The Finch Report: UCL’s David Price Responds

The much-awaited report from the Finch Committee was published today. The Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research)

The good news: the Report recommends that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional model — which currently sees much research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be phased out.

The bad news: the Report estimates that this will require the higher education sector to find an extra £50-60 million a year to disseminate its research.  

The bulk of this extra money will be needed in order to pay for researchers to publish in so-called Gold OA and Hybrid OA journals. Instead of billing readers for access to research papers, as subscription journals do, OA journals bill authors, or their funders or institutions, for publishing papers — by means of article-processing charges (APCs).

These charges range from $305 to $3,930 per article, and are the price publishers demand for making research papers freely available on the Internet.

Some have greeted the Report with enthusiasm. Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, the world's second largest private funder, commented. “We are delighted that the Finch Report encourages the UK to embrace open access, something that we at the Wellcome Trust feel very strongly about. There is a real groundswell of opinion in support of open access in the UK, the USA, Europe and beyond and this is a real opportunity for the UK to lead the way.”

Others are far less enthusiastic, arguing that by failing to support and promote Green OA (aka self-archiving), the Committee missed an important opportunity to push for a more cost-effective solution.

With Green OA, authors continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but make their papers freely available on the Internet by self-archiving them in an institutional repository — usually after an embargo period intended to allow the publisher to recoup the publication costs through the subscription.

Many OA advocates believe that Green OA is a much less costly route to OA. Publishers dislike it intensely.

A hard place

“The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research,” argues University of Southampton cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad. “The Finch Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act (RWA) — since discredited and withdrawn — failed to do: to push ‘Green’ OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors’ funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review — and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward ‘Gold’ OA publishing, at the publishers’ pace and price.”

Whatever one’s views about the conclusions reached by the Finch Committee, and whatever one feels about the relative merits of Green and Gold OA (see here for instance), if the Report’s recommendations are implemented it will put UK universities in a hard place. For it is they who will have to find much of the extra money needed, at a time when their budgets are already under huge pressure.

Unsurprisingly, therefore the Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL) David Price is not best pleased. “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense,” he told me. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Price’s message to David Willetts is simple: more work needs to be done to find an adequate solution. “Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to get the best transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world,” he suggests. “The Finch recommendations are only part of the answer.”

For more of Price’s views read on.

Open Access Mandates: Ensuring Compliance

Three years ago, I wondered aloud how we should judge the success of an Open Access (OA) mandate. In particular, I wondered what level of compliance it was reasonable to expect a mandate to attain, and pointed out that OA advocates believe it is possible to achieve a 70% compliance rate within two years, if the mandate is compulsory.

It is therefore striking that, although the Wellcome Trust has had a compulsory mandate in place since 2006, The Times Higher Education reported in March that the Trust is still only achieving a 55% compliance rate. As a result, The Times Higher added, Wellcome’s head of digital services Robert Kiley wants to get tough on those who do not comply. The current situation, said Kiley, is “simply not acceptable”.

Elsewhere, Nature reported that of the 55% of researchers who comply with Wellcome’s mandate, 85% do so by means of Gold OA. One benefit of Gold OA, presumably, is that the author can hope to pass responsibility for compliance over to the publisher. While this does require paying a Gold OA fee, the Trust will pay this fee for the researcher. However, that 85% figure might seem to suggest that authors are more reluctant to comply with a mandate than some assume.

In my 2009 blog post I also reported that when, in 2008, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) upgraded its request that researchers deposit their published papers into PubMed Central (PMC) into a requirement, compliance accelerated to 49% by the end of the year (from 19%).

In order to establish what level of compliance the NIH is achieving today, I contacted its Office of Extramural Research (ORE). Below is the (slightly edited) transcript of the email conversation I had, which was split over a number of emails.

The upshot is that the NIH is now achieving 75% compliance. 

This invites a question: Why is NIH proving more successful in achieving compliance than the Wellcome Trust? Here are some quick thoughts:

• NIH is the largest public funder of medical research in the world, and so perhaps has greater authority than the Wellcome Trust

• NIH has been more proactive in ensuring compliance

• Where the Wellcome Trust insists that any embargo imposed by a publisher is no longer than six months, the NIH still permits embargoes to be up to 12 months (so perhaps publishers are more willing to post NIH-funded papers in PMC?)

As I say, these are just initial thoughts. I welcome comments from others.

One thing I find noteworthy is that, while the NIH clearly takes a close interest in compliance levels, it does not collect statistics on enforcement actions. With the growth in compliance now apparently levelling off at NIH, this would surely be useful information — and not just for NIH itself, but also for other funders like the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK  (RCUK), both of whom are currently looking to beef up their open access policies.

Q&A with NIH

RP: Can you give me some information on the current compliance rates for the NIH Public Access Policy, and explain how the NIH ensures compliance?

