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The Scholarly Kitchen: The Nelson Memo… Now What?
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The Scholarly Kitchen: The Nelson Memo… Now What?
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Segment:0 .
Hello, and Thank you for joining us for today's SSP webinar presented by the scholarly kitchen, the Nelson memo.
Now what? This is the third event in SSPS 2023 webinar series. I'm Jason Pointe lead of the SSP education committee webinars working group. Before we get started, I'd like to Thank SSP's 2023 education program sponsors Morressier, silver chair, 67 Bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000 for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically.
Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with panelists and other participants. This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event. A quick note on SSP'S code of conduct. In today's meeting.
We are committed to diversity, equity and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email.
We strongly encourage you to provide us with feedback to help shape future sb programming. And now it's my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's discussion. Scholarly Kitchen chef and Vice President of organizational strategy for Ithaka, Roger Schoenfeld. Thanks so much, Jason. It's such an honor to be here today with such a terrific panel.
We're going to be we're going to be talking today about the dynamics around moving to zero embargo, open access for federally funded research in light of the Nelson memo. The question before us today is how we'll be focusing not on the data elements of the Nelson memo, which are important and will affect us in a variety of ways. That's probably a separate webinar for our consideration in months to come, but rather on the open access, zero embargo, open access elements of the mandates that are coming.
So I'm so honored to be able to introduce a panel of terrific friends and colleagues. We have today Colette Bean, who's the chief publishing officer of the American Physiological Society. Angela Cochran, a fellow chef of mine who's the vice president of publishing for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, StevenInchcoombe, who's the president for research at Springer Nature and Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F Gates University librarian at Yale University.
And our opportunity today is to talk openly and collegially about some difficult and exciting opportunities and challenges before us. So, Barbara, I'd like to start with you. Many of the research libraries in the Uc have lobbied, whether it's individually or collectively, for greater open access to scholarly resources. So at a high level, what kind of victory does the Nelson memo represent for the academic library community?
How do you see it today? Great Thank you. And thanks, Roger and everyone for putting together this conversation today. I will say that since the release of the memo, I've taken every opportunity possible to have conversations like this, because there's so much nuance here, there are so many things to learn. And so Thanks to everyone and especially the panelists for this conversation.
And so I would say, Roger, yes, I think libraries and you know, I can only speak for Yale and I'll do my best to speak for libraries today. But we are excited about the idea of free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded research, as the memo describes. We enthusiastically welcome this memo and the forthcoming guidance from the agencies. And as you pointed out, Roger, libraries have worked for decades to determine ways to best provide more open and broad access to scholarship.
And that's taken the form of building infrastructure in the form of institutional repositories, guidance to scholars on depositing scholarship in disciplinary repositories and preprint servers, library publishing operations and workflows, investment in open access resolutions and other ways to get us to a path to open, including exploring new ways to acquire and licensed content to support teaching and learning. So from a mission standpoint, the memo supports University and library mission to broaden access to scholarship.
I can say that Yale's mission has within it the notion of disseminating scholarship broadly. The memo also aligns the US with other countries in the world where there are long established traditions of open access to promote, to promote innovation. And I would say for the public and for researchers, this is fantastic to have immediate and open access and the possibility of retaining copyright to works.
And I would say finally, the memo accelerates this path to open by encouraging the community of libraries, publishers and scholars to figure out how to do this in an equitable way. So victory is a strong word, but I would say we've got we've got the stuff of a good future here. And I and I'm excited to talk about it with all of you today. Great Thank you.
So so now for our three publisher community panelists, could you each take a few minutes to reflect on some of the strategies that you're pursuing to address the fund or policies that are going to result from the Nelson memo? Steven, I think I'd like to start with you. Is it is it fair to say that Springer Nature is doubling down on the gold the gold model? Do you expect to see a growth of individual pieces in the US market or anticipating more transformative agreements?
Tell us a little bit about what you expect to see here. Thank you, Roger, and Thank you, Barbara, for sort of setting the scene there about the goals and progress and but also some of the challenges, the nuances we have to grapple with. And for Springer nature, I think our position is actually pretty clear. We see funded or gold open access involving the payment of an APC as really the only proven, scalable and sustainable model.
Why do I say it? Because publishing has real costs and involves substantial work, including organizing and running, peer review and so on. We know we've heard that about it before, but those costs and the work scale with the article volume, but also with the expectations and needs of validating checking and ultimately publishing and distributing those articles.
As a result, funding needs to scale with those article numbers and with the work that needs to be done. If we want to have a trustworthy scientific research record upon which to build, to use for learning, but also to build for future research. And so if it's permitted, yes, I see a growth in individual apcs and transactions, but I think even more substantially a growth and development of transformative agreements.
And they, I think, offer additional things over and above gold open access that individual lapses. Firstly, they actually simplify the researchers lives so they can focus on the research rather than all the paraphernalia around dealing with individual transactions. And I think we all want researchers to do more research, not to have to spend their time on other things. And secondly, they enable the institutions to effectively outsource the responsibility for progress tracking, compliance management and so on to publishers.
So again, the institutions themselves can avoid those extra costs and extra work, and it makes more sense to do it. To invest in that centrally in a small number, relatively small number of organizations. There were. Tens and hundreds of publishers. There are Tens of thousands around the world of institutions and organizations that might otherwise need to have to address this.
And so, therefore, I see transformative agreements as the most likely long term solution, because they offer stability, scalability, and ultimately will deliver a more efficient research system. And minimize the costs of achieving that transition. Thank you. So, Angela, I'd like to move to you next. I understand that the American Society for Clinical Oncology receives a substantial portion of publishing revenue from things like rights, licensing or preprints or advertising, maybe even more so than subscriptions itself.
So that's a distinctive kind of business model and sort of points to some of the diversity that we see in the publishing landscape. How does that business model, in the more clinically focused nature of the papers that you publish, affect your thinking. And your plans going forward? Yeah thanks, Roger. There are really several reasons why highly selective clinical journals cannot split to an APC open access model.
First is just sort of the numbers. So the number of rejections are very high and those incur costs that are currently covered by that post-publication activity. Second, we solicit a lot of content that helps to put the research in context for physicians and patients. So these are invited article types like editorials or understanding of pathways or oncology grand rounds, and we can't solicit expert commentary and then charge an APC for that content.
And this content actually does make up a high percentage of articles published. We extend the reach of the research to new audiences by investing in extenders like visual abstracts, video abstracts, infographics and podcasts and an APC fueled environment. We are not likely to be able to make the investments in those kinds of Article extenders. And then maintaining our trusted role in the oncology space really means that a lot of checks go into every accepted manuscript.
We're checking for clinical trial registration and requirements like data availability statements and consort diagrams, updates to COI disclosures for every author on a paper biostatistical reviews that are done on many most of the original research that we're publishing, and that requires a significant amount of staff and volunteer time that goes into every published paper. So these are some of the reasons why flipping is not an option, that the cost per article is high and would force the apcs to be high as well.
Higher certainly than we're comfortable with. And as you noted, APCs could not replace revenue from licensing permissions and advertising. So allowing a green option with zero embargo is certainly not ideal as it will decimate subscription revenue over time. But that said, the Green OA zero embargo with a broad reuse licensing attached would force highly selective journals into making some difficult choices.
Thanks Thanks so much. And Colette, your organization is, if I understand correctly, is an independently publishing Research Society. You've I've followed some of the efforts that you've done with I think, some really interesting creative efforts to adapt to the times. But but you remain largely reliant on journal subscriptions.
So how do you expect to address some of the public access needs of your funded authors? Yeah, Thanks. Thanks for having me here today. I will be completely transparent. It's a work in progress. We've about 3 and 1/2 years ago when I joined aps, we recognized the reality that open access was really inevitable.
And for us, this particular policy is really a tipping point for us because we have such a large percentage of our content that's federally funded by the us, it's about half of our content. And so we've been planning for a while in terms of introducing new programs, new products, new in order to generate new revenue sources. We also experimented with our own version of transformative agreements as well, but we still have more work to do.
And we're going to need as much time as possible to continue to prepare. And so we're still evaluating will a gold open access model be best for us? Know we are not a large publisher like Springer Nature where publishing at scale in the ability to publish everything gold will have significant financial repercussions for us. So we're still looking at whether or not another model might be best for us.
