The OA Interviews: Ian Gibson, former Chairman of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee

Like all successful movements, Open Access (OA) has experienced a number of milestone events. Amongst the more significant of these were the creation of the physics preprint repository arXiv in 1991, the 1994 Subversive Proposal, the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the introduction in 2005 of the first  Open Access Policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Ian Gibson

However, one of the more interesting but less celebrated events in the history of OA is surely the 2004 Inquiry into scientific publication conducted by the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. The inquiry seems particularly noteworthy in the wake of this year’s controversial Finch Report, and the new OA policy that Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced in response.

The 2004 Inquiry was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least the way in which it managed to explore a deeply divisive issue in an independent and fair-minded way, despite intense lobbying from all sides.

This independence was all the more striking given that the Inquiry was itself a response to lobbying by OA publishers, origins that gave rise to a great deal of paranoid speculation.

On discovering that the Inquiry was a product of behind-the-scenes agitation by OA publishers, for instance, subscription publishers became extremely jumpy, fearful that it could lead to government intervention that would impact negatively on their profits. In their turn, OA advocates became increasingly concerned that the Select Committee did not understand the issues, and that the Inquiry was therefore in the process of being “captured” by subscription publishers.

The widening suspicion led to a great many rumours and conspiracy theories. When publishing consultant David Worlock was appointed as “specialist adviser” to the Committee, for instance, OA advocates assumed that his appointment had been masterminded by subscription publishers, with the aim of ensuring that the Committee ended up concluding that the status quo should not be disrupted.

What those outside the Committee and its support staff did not know, however, was that Worlock’s appointment was in part a tactical move intended to act as a counterweight to the fact that the Inquiry had been triggered by lobbying from OA publishers. Likewise, they did not know that another (more OA friendly) specialist had been interviewed for the position, but that the Committee had been more impressed by Worlock.

Those caught up in the rumour mill also failed to appreciate that the role of a specialist adviser is not to provide opinions, draw conclusions, or write reports, but solely to offer insights and contacts based on their expertise.

In this case, it was felt necessary to appoint an adviser because the Committee members had no personal experience of the publishing industry. As such, they needed someone with the necessary knowledge to answer the practical questions that they had about it.

When recruiting advisers, select committee staff consult with in-house specialists, and then call up people in the field to ask for suggestions.

Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal

A Q&A with co-architect of the Big Deal Jan Velterop follows this introduction

The scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several decades now, a problem generally referred to as the “serials crisis”. The nub of the issue is that the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster than the consumer price index. This has seen research libraries increasingly struggle to meet the costs of subscribing to all the journals their researchers need.

In the early 1990s, publishers found themselves in a situation where every time they increased the price of a journal they were confronted with a wave of cancellations. In an attempt to recover the lost revenue they would raise the price again, which simply triggered another round of cancellations.

Conscious that their livelihood was under threat, publishers cast around for a way to lock subscribers in, eventually coming up with what became known as the “Big Deal”.

Academic Press Big Deal contract

With the Big Deal, libraries are asked not to subscribe to journals on a title-by-title basis, but to a pre-determined bundle of electronic journals, which they have to commit to for several years. Usually this bundle consists of the publisher’s entire portfolio, which might include hundreds of titles.

The attraction of the Big Deal for the publisher was that it promised to end the annual cancellation cycle. For libraries it provided access to a much larger number of titles for the same price as they had been paying for a smaller set — so long as they took the entire bundle, and so long as they signed a multi-year contract. For authors it provided a larger and more stable audience for their articles.

The Big Deal was pioneered in 1996 by Academic Press (now part of Elsevier), when it signed a three-year licensing contract with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The agreement meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to AP’s entire journal portfolio. Moreover, since it was HEFCE that paid the bill (by means of top slicing), the deal brought the additional benefit of easing the pressure on the budgets of hard-pressed UK research libraries.

The OA Interviews: Ahmed Hindawi, founder of Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Founded in 1997, Hindawi Publishing Corporation was the first subscription publisher to convert its entire portfolio of journals to Open Access (OA). This has enabled the company to grow very rapidly and today it publishes over 400 OA journals. 

The speed of Hindawi’s growth, which included creating many new journals in a short space of time and mass mailing researchers, led to suspicion that it was a “predatory” organisation. Today, however, most of its detractors have been won round and — bar the occasional hiccup — Hindawi is viewed as a respectable and responsible publisher. 

Nevertheless, Hindawi’s story poses a number of questions. First, how do researchers distinguish between good and bad publishers in today’s Internet-fuelled publishing revolution, and what constitutes acceptable practice anyway? Second, does today’s Western-centric publishing culture tend to discriminate against publishers based in the developing world? Third, might the author-side payment model fast becoming the norm in OA publishing turn out to be flawed? Finally, can we expect OA publishing to prove less expensive than subscription publishing? If not, what are the implications? 

