Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 3 - State of play for journals open access

Fred Dylla from the American Institute of Physics

This is the third in a series of reflections on the 2013 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, make sure you save the date for this year's conference on 10-12 September 2014.

State of play for journals open access

So you thought journals open access was all sorted? Not if you attended the session on negotiating with governments chaired by Fred Dylla of AIP. Fred has been closely involved in negotiations about open access models in the USA, Steve Hall of IOPP, as a member of the Finch working group is similarly placed in the UK and Eric Merkel-Sobotta of Springer filled in the picture for the European Union. The aspiration is familiar: everyone wants research results to reach the widest possible audience, and even increasingly acknowledges that this wish has to be paid for in a viable way. The contention is over the How?

In quick succession in the UK in mid 2012, the Finch Report recommended Gold open access as the preferred long-term option, agreed by all stakeholders with Green as the route to this destination. It also made recommendations about funding mechanisms, ways to increase access to the 96% of research published overseas, and experimentation on open access to monographs. The government accepted the report in principle, with Gold as the aim, but no extra money. Job done? Not so fast. Research Councils UK initially, though it is said with inadequate consultation, supported Gold and payment of APCs, but had to retreat, being out of step with what appeared to be happening in other countries, and was criticised by Parliament’s Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, though the latter did not escape criticism itself.

“Throwing things against the wall and hoping you’ll be able to clean up the mess later on seems a poor substitute for evidence-based reasoning” David Crotty, Scholarly Kitchen

The Higher Education Funding Council for England is consulting and appears to be veering towards Green. University policies are still evolving and there is no consistency within the Russell Group of universities, with Gold being favoured by only a very small minority. Most publishers are offering Gold as an option but a pragmatic approach seems the order of the day.

“Status of implementation in UK: Green is the new Gold” Steve Hall

Steve Hall from Institute of Physics Publishing

Let’s go to Brussels then: the Commission’s Horizon 2020 aims to optimize the impact of publicly funded scientific research on economic growth, better and more efficient science and improved transparency, with open access as the general principle, and a mix of Gold and Green: all principles but no practical implementation so far.

In Germany an initial 18-month consultation came out for Gold but an alliance of small publishers, Börsenverein (organizer of Frankfurt Book Fair) and large funders scuppered the initiative. There has been some progress in other countries but it has been difficult to approach the momentum achieved in the UK and USA.

There is some urgency at the European Union level as there will be a new Commission within about a year, and the work may have to start all over again if no solid consensus emerges before then. Eric Merkel-Sobotta urged all his listeners and their associations – ALPSP, STM and others – to build up much more of a presence in Brussels and articulate a coherent argument for the place of publishers in the value-added chain, to defeat the still current cliché of the greedy, rip-off publisher.

“Continue to engage constructively in the debate and increase the volume” 
Eric Merkel-Sobotta

By now the atmosphere in the great marquee was perhaps a little subdued: here we are all ready for new business models for journal publishing, but why is it so difficult? Fred Dylla’s review of the US experience was perhaps a little more positive. There is a clear policy on the part of the Office of Science and Technology Policy for increasing access to the results of federally funded research. Funding agencies have been asked to come up with proposals for achieving this, due about now. Most agencies have not yet publicly responded though the National Institutes for Health are ahead of the game with the offer to open up PubMedCentral to other agencies.

Eric Merkel-Sobotta from Springer

About 70 publishers together with CrossRef have offered the option of CHORUS, a multi-agency, multi-publisher portal and information bridge that identifies articles and provides access, enhances search capabilities and long-term preservation, with no cost to the funding agencies. The universities have offered SHARE, an approach scaled up from existing repositories. This offers potential for collaboration with CHORUS.

Fluid is perhaps the best word to describe the state of play in respect of public access policy, with a fairly systematic approach in the USA, some hope in the UK and head scratching in the rest of the EU. Expect another session at this conference a year from now. Meanwhile, keep up to date with posts on the Scholarly Kitchen and elsewhere.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference 2013: Part 2 - So what about books?

The Belfry, location of the ALPSP 2013 conference

This is the second in a series of reflections on the 2013 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,save the date for the 2014 conference.

So what about books?

Debates during the last couple of decades have been driven largely by journals and journal-related innovations, with books seeming more like an afterthought at times. They are of course a core component of scholarly publishing, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and it seemed this year that thinking and experimenting about them has shifted more to centre stage. Not only have e-books firmly arrived but so has exploration of open access for books, about a decade after journal publishers first started worrying about it.

