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Funds, Funders, Funding
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Funds, Funders, Funding
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Segment:0 .
SIMONE TAYLOR: Good morning, and welcome to our session on Funds, Funders, and Funding. I'll start with a huge thank you to the New Directions Working Group for putting this program together and to our sponsors for helping us make this happen. A couple of housekeeping points, do introduce yourselves through the chat stream if you'd like to do so, and type in any questions and comments you have either through the chat stream or through the Q&A channel.
SIMONE TAYLOR: And we'll get to them when we start the discussion. Sorry, I seem to have stopped sharing my screen, but I'm back on track now. Oh, I've done it again. Excuse me.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, good. Funding is crucial to the research and publishing infrastructure, yet the inner workings of a funding organization can sometimes seem arcane to those of us on the outside as we aim to ensure as effective a process as possible for making results of funded research accessible to those who can most benefit from those results. Thankfully, we have an expert panel here to guide us through the funding to publication cycle, and I'll introduce them briefly here.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Chonnettia Jones, a Researcher in Biochemistry and Cell Biology by training, is Vice President Research at the Michael Smith Foundation and will help us demystify the mechanisms of a funder organization. She will also talk to us about how the funding landscape is changing to become more equitable and inclusive. Jan Philip Solovej is a Researcher in mathematics and theoretical physics with experience in funding agencies and publishing.
SIMONE TAYLOR: He is uniquely placed to talk to us about her research as it navigates the funding landscape to understand how funder requirements impact publication and research and how that, in turn, influences the researchers' interaction with librarians and publishers. Roger Schonfeld is Program Director at ITHAKA S+R where he leads a team of high education researchers and consultants addressing academic libraries, scholarly communications, and museums.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Sitting at the intersection of funding research and publishing, Roger will talk about opportunities to maintain and grow the academic research enterprise. Rounding out the discussion with a publisher's perspective, we have none other than genetics researcher turned journalist and publisher to guide us through the solutions that publishers aim to provide. Nick Campbell is VP Academic Affairs at Springer Nature and will discuss the publisher response to supporting authors and their institutions in meeting funder requirements.
SIMONE TAYLOR: So let's get started. I'll now hand over to Chonnettia.
CHONNETTIA JONES: OK, thank you, Simone, and thank you to the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the opportunity to participate today. So it's with humility and gratitude that I'm delighted to be joining you from the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Today, I won't be speaking on behalf of my current employer, which is the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Rather, I will be sharing some personal observations and opinions drawn from my experience of working with research funders in the US, UK, and in Canada. So I'm often asked what are funders priorities? How do funders make decisions? How are funder policies made and enforced? I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you by saying that that answer is not as straightforward as you might think.
CHONNETTIA JONES: All funders are different. And as this slide shows, they are vastly different in terms of their constitution, their mandate, excuse me, and their governance. And importantly, they are vastly different in their degree of independence and accountability. So funders missions, their strategies, priorities, decisions, and criteria for funding are hugely influenced by these factors.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And furthermore, funders are further influenced by other actors in the research system, including communities, higher education institutions, publishers, and others. So what I thought I would do today is by way of illustration just tell you about one funder's story, and that's the Wellcome Trust. So for those of you who don't know the Wellcome Trust, it's a UK-based charitable foundation that funds health related research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: All of their charitable activities are paid for by an investment portfolio valued at 29 billion pounds sterling. They are politically and financially independent. They don't fundraise. They don't have donors, shareholders. They don't receive public funding in any form. In 2005, Wellcome implemented its first open access policy mandating that published research made possible by funding from Wellcome were made open.
CHONNETTIA JONES: They provided block grants to higher education institutions to help researchers cover access charges. In 2011, the UK government through the BIS innovation and research strategy for growth followed with their own commitment to make publicly funded research accessible free of charge. And the government invited Wellcome to join a cross-sector working group to make recommendations to public research funders on strategies for achieving faster access to research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: The recommendation from this group were shared in the Finch Report, which called for government to implement an open access policy and adopt the block model pioneered by Wellcome for funding open access charges. The Finch Report explicitly mentioned the influence of Wellcome's introduction of the research funder mandatory open access policy in 2005, and the impact of this policy change in the UK was the immediate and significant increase in the proportion of publicly funded research publications that were being made open.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So Wellcome also wanted to see that researchers were equipped, empowered, and motivated to make research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable or fair. So Wellcome at that time examined the fair status of Wellcome funded research publications and found that nearly 100% of Wellcome publications were indeed findable. That's indicated by the blue graphs in this slide.
CHONNETTIA JONES: That is that they were indexed by PubMed. A decade after Wellcome implemented its OA policy, more than 80% of Wellcome's publications were accessible. That's the red curve in this slide. That is the full text was available within six months of publication. Notice, not 100%, 80%. And this represented about a 5% average annual increase in the proportion of OA publications since Wellcome's OA policy was introduced in 2005.
CHONNETTIA JONES: 66% of Wellcome's publications were interoperable. That's the yellow curve. That is that they were in a machine-readable format, and 61% of Wellcome publications were reusable, the green curve, that is they were under CC BY or CC0 license. So the results confirmed to Wellcome that funding and policy while essential for their open access objective was not sufficient and encouraged Wellcome to think about further investments and technologies and platforms to ensure that research outputs are shared and used in ways that unleash their full value.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I'm going to come back to that point in a couple of slides. So another analysis found that Wellcome funded open publications, which are indicated in the teal box to the right, demonstrated a relatively higher normalized citation impact compared to closed publications indicated in the melon-colored box on the left. And this observation was consistent with international reports at that time that open access publications are cited more frequently suggesting to Wellcome that open access accelerates the reach and influence of its funded research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So Wellcome also sought to understand how effective were their strategies compared to other funders. And so while Wellcome was among the top funders that successfully implemented initiatives in open research, they realized that open access publications made up only a proportion of the world's total share of publications. Open accessibility rates vary widely by funder, which is shown in the left graph, and by country, which is shown in the right graph.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So this motivated Wellcome to explore other ways to drive wider adoption of open access. And they realized they couldn't achieve this alone. So Wellcome joined cOAlition S, a coalition of research funders and agencies working to accelerate transition to open access. And two years ago, Wellcome co-founded the Research on Research Institute or RoRI, an international consortium of funders that recently announced they have partnered with Stanford University to develop freeware open-source software to more easily assess the fair status of all publications produced around the world.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So building on more than a decade of work, Wellcome continues to work with other funders, infrastructure providers, and the researcher community to do three things, understand the individual structural and systemic barriers that still remain to open research, support innovative services, resources, tools, and platforms to remove any barriers and to work with others to set standards and best practice for making research outputs open. So through this story, I hope I've persuaded you to see that funders are more than just grant makers.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Rather, they are much more strategic than that. And they thoughtfully deploy a wide range of levers to bring about change, such as what you've heard in the story, advocating for particular positions or policies, forming coalitions to achieve collective impact, convening cross-sector groups of stakeholders and decision makers to bring about attention or visibility to a problem or drive change, implementing and enforcing policies if necessary and partnering.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So looking forward, I'm just going to share maybe two thoughts about why you should pay attention to what funders are doing. And the first is that funders are backing what I'm describing as disruptive innovations to drive open research practice that's not just open access, that's not just open science. They are backing platforms to increase transparency and peer review.
