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Continuing the OA Transformation: Bringing Funders into the Conversation
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Continuing the OA Transformation: Bringing Funders into the Conversation
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Segment:0 .
good afternoon. I hope everyone can hear me OK. I'm normally terrible at judging how to speak into the microphone. Is that working? Everyone can hear properly. Great um, so Thanks for coming. We thought it would be useful to have an environment where.
People in the audience could listen to a group of funders and people from library consortia talk about the transition and what that represents, particularly in the light of the guidance that came out last year. And more importantly than listening to the panel, also the ability for people to post questions of those various people by virtue of trying to open a dialogue around what the future could and should look like, what the challenges are, what the requirements from funders, from consortia and of course, from amongst publishers in the room as well in order to drive that transition towards open access and in the case of the MMO, public access.
And so to that end, we've assembled a fantastic panel. I will be the moderator. I'm Chris Pim from the American Chemical Society. Publications but we are also joined by Jessica, the acting director of the Office of Science policy at NIH Jason price, research and scholarly communication director at the scalp consortium. And Ashley Farley, the program officer of knowledge and research services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And so to kick off, we thought that probably the best way to start would be just to give us all a quick refresher from Jessica around what the guidance has put in place, how NIH has responded to that. And what next steps might look like. So at that point, I will turn over. The one thing I will say is when we come to questions from the audience, if you can, please use the microphone so that the questions are captured for the recording.
Read can everyone hear me OK? Thanks for the introduction, Chris, and Thanks so much for the invitation to be here today. I'm really happy to be here. As Chris said, I'm Jessica. You did give me a promotion, though. I'm the acting deputy director of the Office of Science policy at NIH.
So I feel like I should state that to make sure the record is clear. But yes, I'd like to provide an overview of the memo on equitable access that OSTP released last year, often referred to as the Nelson memo, and talk a little bit about NIH plans and maybe reflect a little bit on what we've heard so far. So in essence, the Nelson memo, the 2022 OSTP memo on ensuring free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded research, which was released in August of last year, has kind of three main buckets of expectations.
One, with regard to data sharing, one with regard to access to publications and one with regard to the use of metadata and persistent identifiers. Most of my focus today will be on the publications and public access piece, but I want to give you the full lay of the land. So the expectations in that memo are that federally funded publications be freely available and publicly accessible without an embargo.
As you may know, there is currently an allowable 12 month embargo period, I'm sure you all know. And that is sort of the big change with regard to access to publications, although there are other things as well. In terms of data, there were expectations regarding that scientific data underlying publications be accessible at the time of publication and that agencies put in place approaches for sharing all scientific data.
Now, in the case of NIH, we recently not that recently, I guess in January of this year, implemented our policy on data management and sharing, which meets both of these expectations with regard to data sharing. So I won't focus too much on that today, but I just want to make sure that you all know that that's part of the landscape. And also an expectation is to establish policies for use of metadata and persistent identifiers to help make research products more findable and transparent.
I think we know that that is a really, really important piece of this and also is not one of the things I'll be focusing most of my time on here today, in part because that part of the memo and expectations is on a much longer time time frame. I think. I think we all know that there's a lot of work to be done there. And we highlight in the plan that we released some sort of early, you know, best practices and models that we'll look to.
But I think most of us acknowledge that there's a lot of work to be done here, and that's on a much longer timeline. So NIH released our plan on. We shared it with OSTP and OMB in February of this year. And at the same time, we released it for public comment as a request for information. And and that plan that RFI closed April 24. So you can no longer comment in that venue, although there will be other opportunities for engagement.
Um, and, and as I said, you know, we articulated that data sharing expectations have been met and that the pids and metadata are on a longer time frame. But for publications, I just want to highlight again, we're trying to keep comments brief here. So I won't go into all the details, but happy to answer questions. You know, some of the main kind of elements of our plan, um, they indicate that that peer review, our plan indicates that peer reviewed scholarly articles will be available in PubMed Central will ultimately be available in PubMed Central as soon as processing is complete without an embargo period.
Um, I'm sure you're familiar with PubMed Central. It's our repository for, for NIH funded research publications. And again currently is sort of one of the key components of our current public access policies that has been in effect since 2008. And we're very proud of this, this infrastructure that we've developed. And we also are very excited about the notion of increasing access for everyone, including tax payers who paid for this research.
So so that it's available right away after publication instead of with an embargo period. Um, the other elements that we have highlighted in our plan is the need to maximize equity and accessibility. I think we again, we feel that on the access side, the reader side, the OSTP expectations do a great deal in terms of equity of access. And again, you can read this and read these public. Haitians much more quickly.
And we'll be able to under these new expectations. But we need to make sure that on the author side that there aren't any unintended consequences in terms of equity in particular. And we've also really noted the importance for us to continue to monitor trends in publication fees and policies to help ensure that fees remain reasonable and equitable. And just want to note that we do allow reasonable publication costs already under our Grants Policy statement.
And we know that that's something that will continue as an allowable cost for grants. So those are some of the key elements. Again, there's a lot more and I encourage you to take a look at the plan which has been posted publicly, if you haven't seen it. But again, we released it for we released our plan for comment for 60 days. We are still analyzing the comments.
But I want to give you a high level idea of what we've heard. And also just want to note that we also had a listening session during the public comment period on April 12th. It's a webinar that's available on our website and on NIH video cast. If you want to listen where we had a lot of good comments from people who shared their views. But we've received 143 comments, again, still analyzing.
But some of the things that we've heard are that, you know, many, many respondents agreed that the current embargo period limits availability of publications and supported removal of the embargo. Um, you know, there were comments about ways to ensure that we availability is not the same as access, right? And there's always more that can be done to increase access to publications and to be mindful of that and thought that was a really helpful comment that also kind of feeds into these issues of equity that are really important to us in terms of equity.
Some of what we heard are, again, that, you know, thinking about ways to be creative in terms of limiting any administrative burden that that may, you know, that may come from eventual policy changes through clear and concise guidance on mechanisms for compliance. Um, certainly there were concerns about, you know, if, if publishing fees go up, will that lead to inequities as lower resource investigators and institutions might be less able to afford to publish or it might cut in more to their budgets proportionally?
Um, so so mean and we agree with those comments. And those are the kinds of exact kinds of things that we are monitoring. Um, um, sort of along those lines, many commenters agree that NIH should monitor fees to publish and the impact on these fees for equity and to really help better define what is a reasonable cost for, for publication. Um, and on the pids and metadata, which as I said, is on a longer timeline, we heard a little bit about how folks felt that NIH should really use currently existing frameworks for metadata and pids as much as possible and provide guidance on how to use these to help ease the administrative burden instead of perhaps creating a whole new system.
Um, that's just a highlight of some of what we've heard. I want to emphasize again that what we've done so far is release a plan. What will follow is a very robust policy development process. We intend to put out a revised draft, NIH public access policy for public comment, you know, before issuing a final policy. And so there will be lots of opportunities for engagement and discussion moving forward because these revisions don't need to actually take effect until December of 2025.
And so we plan to issue a final policy by December of 2024. Again, that will be here quickly. But but there is still a fair amount of time for a lot of dialogue and getting feedback from communities such as yours. So we look forward to that. And again, for the pids and metadata plan, we will be submitting similar to what we did for pubs, a preliminary plan to OSTP and OMB by December of 2024, and then that will follow along the same trajectory in terms of policy development.
So that's what I wanted to highlight for now. Thanks for the opportunity and look forward to the discussion. And so then moving on to Jason. given the concerns that have been raised by groups like the Ivey League universities around the potential for green via gold approaches to be required to fulfill the mandate, I was wondering if you could talk through some of the experiences that SCLC have had around trying to manage the potential budget shocks that could occur.
Sure so we are as a skulk, as a consortium is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from the Ivey Leagues. We have a large group of mid-size and smaller libraries in the range of 3,000 to 10,000 fte, but I can say that they're excited about this. Nelson the Nelson memo and the impact it will have and increasing open publication is certainly something that they are behind and want us to be behind.
So, you know, we are, as a consortia, seeking to support our institutions, author's efforts to comply with the policies without additional institutional funding. So as Chris referred to, there isn't more money to support these efforts. And so we are trying to find ways to address it and looking both from a top down and kind of a bottom up approach to those.
You know, one question that folks have at the same time is they're excited about is what is the impact be on us as an institution. So and I'll refer you over to the slide on the left. That is work from Eric shares at Iowa State University. If you haven't seen this paper, I highly recommend taking a look. There are various views, including an interactive version that allows looking from the publisher what proportion are published.
So here you're looking at the total number of publications on the x-axis and the percentage of federally funded publications on the y-axis. So here, looking at these as universities, you can see that we're talking about for large research universities in the us, you know, 32 to 50% of the articles they publish have federal funding. These are articles then that would be affected by the memo. And so one question our libraries have is, well, what about us?
Where, you know, where do we fit here? And so my expectation as read institutions, as teaching focused institutions is that their numbers would be lower. It would be in the, you know, five, ten, 20% range. But it's still something that they want to be able to support and understand what the impact will be. So in terms of the budget impact on this, we have been working on a kind of a top down approach through read and publish agreements that bring author funding, author grant funding.
And that's the thing that we really feel like is necessary generally to support open access. And since this is linked to grant funding, it's a good opportunity to look at that model. And for that model to be sort of further supported. So, um, the approach that we are partnering with the Uc other California institutions on is to move from the accepted sorry is to, is to find ways to have library subscription dollars cover open publication where there isn't grant funding.
But then when there is Grant funding, we ask authors to contribute to offset the costs for the library. This then supports that growth, which I'll show you in a minute, can help those larger institutions to be able to afford an increase in costs because there's money coming from the authors and the author grants. So in addition to that initial choice that authors make as to whether to publish open or closed, and in the case of OSTP recommendations or requirements, they would be choosing open access then because they are grant funded, they would go through that route where they're asked to use that grant funding to support the open publication.
Other authors who aren't grant funded can be covered under these agreements without including grant funding if they don't have it available. So what does it mean to have funding available for publication in grants? That's one of the questions here and mean the ability to use it is one thing having it set aside or as a top up that doesn't take away from that money and the other things they would want to spend it on is it might be a really good step in the right direction for helping to support this approach.
So what would this top down approach look like? We have a first agreement with American Chemical Society in California involving all three consortia. They're linked agreements. And what we're looking to do is shift the cost from what used to be in 2021 divided among the subscription costs from California State University in red school libraries in orange and Uc libraries in blue.
