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Open access implementation pain points
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Open access implementation pain points
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Segment:0 .
SIMONE TAYLOR: Welcome to NISO Plus 2022. This is a session on the pain points and implementation. Open access has grown to become a significant component of scholarly publishing. Yet its implementation, particularly in response to funding mandates, continues to be challenging at all stages of the workflow, from funding requirements through to publication. Our panel of experts will discuss core problems, including workflow, payments, and reporting, and offer potential solutions for which we invite your feedback in the discussion at the end of the presentations.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Starting us off, Josh Brown, co-founder of MoreBrains co-operative, who will provide an overview of dependencies and open access workflows, presenting a case study of persistent identifiers. AJ Boston, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University, will discuss the challenges librarians face in grappling with the administrative burden of changing policy in emerging business models. Sara Rouhi is director, strategic partnerships at PLOS, a born OA publisher and will walk us through a publisher perspective and the business models on offer.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Martin Jagerhorn, head of business development at ChronosHub, will conclude the presentation, focusing on the potential for FAIR principles to be standardized or more widely adopted. Let's get started. I'll now hand it over to Josh.
JOSH BROWN: Thank you, Simone. And thanks, everyone, for your attention. I'll just share my screen. Fantastic. Well, as Simone said, my name is Josh. I'm a co-founder for research and strategy at MoreBrains Cooperative. And today, I am going to talk about some unserved dependencies because I believe these dependencies across different actors in the open access landscape are a source of most of the pain points.
JOSH BROWN: And take a look at how these foundational gaps in information exchange, interoperability, and system connection are actually causing problems on using persistent identifiers as a case study. So just before I get started, I just have to acknowledge that this work was funded by a grant from Research England, one of the UK's national funders, and commissioned by Jisc. And I'd also like to thank all the experts from around the world who took part in the work that I'll be presenting today and are very generous with their expertise and knowledge.
JOSH BROWN: So why use identifiers as a case study? Well, I think this excerpt from a blog post by Yvonne Campfens of the Open Access Switchboard from December last year sums it up beautifully. And it's all about shared infrastructure. And as she says, PIDs are indispensable, and PIDs in article-level metadata are critical for solving real problems. And some of these problems and the absence of reliable and dependable PID connections are what I'll be talking about today.
JOSH BROWN: So for the work we're talking about, we have developed four ideal world PID-optimized workflows. So a vision of how the workflows that we have to deliver today, the activities that professionals are delivering all around the world, could be made better, automated, made more efficient, made easier with reliable source flows of metadata coming in from PID systems and out to PID registries, where they would then open for others to re-use.
JOSH BROWN: Now, we focused on a range of workflows. Funding, content publication, research data, and institutional research management. All of which, as you can imagine, drawing huge amounts of metadata and information about research activities that take place outside their core spheres. So this is an example of the process we went through. Now, you can see, this has been pretty intense.
JOSH BROWN: Each one of these columns represents a workshop. The first one in which we map out the activity. The second one in which we share a draft of how we've kind of optimized that using PIDs. And then iterations of that to get us to the final version. The four workflows we've created cover the entire research lifecycle. Now, if you think about that bit, you've developed a hypothesis.
JOSH BROWN: You begin to put together an idea for a project that is supported by an institution, that leads to funding. That leads to creating research collaborations, the generation of data, and reports, and publications of articles. And all of these things are fed back to the funder, to the institution, this really does cover the entire research lifecycle. And many, many actors from all the domains involved from publication, libraries, research managers, project managers, and of course, researchers themselves, both as investigators and as authors, I'm not going to go into the detail of all of these, but just to give you a sense of what the content is, we identify overall stages in each workflow.
JOSH BROWN: Generic activities that take place in this. An example there would be an applicant for a grant registering with the funder using their online system. And then these sticky notes in the third column indicate the PIDs that could be used to support that activity. So in this case, the researcher uses their ORCID. And then the fourth column on the right shows how those PIDs could or should be used to support that activity and make it more efficient.