After Huw Alexander of Sage entertainingly showed us that the science fiction writers were way ahead of us in their thinking – of course they don’t need to slavishly follow business models – he led us through some of the uncharted territory. The threats of piracy, Amazon, open access are there but we are learning quickly about platforms, pricing models, advertising and mixed media, though we lack standards for sales data that should inform our thinking. However, the ‘age of convergence’ is upon us: devices will align, formats will standardize and new approaches, e.g. selling through content hubs, will emerge.

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” William Gibson

Despite the ‘terrorism of short termism’ – what to do on Monday, the pressure of the bottom line – some signposts are becoming clearer. Is one sold copy preferable to 10 usages, is ownership preferable to access, is there mileage in subscription or usage based models? What about the partners of the future, not just our current peers but Amazon, Google or even coffee shops as digital outlets (look around you next time you pop out for a cuppa).

What is a book, anyway, asked Hazel Newton of Palgrave Macmillan? The current terminologies were coined in the age when print technologies were dominant. Digital content does not discriminate by number of pages or screens or total length, especially when memory is cheap. It is also far less limited by the time constraints that print technologies impose in the form of publication delays and it allows publishers to stay ahead of the game in rapidly moving fields.

“Constantly question why things are the way they are” Hazel Newton (NB: some quotations are paraphrased though close to the original!)

Breaking the rules, Palgrave’s Pivot series positions itself squarely between the journal article and the full-scale monograph. It's publishing within 12 weeks of acceptance and offers itself as digital collections for libraries, individual ebooks for personal use or digitally-produced print editions. Despite the perceived conservatism of academia, Pivot has so far published more than 100 titles; Hazel considers HEFCE now to be more flexible in what formats it will accept as evidence for the Research Excellence Framework.

This way for open access

But open access for books?

I thought you’d never ask; well Caren Milloy, head of projects at JISC Collections, is questioning editors, sales and marketing and systems people in about 10 humanities and social science publishers about their views and concerns over open access publishing.

The OAPEN-UK project is still under way and it is clear that a lot of internal corporate education will be necessary, all current processes will need to be reviewed, publisher project teams need to start work now and involve all parts of the business. Don’t wait for standards to be developed but think about them now, don’t assume OA for books will follow the journal model and develop a clear idea of what success would look like.

“Open access is here: the need is to invent and develop sustainable business models” Catherine Candea

Three speakers in a session on ‘Making open pay’ chaired by Catherine Candea of OECD gave three different approaches designed primarily for books in the social sciences and humanities. Frances Pinter, founder of Knowledge Unlatched, had no doubt that open access business models will be prominent for books albeit it will take time for these to take root. The model for Knowledge Unlatched is one of upfront funding of origination costs complemented by income from usage, licensing, mandates, value-added services and other options yet to emerge.

Unlike the Author Processing Charge (APC) of the journal Gold OA model, the fixed cost in Knowledge Unlatched would be covered by title fees paid by members of a consortium of libraries, thus ‘unlatching’ publication of titles by members of a publisher consortium in a Creative Commons licensed PDF version. Publishers will then be free to exploit other versions of the title, or subsidiary rights for profit. Knowledge Unlatched provides the link between the library and publisher consortia. A pilot is about to be launched, with 17 publishers so far taking part and a target of 200 libraries to ensure that the title fee is capped at $1,800 per library.

“It’s a numbers game, so look at the margins: lots of little contributions, not just one big one” Pierre Mounier

‘Freemium’ is the model for the platform Open Edition Books outlined by its associate director Pierre Mounier. The platform is run by the Centre for Open Electronic Publishing, Paris and financed by the French national research agency in partnership with, so far, some 30 international publishers. Books are published open access in HTML, but value-added premium services are charged for. These may include other versions such as PDF or ePub, data supplies, dashboard and so on, licensed to libraries. The mix between free and premium may change as library needs change; the most important thing is to keep in touch with the libraries to understand their changing requirements. So far 800 books are included and there is an ambitious annual launch programme. Currently over 60 libraries are subscribers. One-third of revenues goes to the platform and two-thirds to the publisher.

It's a book, but not as you know it.

Also Gold OA in concept, but in a different context, is the publishing of the Nordic Council of Ministers described by Niels Stern. The Council’s publishing model is already OA in the sense that the Council commissions research and is then invoiced for publishing services. That income, however, is not secured for eternity and may be subject to political constraints, so Niels and his colleagues went through a classical business analysis.

They concluded that digital distribution provides most opportunities for change. It also has the potential to offer most value to its customers - politicians, researchers and government officials - ensuring the impact of public money, visibility through flexible access and accountability for money spent.. Open Access was the key to unlocking these benefits, ensuring future loyalty from the customer base and hence future revenue streams.