CHONNETTIA JONES: They are funding platforms that recognize a wider range of research outputs, such as null and negative findings and data sets. They are backing repositories to accelerate access to new knowledge, funding tools to promote research use, and joining member organizations advocating for open research culture and practice. I've just shown a few in the slide, but I promise you there are many more examples that are coming.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And at last, I'll end with the second, which is around systems change. So many funders around the world, both public and private funders, are becoming increasingly interested in addressing systemic challenges in research. Some of the areas that they are drawing attention to are first research culture, which by definition encompasses the behaviors, values, expectations, attitudes, and norms of research systems.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And there's disturbing evidence of poor research culture, which is characterized by hypercompetition and incentive and reward system that places extremely high value on supposed high-impact research papers for hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding and incidences of bullying and harassment. Research excellence is strongly linked to research culture, and research excellence is pervasive in academia and in the evaluation of research for funding, publishing, hiring, and promotion or tenure.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Research excellence is used generally to signify a standard of quality, but it's highly subjective. Its meaning and use is so broad that there is no consensus, standard definition, or reliable measure. And it's characterized by a heavy reliance on publication metrics. It also underpins structural inequities in research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And lastly, equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Calls for action on systemic racism have activated funders to take ED&I and racism seriously and to understand how their policies and practices contribute to further inequities that marginalize communities. My opening remarks were about how different funders are. I'm going to end with what they share in common. Funders share a common-- a strong sense of common purpose, a desire to help the greater good, and a strong preference to work in partnership with communities, not in silos.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I'm really looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Chonnettia. A great deal of food for thought and really enlightening us more about how funders work and what their perspectives are. I'll now hand over to Jan Philip to talk to us about the researcher perspective. Jan Philip.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Yeah, thanks a lot, and hello from sunny afternoon in Copenhagen. It's a pleasure to be here and talk to you. So let me just make this a full screen. So I will give you a perspective from a researcher, but it is a very personal perspective since I have been doing research in mathematics and theoretical physics for 35 years.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: But I have also experience with funding agencies. I've been in the board of the Independent Research Fund in Denmark. I've chaired the advanced grant panel in the European Research Council. I had an advanced grant from the European Research Council myself, and I was on the committee for the Danish National Strategy of Open Access. I apologize for the noise.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: It is because at 5 o'clock here in Copenhagen, the alarm sometimes go off. I hope it's not disturbing you too much. And I have some experience with publishing. I'm also the editor-in-chief of Journal of Mathematical Physics under the American Institute of Physics Publishing. So this is my personal background, and I've been very involved in open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So let me just give you an idea of the players in scholarly publishing and how I from a researcher perspective see their interaction. So they're the funding agencies. They are the researchers, libraries and librarians, publishers, and of course then the readers, the users of the scholarly publishing. And I think sometimes we forget that it's in the interest of all of these to have open science and open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I sometimes get the feeling that people think that researchers are not interested in open access. But I think researchers are very much interested in open access. They want that there should be easy access to their publications. But what I do find is that there is often a lack of common understanding between the players and to some degree some miscommunications between the groups.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And I'll try to explain what I mean a little bit by comparing the interactions between these different players. So let me give you a researcher's perspective, which is what I'm here to present. I think that researchers work in different fields, and funders and publishers should remember that one size does not fit all when it comes to open science.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Some fields like my own fields have very strong archiving traditions. We've been archiving for the past 20 years, meaning we've used the archive. As soon as a paper is written, essentially, in the preprint form, we put it out, and we often use the archive as much as we use publish papers. Other fields have less traditions for open-- for using archive.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Strangely enough, theoretical physics and mathematics have a very strong tradition. Theoretical chemistry does not. I never fully understood why. Then there are the different publication patents. There are the difference between having short papers with many authors sharing the costs of the publications and that work in large collaborative groups or there are the situation that I'm in.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I often write papers just by myself or in very small group, two co-authors. And then, of course, there's the whole situation of monograph versus journal publications. And so these are just some examples of how this one-size-fits-all one has to be very careful with it. Researchers are, as I said before, interested in and very committed to open science but would also like flexibility.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And when I say that, it may sound to some that I'm trying to apologize for not wanting to fully go into open access. But researchers spend a lot of their time doing research and maybe less of their time they're involved in publishing. So for instance, choosing between gold and the green open access and the freedom to choose how to put papers in repositories and what type of repositories, that's very important for the research.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And then librarians. So I've talked about the interaction with funders and publishers. Librarians are extremely helpful, that's been my experience, with helping researchers comply with rules and regulations. As a researcher, it's really difficult to keep track of what rules and regulations are. And I see it for myself.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I like to spend a lot of time trying to find out what the rules and regulations are, but my younger colleagues or maybe even more my older colleagues find it very difficult. I would say one thing when I talk to librarians that online tools are often cumbersome. I guess they should be because they have to really comply with all the rules. But it's important to remember that simplicity is important because researchers do not work with these things every day.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: They don't publish a paper every day. They do research every day and publish, hopefully, quite often but not as often as they work on their research. So in general, researchers find it difficult to know what funders require, what publishers allow, and exactly how to use librarians to help. And I do believe this is particularly difficult for the younger researchers. And then it becomes-- this is my last slide to the new business model.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Who should pay for the changes? I think this is-- it's been discussed a lot, and there's been this general idea that the world of open science should not cost more than what we had before. It should be possible to rearrange everything in a new budget model so it will cost the same. But who should actually pay? And I think we heard about Plan S a moment ago.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I think funders requiring research grants to carry the costs have actually forgotten to think about the question of also increasing the funds. The idea is often that funds for publications are very small. They play very little role. That's not entirely true in all fields. Again, it's the same if you're working in small groups and you publish long papers, it can be rather expensive.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I know it's not like salaries, but it does affect the grant to have to carry the load of open access. And I think one of the problems I had with Plan S was that it avoided this issue entirely. It did not address the issue that if grants should carry the costs, then grants should be increased. I also think populations have generally not been willing to show transparency of their actual costs.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I know that's a criticism that's been heard very often, but I do think it's correct. And my last point, which I think is quite important, is what I call equal opportunity. It is really important that everybody has access to scholarly publications. And I think it's in everybody's interest that we all have access to scholarly publications. But I do think it's also important that all researchers, whether well-funded or from a rich or poor or small country have equal opportunities to publish open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: We always talk about the reader's possibility of the access, but we do not talk as much about the equal opportunity of the researchers to actually publish open access. And one thing that we have seen in some of the-- from my own journal when we've compared with some of our competitors, then we're seeing a pattern that it seems that the choice of corresponding author may be very often dictated by who has the availability of an open access deal.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So if I should give you a take home message from this presentation, it is that open access is not just a requirement. It should also be a right, and we should all have equal opportunity for open access. Thanks a lot. To publish open access. Thanks a lot.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Jan Philip. That is a very, very interesting point on which to end your presentation. I'll hand over to Roger Schonfeld to talk to us about the university library perspective. Thank you, Roger.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Thank you so much, Simone, and to the other panelists as well. This is such a fun and important session to be able to participate in. I'm going to share a little bit from the US University perspective. And I want to say that very explicitly since previous speakers have been speaking I think a little bit more from a UK or in some cases EU perspective.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I just want to distinguish that I'm going to be talking not only about a different slice of the puzzle but also from a different regional context at least in some respects. And that's the US University perspective. The work that I'm doing today benefits tremendously from projects that I've collaborated on with Oya Rieger, looking at the senior research officer, the role of the vice president or vice provost of research-- we interviewed 44 of them at US research universities last year-- and projects that I've done with Jane Radecki looking at the impacts of COVID on the research enterprise as well as academic research budgets.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I really want to encourage anyone who's interested in diving a little bit more deeply into some of the perspective, there's these papers are freely available from the ITHAKA S+R website. Let me start by saying a word or two about the senior research officer. Some in the audience are probably quite familiar with this role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: For others, this may be a little bit of an introduction. In the United States research universities sector, there is a big job, an increasingly centralized role looking after the research enterprise, especially the scientific research enterprise. And it's increasingly been centralized. And this role sometimes has hundreds up to more than 1,000 staff reporting up to it. It's a very big leadership role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It often reports either to the president or the provost. It's responsible for things like academic and administrative functions like compliance and safety, like all the various research support and enablement functions, including proposal development and in some cases management post grant award. It's essentially important for fundraising and revenue, which is the bit that I'm going to be focusing on today, of course, and it's also often responsible for a variety of academic research centers as well.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It is sometimes characterized as a vice president or vice chancellor for research reporting to the president or chancellor, to the CEO of the university. It's sometimes characterized as a vice provost. There are some nuances in that that for today's purposes I won't get into. But the incumbents in these roles are highly successful scientists and administrators sometimes who have risen up through the ranks of academic administration professionally and sometimes who are simply extraordinary scientists who are doing service to their university for a brief period of time in this role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: The individuals who hold this role are ultimately have a lot to say about revenue and budget and influence quite a bit of power inside of their universities. They see in some cases are essentially functioning as the chief revenue officer for the research enterprise responsible for hundreds of millions in some cases more than a billion US dollars in annual revenue.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Some of them they're funded by various kinds of budget models, which I'll kind of elide over a little bit right now, but just to say that their power and influence comes not just from their ability to fund things of which they sometimes have quite a bit of funding for startup packages for new scientists for cost share for certain kinds of proposal developments for targeted grants of one sort or another. But their power and influence also comes through software mechanisms like the ability to allocate the space on campus for laboratories, which is perhaps a surprisingly important form of power to someone who isn't familiar with the way that universities work but also various kinds of convening authority and neutrality across different kinds of schools and departments within the university.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So this senior research officer role is one that for our purposes today is responsible for revenue but exercises power in a number of different ways. And so I want to talk a little bit about how the individuals in this role go about thinking about that revenue responsibility because of course, this is the other side of the funding role from a university-wide administrative perspective.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Here in the United States, higher education is funded by an array of different sources. Tuition comprises a little bit more than a third, state appropriations account for more than 13% in public universities, quite a bit less in private universities. There's hospitals and other related health care revenue grants, which is what we're here today to talk about, ultimately, but also a variety of other things like endowment distribution and these other ancillary revenues, which are actually quite important, things like room and board and space rentals and things of that sort.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Now, if you think about where universities have been over these past 18 months, these difficult past 18 months, there have been pressures on several of these sources of revenue to a university, downward pressure on tuition, downward pressure on hospitals and health care as numerous elective procedures and other kinds of optional health care engagements have declined, and all of that other revenue is driven by a model around in-person engagement.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I really want to stress that there's pressures on a number of these and in some cases pressures on state appropriations as well. The grants, the funding that we've been talking about today has not been under pressure. In the US, funding for scientific research has gone up and actually stands to go up further during and subsequent to the pandemic. So from a university-wide perspective, the revenue from the research enterprise is potentially a very attractive source of stability through a period of quite a bit of instability.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So let me just talk a little bit about how a university goes about breaking even on the research enterprise because it's a little bit tricky as it turns out. So the costs of research, we can't just think about the work that takes place inside of a laboratory or out in the field, right? The cost of research requires research support and enablement services. Some of those are the ones that are actually run by the senior research officers themselves, compliance functions, for example, or shared research cores like shared instrument facilities or animal centers or things of that nature.