And you can see this is relatively evenly distributed based on what they were paying for access to closed articles in the past, what we were paying. But you can see that the publication distribution at the bottom is quite different, right? So the large research universities are publishing much more than the portion they're paying for. So we need to facilitate orderly sort of shift to more of that funding coming from the publications and the model that we've developed, if it is successful, will help us to move and shift that funding by integrating the author, integrating author, grant funding.
So in that middle bar now you can see that the percentage that the lighter color that's associated with the main one is the percentage of author funding, author funded of the total income for those articles. So this shifts and lowers the costs or reduce the cost for libraries while integrating in the author funding. And so you can see that both the red and the blue total sorry, the red and the orange totals are shrinking.
Whereas the Uc system, which was formerly at 34%, now, you know, 20%, 26% is paid by libraries. But a big additional piece is covered by the authors using their grant funds to support the open publication. And so that then is a way that we can handle these shifts or two in that direction in a top down, you know, top down way. So that's OK for the few agreements where we can work out big research or read and publish agreements with big publishers, but it doesn't cover nearly all of our publication and it doesn't cover those institutions that aren't part of these agreements.
So that still is a significant challenge. And and we are looking to figure out how to put together a bottom up support for repository deposit that that green route as an alternative to the publisher based, site based gold publication and. One really big open question that I think this is bringing up is, how can author grant funding or other funding that is from outside of libraries be applied to support that path?
It does take time, effort, staff, tools to do these things, and it's not clear, then how we can support that other model, which is going to be an important part of making this work. So that's really a big question that we have is where is there a way that we can associate those two together? There are many cases where the region publisher agreements are not going to cover what we need to do, and so we have to find that path as well.
Thank you. And then moving on to Ashley. Bill and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been very long standing supporters of gold, open access. And so I was wondering if you could give an overview of the foundation's experiences with gold, what works, what doesn't, what the issues are, and where the future might be.
Very, very happy to. OK so we've had a full open access policy, no embargo since 2015. It's been in all of our grant agreements with no exceptions. We manage all of our APCs from a central fund. And one of the main reasons we did that is we found before we even launched the policy, authors really struggled to have a sense of correct budgeting for one number of articles that may be resulting from the grant and also where they may publish and how much those publications might cost.
And so it was a real administrative burden for program staff to have to reopen grants since publishing happened so far downstream, typically from when the grant ends. So if they're not, you know, if we're not continuing to support them as a grantee or the work, then it creates a big administrative burden to kind of Chase that. So we decided to experiment with the centralized fund, which we still have.
I will say that there's still administrative burden on us. We ended up having to, as a very small two person team, now hire somebody just to be able to Manage Payment on behalf of our grantee authors. Right now, we currently have no cap on number of publications or the cost of those publications. We are one of few funders that will pay $12,000 to Springer Nature to make that nature article open access.
But the thinking is, is that since 2015 we've been collecting the data and we now have the ability to kind of monitor it closely. And we've been learning a lot in the last few months. So we did switch our policy in January 1st, 2021 since we are part of coalition. And so we became plan aligned then. So that switched our spend a bit, which was phasing out hybrid journals and then upping an alternative route around Writer retention, self-archiving green, whatever you would like to call it, so that that shifted our spend a bit, but we found that we weren't saving any money, which is what I had hoped, especially as funders think get more requests to start supporting infrastructure.
And one of the biggest critiques that we receive is that our policy when we originally launched it, was very focused on making sure that our research results were openly available. That's a very small, you know, drop in an entire ocean of research. And so we receive a lot of feedback that as a funder that cares about this, we should be doing more to help other authors and non gates grantees as well, which I completely agree with, is that's, you know, a certain privilege in and of itself.
So how do we shift that, though, if we're very focused on a per article spend, we spend about almost 7 million per year. And what's interesting is as we've looked in to our data in the last few months around our spend, we're being asked to pick up the tab less than we have before. And probably a lot of that is due to the fact that we no longer cover hybrids.
But we are paying more than ever and we're also publishing more than ever. So it's really I think that's a really interesting dynamic. And if I had created slides, I would have put that chart up there. But but yeah, but so we, we, we don't have a lot of transparency into when we are being asked to pick up the bill, which I think is something interesting to dig into and try and understand publisher systems for what I've experienced, you know, in helping our grantees.
Often, you know, it could be because we have a transparent policy and say that all we need is a grant number associated with the article and we'll pick up the tab. Oftentimes, I honestly think it's because Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation starts B And so we're in the pull down list of funders to begin with. And so the system pushes those articles towards us to pay because we do see a lot of co funding with NIH, Wellcome trusts, you know, funders all over the world.
But it's not very clear what who is being asked to pick up the tab. And we don't look at authorship. We're really focused on, you know, any article funded in part or in whole. So now we're looking at the future and kind of what by 2025, it'll be a decade of open access. We are, you know, considering that Plan S is supposedly sunsetting then but really want to take everything that we've learned and see how can we put forth the policy that especially centers more on equity and know that's used a lot.
And I think it's hard to define and it's hard to figure out who should define it. Same with, you know, speaking of definitions, you know, we've always said that we'll only pay. A reasonable fee. And we have found that that's been near impossible to define. We certainly acknowledge that there are costs associated with infrastructure and publishing and resources and people time.
But I think we could also argue that it's not $12,000 per article and that the system is really carrying the brunt of the kind of prestige economy. And I think funders are becoming much more aware that it's so costly because of high rejection rates and kind of bloat and waste in the system. And we would like to try and not keep paying for that. So but there's a lot of work to be done and I'll stop there for now.
OK and so I noted that you mentioned infrastructure, which obviously involves both repositories and the infrastructure that can sit within institutions. But equally there's infrastructure like switchboard and other things of that nature. So perhaps and this is an open question to the panel, if you could talk about what tools and infrastructure you think would be useful to support open access in the future.
I can start if you're not sick of listening to me already. Always switchboard, I think is a great one. That is one that we were initial funders of, mainly because we were trying to think of ways to alleviate the administrative burden, especially on funders and institutions that are trying to enact open access policies. As a main motivator for me personally is if, you know, we really want to see open access become more of the norm and shift in this ecosystem, we need more institutions and funders on board with strong policies.
And one of the biggest barriers is that implementation and support for it. It's, you know, it's one thing to have a policy and post it on your website, but you have to be able to actually implement it, enact it and follow up on noncompliance. And there's a lot of education and work going there. So we have been looking at building tools and infrastructure switchboards.
One of them, one of the others is works, that's a nonprofit group that we've been working with for all of our reporting and data and compliance, and it's been a really great experience and they are open source. So we're hoping that as we develop tools with them, we can open them up to the funder and library community as well to be able to use those. And it's been going well.
I mean, we're still pretty early days, but we have a mechanism where we can find noncompliance. We email the corresponding author automatically. It says, hey, you know, you're not in compliance, upload a copy of your manuscript. We have connections with PubMed Central now, which is great. We also rely heavily on zenodo and we find that authors are really, you know, willing and excited to share their work more broadly.
And that open access has really, really taken off. So that awareness has grown. So that's some of the infrastructure that we work with more directly. Yeah I mean, I guess I'll speak a little bit to PubMed Central because I think that for us and I mean to, to be clear, I mean, no, no, we drew the distinction a little bit between public access and open access at the top. But, you know, compliance sort of compliance for NIH with these public access expectations really has hinged on submission of the author accepted manuscript into PMC and you know, so there are some journals that have indicated their know, that it's fine to submit the author accepted manuscript and PMC, you know go ahead and do that.
Right so so for us you know which is obviously different from the final manuscript or version of record. So I think that the thing I just want to note is that for us, I think one thing that we're really focused on is trying to ensure that PMC is as accessible and user friendly as possible to allow that to happen, since that is our primary mode of compliance with the policy. And you know, I guess the other note that I want to make is that already about a third of our articles come into PMC without a post-publication embargo, about a third, maybe a little bit more than a third.
Again, there's a big difference between a third and 3/3. I understand. But but it's also true that it's not sort of, you know, it's not it's not a 1% of articles are currently in this category. Right? so I think it is important to keep that in context. And we do have, you know, partnerships already at NIH with many publishers for them, as you know, for them to submit articles directly to PMC.
And we plan to continue those types of relationships to try to find ways to further ease, you know, any administrative burden. So one area of tools that we're looking that we're trying to get to right now is how do we have a sense of what the impact will be on us. So, you know, the data from the shared study was based on work in dimensions that's not necessarily accessible to everyone or all institutions to get to that data, um, lens.org as an alternative that we have been using, that's great.
And moving us in the right direction in terms of using that tool to better understand what's going on. But one thing we noticed is that, um, dimensions does have a federally funded checkbox. You can figure that out really easily. If you go into lens.org there, it's every single individual underlying agency that you have to try to catch that's in there.
I think the problem of multiple funding is also there, but being able to use these tools to say, OK, which institutions is this going to affect? How do we support them, how are they different? What what do we need to do? That's a big piece of just sort of really understanding total public and portions of publication and volume of publication for all of our many institutions, some of which are, are quite small.
oh, a switchboard or other solutions that would allow for real time tracking of Article publication is really was really key for us as well kind of across the board, across publishers and places that might be coming from. I don't know if there's much intent there right now to include funding information there. But I think that would be an important part of this as well. Um, and then ultimately, we think about the, the, the, the ideal and on the side of, of repository is having well funded research repositories and infrastructure that support a coherent and comprehensive approach.
What does this look like? You know, PubMed Central works for one part of it, but it doesn't work for all of the agencies that are going to be funding this and articles that will be affected. What does it look like? How will it be discoverable if it's broadly distributed? And how can we support author compliance in an efficient way? So what are those tools looking like? Orchid and then taking ORCID into an institutional level.
And being able to track across what's going on and making sure that we know as things are in the pipeline so that we can support what needs to happen and try to track that compliance in ways that us funders, because of your direct connection with the authors, is a little easier. It's harder for us. We want to be able to support it, but we need a lot better view of what's going on.
OK Thank you. and I think one of the other topics that comes up in all of these conversations now is equity. And both equity in terms of publication as well as access. So the public access point, as Jessica made, will improve equity in terms of access, but may have some impacts on equity in terms of publishing. So given that we've all agreed that there are costs associated with both the infrastructure and publishing, how do we fund equitable?