And in green is something that for some publishers will work. We have our own doubts about whether it would work for us, and it really greed works best for organizations where the accepted manuscript version isn't good enough, that the final version of record is really critical and is enough of incentive for libraries to continue to subscribe. So to be totally transparent, we're still working through that.
We have our strategic planning process underway for our next three year strategic plan, and we'll make some decisions about this in the coming I'd say six months to a year. But, you know, it's a bit of a grand experiment. Right know, we know that there are tremendous benefits to open access. However, there's also a lot of economic challenges to trying to make a number of different models work.
So stay tuned. Well, we'll keep you posted. That's great. Thank you. Yeah I mean, I really appreciate the directness, the candor that all three of you have brought to bear here. It's really clear that the different publishers are differently situated for a variety of reasons. And so I think that diversity of Voices is part of what we are looking forward to sharing during the course of this session today.
Barbara, as I want to turn back to you now, as libraries look at this transition, and you gave us a really great overview at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the role of the research library or the role of the Yale library in this transition? And how do you hope to use your investments? I mean, libraries like libraries never feel like they have enough to invest, but they also bring tremendous resources to the table.
And how do you hope to use those resources to shape to shape the nature of this transition that we're all going through together? Oh, absolutely. Well, it was great hearing from all of you, because, Roger, you've just made the point that a diversity of publishing models, you know, we've heard there are many approaches here. And I think that that's a healthy ecosystem.
I think similarly, libraries are looking for a diversity of approaches here, that there's no one size fits all. And so one thing that some of you may have seen is the 13 Ivy Plus libraries in the last few months put together a letter that we shared with the OSTP about some concerns that we have about just pursuing a gold oa model to the point that a diversity of options here, I think, is good for publishers and for libraries.
I'd like to think about this as we're placing bets, we're directionally going somewhere, right? We know that it's great. I think we're all excited about directionally moving towards open. And, you know, libraries are participating in transformative agreements. Transformative agreements aren't an end state, in my opinion. I think they're transitional agreements in a lot of ways to get us towards a more open future.
And so I think libraries are looking at all different kinds of models and investing our dollars, our time, our advocacy in listening, learning and trying to determine where we can best support different models out there. So, for example, after we wrote the letter to OCP, several of the library directors from Ivy Plus were asked to talk to the federal agencies. And we gave the opinion that we would love to see them pursuing green OA as a part of the path that gold OS has some equity challenges.
And I think we'll get to that later in the conversation that libraries have invested strongly in the kinds of infrastructure that enables green away. It may not be the full solution, but we do believe that that infrastructure has been something we've built and we could contribute to the landscape. And so I know there are concerns about where libraries will continue to invest.
I have heard that from many of you. Are we just going to drop subscriptions if we go down this road? And at this point, from the standpoint of research, about 50% of research, I've looked at a number of sources on this. 50% of research in the US is federally funded. And so that leaves a lot of research out there still that will be published.
And I think libraries don't object to subscriptions entirely. We want to find an environment in which it isn't subscriptions and meaning we're paying to subscribe, but then also having additive costs. And so we're just watching the business models carefully to make sure that we're fulfilling mission stewarding the university's money in a way that is responsible when it comes to scholarship.
Great Thank Thank you. So so you've sort of introduced the green the green road, which I really appreciate. I think maybe we should spend a little time hearing about some of the feasibility, the sort of feasibility of that model. I think, Colette, you spoke about it already, but I think we can all agree that it's essential that some of the basic services of publishing continue to be supported.
And that's sometimes invoked as one of the challenges from a publisher perspective of this green road. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, will libraries continue to subscribe in that model? It sounds it it's Barbara I thought your point about not subscriptions and right is a really is a really interesting point of departure and will publishers be able to enable it in some of the ways that we're looking for or try to impede it?
So, I don't know, maybe, Barbara, you could just respond directly, like, how do you how do you see that that green road working? I mean, will libraries continue to subscribe under that kind of model? So I believe so. And again, I'm speaking for Yale. We we have the resources to think about multiple paths here.
And so subscriptions are still an important part of this landscape. And I think that things aren't changing fast enough that we would start dropping subscriptions any time soon. I think it's conversations like this that have us all working together, libraries and publishers, to figure out how we want to get to where we're going. And so I don't see immediate moving away from subscriptions.
If we were to move to more of a green approach, I think it's important that to state that libraries know there's value add in publishing and that it costs something. And so, you know, we're not naive to think that what publishers do doesn't cost money and is a value add. I think we really embrace that notion. But I think simultaneously libraries are exploring through library publishing, through green routes, different ways for libraries in other part of the scholarly parts of the scholarly ecosystem.
To think about that value add, who can do that and also what does it cost? I think this is really kind of a sticking point right now is what are the real costs? I think transparency around costs have been a challenge for libraries for some time. APCs can seem arbitrary, almost like what the market will bear versus what mapping to what the costs actually are.
And so that's just something that we're following carefully. Again, we're for financial stewards of the money of our universities. We want to make sure that when we're investing that we know what we're paying for. It isn't just cost recovery, I realize that. But that having a bit more transparency around the apc, I think would be helpful. So I believe libraries like the green route, but that doesn't mean that we don't value what is brought with what publishers can add.
It's just I think it's part of the landscape. And we, you know, I would say we're not ready for it entirely, but we're building infrastructure that would allow for more of this work to be done in that way. Yeah that's really helpful. Thank you. I want to turn things over to maybe Angela next, because I'm curious what the green road looks like from ASCO's perspective.
You stated in your sort of introduction to this topic that editorial and peer review processes need to continue to be supported. And I'm actually concerned that for some journals it won't be supported in the same way that it can be supported under current models. Lesson revenue certainly means fewer positions. There are some organizations that we pay to be members of that are in support of industry initiatives that we're not really required to be members of organizations like COPE and ORCID industry associations like STM and AAP.
These these are not inexpensive things. And I think that some decisions will need to be made. Turnaround times may certainly get longer if we're talking about having to either outsource the vendors more work or any reductions in staff or volunteers. Societies that are in commercial partnerships really have no idea what future contracts are going to look like.
But I think we all assume that our editorial support budgets will not look the same in the future. And a flip to open access means higher volume publishing, which may not support the same kind of high quality editorial, some of the activities that I mentioned earlier. I think it's nice for to hear from libraries that they don't plan on cutting subscriptions on January 1st, 2026.
I didn't expect that. I think we're all sort of expecting a trade off over time. And, you know, the fact of the matter is that many of us have journals that will fall into that 50, 60, 70% of the content that is in a specific journal title may end up being free in PubMed central with no embargo. And I don't actually think that libraries will keep subscriptions to all of those journals.
I think that the other sort of. He's a bit for smaller institutions in particular is that once the agencies figure out how much a mostly gold open access publishing ecosystem will cost and what the requests for funding look like for paying for open access. I'm not sure they'll continue to provide the same level of institutional overhead that they are expecting to support libraries for subscription.
So I do think that library budgets, I don't see any growth opportunity here. And then in a mostly away environment, I think under reading, publish or transformative agreements. I'm not sure that I think that they are specifically transitional. I think in a way they're an easy way to pay for open access fees for institutions that are heavy, heavy research institutions.
I don't really know that they need libraries to facilitate those contracts in those deals either. So I'm not sure we can really depend far into the future on library support if they're under a green model where there is significant, significant amounts of content that are freely available.
Yeah I appreciate that perspective because you kind of bring out the question of not just what we might want to see, but like what, how some of the structural factors might over time evolve. Stephen, I want to give you a chance to kind of speak to this set of issues as well, because you spoke so clearly in support of the gold model earlier. But how do you how do you see the green the green model here for post Nelson memo?
Well, I think the green model. Was a transitionary mechanism to get going with things. But the harsh truth, I'm afraid, and we're already experiencing it in Europe, is it's not a sustainable model, Barbara. The very language that you use about, look, I think we libraries have to be financially responsible. We're stewards of funding.
We need to look at the benefits we provide. And so on. We've had that language had some reassurances when we were first doing open access and introducing the first read and publish deals or transformative agreements. And now we see in renewables time, well, all of this is open access. Why should we carry on with these other subscriptions? We have to look at where the biggest benefits are for our funding.
So in green zero embargoed green when it was had an embargo on it, it could coexist with subscriptions that many of the people who've been putting forward zero embargo are very clear. The purpose is to kill off subscriptions and because they see them as a way in which the funding is being spread too thin across subscriptions and open access, and they're very keen on the benefits of open access.
