The UK Publishers Association comments on the Finch Report

The eagerly awaited Finch Report was published on 18^th June. The Finch 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.

Grayam Taylor of the Publishers Association

After due deliberation, the Committee concluded that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional journal model — which currently sees most research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be gradually discontinued.

The Finch Report has been welcomed by publishers and their trade associations (e.g. here, here and here), and by research funders (e.g. here and here). 

However, it has been received with a mixture of frustration, disbelief, and anger by some UK research universities, and by many OA advocates (e.g. here, here and here).

What has dismayed critics is that in recommending the so-called gold route to OA (where researchers pay to publish in OA journals), rather than the green route (where they continue to publish in subscription journals at no cost, and then self-archive their papers in an institutional repository) the Finch Report appears to have condemned the research community to having to find an additional £50-60 million a year to publish its research, at a time when university budgets are under severe pressure.

Since much of this additional money is expected to go into the pockets of publishers, some have charged the Finch Committee with succumbing to lobbying.

Others maintain that if the Finch recommendations are implemented the number of research papers published will have to be rationed.

What do publishers make of the criticisms? To find out, I contacted Graham Taylor, Director of Educational, Academic and Professional Publishing at the UK-based Publishers Association. Our email Q&A is below.

On lobbying

RP: The Finch Report recommends that all publicly funded research be made freely available on an Open Access basis, and that the traditional subscription model be phased out. The Publishers Association has welcomed the Report, describing it as a “’balanced package’ of recommendations for extending access to research outputs within the UK”.

By contrast, many in the OA movement have greeted the Report with dismay. Stevan Harnad, for instance, has described it as a product of “strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby”, and a “fiasco”. Meanwhile, David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL, commented to me that, “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense”. He added, “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

What is it that critics of the Report like this are not seeing that publishers do see?

GT: In fact the report recommends that “a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded”. In proposing that the UK “should embrace the transition to open access”, the report recognises that “the process itself will be complicated” and that “no single channel can on its own maximise research publications for the greatest number of people”.

The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

Last week I published an interview with David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL).  

Commenting on the interview on the Liblicense mailing list Anthony Watkinson said, “My impression is those pressing for OA, at least among the library sector and even within UCL, have moved on. A roadmap has been produced by the information officers of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). This organisation is chaired by none other than Paul Ayris of UCL, an Open Access advocate.”

Watkinson is a former Wiley-Blackwell publisher, a consultant to the Publishers Association, and now a part-time senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at UCL.

Paul Ayris, Direct of UCL Library Services

My curiosity piqued I contacted Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, and asked him if he thought the LERU Roadmap was at variance with what Price had said to me in the interview?

Ayris replied, “UCL’s position, as outlined in your interview with Professor Price, is to my mind in line with the LERU Roadmap, whose composition I co-ordinated. True, the Roadmap does not mention National Licensing approaches, but it does show the benefits and challenges of the Gold and Green routes to Open Access and the requirements that both lay on Universities.”

Ayris offered to write a guest post aligning the Finch Report with the LERU Roadmap. I agreed, and publish it below. 

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The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

By Paul Ayris 

The Finch Report, which was  recently published in the UK, has caused a storm of comment, even controversy. Responses have been lined up behind the barricades of either Green or Gold Open Access (OA), and predictions have been made about the destruction of the UK publishing industry. 

Universities and research funders rightly worry about the implications of the funding burden that full implementation of the Finch recommendations would lay on them. There is much heat, but where is the light?

The Finch Report is, in many ways, an academic study of what the authors feel is the future trajectory of scholarly publishing to support research, teaching and learning, public engagement and enterprise. It’s a laudable and important attempt to establish a leadership role for the UK in Open Access — a country that produces around 6% of the global research output. 

The Finch vision is for a fully Gold OA world, where Green OA repositories take on a role as a supporting player for grey literature and to support University marketing. National licences to commercial content are suggested as a short term win, to bring about equality of access across UK HE, and to embrace new sectors such as the NHS and SMEs.

Where does the Finch view sit in a global OA world? A new report by John Houghton and Alma Swan, financed by the JISC and to be published imminently, takes a different look at the OA debate. 

Houghton and Swan have undertaken detailed economic modelling, something missing from Finch, to compare the costs of Green and Gold Open Access if a university unilaterally opted for either of these routes, or if the whole world changed to either Green or Gold. 

Their analysis tells us a lot about the difficulties of transition to a fully OA environment. Their conclusion is that, for universities, at the present time the most cost effective route is for a University to opt for Green OA. Should the whole world turn OA, then their modelling supports Finch, in that the biggest saving for a University would come from Gold (Chart 23 in the forthcoming Report).

This is an important recognition of the difficulties of transition. One of the weaknesses in Finch is that it does not adequately model the transition to OA or the time it might take to achieve. 

Another recent publication, which also acknowledges the difficulties of transition, is the LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access. This document was published in June 2011 by the League of European Research Universities as an Advice paper for its members, and indeed for all European Universities. 

The Roadmap was well received in Germany, with a glowing tribute in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The document identifies signs and pathways for both the Green and Gold routes to OA, and the benefits and challenges of all approaches. 

A survey of European research universities found that Green approaches were more deeply embedded there than Gold. The Roadmap therefore paints a realistic picture of what faces a European research university in their attempts to embrace OA.

In this context, what is the significance of the Finch Report? It is visionary, bold and well-intentioned. But there are gaps. It fails to appreciate the difficulties of transition to OA here and now. 

Taken with the Houghton and Swan, and the LERU work, a different trajectory for the future of OA can be said to emerge. This is more nuanced than Finch suggests. 

In the short term, a scaled up version of Green OA, linked to extended national licencing, would help solve the problems of access to content that Finch quite rightly is trying to address. 

