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.

Elsevier needs to get out more

As many in the research community will now be aware, a controversial piece of legislation was introduced into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year.

Known as the Research Works Act (RWA), or HR 3699, the proposed new law would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication.

The RWA would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers. As such, it poses a serious threat to the Open Access (OA) movement.

The bill is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

In the past week or so a number of AAP members have publicly disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

One one member of the AAP that does clearly support the RWA is Amsterdam-based Elsevier, and a few days ago the company emailed me the following statement explaining why:

Our support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnership with government agencies and other funders to promote access to research works, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which don't take into account the needs of different journals.

One of Elsevier's primary missions is to work towards providing universal access to high-quality scientific information in sustainable ways. We support the bipartisan bill, which seeks to prevent US government policies, like the one imposed by the NIH, that mandate the dissemination of journal articles published and funded by the private sector. Elsevier and other publishers have embraced and nurtured a whole range of access options to ensure broad dissemination — author pays journals, delayed access, manuscript posting, and patient access, to name a few. We've worked constructively with a number of government agencies to develop new ways to expand access to journal articles reporting on, analyzing and interpreting agency-funded research. But like other publishers and societies we have always opposed the adoption or extension of the NIH policy, which restricts the author's freedom to choose where to publish and undermines the sustainability of journals published by the private sector. The legislation is an effort to prevent such unsustainable policies.

And it is Elsevier that is bearing the brunt of the outcry against the RWA, being widely vilified as “evil” and/or wicked. 

But while there can be little doubt that Elsevier played an important role in the introduction of the RWA, and that it has donated money to the two lawmakers who sponsored the bill, it would be naïve to think that it is the only publisher that supports the RWA. Most of the others have apparently chosen to keep their heads down and let Elsevier take the hits.

For that reason Elsevier has become the primary target for critics of the bill. But why is the criticism quite so vitriolic? Partly, no doubt, because Elsevier is the world’s largest and most dominant subscription publisher, and has long been held to overcharge for its journals, and partly because it resisted Open Access for so long, and with such obduracy.

But I think there an important additional reason. Since Derk Haank departed Elsevier for Springer in 2003, the company has had no human face. In many people’s eyes, therefore, the company is viewed not so much as a publisher, but as a faceless, anonymous, and unheeding, moneymaking machine intent only on sucking the lifeblood out of the research community in order to feed the insatiable appetite of its shareholders.

For current purposes, I am not interested in exploring whether this characterisation of Elsevier reflects reality in any way, and I am not interested in the rights and wrongs of the RWA. I do, however, think that the company could do itself a big favour if it began to communicate more directly, and more effectively, with the research community. 

If Elsevier is indeed now committed to Open Access, and if its publishing services really do — as it maintains — provide good value for money, it really needs to demonstrate as much. And to do that it needs to step out from its Amsterdam publishing tower and talk to people. Rather than lobbying behind closed doors, and communicating by means of press releases and statements, it needs to engage in more public discussion, and in open forums rather than private meeting rooms.

As it happens, the company has shown signs of moving in this direction recently. Earlier this month, for instance, Elsevier’s vice president of global corporate relations Tom Reller entered the lion’s den of a social networking site, and posted comments on the blog of Michael Eisen, a co-founder of OA publisher Public Library of Science, and one of Elsevier’s fiercest critics.

And last week Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise braved the torrid waters of the Liblicense mailing list to explain “how it is possible for Elsevier to be both positive about PubMed Central and the Research Works Act.”

Image from Bernt Rostad

But this needs to be just the start of the process. And it was in order to make this point that I sat down earlier this month outside the Mad Bishop and Bear pub in London’s Paddington station to speak with Reller and Wise (I bought my own coffee, so I don’t expect to find myself listed on a journalist’s version of MapLight).

In doing so, I discovered that neither of them has horns, and they did not breathe fire at me. Of course, there was much that we could not agree on, but we did have a civilised discussion, and I think both sides learned from the exchange of views.

One thing I repeatedly stressed is that Elsevier needs to get out more, and talk to people — not just to its shareholders and larger customers, but to the wider research community. If it doesn't do that, I believe, then it risks later discovering that commenting on Eisen’s blog, and posting to Liblicense, was simply too little, too late.

The good news is that Reller gave me a personal commitment that he would arrange for me to do an interview with someone from Elsevier, likely Alicia Wise.

All that remains is for him to call me with a date and time.

I am waiting for Reller’s call! 

(The call came, and the interview with Alicia Wise is now available here).

The OA interviews: Francis Jayakanth of India’s National Centre for Science Information

Like members of all movements, OA advocates come in all shapes and sizes, and they are driven by a variety of different motives. Some have embraced OA, for instance, because they see it as a good business opportunity, some because they want their research to be more accessible, and so have greater impact, some because they expect it will save their institution large sums of money, and some simply because they believe that OA holds out the promise of providing considerable common good.

What is distinctive about the Open Access (OA) movement, however, is that it is a leaderless revolution. There is no formal organisation or foundation to represent it, and there is no official leader. For all that, OA is generally associated with a small group of high-profile Western-based individuals and organisations that are extremely vocal in their support of OA, and who have shown themselves to be very successful at attracting attention.

Since all movements have to promote themselves effectively this is clearly a good thing. However, it does mean that the contribution of the many “foot soldiers” of the movement can too easily be overlooked. These are people who do not shout about their activities, but simply go about the business of facilitating OA quietly and modestly. 

And it is the foot soldiers based in the developing world that tend to be least visible — people like Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore.