JOSH BROWN: Now, we focused this analysis based-- as I said, this was funded by UK funders, so this is kind of comes from the UK national PID strategy. We focus this on five priority PIDs. Crossref DOIs for grants. ORCID IDs for people. Research Activity Identifiers for projects. Research Organization Registry Identifiers for organizations and Crossref and DataCite DOIs for outputs.
JOSH BROWN: And the key point I want to make is what these all have in common, is they are open infrastructures. And they provide FAIR that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable metadata. And that's really where the value for these workflows comes from, is in exchanging that metadata in a way that it can be reused with minimal barriers. So learning from these workflows, we can see that one principle we identified is that collecting and sharing information as early as possible maximizes the benefits from making that information available for re-use.
JOSH BROWN: So here, you see the application state there's a cluster of PIDs here on that second line. And all of those that represents data being pulled in and reused to automatically populate a funding application. The second red box is during the review, when the funders can reuse that information right down there to identify potential conflicts of interest with reviewers, provide contextual information about the funding applicant to the reviewer, and so on.
JOSH BROWN: So even from one stage to the next, there are benefits from sharing these as early as possible. Another point is it makes it very easy to identify dependencies. So taking the second line again, you can see that gathering application or CV profile data involves pulling data from all of these registries you can see in the third column. So that's a major dependency crunch point as it were.
JOSH BROWN: So to take an example of how these dependencies play out in real life, this is our content publication workflow. This is a little more involved and involves multiple stages across different stakeholders than some of our others. But you can see here, it takes in preprint servers, gold OA journals, toll access journals, and a range of repositories. And each of these blue boxes, there are various core research information infrastructures involved as well.
JOSH BROWN: So I had a wonderful morning mapping out some of these. This is not an exhaustive illustration of all of the dependencies that we were found. But this I thought was enough to make the point, which is that every single one of these purple arrows represents a dependency on somebody having already taken an action. You can see there are ones that move from repositories to journals, from journals to funders, from data repositories to preprint repositories, from institutions in all of their myriad actions.
JOSH BROWN: And this is where they're supporting things like APC payments, policy compliance checks. All of these dependencies which PIDs could be used to serve? Now, there are valuable intermediaries and facilitators who work across the landscape and put this information in and make these processes more efficient. But PIDs support their activities as well. And without this information available openly, it adds burden, and it slows things down.
JOSH BROWN: So here, you can see a brilliant example of that dependency I highlighted. There's a cluster of these purple arrows coming to the funder. And this is all about open access policies. Having a reliable grant identifier, which contains links to all metadata for a machine actionable, machine readable version of their open access policy makes a huge difference to workflows throughout the publication lifecycle.
JOSH BROWN: Now, a quick spot analysis of these shows we have a bit of a problem. A lot of these dependencies are not met. Now, here's a great one. That funder dependency is a cluster of red lines in this version of our diagram. This is where that information is not being made available. Machine readable, machine actionable open access policy information is an unserved dependency.
JOSH BROWN: Now, a lot of these dotted lines are sometimes served, but not consistently. That represents, I think, the scale of the waste that this represents. The scale of people having to engineer solutions to fill these gaps, repeated requests for information. So there are some lessons we can draw from the gaps in this diagram.
JOSH BROWN: One is let's just think about this and the implications of what those lines mean. They represent manual data entry. Multiple emails back and forth to request and share information and a lot of frustration. Now, as I said, there are players. There are partners. There are librarians, service providers, open access management platforms who do a lot streamlining these processes.
JOSH BROWN: But they can't do everything if the data just isn't there. And they need to ask for some additional data to be provided. And here's my second point. Every single one of those lines represents a waste of time, money, and expertise. The minds of all of these people could be better put to work providing more support to research and helping develop better systems and more efficiencies. However, there is a positive.