These at least were some of the questions that occurred to me during my interview with Ahmed Hindawi.

Ahmed Hindawi

Ambition

After training in (and briefly teaching) High Energy Physics, Ahmed Hindawi decided he wanted to become a scholarly publisher — an ambition sparked by the advent of the Internet, his experience using the physics pre-print server arXiv, and a newly-acquired passion for typography.

Inspired by this dream, Hindawi and his wife Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb returned from the US to their native country of Egypt and founded Hindawi Publishing Corporation. From the start they set their sights high, determined to “make a dent in the universe” by leveraging the potential of the Web to “disrupt the scholarly communications industry”.

Becoming a player in the scholarly publishing market was at that time, however, no walk in the park — not least because the subscription model traditionally used to publish scholarly journals had enabled a few large publishers to acquire near-monopoly powers.

Nevertheless, after several false starts, Hindawi and his wife did gain a foothold, taking over publication of the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences (IJMMS) in 1999.

Big break

Hindawi’s big break came in 2001 — when he made a daring bid to acquire the journal International Mathematics Research Notices (IMRN) from Duke University Press. Lacking the wherewithal to buy the journal outright, Hindawi proposed an instalment plan and, to his delight, Duke accepted his proposal. “This was the most significant journal acquisition that we had made up to that point, and it doubled our annual revenue,” says Hindawi.

Now established as a traditional scholarly publisher, Hindawi found himself increasingly frustrated with the limitations of the subscription system. Not only does it make it difficult for new entrants to break into the market, but it inevitably erects a paywall between reader and author, and so significantly limits the potential audience. As a result, many subscription journals have only a handful of subscribers. “[W]e were very concerned about the readership of these journals,” says Hindawi. “It just didn’t feel right to call this publishing.”

So the publisher began experimenting with ways to make the research that he published available sans paywall, including inviting authors to pay a publication fee so that their papers could be made freely available on the Internet — a model that later came to be known as hybrid Open Access (OA).

By 2004, however, the pioneering OA publishers BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) had demonstrated that it was possible to build a viable publishing business from so-called gold OA. So Hindawi made the decision to convert his entire portfolio of journals to gold OA, a process completed by 2007 ...

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If you wish to read the interview with Ahmed Hindawi, 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.

Budapest Open Access Initiative reaffirmed and refreshed

Although the history of the Open Access (OA) movement can be traced back to at least 1994 (or even earlier), its birth is widely held to have taken place at the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Certainly, it was at this point that the term “open access” was first used.

The BOAI emerged from a meeting held in Budapest that had been organised by George Soros’ then named Open Society Institute (OSI). The OSI also kick-started the movement with a grant of $3 million.

OSI’s involvement has allowed a great deal to be achieved over the last ten years. However, much remains to be done. So in February this year OSI — now known as the Open Society Foundations (OSF) — organised a second Budapest meeting (BOAI-10).

Here a “diverse coalition” of OA publishers, funders, librarians, scholarly societies, infrastructure managers, advocates and strategists reaffirmed and refreshed the BOAI, and subsequently drew up 28 recommendations “to make research freely available to all online”. These recommendations were finally published yesterday.

It is worth noting that a great deal has happened in the OA space this year. We have seen the rise and fall of the infamous Research Works Act (RWA). We have witnessed the so-called Academic Spring — which included a boycott by researchers of Elsevier, the world’s largest subscription publisher. We have seen a US petition in favour of OA attract more than 25,000 signatures. And we have seen the publication of the Finch Report in the UK, followed by the announcement of a new OA policy from Research Councils UK (RCUK). Finally, the European Commission has made a new commitment to “improve access to scientific information produced in Europe.”

However, this is not all good news. The Finch Report and the RCUK OA policy in particular have proved highly controversial, with OA critics expressing great concern that they will prove counter-productive, and could “set worldwide open access back by at least a decade”.

Intriguing questions

One intriguing question that arises from the policy errors of Finch/RCUK is whether they might have been avoided had the BOAI-10 recommendations been published earlier in the year. After all, as OA advocate Stevan Harnad points out, RCUK’s policy is in direct contradiction with these recommendations.

We might also wonder whether, in the wake of Finch/RCUK, OA advocates can any longer maintain that OA will resolve the affordability problem that led many to join the OA movement in the first place.

BOAI-10 was chaired by Alma Swan, the director of European advocacy for SPARC. Below I publish an email interview with Swan about the meeting and the recommendations — a discussion that inevitably raised the above questions in my mind.

Swan argues that OA can be cheaper, so long as it is “properly supported by sensible policy”. She adds, “[t]he cheapest transition to OA for the UK is through a primarily green route, and several studies have confirmed that.”