I think I've for many years talked positively about the benefits of open research and open access as a stepping stone to the wider benefits of open research, which to me is really the biggest prize. That's why we're doing this. It's not just for the articles, it's to enable the data, the code and so on to be able to be reusable and freely so without limit.
And I know that's not the purpose of today, but that's the price that we're all ultimately after for the benefit of science and research. But the only way of doing that is if the articles themselves are open and sustainably. So, and that means you have to pay the bills, and that means there has to be money from somewhere and green open access. Undermines that rather than enables it.
So I'm afraid very simply, I would say green 0 embargo green is a dead end. It's not going to deliver for us what the goal is. So we shouldn't be seduced by the fact that some people say, oh, it's free. There's no free lunch. You've got to pay for it something somewhere. And so we have to make sure there is enough income to pay the costs.
And those costs are not just rising because of articles. They're rising because of inflation. And they're also rising because the demands are getting greater. The research integrity we've seen some of the things that have been happening to publishers systems, they're under attack. At the same time, we need to expand the added value. So that things like open data and open code are linked to and curated with the articles, not just left as orphans, disconnected or unable to be understood and reused by others.
And so we need a system that has the right amount of funding, funding that I think the best way of creating value for money, which is what everybody should be aiming for, is to have a more transparent, competitive system within which everybody operates. And I think if we can do that, then that's a much more viable way of progressing our path to that open science future than it is by trying to conjure up magic tricks around so-called free models that apparently will work without any funding, which is where I'm afraid I see green once it's the embargo has been reduced to 0 because it's the very thing that funds it has will be eliminated by it.
It was quite interesting in some earlier conversations that we've had that I've had with some of the panelists, it some somewhat glibly threw out the question of, well, what is it that libraries could do to assure publishers that there wouldn't be large scale cancellations? Right I mean, in a way that seems like the nub of the problem that we're circling around here. The glib remark that I offered was, well, could libraries offer publishers a 20 year license agreement or a 50 year license agreement or what have you?
And one or two people sort of rolled their eyes at that. But it does seem like this could be a case where I don't know if anyone wants to respond to that, but are there ways that libraries might be able to offer publishers some kind of assurance here? But yet I don't know if anyone wants to speak to that at all. I'm just happy to jump in for a minute here.
The I would say I'm thinking about this because this is the month that we're doing our provost budget meeting. And so we're putting together how we are thinking about our budget for the coming year. And one of the things that we look for is some stability in budgeting, right? So, you know, that's what has been nice about subscriptions. In some ways. There are inflationary costs and we but over the years, we've been able to predict that to a certain degree, and that's reassuring when long range plans and financial planning is planning.
With our budget in this year's presentation, I have to say I'm putting one of the risks that is there for our budget is just uncertainty in this landscape because we're not sure what it's going to look like, what our collections budget's going to look like over time. There are new models. Again, this notion of trying out different things, but the advantage of the subscription and I'm not saying it's the perfect way to go forward, but from my perspective, the it does enable some predictability.
I would love to know, you know, I couldn't sign a 20 year license agreement with a publisher, but I would love to know from others on the call how we could have that conversation. You know, what would be a way for us to think about this together such that, as you say, in January 2026, the rug isn't just pulled out from under you. Collette, go ahead.
Yeah, I'd love to also say a few words on this, and I think the comments about predictability in the level of volatility are spot on. You know, I think that the models that we've had in place for many years have offered that while there have been changes over time, we've been able to sort of all look forward and know what to expect over the next couple of years, for example.
And we are absolutely entering into a state that an old colleague from my old role used to call vuca, which is apparently a military term that refers to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Right and we've got it all coming in there right now. And my perspective is that this actually requires partnership. I think that it is going to require a diversity of models, a diversity of approaches, and that we really need to partner together with the library community, the funding community and the publishing community to find a variety of models that might include multi payer options and things of that nature in order to actually weather this.
And I do think that the picture is quite different for a small society publisher like aps than it might be for a Springer Nature or a Wylie or an Elsevier that has the ability to at scale do things differently than you can when you're a small organization. And I also was would like to comment on the comments about apcs and the transparency question, and I don't object to transparency. I think the real tricky thing is that apcs really have been we've been offering subvention for the apcs that we offer.
Right now. We're charging less than it would actually cost us to produce that article. And so as soon as you start to kind of migrate into perhaps a gold model, you're kind of in a difficult spot because you're starting to find yourself in a place that you might be charging my member community more than I would like to in order to actually sustain a gold model.
And so finding other mechanisms that kind of sort of take that pressure off, I think would be tremendous and really helpful. So I do feel like there's opportunity there for us as stakeholders to come together and have those conversations and to come up with some creative solutions. That would be my hope. David and I'm not obsessed with transformative agreements.
It's just they've been going for seven years. So we've they've been evolving. They do now increasingly include they did always include subscriptions and open access. Hence the reason why they were originally called read and publish deals. But they have evolved to become multi payer models that pull together library funding with Grant funding.
And that's again something that those who can operate them are doing them on behalf of their customers because that was a pain point for their customers. And so they've been needing to do that. They're increasingly including fully open access journals as well as journals in transition, which increases the amount of funding and that reduces volatility because just scale does help offset that at least proportionately.
And then lastly, they're increasingly utilizing corridors, if you like, floors and caps to reduce the uncertainty for the customers and for the suppliers, the publishers, because everybody likes predictability. It's not just libraries that like predictability, publishers also have costs to incur to collect point. Apex are not as it's not as high income as was possible when you pulled together subscriptions and content licensing and other sources, corporations, hospitals, which are not going to be contributing to the open access fees in the same way.
So the burden is falling more quietly on research intensive institutions and is also requiring publishers to find a way of reducing our costs in order to accommodate that lower income. But predictability is helpful no matter what you've got to do, or else you can't plan towards it. So I'm just saying, thinking that the collective statement of partnership, that's how I see.
Transformative agreements. They are a vehicle via which you can have the discussion about what are the key requirements for the customer. How can we meet those and what things can we draw upon that's already been created for others? So we don't have to go through the cost, the time, the uncertainty of having to develop things from scratch. It looks like Angela is ready to jump in.
Yeah, I'd like to add a few things that I think the library community could do to help assure particularly small publishers and society publishers. And really, there needs to be a commitment to taking the time to do outreach and to discuss models that work and whether it be subscriptions or app payments. There has been a fear, particularly after plan s, that the smaller publishers and independent societies would be mostly shut out of the transformative agreements.
And I can tell you that that is 100% true. I have been on the receiving end of being told by a large European consortia that we were not big enough for them to bother having those discussions with. And so there needs to be a commitment to we're also willing to talk to you. And I think the other thing that I've been struggling with a little bit is why in some of the library communities are continuing to push for broad reuse licenses on the green model.
I don't I don't understand the skin in the game on that other than to other than an ideological approach. And that has significant revenue ramifications for some of us. Angela, just to make sure everyone understands you're talking about I think you're talking about the non commercial aspect of the licenses. Is that is that right or.
Yep Thank you. This is a great conversation we've got going, so I'm happy to move us on. But if anyone wants to circle back with anything, Barbara or anybody else, happy to give you a chance to jump jump in. Otherwise I'll take us forward. So and I should note, we do have one or two questions that have come in. If if our webinar attendees have questions for us, feel free to put them in the chat now.
But I think what I, what I'd like to try to pull us back to a little bit because we've gotten into by no means the weeds, but some really interesting discussion about the particularities of some of the models here. I think at a broad level, what's really amazing compared to what this webinar might have looked like five or 10 years ago, is that there is a clear consensus on this panel that open access is a good thing.
Right and even though we I think everyone sort of sees the sees the benefits of it, you know, there's a way in which no one really wants to pay for it. Right I mean, and I don't there's a challenge in terms of where the payment is going to come from. The policies here in the US are largely business model, agnostic, or at least that's how it looks like. And that's what we've all been talking around, right?
Like in Europe, there's been much more of a steer in terms of it should work this way. At least that's been my observation. So and in the us, you know, it's pretty clear that researchers will be able to, if they wish to use their grant funding for publication costs. And and on the other hand, it also seems like congress, in its wisdom, is not prepared to simply put money into the system to pay for publishing costs.
Right so even though researchers may be able to have access to apks directly, there's not likely to be additional money coming into the system to support publishing apks or transformative agreements or other alternative infrastructure, even for compliance or distribution or what have you. So all of this seems to mean that one way or the other, we're going to end up diverting funds, potentially funds that would have otherwise paid directly for research to support, whether it be apks or other kinds of infrastructure in support of compliance.