ROGER SCHONFELD: The library is typically not run by the senior research officer but is, of course, an essential research enablement research support service and of course proposal development and grant proposal development and things of that nature. These kinds of services-- I'm sure it's straightforward. These are necessary not only to the current research portfolio but also to their aspirations to grow their research portfolios. But they're often funded out of the general fund rather than restricted funds of one sort or another.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And that's a tricky element because all of those things, all of that overhead, some funders provide funding beyond the direct costs of the research itself. Some funders do. In the US federal funding, each university has-- they negotiate for a percentage of-- they negotiate a rate that they can charge on top of their direct costs to the grant.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So let's say for every dollar they bring in in funding into the laboratory and for APCs and fellowships and all the things that are in the direct costs of the grant, then they can add, let's say, 50%-- the rate varies-- on top of that, that come in as indirect costs, which are ultimately supposed to cover this overhead. But the total funding for overheads collectively do not cover the actual costs of providing that additional funding.
ROGER SCHONFELD: That's in some cases because the federal indirect rate is not high enough to cover that, but there are other funders that don't put any indirect costs in or very, very low levels of indirect costs in. So collectively, every university that engages in serious scientific research is cross subsidizing the research enterprise from other revenue streams. So that may be from tuition or from state appropriations or from the endowment or wherever.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So on balance, research doesn't pay for itself, which is an interesting thing to observe as universities are looking to increase their research revenues today, right? For every dollar of increased research revenue, you have to find another X of cross subsidy. So universities facing revenue squeezes over these last 18 months or at any time have had to reduce their-- they've reduced their general funds.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And we've seen this. Our sector has seen this. Research libraries have experienced budget cuts, and a number of research libraries have as a result really reemphasized their roles as stewards of institutional resources in some cases above and beyond their ability to think broadly about the public good, which has been an interesting and problematic dynamic in some cases.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And some of these research offices, they've at least anticipated substantial cuts. And they are concerned about whether these cuts will actually affect research enablement services. Like will they not be able to push through the same number of grant proposals as they once did before? Those kinds of research enablement services. I just want to close with one or two words on funding strategies because how you make this balance work really matters.
ROGER SCHONFELD: In the case of project types, many senior research officers have been pursuing a strategy of emphasizing the development of very, very large grant proposals, $10 million, $30 million, $50 million grant proposals. I don't know if ROI is exactly the right way to put it, but they see real merit in going big. And they've put enormous resources into supporting these very big proposals that typically require interdisciplinary team-based in some cases interinstitutional research.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And their role in this is breaking down organizational impediments trying to explain to the dean of social sciences why it makes sense for them to work with the dean of medicine on a project when otherwise there are no natural incentives for them to do so on a campus, which is a really interesting set of dynamics. The other direction that many SROs have been pursuing is they have recognized in the US an overreliance on federal agencies.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So if you look at research funding over the last 10 or 20 years, we've seen-- at least pre-pandemic, we saw a bit of a plateauing of federal research funding. And that has produced a sense that we should diversify funding sources beyond NIH, NSF, et cetera, the US funding agencies. There are today some opportunities in new federal funding streams.
ROGER SCHONFELD: NSF is being bulked up in some important ways. There may be some other increases as well, so this may turn a little bit. But the result is that senior research officers have been looking beyond research grants and pursuing strategies for corporate partnerships of one sort or another, philanthropic partnerships of one sort or another that wouldn't have been prioritized to exactly the same degree 10, 15, 20 years ago.
ROGER SCHONFELD: They're also seeing extraordinarily important opportunities and especially for public institutions' obligations to engage the state at the state level and the general public within their communities to translate research and innovation into why does this matter? Why is this important? Why is this impactful? Why is this not just a bunch of eggheads doing work but something that really benefits the general public?
ROGER SCHONFELD: And in one element of that is an opportunity to contribute to economic development within the region. There's so much more to say about the university perspective on research funding, but I think I'm going to close things out here and just say thank you. And I look forward to answering questions and having discussion that this may suggest.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Roger. I'll hand over to Nick now to talk to us about the publisher perspective in all of this.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Nick, you're still on mute, sorry.
NICK CAMPBELL: Sorry, can you hear me now? OK, sorry. I was just saying thank you very much to my colleagues. My presentation may be-- seem a little superficial compared to the in-depth analysis we got from Roger and Chonnettia in particular, but I'll do my best to swing through a few different things that I hope are of interest.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I want to focus on the big picture. And as I said, Chonnettia has already covered a lot of the funder perspective. And so I'm going to be making some-- and she emphasized the differences between funders. By contrast, I'm going to be making wild generalizations about funders with my summary. And my first wild generalization comes as no surprise to most of us, I hope.
NICK CAMPBELL: Funders just want to do their job. And they want to get better at doing it. So funders are driven by their missions and are naturally trying to measure their impact in achieving those missions, right? Increasingly, that means looking beyond the academy. COVID added an acute dimension to that that's shown the value of research to the broader community, but it's also illustrating many of the problems we face in translating research into societal impact.
NICK CAMPBELL: Government funders are largely driven by national R&D agendas, and ultimately, what governments want to see is societal impact and particularly economic impact. If we think about non-government funders missions are usually about something more than just research for its own sake. It's usually about making an impact beyond the academy as well.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I think this is one of the key trends we're seeing and pressures we're seeing across the funding piece in future. And so that often means that the types of research outputs that funders want to recognize, track, and understand the impact of will continue to grow. And data is an obvious one that is an area of future focus. However, publications and general research papers in particular still retain their importance and the impact of to in their own right but also for linking together the impact of other outputs and to allow us to track the network of links between these research objects.
NICK CAMPBELL: So that means that what publishers do-- and I'm trying to come at this from the publisher perspective-- I think is going to become more, not less important, even though maybe the publications themselves, in and of themselves may be reducing in their impact. So what does that mean for publishers? Well, I think in terms of what funders are going to put pressure on publishers if we're thinking about how they're going to impact what we're doing.
NICK CAMPBELL: There's going to be more mandates, more intervention from funders that impact the way that publishers work. And we're already seeing examples. You saw great examples from Chonnettia of how they're actively thinking about how they do that, right? And ultimately, you know, I think this is a good thing. We need to support this trend. Publishers need to support this trend. It's necessary.
NICK CAMPBELL: It's good for research, and it's good for the impact on broader society. And publishers are in good positions as managers of the certification processes of research to do that. And indeed, it's entirely aligned with the missions that most publishers have at their core, right? We're all about the dissemination of research and helping make an impact.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I think these changes that funders are increasingly taking an activist role in doing are good for research and good for us. And we need to engage with them, partner with them like the way Chonnettia highlighted the partnerships. We need to do that as publishers. So but how does it affect how we work at the coalface, you know, what we do in a nitty-gritty fashion? Well, this does mean increasing complexity for publishers, particularly in the short to medium term because as Chonnettia made the point in her talk, there's a wide diversity of funders.
NICK CAMPBELL: And they're taking different attitudes and different paces to their interventions, right? So that means there's more and more complexity to deal with for publishers. And so that means that we've got to invest more, and we need to consider this and plan for the future. And that means the people, the platforms, the processes, the systems to support what we do. So we're investing a substantial amount, for example, at Springer Nature in our submission to accept workflow systems with a view to making that entire experience more seamless for authors, for the researchers like Jan Philip who have to go through this process.
NICK CAMPBELL: And a significant part of that is focused on ensuring our systems can capture information that's relevant to the funders of papers to help streamline compliance downstream. There's still a long way to go in that journey, but we're trying to set ourselves up to serve the needs of authors, institutions, and funders in the process as they evolve over time. Similarly, we're investing in post excerpt processes as well so to service the centralized agreements that are increasingly going to be a part of both publish and read aspects of what publishers do.
NICK CAMPBELL: So we need those systems to support them. We need to be able to track them. We need to be able to do it in a way that works for funders and works for institutions and works for researchers as well. So we've also got to improve legacy subscription systems to support the transition that we're all going through at the moment, this open science transition. This is necessary change that supports the goals of other stakeholders in the systems, but there's still work that needs to be done and money that needs to be spent to achieve systems that support that future of scholarly communication at scale.
NICK CAMPBELL: Examples for us include preparing for Plan S. So Chonnettia mentioned Plan S. We've got to make sure our systems are ready to cope with the compliance requirements that are being put on researchers, institutions, and publishers in order to achieve that. We've also looked at increasingly supporting the researcher journey in that. And that means funder and support services.
NICK CAMPBELL: We help authors identify funding opportunities and navigate this increasingly complex landscape of institutions, funders, and our own policies, right? So we're serving that increasing often need. To do that, we need to leverage an increasingly large database that tracks all these funder policies and these different mandates around the world. And that's maintained by a team who manually identifies, analyzes, and breaks down those institution and funder policies.
NICK CAMPBELL: And it's also supported by ongoing system development around that, so we're trying to develop systems and make this more automated as we go. And the trend we see is for an increasing number of queries to this service. And I'm sure that's happening at a library level as well because librarians support this process and have their own systems for supporting their own researchers in this.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I'm sure that's happening there as well. So ultimately, I think the take-home message I want to leave you with is that in terms of how publishers view the future for themselves and certainly how we're viewing the future for ourselves, they need to view themselves as partners, compliance partners for those other key stakeholders that Jan Philip highlighted, for authors, for librarians, obviously for readers, which is not a group I mentioned here, but readers researchers as authors and readers are really important and for funders in that progressive journey.
