Open Access: Emerald’s Green starts to fade?

When last July Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new Open Access (OA) policy it sparked considerable controversy, not least because the policy required researchers to “prefer” Gold OA (OA publishing) over Green OA (self-archiving). The controversy was such that earlier this year the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee launched an inquiry into the implementation of the policy and the subsequent report was highly critical of RCUK.

As a result of the criticism, RCUK published two clarifications. Amongst other things, this has seen Green OA reinstated as a viable alternative to Gold. At the same time, however, RCUK extended the permissible maximum embargo before papers can be self-archived from 12 to 24 months. OA advocates — who maintain that a six-month embargo is entirely adequate — responded by arguing that this would simply encourage publishers who did not have an embargo to introduce one, and those that did have one to lengthen it. As a result, they added, many research papers would be kept behind publishers’ paywalls unnecessarily.

It has begun to appear that these warnings may have been right. Evidence that publishers have indeed begun to respond to RCUK’s policy in this way was presented during a second inquiry into OA — this time by the House of Commons Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) Committee. The Committee cited the case of a UK publisher who recently introduced a 24-month embargo where previously it did not have one. The publisher was not named, but it turns out to be a UK-based company called Emerald.

Why did Emerald decide that an embargo is now necessary where previously it was not? Why do the details of the embargo on Emerald’s web site differ from the details sent to the publisher’s journal editors? And what does Emerald’s decision to introduce a two-year embargo presage for the development of Open Access? To my surprise, obtaining answers to the first two questions proved more difficult than I had anticipated.

Dire consequences

During the final evidence session in the inquiry into OA held by the UK House of Commons BIS Committee, one of the members of the Committee —  Brian Binley — told the UK Minister for Universities and Science Mr Willetts that the Inquiry had been given information suggesting that the RCUK policy was having a negative impact on OA.

“We have received recent reports of a major British publisher revising its open access policy to require embargoes of 24 months, where previously it had required immediate unembargoed deposit in a repository,” Binley said. “Indeed, Alma Swan [Director of Advocacy Programmes for SPARC Europe] goes on to say that the really awful thing is that their university is in Australia, so ‘the dire consequences of the UK’s policy are, as we all predicted, damaging OA all over the world. 10 years’ work in getting mandates across the globe with maximum six-month embargoes are undone (embarrassingly) by the UK.’”

Binley added, “That is pretty heavy criticism.”

Developing a unified rule for openness: Interview with Alek Tarkowski

Twenty years ago the European Organisation for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — published a statement that made the technology that underpins the Web available on a royalty-free basis. By making the software required to run a web server, along with a basic browser and a library of code, free for all CERN paved the way for a revolution in innovation and creativity.

Alek Tarkowski

As a result, the Web has impacted the world in many varied ways  — not least by generating a stream of new products and services, and by allowing the creation of a multitude of novel new ways for sharing information and knowledge, and on a global basis.

It has also seen the emergence of an accompanying flood of free and open movements committed to promoting greater sharing of ideas and content, and for increased transparency and civic participation in organisations, in communities, and in government. We have seen, for instance, the emergence of the open access, free and open-source software, open data, open science, open politics, and open government movements.

And to facilitate the free flow of information and creativity enabled by the Web, Creative Commons was founded, and tasked with developing new-style licences to make sharing as frictionless as possible.

Initially these movements were bottom-up, citizen-led developments. More recently, governments have become interested in greater openness and sharing too, and begun to encourage and even require it, particularly where resources are created from public funds. Thus we have seen the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) introduce its Public Access Policy, the EU introduce its OA Policy, and we have seen the proposed FASTR Act and the recently announced US Open Data Policy.

To date, these top-down initiatives have tended to be piecemeal, and invariably focused on one type of public resource — e.g. publicly funded research or government data.

At the end of last year, however, a new bill was proposed in Poland that would aim to adopt a more joined-up approach to the openness of public resources. If enacted, the Open Public Resources Act would provide “a unified rule for as large a part of Poland’s public resources as possible”, says Alek Tarkowski an activist for greater openness in Poland.

Given its radical approach, the proposed bill has attracted a good deal of criticism, and it remains unclear how — or even whether — it will become law. If it does pass, says Tarkowski, it will doubtless be watered down in the process.

Whatever its fate, the proposed bill raises some interesting and complex issues. As such, it is worth reviewing its aspirations and objectives, and the nature of the criticism it attracted. In order to do this I conducted an email interview with Tarkowski recently, which I publish below.

Tarkowski was a member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime Minister of Poland that drafted the initial concept of the proposed bill. He is also the director of Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska and co-founder and Public Lead of Creative Commons Poland.

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If you wish to read the interview with Alek Tarkowski, please click on the link below.

 

I am publishing the interview under the CC BY-NC-ND licence. As such, you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.