Right and that that just seems like an inevitability of the way that this is coming together. So so I guess what I'm. Would love to put to the panel is if we're likely to see even a modest decrease there, therefore, the amount of funding that goes to research directly. Is that a reasonable trade here? Like is that a good outcome? And are there things that we can do to keep as much resources as possible for the actual work of science, which I think we're all ultimately here to support and enable?
So I'd love to turn that question over 2 over to the panel. I can go. I can start. Roger so for four. I mean, I obviously represent a not for profit society, and I could certainly say that for my member community, that would not be a reasonable trade.
The reward system that's in place really, you know, we would be doing no favors to my member community if we made it difficult for them to publish. I do hear from my community worries about their ability to pay in a gold environment across the board, not just with aps, what they might publish with aps, because of course they publish with more than just aps. And so I do think that we do we do need to do more to reassure the research community that there will be funding available to support their work and that it won't drain their current research budgets that they need in order to cover the costs for post-docs and grad students and et cetera.
And so I think the real trick is, how do we make sure it isn't a trade off right? That we can get to a place where we're able to support a healthy ecosystem with a variety of models that isn't putting all the onus on libraries. I've noticed some of the comments and I hear you and agree it shouldn't just be on libraries, but also looks across the entire ecosystem to make sure there's an appropriate level of funding.
And so I think there is some onus on the funders as well, if they want a policy like this to ensure that there's funding available to support it. And so that's all I'll say on that. I'll just jump in. Just following your points. One of the things when the library director spoke with the federal agencies was this concern that if we were to focus only on a gold model, that that is money that is diverted from research.
And so I think that is a concern. It's interesting to hear your perspective on that, too, because that is a depending on what kind of entity you are, that impact can be greater or lesser. Right so it sounds like it would have great impact on the size of your organization. We haven't really touched on this, and I don't want to take us too far off track here. But the APC model, too, we haven't touched on the equity issues that was Yale in the current moment can pay for APC and that doesn't mean, we're not that the growth of that we can predict the growth and how far this will go and how scalable.
This will be. We are an institution and I want to just put it out there of privilege to be able to pay for this. That is not true of all institutions, both in the US and especially beyond. And so that is a concern long term about shifting the equity issues to the researcher. Right that making it harder for publication. So that that is a concern that is coupled with the potential of the reduction of actual resources research done with federal funds.
Yeah that's very helpful. Steven, I see you're unmuting yourself. So I think we should ask you to speak to it as well. Thank you. A little bit like we're all enthusiastic about the potential benefits of open research and open access. I think we're all wanting to maximize the amount of money.
Funding available to research. So I don't think anybody's going to say that that should be reduced. But I think one also needs to look at the whole enterprise of research. What is clear and there's been quite there's been some published research on this, is that because data and encode and some degree protocols when it comes to reproducibility and building on work isn't currently available.
There is work that is duplicated. There is work that has errors in that are not found early enough and it is much harder to build on work, especially in the employed area that could be taken into the commercial sector to create economic growth in society, which in turn increases the amount of taxpayer's income which fuels ultimately research itself. So when you look at a whole enterprise level, there is a return on investment for funding more on that, particularly the data on the code side in the sciences, I think it's a harder case when you get outside of the hard sciences and the Applied Sciences into some other areas.
And I don't know, there might well be a case for it, but it might be harder to harder to make. But there's certainly a case in substantial parts of research and like it or not, open access to the articles is a stepping stone to that. You can't get there without the open access to the articles themselves. Proper open access, not just public access, not just free, but but reusable.
So in my view, we have to look at it as the whole enterprise. And ideally we could convince with a proper set of data, Congress and appropriations to actually fund more. But if we can't, we should, at least as it's not for publishers or libraries, actually, it will be for funding agencies and policy makers to decide whether they can take a joined up approach and see that the benefit of funding, the funding that they put into research can be magnified and accelerated the research progress through the use of open research techniques to the fullest extent, not across everything.
I think there's quite a lot of things that could be pragmatically looked at and said, this doesn't really create a return on investment, but these areas do, and at least we should start with those and not allow, if you like, the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Let's make sure that we can do it well. But if we can't get money from the government, then we should at least make sure that the money that is available is applied in the most effective way possible for the benefit of the whole of society, because in the long term that will be more self sustaining and more beneficial to all of us.
So there have been a couple of questions that have come into the chat, which I thought were the questions box rather, which some of which I think helped to help to indicate the diversity of attendees that we have here and perspectives that we have among attendees as well. Steven, I think I want to put one question to you, because it sort of brings together a few questions that have come in that seem to focus on the place and perspective of commercial publishers in the ecosystem.
So I'll just gloss through a couple of lines here. So one person wrote that the conversation so far seems to imply that libraries must must continue to support the commercial publishing industry, and we should be giving publishers assurances we'll continue to fund them. That may be a reaction to something that the question that I asked actually more so than something that you've said.
But but there is a question since the idea that libraries are responsible for maintaining the status quo by continuing to fund publishers, while publishers aren't necessarily rethinking their business models and approaches, feels problematic and that the onus is on publishers to demonstrate their value in a new landscape. Could you perhaps speak directly to that? Because I think you've been talking around it a little bit, but I thought you should have the opportunity to respond directly to that perspective.
I don't think so. If I've given them a different impression, then I'll try and correct it now. I think it's up to everybody to show the value that they bring to the table on behalf of the responsibilities that they have in the system. I think publishers are, in my experience, trying to do that. I think some have been doing it for longer than others. We started publishing open access in 2006.
So I feel like we've been on this journey for a long time. And at least a big all the time I've been in academic or scholarly publishing. We have been changing our organization continuously and changing our costs and changing of what we offer and how we offer it to try to better meet what we're told are the needs from our customers. There's these things like funding agencies. I don't think we're it's for us to define as service providers what the demand should be.
I think for us to listen to what that demand is and try to meet it in the most effective and efficient ways possible. And that's what we try to do. If I'm given the idea that it's for others to adapt and to meet our needs, then please take that as a correction. I think it's quite the opposite. I think we should listen to our market and our customers and meet their needs and do so in a transparent way so that ultimately that what we deliver and the value for money we deliver can be objectively assessed and compared with others.
And the money. The business should move to wherever is most efficient and effective, not be fossilized on some status quo. Thank you. I appreciate those that you're sharing that I think unless there are other comments that any of the panelists wishes to offer on anything that we've already discussed, and I'll just pause for one moment to look around and see.
Oh, Colette, go ahead. Well, before you conclude, Roger, I saw a comment about smaller publishers being driven towards commercial publishers. And I'd love to say a quick word about that, because I really am a firm believer that a diverse publishing ecosystem where large scholarly publishers sit along smaller publishers like apps, is really essential because it drives innovation and experimentation.
So I am a proponent for us having models that enable smaller publishers to continue to survive and to exist independently. And so we do need some flexibility in the system to ensure that we have a diversity of models available so that each individual organization can choose the best approach to transform. So I just thought I would say a quick word about that.
Yeah, I think that's a great note to note to end on. I think that we have a. An ecosystem that is fairly diverse here, both on the library side as well as the publisher side. I think we could easily bring a few more voices into this mix and bring as many more perspectives to bear and experiences to bear. But I think as we look around, there are real pressures, both, frankly, on all sides to push us towards scale.
And one of the challenges in the push to scale can be the paving over of some of the diversity that we have in approaches and models. So perhaps that's a good note to leave things on. I can't Thank enough our four panelists, Colette, Angela, Steven, Barbara, for sharing with such kindness and candor your own perspectives. And I think that one of the things that I hope has come out of this discussion is some opportunity for further dialogue and some additional collaborations, perhaps.
And with that, Jason, I'd like to turn things back to you. All right. Thank you, Roger. And Thank you all to the panelists. This was a very informative and engaging discussion, and I really think we could keep going for another hour. Thank you as well to all of our attendees for joining us today. And of course, Thanks to our 2023 education sponsors, Morresier, silverchair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000 attendees.
You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide us with feedback to help us pick topics for our future events. And please also check the SSP website for information on upcoming SSP events, including, of course, the 45th annual meeting coming up in Portland, Oregon. Today's discussion was recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SSP website.
This concludes our session. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, everyone. Bye Thanks.