This, of course, goes to the heart of the concerns about Finch and the RCUK policy, since both maintain that gold OA should become the main vehicle for scholarly publishing in future, and both relegate green OA self-archiving to a bit player. 

As a result, some argue, OA can no longer be expected to lower costs, but rather to increase them. By how much will it increase them? Harnad predicts that the UK research community’s publishing costs will likely rise by 6% as a result of the RCUK policy.

We can but hope that the publication of the BOAI-10 recommendations will refocus policy-makers’ minds on the affordability issue, and that RCUK will rethink its erroneous policy as a result. 

Below is the Q&A interview I did with Swan.

OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy

When on July 16^th Research Councils UK (RCUK) published its updated Policy on Access to Research Outputs the Open Access (OA) movement greeted the news with enthusiasm. This was hardly surprising: unlike the recommendations in the controversial Finch Report (published a month earlier), RCUK stressed that it continues to view both gold OA publishing and green OA self-archiving as equal partners in any OA policy.

Stevan Harnad

Gold and green are the two strategies outlined eight years ago when the OA movement was born, and are viewed as being essential components of any successful transition to OA.

By contrast, Finch concluded that the main vehicle should now be gold OA, either via pure open access journals or via hybrid journals, and that this should be funded by article processing charges (APCs).

At the same time, Finch argued, it was time to downgrade green OA, and reduce the role of institutional repositories to merely, "providing access to research data and to grey literature" and assisting in digital preservation. 

Set alongside the Finch proposals, OA advocates quickly concluded that RCUK’s policy was a godsend.

One of the first to applaud the new policy was long-standing OA advocate, and self-styled archivangelist, Stevan Harnad. The minute the report was published a relieved Harnad began flooding mailing lists with messages congratulating RCUK on coming up with a policy that not only defied Finch, but was stronger than its current OA policy. 

But as Harnad set about talking up the policy, and seeking to win over sceptics and doubters, he himself began to have doubts. And eventually he was driven to the conclusion that he had no option but to withdraw his support for the RCUK policy — which he now characterises as “autistic”, and a “foolish, wasteful and counterproductive step backwards”.

How has what at first sight seemed so desirable rapidly become something terrible? Curious to find out, I contacted Harnad. Below I publish the email interview that emerged from our conversation.

The OA Interviews: Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, and member of the Finch Committee on OA

The past month has seen a flurry of activity in the Open Access (OA) space, most of it focused on the UK.

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford

Events were triggered by the publication on 18^th June of the eagerly awaited Finch Report. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was set up last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, who asked it to consider how access to research could be expanded in the UK.

As I noted last week, the Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in gold OA or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research.

To understand the reaction that the Committee’s proposals have received from some in the research community we need to remember that when the OA movement was born — with the 2004 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) — two complementary strategies were agreed: BOAI-1 and BOAI-2, now more usually referred to as green OA (self-archiving) and gold OA (OA journals).

Gold OA generally implies that instead of charging readers to access scholarly journals (by means of subscriptions), publishers charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (via an article-processing charge, or APC). This allows publishers to make research papers immediately and freely available on the Internet.

With green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but also self-archive their papers in their institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. This approach means that researchers can make their papers freely available themselves.

What was radical (and surprising) about the Finch Report was that it proposed abandoning BOAI’s double-pronged strategy in favour of an exclusively gold approach. As such, it downgraded green OA and institutional repositories to bit players merely, “providing access to research data and to grey literature” and assisting in digital preservation.

Where self-archiving did continue to take place, Finch suggested, it would be unfair on publishers if the papers they published were self-archived before a 12-month embargo had elapsed (except where the publisher provided no mechanism to pay for gold OA).

Protest

The report sparked a firestorm of protest, with many researchers bridling at the thought of having to pay to publish all their papers, and green OA advocates expressing dismay that all the time and hard work that had been put into building a network of institutional repositories, had been so casually dismissed.

It did not help that Finch estimated its proposals would cost the UK research community an additional £50-60 million a year. Since in the current economic climate there is no hope of receiving additional funding from the UK government, universities would have to find these extra costs from their existing budgets. 

Moreover, as the cost burden would primarily fall on the Russell Group universities, the Report has proved somewhat divisive.

David Price, Vice-Provost (Research), University College London (UCL), has been particularly critical. “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense,” he said to me on the day the report was published. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Discontent was fuelled further by the publication on July 5^th of a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG). This revealed that green OA could provide a much more cost-effective route to OA than gold. Specifically, the report concluded, if the UK undertook a unilateral move to gold OA the cost to large research intensive institutions (i.e. Russell Group universities) would be about £1.7 million a year. A unilateral move to green OA, by contrast, would cost them only around £100,000 a year.

These turbulent waters were further muddied on July 16^th, when Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy. RCUK had ignored the Finch recommendations, reinstating green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisting that publishers be given no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers).