What does it look like? Yeah and so I'll open that one up to the panel. Think actually you mentioned it. So you can go first again. Yes Thank you. OK so I think this is such a hard question to answer. And I don't want to just focus also on the funding of equitable publishing, because I think we really need to work equity into the entire ecosystem, especially starting with funding.
And that's something that we've been working on at the foundation because you start to see downstream, you know, if we have the most privileged labs getting the most funding, they have the most resources, they're going to be able to have the most amount of data access and training and management to be able to write those papers that are going to get, you know, the most attention. And there's a lot of inequity built into that alone, whether or not we make that article open access.
So I do want to take this at a wider lens than just that. But if we're focusing on the funding equitable at this point, I think there's a couple things that we've all decided on is as a community writ large, and that's that APCs are not sustainable and not equitable, that waivers to those APCs are not sustainable or equitable. And now it's sort of what do we do with that information? And there's a lot of models that funders are trying to get behind.
So around like the diamond, which I know we need to rename some of these things, but diamond publishing subscribe to open, you're trying to experiment with different business models, but I think at the same time too, we have to be a bit, a bit honest with the situation and that, you know, we're not going to see APC prices go down. We're not going to see, you know, a lot of the money move in ways that we wanted to see.
And I think if we can become more transparent and honest about that, we'll have better options that will have an actual impact more broadly. Um, yeah, other than that, I think we've, we've done in the past, which is kind of throw money at it and hope, hope it gets solved. Um, so I think we're going to try different, different publishing models as well to reach something that's much more equitable.
Certainly we see that the importance for supporting those and trying to find them as well. And there is a real concern about the APC based economy that we're in and still is gaining steam. So we'd like to see those things work on the APC side, one step in the right direction. And I think we have to be OK with baby steps here.
Getting directly to equitable is going to be really a challenge. But for instance, we have five read and publish agreements. They range and we have hundreds or 110 members, many of which are small and publish very rarely, if at all, in the journals from those publishers. So maybe a good step in the right direction is to say, OK, if we have 20 institutions and they're spending this much money and we're covering open publishing for them, if for their authors that don't have grant funding, can we look at the total publication of the entire rest of the consortium of participants and say, if that's only a marginal increase of 10 or 15%, then can we include coverage for open publication and the rare cases where it happens for all of those additional institutions that are a part of our consortium.
So sort of spreading the ability to pay for that into the places where the money is already kind of coming from. And I think that's a luxury that we have as a consortium that has a lot of smaller institutions. And so it's not big numbers. It's just it's big numbers of libraries. It's not big numbers of publications. So thinking actively about how we can be more inclusive in these agreements and not just restrict the benefits to those who are current subscribers, who are licensing the closed contents as a part of these agreements is a big deal.
So it's one thing to include authors from institutions that have site licenses that don't have grant funding. And at least we're covering that. So they don't need to pay APCs. But then you want to be able to expand that out to the other institutions that we represent that aren't directly contributing to those agreements.
Yeah, I think all I would add is that, again, as I mean in our role at NIH, um, in part because we fund, you know, we fund so, so much in so many different types of investigators and things like that. I think, you know, our position has been to be, you know, agnostic, agnostic on specific publishing models at this stage. So, so that does create, um, you know, so we are excited to see the publishing models that, that develop and, and want to, you know, find ways for us to, you know, softly encourage those, those approaches to, to, to remain equitable.
Um, Uh, and obviously I think the big thing for us is to ensure that whatever policies we put in place don't unintentionally drive the system in a way that is less equitable, right? And so, so that's a lot of, of what we're trying to hear here about. I my background is more in sort of emerging technology policy. And I have definitely learned that like too early in a technology, if you put too if you say we're definitely going in this direction like it can really mean you can, you can really mess things up.
Um, and so, so I think that we, you know, have tried to remain open and flexible and realize also our responsibility to, to ensure that whatever flexibility we allow, you know, does not also then drive towards an equitable solution. So so I mean, I think that that's really the tension for us. I think a lot of this a lot of the focus therefore will be on, you know, what can we do to be monitoring, you know, costs, to be monitoring these types of impacts?
What are the things that we should be monitoring for? And also, you know, where are places where I mean, sort of to your point earlier, um, there's the funding of and then there's also all the other stuff that goes into the enterprise, which, you know, NIH has a big role in. So are there other things that we can do, you know, through different types of resources, through different types of infrastructure and things like that, that will also help that, you know, aren't strictly just about, you know, how much we're willing to pay for publication costs, right?
So to sort of broaden that aperture, I guess. And then guess before we open it up for questions from the audience. As a question for Ashley and Jessica, what can publishers and potentially librarians do to assist you with ensuring the transition works smoothly? I mean, I guess what I would say is, you know, I think the main thing is please tell us what you think.
Right? so so we've been doing a lot of things to try to have these listening sessions and our RFI and we have other, you know, new things that we want to do. So, um, in terms of engagement. So, so I think the big thing for us is, you know, we don't want to make assumptions. So it's, it's better for us to hear from all of these communities about, you know, what things you think need in order to make this work.
Um, you know, I, of course, publishers and librarians can help socialize these, these policies and resources and build, build policy, build policies and resources when it makes sense. You know, we are very happy with the relationships that we already have with the partnerships we have with many publishers to partner with PMC, to deposit articles and ease administrative needs of investigators. And then, you know, ultimately, I mean, again, this is kind of moving beyond the publications piece, but I think we'll really need help from publishers and librarians to help think about some of these best practices for accessibility, findability and transparent transparency when we, you know, move more into that phase of this process.
It's very kind of. I would say, from a publisher's perspective. I mean, we've had, you know, over eight years now of engaging on our policy and like our wants and needs. And I don't think it would be helpful to have a lot more frank, honest conversations. And so when we use terms like wanting publishers and funders to be more in partnership, like what that actually means and what that looks like and like, I'm, I understand that business comes first.
And that's going to be the purview of most of the publishers, is fulfilling that need first. And I think that's just important to acknowledge. And then from a funder perspective, that is not our first priority. Um, our priority is making sure that our research is disseminated and widely available. And able to be built upon for further impact. And so that's, that's our, our first remit there.
And then as far as librarians, I love librarians. I'm a librarian. Um, I would love to see librarians and funders work more closely together. I don't know how to do that, and I'm active in some circles, but I think there needs to be more deeper understanding of how we're both kind of paying into the same system. And I worry that that's, you know, inefficient and that if we're trying to make things the money move then in different directions and we're creating new models and is just kind of compiling upon itself.
And I really worry that we're going to get into a completely untenable system while we're also experimenting, which is important. So I think just if we had more opportunities to connect and talk about those kind of models and what we're thinking in the future, that'll help make it more of a reality than think it is now. OK Thank you. So we have about 15 minutes left of the session, so I'm going to open it up to the floor for questions.
Just as a reminder, if you could please use the microphone, that would be very helpful. Questions Thank you. Since nobody asks, nobody's nobody's asking anything, I'll come up. Matthew chervenak I'm an investor in the area and I'm curious from the funders point of view. You know, when I think about scientific publishing, I think about, you know, there's only 10% of what the scientist does actually gets into a publication.
There's all these negative results. There's all this value that they create in the process of doing research that is wasted is not communicated, that it's duplicated somewhere else. And, you know, what are your thoughts on that aspect of it and whether you think there are models or trends or ideas that we could use to get that other information out into the world and get a bigger Roi for the money that you're putting in?
Um, I mean, I'll just jump in quickly to say, I mean, this was a huge impetus for our, our recently implemented data, data management and sharing policy, which again, does not, you know, mandate the sharing of all scientific data. Um, it, you know, it. We have a long definition that I won't go into here about of, you know, what, what is, what is expected in terms of scientific data and certainly especially for NIH, there are plenty of times when sharing data isn't appropriate because of consent or privacy.
You know, you know, human subjects, considerations, things like that. But nonetheless, you know, really it is for us, I think, you know, trying to instill the importance of, you know, at the time of publication. And also, you know, even if it's not data associated with a publication, you know, that we, you know, an expectation now is that people will have a data management and sharing plan that has to be, you know, reviewed and considered by the Institute or center that's funding this work that really has as an emphasis, you know, trying to maximize the sharing of this data, you know, whether or not it's directly associated with the publication.
So again, that's not, um, that's not the whole answer. But just, you know, I think that that was a huge piece of our impetus for that policy. Yeah, I think over the years we launched gates open research, which is built on F1000 publishing technology as really a hope to start to socialize the sharing and publishing of, of different information archetypes or whatever you want to call them to try to really promote that.
The uptake has been very slow because those things aren't necessarily incentivized. And that's the biggest thing is that, you know, even when we're encouraging grantee authors to share things differently, it just it's so ingrained that the thing has to look like a research article type. And then if they're used to being told from other journals that this isn't in scope or fit or not interesting enough, they're not going to spend the time and energy to publish it elsewhere, even if we provide the technology.
So now we're trying to think more of through, you know, I think having strong policies is really important. And then forcing those policies. We unfortunately don't have a data policy. We have kind of a global access clause which is meant to cover data, but it's sort of mushy. And so it's hard to get the data actually shared. So we've been experimenting with data management sharing plans, which has been going well because I think it is really important to have those conversations upstream.
But then now we're, you know, at the end of it and trying to work back and make sure that we have compliance with what was shared management plan, which is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Um, but I think one thing we can do right now in the immediate term is, is really incentivize and support those researchers that do want to share those things. And we do have researchers that are very open science, open research minded and motivated, and we should be supporting and celebrating those people before we can scale it.
And and introduce it to the less the willing. Yes first a comment. Then a question. So we were talking at some point about how do we identify those papers that result from federally funded research. But think for a lot of universities, their sources of funding are very intermingled within labs and through overhead, for example.
And so I think for a lot of major research institutions, we should think about these policies as probably affecting all, you know, published research. But my question was about open innovation and data, because one of the things I've heard from faculty at MIT who go off and create companies, you know, and patent things. Are there exceptions in those cases? And how to think about the patenting process and the innovation life cycle, if you will.
So thank you. Yeah, we mean, again, in terms of data, we do have certain, you know, that that is a consideration in the data management and sharing policy. I mean for, for sure for any sbir, you know, small business grants and things like that, there are allowances for, for not sharing data because of those considerations.
And, and, you know, we're, we're exploring, you know, other types of guidance to provide as well for, for other types of data, you know, that may have potential, you know, patent or IP implications that aren't associated with SBIR and STTR. But I think we acknowledge that, again, if things are, you know, directly associated with an invention that there are again, the main point is you should have a plan for sharing this data.
