Open Access in the Humanities: the need for a balanced approach

Thomas Parisot, Institutional Relations Officer at Cairn.info, discussed open access in the humanities at the Beyond the Rhetoric: New opportunities in open access seminar.

He provided an international perspective including some interesting statistics from France where peer review journals in humanities and social sciences are worth 17 million euros each year; collective works of research 5 million euros; research books 60
 million euros; essays 111 million euros; general interest journals 5 million; and the average annual income of a journal is 8,500 euros.

With perhaps the best line of the day - 'open access, not open excess' - Thomas outlined the key challenges for the French market in terms of OA.

The big debate is around whether or not one size fits all. The article life cycle in humanities and social sciences is different to the sciences. with only 18 % of the interest raised in research institutions related to articles published the last 12 months. This difference between disciplines should prompt concerted reflection and actions among stakeholders. There have been on-going discussions with policy makers in France to support publication diversity, and an OA in HE
working group was launched in Belgium, including publishers and libraries which hopes to define a reasonable mandate policy in open repositories.

He outlined the challenge of definition: what is a publicly funded research? If a philosopher works in a public university, but also, from time to time, for specialised newspapers, is an essayist writing an article in a peer-review journal and all this is based on several years of reflection and discussions with colleagues. If he publishes a book on the same subject one year later, what is it open access to? How can you define the access? It is difficult to assess what can be publicly funded or not. Another issue when trying to explain the differences between the humanities and social sciences when compared to STM to policy makers is the lack of data. They are trying to see what kind of data they can share - and also research and develop - to inform the decisions being made.

They are developing a range of new initiatives at Cairn including an international edition which will provide an interface in English enabling non-French speaking scholars to discover content of interest published in French. A platform has been launched currently, Heloise, developed in partnership between the French publishers association and CNRS, to inform authors of embargo periods defined by French publishers in the humanities and social sciences. They have also joined with a range of partners including a national radio station to debate the issue and raise awareness with an event planned for 15th February 2013.

Models can be probably be adapted but time, data, effort and caution is needed when it comes to the fragile economy of publications in the Humanities.

BMJ Group launches six specialty editions of its open access title BMJ Open

The international medical publisher BMJ Group has launched six specialty editions of its innovative online journal BMJ Open (bmjopen.com/editions) to coincide with Open Access Week.*

The editions showcase BMJ Open’s specialist research, and will initially cover dermatology, HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, neurology, obstetrics & gynaecology, and oncology.
 
BMJ Open, which launched in February 2011, is BMJ Group’s first online general medical journal dedicated solely to publishing open access research.
 
All its research, supplementary files, and peer reviewers' reports are fully and openly available online. Underlying data, where available, is linked to in open repositories, such as Dryad.

To date, BMJ Open has published more than 600 original research papers and protocols, many of which have attracted considerable attention from academics, healthcare professionals, and the media.
 
High impact studies have included a technique to pick up outbreaks of hospital acquired infections more quickly from Oxford University; the potential link between sleeping pills and cancer from California’s Scripps Clinic; and unique research on the wellbeing and quality of life of people with locked-in syndrome in France.

Commenting on the launch of the new editions, BMJ Open’s Editor in Chief, Dr Trish Groves said: “BMJ Open has grown rapidly in reputation and content, and we're delighted to be able to increase still further the visibility of the journal's specialty research in these new editions.”
 
She added: “The title is now a natural home for open access medical research from all fields."
 
Contact:
Stephanie Burns, BMJ Group Press Office, London, UK
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7383 6920
Email: sburns@bmjgroup.com
 
Notes for editors:
*Open Access Week (Oct 22-28) is a global event now in its sixth year, which offers an opportunity for academics and researchers to learn about the potential benefits of open access, share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and help make open access common practice in scholarship and research.
http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about

Why 'author pays' publishing might be a good idea...

It may surprise some people to learn that I am supportive of the notion of 'author pays' publishing (or more correctly, of publishing models supported by author-side payments since the actual cash often comes from funding bodies or other sources).