JOSH BROWN: All of these PIDs exist by definition. You saw that we were looking at existing identify systems in the design of the workflows. So this is all here, and it could be implemented. So my final call to all of us is everybody benefits if and only if everyone else does their bit. Nobody benefits until everybody benefits. Because all of those dependencies play across large and small players.
JOSH BROWN: We need better standards for metadata exchange between PID registries because the benefits come from reusing that metadata. And actually, the automations, the time savings, multiple times, every time that metadata is reused more than once, that's a multiplier on the benefits. And collectively, we need to lower the cost and difficulty of implementing these systems. And this is where standards and community bodies like NISO have a huge part to play in making it easier to leverage these critical infrastructures because as I said, nobody benefits until everybody else benefits.
JOSH BROWN: So those are my take-home slides. Thank you for your attention. I will stop sharing and pass over to AJ for his presentation.
AJ BOSTON: That was great, Josh. Thank you.
JOSH BROWN: Thanks, AJ.
AJ BOSTON: And let me just work through my Zoom share Implementation Pain Points, and we'll get started. All right. So hey, everybody. I am AJ Boston. I'm a scholarly communication librarian at Murray State University. And it's my pleasure to be able to speak with you all today. In this brief presentation, I want to provide you with a list of open access implementation pain points.
AJ BOSTON: And these are broken down into two categories. The first category is payment. And the related pain points of this category include who's going to pay and by how much? The second category is policy. And the related pain points in this category include what the hell does this mean? And who's going to explain it? And that's all of them.
AJ BOSTON: That's a comprehensive list of open access implementation pain points. And I look forward to answering your questions in the Q&A. OK. Joking a little bit there, but just a little. I do think many open access implementation pain points can basically be boiled down to these four. So let's go ahead and talk about them in a little bit more depth.
AJ BOSTON: Starting in the payment category, we begin with who's going to pay, and by how much? Even going back to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, there has not been consensus on a single way forward. The agreed outcome, I think it's safe to say, among open access advocates, has been to make more research literature open access. But that's what's been less agreed upon is who will pay, if not the reader, and by how much?
AJ BOSTON: So let's run through some of the ways that have been devised to redirect the payment source away from the individual reader. One of the first models we saw was the APC, where the author would pay to make their article open. Or more often, the author's funder or institution would pay on their behalf. You've probably seen some of the multifigure prices that big name journals charge.
AJ BOSTON: And so one pain point is simply that not everyone can afford this route. And the disparity there can only serve to increase inequity in the research landscape. A more recent open payment model is the so-called transformative agreement, where a library or institution pays its authors APCs and a bundle, along with subscription access to read these same journals. TAs are great options for authors at well-resourced institutions because authors don't have to think too hard about payment.
AJ BOSTON: And it's a great option for the partnering publishers because it guarantees cash flow and creates an incentive for funded authors to choose to submit to their journals over others. But again, a huge pain point is the increase of inequity between those who can pay and those who cannot. The next model I want to mention is the diamond or platinum open access journal, where the journal has some benefactor on their side, like a library or other host institution subsidizing cost, which allows any reader to read and any author to publish without paying a fee.
AJ BOSTON: I prefer to call this diamond. Others call it platinum. And whatever you want to call it, the pain point comes down to the ability to maintain sufficient funding. And let me also note that the whole color and minerals-based coding scheme for open access types, like green, gold, and bronze, that's a pain point all in itself.
AJ BOSTON: Next, a very new open model is subscribed to open, which is where a journal will open up a year's worth of articles, regardless of the author's funder or institution if an undisclosed level of subscribers are maintained. And I know I'm horribly oversimplifying this one and recommend you go read further about STO if you're unfamiliar with it.
AJ BOSTON: But the pain point here again comes down to maintaining sufficient funding. And then the final open model we'll discuss here is green open access. Rather than paying an article publishing fee to a non-diamond journal, authors are usually able to post their post print manuscript to an open access repository, provided that they correctly cite the publishing journal, as well as adhere to an embargo period if there is one.