NICK CAMPBELL: But that journey is worth taking because it's good for research and it is good for the broader impact of research. So we should get on board and make it a major focus of what we do. So that's it for me. Thanks very much.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Nick. A great way to end the session, and just emphasizing that this essentially is a collaborative effort between all the stakeholders. Please put your questions through in the chat or the Q&A channels. I'll start off the Q&A piece of this. And I think I'll start with a question to Roger.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Roger, you spoke extensively about the research-- the academic research enterprise. In providing support and enablement services, what do you think is the key challenge for the research library given the broad range of subject areas that academic research libraries serve? And how can researchers leverage that support to their best advantage?
ROGER SCHONFELD: So there's an answer that has not to do with funding and an answer that has to do with funding. And I think that the key challenge for research libraries in providing research support in my view is that there's a set of services that are at the disciplinary or subdisciplinary or methodological level that researchers really, really need, not just in the humanities fields but in scientific fields as well.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Few research libraries at the level of the institution have the resources to provide that level of research support and enablement. And so the challenge for them is that many of those kinds of services are being provided now outside of the library. They're being provided through some of these shared research course. They're being provided in a variety of other ways or there are gaps where they're not being provided at all.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I think there's a real question of institutional versus cross-institutional scale in terms of providing research support in some of those areas. We see this with research data is kind of a perfect example of that. I think that the libraries also have a series of challenges around what their role really is in all of the workflows that we're talking about here today.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I think that we have a real question that some libraries have begun to answer that they feel they have a kind of data analytics role that they play at the intersection between funders and research enablement and so forth. But I don't think very many libraries have positioned themselves that way or have been able to position themselves that way on their campuses. So I do think it raises a great deal of questions about-- in the US context here again, in the US context about whether there is a compliance role, a mandate role, how that, in fact, fits together.
ROGER SCHONFELD: We've seen some cases where institutional repositories have been used for those purposes, certainly, but not-- I wouldn't say uniformly.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, now that's an interesting point, the point about institutional repositories. I know sometimes librarians will say that even though they are the resource for providing for archiving papers, say, in a green open access sense that Jan Philip mentioned, they can't really police that effort. The initiative needs to come back-- needs to come from the researcher. So that's something maybe that we will need to talk more about and find out how it works.
SIMONE TAYLOR: I'm sure it differs from institution to institution. I will go to Jan Philip. Jan Philip, you mentioned-- you made an interesting point about enabling early publishing for all researchers irrespective of funding or funding at the institution or geographical location. Who would be best placed to address this?
SIMONE TAYLOR: From a researcher's perspective, would that be the funder or the publisher?
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: OK, so if you ask the question in this way would it be the funders or the publishers, I think probably the publishers to give enough possibilities for open access even for authors that have-- do not really have the means. I mean, funders, they struggle with diversity making sure that they have-- at least in Europe, it's a big issue to have geographic spread of the funding for the European Research Council.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: It's a big issue that the former Eastern European countries, they are much less funded than the Western European countries. Therefore, they would also have less access to the funds for open access for open science in general. I know that funders are struggling with this, but in the end, of course, funders cannot help those that are not funded. And I think there, publishers have a big role.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I do think, however, also universities have a big role, I mean, somehow to make sure that the cost is spread, that the people that have less funds have still the possibility. But there is the difference between countries, right? That some countries can have really good deals with publishers, and smaller countries, poorer countries maybe will not have these good deals. And I think that's a problem.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So I think it's between the publishers, it's between the universities, and the funders, of course, also play a role.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, Thank you, Jan Philip. So, Nick, in response to Jan Philip's point about publishers having to be the main driver for this, how would you say publishers can use their expertise and their resources to improve the author experience and support the less able authors in the new access open science space?
NICK CAMPBELL: Well, I think I agree with Jan Philip's final point where he said he thinks that those are publishers, the institutions, and the funders, but I'm not so sure it's just the publishers. I definitely think publishers have a role, right? So I mean, publishers at the moment do try and address this in a not satisfactory way via waivers. And so this is a way that publishers address this equity issue. But it's not satisfactory, and it's not particularly super scalable.
NICK CAMPBELL: And ultimately, when you think about it, waivers do-- I mean, someone pays for waivers, right? For a sustainable business model, the more waivers you give, someone else pays more, right? If you have your waiver bar at a certain level, the people who are paying have to pay more to subsidize that, right? So in many ways, funders and institutions at western nations if you're thinking about it on the developing world versus the developed world or the lower middle income countries versus higher income countries, the higher income countries that can pay will pay somehow to support the system, right?
NICK CAMPBELL: And there are different ways of paying. So for me, it needs to be a co-created solution. I mean, I absolutely agree with Jan Philip. That is one of the key issues that we have to address in the transition to full open access. We have to find a path that doesn't exclude people and it doesn't disadvantage people. So it's vital, but I think we need to work on it together. We need to be creative.
NICK CAMPBELL: We need to be innovative. And there may not be one great solution that covers it all. I think we may need more than one solution. But we need to have the conversation sooner rather than later if we want to get there sooner rather than later.
SIMONE TAYLOR: I agree with that. And it ties in nicely with the question that Sophie Rice has asked in the chat that I'm going to ask Chonnettia to answer. For authors that receive grant funding or foundation funding, do they also receive support from the funders to publish their work open access? This was something that Jan Philip mentioned that wasn't explicitly covered in Plan S. So Chonnettia, can you bring some insight into that from a funder's perspective?
CHONNETTIA JONES: Yeah, no, that's a great question, so thank you for the question. And to just link back to what Jan Phillips said, so the short answer is yes, funders do cover the cost of open access charges either through eligible costs when a researcher, for example, submits a grant and says, this is the-- I would like money to be able to pay for open access charges, and this is-- I anticipate these many research outputs that will require this through block grants, which I mentioned in my talk.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Some funders provide whole block grants to higher education institutions, for example, so that they have the flexibility to disperse that funding to pay for open access. So that very well could go to libraries, for example. But I think what Jan Philip is raising in the Plan S discussion is related to this, but I would probably position it slightly different, which is although funders are paying for the cost, I think it's a fair statement to say that they haven't put more money aside in order to achieve that.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And so what happens is that it puts pressure on the individuals, whether that's institutions or researchers to cover those costs alongside the cost of research. I think what's coming through quite strongly is that's where I think a lot of the division is happening, right? It comes down to that.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And so I think we all have a shared vision, but that vision and the implementation of that really impacts us quite differently. And I'll just say this, it's not that-- and this is why I think the cooperation between funders, for example, and publishers, and I agree with Nick's statement, really, we need to work together, both in terms of how to innovate to make open access much more cost effective and feasible and accessible to people around the world no matter where they are.
CHONNETTIA JONES: But there has to be some innovation. There has to be some new design to be able to achieve that to be able to make that more affordable. And I think that's right now where the challenge is. Just from some of the work that I'm aware of that funders have done, when they've actually looked at the costs that they put towards open access charges, it's eye watering. It's truly eye watering.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And I think that when you're working in budgets and for all of the reasons I've described in my talk where you're trying to achieve a lot of different things and you look at your budgets and you look at what proportion of your funding is going toward this, a funder is naturally going to ask, what's the return on that investment? What impact is that having? So it's not that funders don't appreciate the cost of transitioning to open access.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I think there's clearly an open dialogue happening right now around can we make these costs more affordable for everyone and still be able to achieve that shared vision?
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Chonnettia. That sums up the point, really, that ultimately, it has to be a shared vision and shared costs to create this infrastructure that everyone can contribute to to make funding and research and its dissemination a lot more sustainable than it is today. We are out of time. There are a couple of questions in the chat.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Oh, they're comments from an anonymous attendee. cOAlition S requires that the research-- that research funded by its members be published in an open access journal. If an author wants to publish their Plan S funded research in a subscription journal, the journal editor will have to reject the submission. This can be seen as an infringement on the author's choice of a journal where they want to publish their paper.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Jan Philip did address this that researchers would like funders and consequently publishers to be a bit more flexible because ultimately, researchers want to reserve the right. Jan Philip, you want to comment further?
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I could. I think it's true that it would infringe on the author's right to choose a journal, but I must say to that extent, I do agree with Plan S that we also have to move in that direction, so that infringement is maybe acceptable I would think that. And certainly, in the period when we transition to a more open access model, I think we would have to do something like that. So for that, I do actually think Plan S is moving in the right direction.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I'm more worried about the budget model of Plan S.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Yeah, OK. Well, it's 11:46, so I don't want to keep the panel here any longer. Thank you very much for devoting an hour of your time to talk to us about your experience. I have certainly learned a lot from all of you this afternoon, and I hope our audience has found the session as interesting as I did. Thank you very much. Thanks to Mary Beth and the rest of the New Directions panel, and I hope to see you again soon.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thanks, everyone.
Segment:0 .
