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.

Rockefeller University Press: CC-BY is not essential for Open Access

The new Open Access (OA) policy that Research Councils UK (RCUK) plans to introduce on April 1^st has proved highly controversial within the research community.

Mike Rossner

Some have expressed concern over its preference for Gold OA (OA publishing), and its concomitant disdain for Green OA (self-archiving). Others have been angered by its vacillating attitude towards the appropriate length for self-archiving embargoes.

But what may turn out to be the most divisive aspect of the new policy are its licensing requirements, notably its insistence that when RCUK-funded researchers embrace Gold OA, and pay an article-processing charge (APC), the publisher must make the paper available under a CC-BY licence.

Adding to the discomfort of those who are unhappy with this funding condition, on the same day (April 1^st) the UK’s Wellcome Trust  — which was highly influential in the development of the RCUK policy — will introduce a similar rule.

The divisiveness of this new licensing approach is, perhaps, no better demonstrated than the decision by the executive director of Rockefeller University Press (RUP) Mike Rossner to pen an editorial called “New mandates? No problem for The Rockefeller University Press”.

In the editorial, Rossner questions the need for RCUK and Wellcome to insist on CC-BY, and challenges their justification that it is necessary to do so in order to permit reuse of the research they have funded, particularly through text and data mining of papers.

OA-friendly

It is important to note that over the years RUP has gained for itself an enviable reputation as one of the most (if not the most) OA-friendly of all the traditional publishers.

RUP insists on no more than a six-month embargo before the papers it publishes can be made freely available — and in fact it releases them all itself at that point. Moreover, unlike other subscription publishers, RUP licences all its content under the more liberal CC-BY-NC-SA licence.

In addition, Rossner has on a number of occasions publicly criticised other publishers when they have sought to derail OA — e.g. here and here.

Indeed, so OA-friendly did Rossner appear to be to OA advocates that in 2009 the OA advocacy group SPARC honoured him as a SPARC Innovator. As SPARC put it at the time, “Mike Rossner is an anomaly, of sorts, in the scientific publishing world. He is a force from within the establishment pushing for policies to make information more widely accessible and verifiable.”

Since then, Rossner has continued to prove OA-friendly. Last year he publicly supported the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — which, amongst other things, would have reduced the embargo period specified in the Public Access Policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 12 months to 6 months, and required all the major agencies of the federal government to introduce the new strengthened policy too.

Likewise, Rossner publicly disavowed the publisher-sponsored Research Works Act (RWA), a US bill that would have had the opposite effect to FRPAA, reversing the NIH Public Access policy and preventing other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers. 

And last year Rossner — with SPARC’s Heather Joseph, plus Michael Carroll, and John Willbanks — co-founded Access2Research, and launched the petition that led to the recent executive directive ordering all US Federal Agencies with research and development budgets over $100M to develop public access policies within twelve months (referred to by Rossner below as the White House directive).

The Open Access Interviews: Professor Jack Meadows

Jack Meadows

Photo provided by Dr Ramaiah

Any movement dedicated to changing long-established ways of doing things is likely to engender a heated debate, and a debate that inevitably produces polarised views. Thus it is with the Open Access (OA) movement.

But what is distinctive about the OA debate is that it has produced not a simple juxtaposition of those who support the old and those who support the new. It is more complex than that.

On one side of the OA rift, of course, are the traditional subscription publishers. They are determined to protect their business interests, and fearful that OA might threaten the high levels of profitability to which they have become accustomed.

On the other side, however, is to be observed not a single movement (or even a single OA organisation), but rather a disparate collection of factions — all of whom want change, all of whom are passionate in their advocacy for OA, but most of whom end up constantly disagreeing with one another — about objectives, about strategy, and even about definitions.

In fact, the more passionate OA advocates tend to disagree with one another even more violently than they do with their publisher opponents. And the resulting internecine warfare has only intensified as publishers have begun reluctantly to provide OA — because in doing so publishers are invariably providing it in ways, and at a cost, that pleases some OA advocates while displeasing others.