Ah-ha

Jayakanth’s ah-ha moment came in 2001, when he first saw arXiv, the physics preprint repository. “I was very impressed with the concept of electronic pre-print servers, and I wanted to do something similar for IISc publications,” he explains, adding, “[M]ost of the research publications produced by IISc are locked up in high-impact, commercial journals. For those who cannot afford a subscription to the journals, the visibility and the potential impact of research produced by IISc and published in these journals is lost.”

Francis Jayakanth

The appeal of OA for Jayakanth, therefore, is that it is “the best way of ensuring that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility.”

Keen to help Indian researchers achieve this wider visibility, Jayakanth became a dedicated and highly effective advocate for OA. More importantly, he determined to do whatever he could in a practical way to advance the cause of Open Access in his native country.

In 2002, Jayakanth was instrumental in the creation of India’s first institutional repository ePrints@IISc. Today this repository contains over 32,000 publications — around 80% of all the publications produced by researchers at IISc. Strikingly, this has been achieved despite the absence of an open-access mandate at IISc requiring researchers to deposit their papers.

Jayakanth also threw himself headlong into the task of helping colleagues at other Indian institutions play their part in the OA revolution. He began organising and running workshops and conferences on OA, helping others to set up their own repositories, and assisting in the creation of new OA journals, and the conversion of print-only journals to OA.

The Research Works Act: Two more dissenters

Open Access advocate PeterSuber is maintaining a page at the Berkman Center listing publishers and societies who oppose the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699. 

Two new entries have recently been added to this page concerning societies that dissent from the RWA.

The first entry points to a January 11th post on the Code for Life blog reporting that a letter about the RWA has been sent to members of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) by ISCB executive officer BJ Morrison McKay.

In the letter Morrison McKay says, “ISCB strongly opposes this bill [RWA]. Burkhard Rost, ISCB President, and Richard Lathrop, ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee Chair, are drafting a letter to the bill’s authors that expresses our opposition and emphasizes the importance of the ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature that was released in 2010.”

Morrison McKay's letter also invites members of ISCB who have yet to sign its OA statement to do so.

The second entry points to a comment on the Savage Minds blog reporting that on January 18th the Executive Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) voted UNANIMOUSLY to pass a resolution opposing the RWA.

The resolution begins, “On behalf of the SCA membership, the SCA Executive Board urges the American Anthropological Association to oppose the Research Works Act (HR 3699) introduced into Congress on December 19, 2011, and to distance itself from the endorsement of this legislation by the Association of American Publishers, of which AAA is a member.”

As the resolution indicates, the RWA is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

Neither the ISCB nor the SCA are themselves members of the AAP, although, as is evident from the resolution, the AAA is a member.

If passed, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, a policy that requires all NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible online within 12 months. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

A number of AAP members have already disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Other AAP members have indicated that they prefer to stay neutral (see here and here).

In addition, the OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC) has announced that it opposes the RWA. And BMC’s parent company, Springer has also published a statement on the RWA. Like the above two societies, neither BMC nor Springer is a member of the AAP.

Springer Statement on the US Research Works Act

Springer, the world's second largest scholarly journal publisher, has sent me the following statement on the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699:

We do not think that the RWA will be successful, but we hope that it will generate measured, intelligent and constructive debate, which we greatly prefer to histrionics and exaggeration. That said, the RWA does not seem to be rooted in opposition to open access, but rather in opposition to unfunded government mandates.

Springer is the largest open access publisher worldwide and fully supports – and significantly invests in – open access as a business model. “Gold” open access publishing provides one model to properly address the question of funding the system of ordered, layered and certified scientific knowledge that is currently performed by scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Springer welcomes any opportunity to develop and grow this model in partnership with researchers, institution, societies and foundations.

“Green” open access archiving does not cover the costs associated with formal publication, and poses risks in terms of the sustainability of scholarly communications. Springer therefore believes that systematic green open access self-archiving enforced by an unfunded mandate and “one-size-fits-all” embargos should not be adopted as a policy. At the same time, we will always try to assist our authors in meeting publishing requirements they may face.

Should society deem it desirable to have scientific articles available for free to the public, it must come up with a system which not only pays for publishers’ investments, but which also ensures the sustainability of scientific communications. We believe that “gold” open access accomplishes this.

That said, we realize that scholarly communication is changing, and we continue to welcome discussions with all parties concerned with the future of scientific publishing.

If passed, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access (OA) movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, a policy that requires all NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible online within 12 months. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

While traditional subscription publishers like Springer have now embraced Gold OA, in which they levy a one-off article processing charge for publishing papers, they have become increasingly unhappy about Green OA, where researchers continue to publish in subscription journals but make a copy of their papers freely available online, usually in an institutional repository, or a subject-based repository like PubMed Central. They particularly object to the use of mandates, where funders or universities require their researchers to make their papers openly available online, albeit after an embargo period. Mandates, they argue, might eventually destroy the subscription business model, and perhaps the entire scholarly publishing system with it.*

As Springer CEO Derk Haank put it to me a year ago, “I draw a distinction between author archiving and mandatory OA requirements such as the NIH Public Access Policy where they don't allow for a sufficient embargo … OA mandates institutionalise the process of author archiving, and if the delay between publication and archiving is only a couple of months, then there is a real danger of destroying the equilibrium that we have achieved over OA … There has to be a time lag. Otherwise, publishers will have no choice but to go fully OA. That could create a very messy situation and possibly destroy the current system.”

Yesterday the OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), which Springer acquired in 2008, released a statement opposing the RWA.

The RWA is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

Neither Springer nor BMC is a member of the AAP. We should, however, note that a number of AAP members have disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Some other AAP members have opted to stay neutral (see here and here).

* A hypothesis, we should note, that is challenged by OA advocates.