Michelle Willmers on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A below is with Michelle Willmers, Project Manager of the OpenUCT Initiative at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.

Michelle Willmers

A former journal publishing manager, Michelle Willmers was drawn to the Open Access movement after witnessing international publishers sweep into South Africa and acquire local journals. They then locked these journals behind paywalls and sought to sell them to local academic institutions at prices most simply could not afford.

For the South African academic community this was a case of bad to worse: Historically South African research has not been published over much in international journals. As such, it has tended to be invisible to the global research community. Now it was in danger of becoming invisible to local researchers as well.

Explaining her journey to OA Willmers says, “It was perhaps less of a case of becoming an OA advocate than having a deep realisation that the local scholarly communication paradigm was broken. The conversation around how to first acknowledge and then address this led in the open access direction.”

It was this same broken local context that led to the creation (in 1997) of the South Africa-based service African Journals Online (AJOL) — which Dominique Babini referred to in an earlier Q&A in this series. A local web portal that enables African journals to make their content available online (and so visible on a global basis without the need to cede ownership to international publishers), AJOL currently hosts content from 462 African journals, 150 of which are OA.

And it is this local context that saw the recent launch of SciELO-SA, a South African version of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), the online open-access publishing platform pioneered in Brazil. SciELO-SA was launched with the content of 26 “free to access and free to publish” South African journals, and it is expected that the service will eventually include around 180 of the country’s 300 journals.

Let’s be open about Open Access

To what extent should we expect publishers who profess a commitment to Open Access (OA) to be open in other ways too? This is a question often raised in discussions about OA. Some, for instance, argue (e.g. here and here) that OA ought to go hand-in-hand with open peer review (particularly in light of the recent “sting” of OA journals by Science). Others have argued that OA publishers have a duty to be more open in the management of their business. And it has been suggested that OA publishers should be more transparent about their finances. But what about when publishers make use of social media like blogs? How transparent should they be about who is behind the site, and what their objective is? This thought occurred to me recently when I was trying to find out who runs the Open Science blog.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Like companies everywhere, scholarly publishers have in recent years taken an increasing interest in the social web. Most, if not all, now have their own Twitter accounts, some have Google+ accounts, and most now run their own blogs (see for instance those run by PLOS, BioMed Central, Wiley and Elsevier).

In doing so, they invariably view the new platforms as useful new marketing tools for promoting their products and services — or in some cases as a space where their authors can promote their own books or journals (see, for instance, the blog run by Springer). Given these objectives, it is apparent to anyone reading or subscribing to these blogs exactly who runs them, what their purpose is, and the nature of the relationship they are asking readers to enter into with the site. If nothing else, the URL will invariably flag ownership.

But what if a publisher were to run a blog without indicating that it owned and/or controlled it? Suppose, for instance, that the intention was simply to provide a platform for discussing and reporting on a particular topic (e.g. Open Access). In such circumstances, could anonymity (or at least some degree of non-transparency) engender more productive discussions? In other words, might it be possible to provide a more effective communication platform if ownership of the site was cloaked in some way? Or would the interests of the site owner make it impossible to provide an independent platform?

These questions presented themselves to me in August, after I linked via Google+ to an article on the Open Science blog. Entitled Green vs. Gold OA. Which one to choose, the stated aim of the article was to outline the pros and cons of the two main forms of OA.

Elsevier’s Philippe Terheggen on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A below is with Philippe Terheggen, Managing Director, STM Journals. Terheggen, who is responsible for all 2,500 of Elsevier’s journals, is the second representative of a traditional commercial publisher to take part in this series.
 

Philippe Terheggen

As the largest legacy journal publisher, Elsevier tends to attract more criticism from the OA movement than other publishers. One could argue, however, that it has conspired in this by doing more than other publishers to try to derail OA — not least by aggressively supporting the infamous Research Works Act (RWA) in 2011.

Today, however, Elsevier accepts that OA has become mainstream, that it needs to embrace it, and that it may not turn out to be the monster that the publisher assumed it to be. As Philippe Terheggen  says below, “In my opinion, we’re past the notion of OA as a threat to publishers as there are many examples of OA publishers who run a perfectly healthy business.”

Please scroll through if you wish to go direct to the Q&A

At the end of the Q&A is a timeline

But where is Elsevier with OA right now? Currently, it publishes some 2,500 journals, all of which are available on its electronic platform ScienceDirect, which now hosts nearly 12 million articles. The vast majority of these journals, however, are still subscription-based, and Elsevier currently publishes just 56 pure Gold OA journals. It does however offer a Hybrid OA option for 1,600 of its subscription journals.

How quickly is Elsevier moving to embrace OA? At the beginning of 2013 the publisher had 31 OA titles. This year 25 new ones will be added, and the expectation is that a further 25 OA journals will be launched in 2014.

