The Public Library of Science (PLOS)
and the University of California (UC) have today announced a two-year agreement designed to make it easier and more affordable for UC researchers to publish in
the non-profit open-access publisher’s suite of seven journals.
Under the agreement – which is planned to go into effect this Spring –
UC Libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the article processing
charge (APC) incurred when UC authors choose to publish in a PLOS journal.
Authors who do not have research funds available can request UC Libraries pay the full APC fee. The aim is to
ensure that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for UC authors
wishing to publish with PLOS.
The pilot is intended to test whether an institutional participation model that
leverages multiple funding sources, rather than only grant funds, can provide a
sustainable and inclusive path to full open access.
Below PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt discusses the new
agreement and addresses some of the issues that the current trend for universities and consortia to sign so-called transformative agreements with legacy publishers raises for native open-access publishers like PLOS.
The interview begins …
 |
| Alison Mudditt |
RP: The PLOS/UC agreement is essentially the same deal as UC
signed with JMIR Publications in January. Is
that correct?
AM: Essentially yes. UC has made their priorities for these agreements
clear, so most UC deals will be very
similar.
In addition, we are generating custom reporting for the UC to help them
evaluate the efficacy of the pilot in bringing new authors to open access
publishing while maintaining existing funding streams.
RP: Would I be right in thinking that these deals are native open-access
publishers’ response to the transformative agreements that legacy publishers
have been signing with universities and consortia like Project DEAL?
AM: While we can only speak on behalf of PLOS, this is certainly one
of the drivers for us. We think that there is a significant opportunity for
institutions and funders to prioritize partnerships with native OA publishers
who stand fully aligned with their OA objectives.
We have been reassured by the commitment from institutions and consortia
not to sideline negotiations with (and thereby disadvantage) native OA
publishers.
RP: How many articles do you envisage UC faculty publishing with PLOS
during the two-year period of the agreement?
AM: If we base it on previous years, then around 600-800 articles.
RP: How many articles a year do UC faculty currently publish with PLOS?
AM: Around 300 per year, across the seven journals.
RP: As I understand it, the agreement means that UC faculty will be able
to publish in any PLOS journal and the first $1,000 will be paid by UC
libraries. If the researcher has access to no research funds s/he can request
full funding from the libraries. Is there any maximum sum agreed with UC
libraries such that the funds could run out before the pilot ends?
AM: Yes, we have agreed to a capped total spend of $1.5M USD over the
two-year period. This cap reflects library spend plus grant
funding declared by authors.
Once that spending cap is reached, PLOS has committed to cover the cost
of additional UC publications (assuming UC authors continue to faithfully
declare their existing grant funding, a two year spend is most likely to fall
between $1.2M and $1.25M).
$1.5M would demonstrate an unprecedented increase in publications from
the UC – but of course, a key unknown is the level of demand once the barrier
of APCs is removed.
If for some reason, we reach this cap earlier in the agreement period
than expected (if at all), we have agreed to good faith renegotiations to
ensure that both PLOS and the UC are protected from unanticipated surges in
cost.
RP: Will the details of the agreement be published?
AM: Yes – as are all of the UC agreements.
RP: PLOS has an Institutional
Account Program, of which I do not
think UC is currently a participant. What is the difference between the
agreement announced today and UC simply signing up to become a participant of
the IAP?
AM: The Institutional Account Program is a simple direct billing
program meant to minimize administrative overhead of APCs either through
pay-as-you-go monthly invoices or debiting from a standalone account. While
useful for mitigating administrative costs, it is not an OA deal,
or transformative, in and of itself.
This new deal enables the UC to allow grants to cover APCs when they
exist, so they can focus their support on where it is needed most (i.e. where
authors do not have the grant funds). It introduces an organized,
multiple-payer model of OA, which we think is important to test out.
And it meets our primary goals with new business models of ensuring that
any author who wants to can publish with PLOS, regardless of ability to pay an
APC.
Number of questions
RP: Is PLOS talking to other universities/consortia with a view to
signing similar arrangements with them?
AM: Yes, absolutely. We’ve asked ourselves a number of
questions in approaching these arrangements:
· How do we make the
next phase of “open” in scholarly publishing as equitable and inclusive as
possible? To us, APCs cannot be the be-all and end-all of this “transition to
open”. This shift should be characterized by multiple business models that meet
authors and institutions where they are.
· What do institutions
and consortia need from us as a publisher? Depending on region, research focus,
institution-type etc., our partners have different needs and pain points. It
might be alleviating the high cost of APC administration. It might be a fee
structure that requires no APCs for authors. It might be a combination of
services and fees to meet compliance mandates. We are eager to develop a range
of solutions.
· Ultimately, we are
striving to remove as many barriers as possible for authors to make their full
research outputs open and transparent.