NIH: OSTP has submitted a report to Congress that included a current overview of the NIH policy, compliance level and impacts on Page 12.

Our current compliance efforts have been focused on outreach and engagement with institutions and publishers, as outlined on pages 3 and 4 of David Lipman's testimony to Congress in 2010.

RP: Ok, so after reading these documents I conclude the following:

1. The initial voluntary policy saw compliance rates of 19%.

2. The mandatory policy (introduced in April 2008) saw compliance grow to 49% by the end of 2008, 70% by the end of 2009 and currently stands at 75%.

3. In order to increase compliance the NIH has a) engaged in awareness programs; b) improved its ability to track papers resulting from NIH research awards; c) developed new systems to assist sponsored research offices at universities and medical research centres in tracking their compliance; d) improved the submission process for authors by i) co-opting publishers to deposit for authors and ii) introducing the NIH Manuscript Submission System.

NIH: To be clear, we introduced the NIH manuscript submission system in 2005. We have made modifications and improved our guidance, but it is not new.

We don't think it is accurate to say that we have 'co-opted' publishers, as the NIH policy does not apply to them.

RP:  Why do you think publishers agree to deposit papers for authors?

NIH: We generally hear three reasons why some publishers take an active role:

1) They want to be on PMC because of its high visibility, integration with other resources, and secure and free archiving — many journals do this for all their content, regardless of whether it falls under the NIH public access policy

2) They want to provide a service to their authors

3) They want greater control over the version posted to PMC (some want only the published version posted, and others want only the final peer-reviewed manuscript posted)

Green or Gold?

RP: Can you say what percentage of the papers deposited in PubMed Central are papers that have been published in a subscription journal and then self-archived (i.e. Green OA) and what percentage have been published in an OA journal for a fee (i.e. Gold OA)?

NIH: We do not characterize PubMed Central (PMC) deposits in terms of green and gold Open Access (OA). PMC is more than a repository for papers resulting from NIH-funded research.  See here.

All 2.4 million PMC articles are available without charge on PMC. This number includes about 225,000 author manuscripts, and the rest are final published versions that have been provided to PMC by publishers.

We do not have a simple way of generating counts of which papers are from subscription based journals and which are not. However, to put the above numbers in context, note also that close to half of the articles in PMC are from the digitized (scanned) issues of journals from the period between the mid-1800s and the mid to late 1990s — predating the birth of OA journals and the NIH public access policy.

About 450,000 articles make up the PMC OA subset. The term Gold OA generally refers to articles that are available under a very open license (such as CC-BY) and involve an open access fee charged to authors. The articles in the PMC OA subset come with a variety of licenses, not just CC-BY.

In addition, some of these OA articles are from journals that, to our knowledge, don't charge an OA fee — the Rockefeller Press journals, for example here. 

Enforceable?

RP:  I came across a message on the Liblicence mailing list recently from someone who appeared to have concluded that there is no real force behind the NIH policy. Would it be accurate to say that the NIH currently has no way of enforcing compliance?

NIH: The NIH Public Access policy is a term and condition of award.  As we state in our FAQ: A grantee's failure to comply with the terms and conditions of award may cause NIH to take one or more enforcement actions, depending on the severity and duration of the non-compliance. NIH will undertake any such action in accordance with applicable statutes, regulations, and policies.

NIH generally will afford the grantee an opportunity to correct the deficiencies before taking enforcement action unless public health or welfare concerns require immediate action.

However, even if a grantee is taking corrective action, NIH may take proactive action to protect the Federal government's interests, including placing special conditions on awards or precluding the grantee from obtaining future awards for a specified period, or may take action designed to prevent future non-compliance, such as closer monitoring. See Enforcement Actions in the NIH Grants Policy Statement (11/03).

RP: Can you tell me how many researchers have received research funds for the last five years, and then give me annual figures on enforcement actions that have been taken against researchers who have  failed to comply with the public access policy. E.g. how many enforcement letters have been sent out, how many researchers have had special conditions placed on their awards, and how many have been precluded from obtaining future awards for a specified period (and for how long a period)?

NIH: We funded over 228,000 grants in the past 5 years, which support hundreds of thousands of investigators. NIH public access policies have been developed centrally, and compliance activities are carried out by individual NIH institutes and centers.

There are currently terms and conditions which require institutions to comply with the public access policy. When an investigator is found out of compliance with the NIH public access policy, the NIH institute or center in which the award resides will send out letters to bring the investigator into compliance.

NIH does not currently collect statistics on compliance efforts.

The OA interviews: Carlos Rossel, Publisher at the World Bank

Carlos Rossel

“The Bank is committed to sharing our data, knowledge and analysis with others in the search for development solutions. By making Bank research and knowledge products published by the Bank available libre OA, third parties are free to use, reuse, and build upon the Bank’s work in ways that can lead to innovative solutions to local development problems.”

