Open Access: Springer tightens rules on self-archiving

Last month Danny Kingsley — Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG) — highlighted a number of publishers that have recently changed their self-archiving (Green OA) policies.

Amongst those named by Kingsley was Springer — the world’s second-largest journal publisher — which changed its self-archiving policy earlier this year.

While Springer had previously insisted that where a funder required papers to be deposited in a central repository like PubMed Central this could only be done after a 12-month embargo, it allowed authors to post their papers in institutional repositories immediately. Under the new policy, however, the 12-month embargo has been extended to cover papers posted in institutional repositories as well. (Although authors can still post copies of their accepted manuscripts on their personal web sites without embargo).

Kingsley concluded that the change was likely a response to the new UK OA policy introduced by Research Councils UK (RCUK) on April 1^st.  Elsewhere, OA advocate Stevan Harnad has described the change as “Springer Silliness”, and a Springer author has expressed “confusion” over what the policy actually means.

In the hope of clarifying matters I sent a list of questions to Springer. I publish the answers to those questions below exactly as they were provided by Springer, which answered them on condition that I published them “in full, uninterrupted, and unedited (including hyperlinks) as a cohesive whole”.

I would simply note that in answering my question on whether it had any evidence that self-archiving has had a negative impact on it, Springer cites a survey undertaken by The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). I would invite interested parties to read an interview I did with the Chief Executive of ALPSP Audrey McCulloch about the survey last year.

Answers by Eric Merkel-Sobotta (Corporate Communications, Springer) to questions on self-archiving from Richard Poynder

25 June 2013

Q: As I understand it, Springer recently changed its Green OA policy. Can you confirm that this is so, and say when the change was made?

A: Yes, it is true that Springer modified its self-archiving policy earlier this year. The changes were made in order to make the policy as simple and consistent as possible, while also ensuring the sustainability of both green and gold open access models.

As a result of the changes, the same embargo rules now apply, whether the deposit is voluntary or mandatory, and whether the article is deposited in a funder repository or an institutionally managed repository.

We believe that this is unambiguous and simpler than policies which apply different rules according to who manages the repository, or those policies which allow self-archiving only if it is not required (!).

As you know, there is widespread, if not universal, acceptance that systematic and widespread author manuscript deposit (“green” open access) of subscription-based journal articles in repositories requires an embargo period in order to ensure the sustainability of the journals.

Q: Some OA advocates would question that assumption. Certainly they would say that there is no evidence that embargoes have had a negative impact on publishers to date. Does Springer have any evidence that it has been negatively affected by self-archiving? If so, can you say something about that evidence?

A: It is clearly not feasible to say at precisely what point immediate free access to articles via repositories would cause widespread disruption of the subscription model, but have a look at the ALPSP “one question survey”:

http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/ALPSPPApotentialresultsofsixmonthembargofv.pdf

and the comment related to it on Scholarly Kitchen:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/06/the-alpsp-report-on-six-month-embargo-mandates-stm-journals-die-slowly-social-science-journals-die-quickly/

However, a model in which the costs of publishing are paid by subscribing institutions who pay voluntarily despite the fact that the material they are subscribing to is all freely available does not seem, from first principles, to be desirable or stable.

That is why Springer, which has been committed to open access in deeds, not just words, for almost 10 years, is focused on offering two models which we believe to be stable and sustainable: embargoed green open access, and immediate gold open access.

Q: Can you confirm that the policy change was primarily a response to the new RCUK OA policy? If not, why was the change made?

A: No, it was not. We modified the policy to make it simple and consistent for our authors, for funders and for our employees, as all forms of open access continue to grow.

Q: How was news of the change conveyed to the research community? Did Springer put out a press release for instance?

A: Our policies on archiving are communicated very clearly to authors during the journal publishing/production process. We do not primarily communicate to our authors via the media.

Q: Can you specify exactly how the policy has changed?

A: Springer previously required a 12-month embargo period for deposit in funder repositories and only allowed this if the funder required deposit, but did not specify an embargo period for deposit in institutional repositories.

In order to ensure that green open access deposit remains sustainable on a large scale, we are standardizing the embargo period for all repository archiving to 12 months.

To be clear:  this means that Springer authors can deposit into a funder repository after a 12-month embargo period even if the funder does not require the author to do so.

Authors will still be entitled to make their accepted manuscript available via their personal website without any embargo.

Q: You may know that OA advocate Stevan Harnad argues that the change Springer has made is “inconsequential”. As he put it, “There is no difference between the authors' ‘own websites’ and their own institution's ‘repository’.” I assume you would not agree? So how does Springer distinguish between an institutional repository and an author’s personal website? It is clearly important that authors can understand this difference.