RP: PLOS has, at
least since 2017, said that there is a need to move beyond APCs and that
it, therefore, needs to develop other business models. Will not agreements like
this serve to perpetuate the APC model rather than move beyond it.
AM: The reality is that many of our consortial partners
– especially in Europe – are deeply committed to the APC workflow and want our
help to make it more efficient, transparent, and compliant with funder
mandates.
In other regions – like the US – many libraries have not managed APC
budgets and wish to move to alternative models that don’t restrict their
authors and don’t involve micropayments.
At this stage in the OA transition, our goal is to bring flexibility to
process and avoid prescriptions where possible.
RP: What alternatives to APCs is PLOS currently looking at?
AM: We are currently working through a new “collective action model”,
initially for our highly selective journals PLOS Medicine and PLOS
Biology. So far we have not made APCs pay for the cost of selectivity and
have elected to use cross-journal subsidies rather than charging higher APCs.
As PLOS grows, we are excited to debut a new model that integrates both
read and publish institutions to ensure collective action success. This will be
a pilot and we’ll be announcing more details at the UKSG meeting in April.
In addition to collective action models, we are exploring “flat fee”
models for institutions that want to move away from resource-intensive
administration of APCs. We have seen quite a bit of interest in these models
and hope to announce new agreements in the coming months.
RP: OA advocates used to argue that one of the benefits of
pay-to-publish is that authors are made aware of publishing costs in a way they
never were with the subscription model (since they could publish for free and,
thanks to Big Deals paid for by the library, they had free-at-the-point-of use
access to journals).
As such, it was said, pay-to-publish would force researchers to start
making price sensitive decisions and this would exert downward pressure on the
costs of scholarly communication.
I note your press release makes the point of saying that the agreement
with UC will ensure “that lack of research funds does not present a barrier for
UC authors who wish to publish in PLOS journals.” Agreements like the one PLOS
has signed with UC – and certainly the transformative agreements that
universities and consortia are signing with legacy publishers – surely protect
authors from the financial consequences of their publishing decisions in a not
dissimilar way to the subscription model, and so presumably will have no
effective price control mechanisms built-in.
AM: The reality is that this hasn’t played out. We’ve seen that APC
price increases have shown little relation to the costs they’re meant to represent (hence
the value of the Plan S transparency pilot PLOS is participating
in with other publishers). We’ve also seen that authors are still choosing to
publish with “prestige” journals regardless of the cost of APCs.
This suggests that focusing on authors to play the cost management role
is unrealistic – it makes far more sense for this to sit with libraries, who
have the relevant skills and experience.
In this particular case, the key
component is the $1.5M USD price cap over the two years (which caps spend from
both the library and authors’ own funding sources). This represents risk for
both PLOS and the UC but both sides are committed to learning and adapting as
we go.
RP: How would you respond to someone who suggested that these deals are
therefore a step backwards?
AM: With polite disagreement! As noted above, we need a range of
models for different needs and while we absolutely want to find strong
alternative business models, it’s clear that APCs still have some role to play.
I have been clear about concerns
with transformative agreements, especially from the large commercial
publishers, but as with so many things, there’s important nuance. Deals such as
this still meet important goals for PLOS, including making it possible for more
researchers to publish with us.
It goes a long way towards ensuring equity and author
price awareness by asking authors to honestly represent their funding situation
while simultaneously making native OA publishing an option for those with no
funding. Our success metrics for this pilot include:
· Impact on submissions
from across the UC.
· Impact on new authors
coming to PLOS.
· Increases in
publications in subject areas that typically have little or no funding.
Any of these outcomes would be evidence that the UC’s pilot program is effectively accelerating an OA transition within the UC (at least in PLOS’ case).
RP: Another issue that has arisen with pay-to-publish is that
research-intensive universities like UC (which says it publishes 10% of all US
papers) will have to pay more rather than less in a pay-to-publish world.
Do you think they are going to have to swallow the pain on this, or
might we see less research-intensive universities agree to share publishing
costs in the way they did with the subscription system? Do you have views on
whether such a cost-sharing arrangement is desirable/necessary? Is PLOS looking
at ways in which such cost-sharing could be organised?
AM: A shift to a truly “open-to-read-open-to-publish” paradigm will require
all existing stakeholders to contribute. How much and through what mechanisms may
change, but money exiting the system is not going to accelerate this change.
In our conversations, we’ve been heartened by the serious commitment
“read” institutions are making to participate in this new ecosystem and avoid
the label of “free riders.”
We’re using our understanding of their needs to
inform the new collective model in development (see above).
RP: As you indicate, transformative agreements have been criticised for the way they are
enabling legacy publishers to lock themselves into the new OA environment, to
the disadvantage of native OA publishers. In fact, some believe this poses an
existential threat to small native open-access publishers and learned
societies. Would you agree? If so, what can be done about it?