Segment:0 .
Hello, and Thank you for joining us for today's SSP webinar presented by the scholarly kitchen, the Nelson memo.
Now what? This is the third event in SSPS 2023 webinar series. I'm Jason Pointe lead of the SSP education committee webinars working group. Before we get started, I'd like to Thank SSP's 2023 education program sponsors Morressier, silver chair, 67 Bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000 for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically.
Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with panelists and other participants. This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event. A quick note on SSP'S code of conduct. In today's meeting.
We are committed to diversity, equity and providing a safe, inclusive and productive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and free expression of ideas, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email.
We strongly encourage you to provide us with feedback to help shape future sb programming. And now it's my pleasure to introduce the moderator for today's discussion. Scholarly Kitchen chef and Vice President of organizational strategy for Ithaka, Roger Schoenfeld. Thanks so much, Jason. It's such an honor to be here today with such a terrific panel.
We're going to be we're going to be talking today about the dynamics around moving to zero embargo, open access for federally funded research in light of the Nelson memo. The question before us today is how we'll be focusing not on the data elements of the Nelson memo, which are important and will affect us in a variety of ways. That's probably a separate webinar for our consideration in months to come, but rather on the open access, zero embargo, open access elements of the mandates that are coming.
So I'm so honored to be able to introduce a panel of terrific friends and colleagues. We have today Colette Bean, who's the chief publishing officer of the American Physiological Society. Angela Cochran, a fellow chef of mine who's the vice president of publishing for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, StevenInchcoombe, who's the president for research at Springer Nature and Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F Gates University librarian at Yale University.
And our opportunity today is to talk openly and collegially about some difficult and exciting opportunities and challenges before us. So, Barbara, I'd like to start with you. Many of the research libraries in the Uc have lobbied, whether it's individually or collectively, for greater open access to scholarly resources. So at a high level, what kind of victory does the Nelson memo represent for the academic library community?
How do you see it today? Great Thank you. And thanks, Roger and everyone for putting together this conversation today. I will say that since the release of the memo, I've taken every opportunity possible to have conversations like this, because there's so much nuance here, there are so many things to learn. And so Thanks to everyone and especially the panelists for this conversation.
And so I would say, Roger, yes, I think libraries and you know, I can only speak for Yale and I'll do my best to speak for libraries today. But we are excited about the idea of free, immediate and equitable access to federally funded research, as the memo describes. We enthusiastically welcome this memo and the forthcoming guidance from the agencies. And as you pointed out, Roger, libraries have worked for decades to determine ways to best provide more open and broad access to scholarship.
And that's taken the form of building infrastructure in the form of institutional repositories, guidance to scholars on depositing scholarship in disciplinary repositories and preprint servers, library publishing operations and workflows, investment in open access resolutions and other ways to get us to a path to open, including exploring new ways to acquire and licensed content to support teaching and learning. So from a mission standpoint, the memo supports University and library mission to broaden access to scholarship.
I can say that Yale's mission has within it the notion of disseminating scholarship broadly. The memo also aligns the US with other countries in the world where there are long established traditions of open access to promote, to promote innovation. And I would say for the public and for researchers, this is fantastic to have immediate and open access and the possibility of retaining copyright to works.
And I would say finally, the memo accelerates this path to open by encouraging the community of libraries, publishers and scholars to figure out how to do this in an equitable way. So victory is a strong word, but I would say we've got we've got the stuff of a good future here. And I and I'm excited to talk about it with all of you today. Great Thank you.
So so now for our three publisher community panelists, could you each take a few minutes to reflect on some of the strategies that you're pursuing to address the fund or policies that are going to result from the Nelson memo? Steven, I think I'd like to start with you. Is it is it fair to say that Springer Nature is doubling down on the gold the gold model? Do you expect to see a growth of individual pieces in the US market or anticipating more transformative agreements?
Tell us a little bit about what you expect to see here. Thank you, Roger, and Thank you, Barbara, for sort of setting the scene there about the goals and progress and but also some of the challenges, the nuances we have to grapple with. And for Springer nature, I think our position is actually pretty clear. We see funded or gold open access involving the payment of an APC as really the only proven, scalable and sustainable model.
Why do I say it? Because publishing has real costs and involves substantial work, including organizing and running, peer review and so on. We know we've heard that about it before, but those costs and the work scale with the article volume, but also with the expectations and needs of validating checking and ultimately publishing and distributing those articles.
As a result, funding needs to scale with those article numbers and with the work that needs to be done. If we want to have a trustworthy scientific research record upon which to build, to use for learning, but also to build for future research. And so if it's permitted, yes, I see a growth in individual apcs and transactions, but I think even more substantially a growth and development of transformative agreements.
And they, I think, offer additional things over and above gold open access that individual lapses. Firstly, they actually simplify the researchers lives so they can focus on the research rather than all the paraphernalia around dealing with individual transactions. And I think we all want researchers to do more research, not to have to spend their time on other things. And secondly, they enable the institutions to effectively outsource the responsibility for progress tracking, compliance management and so on to publishers.
So again, the institutions themselves can avoid those extra costs and extra work, and it makes more sense to do it. To invest in that centrally in a small number, relatively small number of organizations. There were. Tens and hundreds of publishers. There are Tens of thousands around the world of institutions and organizations that might otherwise need to have to address this.
And so, therefore, I see transformative agreements as the most likely long term solution, because they offer stability, scalability, and ultimately will deliver a more efficient research system. And minimize the costs of achieving that transition. Thank you. So, Angela, I'd like to move to you next. I understand that the American Society for Clinical Oncology receives a substantial portion of publishing revenue from things like rights, licensing or preprints or advertising, maybe even more so than subscriptions itself.
So that's a distinctive kind of business model and sort of points to some of the diversity that we see in the publishing landscape. How does that business model, in the more clinically focused nature of the papers that you publish, affect your thinking. And your plans going forward? Yeah thanks, Roger. There are really several reasons why highly selective clinical journals cannot split to an APC open access model.
First is just sort of the numbers. So the number of rejections are very high and those incur costs that are currently covered by that post-publication activity. Second, we solicit a lot of content that helps to put the research in context for physicians and patients. So these are invited article types like editorials or understanding of pathways or oncology grand rounds, and we can't solicit expert commentary and then charge an APC for that content.
And this content actually does make up a high percentage of articles published. We extend the reach of the research to new audiences by investing in extenders like visual abstracts, video abstracts, infographics and podcasts and an APC fueled environment. We are not likely to be able to make the investments in those kinds of Article extenders. And then maintaining our trusted role in the oncology space really means that a lot of checks go into every accepted manuscript.
We're checking for clinical trial registration and requirements like data availability statements and consort diagrams, updates to COI disclosures for every author on a paper biostatistical reviews that are done on many most of the original research that we're publishing, and that requires a significant amount of staff and volunteer time that goes into every published paper. So these are some of the reasons why flipping is not an option, that the cost per article is high and would force the apcs to be high as well.
Higher certainly than we're comfortable with. And as you noted, APCs could not replace revenue from licensing permissions and advertising. So allowing a green option with zero embargo is certainly not ideal as it will decimate subscription revenue over time. But that said, the Green OA zero embargo with a broad reuse licensing attached would force highly selective journals into making some difficult choices.
Thanks Thanks so much. And Colette, your organization is, if I understand correctly, is an independently publishing Research Society. You've I've followed some of the efforts that you've done with I think, some really interesting creative efforts to adapt to the times. But but you remain largely reliant on journal subscriptions.
So how do you expect to address some of the public access needs of your funded authors? Yeah, Thanks. Thanks for having me here today. I will be completely transparent. It's a work in progress. We've about 3 and 1/2 years ago when I joined aps, we recognized the reality that open access was really inevitable.
And for us, this particular policy is really a tipping point for us because we have such a large percentage of our content that's federally funded by the us, it's about half of our content. And so we've been planning for a while in terms of introducing new programs, new products, new in order to generate new revenue sources. We also experimented with our own version of transformative agreements as well, but we still have more work to do.
And we're going to need as much time as possible to continue to prepare. And so we're still evaluating will a gold open access model be best for us? Know we are not a large publisher like Springer Nature where publishing at scale in the ability to publish everything gold will have significant financial repercussions for us. So we're still looking at whether or not another model might be best for us.