SIMONE TAYLOR: Good morning, and welcome to our session on Funds, Funders, and Funding. I'll start with a huge thank you to the New Directions Working Group for putting this program together and to our sponsors for helping us make this happen. A couple of housekeeping points, do introduce yourselves through the chat stream if you'd like to do so, and type in any questions and comments you have either through the chat stream or through the Q&A channel.
SIMONE TAYLOR: And we'll get to them when we start the discussion. Sorry, I seem to have stopped sharing my screen, but I'm back on track now. Oh, I've done it again. Excuse me.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, good. Funding is crucial to the research and publishing infrastructure, yet the inner workings of a funding organization can sometimes seem arcane to those of us on the outside as we aim to ensure as effective a process as possible for making results of funded research accessible to those who can most benefit from those results. Thankfully, we have an expert panel here to guide us through the funding to publication cycle, and I'll introduce them briefly here.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Chonnettia Jones, a Researcher in Biochemistry and Cell Biology by training, is Vice President Research at the Michael Smith Foundation and will help us demystify the mechanisms of a funder organization. She will also talk to us about how the funding landscape is changing to become more equitable and inclusive. Jan Philip Solovej is a Researcher in mathematics and theoretical physics with experience in funding agencies and publishing.
SIMONE TAYLOR: He is uniquely placed to talk to us about her research as it navigates the funding landscape to understand how funder requirements impact publication and research and how that, in turn, influences the researchers' interaction with librarians and publishers. Roger Schonfeld is Program Director at ITHAKA S+R where he leads a team of high education researchers and consultants addressing academic libraries, scholarly communications, and museums.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Sitting at the intersection of funding research and publishing, Roger will talk about opportunities to maintain and grow the academic research enterprise. Rounding out the discussion with a publisher's perspective, we have none other than genetics researcher turned journalist and publisher to guide us through the solutions that publishers aim to provide. Nick Campbell is VP Academic Affairs at Springer Nature and will discuss the publisher response to supporting authors and their institutions in meeting funder requirements.
SIMONE TAYLOR: So let's get started. I'll now hand over to Chonnettia.
CHONNETTIA JONES: OK, thank you, Simone, and thank you to the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the opportunity to participate today. So it's with humility and gratitude that I'm delighted to be joining you from the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Today, I won't be speaking on behalf of my current employer, which is the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Rather, I will be sharing some personal observations and opinions drawn from my experience of working with research funders in the US, UK, and in Canada. So I'm often asked what are funders priorities? How do funders make decisions? How are funder policies made and enforced? I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you by saying that that answer is not as straightforward as you might think.
CHONNETTIA JONES: All funders are different. And as this slide shows, they are vastly different in terms of their constitution, their mandate, excuse me, and their governance. And importantly, they are vastly different in their degree of independence and accountability. So funders missions, their strategies, priorities, decisions, and criteria for funding are hugely influenced by these factors.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And furthermore, funders are further influenced by other actors in the research system, including communities, higher education institutions, publishers, and others. So what I thought I would do today is by way of illustration just tell you about one funder's story, and that's the Wellcome Trust. So for those of you who don't know the Wellcome Trust, it's a UK-based charitable foundation that funds health related research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: All of their charitable activities are paid for by an investment portfolio valued at 29 billion pounds sterling. They are politically and financially independent. They don't fundraise. They don't have donors, shareholders. They don't receive public funding in any form. In 2005, Wellcome implemented its first open access policy mandating that published research made possible by funding from Wellcome were made open.
CHONNETTIA JONES: They provided block grants to higher education institutions to help researchers cover access charges. In 2011, the UK government through the BIS innovation and research strategy for growth followed with their own commitment to make publicly funded research accessible free of charge. And the government invited Wellcome to join a cross-sector working group to make recommendations to public research funders on strategies for achieving faster access to research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: The recommendation from this group were shared in the Finch Report, which called for government to implement an open access policy and adopt the block model pioneered by Wellcome for funding open access charges. The Finch Report explicitly mentioned the influence of Wellcome's introduction of the research funder mandatory open access policy in 2005, and the impact of this policy change in the UK was the immediate and significant increase in the proportion of publicly funded research publications that were being made open.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So Wellcome also wanted to see that researchers were equipped, empowered, and motivated to make research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable or fair. So Wellcome at that time examined the fair status of Wellcome funded research publications and found that nearly 100% of Wellcome publications were indeed findable. That's indicated by the blue graphs in this slide.
CHONNETTIA JONES: That is that they were indexed by PubMed. A decade after Wellcome implemented its OA policy, more than 80% of Wellcome's publications were accessible. That's the red curve in this slide. That is the full text was available within six months of publication. Notice, not 100%, 80%. And this represented about a 5% average annual increase in the proportion of OA publications since Wellcome's OA policy was introduced in 2005.
CHONNETTIA JONES: 66% of Wellcome's publications were interoperable. That's the yellow curve. That is that they were in a machine-readable format, and 61% of Wellcome publications were reusable, the green curve, that is they were under CC BY or CC0 license. So the results confirmed to Wellcome that funding and policy while essential for their open access objective was not sufficient and encouraged Wellcome to think about further investments and technologies and platforms to ensure that research outputs are shared and used in ways that unleash their full value.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I'm going to come back to that point in a couple of slides. So another analysis found that Wellcome funded open publications, which are indicated in the teal box to the right, demonstrated a relatively higher normalized citation impact compared to closed publications indicated in the melon-colored box on the left. And this observation was consistent with international reports at that time that open access publications are cited more frequently suggesting to Wellcome that open access accelerates the reach and influence of its funded research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So Wellcome also sought to understand how effective were their strategies compared to other funders. And so while Wellcome was among the top funders that successfully implemented initiatives in open research, they realized that open access publications made up only a proportion of the world's total share of publications. Open accessibility rates vary widely by funder, which is shown in the left graph, and by country, which is shown in the right graph.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So this motivated Wellcome to explore other ways to drive wider adoption of open access. And they realized they couldn't achieve this alone. So Wellcome joined cOAlition S, a coalition of research funders and agencies working to accelerate transition to open access. And two years ago, Wellcome co-founded the Research on Research Institute or RoRI, an international consortium of funders that recently announced they have partnered with Stanford University to develop freeware open-source software to more easily assess the fair status of all publications produced around the world.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So building on more than a decade of work, Wellcome continues to work with other funders, infrastructure providers, and the researcher community to do three things, understand the individual structural and systemic barriers that still remain to open research, support innovative services, resources, tools, and platforms to remove any barriers and to work with others to set standards and best practice for making research outputs open. So through this story, I hope I've persuaded you to see that funders are more than just grant makers.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Rather, they are much more strategic than that. And they thoughtfully deploy a wide range of levers to bring about change, such as what you've heard in the story, advocating for particular positions or policies, forming coalitions to achieve collective impact, convening cross-sector groups of stakeholders and decision makers to bring about attention or visibility to a problem or drive change, implementing and enforcing policies if necessary and partnering.
CHONNETTIA JONES: So looking forward, I'm just going to share maybe two thoughts about why you should pay attention to what funders are doing. And the first is that funders are backing what I'm describing as disruptive innovations to drive open research practice that's not just open access, that's not just open science. They are backing platforms to increase transparency and peer review.