In the longer term, the Gold OA vision of Finch (the Goldfinch) may well become the predominant model. But for this to work, the whole of the world needs to turn OA, and that is not going to happen tomorrow, nor any time soon.

The Finch Report is therefore an important marker on the road to OA, but in itself it is not the whole story.

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.

A New Declaration of Rights: Open Content Mining

In a recent investment report, analyst Claudio Aspesi concluded that a new front had opened up in the Open Access (OA) debate. Writing in April, Aspesi noted that academics are “increasingly protesting the limitations to the usage of the information and data contained in the articles published through subscription models, and — in particular — to the practice of text mining articles.” Aspesi is right, and a central figure in this battleground is University of Cambridge chemist Peter Murray-Rust. A long-time advocate for open data, Murray-Rust is now spearheading an initiative to draft a “Content Mining Declaration”. What is the background to this?

Peter Murray-Rust

When I interviewed Peter Murray-Rust in 2008, he expressed considerable frustration at the difficulties he was experiencing in trying to extract and reuse the data published in scholarly journals — even where his university had paid an electronic licence to access the content. 

What Murray-Rust wanted to do, he explained, was to capture the “embedded data” contained in the tables, charts, and images published in science papers, along with the “supplemental information” that often accompanies papers. To do this, he had developed a variety of software tools to mine large quantities of digital text. Having extracted the data he then wanted to aggregate them, compare them, input them into programs, use them to create predictive models, and reuse them in a variety of other ways.

However, he was having huge problems achieving this, not because of any technical issue, but because of uncertainty over copyright and publishers’ insistence that a licence to read journals does not encompass the right to mine them with software.

To add to Murray-Rust’s frustration, many of his colleagues were either unsympathetic or uncomprehending. Even more galling, the Open Access movement — which should have been a natural ally — was more interested in making papers freely available to eyeballs, than to software. Even papers published in OA journals, he noted, are often released under licences that do not come with reuse rights.

In pursuit of his dream, Murray-Rust became a formative voice in the creation of the open data movement. Open data, Murray-Rust explained to me in 2008, is data “free of any restraint on access and on reuse.”  Recently, however, governments have tended to lead the way in urging for open data, spawning a generation of data wranglers; open scientific information has often lagged behind, but is now beginning to be seen as a central issue.

Four years later Murray-Rust is still frustrated. He is not, however, a man to give up, and he continues his advocacy today under the rubric of “open content mining”. Essentially, this is text mining plus. As Murray-Rust explains today, he views the mining of scholarly journals as a hierarchical activity, with content mining encompassing not just the mining of text and data, but other types of content too, including images, tables, graphs, audio, and video.

Simply using the term “text mining”, he adds, “might imply that anything other than text should be protected by the ‘content provider’. However, I and others can extract factual information from a wide range of material.”

The good news is that the research community is finally beginning to understand what Murray-Rust has been “banging on about” for all these years, as are research funders and governments, and Murray-Rust believes the door to what he wants is finally beginning to open.

However, he says, it is imperative that text mining advocates push hard at that open door if they want to achieve their objectives. To this end, Murray-Rust recently convened an ad hoc group of interested parties to draft what he calls a “Content Mining Declaration” (disclosure: I am a member of the group).

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If you wish to read the rest of the article, and a short Q&A with Murray-Rust, 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 rest of the text (as a PDF file) click HERE.

Open Access: The People’s Petition

(There is a short Q&A with OA advocate John Wilbanks below. Scroll down if you wish to skip this introduction)

**This petition reached the threshold 25,000 signatures on 3rd June 2012**

Earlier this month a group of Open Access (OA) advocates flew to Washington to attend a meeting with the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Their objective was to convince OSTP that it is vital the US government ensures that all publicly-funded research is made freely available on the Internet.

The omens seemed good: at the end of last year the OSTP had issued an RFI on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research, and the Obama Administration has been making positive noises about OA for a while now (although without introducing any new policies as yet).

Moreover, in February the OA movement had defeated a piece of publisher-backed legislation called the Research Works Act (RWA) that, if it had passed, would have slain the poster child of the OA movement — the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. This policy requires that all NIH-funded papers are made freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication.

The same month a piece of bipartisan legislation — the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — had been introduced in both US houses that would have the reverse effect of the RWA. If passed, it would  propagate the NIH policy to a dozen or so other US federal agencies, and reduce the current NIH embargo from 12 months to six.

Yes, the omens were good. To cap it all, says John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation, and one of the group that travelled to Washington, the meeting appeared to go well. “They listened to us, they clearly had studied the issues.”  

Nagging feeling

Flying home to the West Coast on a redeye, however, Wilbanks began to experience a nagging feeling that their job was not complete. After all, he thought, the OSTP had made no promises; and it would inevitably be talking to publishers as well. And publishers tell a very different story about OA.

“And it hit me — us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike Rossner, and Heather Joseph — that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not carrying the day,” Wilbanks explained on this blog. “We needed to do something else.”

That something else became an initiative called Access2Research. The objective was to engage the public in the discussions about OA. As Wilbanks wrote on his blog, “The only thing missing from the open access debate is the public.”

The best way of engaging the people, it was decided, was to launch a petition on the “We the People” site — which was introduced on whitehouse.gov by the US government last September — and invite the public to sign it.

The petition — which went live on the night of 20^th May — reads: “Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.”

It ends by urging President Obama “to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.”

In order to receive a response from the US government the petition must attract 25,000 signatures within 30 days (i.e. 19^th June). But here too the omens are good: within the first two and a half days the petition had attracted half the number of signatures necessary, with roughly 200 being added every hour.

At the time of writing the number stands at 16,443, two thirds of the way there, yet with 24 days still to run.

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.