And in green is something that for some publishers will work. We have our own doubts about whether it would work for us, and it really greed works best for organizations where the accepted manuscript version isn't good enough, that the final version of record is really critical and is enough of incentive for libraries to continue to subscribe. So to be totally transparent, we're still working through that.
We have our strategic planning process underway for our next three year strategic plan, and we'll make some decisions about this in the coming I'd say six months to a year. But, you know, it's a bit of a grand experiment. Right know, we know that there are tremendous benefits to open access. However, there's also a lot of economic challenges to trying to make a number of different models work.
So stay tuned. Well, we'll keep you posted. That's great. Thank you. Yeah I mean, I really appreciate the directness, the candor that all three of you have brought to bear here. It's really clear that the different publishers are differently situated for a variety of reasons. And so I think that diversity of Voices is part of what we are looking forward to sharing during the course of this session today.
Barbara, as I want to turn back to you now, as libraries look at this transition, and you gave us a really great overview at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the role of the research library or the role of the Yale library in this transition? And how do you hope to use your investments? I mean, libraries like libraries never feel like they have enough to invest, but they also bring tremendous resources to the table.
And how do you hope to use those resources to shape to shape the nature of this transition that we're all going through together? Oh, absolutely. Well, it was great hearing from all of you, because, Roger, you've just made the point that a diversity of publishing models, you know, we've heard there are many approaches here. And I think that that's a healthy ecosystem.
I think similarly, libraries are looking for a diversity of approaches here, that there's no one size fits all. And so one thing that some of you may have seen is the 13 Ivy Plus libraries in the last few months put together a letter that we shared with the OSTP about some concerns that we have about just pursuing a gold oa model to the point that a diversity of options here, I think, is good for publishers and for libraries.
I'd like to think about this as we're placing bets, we're directionally going somewhere, right? We know that it's great. I think we're all excited about directionally moving towards open. And, you know, libraries are participating in transformative agreements. Transformative agreements aren't an end state, in my opinion. I think they're transitional agreements in a lot of ways to get us towards a more open future.
And so I think libraries are looking at all different kinds of models and investing our dollars, our time, our advocacy in listening, learning and trying to determine where we can best support different models out there. So, for example, after we wrote the letter to OCP, several of the library directors from Ivy Plus were asked to talk to the federal agencies. And we gave the opinion that we would love to see them pursuing green OA as a part of the path that gold OS has some equity challenges.
And I think we'll get to that later in the conversation that libraries have invested strongly in the kinds of infrastructure that enables green away. It may not be the full solution, but we do believe that that infrastructure has been something we've built and we could contribute to the landscape. And so I know there are concerns about where libraries will continue to invest.
I have heard that from many of you. Are we just going to drop subscriptions if we go down this road? And at this point, from the standpoint of research, about 50% of research, I've looked at a number of sources on this. 50% of research in the US is federally funded. And so that leaves a lot of research out there still that will be published.
And I think libraries don't object to subscriptions entirely. We want to find an environment in which it isn't subscriptions and meaning we're paying to subscribe, but then also having additive costs. And so we're just watching the business models carefully to make sure that we're fulfilling mission stewarding the university's money in a way that is responsible when it comes to scholarship.
Great Thank Thank you. So so you've sort of introduced the green the green road, which I really appreciate. I think maybe we should spend a little time hearing about some of the feasibility, the sort of feasibility of that model. I think, Colette, you spoke about it already, but I think we can all agree that it's essential that some of the basic services of publishing continue to be supported.
And that's sometimes invoked as one of the challenges from a publisher perspective of this green road. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, will libraries continue to subscribe in that model? It sounds it it's Barbara I thought your point about not subscriptions and right is a really is a really interesting point of departure and will publishers be able to enable it in some of the ways that we're looking for or try to impede it?
So, I don't know, maybe, Barbara, you could just respond directly, like, how do you how do you see that that green road working? I mean, will libraries continue to subscribe under that kind of model? So I believe so. And again, I'm speaking for Yale. We we have the resources to think about multiple paths here.
And so subscriptions are still an important part of this landscape. And I think that things aren't changing fast enough that we would start dropping subscriptions any time soon. I think it's conversations like this that have us all working together, libraries and publishers, to figure out how we want to get to where we're going. And so I don't see immediate moving away from subscriptions.
If we were to move to more of a green approach, I think it's important that to state that libraries know there's value add in publishing and that it costs something. And so, you know, we're not naive to think that what publishers do doesn't cost money and is a value add. I think we really embrace that notion. But I think simultaneously libraries are exploring through library publishing, through green routes, different ways for libraries in other part of the scholarly parts of the scholarly ecosystem.
To think about that value add, who can do that and also what does it cost? I think this is really kind of a sticking point right now is what are the real costs? I think transparency around costs have been a challenge for libraries for some time. APCs can seem arbitrary, almost like what the market will bear versus what mapping to what the costs actually are.
And so that's just something that we're following carefully. Again, we're for financial stewards of the money of our universities. We want to make sure that when we're investing that we know what we're paying for. It isn't just cost recovery, I realize that. But that having a bit more transparency around the apc, I think would be helpful. So I believe libraries like the green route, but that doesn't mean that we don't value what is brought with what publishers can add.
It's just I think it's part of the landscape. And we, you know, I would say we're not ready for it entirely, but we're building infrastructure that would allow for more of this work to be done in that way. Yeah that's really helpful. Thank you. I want to turn things over to maybe Angela next, because I'm curious what the green road looks like from ASCO's perspective.
You stated in your sort of introduction to this topic that editorial and peer review processes need to continue to be supported. And I'm actually concerned that for some journals it won't be supported in the same way that it can be supported under current models. Lesson revenue certainly means fewer positions. There are some organizations that we pay to be members of that are in support of industry initiatives that we're not really required to be members of organizations like COPE and ORCID industry associations like STM and AAP.
These these are not inexpensive things. And I think that some decisions will need to be made. Turnaround times may certainly get longer if we're talking about having to either outsource the vendors more work or any reductions in staff or volunteers. Societies that are in commercial partnerships really have no idea what future contracts are going to look like.
But I think we all assume that our editorial support budgets will not look the same in the future. And a flip to open access means higher volume publishing, which may not support the same kind of high quality editorial, some of the activities that I mentioned earlier. I think it's nice for to hear from libraries that they don't plan on cutting subscriptions on January 1st, 2026.
I didn't expect that. I think we're all sort of expecting a trade off over time. And, you know, the fact of the matter is that many of us have journals that will fall into that 50, 60, 70% of the content that is in a specific journal title may end up being free in PubMed central with no embargo. And I don't actually think that libraries will keep subscriptions to all of those journals.
I think that the other sort of. He's a bit for smaller institutions in particular is that once the agencies figure out how much a mostly gold open access publishing ecosystem will cost and what the requests for funding look like for paying for open access. I'm not sure they'll continue to provide the same level of institutional overhead that they are expecting to support libraries for subscription.
So I do think that library budgets, I don't see any growth opportunity here. And then in a mostly away environment, I think under reading, publish or transformative agreements. I'm not sure that I think that they are specifically transitional. I think in a way they're an easy way to pay for open access fees for institutions that are heavy, heavy research institutions.
I don't really know that they need libraries to facilitate those contracts in those deals either. So I'm not sure we can really depend far into the future on library support if they're under a green model where there is significant, significant amounts of content that are freely available.
Yeah I appreciate that perspective because you kind of bring out the question of not just what we might want to see, but like what, how some of the structural factors might over time evolve. Stephen, I want to give you a chance to kind of speak to this set of issues as well, because you spoke so clearly in support of the gold model earlier. But how do you how do you see the green the green model here for post Nelson memo?
Well, I think the green model. Was a transitionary mechanism to get going with things. But the harsh truth, I'm afraid, and we're already experiencing it in Europe, is it's not a sustainable model, Barbara. The very language that you use about, look, I think we libraries have to be financially responsible. We're stewards of funding.
We need to look at the benefits we provide. And so on. We've had that language had some reassurances when we were first doing open access and introducing the first read and publish deals or transformative agreements. And now we see in renewables time, well, all of this is open access. Why should we carry on with these other subscriptions? We have to look at where the biggest benefits are for our funding.
So in green zero embargoed green when it was had an embargo on it, it could coexist with subscriptions that many of the people who've been putting forward zero embargo are very clear. The purpose is to kill off subscriptions and because they see them as a way in which the funding is being spread too thin across subscriptions and open access, and they're very keen on the benefits of open access.