CHONNETTIA JONES: They are funding platforms that recognize a wider range of research outputs, such as null and negative findings and data sets. They are backing repositories to accelerate access to new knowledge, funding tools to promote research use, and joining member organizations advocating for open research culture and practice. I've just shown a few in the slide, but I promise you there are many more examples that are coming.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And at last, I'll end with the second, which is around systems change. So many funders around the world, both public and private funders, are becoming increasingly interested in addressing systemic challenges in research. Some of the areas that they are drawing attention to are first research culture, which by definition encompasses the behaviors, values, expectations, attitudes, and norms of research systems.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And there's disturbing evidence of poor research culture, which is characterized by hypercompetition and incentive and reward system that places extremely high value on supposed high-impact research papers for hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding and incidences of bullying and harassment. Research excellence is strongly linked to research culture, and research excellence is pervasive in academia and in the evaluation of research for funding, publishing, hiring, and promotion or tenure.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Research excellence is used generally to signify a standard of quality, but it's highly subjective. Its meaning and use is so broad that there is no consensus, standard definition, or reliable measure. And it's characterized by a heavy reliance on publication metrics. It also underpins structural inequities in research.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And lastly, equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Calls for action on systemic racism have activated funders to take ED&I and racism seriously and to understand how their policies and practices contribute to further inequities that marginalize communities. My opening remarks were about how different funders are. I'm going to end with what they share in common. Funders share a common-- a strong sense of common purpose, a desire to help the greater good, and a strong preference to work in partnership with communities, not in silos.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I'm really looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Chonnettia. A great deal of food for thought and really enlightening us more about how funders work and what their perspectives are. I'll now hand over to Jan Philip to talk to us about the researcher perspective. Jan Philip.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Yeah, thanks a lot, and hello from sunny afternoon in Copenhagen. It's a pleasure to be here and talk to you. So let me just make this a full screen. So I will give you a perspective from a researcher, but it is a very personal perspective since I have been doing research in mathematics and theoretical physics for 35 years.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: But I have also experience with funding agencies. I've been in the board of the Independent Research Fund in Denmark. I've chaired the advanced grant panel in the European Research Council. I had an advanced grant from the European Research Council myself, and I was on the committee for the Danish National Strategy of Open Access. I apologize for the noise.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: It is because at 5 o'clock here in Copenhagen, the alarm sometimes go off. I hope it's not disturbing you too much. And I have some experience with publishing. I'm also the editor-in-chief of Journal of Mathematical Physics under the American Institute of Physics Publishing. So this is my personal background, and I've been very involved in open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So let me just give you an idea of the players in scholarly publishing and how I from a researcher perspective see their interaction. So they're the funding agencies. They are the researchers, libraries and librarians, publishers, and of course then the readers, the users of the scholarly publishing. And I think sometimes we forget that it's in the interest of all of these to have open science and open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I sometimes get the feeling that people think that researchers are not interested in open access. But I think researchers are very much interested in open access. They want that there should be easy access to their publications. But what I do find is that there is often a lack of common understanding between the players and to some degree some miscommunications between the groups.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And I'll try to explain what I mean a little bit by comparing the interactions between these different players. So let me give you a researcher's perspective, which is what I'm here to present. I think that researchers work in different fields, and funders and publishers should remember that one size does not fit all when it comes to open science.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Some fields like my own fields have very strong archiving traditions. We've been archiving for the past 20 years, meaning we've used the archive. As soon as a paper is written, essentially, in the preprint form, we put it out, and we often use the archive as much as we use publish papers. Other fields have less traditions for open-- for using archive.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Strangely enough, theoretical physics and mathematics have a very strong tradition. Theoretical chemistry does not. I never fully understood why. Then there are the different publication patents. There are the difference between having short papers with many authors sharing the costs of the publications and that work in large collaborative groups or there are the situation that I'm in.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I often write papers just by myself or in very small group, two co-authors. And then, of course, there's the whole situation of monograph versus journal publications. And so these are just some examples of how this one-size-fits-all one has to be very careful with it. Researchers are, as I said before, interested in and very committed to open science but would also like flexibility.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And when I say that, it may sound to some that I'm trying to apologize for not wanting to fully go into open access. But researchers spend a lot of their time doing research and maybe less of their time they're involved in publishing. So for instance, choosing between gold and the green open access and the freedom to choose how to put papers in repositories and what type of repositories, that's very important for the research.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: And then librarians. So I've talked about the interaction with funders and publishers. Librarians are extremely helpful, that's been my experience, with helping researchers comply with rules and regulations. As a researcher, it's really difficult to keep track of what rules and regulations are. And I see it for myself.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I like to spend a lot of time trying to find out what the rules and regulations are, but my younger colleagues or maybe even more my older colleagues find it very difficult. I would say one thing when I talk to librarians that online tools are often cumbersome. I guess they should be because they have to really comply with all the rules. But it's important to remember that simplicity is important because researchers do not work with these things every day.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: They don't publish a paper every day. They do research every day and publish, hopefully, quite often but not as often as they work on their research. So in general, researchers find it difficult to know what funders require, what publishers allow, and exactly how to use librarians to help. And I do believe this is particularly difficult for the younger researchers. And then it becomes-- this is my last slide to the new business model.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: Who should pay for the changes? I think this is-- it's been discussed a lot, and there's been this general idea that the world of open science should not cost more than what we had before. It should be possible to rearrange everything in a new budget model so it will cost the same. But who should actually pay? And I think we heard about Plan S a moment ago.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I think funders requiring research grants to carry the costs have actually forgotten to think about the question of also increasing the funds. The idea is often that funds for publications are very small. They play very little role. That's not entirely true in all fields. Again, it's the same if you're working in small groups and you publish long papers, it can be rather expensive.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I know it's not like salaries, but it does affect the grant to have to carry the load of open access. And I think one of the problems I had with Plan S was that it avoided this issue entirely. It did not address the issue that if grants should carry the costs, then grants should be increased. I also think populations have generally not been willing to show transparency of their actual costs.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I know that's a criticism that's been heard very often, but I do think it's correct. And my last point, which I think is quite important, is what I call equal opportunity. It is really important that everybody has access to scholarly publications. And I think it's in everybody's interest that we all have access to scholarly publications. But I do think it's also important that all researchers, whether well-funded or from a rich or poor or small country have equal opportunities to publish open access.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: We always talk about the reader's possibility of the access, but we do not talk as much about the equal opportunity of the researchers to actually publish open access. And one thing that we have seen in some of the-- from my own journal when we've compared with some of our competitors, then we're seeing a pattern that it seems that the choice of corresponding author may be very often dictated by who has the availability of an open access deal.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So if I should give you a take home message from this presentation, it is that open access is not just a requirement. It should also be a right, and we should all have equal opportunity for open access. Thanks a lot. To publish open access. Thanks a lot.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Jan Philip. That is a very, very interesting point on which to end your presentation. I'll hand over to Roger Schonfeld to talk to us about the university library perspective. Thank you, Roger.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Thank you so much, Simone, and to the other panelists as well. This is such a fun and important session to be able to participate in. I'm going to share a little bit from the US University perspective. And I want to say that very explicitly since previous speakers have been speaking I think a little bit more from a UK or in some cases EU perspective.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I just want to distinguish that I'm going to be talking not only about a different slice of the puzzle but also from a different regional context at least in some respects. And that's the US University perspective. The work that I'm doing today benefits tremendously from projects that I've collaborated on with Oya Rieger, looking at the senior research officer, the role of the vice president or vice provost of research-- we interviewed 44 of them at US research universities last year-- and projects that I've done with Jane Radecki looking at the impacts of COVID on the research enterprise as well as academic research budgets.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I really want to encourage anyone who's interested in diving a little bit more deeply into some of the perspective, there's these papers are freely available from the ITHAKA S+R website. Let me start by saying a word or two about the senior research officer. Some in the audience are probably quite familiar with this role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: For others, this may be a little bit of an introduction. In the United States research universities sector, there is a big job, an increasingly centralized role looking after the research enterprise, especially the scientific research enterprise. And it's increasingly been centralized. And this role sometimes has hundreds up to more than 1,000 staff reporting up to it. It's a very big leadership role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It often reports either to the president or the provost. It's responsible for things like academic and administrative functions like compliance and safety, like all the various research support and enablement functions, including proposal development and in some cases management post grant award. It's essentially important for fundraising and revenue, which is the bit that I'm going to be focusing on today, of course, and it's also often responsible for a variety of academic research centers as well.
ROGER SCHONFELD: It is sometimes characterized as a vice president or vice chancellor for research reporting to the president or chancellor, to the CEO of the university. It's sometimes characterized as a vice provost. There are some nuances in that that for today's purposes I won't get into. But the incumbents in these roles are highly successful scientists and administrators sometimes who have risen up through the ranks of academic administration professionally and sometimes who are simply extraordinary scientists who are doing service to their university for a brief period of time in this role.
ROGER SCHONFELD: The individuals who hold this role are ultimately have a lot to say about revenue and budget and influence quite a bit of power inside of their universities. They see in some cases are essentially functioning as the chief revenue officer for the research enterprise responsible for hundreds of millions in some cases more than a billion US dollars in annual revenue.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Some of them they're funded by various kinds of budget models, which I'll kind of elide over a little bit right now, but just to say that their power and influence comes not just from their ability to fund things of which they sometimes have quite a bit of funding for startup packages for new scientists for cost share for certain kinds of proposal developments for targeted grants of one sort or another. But their power and influence also comes through software mechanisms like the ability to allocate the space on campus for laboratories, which is perhaps a surprisingly important form of power to someone who isn't familiar with the way that universities work but also various kinds of convening authority and neutrality across different kinds of schools and departments within the university.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So this senior research officer role is one that for our purposes today is responsible for revenue but exercises power in a number of different ways. And so I want to talk a little bit about how the individuals in this role go about thinking about that revenue responsibility because of course, this is the other side of the funding role from a university-wide administrative perspective.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Here in the United States, higher education is funded by an array of different sources. Tuition comprises a little bit more than a third, state appropriations account for more than 13% in public universities, quite a bit less in private universities. There's hospitals and other related health care revenue grants, which is what we're here today to talk about, ultimately, but also a variety of other things like endowment distribution and these other ancillary revenues, which are actually quite important, things like room and board and space rentals and things of that sort.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Now, if you think about where universities have been over these past 18 months, these difficult past 18 months, there have been pressures on several of these sources of revenue to a university, downward pressure on tuition, downward pressure on hospitals and health care as numerous elective procedures and other kinds of optional health care engagements have declined, and all of that other revenue is driven by a model around in-person engagement.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So I really want to stress that there's pressures on a number of these and in some cases pressures on state appropriations as well. The grants, the funding that we've been talking about today has not been under pressure. In the US, funding for scientific research has gone up and actually stands to go up further during and subsequent to the pandemic. So from a university-wide perspective, the revenue from the research enterprise is potentially a very attractive source of stability through a period of quite a bit of instability.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So let me just talk a little bit about how a university goes about breaking even on the research enterprise because it's a little bit tricky as it turns out. So the costs of research, we can't just think about the work that takes place inside of a laboratory or out in the field, right? The cost of research requires research support and enablement services. Some of those are the ones that are actually run by the senior research officers themselves, compliance functions, for example, or shared research cores like shared instrument facilities or animal centers or things of that nature.