In fact, suggested OA advocate Peter Suber, the RCUK policy reverses Finch, favouring green over gold. And where RCUK makes clear what CC licences should be used, Suber added, Finch is vague “about what license to require (or what reuse rights to demand) when taxpayers pay the costs of publication.”

To add to the drama, RCUK’s new policy was published just hours before David Willetts announced his acceptance of all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals. Unsurprisingly perhaps, OA advocates concluded that the timing was no accident.

Then to cap it all, the next day (17^th July) the European Commission issued a Communication proposing a Europe-wide OA strategy that essentially mimics the RCUK policy.

The Finch Report and its implications for the developing world

There are two routes to Open Access. With gold OA, publishers cease to charge readers to access scholarly journals (in the form of subscriptions), but instead charge authors, or their funders or institutions, to publish their papers (by means of an article-processing charge, or APC). This allows publishers to make research papers freely available on the Internet.

With green OA, researchers continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but then self-archive their papers in their institutional repository, usually after an embargo period. In this way, researchers can make their papers freely available themselves.

Over the years there has been much debate as to which is the better method for achieving OA, but no consensus has ever been reached. In the past month, however, a number of developments have served to focus minds on the respective merits of green and gold as never before.

It began with the publication on 18th June of the Finch Report. Chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, the Finch Committee was formed last year by the UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and asked to consider how access to research could be expanded.

Clear policy direction

After giving the matter due consideration, the Finch Committee concluded that a clear policy direction should be set towards supporting publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially where the research has been publicly funded.

In other words, Finch recommended that gold OA should be viewed as the norm for publishing research papers.

By contrast, Finch recommended that the institutional repository (i.e. green OA) should be relegated to the role of bit player, merely “providing access to research data and to grey literature” and assisting in digital preservation. Where self-archiving does take place, Finch suggested, it would be unreasonable to allow papers to be deposited before an embargo period of at least 12 months had passed (except where publishers do not offer a mechanism to pay for OA gold).

The Finch report ignited a firestorm of protest, not least because it estimated that its recommendations would cost the UK research community an additional £50-60 million a year. Since it was clear that there would be no additional funding from the UK government, this meant that universities would have to find the additional money from existing budgets.

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

Serving to spur on the complaints, a few weeks later a report commissioned by the UK Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG) concluded that green OA offered a much more cost-effective route. Specifically, OAIG said, where a unilateral move to gold OA in the UK would cost large research intensive institutions about £1.7 million a year, a unilateral move to green OA would cost only around £100,000 a year.

In this light, it is perhaps unsurprising that when on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new OA policy, it reinstated green OA as an equal partner to gold, and insisted on no more than a 6-month embargo (except for humanities and social science papers), apparently ignoring many of the Finch recommendations.

RCUK’s new policy, we should note, was published just hours before David Willetts announced that he was accepting all the Finch proposals, bar one on VAT rates for e-journals.

The very next day (yesterday) the EC issued a Communication on providing better access to scientific information in which it proposed an OA policy that mimics the RCUK policy.

No easy task

Where this leaves the Finch recommendations remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that adopting a national OA policy in a research environment that is truly global is no easy task — particularly where gold OA is viewed as the main vehicle for achieving OA.

As Graham Taylor of the UK Publishers Association pointed out to me recently, “6% of global research outputs derive from the UK, but if that is funded by APCs then the UK alone must cover that cost, which was previously spread over global subscriptions.”

However, there is perhaps a more important issue at stake here. In assuming that OA could or should be approached in a purely national way, the Finch Report failed to see (or simply ignored) the implications of establishing a model for OA that would inevitably have serious negative implications for researchers in more financially constrained parts of the world.

For years now scientists in the developing world have been locked out of much of the world’s research, simply because the very high costs of journal subscriptions means that their institutions are unable to afford to buy access to most science journals.

To replace that with an author-pays OA model would simply replace one problem with another, and possibly a more serious problem at that.

Thus where today researchers in the developing world are unable to read much published research, gold OA will surely prevent many of them from being able to publish their own research — threatening to turn them into passive witnesses to the development of science, not active players. After all, if UCL is wondering how it can afford to pay for gold OA, how on earth could impoverished research institutions in the developing world hope to pay the necessary charges for their researchers to publish their papers were gold OA to become the norm?

In this light, Finch’s one-dimensional approach to OA appears most unfortunate. And it is no surprise that many OA advocates have welcomed the more balanced approach adopted by RCUK and the EC.

Who better to explain the problems that Finch poses for the developing world than the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) — a charity whose mission it is to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication, and which promotes open access initiatives in the developing world.

Below I republish EPT’s formal response to the Finch report, which was signed by EPT chairman Professor Derek Law.