You should proactively and prospectively, and you should work with the NIH Institute and center to ensure that the plan that again, that it is reasonable and obviously there is some subjectivity there in terms of, you know, patenting and IP as well. Oh, Yeah. That's a, I think it's all about timing. And that's what we work with.
This is a bit outside of my scope, but we typically advise patenting and any kind of IP registration before formal publication because right now our policies are pretty contingent upon that, you know, publication in a journal. So there's a lot of time beforehand to do that. Personally, you know, I'm much more open, open patent minded, but that's not the foundation's purview. So I'll leave it that.
But I do want to touch on your comment, though, because that was something I wanted to mention earlier and for God. But when we're thinking, especially in the theme of this conference around, you know, transparency and trust, I really wish there was more motivation for publishers. And I know this is an overgeneralization, so hashtag not all publishers.
Some do this well, but care more around the funding metadata and confirming that because I think that's a really important part of establishing that trust and that research is making sure it was actually has the funding sources and connections to that grant back to that institution. And it's been hard for us to engage and get that right. And I know, you know, there's great work around Crossref on that, but I think there's a big gap there.
And um, tying it to, you know, trust in the research should be a big motivator. But Adrian Stanley, Thanks for coming out on this panel. You know, one of the questions and just perhaps to highlight, it's a comment and then a question on top of it. But Thanks for the call out for the switchboard. I think that is bringing together funders and librarians and publishers in a good way.
But the kind of question to you and us all in the room is where are the best venues where we can come together and sort of interact and share? And I know, Ashley, you were part of the task force with SSP for a little while, but it feels like these panels happen in little pockets where there could be a lot more meaningful discussion. But Yeah. I mean, if we're going to have full transparency here, I stopped being engaged in that task group and several others around publishers because it does come down to just discussions of business models, which I understand is important and kind of what keeps everything running.
But at the same point in time, that's not that's not the highest priority or the remit necessarily of funders or librarians. And I think it's hard when those conversations continually lead down that track. And I feel like there ends up just kind of circling around that point and then just overall seeing kind of a lack of innovation and really think experimentation and forward thinking.
And changing publishing as a whole and not just focused on the business models. OK OK. Do we have. Any more questions? Well, I actually have a question. I don't know how dangerous it feels like a dangerous question because it feels extremely naive.
Um, but, What I'm interested in because we're, you know, putting forth this model that asks authors with Grant funding to contribute to pay for publication where funding is available. I wonder if either there are already or have been discussed ways in which. As grants are being written, whatever additional costs might be built in to support open publication.
Don't take away from the money they can use for research. Is that is that a clear mean that is that's certainly a common discussion right is sort of this. Um, so so again, currently, you know, NIH is willing to pay reasonable costs. It is defined in our Grants Policy statement. It's not for publication in particular, but what a reasonable cost is in general.
Um, one of those, one of the parameters is that it. It should not be a cost that is different for, for us than for anybody else, right? So like you can't, you know, you can't charge the government more than you would charge any other person. Right that kind of stuff. Um, but certainly, you know, I mean, I'll just say certainly a concern or consideration that's often raised for any, any policy changes is this notion that we do pay for this.
We we pay for APCs. Now we pay for all of these fees. They're they're part of grant costs now. They're allowable costs. We'll pay for them. But I think, you know, it's a fair point that, um, you know, they're a concern that's often raised is there's a 250,000, you know, dollar modular, by the way, that's not the cap for a grant.
A lot of people say the cap, it's not the cap for a grant. It's the cap for a modular grant. There are lots of grants that can go above that. Right but that with, you know, if there are increased costs for all of these other things. And that cap stays the same, that it has the impact. And I mean, I really do think that's one of the key issues in terms of equity, right? In terms of if, if, um, you know, if you're an institution or an investigator with, with fewer grants and a higher and higher percentage of those every time is getting taken up by whatever, you know, data sharing costs, cost to publish, you know, whatever it is, it can take away costs for research.
You know, I think that that's. A legitimate critique. You know, again, it's also true that people can, you know, write a budget that goes above $250,000 and requests more funding, but that clearly is a consideration and something that has been raised as sort of one of the key equity considerations. Yes will pay for it. But if the overall if the amount is still here and the other costs keep raising to there, then it leaves less money for research.
So, I mean, I do think that that is sort of one of the things that we're really trying to grapple with in these discussions of equity. So that's exactly why we run it from a central fund is because it doesn't come from the research, but of course, it still comes from somewhere. I mean, we spend $7 billion, which mean I in gates money is like a rounding error. But but it's still, you know, I mean, I know many of our program staff would rather that be spent on malaria research than open access publications.
And so I think that's I think it's definitely possible, but it's hard. And I the hardest part of it, again, is the author awareness. Like no matter what we try to do, there's still seems to be zero price sensitivity awareness for a lot of our authors. It's complicated because, you know, like we go off of acknowledgment for eligibility. But you know, other funders will go off of author rank and order and that's all confusing.
Um, and then I think the hard part too is that grants can be depending on the institution, you know, like some of our shortest might be five years. We've had, you know, frontiers raised apex 10% last year. So you can quite quickly already be very priced out of what you've, you've set aside for apex.
Thank you all for being here today. Um, NIH, when you pay, do you have to pay sales tax? I'm not actually asking that. So, um, my real question is, um, I'm thinking about Jason. He talked about the consortia, the idea that if you have a lot of libraries in a consortia and most of them are paying in and there's just, there's these other schools that just have a few things. And if it's just a marginal cost to just go ahead and pay that little bit more and just have the whole thing paid for.
Um, with the Nelson memo, we're going to have a lot of stuff that goes open access. Um, I'm wondering what your thoughts are about national funders, private funders, kind of looking at the total, um, how much, how much we're making away total and maybe just, you know. Medicare for all for publishing. Like, what are your thoughts on that? Well, there's certainly you know, we really applaud this move forward.
At the same time, the question is, is there more money to pay for this change? And ideally, it would come across the board instead of having to be managed the way it is. So the thoughts are it would be fantastic. I mean, there's some research been done and it's like 1% to 2% of total research, government research funding would cover that. What that those costs are, isn't there a way to somehow do that and cover it for everybody?
So we don't have the challenges that we have all been discussing up to now. So, I mean, it'd be great to see it happen. I don't know that it seems very likely to me. Just in case it's hot. I often note for people in case it's a useful resource, that was it. At the same time, I'm not sure if it was at the same time that they released that released the memo, but but shortly around the same time, they released sort of a cost and economic analysis that that, you know, can be useful to look at as well in terms of having to, you know, estimate how how, you know, and they sort of considered the issue of, you know, is the taxpayer paying twice.
Right if they have to pay article fees to read. But they also paid for the research. You know, it's sort of like paying twice for the same thing. Right so it's kind of interesting. So you might want to I can try to get people to resource. But it's a really interesting economic analysis thought. And again, all with the understanding that we don't exactly know how this is.
All right it's all um, we can't assume a certain outcome in terms of how this is all going to play out. So it actually, I mean, it does make it really hard to do the analysis, but it just might be useful to take a look at. Hi, I'm Tom. I do public affairs and advocacy for frontiers, so wanted to bring up because we were just mentioned in terms of the increase in prices.
Um, Ashley, you and I both spoke on the April 12 call that the NIH has up on his website. And you had mentioned that in all of the years that gates has been funding apcs, you still can't put your finger on what a reasonable price for an APC is. So I just wanted to point that out in context of us raising our prices. That goes on both sides. We're all trying to figure out what a reasonable price for an APC is.
You also had mentioned, too, that you stepped away from the task force because we do get into talking about the business models. we would welcome advice on how we could innovate better. So if there are thoughts on that, because you're right, we do at the end of the day, think about how we're going to pay for these things that we want to do. But what advice do you or the panel have about how are we not innovating better and what should we be thinking about going forward?
Yes should also state that I'm not a business person or an economist, but from what I've seen, you know, my experience from a librarian perspective and also as a funder that's being asked to spend and invest more in infrastructure and open infrastructure, open source things. Um, it would be great to see, especially the funders that mean the publishers that are really great and embracing open access and open science and want to push that forward, use those types of technologies and use more open source infrastructure.
And in a lot of ways that can help. Again, I could be wrong, but keep the costs down throughout the process. And I think it's I mean, as a fully open access publisher, you are already ahead of the game. So I try not to overgeneralize and definitely much more cost effective than a lot of the other funders and publishers. And I think the hard part is trying to flip that subscription hybrid model where I'm now at the point where I think it's less and less possible to make that flip because the systems just aren't built like trying to pay some of the largest publishers that we do.
And we're interfacing with four different systems that don't talk to each other. So it's really hard to get metadata through the system. Um, I mean, from speaking from frontiers, we just had a call with your team and it's one of the best platforms that we have to manage our apks and get our data, which is, which is great. And we would love to, to see more of that.
But it's, I think, sadly, the, the norm. I mean, the exception rather than the norm. And I would like to see, you know, more partnerships around open infrastructure and like if funders are going to invest in it, that's great and we should. But it needs to be used at the same time. And I moving technologies is often costly, time consuming and expensive, but I think in the long run, that's the only way that we're going to get to something that's much more sustainable and equitable.
Think last question. Great David weinrich from STM until Ashley's comment that. Kind of undermined what you had said before. I really appreciated everyone talking about how there should be more dialogue between the publishers and funders and libraries, and sme's actively working on that and trying to outreach.
I'm always struck, Jessica, that what did you say it was 130 comments. 134 comments. That's embarrassing. That I think it was 143 comments. Sorry Yeah. It's still embarrassing that for a policy of this impact. I spoke on a panel yesterday about how everybody in this room needs to get more involved and share your perspectives.
You know, there are some things that I disagree with that were said, but I think that we need more dialogue to the metadata question. You know, it's something publishers are actively interested in, actively investing in. We need more support on the funder side to make sure that there are bids for grants and, you know, APIs where we can query those things so that we can build the trust.
I think if you went to any of the other sessions during this meeting that you would have seen, there's a lot of innovation and a lot of work going on, and most of the organizations, if not all of the publishing organizations in this room, are in fact, mission driven organizations who are driven not by the business, but by disseminating information, making it useful. But it does have a business behind it that needs to be addressed.
And I think hopefully I'll come and share my card, but we can have more dialogue on those points. OK Thank you. If we could all give round of applause for our panel. Thank you for listening.
