Managing the open access data deluge without going grey

Cameron Neylon: the OA data deluge

The final two sessions at ALPSP's Data, the universe and everything seminar reflected on the changing nature of data within an open access context and what needs to be taken into account when trying to cope with data.

Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director at PLOS, counselled delegates on 'Managing a (Different) Data Deluge'. Publishing is now a different business. Customer may look the same, but they act different and you have to think differently. Data is core to the value you give.

There's no sign of the growth trajectory of open access publishers slowing down. PLOS One on its own is 11% of the funded research papers output from the Wellcome Trust. PLOS One is 5% of the biomedical literature. PLOS One Publishes on average 100 papers per day. All the metadata they have comes from the authors and they don’t necessarily have accurate data on who they are or where they are based, so it gets complicated. This is happening on a large scale across scholarly communication services.

Neylon believes that the business of open access publishing is fundamentally different to subscription publishing. With a traditional subscription business you have a pool of researchers and institutions. Advertising and reprints come from third parties. This is a distribution model and not so much about where the research has come from.

With an APC-funded open access business it is a service or push model. The customer is the author at some level. Increasingly (in UK for example) this is coming through the funder. This means that suddenly all these players have an interest) which they didn’t have before). A third model is the funders directly funding infrastructure (e.g. eLife, PDB, Genbank etc).

The customer = institution, the author, the funder. They have questions about how much? How many articles have you published? What's the quality of service? Are there compliance guarantees (this is relatively simple in the UK, but tricky in North America or the EU). They want repository deposit. And all this has to happen at scale. You need to track who funded the research. This means that the market is being commoditized. It also means that the market is smaller, with space to make profit smaller.

Neylon feels that if we do not do this collectively, the whole system will collapse and we’ll be left with one or two big players. Using identifiers, capturing data up front and making it easy for the author to include the correct data up front are key to tackling the issue of the data deluge we face. If we don’t will have lost the opportunities. It’s about shared data identifiers and making them at the core of your systems.

He reflected on the particular challenge that smaller publishers face if they are to survive. They need to share infrastructure across multiple organisations. ALPSP is well placed to support and advise suppliers that smaller publishers need ORCID and FundRef etc up front.

Ann Lawson, Senior Director of Publisher Relations and EBSCOAdvantage Europe, focused on the various challenges for managing open access data without going grey. EBSCO see the impact of data from their own perspective (with 27 million articles in the EBSCO database products) and also from the perspectives of their client publishers and institutions. They have their own ID systems, but also input any partner or publisher IDs which results in 485 data elements per subscription record.

Ann Lawson: trying not to go grey

In a recent research report drawn from their own data, they've noted that large publishers are getting larger: in 1994 the top 10 publishers were responsible for 19% by value. In 2009, the top 10 publishers represented 50% by value. And in 2013, the top 10 publishers accounted for 68% by value.

In the immediate future, EBSCO see a mixed market of Gold, Green and Subscriptions within scholarly communications. However, there will be an impact on transactions from individual journals, to big deals, to small gold open access APCs. The impact on subscription agents is challenging as they have to keep on doing what they do, plus play in the open access area. There is a challenge of scale and transparency for everyone.

What will these market trends mean for data? There is a new cycle for open access which impacts on the need for data. This includes measures of value for money, speed to publication, reach and impact, reporting, funding sources, and the approval process.

There are data issues for the institution: who are active authors? What funding sources are available? Which funders demand what compliance? Which journals are compliant? What happens at school/research group? How much does the APC cost? Who paid what, with what effect? What reporting is needed for whom? Compliance – and deposit in repositories.

The institution workflow is at the heart of the data flow:

• Policies
• Advocacy 
• OA request form 
• Acceptance email 
• Funding pot 
• Copy of invoice 
• Article and DOI 
• CC licence 
• VAT 
• Approvals 
• Records 
• Reporting and analysis.

The reality is that many publisher systems do not have the ability to adapt their systems. Current points of tension include: money management, complex workflows, and author involvement. Discovery is key, but can be tricky with hybrid journals so discovery at article level is essential. NISO is helping, but there is more work to be done in this and many other areas of data.

'Scientifically sound' What does that mean in peer review? Cameron Neylon asks...

Cameron Neylon, Director of Advocacy at the Public Library of Science, challenged the audience at The Future of Peer Review seminar.

He suggested that if we're going to be serious about science, we should be serious about applying the tools of science to what we (the publishers) do.

What do we mean when we say 'scientifically sound'? Science works most of the time, so we tend not to question it because of this. Should we review for soundness, as a pose to reviewing for soundness and importance.

How can we construct a review process that is scientifically sound? The first thing you would do in a scientific process is to look at the evidence, but Neylon believes the evidence is almost totally lacking for peer review. There are very few good studies. Those that exist show frightening results.

We need to ask questions about the costs and the benefits. Rubriq calculated there are 15 million hours of lost time reviewing papers that were rejected in 2012. (This video post illustrates the issues they raise). This is equivalent to around $900m if you calculate reviewers' time. How can we tell this is benefitting science? We need to decide whether we would be better spending that money and time on doing more research or improving the process.

Neylon asked what would the science look like to assess the effectiveness of peer review? There are some hard questions to ask. We'd need very large data sets and interventions including randomised control trials. But there are other methods that can be applied if data is available. Getting data about the process that you are confident with is at the heart of problem.

The obvious thing is to build a publishing system for the web. Disk space is pretty cheap and bandwidth can be managed. Measure what can be measured. Reviewers are pretty good at checking technical validity of papers. Importance is more nebulous. Taking this approach, Neylon believes that you end up with something that looks like PLOS One.