The UK’s Open Access Policy: Controversy Continues

The new Open Access (OA) policy introduced this year by Research Councils UK (RCUK) — in response to last year’s Finch Report — has been very controversial, particularly its exhortation to researchers to “prefer” Gold over Green Open Access

When it was first announced there was an outcry from UK universities over the cost implications of the new policy. In response, on 7th September last year the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts made an additional £10 million available to 30 research intensive universities to help pay OA transition costs.

But the controversy has continued regardless, and in January this year the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee launched an inquiry into the policy. The subsequent report roundly criticised RCUK for the way it had been implemented, and concluded that lack of clarity about the policy and the guidance offered was ‘unacceptable’. RCUK responded by making a number of “clarifications”, and extended the permissible embargo period before research papers could be made available under Green OA from 6 and 12 months, to 24 months — an extension that led many OA advocates to complain that a bad policy had been made worse.

In the meantime, the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Select Committee had announced its own inquiry, which at the time of writing remains ongoing. During this inquiry a number of new issues have emerged, including complaints that some publishers are exploiting RCUK’s new policy to pump up their profits (profits that many believe are already unacceptably high). There are concerns, for instance, that the £10m in additional funding that Willetts provided is being used inappropriately. At the centre of these new concerns is Elsevier, the world’s largest scholarly publisher.

When last September Willetts made an additional £10 million available to research intensive universities it was widely assumed that the money had been provided to help them meet the costs arising from the fact that when the new RCUK policy came into effect on April 1st this year their researchers would have to start paying to publish their papers. 

This assumption was understandable: When BIS announced the grant it said the money was, “to kick-start the process of developing policies and setting up funds to meet the costs of article processing charges (APCs).”

In the same press release Willetts was quoted saying, “This extra £10 million investment will help some of our universities move across to the open access model. This will usher in a new era of academic discovery and keep the UK at the forefront of research to drive innovation and growth.”

Critics argue, however, that at least some of this money is being used to pay for papers that have already been published in subscription journals. Specifically, they cite the fact that on December 20^th last year Elsevier approached JISC Collections — the organisation that procures digital content on behalf of UK research institutions — and offered, in effect, to sell back to UK universities the papers that their researchers had published with it during 2012. That is, it offered to make papers that had been published in subscription journals OA retrospectively.

Open Access in Poland: Interview with Bożena Bednarek-Michalska

Bożena Bednarek-Michalska is an information specialist and deputy director of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Torun, Poland. She is also a member of Poland’s Open Education Coalition (KOED), a board member of SPARC Europe, and the EIFL-OA country coordinator for Poland.

Bożena Bednarek-Michalska

While conducting the interview below with Bednarek-Michalska three things struck me as noteworthy about the current state of Open Access (OA) in Poland.

First, Bednarek-Michalska reports that access to research information in Poland is “not bad”. In light of Harvard University’s 2012 Memorandum arguing that subscription-based scholarly publishing is now “fiscally unsustainable” this is striking. Harvard is the world’s wealthiest university. If Harvard is struggling, why are Polish universities not struggling too?

Of course, Harvard is a private university, and so has to fund its own information needs. In Poland, by contrast, most subscriptions to international journals are paid for (or at least subsidised) by the Polish government — by means of national licensing schemes, or Big Deals.

So if the traditional subscription-based system is providing reasonable access to research in Poland why are Polish researchers being asked to embrace OA?

Because, says Bednarek-Michalska, it would be foolish to assume that the Polish government will continue to pay the increasingly expensive toll charges that subscription publishers demand. Moreover, she adds, the large electronic journal bundles that commercial publishers offer do not generally include titles published by transition and developing countries. Consequently, she says, it is vital that the research community builds its own open resources. (In fact, the information needs of Polish researchers are already being supplemented by open resources).

In addition, adds Bednarek-Michalska, there are unselfish reasons why the research community should aim to make OA the norm — not least because institutions in the developing world can generally afford to buy access to only a handful of international journals. As a result, their researchers are being deprived of the essential raw material they need in order to contribute to the research endeavour. In short, the developing world has a great deal to contribute, but for so long as it is excluded from much of the global exchange of scientific knowledge it will struggle to play its part effectively.

Not a source of revenue

The second thing to strike me in talking to Bednarek-Michalska was that, unlike most journals published in Western Europe and North America, Polish journals are not viewed as a source of revenue. Indeed, since it is assumed that the role of scholarly journals is to disseminate research, rather than make money, they tend to be subsidised. For this reason, no doubt, many Polish journals are produced not by commercial publishers, but by the organisations that generate the research in the first place — universities and institutes.

The appeal of OA for Polish research institutions, therefore, is not just that it can the increase the visibility of their research output, but (thanks to the frictionless nature of the digital network) it can reduce costs too.

As Bednarek-Michalska explains, “[T]he costs associated with distributing titles (to both Polish and foreign libraries) are huge. As such they represent a significant financial burden for universities, and everyone is looking to reduce this expenditure today.”