The debate is further complicated by the fact that much of the discussion about OA tends to lack historical perspective. It is also frequently based on unfounded claims and unfulfillable expectations, on all sides. 

Potential quagmire

One consequence of all this is that politicians and bureaucrats are frequently confused when trying to work out what to do about OA. This can lead to badly-thought-through and controversial policies, which appears to be what happened with the Finch Report — now official UK government policy — and the subsequent OA policy announced by Research Council’s UK (RCUK) last July. RCUK’s new policy was immediately attacked from all directions.

The upshot is that OA must be viewed as a potential quagmire for universities, for research funders and for politicians. The problem they face is that it is no longer possible not to respond to the clamour for OA. Yet the wrong response can end up making matters worse. It does not help that the abundance of advisers and consultants willing to offer advice on OA invariably have their own agenda, and often a vested interest in a particular outcome.

All in all, one is left wondering if there is anyone in the world able to provide an objective assessment of the current state of play of scholarly communication and its likely future development, including OA’s role in that development.

But perhaps there is someone. What about Jack Meadows, Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University?

Before retiring in 2001 Meadows was, at different times in his academic career, a physicist, an astronomer, an information scientist, and a historian of science. During that time he also ran a number of different academic departments, and was both a Dean and a Pro-Vice Chancellor. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and Permanent Vice-President of the Library Association. And we could mention in passing that he has an asteroid named after him too — asteroid 4600 Meadows to be precise.

Vitally, Meadows has devoted a great deal of time during his life to thinking about and researching the history of scholarly communication.

“Jack Meadows’ contributions to the study of the history of science, and of scholarly publishing trends are outstanding,” says Charles Oppenheim, who took over as head of the Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University when Meadows retired. “He was involved in the very earliest experiments with ejournals, and his book Communication in Science is a model of how to write a well-researched but fascinating history. He also edited The Origins of Information Science, which is also a model history.”

In total, Meadows has published some 250 articles and 24 books, including (as noted by Oppenheim) Communication in Science and Communicating Research. And he continues to research and write on such matters in retirement.

No particular dream to sell

Who better then to offer an objective assessment of the revolution sweeping through the world of scholarly communication, and to do so with an informed historical perspective? Importantly, although he has observed the development of OA over the years, Meadows is not an advocate for any specific form of OA. As such, he has no particular dream to sell, and no horse in the OA race.

Moreover, Meadows is no dry academic without any understanding of the beatings of the human heart, or the need for moderation in the pursuit of one’s goals. And he is able and willing to dispense sound advice. Meadows, says Oppenheim, is “a very wise and supportive man who has time for everyone.”

Former Loughborough student  Chennupati Ramaiah — who now heads up the Department of Library and Information Science in Pondicherry University, India — can testify to the soundness of Meadows’ advice.

“Professor Meadows is a true human being, and an excellent teacher, researcher and administrator. He is the only person who told me not to work too much, and advised me to go on holiday so that I could recharge my batteries. This helped me work more effectively, and allowed me to get my PhD degree in on time.”

Doubtless a few overheated OA advocates could benefit from such wise counsel. And those participating in some of the more fervid online exchanges about OA could surely profit from a dose of Meadows’ humour. “He has a dry wit (his corny jokes are famous),” explains Oppenheim. Readers will perhaps spot this trait in some of the answers Meadows gives in the interview below.

One is also inclined to suggest that some of the more confused politicians and funders could do worse than give Meadows a call and ask for some advice.

But let’s give Ramaiah the last word on Jack Meadows. “Professor Meadows thinks deeply and explains simply”, he says, “Three people have had a lasting influence on my life: My Guruji, Bhagavan Sri Viswayogi Viswamjee Maharaj — who has assisted me in my spiritual life — Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who has provided me with a role model in my daily life, and Professor Meadows, who has been a true mentor for me in my research and teaching activities.”

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If you wish to read the interview with Jack Meadows, please click on the link below. 

 

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so 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.