AM: We’re
on the record with our concerns about so-called “transformative” agreements
precisely because of the risk that they further entrench the dominant market
position of the large commercial publishers.
We certainly don’t see the current market shifts as an existential
threat to PLOS although they certainly require us to refocus on our library
partners (something PLOS had moved away from).
We’ve been excited by the
response we’ve had from libraries and consortia across the world: so many are
aligned with our vision of a world where the open sharing of research is
easier, more efficient and fair for all authors.
Prioritising native open-access publishers
RP: The founder of JMIR (Gunther Eysenbach) has gone so far as to suggest
that transformative agreements are possibly illegal “under the anti-trust,
competition and procurement laws.” Does he have a point? Do you envisage a
legal challenge to the raft of transformative agreements we are seeing being
signed – either in North America or Europe?
AM: We do not think they are illegal but we do support the notion that
native OA publishers should get some priority in institutional and funder
arrangements for having paved the way for this transition.
RP: Eysenbach has also argued that funders and consortia like Project
DEAL ought, by rights, to use a tendering process when awarding large OA
publishing contracts. Subsequently, The Scholarly Kitchen suggested that tying
open-access publishing services to reading access might at some point, in some
contexts, fall foul of procurement offices.
With this issue (amongst others) in mind, in Europe we have seen a proposal
for a pilot project aimed at developing pure open access contracts via a
tendering process. What are your views on this issue and the implications for
PLOS?
AM: I think our answer above makes our position clear. We support any
and all positive ways native OA publishers could be appropriately recognized
and, in light of our full alignment with the OA mission of such
organizations, given priority.
But we think there are better ways than legal recourse to demonstrate
our value.
RP: Meanwhile, in the US there is talk of Trump signing an Executive
Order that would (it is rumoured) remove the current embargo on the green OA
policy introduced by Obama. I note PLOS has signed
a letter supporting the idea, so it presumably believes it would be good for PLOS
if such an EO were signed.
But if it were – and the EO insisted on immediate open access – is it
not likely that, like Plan S, it would trigger a raft of new transformative
agreements being signed with legacy publishers – as UC, Iowa
State, MIT, Michigan
State and Carnegie
Mellon have already done in the US? That would not be a good
development from PLOS’ perspective presumably?
AM: We support the driver behind the rumoured EO since it is a
statement of priority and emphasis for OA which is somewhat lacking in the US.
We are in discussions with many US institutions, in addition to the UC, and
would have no concerns about such an EO because we know our partners in the US
are eager to ensure PLOS and native OA publishers are at the table.
Excited and confident
RP: We have over time seen some of the darlings of open access fall into
the hands of legacy publishers, a development that has disappointed OA
advocates. BMC, for instance, was acquired by Springer in 2008;
SSRN and bepress were acquired by Elsevier in 2016
and 2017; and in January
F1000Research was acquired by Taylor and
Francis.
These, of course, were all for-profits whereas PLOS is a non-profit.
However, we could note that – to the consternation of
many in the open access movement – in 2016 the non-profit Knowledge Unlatched
was transformed from
a UK non-profit CIC to a for-profit GmbH and relocated to Berlin. Explaining
why it was necessary KU founder Frances Pinter said,
“As a not-for-profit CIC with few assets, we were not able to take on
commercial loans. Grant-giving bodies and philanthropic funders regarded the
proof of concept as a success – and therefore not requiring further funding
from them.”
Last November, The Scholarly Kitchen reported
that in 2018 PLOS ran a $5.5 million deficit on $32M dollars of revenue, and so
it is presumably in a vulnerable situation. Is it technically/legally possible
that PLOS could undergo a similar transformation from non-profit to for-profit
status and then be acquired by, say, Elsevier or Springer? What is to stop that
happening?
AM: PLOS has been pretty open about the fact that 2018 was a year of
major transformation. Having made the decision to discontinue development of Aperta at the end of 2017, our results in 2018 reflect both the write-off of
that investment and significant organizational restructuring.
We’ve gone through a careful, and sometimes painful, process of
deconstructing what wasn’t sustainable and reconstructing in ways that position
us for long-term impact and sustainability.
These decisions led to a significant turnaround in 2019 and a surplus of
well over $1m (our first meaningful surplus since 2014) – and we still have a
substantial cash reserve to fund future investment.
So we are entering 2020 both excited and confident of our future.
Equally importantly, we’ve become much clearer about redefining how we innovate
and lead – this is the work that PLOS was born to do. Leading the way in
development of equitable and sustainable business models for OA is one
important aspect of our work in continuing to push the boundaries of “open”.
RP: Finally, can you say what PLOS’ priorities are for 2020?
AM: We’d prefer to focus on the UC announcement, and we hope that the
responses above showcase enough of our 2020 priorities for now! Ask us again
sometime...
RP: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Good luck with
your plans for the future.
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