Open Access Gets A 'Big Bang'

The STM Market has always been a rich seam for publishing, but it is very different from other sectors in many aspects. The old joke was that publishers got the material for free, got it peer reviewed for free and then sold it back to the University for significant amounts of money. Obliviously, there is always a slither of truth in all such stories, but the reality is that publishers have greatly assisted the spread of knowledge and ensured the quality, accuracy and currency of material. However, digital and communications is forcing everyone to rethink the value chain and the STM sector is not immune.

In July, UK government announced that it would require the country’s taxpayer-funded research to be open-access from April 2013. In Europe, the European Commission also adopted a similar approach aimed at opening up all the work funded under its Horizon 2020 research programme, which is set to run from 2014 to 2020. The aim is to making all EU-funded research open to all and deliver some 60% of all European publicly funded research articles to be open access by 2016.

Now it appears that the particle physics world has created its own ‘Big Bang’  and is about to make its research papers freely available through open access. This is unique, in that the initiative is across the specialist field and is helped by the relative smaller number of journals involved (12 journals cover 90% of high-energy-physics papers published). Particle physics already posts most papers on the preprint server arXiv but peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals.

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP) aims to ensure that all particle-physics articles (some 7,000 last year) are free on journal websites with payments from libraries funding the access. Under the deal, the journals will receive agreed payments per paper. The transition to open access is hoped to be transparent with researchers not noticing any effect on their grant funding or on the way they publish papers. The consortium will pay the contracts from an annual budget of €10 million, which is funded not by authors or research grants, but by ledged from over a thousand libraries, funding agencies and research consortia.

The question is as to whether this model can be replicated by others or remains unique due to the small number of journals and publishers involved?

Open Access and Open Research are happening and the transition for many will not be as smooth or painless as the Big Bang of high-energy-physics.

Open Access opt out at Harvard

The Journal model has defied all that have striven to destroy it. It creates value by creating authority and reference and its that refrence that is required by its contributors and readers alike. Ok, the authors give it away, its reviewed for free, the subcriptions are paid for in advance of publication, there is no garenteed publications schedule and the very institutions who employ the authors pay to get the copy back.

Harvard are now planning to change things albeit quietly by voting to enable its arts and sciences faculty to distribute their scholarship freely online. If passed an open access repository run by the library would instantly make maretial available on the Internet. Authors would still retain copyright and the ability to publish anywhere. In fact the system would be an opt out one which would automatically include works unless the author opted out. An interesting position for authors who could be said to be dammed iof they do and dammed if they don’t.

It will be interesting to see what happens, how many will opt out, whether the impact will release greater funds for the libraries and the reaction of others including publishers.

What do you want to call it?

Some of us have always struggled to see textural works as books or journals and remember the shock and horror of many when all works were first referred to as ‘product’ or worse still ‘stuff’. But the reality is that it is hard to keep these fine lines of definition when the works themselves are being digitally exploded. Books have always come in many formats, or renditions and often belong to a series or have associated works. Today there are now many more digital formats and as with training course packs and reference works, they are now also being fragmented within the works themselves. Journals were always broken down into issues and articles but in the online world the referential linking to supplemental information is very real.

Ingram Digital Group, and Swets, a leading worldwide subscription services company, have announced a joint initiative which combines the features of Ingram’s MyiLibrary and Swets offers, to provide organizations a single access interface to manage both their journal subscriptions and eBooks.

It is clearly a step forward in breaking down the demarcation barriers between subscription and purchased product and the article and book worlds. We also see others such as Cengage (previously Thomson Learning EMEA) starting to combine their article and book offers within services such as BizEd Premier. Others, such as in the travel sector, are starting to combine multimedia not as an afterthought, but into the original design and development. We are clearly entering the world of stuff or whatever we want to call it.

Cheaper Journals?

Cheaper journals? I had to read the article again as I must be dreaming. It was like listening to Gordon Brown giving us all a tax cut – there has to be a catch, after all we had nothing like this before and to the contrary only heard about journal price increases for many years.

Oxford University Press is reported to be lowering prices on its range of 28 journals in its "hybrid" Open Access (OA) scheme by an average of 5%.

Major journal publishers have all launched hybrid open access schemes which enables authors to pay for their articles published in traditionally non-OA journals to be made freely available. The successes of the schemes are dependant on authors signing up and adopting the new model. Once sufficient sign up is achieved then the costs reduce and the price can come down – simple commerce.

However, it is reported that Elsevier and CUP have only got 1% of authors to agree to make articles Open Access in their hybrid journals and it appears still early days. One swallow doesn’t make a summer but we may be witnessing a change in the commercial model and relationships in this highly lucrative and important marketplace.

Open Access - Who Pays?

The thorny issue of ‘open access’ was raised again in an article today in the Guardian. This is not an issue that is going away, nor is it going to be resolved quickly.

Today researched give their research papers to publishers who get them peer reviewed, edited, marketed, published and distributed through their branded journals. The practice seems very laudable in that the publisher acts as the arbitrator of quality, ensuring their value and the appropriate indexing, referencing, citations etc are correct and that the paper is brought to the attention of the academic community.

However the European Research Council has argued that the high price of scientific journals was "impeding scientific progress" and last year the European commission published an independent report stating that the price of scientific journals has risen 200%-300% beyond inflation between 1975 and 1995. The market, the study said, was worth up to $11bn (£5.6bn) a year.

So on one hand, we have commercial parties who are trying to assist researchers and institutions publish and access a rich body of work, and on the other hand, we have researchers trying to publish and institutions trying to access a rich body of work. The key therefore lies in the value that the publisher brings to the table and whether that equates to the value perceived by the creator and the reader.

Yesterday paper dictated the workflow of submission, peer review, editorial, production and distribution. Today digital communications potentially turns much of this on its head. Yesterday journals were often ‘twigged’ to maximize the specialization and some would suggest their price. Today online search and discovery and referencing should change this. Yesterday publication and subscritions were scheduled to align with issues within academic years. Today articles should be managed in real time and not bound by issues which become increasingly irrelevant.

There is no easy answer to the digital relationships that needs to exist between publishers, creators and channels. This problem is not unique to journals but also has implications across the total social publishing environment. Perhaps there is logic in looking back to a time before publisher’s became the dominant player? What is clear is that the answer will not be found in the recent printed journal model and there is a need for all parties to recognize and respect the value each brings to the table in the digital world.