A: Commenting on one sentence taken out of context is not helpful. However, we believe the difference between author’s personal website and an institutional repository is widely understood. www.eprints.org describes institutional repositories, e.g. hosted by Eprint, as "a collection of digital documents [… which] share the same metadata, making their contents interoperable with one another." Author websites on the other hand serve various purposes and are not specifically created for document collection.

Q: You said that the change was intended to provide full support for both Gold and Green. How does extending an embargo from 0 to 12 months provide support for Green OA? It surely serves to weaken it?

A: We have eliminated from our policy the distinction between institutional repositories and others, such as subject and funder repositories, and created one simple rule that applies across the board -- authors may deposit in any repository they like, and regardless of whether they are required by a mandate or not, as long as the embargo period is observed.

This supports green OA by making it sustainable, and therefore making it possible for Springer as a publisher to actively encourage and facilitate it. It also helps to clarify the respective benefits of the Green and Gold models, each of which is likely to have a place going forward.

Q: I wonder if perhaps SHERPA/RoMEO has misunderstood Springer’s current policy, or has yet to note the change. Taylor & Francis is listed as a Yellow publisher. It is not clear to me that Springer’s policy is significantly different — both publishers appear to have a 12 month embargo. Do you believe the two policies are sufficiently different to warrant the different classification they have been given?

A: Springer’s revised repository archiving policy continues to be classified as “green” as confirmed by SHERPA/RoMEO. We allow self-archiving of the author’s version to the author’s personal website without embargo.

And just to remind everyone: we were the first “traditional” publisher to offer an open access option for the majority of its 2,000 subscription-based journal portfolio – the hybrid OA model, Springer Open Choice – in 2004. Since then, we have refined and extended this publication model.

In 2008, Springer acquired BioMed Central, making Springer the world’s largest open access publisher.

In 2010 Springer launched SpringerOpen, a new OA portfolio that includes journals covering all areas of science and in January 2012, the SpringerOpen journal portfolio was joined by SpringerPlus, an interdisciplinary open access journal publishing research in all disciplines. Currently, we publish more than 350 OA journals, and last year, we expanded our open access program to SpringerOpen books as an addition to its established open access journal portfolio.

Q: Indeed, but this all relates to Gold OA, not Green OA. I suspect that OA advocates will conclude that the link here is that — in light of the RCUK policy — Springer has decided that if it extends its embargo it will be able to persuade researchers to pay to publish in BioMed Central or SpringerOpen, rather than self-archive papers published in Springer’s subscription journals. In other words, they are likely to suspect that Springer has changed its OA policy in the way it has in order to increase its revenues, rather than protect existing revenues. Would those that conclude this have a point? Why? Why not?

A: We modified our policy because, with open access (both green and gold) becoming a more and more substantial part of scientific publishing, it was vital to ensure that our policies in this area were consistent and fully sustainable. For a publisher, sustainability certainly includes maintaining the revenue stream which supports the many activities that add value during the publication process.

Q: As you note, Springer pioneered Hybrid OA in 2004, when it launched Open Choice. OA advocates are very sceptical about Hybrid OA, not just because it is generally more expensive than pure Gold OA, but because it allows publishers to “double dip” (i.e. earn revenue from article-processing charges in addition to the money it makes from subscriptions for the same journals). What is Springer doing to prevent double-dipping?

A: In 2004, when Springer introduced Open Choice for the majority of its subscription journals, it committed to adjusting subscription prices once the share of paid Open Choice articles reached a significant threshold. Three years later, as the number of authors taking up the open access option increased, these adjustments began. During the preparation of the 2011 price list, the annual analysis of the data showed that the first journals had reached shares of paid Open Choice articles of 8% and more. Subsequently, as announced to the research and library community, their subscription prices were adjusted by that share. This practice has continued ever since.

Q: Finally, can you say how the change to Springer’s policy will improve Open Access? Since it will surely mean that more papers remain behind paywalls will it not slow down rather than accelerate OA?

A: That sounds a bit dramatic. The change in policy will not improve or damage open access.

The result of our modification provides a simple and consistent policy for our authors, for funders and for our employees that have daily contact with researchers. We feel that a certain straight-forwardness and ease of understanding was warranted, and this is the benefit for authors and funders.

Open access is healthy and here to stay, and anyone that thinks it is a delicate little flower in danger of being squashed, or is the target of a destructive anti-OA cabal, is simply being unnecessarily alarmist.

Open Access: Emerald’s Green starts to fade?

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

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

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

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

Dire consequences

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

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

Binley added, “That is pretty heavy criticism.”

Developing a unified rule for openness: Interview with Alek Tarkowski

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

Alek Tarkowski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

The UK’s Open Access Policy: Controversy Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Access in Poland: Interview with Bożena Bednarek-Michalska

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

Bożena Bednarek-Michalska

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a source of revenue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broader movement for openness

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

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

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

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

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