She adds that OA encompasses two intertwined issues. “Open access has to be understood as an issue of cost (without charge) as well as an issue of accessibility. If you have a printed version of a journal sitting on the shelf in the library but researchers can only use it in the reading room, accessibility is low. Open access means that journals can be digitised and placed on the open Internet.”

One consequence of the Polish approach is that home-grown publisher Versita (acquired by De Gruyter last year) has introduced an OA model that it calls “publisher pays”. Here publication costs are met by the university or institute that produces the journal, not by its authors (or their funders). 

When learning this it occurred to me that, in light of the increasingly controversial nature of article-processing charges, this approach — were it to be widely adopted — would make Gold OA far more palatable to the research community (Although whether, if commercial publishers were involved, the  cost of distributing research in this way would prove any more sustainable than the subscription system might be doubted).

However, Polish OA advocates are not overly taxed with this issue today. As Bednarek-Michalska explains, right now Green OA has a good deal more traction than Gold OA, and Polish universities are busy setting up institutional repositories to facilitate it. Partly for this reason, perhaps, the highly controversial RCUK OA policy — which expects researchers to “prefer” Gold OA — has attracted little attention in the country.

By contrast, developments in both the EU and the US — including the OA requirements of Horizon 2020, the successful NIH Public Access Policy, the recent White House Memo on Public Access, and the proposed US legislation known as the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act (FASTR) — are being watched closely, and have encouraged the Polish government and its ministries to take an interest in OA. (We could note that OA efforts in the US are primarily focused on Green OA, not Gold OA, and the EU, unlike the UK, has expressed no preference.)

Broader movement for openness

Third, it would appear that activists in Poland tend to view OA as just one component of a much broader movement for openness. This is perhaps because they became interested in the topic at a later stage than those in the West (where OA has been an issue for some twenty years now). As a result, they entered the debate at a point where a number of different open movements were beginning to coalesce.

This broader approach is reflected in a new draft bill called the “Act on Open Public Resources”. If the bill were to become a reality it would apply to all publicly-funded scientific, educational and cultural resources. That is, it would cover not just scholarly papers and scientific data, but (where they were publicly-funded, or produced by a  public institution) “maps and plans, photographs, films and microfilms, audio and video recordings, opinions, analysis, reports and other works and subject-matter of related rights in the meaning of the law of 1994 on copyright and related rights, as well as databases in the meaning of the law of 2001 on the legal protection of databases.” (As translated by Tomasz Targosz of Jagiellonian University).

This suggests that if the proposed bill were enacted, Poland could find itself taking a leadership role. As Targosz points out, while as it is currently conceived the proposed Act can expect to face significant difficulties, it does nevertheless take a novel approach. For this reason, he suggests, it would benefit everyone if the experience of the wider movement could be brought to bear on the bill. “As the Polish attempt seems to be one of the first of its kind, certainly in the EU, insight from other countries could perhaps help to make it better and consequently to have a model law for the rest,” he says.

Unfortunately, the bill appears to have attracted little or no attention outside Poland, certainly in the West.

Read on to discover more about the current state of OA in Poland.

The Open Access Interviews: Johannes Fournier, speaking for the Global Research Council

Johannes Fournier

During a two-day inaugural Global Summit on Merit Review held in Washington last May — which was organised by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) at the request of the White House Office of Science & Technology (OSTP) — a new organisation called the Global Research Council (GRC) came into being.

Explaining the rationale for the new organisation, NSF Director Subra Suresh said, “This global summit is the first step toward a more unified approach to the scientific process. Science can rise above economic and cultural differences to help develop trust and clear the path for agreements in other areas. Global scientific collaboration expands the pool of knowledge that belongs to everyone and serves as a tool to improve health, security and opportunity throughout the world. Good science anywhere is good for science everywhere.”

The first initiative of the GRC was to publish a Merit Review Statement. Released at the end of the Washington summit, this outlines a set of principles for assessing funding applications, including the need to provide expert assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, and confidentiality, as well as integrity and ethical consideration.

But for Open Access (OA) advocates, a more interesting outcome of the Washington summit was the news that the GRC had decided to take up the issue of OA. As a result, at a second summit — to be held in Berlin at the end of May with representatives from around 70 research agencies — GRC will release consensus statements on both merit review and OA.

But what exactly is GRC, how will it be funded, what is its remit, and what precisely are its aspirations so far as Open Access is concerned?

To find out more I conducted an interview with Johannes Fournier, who works for the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Fournier is Program Director for the Scientific Library Services and Information Systems group, the unit within DFG’s head office which looks after information infrastructure and Open Access. As host of the upcoming GRC annual meeting, the DFG has taken the lead on the issue of OA, and Fournier took part in all the regional conferences that have been held in preparation for the May event.

Fournier is also assisting the GRC’s International Steering Committee in developing an action plan on Open Access. 

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If you wish to read the interview with Johannes Fournier, please click on the link below.

I am publishing the interview under the CC BY-NC-ND licence. As such, you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.