The conclusions from their approach will be familiar from different contexts:

• Keep an open mind: stop copying previous behaviours. 
• Revisit your arenas constantly. 
• Zoom in on your target audiences and find new needs by listening. 
• But don’t cogitate forever; take the courage to act!

The model is true Gold. It pays because it is building an organizational asset, with your customers solidly behind you.

Rapporteur
Kurt Paulus, Bradford-on-Avon

Access to Research pilot launched

Minister for Universities & Science,
David Willetts, addresses the audience

Last night saw the launch of the Access to Research pilot at The Library at Deptford Lounge in Lewisham, South London. The pilot, a two year project in the UK to provide free access to research via computers in public libraries, was launched by the Publishers Licensing Society with guest speaker, the Rt Hon David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science.

The two year pilot has over 1.5 million articles from 8,400 scholarly and academic journals available in 79 local authority libraries. The initiative is supported by trade bodies the Publishers Association and the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers, as well as the Society of Chief Librarians and technical partner ProQuest.

Janene Cox, President of the Society
of Chief Librarians

The project will allow users to search and read scholarly research articles while in the library. It is anticipated it will be of particular relevance to small business, students and special interests, where the person doesn't have access to an institutional library.

Libraries and publishers are being encouraged to sign up to boost the number of articles that included and to increase the number of locations where the content can be accessed.

'The government believes in open access, but understands there is a cost to publication.' David Willetts

David Willetts was joined by PLS Chief Executive Sarah Faulder, President, Society of Chief Librarians, Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association and Phill Hall, project contact at technical partner ProQuest.

Sarah Faulder, PLS Chief Executive

'This is an important initiative and working across organisations in a partnership effort has involved compromise and risks to make this pilot launch.' Janene Cox

ALPSP is delighted to support the project through promoting participation to our members as well as access to our journal Learned Publishing. Further information about the initiative is available on the Access to Research microsite.

News coverage to date includes articles on the BBC, The Bookseller, PR Newswire,

 

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.

Data linking systems: publishers’ experiences

Three publishers - Royal Society of Chemistry, Taylor & Francis, and the British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery - shared their experiences of data linking systems at last week's Data, the Universe and Everything seminar.

Sarah Day, Royal Society of Chemistry

Sarah Day, Senior Marketing Manager, CRM and Customer Systems at the Royal Society of Chemistry outlined how they integrated Ringgold into Salesforce, their cloud based CRM system.

The RSC data model includes: activity, contact, account, opportunity, campaign, and campaign member. Salesforce is customisable so they integrated Ringgold into their Account function. They use Ringgold for initial aggregation and import of data into Salesforce, for improving data quality, for external links (to related systems) and for bringing SCV data back into Salesforce. 

Before they implemented Salesforce they had to do manual and fuzzy checks on a range of spreadsheets used for sales leads. One challenge was that they hadn’t fully integrated Ringgold so they had to copy and paste to get hierarchy of institutions. Sales team now have to apply the Ringgold ID otherwise they can’t close or apply revenue to an account. This has proved to be an effective way to drive compliance.

Ringgold is the central identifier source for Salesforce, MasterVision (SCV), THINK (Subscription Management), authentication engine. There are, however, some challenges. The data entry team have to understand the data (e.g. understand phonetic spelling for Japanese or Chinese English pronunciation, etc). You may also have good reasons for inconsistent identifiers in your systems (Salesforce rolls up to a parent organisation, access/permissions may be different, etc).

Sarah Wright, Taylor & Francis

Sarah Wright, Customer Services Director for Taylor & Francis outlined the benefits of linking systems from a customer service point of view. 

Customers expect answers and service instantly. Automated systems help. With traditional systems, a customer order is taken, the payment is processed and you send the issue of the journal. But how can you use the same system to deliver access to online content? 

Print copies are straight forward: you post one to a particular address (e.g. Christ Church College). But if an institutional subscription has been purchased for online access this needs to go to Christ Church College, Queens College, the Department of Economics, in fact the whole university. 

Once you factor in duplications in the system due to different parts of the supply chain having different forms of data for the same place, it's a complex picture. 

As a result, they chose Ringgold ID. They have two levels so they can see they both link to the university one. Although institutional identifiers are great, they don’t always reflect how they sell to their customers (e.g. global corporate companies, consortia, etc). They can tell the system that online access should go at parent level. This has been a big success with benefits including: increased usage, reduction in complaints, improved service, visibility and reporting as well as project transfer. It is now ingrained in daily processes and reviewed all the time – so not a one-off project. Keeping data clean allows them to get the right content to the right customer at the right time.