Media research analyst at Exane BNP Paribas Sami Kassab on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Sami Kassab

Sami Kassab is an Executive Director at the investment company Exane BNP Paribas, where he runs the Media Research team covering professional publishing. Amongst the companies Kassab monitors are Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Informa, John Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and Pearson. Currently, Kassab is positive about the sector, arguing that scientific publishing offers “best in class defensive growth in a very resilient industry”. Kassab believes that Open Access (OA) is still a marginal activity and in any case poses neither a short-term nor a long-term threat to large scholarly publishers. In fact, he says, it will enable them to monetise more articles than they have been able to monetise historically.

Kassab’s views will undoubtedly challenge OA advocates, who have long maintained that Open Access will mean that publishers will play a much smaller role in disseminating research in the future. This, they add, will force them to downsize, and so reduce the financial burden on the research community. Indeed, it was in the expectation that OA will lower the costs of scholarly communication that many people joined the OA movement in the first place — especially librarians, who have long sought relief from the so-called serials crisis (Whereby the cost of serials has consistently outstripped libraries’ ability to pay for all the journals they need).

Concomitantly, OA advocates argued that Open Access will inevitably reduce the profits of scholarly publishers, a belief that gained credence from the way in which publishers have persistently lobbied against OA over the past decade or so.

Until a few years ago Sami Kassab and his colleagues at BNP Paribas viewed OA as a threat to publishers too. In 2003, for instance, the website newratings.com reported that BNP Paribas had downgraded Reed Elsevier to “underperform” — on the grounds that the investment firm had concerns “regarding the company's current subscription based access, as compared to the newer and more successful article-fee based open access system.”

But this is no longer the view of Exane BNP Paribas, or of Kassab. Today the investment company is upbeat about the future of large scholarly publishers like Elsevier.

Björn Brembs on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A below is with Björn Brembs, Professor of Neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Brembs, who self-characterises himself as a “disgruntled user of a dysfunctional scholarly communication system”, believes it is time for the research community to take ownership of the scholarly communication system back from publishers, and build a “modern scholarly infrastructure”.

 

Björn Brembs

Like palaeontologist Mike Taylor (interviewed earlier in this series), Brembs is a second-generation OA advocate. His interest in OA began in 2004, ten years after self-styled archivangelist Stevan Harnad posted his Subversive Proposal calling on researchers to create their own local FTP archives and make their published papers freely available on the Internet. 

And two years earlier, in 2002, a group of like-minded people had gathered in Hungary to launch the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Although the notion of making papers freely available had been around for a decade or more, it was in Budapest that the term “Open Access” was finally adopted.

We could also note that 2004 was the year that Springer launched Open Choice, pioneering the controversial form of OA known as Hybrid OA. The same year the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee published an influential report recommending that all UK researchers be mandated to deposit copies of their articles in their institutional repository so that their research could be “read, free of charge, online.”

Open Access in Serbia: Interview with Biljana Kosanović

Biljana Kosanović is Head of the Department of Scientific Information at the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade. Recently I spoke to Kosanović about the research environment in Serbia, about access to international journals, about local Serbian journals, about initiatives like doiSerbia, and about Open Access. It turns out that the situation is not quite how I had envisaged it.

Biljana Kosanović

Those who advocate for Open Access (OA) argue that in the age of the Internet the traditional subscription-based journal system used to publish scholarly papers is outdated, and so places an unnecessary barrier between researchers and published research.

Why? Because in order to have their work published, researchers freely give their papers to publishers, who then package them into journals and put those journals behind a subscription paywall so that they can recoup their costs, and make a profit. Many, however, believe that journal subscriptions are unreasonably high. Moreover, argue OA advocates, while this paywall may have been inevitable in a print world, in an online environment it is not, and simply creates a needless accessibility problem.

For so long as research libraries could afford to subscribe to all the journals they needed this accessibility problem was minimal, or non-existent. With the amount of research published growing year by year, however, it has become increasingly difficult for research libraries to afford all the journals they need — creating an affordability problem. And this affordability problem has led to a serious accessibility problem.

In an attempt to resolve the problem, in the 1990s publishers created the so-called Big Deal. Instead of selling subscriptions on a journal-by-journal basis, they started to sell discounted packages of (sometimes hundreds) of journals on an all-you-can-eat basis.

Librarians initially welcomed the Big Deal, since it gave them more for less. Subsequently, however, they concluded that it had exacerbated the affordability problem, and so made the accessibility problem much worse. Not only have prices continued to rise, but libraries have come to feel that they are locked into large over-priced contracts from which they are now unable to escape.

Untenable

Underlining how serious the problem has become, last year the library of the wealthiest university in the world — Harvard — published a Memorandum in which it asserted that subscription-based scholarly publishing is now untenable. “Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,” the Memorandum read. “This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers … to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.” [I.e. sell Big Deals, and at increasingly higher prices].

Even Harvard’s wealth, it would seem, is no longer able to afford to provide access to all the journals its researchers need. So Harvard Library proposed a number of solutions, most notably that researchers should embrace Open Access (OA), which ensures that research papers are made freely available outside publishers’ paywalls.