Segment:0 .
good afternoon. I hope everyone can hear me OK. I'm normally terrible at judging how to speak into the microphone. Is that working? Everyone can hear properly. Great um, so Thanks for coming. We thought it would be useful to have an environment where.
People in the audience could listen to a group of funders and people from library consortia talk about the transition and what that represents, particularly in the light of the guidance that came out last year. And more importantly than listening to the panel, also the ability for people to post questions of those various people by virtue of trying to open a dialogue around what the future could and should look like, what the challenges are, what the requirements from funders, from consortia and of course, from amongst publishers in the room as well in order to drive that transition towards open access and in the case of the MMO, public access.
And so to that end, we've assembled a fantastic panel. I will be the moderator. I'm Chris Pim from the American Chemical Society. Publications but we are also joined by Jessica, the acting director of the Office of Science policy at NIH Jason price, research and scholarly communication director at the scalp consortium. And Ashley Farley, the program officer of knowledge and research services at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
And so to kick off, we thought that probably the best way to start would be just to give us all a quick refresher from Jessica around what the guidance has put in place, how NIH has responded to that. And what next steps might look like. So at that point, I will turn over. The one thing I will say is when we come to questions from the audience, if you can, please use the microphone so that the questions are captured for the recording.
Read can everyone hear me OK? Thanks for the introduction, Chris, and Thanks so much for the invitation to be here today. I'm really happy to be here. As Chris said, I'm Jessica. You did give me a promotion, though. I'm the acting deputy director of the Office of Science policy at NIH.
So I feel like I should state that to make sure the record is clear. But yes, I'd like to provide an overview of the memo on equitable access that OSTP released last year, often referred to as the Nelson memo, and talk a little bit about NIH plans and maybe reflect a little bit on what we've heard so far. So in essence, the Nelson memo, the 2022 OSTP memo on ensuring free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded research, which was released in August of last year, has kind of three main buckets of expectations.
One, with regard to data sharing, one with regard to access to publications and one with regard to the use of metadata and persistent identifiers. Most of my focus today will be on the publications and public access piece, but I want to give you the full lay of the land. So the expectations in that memo are that federally funded publications be freely available and publicly accessible without an embargo.
As you may know, there is currently an allowable 12 month embargo period, I'm sure you all know. And that is sort of the big change with regard to access to publications, although there are other things as well. In terms of data, there were expectations regarding that scientific data underlying publications be accessible at the time of publication and that agencies put in place approaches for sharing all scientific data.
Now, in the case of NIH, we recently not that recently, I guess in January of this year, implemented our policy on data management and sharing, which meets both of these expectations with regard to data sharing. So I won't focus too much on that today, but I just want to make sure that you all know that that's part of the landscape. And also an expectation is to establish policies for use of metadata and persistent identifiers to help make research products more findable and transparent.
I think we know that that is a really, really important piece of this and also is not one of the things I'll be focusing most of my time on here today, in part because that part of the memo and expectations is on a much longer time time frame. I think. I think we all know that there's a lot of work to be done there. And we highlight in the plan that we released some sort of early, you know, best practices and models that we'll look to.
But I think most of us acknowledge that there's a lot of work to be done here, and that's on a much longer timeline. So NIH released our plan on. We shared it with OSTP and OMB in February of this year. And at the same time, we released it for public comment as a request for information. And and that plan that RFI closed April 24. So you can no longer comment in that venue, although there will be other opportunities for engagement.
Um, and, and as I said, you know, we articulated that data sharing expectations have been met and that the pids and metadata are on a longer time frame. But for publications, I just want to highlight again, we're trying to keep comments brief here. So I won't go into all the details, but happy to answer questions. You know, some of the main kind of elements of our plan, um, they indicate that that peer review, our plan indicates that peer reviewed scholarly articles will be available in PubMed Central will ultimately be available in PubMed Central as soon as processing is complete without an embargo period.
Um, I'm sure you're familiar with PubMed Central. It's our repository for, for NIH funded research publications. And again currently is sort of one of the key components of our current public access policies that has been in effect since 2008. And we're very proud of this, this infrastructure that we've developed. And we also are very excited about the notion of increasing access for everyone, including tax payers who paid for this research.
So so that it's available right away after publication instead of with an embargo period. Um, the other elements that we have highlighted in our plan is the need to maximize equity and accessibility. I think we again, we feel that on the access side, the reader side, the OSTP expectations do a great deal in terms of equity of access. And again, you can read this and read these public. Haitians much more quickly.
And we'll be able to under these new expectations. But we need to make sure that on the author side that there aren't any unintended consequences in terms of equity in particular. And we've also really noted the importance for us to continue to monitor trends in publication fees and policies to help ensure that fees remain reasonable and equitable. And just want to note that we do allow reasonable publication costs already under our Grants Policy statement.
And we know that that's something that will continue as an allowable cost for grants. So those are some of the key elements. Again, there's a lot more and I encourage you to take a look at the plan which has been posted publicly, if you haven't seen it. But again, we released it for we released our plan for comment for 60 days. We are still analyzing the comments.
But I want to give you a high level idea of what we've heard. And also just want to note that we also had a listening session during the public comment period on April 12th. It's a webinar that's available on our website and on NIH video cast. If you want to listen where we had a lot of good comments from people who shared their views. But we've received 143 comments, again, still analyzing.
But some of the things that we've heard are that, you know, many, many respondents agreed that the current embargo period limits availability of publications and supported removal of the embargo. Um, you know, there were comments about ways to ensure that we availability is not the same as access, right? And there's always more that can be done to increase access to publications and to be mindful of that and thought that was a really helpful comment that also kind of feeds into these issues of equity that are really important to us in terms of equity.
Some of what we heard are, again, that, you know, thinking about ways to be creative in terms of limiting any administrative burden that that may, you know, that may come from eventual policy changes through clear and concise guidance on mechanisms for compliance. Um, certainly there were concerns about, you know, if, if publishing fees go up, will that lead to inequities as lower resource investigators and institutions might be less able to afford to publish or it might cut in more to their budgets proportionally?
Um, so so mean and we agree with those comments. And those are the kinds of exact kinds of things that we are monitoring. Um, um, sort of along those lines, many commenters agree that NIH should monitor fees to publish and the impact on these fees for equity and to really help better define what is a reasonable cost for, for publication. Um, and on the pids and metadata, which as I said, is on a longer timeline, we heard a little bit about how folks felt that NIH should really use currently existing frameworks for metadata and pids as much as possible and provide guidance on how to use these to help ease the administrative burden instead of perhaps creating a whole new system.
Um, that's just a highlight of some of what we've heard. I want to emphasize again that what we've done so far is release a plan. What will follow is a very robust policy development process. We intend to put out a revised draft, NIH public access policy for public comment, you know, before issuing a final policy. And so there will be lots of opportunities for engagement and discussion moving forward because these revisions don't need to actually take effect until December of 2025.
And so we plan to issue a final policy by December of 2024. Again, that will be here quickly. But but there is still a fair amount of time for a lot of dialogue and getting feedback from communities such as yours. So we look forward to that. And again, for the pids and metadata plan, we will be submitting similar to what we did for pubs, a preliminary plan to OSTP and OMB by December of 2024, and then that will follow along the same trajectory in terms of policy development.
So that's what I wanted to highlight for now. Thanks for the opportunity and look forward to the discussion. And so then moving on to Jason. given the concerns that have been raised by groups like the Ivey League universities around the potential for green via gold approaches to be required to fulfill the mandate, I was wondering if you could talk through some of the experiences that SCLC have had around trying to manage the potential budget shocks that could occur.
Sure so we are as a skulk, as a consortium is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from the Ivey Leagues. We have a large group of mid-size and smaller libraries in the range of 3,000 to 10,000 fte, but I can say that they're excited about this. Nelson the Nelson memo and the impact it will have and increasing open publication is certainly something that they are behind and want us to be behind.
So, you know, we are, as a consortia, seeking to support our institutions, author's efforts to comply with the policies without additional institutional funding. So as Chris referred to, there isn't more money to support these efforts. And so we are trying to find ways to address it and looking both from a top down and kind of a bottom up approach to those.
You know, one question that folks have at the same time is they're excited about is what is the impact be on us as an institution. So and I'll refer you over to the slide on the left. That is work from Eric shares at Iowa State University. If you haven't seen this paper, I highly recommend taking a look. There are various views, including an interactive version that allows looking from the publisher what proportion are published.
So here you're looking at the total number of publications on the x-axis and the percentage of federally funded publications on the y-axis. So here, looking at these as universities, you can see that we're talking about for large research universities in the us, you know, 32 to 50% of the articles they publish have federal funding. These are articles then that would be affected by the memo. And so one question our libraries have is, well, what about us?
Where, you know, where do we fit here? And so my expectation as read institutions, as teaching focused institutions is that their numbers would be lower. It would be in the, you know, five, ten, 20% range. But it's still something that they want to be able to support and understand what the impact will be. So in terms of the budget impact on this, we have been working on a kind of a top down approach through read and publish agreements that bring author funding, author grant funding.
And that's the thing that we really feel like is necessary generally to support open access. And since this is linked to grant funding, it's a good opportunity to look at that model. And for that model to be sort of further supported. So, um, the approach that we are partnering with the Uc other California institutions on is to move from the accepted sorry is to, is to find ways to have library subscription dollars cover open publication where there isn't grant funding.
But then when there is Grant funding, we ask authors to contribute to offset the costs for the library. This then supports that growth, which I'll show you in a minute, can help those larger institutions to be able to afford an increase in costs because there's money coming from the authors and the author grants. So in addition to that initial choice that authors make as to whether to publish open or closed, and in the case of OSTP recommendations or requirements, they would be choosing open access then because they are grant funded, they would go through that route where they're asked to use that grant funding to support the open publication.
Other authors who aren't grant funded can be covered under these agreements without including grant funding if they don't have it available. So what does it mean to have funding available for publication in grants? That's one of the questions here and mean the ability to use it is one thing having it set aside or as a top up that doesn't take away from that money and the other things they would want to spend it on is it might be a really good step in the right direction for helping to support this approach.
So what would this top down approach look like? We have a first agreement with American Chemical Society in California involving all three consortia. They're linked agreements. And what we're looking to do is shift the cost from what used to be in 2021 divided among the subscription costs from California State University in red school libraries in orange and Uc libraries in blue.