It won't surprise anyone to know that I have some caveats:

Firstly, publishers should be left alone to determine their own business models - those that are best for them and for the communities that they serve - and this means being free of, for example, interference from governments which pushes them in one direction or another.

Secondly, the actual level of fees that journals would need to charge is likely to be very much higher than the typical fees currently seen in the marketplace. My [wholly unscientific, so you'll have to trust me on this] experience would suggest that fees would need to be many thousands of dollars (but more research like that undertaken by the Research Information Network is needed).

Thirdly, it is pretty clear that as things stand adequate funds are not yet available to cover these costs for all disciplines. It may be possible in time to divert funds away from library acquisition budgets to pay author-side publication charges (no, I'm afraid that any monies 'saved' from cancelled journal subscriptions won't get used for all of those books you've been wanting to buy...') but that's not going to happen overnight...

Fourthly, and related to my third point, there is the issue of the differences in funding from one discipline of academic endeavour to the next and the impact that this has on the affordability of 'author pays'. Whilst I admire greatly the clarity of the Wellcome Trust's statement that they see dissemination as part of the research and are therefore willing to pay 1-2 per cent of their research budget to fund that dissemination, that only holds for well-funded subjects where research grants are relatively large. The absolute cost of dissemination is likely to be broadly the same irrespective of discipline but in subjects with modest research grants like mathematics or ecology the percentage cost of dissemination will be much higher than 1 or 2 per cent - perhaps even exceeding 100 per cent. So the dissemination could well cost more than the entire research budget.

Fifth, it is very important to ensure that the mechanism of publishing is accessible to everyone and that means that in an 'author pays' publishing system those that can afford to pay have to subsidize those that cannot (this happens in the subscription world through organizations like INASP).

Sixth, it is not a sin for publishers to make a profit (surplus, call it what you will...). Profit is an incentive for good publishing, results in innovation, and means that publishers have funds available to invest in the future of scholarly communication (journal publishing is a model industry in terms of adoption of new technologies and it is just grossly and ludicrously wrong to suggest that they have been slow to embrace the Internet, for example).

Now, before this turns into a version of Monty Python's 'What have the Romans ever done for us' in reverse, let me explain why I think 'author pays' publishing could be a good thing for some publishers.

A) Benefit to the advancement of knowledge
I don't think you can argue against the fact that Open Access could bring benefits to some disciplines for example if the whole corpus of literature was open to interrogation by data and text mining tools. If you want a compelling case for this, talk to Peter Murray-Rust (or let him talk at you!) and find out about the interesting stuff the chemists are doing...

B) Scalability of income
I've been involved with running a couple of journal publishing businesses in my time and one of the problems we had was that we couldn't raise the price of the journal fast enough to cover the costs of the extra papers we were publishing. We managed to increase the quality, and kept increasing the rejection rates of the journals, but there were still more and more high-quality papers to be published. A model where the income scales more or less directly with the number of papers you are publishing therefore seems like a good thing (I also think that submission, rather than acceptance, fees are an interesting concept but that will have to be the subject of a future post...)

C) Small publishers with no sales force
Again referring to my own experience of running a smallish publishing house, there was no way that I could deploy an international sales force trotting around the globe polishing the doorknobs of librarians and selling our wares. Our relationship with the librarian community was therefore pretty much non-existent. However, we had great visibility among, and relationships with, the authoring community who really appreciated what we were doing for them... so if they paid the bills (as long as they had the money, of course) I would have been quite happy.

D) Eliminates motives for piracy
This, I think, is a big issue and one which is only going to get bigger. In-copyright academic content is increasingly appearing illegally on peer-to-peer file sharing sites and it is virtually impossible for the publishing industry to police this. At the very least it is very expensive. Open access does eliminate the motive for piracy and may, in the very long way, be a pragmatic approach to stopping piracy. I bet the music industry wishes it had the equivalent of an 'author pays' option.

Incidentally, there are a number of less-than-ideal artefacts that are shared by both the subscription and 'author pays' model. In both publishers expend time and money dealing with articles that are rejected and so the higher your rejection rate, the higher your costs. I don't believe that this is an incentive to publish poor articles and the quality of a publication and its brand are going to continue to be very important.