AJ BOSTON: There's also the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, which in successful cases, will allow green deposit without embargo. And it's not the case with green open access that nobody has to pay anything. The option requires infrastructure related to the maintenance of a repository and its staffing. Both of which required funding, which of course, is the pain point.
AJ BOSTON: At a recent community call for the US repository network project, there was a Google jamboard for participants to share their IR-related challenges. And the results drove home the fact that funding and policy really are quite common challenges for repository folks. So just to reiterate this slide, there are several different ways that open access may be implemented. And each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
AJ BOSTON: But the commonality is that they all have payment-related pain points. The second commonality is that they have policy-related pain points, which brings us now to our next slide. Yes, policy. What the hell do these policies mean? And who is going to explain it to the authors? So let's talk about three open models from the previous slide, starting with the article processing charge.
AJ BOSTON: APCs. I asked the coffee lister for examples of their own pain points. For APCs, one librarian noted that simply explaining and answering where the money is for author's APCs as a burden. Another librarian at an R1 shared that she found APC payments to be a huge administrative and fiscal burden. In her words, she stated, chasing down and keeping track of all the documentation entailed and processing away fund applications and invoices as a headache.
AJ BOSTON: And frankly, I believe our time could be better spent elsewhere. But she didn't want to shut down the fund, since it did support many grad students and early career researchers who want to publish away, but have no grants or departmental funding. That same librarian also shared some headaches involved with transformative agreements. TAs.
AJ BOSTON: Again, in that librarians own words, she said, the variety and sheer number of business models that are emerging to support both OA journals and monographs is difficult to keep up with these days. She said she understands why so many are needed, but notes this involves a big learning curve, which is resulting in a very high burden in terms of both money and staff resources. Before I move on, I want to hold here to note that I've abbreviated the list on this slide, which could have been very long.
AJ BOSTON: One of the themes that appeared in my conversations around this topic was the sheer complexity of the whole open access situation, how it's increasingly difficult to create outreach materials that quickly and easily explain all this. It's difficult to assess and evaluate all the new business models. And as one of my respondents said, none of these models fit neatly into the way most collection folks would approach assessing a new purchase.
AJ BOSTON: It is important to ask with regards to these models what kind of behaviors and values do we want to support with our limited funds, and then how do we assess the OA content we support? And when it comes to open access content, regular use stats, they're just not very helpful. Now, the final OA implementation I want to talk about is near and dear to my heart.
AJ BOSTON: Green open access. There are many small pain points that one can experience in this space. Let me tell you about some of mine. My library has an open access policy that encourages library faculty to make their scholarship open access, which we've been working to get accepted at the university level. I tried to get the libraries to implement a mandate, but that has so far proved an insurmountable pain point.
AJ BOSTON: In any case, I have sign up for alerts that tell me when faculty from my institution have published. Our faculty region has set up a hashtag that promotes new scholarship that is also very helpful. But even between my different sources, I know that my picture of what is published at my school is incomplete in keeping on top of that as a hurdle. Once I do know someone has published, I'll reach out to them congratulate their new work, and then ask if I may deposit the work on their behalf into the repository.
AJ BOSTON: I'm in an OK position to do this kind of artisanal, small batch strategy because we're a small institution, and I'm on a ton of committees. But the pain points remain. Will they answer their email at all? Will they agree to allow me to deposit? What questions and potential misconceptions do they have about copyrights and the publisher's policies? And biggest of all, will they send me the correct version of their article.
AJ BOSTON: After I explain, no, that's the published copy you've sent me. I need your final copy without the logos, will they then send me the correct version of their article? Usually, 60-40 odds in favor that they will. And even in the best case scenario, this all takes about 10 to 20 minutes of my day, which is not a lot. But it adds up. And that's a pain point.