I think I've for many years talked positively about the benefits of open research and open access as a stepping stone to the wider benefits of open research, which to me is really the biggest prize. That's why we're doing this. It's not just for the articles, it's to enable the data, the code and so on to be able to be reusable and freely so without limit.
And I know that's not the purpose of today, but that's the price that we're all ultimately after for the benefit of science and research. But the only way of doing that is if the articles themselves are open and sustainably. So, and that means you have to pay the bills, and that means there has to be money from somewhere and green open access. Undermines that rather than enables it.
So I'm afraid very simply, I would say green 0 embargo green is a dead end. It's not going to deliver for us what the goal is. So we shouldn't be seduced by the fact that some people say, oh, it's free. There's no free lunch. You've got to pay for it something somewhere. And so we have to make sure there is enough income to pay the costs.
And those costs are not just rising because of articles. They're rising because of inflation. And they're also rising because the demands are getting greater. The research integrity we've seen some of the things that have been happening to publishers systems, they're under attack. At the same time, we need to expand the added value. So that things like open data and open code are linked to and curated with the articles, not just left as orphans, disconnected or unable to be understood and reused by others.
And so we need a system that has the right amount of funding, funding that I think the best way of creating value for money, which is what everybody should be aiming for, is to have a more transparent, competitive system within which everybody operates. And I think if we can do that, then that's a much more viable way of progressing our path to that open science future than it is by trying to conjure up magic tricks around so-called free models that apparently will work without any funding, which is where I'm afraid I see green once it's the embargo has been reduced to 0 because it's the very thing that funds it has will be eliminated by it.
It was quite interesting in some earlier conversations that we've had that I've had with some of the panelists, it some somewhat glibly threw out the question of, well, what is it that libraries could do to assure publishers that there wouldn't be large scale cancellations? Right I mean, in a way that seems like the nub of the problem that we're circling around here. The glib remark that I offered was, well, could libraries offer publishers a 20 year license agreement or a 50 year license agreement or what have you?
And one or two people sort of rolled their eyes at that. But it does seem like this could be a case where I don't know if anyone wants to respond to that, but are there ways that libraries might be able to offer publishers some kind of assurance here? But yet I don't know if anyone wants to speak to that at all. I'm just happy to jump in for a minute here.
The I would say I'm thinking about this because this is the month that we're doing our provost budget meeting. And so we're putting together how we are thinking about our budget for the coming year. And one of the things that we look for is some stability in budgeting, right? So, you know, that's what has been nice about subscriptions. In some ways. There are inflationary costs and we but over the years, we've been able to predict that to a certain degree, and that's reassuring when long range plans and financial planning is planning.
With our budget in this year's presentation, I have to say I'm putting one of the risks that is there for our budget is just uncertainty in this landscape because we're not sure what it's going to look like, what our collections budget's going to look like over time. There are new models. Again, this notion of trying out different things, but the advantage of the subscription and I'm not saying it's the perfect way to go forward, but from my perspective, the it does enable some predictability.
I would love to know, you know, I couldn't sign a 20 year license agreement with a publisher, but I would love to know from others on the call how we could have that conversation. You know, what would be a way for us to think about this together such that, as you say, in January 2026, the rug isn't just pulled out from under you. Collette, go ahead.
Yeah, I'd love to also say a few words on this, and I think the comments about predictability in the level of volatility are spot on. You know, I think that the models that we've had in place for many years have offered that while there have been changes over time, we've been able to sort of all look forward and know what to expect over the next couple of years, for example.
And we are absolutely entering into a state that an old colleague from my old role used to call vuca, which is apparently a military term that refers to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Right and we've got it all coming in there right now. And my perspective is that this actually requires partnership. I think that it is going to require a diversity of models, a diversity of approaches, and that we really need to partner together with the library community, the funding community and the publishing community to find a variety of models that might include multi payer options and things of that nature in order to actually weather this.
And I do think that the picture is quite different for a small society publisher like aps than it might be for a Springer Nature or a Wylie or an Elsevier that has the ability to at scale do things differently than you can when you're a small organization. And I also was would like to comment on the comments about apcs and the transparency question, and I don't object to transparency. I think the real tricky thing is that apcs really have been we've been offering subvention for the apcs that we offer.
Right now. We're charging less than it would actually cost us to produce that article. And so as soon as you start to kind of migrate into perhaps a gold model, you're kind of in a difficult spot because you're starting to find yourself in a place that you might be charging my member community more than I would like to in order to actually sustain a gold model.
And so finding other mechanisms that kind of sort of take that pressure off, I think would be tremendous and really helpful. So I do feel like there's opportunity there for us as stakeholders to come together and have those conversations and to come up with some creative solutions. That would be my hope. David and I'm not obsessed with transformative agreements.
It's just they've been going for seven years. So we've they've been evolving. They do now increasingly include they did always include subscriptions and open access. Hence the reason why they were originally called read and publish deals. But they have evolved to become multi payer models that pull together library funding with Grant funding.
And that's again something that those who can operate them are doing them on behalf of their customers because that was a pain point for their customers. And so they've been needing to do that. They're increasingly including fully open access journals as well as journals in transition, which increases the amount of funding and that reduces volatility because just scale does help offset that at least proportionately.
And then lastly, they're increasingly utilizing corridors, if you like, floors and caps to reduce the uncertainty for the customers and for the suppliers, the publishers, because everybody likes predictability. It's not just libraries that like predictability, publishers also have costs to incur to collect point. Apex are not as it's not as high income as was possible when you pulled together subscriptions and content licensing and other sources, corporations, hospitals, which are not going to be contributing to the open access fees in the same way.
So the burden is falling more quietly on research intensive institutions and is also requiring publishers to find a way of reducing our costs in order to accommodate that lower income. But predictability is helpful no matter what you've got to do, or else you can't plan towards it. So I'm just saying, thinking that the collective statement of partnership, that's how I see.
Transformative agreements. They are a vehicle via which you can have the discussion about what are the key requirements for the customer. How can we meet those and what things can we draw upon that's already been created for others? So we don't have to go through the cost, the time, the uncertainty of having to develop things from scratch. It looks like Angela is ready to jump in.
Yeah, I'd like to add a few things that I think the library community could do to help assure particularly small publishers and society publishers. And really, there needs to be a commitment to taking the time to do outreach and to discuss models that work and whether it be subscriptions or app payments. There has been a fear, particularly after plan s, that the smaller publishers and independent societies would be mostly shut out of the transformative agreements.
And I can tell you that that is 100% true. I have been on the receiving end of being told by a large European consortia that we were not big enough for them to bother having those discussions with. And so there needs to be a commitment to we're also willing to talk to you. And I think the other thing that I've been struggling with a little bit is why in some of the library communities are continuing to push for broad reuse licenses on the green model.
I don't I don't understand the skin in the game on that other than to other than an ideological approach. And that has significant revenue ramifications for some of us. Angela, just to make sure everyone understands you're talking about I think you're talking about the non commercial aspect of the licenses. Is that is that right or.
Yep Thank you. This is a great conversation we've got going, so I'm happy to move us on. But if anyone wants to circle back with anything, Barbara or anybody else, happy to give you a chance to jump jump in. Otherwise I'll take us forward. So and I should note, we do have one or two questions that have come in. If if our webinar attendees have questions for us, feel free to put them in the chat now.
But I think what I, what I'd like to try to pull us back to a little bit because we've gotten into by no means the weeds, but some really interesting discussion about the particularities of some of the models here. I think at a broad level, what's really amazing compared to what this webinar might have looked like five or 10 years ago, is that there is a clear consensus on this panel that open access is a good thing.
Right and even though we I think everyone sort of sees the sees the benefits of it, you know, there's a way in which no one really wants to pay for it. Right I mean, and I don't there's a challenge in terms of where the payment is going to come from. The policies here in the US are largely business model, agnostic, or at least that's how it looks like. And that's what we've all been talking around, right?
Like in Europe, there's been much more of a steer in terms of it should work this way. At least that's been my observation. So and in the us, you know, it's pretty clear that researchers will be able to, if they wish to use their grant funding for publication costs. And and on the other hand, it also seems like congress, in its wisdom, is not prepared to simply put money into the system to pay for publishing costs.
Right so even though researchers may be able to have access to apks directly, there's not likely to be additional money coming into the system to support publishing apks or transformative agreements or other alternative infrastructure, even for compliance or distribution or what have you. So all of this seems to mean that one way or the other, we're going to end up diverting funds, potentially funds that would have otherwise paid directly for research to support, whether it be apks or other kinds of infrastructure in support of compliance.