ROGER SCHONFELD: The library is typically not run by the senior research officer but is, of course, an essential research enablement research support service and of course proposal development and grant proposal development and things of that nature. These kinds of services-- I'm sure it's straightforward. These are necessary not only to the current research portfolio but also to their aspirations to grow their research portfolios. But they're often funded out of the general fund rather than restricted funds of one sort or another.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And that's a tricky element because all of those things, all of that overhead, some funders provide funding beyond the direct costs of the research itself. Some funders do. In the US federal funding, each university has-- they negotiate for a percentage of-- they negotiate a rate that they can charge on top of their direct costs to the grant.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So let's say for every dollar they bring in in funding into the laboratory and for APCs and fellowships and all the things that are in the direct costs of the grant, then they can add, let's say, 50%-- the rate varies-- on top of that, that come in as indirect costs, which are ultimately supposed to cover this overhead. But the total funding for overheads collectively do not cover the actual costs of providing that additional funding.
ROGER SCHONFELD: That's in some cases because the federal indirect rate is not high enough to cover that, but there are other funders that don't put any indirect costs in or very, very low levels of indirect costs in. So collectively, every university that engages in serious scientific research is cross subsidizing the research enterprise from other revenue streams. So that may be from tuition or from state appropriations or from the endowment or wherever.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So on balance, research doesn't pay for itself, which is an interesting thing to observe as universities are looking to increase their research revenues today, right? For every dollar of increased research revenue, you have to find another X of cross subsidy. So universities facing revenue squeezes over these last 18 months or at any time have had to reduce their-- they've reduced their general funds.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And we've seen this. Our sector has seen this. Research libraries have experienced budget cuts, and a number of research libraries have as a result really reemphasized their roles as stewards of institutional resources in some cases above and beyond their ability to think broadly about the public good, which has been an interesting and problematic dynamic in some cases.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And some of these research offices, they've at least anticipated substantial cuts. And they are concerned about whether these cuts will actually affect research enablement services. Like will they not be able to push through the same number of grant proposals as they once did before? Those kinds of research enablement services. I just want to close with one or two words on funding strategies because how you make this balance work really matters.
ROGER SCHONFELD: In the case of project types, many senior research officers have been pursuing a strategy of emphasizing the development of very, very large grant proposals, $10 million, $30 million, $50 million grant proposals. I don't know if ROI is exactly the right way to put it, but they see real merit in going big. And they've put enormous resources into supporting these very big proposals that typically require interdisciplinary team-based in some cases interinstitutional research.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And their role in this is breaking down organizational impediments trying to explain to the dean of social sciences why it makes sense for them to work with the dean of medicine on a project when otherwise there are no natural incentives for them to do so on a campus, which is a really interesting set of dynamics. The other direction that many SROs have been pursuing is they have recognized in the US an overreliance on federal agencies.
ROGER SCHONFELD: So if you look at research funding over the last 10 or 20 years, we've seen-- at least pre-pandemic, we saw a bit of a plateauing of federal research funding. And that has produced a sense that we should diversify funding sources beyond NIH, NSF, et cetera, the US funding agencies. There are today some opportunities in new federal funding streams.
ROGER SCHONFELD: NSF is being bulked up in some important ways. There may be some other increases as well, so this may turn a little bit. But the result is that senior research officers have been looking beyond research grants and pursuing strategies for corporate partnerships of one sort or another, philanthropic partnerships of one sort or another that wouldn't have been prioritized to exactly the same degree 10, 15, 20 years ago.
ROGER SCHONFELD: They're also seeing extraordinarily important opportunities and especially for public institutions' obligations to engage the state at the state level and the general public within their communities to translate research and innovation into why does this matter? Why is this important? Why is this impactful? Why is this not just a bunch of eggheads doing work but something that really benefits the general public?
ROGER SCHONFELD: And in one element of that is an opportunity to contribute to economic development within the region. There's so much more to say about the university perspective on research funding, but I think I'm going to close things out here and just say thank you. And I look forward to answering questions and having discussion that this may suggest.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Roger. I'll hand over to Nick now to talk to us about the publisher perspective in all of this.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Nick, you're still on mute, sorry.
NICK CAMPBELL: Sorry, can you hear me now? OK, sorry. I was just saying thank you very much to my colleagues. My presentation may be-- seem a little superficial compared to the in-depth analysis we got from Roger and Chonnettia in particular, but I'll do my best to swing through a few different things that I hope are of interest.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I want to focus on the big picture. And as I said, Chonnettia has already covered a lot of the funder perspective. And so I'm going to be making some-- and she emphasized the differences between funders. By contrast, I'm going to be making wild generalizations about funders with my summary. And my first wild generalization comes as no surprise to most of us, I hope.
NICK CAMPBELL: Funders just want to do their job. And they want to get better at doing it. So funders are driven by their missions and are naturally trying to measure their impact in achieving those missions, right? Increasingly, that means looking beyond the academy. COVID added an acute dimension to that that's shown the value of research to the broader community, but it's also illustrating many of the problems we face in translating research into societal impact.
NICK CAMPBELL: Government funders are largely driven by national R&D agendas, and ultimately, what governments want to see is societal impact and particularly economic impact. If we think about non-government funders missions are usually about something more than just research for its own sake. It's usually about making an impact beyond the academy as well.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I think this is one of the key trends we're seeing and pressures we're seeing across the funding piece in future. And so that often means that the types of research outputs that funders want to recognize, track, and understand the impact of will continue to grow. And data is an obvious one that is an area of future focus. However, publications and general research papers in particular still retain their importance and the impact of to in their own right but also for linking together the impact of other outputs and to allow us to track the network of links between these research objects.
NICK CAMPBELL: So that means that what publishers do-- and I'm trying to come at this from the publisher perspective-- I think is going to become more, not less important, even though maybe the publications themselves, in and of themselves may be reducing in their impact. So what does that mean for publishers? Well, I think in terms of what funders are going to put pressure on publishers if we're thinking about how they're going to impact what we're doing.
NICK CAMPBELL: There's going to be more mandates, more intervention from funders that impact the way that publishers work. And we're already seeing examples. You saw great examples from Chonnettia of how they're actively thinking about how they do that, right? And ultimately, you know, I think this is a good thing. We need to support this trend. Publishers need to support this trend. It's necessary.
NICK CAMPBELL: It's good for research, and it's good for the impact on broader society. And publishers are in good positions as managers of the certification processes of research to do that. And indeed, it's entirely aligned with the missions that most publishers have at their core, right? We're all about the dissemination of research and helping make an impact.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I think these changes that funders are increasingly taking an activist role in doing are good for research and good for us. And we need to engage with them, partner with them like the way Chonnettia highlighted the partnerships. We need to do that as publishers. So but how does it affect how we work at the coalface, you know, what we do in a nitty-gritty fashion? Well, this does mean increasing complexity for publishers, particularly in the short to medium term because as Chonnettia made the point in her talk, there's a wide diversity of funders.
NICK CAMPBELL: And they're taking different attitudes and different paces to their interventions, right? So that means there's more and more complexity to deal with for publishers. And so that means that we've got to invest more, and we need to consider this and plan for the future. And that means the people, the platforms, the processes, the systems to support what we do. So we're investing a substantial amount, for example, at Springer Nature in our submission to accept workflow systems with a view to making that entire experience more seamless for authors, for the researchers like Jan Philip who have to go through this process.
NICK CAMPBELL: And a significant part of that is focused on ensuring our systems can capture information that's relevant to the funders of papers to help streamline compliance downstream. There's still a long way to go in that journey, but we're trying to set ourselves up to serve the needs of authors, institutions, and funders in the process as they evolve over time. Similarly, we're investing in post excerpt processes as well so to service the centralized agreements that are increasingly going to be a part of both publish and read aspects of what publishers do.
NICK CAMPBELL: So we need those systems to support them. We need to be able to track them. We need to be able to do it in a way that works for funders and works for institutions and works for researchers as well. So we've also got to improve legacy subscription systems to support the transition that we're all going through at the moment, this open science transition. This is necessary change that supports the goals of other stakeholders in the systems, but there's still work that needs to be done and money that needs to be spent to achieve systems that support that future of scholarly communication at scale.
NICK CAMPBELL: Examples for us include preparing for Plan S. So Chonnettia mentioned Plan S. We've got to make sure our systems are ready to cope with the compliance requirements that are being put on researchers, institutions, and publishers in order to achieve that. We've also looked at increasingly supporting the researcher journey in that. And that means funder and support services.
NICK CAMPBELL: We help authors identify funding opportunities and navigate this increasingly complex landscape of institutions, funders, and our own policies, right? So we're serving that increasing often need. To do that, we need to leverage an increasingly large database that tracks all these funder policies and these different mandates around the world. And that's maintained by a team who manually identifies, analyzes, and breaks down those institution and funder policies.
NICK CAMPBELL: And it's also supported by ongoing system development around that, so we're trying to develop systems and make this more automated as we go. And the trend we see is for an increasing number of queries to this service. And I'm sure that's happening at a library level as well because librarians support this process and have their own systems for supporting their own researchers in this.