And you can see this is relatively evenly distributed based on what they were paying for access to closed articles in the past, what we were paying. But you can see that the publication distribution at the bottom is quite different, right? So the large research universities are publishing much more than the portion they're paying for. So we need to facilitate orderly sort of shift to more of that funding coming from the publications and the model that we've developed, if it is successful, will help us to move and shift that funding by integrating the author, integrating author, grant funding.
So in that middle bar now you can see that the percentage that the lighter color that's associated with the main one is the percentage of author funding, author funded of the total income for those articles. So this shifts and lowers the costs or reduce the cost for libraries while integrating in the author funding. And so you can see that both the red and the blue total sorry, the red and the orange totals are shrinking.
Whereas the Uc system, which was formerly at 34%, now, you know, 20%, 26% is paid by libraries. But a big additional piece is covered by the authors using their grant funds to support the open publication. And so that then is a way that we can handle these shifts or two in that direction in a top down, you know, top down way. So that's OK for the few agreements where we can work out big research or read and publish agreements with big publishers, but it doesn't cover nearly all of our publication and it doesn't cover those institutions that aren't part of these agreements.
So that still is a significant challenge. And and we are looking to figure out how to put together a bottom up support for repository deposit that that green route as an alternative to the publisher based, site based gold publication and. One really big open question that I think this is bringing up is, how can author grant funding or other funding that is from outside of libraries be applied to support that path?
It does take time, effort, staff, tools to do these things, and it's not clear, then how we can support that other model, which is going to be an important part of making this work. So that's really a big question that we have is where is there a way that we can associate those two together? There are many cases where the region publisher agreements are not going to cover what we need to do, and so we have to find that path as well.
Thank you. And then moving on to Ashley. Bill and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been very long standing supporters of gold, open access. And so I was wondering if you could give an overview of the foundation's experiences with gold, what works, what doesn't, what the issues are, and where the future might be.
Very, very happy to. OK so we've had a full open access policy, no embargo since 2015. It's been in all of our grant agreements with no exceptions. We manage all of our APCs from a central fund. And one of the main reasons we did that is we found before we even launched the policy, authors really struggled to have a sense of correct budgeting for one number of articles that may be resulting from the grant and also where they may publish and how much those publications might cost.
And so it was a real administrative burden for program staff to have to reopen grants since publishing happened so far downstream, typically from when the grant ends. So if they're not, you know, if we're not continuing to support them as a grantee or the work, then it creates a big administrative burden to kind of Chase that. So we decided to experiment with the centralized fund, which we still have.
I will say that there's still administrative burden on us. We ended up having to, as a very small two person team, now hire somebody just to be able to Manage Payment on behalf of our grantee authors. Right now, we currently have no cap on number of publications or the cost of those publications. We are one of few funders that will pay $12,000 to Springer Nature to make that nature article open access.
But the thinking is, is that since 2015 we've been collecting the data and we now have the ability to kind of monitor it closely. And we've been learning a lot in the last few months. So we did switch our policy in January 1st, 2021 since we are part of coalition. And so we became plan aligned then. So that switched our spend a bit, which was phasing out hybrid journals and then upping an alternative route around Writer retention, self-archiving green, whatever you would like to call it, so that that shifted our spend a bit, but we found that we weren't saving any money, which is what I had hoped, especially as funders think get more requests to start supporting infrastructure.
And one of the biggest critiques that we receive is that our policy when we originally launched it, was very focused on making sure that our research results were openly available. That's a very small, you know, drop in an entire ocean of research. And so we receive a lot of feedback that as a funder that cares about this, we should be doing more to help other authors and non gates grantees as well, which I completely agree with, is that's, you know, a certain privilege in and of itself.
So how do we shift that, though, if we're very focused on a per article spend, we spend about almost 7 million per year. And what's interesting is as we've looked in to our data in the last few months around our spend, we're being asked to pick up the tab less than we have before. And probably a lot of that is due to the fact that we no longer cover hybrids.
But we are paying more than ever and we're also publishing more than ever. So it's really I think that's a really interesting dynamic. And if I had created slides, I would have put that chart up there. But but yeah, but so we, we, we don't have a lot of transparency into when we are being asked to pick up the bill, which I think is something interesting to dig into and try and understand publisher systems for what I've experienced, you know, in helping our grantees.
Often, you know, it could be because we have a transparent policy and say that all we need is a grant number associated with the article and we'll pick up the tab. Oftentimes, I honestly think it's because Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation starts B And so we're in the pull down list of funders to begin with. And so the system pushes those articles towards us to pay because we do see a lot of co funding with NIH, Wellcome trusts, you know, funders all over the world.
But it's not very clear what who is being asked to pick up the tab. And we don't look at authorship. We're really focused on, you know, any article funded in part or in whole. So now we're looking at the future and kind of what by 2025, it'll be a decade of open access. We are, you know, considering that Plan S is supposedly sunsetting then but really want to take everything that we've learned and see how can we put forth the policy that especially centers more on equity and know that's used a lot.
And I think it's hard to define and it's hard to figure out who should define it. Same with, you know, speaking of definitions, you know, we've always said that we'll only pay. A reasonable fee. And we have found that that's been near impossible to define. We certainly acknowledge that there are costs associated with infrastructure and publishing and resources and people time.
But I think we could also argue that it's not $12,000 per article and that the system is really carrying the brunt of the kind of prestige economy. And I think funders are becoming much more aware that it's so costly because of high rejection rates and kind of bloat and waste in the system. And we would like to try and not keep paying for that. So but there's a lot of work to be done and I'll stop there for now.
OK and so I noted that you mentioned infrastructure, which obviously involves both repositories and the infrastructure that can sit within institutions. But equally there's infrastructure like switchboard and other things of that nature. So perhaps and this is an open question to the panel, if you could talk about what tools and infrastructure you think would be useful to support open access in the future.
I can start if you're not sick of listening to me already. Always switchboard, I think is a great one. That is one that we were initial funders of, mainly because we were trying to think of ways to alleviate the administrative burden, especially on funders and institutions that are trying to enact open access policies. As a main motivator for me personally is if, you know, we really want to see open access become more of the norm and shift in this ecosystem, we need more institutions and funders on board with strong policies.
And one of the biggest barriers is that implementation and support for it. It's, you know, it's one thing to have a policy and post it on your website, but you have to be able to actually implement it, enact it and follow up on noncompliance. And there's a lot of education and work going there. So we have been looking at building tools and infrastructure switchboards.
One of them, one of the others is works, that's a nonprofit group that we've been working with for all of our reporting and data and compliance, and it's been a really great experience and they are open source. So we're hoping that as we develop tools with them, we can open them up to the funder and library community as well to be able to use those. And it's been going well.
I mean, we're still pretty early days, but we have a mechanism where we can find noncompliance. We email the corresponding author automatically. It says, hey, you know, you're not in compliance, upload a copy of your manuscript. We have connections with PubMed Central now, which is great. We also rely heavily on zenodo and we find that authors are really, you know, willing and excited to share their work more broadly.
And that open access has really, really taken off. So that awareness has grown. So that's some of the infrastructure that we work with more directly. Yeah I mean, I guess I'll speak a little bit to PubMed Central because I think that for us and I mean to, to be clear, I mean, no, no, we drew the distinction a little bit between public access and open access at the top. But, you know, compliance sort of compliance for NIH with these public access expectations really has hinged on submission of the author accepted manuscript into PMC and you know, so there are some journals that have indicated their know, that it's fine to submit the author accepted manuscript and PMC, you know go ahead and do that.
Right so so for us you know which is obviously different from the final manuscript or version of record. So I think that the thing I just want to note is that for us, I think one thing that we're really focused on is trying to ensure that PMC is as accessible and user friendly as possible to allow that to happen, since that is our primary mode of compliance with the policy. And you know, I guess the other note that I want to make is that already about a third of our articles come into PMC without a post-publication embargo, about a third, maybe a little bit more than a third.
Again, there's a big difference between a third and 3/3. I understand. But but it's also true that it's not sort of, you know, it's not it's not a 1% of articles are currently in this category. Right? so I think it is important to keep that in context. And we do have, you know, partnerships already at NIH with many publishers for them, as you know, for them to submit articles directly to PMC.
And we plan to continue those types of relationships to try to find ways to further ease, you know, any administrative burden. So one area of tools that we're looking that we're trying to get to right now is how do we have a sense of what the impact will be on us. So, you know, the data from the shared study was based on work in dimensions that's not necessarily accessible to everyone or all institutions to get to that data, um, lens.org as an alternative that we have been using, that's great.
And moving us in the right direction in terms of using that tool to better understand what's going on. But one thing we noticed is that, um, dimensions does have a federally funded checkbox. You can figure that out really easily. If you go into lens.org there, it's every single individual underlying agency that you have to try to catch that's in there.
I think the problem of multiple funding is also there, but being able to use these tools to say, OK, which institutions is this going to affect? How do we support them, how are they different? What what do we need to do? That's a big piece of just sort of really understanding total public and portions of publication and volume of publication for all of our many institutions, some of which are, are quite small.
oh, a switchboard or other solutions that would allow for real time tracking of Article publication is really was really key for us as well kind of across the board, across publishers and places that might be coming from. I don't know if there's much intent there right now to include funding information there. But I think that would be an important part of this as well. Um, and then ultimately, we think about the, the, the, the ideal and on the side of, of repository is having well funded research repositories and infrastructure that support a coherent and comprehensive approach.
What does this look like? You know, PubMed Central works for one part of it, but it doesn't work for all of the agencies that are going to be funding this and articles that will be affected. What does it look like? How will it be discoverable if it's broadly distributed? And how can we support author compliance in an efficient way? So what are those tools looking like? Orchid and then taking ORCID into an institutional level.
And being able to track across what's going on and making sure that we know as things are in the pipeline so that we can support what needs to happen and try to track that compliance in ways that us funders, because of your direct connection with the authors, is a little easier. It's harder for us. We want to be able to support it, but we need a lot better view of what's going on.
OK Thank you. and I think one of the other topics that comes up in all of these conversations now is equity. And both equity in terms of publication as well as access. So the public access point, as Jessica made, will improve equity in terms of access, but may have some impacts on equity in terms of publishing. So given that we've all agreed that there are costs associated with both the infrastructure and publishing, how do we fund equitable?