Right and that that just seems like an inevitability of the way that this is coming together. So so I guess what I'm. Would love to put to the panel is if we're likely to see even a modest decrease there, therefore, the amount of funding that goes to research directly. Is that a reasonable trade here? Like is that a good outcome? And are there things that we can do to keep as much resources as possible for the actual work of science, which I think we're all ultimately here to support and enable?
So I'd love to turn that question over 2 over to the panel. I can go. I can start. Roger so for four. I mean, I obviously represent a not for profit society, and I could certainly say that for my member community, that would not be a reasonable trade.
The reward system that's in place really, you know, we would be doing no favors to my member community if we made it difficult for them to publish. I do hear from my community worries about their ability to pay in a gold environment across the board, not just with aps, what they might publish with aps, because of course they publish with more than just aps. And so I do think that we do we do need to do more to reassure the research community that there will be funding available to support their work and that it won't drain their current research budgets that they need in order to cover the costs for post-docs and grad students and et cetera.
And so I think the real trick is, how do we make sure it isn't a trade off right? That we can get to a place where we're able to support a healthy ecosystem with a variety of models that isn't putting all the onus on libraries. I've noticed some of the comments and I hear you and agree it shouldn't just be on libraries, but also looks across the entire ecosystem to make sure there's an appropriate level of funding.
And so I think there is some onus on the funders as well, if they want a policy like this to ensure that there's funding available to support it. And so that's all I'll say on that. I'll just jump in. Just following your points. One of the things when the library director spoke with the federal agencies was this concern that if we were to focus only on a gold model, that that is money that is diverted from research.
And so I think that is a concern. It's interesting to hear your perspective on that, too, because that is a depending on what kind of entity you are, that impact can be greater or lesser. Right so it sounds like it would have great impact on the size of your organization. We haven't really touched on this, and I don't want to take us too far off track here. But the APC model, too, we haven't touched on the equity issues that was Yale in the current moment can pay for APC and that doesn't mean, we're not that the growth of that we can predict the growth and how far this will go and how scalable.
This will be. We are an institution and I want to just put it out there of privilege to be able to pay for this. That is not true of all institutions, both in the US and especially beyond. And so that is a concern long term about shifting the equity issues to the researcher. Right that making it harder for publication. So that that is a concern that is coupled with the potential of the reduction of actual resources research done with federal funds.
Yeah that's very helpful. Steven, I see you're unmuting yourself. So I think we should ask you to speak to it as well. Thank you. A little bit like we're all enthusiastic about the potential benefits of open research and open access. I think we're all wanting to maximize the amount of money.
Funding available to research. So I don't think anybody's going to say that that should be reduced. But I think one also needs to look at the whole enterprise of research. What is clear and there's been quite there's been some published research on this, is that because data and encode and some degree protocols when it comes to reproducibility and building on work isn't currently available.
There is work that is duplicated. There is work that has errors in that are not found early enough and it is much harder to build on work, especially in the employed area that could be taken into the commercial sector to create economic growth in society, which in turn increases the amount of taxpayer's income which fuels ultimately research itself. So when you look at a whole enterprise level, there is a return on investment for funding more on that, particularly the data on the code side in the sciences, I think it's a harder case when you get outside of the hard sciences and the Applied Sciences into some other areas.
And I don't know, there might well be a case for it, but it might be harder to harder to make. But there's certainly a case in substantial parts of research and like it or not, open access to the articles is a stepping stone to that. You can't get there without the open access to the articles themselves. Proper open access, not just public access, not just free, but but reusable.
So in my view, we have to look at it as the whole enterprise. And ideally we could convince with a proper set of data, Congress and appropriations to actually fund more. But if we can't, we should, at least as it's not for publishers or libraries, actually, it will be for funding agencies and policy makers to decide whether they can take a joined up approach and see that the benefit of funding, the funding that they put into research can be magnified and accelerated the research progress through the use of open research techniques to the fullest extent, not across everything.
I think there's quite a lot of things that could be pragmatically looked at and said, this doesn't really create a return on investment, but these areas do, and at least we should start with those and not allow, if you like, the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Let's make sure that we can do it well. But if we can't get money from the government, then we should at least make sure that the money that is available is applied in the most effective way possible for the benefit of the whole of society, because in the long term that will be more self sustaining and more beneficial to all of us.
So there have been a couple of questions that have come into the chat, which I thought were the questions box rather, which some of which I think helped to help to indicate the diversity of attendees that we have here and perspectives that we have among attendees as well. Steven, I think I want to put one question to you, because it sort of brings together a few questions that have come in that seem to focus on the place and perspective of commercial publishers in the ecosystem.
So I'll just gloss through a couple of lines here. So one person wrote that the conversation so far seems to imply that libraries must must continue to support the commercial publishing industry, and we should be giving publishers assurances we'll continue to fund them. That may be a reaction to something that the question that I asked actually more so than something that you've said.
But but there is a question since the idea that libraries are responsible for maintaining the status quo by continuing to fund publishers, while publishers aren't necessarily rethinking their business models and approaches, feels problematic and that the onus is on publishers to demonstrate their value in a new landscape. Could you perhaps speak directly to that? Because I think you've been talking around it a little bit, but I thought you should have the opportunity to respond directly to that perspective.
I don't think so. If I've given them a different impression, then I'll try and correct it now. I think it's up to everybody to show the value that they bring to the table on behalf of the responsibilities that they have in the system. I think publishers are, in my experience, trying to do that. I think some have been doing it for longer than others. We started publishing open access in 2006.
So I feel like we've been on this journey for a long time. And at least a big all the time I've been in academic or scholarly publishing. We have been changing our organization continuously and changing our costs and changing of what we offer and how we offer it to try to better meet what we're told are the needs from our customers. There's these things like funding agencies. I don't think we're it's for us to define as service providers what the demand should be.
I think for us to listen to what that demand is and try to meet it in the most effective and efficient ways possible. And that's what we try to do. If I'm given the idea that it's for others to adapt and to meet our needs, then please take that as a correction. I think it's quite the opposite. I think we should listen to our market and our customers and meet their needs and do so in a transparent way so that ultimately that what we deliver and the value for money we deliver can be objectively assessed and compared with others.
And the money. The business should move to wherever is most efficient and effective, not be fossilized on some status quo. Thank you. I appreciate those that you're sharing that I think unless there are other comments that any of the panelists wishes to offer on anything that we've already discussed, and I'll just pause for one moment to look around and see.
Oh, Colette, go ahead. Well, before you conclude, Roger, I saw a comment about smaller publishers being driven towards commercial publishers. And I'd love to say a quick word about that, because I really am a firm believer that a diverse publishing ecosystem where large scholarly publishers sit along smaller publishers like apps, is really essential because it drives innovation and experimentation.
So I am a proponent for us having models that enable smaller publishers to continue to survive and to exist independently. And so we do need some flexibility in the system to ensure that we have a diversity of models available so that each individual organization can choose the best approach to transform. So I just thought I would say a quick word about that.
Yeah, I think that's a great note to note to end on. I think that we have a. An ecosystem that is fairly diverse here, both on the library side as well as the publisher side. I think we could easily bring a few more voices into this mix and bring as many more perspectives to bear and experiences to bear. But I think as we look around, there are real pressures, both, frankly, on all sides to push us towards scale.
And one of the challenges in the push to scale can be the paving over of some of the diversity that we have in approaches and models. So perhaps that's a good note to leave things on. I can't Thank enough our four panelists, Colette, Angela, Steven, Barbara, for sharing with such kindness and candor your own perspectives. And I think that one of the things that I hope has come out of this discussion is some opportunity for further dialogue and some additional collaborations, perhaps.
And with that, Jason, I'd like to turn things back to you. All right. Thank you, Roger. And Thank you all to the panelists. This was a very informative and engaging discussion, and I really think we could keep going for another hour. Thank you as well to all of our attendees for joining us today. And of course, Thanks to our 2023 education sponsors, Morresier, silverchair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000 attendees.
You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide us with feedback to help us pick topics for our future events. And please also check the SSP website for information on upcoming SSP events, including, of course, the 45th annual meeting coming up in Portland, Oregon. Today's discussion was recorded and all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SSP website.
This concludes our session. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, everyone. Bye Thanks.
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