licensing model for libraries (so they take part in the funding of publication platform). It has been introduced as a pilot scheme and is based on the combination of free content in HTML + premium content (PDF, e-pub) and services, with a revenue split model.

The Knowledge Unlatched pilot launches next year whereby libraries form a global consortium, use existing acquisitions budget, select individually and purchase collectively. The price is based on fixed or ‘first digital copy’ costs and libraries receive a value-added edition. Monographs are then published open access.

A Swedish project has been established to achieve open access using existing funds for books: ‘Towards quality controlled Open Access Monographs in Sweden - exploring the possibilities of a consortium based approach.’

Ferwerda's own organisation, the Open Access Publishing in European Networks, has developed a Library which aggregates a collection of OA books to provide quality assurance, increase visibility and retrievability. They have more than 30 publishers with over 1000 books listed. He differentiated from other infrastructure services available as:

• the OAPEN Library is a deposit service
• the Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service
• and the e-Depot National Library is a preservation service.

Other OAPEN projects include setting up limited publication funds for books (2-3 years) in different EU countries. They are looking to cooperation of research funders and publishers and want to measure the effect of OA on usage and sales to come up with guidelines and recommendations.

The pilots running in the UK and Netherlands are very similar. OAPEN-UK is managed by JISC Collections. There are five publishers in the UK including Taylor & Francis, Liverpool University Press, University of Wales Press, Berg and Palgrave Macmillan. They have come up against a reluctance from publishers to take part so at the moment there are 80 OA books in total from 13 publishers in the two countries.

They hope to measure the effects of OA on the following areas from this study:

1. Discovery: visits in Google Book Search - 100% versus 10% open
2. Usage: page views in Google Book Search 100% versus 10% open
3. Impact: Citations in Google Scholar
4. Sales

While this is the early stage of the project - and there are limitations in the scale of the study - there are some observations they have been able to make. OA for books works by some measures. It improves discovery with three times higher visits and eight times higher page views in Google Books. OA books were also downloaded six and a half more times (but this is downloads not sales). So far, OA has NOT impacted sales, although it is too early for final conclusions. They have also tried to monitor the costs of books with total average costs of open access titles at 5678 euros while print is at 6489 euros. It is clear that there are still substantial costs for editing, acquiring and reviewing books with both approaches.

Time and data will shed further light on the realities of open access books, but it is worth taking time to consider the different options.

ALPSP Conference Day 3: Giving away the farm

'Giving away the farm' was the penultimate session from this morning's programme. Chaired by Catherine Candea from OECD, the panel reflect on the pressure scholarly publishers are under to give away content. 

With six month embargoes being demanded and some publishers moving fully to giving away their output as soon as it’s published, what effect is this going to have on the industry?

Wim van der Stelt from Springer provided an relatively upbeat assessment of where they are at. It’s good that the Finch group recommended the gold OA route and acknowledged that content needs to be paid for. Meanwhile, Europe, as always, took the wrong decision and have come down on the side of green with a 6 months embargo or gold, but with the funding still insecure. 

Springer pioneered the hybrid journal and now have price adjustments for selected hybrid journals every year. They moved into real/full open access when they bought BioMed Central in 2008. Not only did it provide them with an open access portfolio, but also helped their systems and processes to be author oriented. Most importantly, they bought in the new culture enabling them to shift from legacy culture. Oh, and it also makes money.

Springer Open now has over 405 members in 46 countries. Their Open Access journals are in all area including economics, social sciences, humanities, etc and 15% of all their articles are already open access. Springer Open now includes books! 

His advice to publishers on what they can do included:

• provide hybrid option
• start full open access
• transfer subscription journals to open access
• look at sister journals
• sponsored journals
• new journals
• be creative with financial models for society journals

But don’t forget... open access is just a business model so keep on providing the service of validation, structuring and dissemination and don’t forget to develop new services.

Jose de Buerba from the World Bank took us through their transition from charging for publications to making everything free. They are the largest Development Agency worldwide with $35.2 billions in projects approved during FY12. With 10,000+ staff and 120 field offices (mostly in developing countries) their annual publishing outputs in 2011 were: 367 journal articles (75% published externally), 438 working papers, 146 books, 500+ other pieces of analytical work very diverse subjects.

The World Bank mission is to help generate a world free of poverty, but their conflict was between: mission or money. They have embraced green OA so they can be open about what they know (data and knowledge), what they do (operations and results), about how they work (partnerships for openness), and have open government (transparency, accountability).

This video puts it neatly:

The new currency is for development impact and their Open Knowledge Repository has had 140,000 downloads since September. The business model comprises: budget from the institution, publishing service fee, revenues from commercial activity from value added products.

Xavier Cazin from Immateriel.fr considered paid content vs paid comfort. They are one of the four ebook distributors in France. Distribution is still pertinent for their ebook market and it involves seeing all kinds of publishing offers based on the same content.

The certainties of print costs have gone and with digital content it has become difficult to understand what people are expecting on pricing. One trend they’ve seen as a distributor is that of people making a business out of refurbishing public domain content. Why does it sell? And why at that price?

He considered what customers are willing to pay for: 

• ease of access (where they are now)
• handy (readable with my current device/app)
• easy navigation through the content

And what are the reading rewards? A rich and well designed environment, content/curation appropriate to current needs and sharing functionalities. In his view, the product unit price should work to equation of ease of access + reading rewards = value. For the reader, content quality + authors reputation = content reputation. Based on this, the total revenue should be: product unit price x number of customers/readers with the former related to reading comfort and the latter to content reputation.

For anyone not clear on definitions of OA there’s an overview on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access