What does it look like? Yeah and so I'll open that one up to the panel. Think actually you mentioned it. So you can go first again. Yes Thank you. OK so I think this is such a hard question to answer. And I don't want to just focus also on the funding of equitable publishing, because I think we really need to work equity into the entire ecosystem, especially starting with funding.
And that's something that we've been working on at the foundation because you start to see downstream, you know, if we have the most privileged labs getting the most funding, they have the most resources, they're going to be able to have the most amount of data access and training and management to be able to write those papers that are going to get, you know, the most attention. And there's a lot of inequity built into that alone, whether or not we make that article open access.
So I do want to take this at a wider lens than just that. But if we're focusing on the funding equitable at this point, I think there's a couple things that we've all decided on is as a community writ large, and that's that APCs are not sustainable and not equitable, that waivers to those APCs are not sustainable or equitable. And now it's sort of what do we do with that information? And there's a lot of models that funders are trying to get behind.
So around like the diamond, which I know we need to rename some of these things, but diamond publishing subscribe to open, you're trying to experiment with different business models, but I think at the same time too, we have to be a bit, a bit honest with the situation and that, you know, we're not going to see APC prices go down. We're not going to see, you know, a lot of the money move in ways that we wanted to see.
And I think if we can become more transparent and honest about that, we'll have better options that will have an actual impact more broadly. Um, yeah, other than that, I think we've, we've done in the past, which is kind of throw money at it and hope, hope it gets solved. Um, so I think we're going to try different, different publishing models as well to reach something that's much more equitable.
Certainly we see that the importance for supporting those and trying to find them as well. And there is a real concern about the APC based economy that we're in and still is gaining steam. So we'd like to see those things work on the APC side, one step in the right direction. And I think we have to be OK with baby steps here.
Getting directly to equitable is going to be really a challenge. But for instance, we have five read and publish agreements. They range and we have hundreds or 110 members, many of which are small and publish very rarely, if at all, in the journals from those publishers. So maybe a good step in the right direction is to say, OK, if we have 20 institutions and they're spending this much money and we're covering open publishing for them, if for their authors that don't have grant funding, can we look at the total publication of the entire rest of the consortium of participants and say, if that's only a marginal increase of 10 or 15%, then can we include coverage for open publication and the rare cases where it happens for all of those additional institutions that are a part of our consortium.
So sort of spreading the ability to pay for that into the places where the money is already kind of coming from. And I think that's a luxury that we have as a consortium that has a lot of smaller institutions. And so it's not big numbers. It's just it's big numbers of libraries. It's not big numbers of publications. So thinking actively about how we can be more inclusive in these agreements and not just restrict the benefits to those who are current subscribers, who are licensing the closed contents as a part of these agreements is a big deal.
So it's one thing to include authors from institutions that have site licenses that don't have grant funding. And at least we're covering that. So they don't need to pay APCs. But then you want to be able to expand that out to the other institutions that we represent that aren't directly contributing to those agreements.
Yeah, I think all I would add is that, again, as I mean in our role at NIH, um, in part because we fund, you know, we fund so, so much in so many different types of investigators and things like that. I think, you know, our position has been to be, you know, agnostic, agnostic on specific publishing models at this stage. So, so that does create, um, you know, so we are excited to see the publishing models that, that develop and, and want to, you know, find ways for us to, you know, softly encourage those, those approaches to, to, to remain equitable.
Um, Uh, and obviously I think the big thing for us is to ensure that whatever policies we put in place don't unintentionally drive the system in a way that is less equitable, right? And so, so that's a lot of, of what we're trying to hear here about. I my background is more in sort of emerging technology policy. And I have definitely learned that like too early in a technology, if you put too if you say we're definitely going in this direction like it can really mean you can, you can really mess things up.
Um, and so, so I think that we, you know, have tried to remain open and flexible and realize also our responsibility to, to ensure that whatever flexibility we allow, you know, does not also then drive towards an equitable solution. So so I mean, I think that that's really the tension for us. I think a lot of this a lot of the focus therefore will be on, you know, what can we do to be monitoring, you know, costs, to be monitoring these types of impacts?
What are the things that we should be monitoring for? And also, you know, where are places where I mean, sort of to your point earlier, um, there's the funding of and then there's also all the other stuff that goes into the enterprise, which, you know, NIH has a big role in. So are there other things that we can do, you know, through different types of resources, through different types of infrastructure and things like that, that will also help that, you know, aren't strictly just about, you know, how much we're willing to pay for publication costs, right?
So to sort of broaden that aperture, I guess. And then guess before we open it up for questions from the audience. As a question for Ashley and Jessica, what can publishers and potentially librarians do to assist you with ensuring the transition works smoothly? I mean, I guess what I would say is, you know, I think the main thing is please tell us what you think.
Right? so so we've been doing a lot of things to try to have these listening sessions and our RFI and we have other, you know, new things that we want to do. So, um, in terms of engagement. So, so I think the big thing for us is, you know, we don't want to make assumptions. So it's, it's better for us to hear from all of these communities about, you know, what things you think need in order to make this work.
Um, you know, I, of course, publishers and librarians can help socialize these, these policies and resources and build, build policy, build policies and resources when it makes sense. You know, we are very happy with the relationships that we already have with the partnerships we have with many publishers to partner with PMC, to deposit articles and ease administrative needs of investigators. And then, you know, ultimately, I mean, again, this is kind of moving beyond the publications piece, but I think we'll really need help from publishers and librarians to help think about some of these best practices for accessibility, findability and transparent transparency when we, you know, move more into that phase of this process.
It's very kind of. I would say, from a publisher's perspective. I mean, we've had, you know, over eight years now of engaging on our policy and like our wants and needs. And I don't think it would be helpful to have a lot more frank, honest conversations. And so when we use terms like wanting publishers and funders to be more in partnership, like what that actually means and what that looks like and like, I'm, I understand that business comes first.
And that's going to be the purview of most of the publishers, is fulfilling that need first. And I think that's just important to acknowledge. And then from a funder perspective, that is not our first priority. Um, our priority is making sure that our research is disseminated and widely available. And able to be built upon for further impact. And so that's, that's our, our first remit there.
And then as far as librarians, I love librarians. I'm a librarian. Um, I would love to see librarians and funders work more closely together. I don't know how to do that, and I'm active in some circles, but I think there needs to be more deeper understanding of how we're both kind of paying into the same system. And I worry that that's, you know, inefficient and that if we're trying to make things the money move then in different directions and we're creating new models and is just kind of compiling upon itself.
And I really worry that we're going to get into a completely untenable system while we're also experimenting, which is important. So I think just if we had more opportunities to connect and talk about those kind of models and what we're thinking in the future, that'll help make it more of a reality than think it is now. OK Thank you. So we have about 15 minutes left of the session, so I'm going to open it up to the floor for questions.
Just as a reminder, if you could please use the microphone, that would be very helpful. Questions Thank you. Since nobody asks, nobody's nobody's asking anything, I'll come up. Matthew chervenak I'm an investor in the area and I'm curious from the funders point of view. You know, when I think about scientific publishing, I think about, you know, there's only 10% of what the scientist does actually gets into a publication.
There's all these negative results. There's all this value that they create in the process of doing research that is wasted is not communicated, that it's duplicated somewhere else. And, you know, what are your thoughts on that aspect of it and whether you think there are models or trends or ideas that we could use to get that other information out into the world and get a bigger Roi for the money that you're putting in?
Um, I mean, I'll just jump in quickly to say, I mean, this was a huge impetus for our, our recently implemented data, data management and sharing policy, which again, does not, you know, mandate the sharing of all scientific data. Um, it, you know, it. We have a long definition that I won't go into here about of, you know, what, what is, what is expected in terms of scientific data and certainly especially for NIH, there are plenty of times when sharing data isn't appropriate because of consent or privacy.
You know, you know, human subjects, considerations, things like that. But nonetheless, you know, really it is for us, I think, you know, trying to instill the importance of, you know, at the time of publication. And also, you know, even if it's not data associated with a publication, you know, that we, you know, an expectation now is that people will have a data management and sharing plan that has to be, you know, reviewed and considered by the Institute or center that's funding this work that really has as an emphasis, you know, trying to maximize the sharing of this data, you know, whether or not it's directly associated with the publication.
So again, that's not, um, that's not the whole answer. But just, you know, I think that that was a huge piece of our impetus for that policy. Yeah, I think over the years we launched gates open research, which is built on F1000 publishing technology as really a hope to start to socialize the sharing and publishing of, of different information archetypes or whatever you want to call them to try to really promote that.
The uptake has been very slow because those things aren't necessarily incentivized. And that's the biggest thing is that, you know, even when we're encouraging grantee authors to share things differently, it just it's so ingrained that the thing has to look like a research article type. And then if they're used to being told from other journals that this isn't in scope or fit or not interesting enough, they're not going to spend the time and energy to publish it elsewhere, even if we provide the technology.
So now we're trying to think more of through, you know, I think having strong policies is really important. And then forcing those policies. We unfortunately don't have a data policy. We have kind of a global access clause which is meant to cover data, but it's sort of mushy. And so it's hard to get the data actually shared. So we've been experimenting with data management sharing plans, which has been going well because I think it is really important to have those conversations upstream.
But then now we're, you know, at the end of it and trying to work back and make sure that we have compliance with what was shared management plan, which is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Um, but I think one thing we can do right now in the immediate term is, is really incentivize and support those researchers that do want to share those things. And we do have researchers that are very open science, open research minded and motivated, and we should be supporting and celebrating those people before we can scale it.
And and introduce it to the less the willing. Yes first a comment. Then a question. So we were talking at some point about how do we identify those papers that result from federally funded research. But think for a lot of universities, their sources of funding are very intermingled within labs and through overhead, for example.
And so I think for a lot of major research institutions, we should think about these policies as probably affecting all, you know, published research. But my question was about open innovation and data, because one of the things I've heard from faculty at MIT who go off and create companies, you know, and patent things. Are there exceptions in those cases? And how to think about the patenting process and the innovation life cycle, if you will.
So thank you. Yeah, we mean, again, in terms of data, we do have certain, you know, that that is a consideration in the data management and sharing policy. I mean for, for sure for any sbir, you know, small business grants and things like that, there are allowances for, for not sharing data because of those considerations.
And, and, you know, we're, we're exploring, you know, other types of guidance to provide as well for, for other types of data, you know, that may have potential, you know, patent or IP implications that aren't associated with SBIR and STTR. But I think we acknowledge that, again, if things are, you know, directly associated with an invention that there are again, the main point is you should have a plan for sharing this data.