If the library of the world’s wealthiest university can no longer afford to provide its faculty with all the research they need, I thought, how appalling must it be for researchers in universities based in less wealthy countries? It was for this reason that I made contact with Biljana Kosanović.  Serbia, we should note, is a transition country. It is also classified by many as a developing country (e.g. here and here).

To my surprise, however, Kosanović, informed me that access to international research is not a serious problem in Serbia.

Pretty satisfied

She added that this is because eleven years ago the Consortium of Serbian Libraries for Coordinating Acquisition (KoBSON) was created, and charged with negotiating and managing national licensing schemes (Big Deals) with scholarly publishers. The aim was to ensure that Serbian researchers had access to all the international journals they needed.

How do we know that access to international journals is currently satisfactory in Serbia? “Two years ago — when we celebrated the tenth anniversary of KoBSON — we did a big survey of our users,” Kosanović explained to me. “We got around 3,000 respondents — which is pretty good for a user population of 30,000. Based on that, I would say that our users are pretty satisfied with what we offer them. There were only a few publishers they mentioned that we don’t have in our collections.”

How can it be that access to research appears to be less problematic for Serbian researchers than it is for those based at Harvard University?

Read the interview with Kosanović below to find out. In doing so you will also learn something of the research information environment in Serbia, and you will learn about the current state of Open Access in the country — for despite Serbian researchers’ current satisfaction with their access needs, Kosanović is a committed OA advocate.

“KoBSON is not a long-term solution,” Kosanović explained, adding, “I am sure that OA is the future of scholarly publishing, but this future will not arrive in the next year or two — so initiatives like KoBSON remain essential.”

In the meantime, there is much to be done. Currently only one university in Serbia has signed the Berlin Declaration, there are no OA mandates, and there are few institutional repositories.

On the other hand, more and more Serbian journals are becoming OA, thanks in part to the efforts of Kosanović and her colleagues who manage the doiSerbia initiative.

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If you wish to read the interview with Biljana Kosanović, 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.

De Gruyter’s Sven Fund on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Sven Fund

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A below is with Sven Fund, CEO of Berlin-based scholarly publisher De Gruyter. Fund is the first representative of a traditional commercial publisher to take part in this series.

By any account De Gruyter can fairly be described as a traditional publisher (or as OA advocates prefer, “legacy publisher”). Created by Walter De Gruyter in 1919 by combining five existing publishers, De Gruyter’s roots go back to 1749 when the bookstore of the Königlichen Realschule in Berlin was given the right to print books by King Frederick II of Prussia.

In 1801 Königlichen Realschule was taken over by Georg Reimer, and Georg Reimer Publishers was one of the companies merged to form Walter De Gruyter & Co in 1919.

Today De Gruyter’s publishing program includes theology and philosophy, biology and chemistry, linguistics and literature, mathematics and physics, history and archaeology, as well as law and medicine. 

Please scroll through the introduction to go direct to the Q&A

Open Access to papers and books

Like other traditional publishers De Gruyter has in recent years launched a number of Open Access initiatives. In April 2009 — five years after Springer pioneered Hybrid OA when it introduced Open Choice —  De Gruyter announced the De Gruyter Open Library, introducing OA options for both its journals (pure Gold and Hybrid OA), as well as books.

In 2009 De Gruyter also announced that, from 2010, it would be publishing the “Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World” series, thereby expanding its OA efforts into the humanities. A partnership with the Excellence Cluster Topoi, with funding from the German Research Foundation, the series encompasses all the disciplines of Ancient Studies, from prehistory and early history through classical archaeology to antique philosophy, epistemology and theology.

As well as being published in print book form, selected titles from the Topoi series are also available as OA eBooks on the www.degruyter.com website. The Topoi initiative was featured as an Open Access Success Story by Knowledge Exchange in 2009.

Currently De Gruyter publishes twelve pure OA journals, and all of its 364 subscription journals now offer a Hybrid OA option. And to date it has published 47 OA books under its own OA books programme. This includes some that will be published next year.

De Gruyter’s most daring OA move, however, came in 2010, when it acquired the Polish OA publisher Versita, which currently publishes 439 pure OA journals — an acquisition reminiscent of Springer’s decision to acquire BioMed Central in 2008.

How much does De Gruyter charge for its different OA options? The article-processing charge for both pure Gold and Hybrid OA is currently €1,750 ($2,450). The cost of publishing a book is less clear. When I asked the publisher’s PR representative she said she did not know. So I emailed a few authors who had published OA books with De Gruyter. Those that replied said they had been given special discounted deals, with one citing a figure of €5,000. By way of comparison, we could note that Palgrave Macmillan currently charges £11,000 ($17,500) to publish an OA book, and Springer charges around €15,000.  

What about Green OA? According to the SHERPA/ROMEO database, De Gruyter is a “yellow” publisher rather than a green one. Specifically, it allows authors only to archive their pre-prints, and only on their own personal web site. It also imposes a 12-month embargo.