The growth curve for PLOS One is steep as it tackles these issues. In addition to this growth trajectory, 85% of papers are cited after 2 years: well above average for STM literature. There still remains a challenge of delivering that content to the right people at the right time. Technical validity depends on technical checks. PLOS One has six pages of questions to be answered before it goes to an editor. How much could we validate computationally? Where are computers better than people?

What has changed since similar talks 5 years ago? New approaches that were being discussed then are happening now (e.g. Rubriq). The outside world is much more sceptical about what happens with public funding. According to Neylon, one thing is for sure when it comes to peer review. The sciences need the science.

These notes were compiled from a talk given by Cameron Neylon at ALPSP's The Future of Peer Review seminar (London, November 2013) under CC-BY attribution. Previous presentations by Cameron can be found on his SlideShare page.

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference. Data, data, data!

This is the third in a series of reflections on the 2012 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, book now to secure your place at the 2013 conference.

Data, data, data

Though not an explicit theme of the conference, speaker after speaker emphasized the need for scholarly publishers to be on top of the information they have, or should have, about the behaviours of their users and customers. Mark Ware enjoined us to use extreme analytics to make sense of the customer and user data we have, indispensable for business-to-business companies but equally important fort the rest of us. Tom Taylor, talking about global consortia and library markets, suggested that consortia deals continue to be healthy and renewed provided we understand the local factors across the world that influence decisions: investment or retrenchment in education and research, general economic climate, open or closed consortia, political stability or lack of it and, of course, direct customer contact and service.

Matt Rampone in the mobile session urged publishers to invest in analysis of their readers. Forcefully, Charlie Rapple encouraged them to get to know their audiences, articulate questions they want answered before doing market research: what are the users actually doing, what devices do they use, what are their problems: evidence-based strategy formulation!

And, as Tracy Gardner of Simon Inger Consulting reminded everyone, there is the fourth scholarly publishing survey, currently in progress, that will be required reading when it comes out.

Open access

The Budapest Open Archives Initiative is 10 years old. Pressure from researchers, funding bodies and governments on publishers to open up access to their information has been intense and has even spilled over into the daily press. Although open access journals are not new, progress has been slow as publishers struggle with the new business models required to make sense of them. The green OA model – author deposit in institutional or other repositories after an embargo period – has been most in evidence, with funding agencies increasingly mandating this. The main argument here then is over the embargo period, ranging from 6 to 18 months.

This is the model chosen by the World Bank for its publications, a relatively small part of the work of the world’s largest development agency, so the business impact of open access is not too severe. For Springer, one of the largest STM publishers, the situation is quite different. Nevertheless, Springer has been moving gradually towards green open access, as Wim van der Stelt explained, helped by the acquisition of BioMed Central in 2008. Springer Open has 100 journals across all subject areas, has 405 members in 46 countries, includes books, and 15% of Springer articles are now open access. The embargo period is 12 months. Price adjustments are made even for selected hybrid journals depending on their OA content. Prices may go up as well as down and they “do make money”.

“Don’t forget: Open Access is just a business model, so keep up with your traditional services.” Wim van der Stelt

Wim advised doubters to be courageous and provide hybrid options, transfer subscription journals to open access, start sister journals and sponsored journals and launch fully open access new journals; also be creative with financial models for society journals, for example reducing or forgiving charges to members for one or more of their papers.

Gold Open Access – fully open access from publication, with authors paying a publication charge – has been slower to get off the ground although there are some early gold OA journals that are now quite well established. Three things have helped to accelerate development. Firstly there has been a gradual increase in the publication charge to a level that now makes business sense. Secondly, some funding agencies have agreed to pay the charge out of research grants. Finally, governments have slowly begun to shift policies, most notably the British government which accepted the recommendations of the Finch report, supporting gold OA, earlier this year, The European Union - green with six month embargo or gold without agreement on funding - has yet to be as bold, and things are not moving very rapidly in the USA either.

Whatever the outcome, the social sciences will move at different speed than the physical ones because of different funding arrangements.  The transition will also bring new administrative issues for author publication charges by institutions as the system migrates, particularly with authors from different institutions.

Freemium: a new business model?

Disruptive as the open access model may appear, as yet it has not yet led to fundamental change in the economics of scholarly publishing. As Mary Waltham pointed out, E-Biomed which morphed into PubMed Central was launched in 1999 to fierce opposition from publishers. Yet progress towards full open access has been quite slow and, as Thomas Taylor reminded us, the subscription based consortia model continues to be strong. At the same time, Cameron Neylon cautioned, in the long term there isn’t much money in controlling access to content, but there is a lot of money in tools and platforms to enable access. This is an opportunity for publishers to produce premium services.

How this might work was illustrated by Xavier Cazin of Immateriél, drawing on actual e-book sales experiences in France. Immateriél  has found that public domain books often sell at a price, OECD books sell at £11.99 through a bookshop even though they are free from the OECD website and discount offers bring in extra revenue even though the content value does not change. What customers are willing to pay for is ease of access: easy from where I am, readable on my current device, easy navigation through content. They are also prepared to pay for reading rewards: rich and well designed environment, content and curation appropriate to my current needs and sharing functionalities. The two combine to give ‘reading comfort’ which relates directly to the price people are prepared to pay. It follows that there is a job to do for publishers: find out exactly, for your content and your customers, what you need to do to produce products and services that provide this reading comfort.

The model of free+premium = freemium is a combination of a large, addressable audience whose needs we identify through analytics, to whom we offer free versions with a clear value but also premium offers with added value.

Kurt Paulus, 2012
Book now for the 2013 conference.