NICK CAMPBELL: So I'm sure that's happening there as well. So ultimately, I think the take-home message I want to leave you with is that in terms of how publishers view the future for themselves and certainly how we're viewing the future for ourselves, they need to view themselves as partners, compliance partners for those other key stakeholders that Jan Philip highlighted, for authors, for librarians, obviously for readers, which is not a group I mentioned here, but readers researchers as authors and readers are really important and for funders in that progressive journey.
NICK CAMPBELL: But that journey is worth taking because it's good for research and it is good for the broader impact of research. So we should get on board and make it a major focus of what we do. So that's it for me. Thanks very much.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Nick. A great way to end the session, and just emphasizing that this essentially is a collaborative effort between all the stakeholders. Please put your questions through in the chat or the Q&A channels. I'll start off the Q&A piece of this. And I think I'll start with a question to Roger.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Roger, you spoke extensively about the research-- the academic research enterprise. In providing support and enablement services, what do you think is the key challenge for the research library given the broad range of subject areas that academic research libraries serve? And how can researchers leverage that support to their best advantage?
ROGER SCHONFELD: So there's an answer that has not to do with funding and an answer that has to do with funding. And I think that the key challenge for research libraries in providing research support in my view is that there's a set of services that are at the disciplinary or subdisciplinary or methodological level that researchers really, really need, not just in the humanities fields but in scientific fields as well.
ROGER SCHONFELD: Few research libraries at the level of the institution have the resources to provide that level of research support and enablement. And so the challenge for them is that many of those kinds of services are being provided now outside of the library. They're being provided through some of these shared research course. They're being provided in a variety of other ways or there are gaps where they're not being provided at all.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I think there's a real question of institutional versus cross-institutional scale in terms of providing research support in some of those areas. We see this with research data is kind of a perfect example of that. I think that the libraries also have a series of challenges around what their role really is in all of the workflows that we're talking about here today.
ROGER SCHONFELD: And so I think that we have a real question that some libraries have begun to answer that they feel they have a kind of data analytics role that they play at the intersection between funders and research enablement and so forth. But I don't think very many libraries have positioned themselves that way or have been able to position themselves that way on their campuses. So I do think it raises a great deal of questions about-- in the US context here again, in the US context about whether there is a compliance role, a mandate role, how that, in fact, fits together.
ROGER SCHONFELD: We've seen some cases where institutional repositories have been used for those purposes, certainly, but not-- I wouldn't say uniformly.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, now that's an interesting point, the point about institutional repositories. I know sometimes librarians will say that even though they are the resource for providing for archiving papers, say, in a green open access sense that Jan Philip mentioned, they can't really police that effort. The initiative needs to come back-- needs to come from the researcher. So that's something maybe that we will need to talk more about and find out how it works.
SIMONE TAYLOR: I'm sure it differs from institution to institution. I will go to Jan Philip. Jan Philip, you mentioned-- you made an interesting point about enabling early publishing for all researchers irrespective of funding or funding at the institution or geographical location. Who would be best placed to address this?
SIMONE TAYLOR: From a researcher's perspective, would that be the funder or the publisher?
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: OK, so if you ask the question in this way would it be the funders or the publishers, I think probably the publishers to give enough possibilities for open access even for authors that have-- do not really have the means. I mean, funders, they struggle with diversity making sure that they have-- at least in Europe, it's a big issue to have geographic spread of the funding for the European Research Council.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: It's a big issue that the former Eastern European countries, they are much less funded than the Western European countries. Therefore, they would also have less access to the funds for open access for open science in general. I know that funders are struggling with this, but in the end, of course, funders cannot help those that are not funded. And I think there, publishers have a big role.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I do think, however, also universities have a big role, I mean, somehow to make sure that the cost is spread, that the people that have less funds have still the possibility. But there is the difference between countries, right? That some countries can have really good deals with publishers, and smaller countries, poorer countries maybe will not have these good deals. And I think that's a problem.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: So I think it's between the publishers, it's between the universities, and the funders, of course, also play a role.
SIMONE TAYLOR: OK, Thank you, Jan Philip. So, Nick, in response to Jan Philip's point about publishers having to be the main driver for this, how would you say publishers can use their expertise and their resources to improve the author experience and support the less able authors in the new access open science space?
NICK CAMPBELL: Well, I think I agree with Jan Philip's final point where he said he thinks that those are publishers, the institutions, and the funders, but I'm not so sure it's just the publishers. I definitely think publishers have a role, right? So I mean, publishers at the moment do try and address this in a not satisfactory way via waivers. And so this is a way that publishers address this equity issue. But it's not satisfactory, and it's not particularly super scalable.
NICK CAMPBELL: And ultimately, when you think about it, waivers do-- I mean, someone pays for waivers, right? For a sustainable business model, the more waivers you give, someone else pays more, right? If you have your waiver bar at a certain level, the people who are paying have to pay more to subsidize that, right? So in many ways, funders and institutions at western nations if you're thinking about it on the developing world versus the developed world or the lower middle income countries versus higher income countries, the higher income countries that can pay will pay somehow to support the system, right?
NICK CAMPBELL: And there are different ways of paying. So for me, it needs to be a co-created solution. I mean, I absolutely agree with Jan Philip. That is one of the key issues that we have to address in the transition to full open access. We have to find a path that doesn't exclude people and it doesn't disadvantage people. So it's vital, but I think we need to work on it together. We need to be creative.
NICK CAMPBELL: We need to be innovative. And there may not be one great solution that covers it all. I think we may need more than one solution. But we need to have the conversation sooner rather than later if we want to get there sooner rather than later.
SIMONE TAYLOR: I agree with that. And it ties in nicely with the question that Sophie Rice has asked in the chat that I'm going to ask Chonnettia to answer. For authors that receive grant funding or foundation funding, do they also receive support from the funders to publish their work open access? This was something that Jan Philip mentioned that wasn't explicitly covered in Plan S. So Chonnettia, can you bring some insight into that from a funder's perspective?
CHONNETTIA JONES: Yeah, no, that's a great question, so thank you for the question. And to just link back to what Jan Phillips said, so the short answer is yes, funders do cover the cost of open access charges either through eligible costs when a researcher, for example, submits a grant and says, this is the-- I would like money to be able to pay for open access charges, and this is-- I anticipate these many research outputs that will require this through block grants, which I mentioned in my talk.
CHONNETTIA JONES: Some funders provide whole block grants to higher education institutions, for example, so that they have the flexibility to disperse that funding to pay for open access. So that very well could go to libraries, for example. But I think what Jan Philip is raising in the Plan S discussion is related to this, but I would probably position it slightly different, which is although funders are paying for the cost, I think it's a fair statement to say that they haven't put more money aside in order to achieve that.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And so what happens is that it puts pressure on the individuals, whether that's institutions or researchers to cover those costs alongside the cost of research. I think what's coming through quite strongly is that's where I think a lot of the division is happening, right? It comes down to that.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And so I think we all have a shared vision, but that vision and the implementation of that really impacts us quite differently. And I'll just say this, it's not that-- and this is why I think the cooperation between funders, for example, and publishers, and I agree with Nick's statement, really, we need to work together, both in terms of how to innovate to make open access much more cost effective and feasible and accessible to people around the world no matter where they are.
CHONNETTIA JONES: But there has to be some innovation. There has to be some new design to be able to achieve that to be able to make that more affordable. And I think that's right now where the challenge is. Just from some of the work that I'm aware of that funders have done, when they've actually looked at the costs that they put towards open access charges, it's eye watering. It's truly eye watering.
CHONNETTIA JONES: And I think that when you're working in budgets and for all of the reasons I've described in my talk where you're trying to achieve a lot of different things and you look at your budgets and you look at what proportion of your funding is going toward this, a funder is naturally going to ask, what's the return on that investment? What impact is that having? So it's not that funders don't appreciate the cost of transitioning to open access.
CHONNETTIA JONES: I think there's clearly an open dialogue happening right now around can we make these costs more affordable for everyone and still be able to achieve that shared vision?
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Chonnettia. That sums up the point, really, that ultimately, it has to be a shared vision and shared costs to create this infrastructure that everyone can contribute to to make funding and research and its dissemination a lot more sustainable than it is today. We are out of time. There are a couple of questions in the chat.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Oh, they're comments from an anonymous attendee. cOAlition S requires that the research-- that research funded by its members be published in an open access journal. If an author wants to publish their Plan S funded research in a subscription journal, the journal editor will have to reject the submission. This can be seen as an infringement on the author's choice of a journal where they want to publish their paper.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Jan Philip did address this that researchers would like funders and consequently publishers to be a bit more flexible because ultimately, researchers want to reserve the right. Jan Philip, you want to comment further?
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I could. I think it's true that it would infringe on the author's right to choose a journal, but I must say to that extent, I do agree with Plan S that we also have to move in that direction, so that infringement is maybe acceptable I would think that. And certainly, in the period when we transition to a more open access model, I think we would have to do something like that. So for that, I do actually think Plan S is moving in the right direction.
JAN PHILIP SOLOVEJ: I'm more worried about the budget model of Plan S.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Yeah, OK. Well, it's 11:46, so I don't want to keep the panel here any longer. Thank you very much for devoting an hour of your time to talk to us about your experience. I have certainly learned a lot from all of you this afternoon, and I hope our audience has found the session as interesting as I did. Thank you very much. Thanks to Mary Beth and the rest of the New Directions panel, and I hope to see you again soon.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Thanks, everyone.
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