You should proactively and prospectively, and you should work with the NIH Institute and center to ensure that the plan that again, that it is reasonable and obviously there is some subjectivity there in terms of, you know, patenting and IP as well. Oh, Yeah. That's a, I think it's all about timing. And that's what we work with.
This is a bit outside of my scope, but we typically advise patenting and any kind of IP registration before formal publication because right now our policies are pretty contingent upon that, you know, publication in a journal. So there's a lot of time beforehand to do that. Personally, you know, I'm much more open, open patent minded, but that's not the foundation's purview. So I'll leave it that.
But I do want to touch on your comment, though, because that was something I wanted to mention earlier and for God. But when we're thinking, especially in the theme of this conference around, you know, transparency and trust, I really wish there was more motivation for publishers. And I know this is an overgeneralization, so hashtag not all publishers.
Some do this well, but care more around the funding metadata and confirming that because I think that's a really important part of establishing that trust and that research is making sure it was actually has the funding sources and connections to that grant back to that institution. And it's been hard for us to engage and get that right. And I know, you know, there's great work around Crossref on that, but I think there's a big gap there.
And um, tying it to, you know, trust in the research should be a big motivator. But Adrian Stanley, Thanks for coming out on this panel. You know, one of the questions and just perhaps to highlight, it's a comment and then a question on top of it. But Thanks for the call out for the switchboard. I think that is bringing together funders and librarians and publishers in a good way.
But the kind of question to you and us all in the room is where are the best venues where we can come together and sort of interact and share? And I know, Ashley, you were part of the task force with SSP for a little while, but it feels like these panels happen in little pockets where there could be a lot more meaningful discussion. But Yeah. I mean, if we're going to have full transparency here, I stopped being engaged in that task group and several others around publishers because it does come down to just discussions of business models, which I understand is important and kind of what keeps everything running.
But at the same point in time, that's not that's not the highest priority or the remit necessarily of funders or librarians. And I think it's hard when those conversations continually lead down that track. And I feel like there ends up just kind of circling around that point and then just overall seeing kind of a lack of innovation and really think experimentation and forward thinking.
And changing publishing as a whole and not just focused on the business models. OK OK. Do we have. Any more questions? Well, I actually have a question. I don't know how dangerous it feels like a dangerous question because it feels extremely naive.
Um, but, What I'm interested in because we're, you know, putting forth this model that asks authors with Grant funding to contribute to pay for publication where funding is available. I wonder if either there are already or have been discussed ways in which. As grants are being written, whatever additional costs might be built in to support open publication.
Don't take away from the money they can use for research. Is that is that a clear mean that is that's certainly a common discussion right is sort of this. Um, so so again, currently, you know, NIH is willing to pay reasonable costs. It is defined in our Grants Policy statement. It's not for publication in particular, but what a reasonable cost is in general.
Um, one of those, one of the parameters is that it. It should not be a cost that is different for, for us than for anybody else, right? So like you can't, you know, you can't charge the government more than you would charge any other person. Right that kind of stuff. Um, but certainly, you know, I mean, I'll just say certainly a concern or consideration that's often raised for any, any policy changes is this notion that we do pay for this.
We we pay for APCs. Now we pay for all of these fees. They're they're part of grant costs now. They're allowable costs. We'll pay for them. But I think, you know, it's a fair point that, um, you know, they're a concern that's often raised is there's a 250,000, you know, dollar modular, by the way, that's not the cap for a grant.
A lot of people say the cap, it's not the cap for a grant. It's the cap for a modular grant. There are lots of grants that can go above that. Right but that with, you know, if there are increased costs for all of these other things. And that cap stays the same, that it has the impact. And I mean, I really do think that's one of the key issues in terms of equity, right? In terms of if, if, um, you know, if you're an institution or an investigator with, with fewer grants and a higher and higher percentage of those every time is getting taken up by whatever, you know, data sharing costs, cost to publish, you know, whatever it is, it can take away costs for research.
You know, I think that that's. A legitimate critique. You know, again, it's also true that people can, you know, write a budget that goes above $250,000 and requests more funding, but that clearly is a consideration and something that has been raised as sort of one of the key equity considerations. Yes will pay for it. But if the overall if the amount is still here and the other costs keep raising to there, then it leaves less money for research.
So, I mean, I do think that that is sort of one of the things that we're really trying to grapple with in these discussions of equity. So that's exactly why we run it from a central fund is because it doesn't come from the research, but of course, it still comes from somewhere. I mean, we spend $7 billion, which mean I in gates money is like a rounding error. But but it's still, you know, I mean, I know many of our program staff would rather that be spent on malaria research than open access publications.
And so I think that's I think it's definitely possible, but it's hard. And I the hardest part of it, again, is the author awareness. Like no matter what we try to do, there's still seems to be zero price sensitivity awareness for a lot of our authors. It's complicated because, you know, like we go off of acknowledgment for eligibility. But you know, other funders will go off of author rank and order and that's all confusing.
Um, and then I think the hard part too is that grants can be depending on the institution, you know, like some of our shortest might be five years. We've had, you know, frontiers raised apex 10% last year. So you can quite quickly already be very priced out of what you've, you've set aside for apex.
Thank you all for being here today. Um, NIH, when you pay, do you have to pay sales tax? I'm not actually asking that. So, um, my real question is, um, I'm thinking about Jason. He talked about the consortia, the idea that if you have a lot of libraries in a consortia and most of them are paying in and there's just, there's these other schools that just have a few things. And if it's just a marginal cost to just go ahead and pay that little bit more and just have the whole thing paid for.
Um, with the Nelson memo, we're going to have a lot of stuff that goes open access. Um, I'm wondering what your thoughts are about national funders, private funders, kind of looking at the total, um, how much, how much we're making away total and maybe just, you know. Medicare for all for publishing. Like, what are your thoughts on that? Well, there's certainly you know, we really applaud this move forward.
At the same time, the question is, is there more money to pay for this change? And ideally, it would come across the board instead of having to be managed the way it is. So the thoughts are it would be fantastic. I mean, there's some research been done and it's like 1% to 2% of total research, government research funding would cover that. What that those costs are, isn't there a way to somehow do that and cover it for everybody?
So we don't have the challenges that we have all been discussing up to now. So, I mean, it'd be great to see it happen. I don't know that it seems very likely to me. Just in case it's hot. I often note for people in case it's a useful resource, that was it. At the same time, I'm not sure if it was at the same time that they released that released the memo, but but shortly around the same time, they released sort of a cost and economic analysis that that, you know, can be useful to look at as well in terms of having to, you know, estimate how how, you know, and they sort of considered the issue of, you know, is the taxpayer paying twice.
Right if they have to pay article fees to read. But they also paid for the research. You know, it's sort of like paying twice for the same thing. Right so it's kind of interesting. So you might want to I can try to get people to resource. But it's a really interesting economic analysis thought. And again, all with the understanding that we don't exactly know how this is.
All right it's all um, we can't assume a certain outcome in terms of how this is all going to play out. So it actually, I mean, it does make it really hard to do the analysis, but it just might be useful to take a look at. Hi, I'm Tom. I do public affairs and advocacy for frontiers, so wanted to bring up because we were just mentioned in terms of the increase in prices.
Um, Ashley, you and I both spoke on the April 12 call that the NIH has up on his website. And you had mentioned that in all of the years that gates has been funding apcs, you still can't put your finger on what a reasonable price for an APC is. So I just wanted to point that out in context of us raising our prices. That goes on both sides. We're all trying to figure out what a reasonable price for an APC is.
You also had mentioned, too, that you stepped away from the task force because we do get into talking about the business models. we would welcome advice on how we could innovate better. So if there are thoughts on that, because you're right, we do at the end of the day, think about how we're going to pay for these things that we want to do. But what advice do you or the panel have about how are we not innovating better and what should we be thinking about going forward?
Yes should also state that I'm not a business person or an economist, but from what I've seen, you know, my experience from a librarian perspective and also as a funder that's being asked to spend and invest more in infrastructure and open infrastructure, open source things. Um, it would be great to see, especially the funders that mean the publishers that are really great and embracing open access and open science and want to push that forward, use those types of technologies and use more open source infrastructure.
And in a lot of ways that can help. Again, I could be wrong, but keep the costs down throughout the process. And I think it's I mean, as a fully open access publisher, you are already ahead of the game. So I try not to overgeneralize and definitely much more cost effective than a lot of the other funders and publishers. And I think the hard part is trying to flip that subscription hybrid model where I'm now at the point where I think it's less and less possible to make that flip because the systems just aren't built like trying to pay some of the largest publishers that we do.
And we're interfacing with four different systems that don't talk to each other. So it's really hard to get metadata through the system. Um, I mean, from speaking from frontiers, we just had a call with your team and it's one of the best platforms that we have to manage our apks and get our data, which is, which is great. And we would love to, to see more of that.
But it's, I think, sadly, the, the norm. I mean, the exception rather than the norm. And I would like to see, you know, more partnerships around open infrastructure and like if funders are going to invest in it, that's great and we should. But it needs to be used at the same time. And I moving technologies is often costly, time consuming and expensive, but I think in the long run, that's the only way that we're going to get to something that's much more sustainable and equitable.
Think last question. Great David weinrich from STM until Ashley's comment that. Kind of undermined what you had said before. I really appreciated everyone talking about how there should be more dialogue between the publishers and funders and libraries, and sme's actively working on that and trying to outreach.
I'm always struck, Jessica, that what did you say it was 130 comments. 134 comments. That's embarrassing. That I think it was 143 comments. Sorry Yeah. It's still embarrassing that for a policy of this impact. I spoke on a panel yesterday about how everybody in this room needs to get more involved and share your perspectives.
You know, there are some things that I disagree with that were said, but I think that we need more dialogue to the metadata question. You know, it's something publishers are actively interested in, actively investing in. We need more support on the funder side to make sure that there are bids for grants and, you know, APIs where we can query those things so that we can build the trust.
I think if you went to any of the other sessions during this meeting that you would have seen, there's a lot of innovation and a lot of work going on, and most of the organizations, if not all of the publishing organizations in this room, are in fact, mission driven organizations who are driven not by the business, but by disseminating information, making it useful. But it does have a business behind it that needs to be addressed.
And I think hopefully I'll come and share my card, but we can have more dialogue on those points. OK Thank you. If we could all give round of applause for our panel. Thank you for listening.
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