When Jim Yong Kim takes office as the new president of the World Bank on 1^st July, he will be the first development professional to head the Bank. That is new. But it is not all that is new at the World Bank. The new president will inherit an organisation that has undergone a lot of navel gazing over the past few years. Its conclusion: the Bank needs to rethink the way it operates.

The outgoing president of the Bank Robert Zoellick gave some insight into the Bank’s internal deliberations in a speech at Georgetown University in September 2010. Significantly, Zoellick acknowledged that pushing top-down economic solutions that were baked in the West on developing countries can no longer be viewed as adequate.

In his speech — entitled “Democratising Development Economics” — Zoellick pointed out that “modern portfolio theories” of economics have too often failed to deliver on their claims. The hubris behind such claims, he added, “turned to humility in the 2007 sub-prime crisis that led to the global economic crisis.”

To underline his point, Zoellick said, “AHe asccording to its risk model, one investment bank suffered a loss on several consecutive days that should only have occurred once in 14 life-spans of our universe.”

The discrediting of established thinking by the global crisis, said Zoellick, has obvious implications for development economics. In fact, he added, even before the crisis “there was a questioning of prevailing paradigms and a sense that development economics needed rethinking. The crisis has only made that more compelling.”

What has become apparent, Zoellick said, is that development economics needs, “to reach out to better encompass the experiences of successful emerging economies not with ordered templates or with blueprints, not with prescriptions for prescriptees, but inquiringly, cooperatively, openly.”

World Bank to Introduce Open Access Policy

The World Bank has announced today that it is introducing an Open Access (OA) policy. This will mandate that World Bank research outputs and knowledge products are deposited in a newly-created institutional repository called the Open Knowledge Repository (OKR), which will be freely accessible on the Internet.

In addition, the Bank will become the first major international organisation to make much of its research output available under Creative Commons licensing. As a result, any user in the world will be able to read, download, save, copy, print, reuse and link to the full text of the World Bank’s work, free of charge.

The new policy — effective July 1^st — will cover monographs (i.e., books, reports, etc.), externally-published sections or chapters of books written by Bank staff, working papers, journal articles, economic and sector work, plus associated datasets.

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs. Its official goal is to reduce poverty and support development. 

Back to Budapest

Ten years ago, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (then known as the Open Society Initiative) gathered together a group of people who believed passionately that publicly-funded research ought to be freely available on the Internet. 

Open Society Archives

It was a somewhat disparate group of people with varying interests and agendas. But over the course of two cold December days in Budapest, the group hammered out a common vision, and an agenda. This was then articulated in a public declaration — a declaration they called the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and a declaration that  gave birth to the open-access (OA) movement.

The BOAI called for all publicly-funded research articles to be made freely available on the Internet, and in such a way that any user could “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”

It also proposed two ways in which this objective could be met. First, by researchers self-archiving any papers they published in subscription journals on the Internet themselves (aka Green OA); second, by researchers opting to publish in open-access journals so that the publisher made their work freely availale online (aka Gold OA).

Thus was born the open-access movement, and a decade of heated advocacy, joyful successes, and sometimes bitter disappointments. In the process, OA has become both the hottest and the most controversial topic within the world of scholarly publishing.

As Open Society Foundations’ Melissa Hagemann put it recently, “Today, Open Access is at the forefront of discussions about scholarly communications in the digital age. Open Access  is taught in universities, debated in Parliaments, embraced and opposed by publishers, and most importantly, mandated by over 300 research funders and institutions, including the largest funder of research in the world, the U.S. National Institutes of Health.”

Hagemann added however, “[T]he fight for open access to research has not been won. The U.S. Congress is considering reversing the NIH mandate in a bill — the Research Works Act — backed by traditional publishers.”

Against this background, last week the Open Society Foundations once again gathered together a group of open-access advocates, along with a number of research funders, and asked them to agree on what they think needs to be done over the next ten years.

The event took the form of a roundtable discussion, with topics discussed including policy, sustainability, new metrics, and research re-use issues.

Once again held in Budapest, in the Open Society Archives, the discussion was chaired by Alma Swan, director of European advocacy at the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

“The aim,” explains Swan, “was to agree a list of recommendations outlining where we think energy and funding would be best directed over the next ten years.”

The list of recommendations is expected to be published in the next few weeks. When it is, I hope to publish an interview with Alma Swan.

** The interview with Alma Swan is now available here **

The Battle of the Bills

As anger over the Research Works Act (RWA) continues to grow the open access (OA) movement has come up with the ultimate riposte — a new version of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

The FRPAA is the exact opposite of the RWA: Where the RWA would roll back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, the FRPAA would strengthen it — by reducing the maximum embargo period before published research papers have to be made freely available online from 12 months to six months.