Peter Richardson, Managing Director at the British Editorial Society of Bone and Joint Surgery, outlined the problem they faced: legacy systems - such as old and inflexible subscription systems and the author database - that do not communicate.

They have data ‘black holes’ such as new leads stored in their email marketing client Adestra that aren't updated if/when the lead was converted. There might also be poor data management by individuals and an over-reliance on external subscription data which may sometimes be of poor quality.

Peter Richardson: plugging data black holes

There were also external factors such as opportunities to link data together using identifiers such as Ringgold or ORCID. Users expectations drive the need for better data linking systems as does the drive for better customer service and more efficiencies. 

They have tackled these challenges with a brand new subscription fulfilment system - Myriad - which went live in August 2013. Data about customers is held separately from individual subscription records,  with an improved data intake. 

DataSalon will pull everything together, including data previously poured into ‘black holes’. DataSalon will also pull together customer, subscription information with the Ringgold identifier, leads, authors,  OVID customers etc. They have a greatly improved ‘dashboard’ and enhanced marketing opportunities. 

They hope to achieve better capture of marketing data (demographics, campaign codes, etc) in Myriad, have accurate addresses and data (end user info, mailing address) and better targeted campaigns as a result. Myriad is up and running and the project with DataSalon is just getting under way. They will know more in a couple of months, but believe they are on the right track.

Kirsty Meddings on New Metadata, New Identifiers: CrossMark and FundRef

Kirsty Meddings from CrossRef

Kirsty Meddings, Product Manager at CrossRef, updated the delegates at ALPSP's recent data seminar on 'New Metadata, New Identifiers: CrossMark and FundRef.'

CrossRef is a non-profit membership association with over 4,000 publishers and organisations who are members. Traditional metadata includes title, volume, contributors, issue, publication date, ISSN, ISBN, URL, DOI and first page information. New metadata elements include: funder name, correction, award number, license reference, ORCID, publication history and retraction.

Funder information is increasingly important. Often it is a free text definition and there are issues of consistency even when marked up with tagging and names (e.g. NIH, N.I.H., etc). Why does this matter? Funding bodies can’t easily track published output of funded work. It isn’t easy to report which articles result from research supported by specific funders, making it really difficult to report and analyse. This is why FundRef was launched. They are exploring tying together funder IDs with Ringgold and an overlaying ISNI ID.

They are looking at the with Licence_Ref element for updates and changes, erratum corrigendum, updates, enhancements, withdrawals, retractions, new editions and policy updates. As Meddings noted, we’ve come a long way from the days of product recall, but there is still some way to go before we get it right.

Laurel L Haak on ORCID Author Identifiers

Laurel L. Haak is Executive Director of ORCID. She provided an outline of what they do and new developments for 2014 at the Data, the universe and everything seminar.

ORCID is an independent non-profit organisation supported by member fees. They run an open registry of unique identifiers for researchers and APIs for the community to embed identifiers in research systems and workflows. Data marked public by researchers is published annually by ORCID under a CC0 waiver. ORCID code is available on their GitHub open source repository and they support community efforts to develop tools and services.

ORCID is for anyone who contributes to scholarly communication – not just academics or researchers. They capture and make more public what these contributions are, particularly for peer review.

There are multiple contribution types including:

• Funding
• Publications
• Service Activities
• Affiliations
• People
• Datasets
• Impacts.

ORCID is a unique identifier that will go with you through your career. It is integrated in standard workflows and embedded in works metadata, independent of platform. You can link in with websites and other identifiers (eg ResearcherID, Scopus, Author ID, ISNI). It tackles the issue of different spellings of names and is great for thinking beyond the paper.

ORCID has broad international usage with 34 countries with over 10,000 unique visitors and 82 countries with over 1,000 unique visitors. The registry supports multiple character sets. They have content in Spanish, French, English and Chinese (adding Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian in 2014). 

They have issued over 500,000 identifiers since the launch in October 2012 with registrations growing steadily. The majority (about two thirds) come through trusted parties such as publishers. They are also beginning to see universities creating ORCID identifiers for research staff

ORCID works collaboratively with the research community to ensure use and adoption of research information exchange standards (e.g. ISNI, ODIN, CASRAI, Ringgold, CERiF-XML, CrossRef etc). They link to and include identifiers from other systems including DOIs, ISBNs, ISNIs, etc.

New features in 2014 include:

• Funding
• New languages
• Account delegation
• Third party assertions
• New search and link wizards
• Continuing to harmonize metadata

Who is integrating ORCID and how? They are working with research funders, professional associations, research institutions and metrics sites to incorporate ORCID IDs.