And where the RWA would outlaw other US federal agencies from imposing NIH-like mandates on their funded researchers, the FRPAA would require all the major agencies of the federal government to introduce the new strengthened policy.

In a post on Google+, OA advocate Peter Suber reports that the new version of the FRPAA is expected to be introduced in both the House and the Senate today. 

The bipartisan House sponsors of the FRPAA are Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS), and William Lacy Clay (D-MO), and the bipartisan Senate sponsors are John Cornyn (R-TX), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Ron Wyden (D-OR).

In a message posted today on his web site, Congressman Doyle is quoted as saying:

“Americans have the right to see the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars. Yet such research too often gets locked away behind a pay-wall, forcing those who want to learn from it to pay expensive subscription fees for access.

“The Federal Research Public Access Act will encourage broader collaboration among scholars in the scientific community by permitting widespread dissemination of research findings. Promoting greater collaboration will inevitably lead to more innovative research outcomes and more effective solutions in the fields of biomedicine, energy, education, and health care.”

For those wanting more information about the FRPAA, Suber has created a wiki page at Harvard’s Berkman Center. This explains the new bill and its implications in greater detail. 

UPDATE: The RWA has been defeated. 

The Open Access Interviews: Jan Velterop

In the world of scholarly publishing, Jan Velterop is a well-regarded “old hand”. But an old hand who has shown himself to be very receptive to new ways of doing things.

Jan Velterop

He began his publishing career at Elsevier in the mid-1970s, and subsequently worked for a number of other leading publishers, including Academic Press, Nature, and Springer. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, Velterop has always been willing to embrace new ideas, and new models, particularly those made possible by the Internet.

While at Academic Press in the mid-1990s, Velterop was one of the architects of what was to become known as the Big Deal — an arrangement by which large bundles of electronic journals are sold on multi-year “all you can eat” contracts. While the Big Deal has now fallen into disfavour, it was a revolutionary development in the world of scholarly publishing, and remains a very significant part of the landscape.

In 2000, Velterop joined BioMed Central, the first commercial open-access science publisher, and in 2001 he was one of a small group of people who gathered together in Budapest to discuss, “the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.”

It was at that meeting that the Open Access movement was born, along with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the BOAI statement — “the clearest and most generic of what Open Access means and should mean”, suggests Velterop.

Like the Big Deal before it, open-access publishing was initially scorned by other publishers. By 2008, however, it was clear that it was the wave of the future, a truth underlined by the acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer in October of that year.

Ever restless for new challenges, Velterop quickly moved on, and began to put his formidable talents to addressing the problems of information overload and the interoperability of data. To this end, in 2009 he was one of the initiators of the Concept Web Alliance, “an open collaborative community that is actively addressing the challenges associated with the production of unprecedented volumes of academic and professional data.”

Today, Velterop is CEO of Academic Concept Knowledge Limited (AQnowledge), a new company developing tools for “semantic knowledge navigation”. In particular, says Velterop, it is trying to “make the interfaces from the literature to open data resources financially sustainable.”

Velterop’s journey from traditional print publishing to the semantic web has inevitably impacted on his vision of what scholarly publishing is and ought to be — a vision now somewhat distanced from his erstwhile publisher colleagues.

At the beginning of January, for instance, Velterop wrote on his blog, “Looking at it as dispassionately as possible, one could conclude that peer review is the only remaining significant raison d’être of formal scientific publishing in journals.”

He then went on to make the heretical suggestion that traditional pre-publication peer review should be abandoned in favour of the “endorsement” model pioneered by the physics pre-print server arXiv. By doing so, he says, the research community could save the taxpayer $3 billion a year of unnecessary expense.

The heresy does not end there. Speaking of the future of scholarly publishing, and the role of publishers, Velterop says, “The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all, some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs they evolved from, though. Much smaller.”

In short, if Velterop’s vision of the future of scholarly communication proves accurate, publishers can expect their role to be dramatically reduced, with obvious implications for their revenues, and thus for their profits. “I have for a long time felt that ‘publisher’ is a misnomer for the outfits that are called that, anyway,” says Velterop, “Publishing is what the author can do, and increasingly does, autonomously; it is the tagging of an article with a peer reviewed journal title that the ‘publishers’ do.”

It is, therefore, unsurprising that Velterop takes the view that publishers have made a serious error of judgment in pushing for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA) — a new bill introduced into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year that would roll back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health. “I truly don’t understand how a sophisticated industry could get itself into a PR disaster like the RWA,” he says.

More of Velterop’s views on these and other aspects of scholarly publishing can be read in the attached interview.

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If you wish to read the interview with Jan Velterop, 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.