AJ BOSTON: In conclusion, I would ask the audience what they think could be done to mitigate or even wipe out one or more of these pain point categories. For instance, does a third party provider have the right model in mind to handle the paperwork? Oh, let me get those on the screen for you. I'm so sorry.
AJ BOSTON: Will the right campaign with the perfectly chosen words push all authors to deposit green or publish in diamond journals? Could there be a revolution around the corner with the academy-owned OA publishing supplants all current dominant forms of publishing? Could institutions coordinate transformative agreements in a way that extends subsidization of OA fees to all authors regardless of affiliation?
AJ BOSTON: Am I leading the witness with my hypotheticals? I don't know. Maybe. But I do want to hear your ideas for how to fix any of this. I'm going to go ahead and thank you very much for your time. And I'll leave the rest of this for further discussion. And I look forward to the chat. And I will now pass it on to Sara.
SARA ROUHI: Thanks, AJ. That was fantastic. Just sharing my screen now. I'm really happy to go after Josh and AJ because I think I tag team nicely with the points that they raised. And I'll be sharing the perspective from PLOS as a native open access publisher. My name is Sarah Rouhi, the director of strategic partnerships at PLOS.
SARA ROUHI: And my focus today is going to be pain points from the publisher perspective, but the overlap with what all of our speakers are going to address, I think, really speaks to the stakeholder-wide, cross-industry challenges. These are not siloed within any one type of organization within scholarly communications so at a very high level if you're not aware of PLOS, we've been open access from when we started in the early 2000s.
SARA ROUHI: We now have 12 titles with various levels of scope and levels of acceptance. PLOS One being the major and the first open access mega journal. Since I joined in 2019, PLOS has really prioritized moving away from just article processing charges. I appreciate the intro AJ provided around how those work. To look at more models and the process of exploring different business models has really revealed a whole new set of pain points for PLOS that we didn't know existed even a couple of years ago.
SARA ROUHI: So the four models that are not about charging individual authors are a very transactional model, where the libraries pay on behalf of the authors, which AJ described. There's never enough money for those. They can be quite burdensome to administer. Those library budgets that are dedicated to just paying one article at a time. Additionally, we have three other models.
SARA ROUHI: Our community action and publishing model as a collective action model. Our global equity model focuses on addressing equity challenges based on geographic location. And then our flat fee model for the remaining titles, including PLOS One, is really focused on reducing administrative burden. So these models were generated after talking to consortia and libraries globally for about nine months.
SARA ROUHI: And each one of them is tackling a different issue that PLOS is prioritizing as part of our mission. So the goals vary. The first really is around equity and inclusion. APCs are inherently exclusionary. So you may be as aligned with PLOS around our open science and open access goals. But you may not have even a couple hunded dollars to pay open access charge.
SARA ROUHI: And that's without talking about $11,000, $12,000 APCs which can exist in some places. So there's a fundamental barrier that APCs provide that we want to move away from. And in so doing, generate mixed revenue opportunities for PLOS, right? If we're just focusing on individual authors paying, if you want to talk about retail. We also want to have a kind of B2B model where we have revenue coming in from institutions, that allows authors to engage with PLOS without paying fees.
SARA ROUHI: These models really have to be built on what our actual costs are. So PLOS has been heavily involved in the Plan S price transparency work. So we can explain where our fees are coming from. And libraries obviously expect this if they want to partner with us. And then lastly, a lot of this work reduces the administrative burden that AJ identified because APCs are not the focus of the models.
SARA ROUHI: Essentially, all of them are basically one annual fee for unlimited publishing in PLOS titles. So this is what we're trying to do with the models. And it's once you get into the nitty gritty of how to do this that the pain points arise. And so there'll be a little bit of repetition here, but I'll try to give the publisher angle on this. So the first two challenges around any new model are really around gathering the data and identifying the problems that you want to solve.
SARA ROUHI: The data piece and the modeling piece really rely on persistent identifiers. You need your institutional affiliations to be accurate. You need your accounts of authors, either in the corresponding or contributing author position, to be accurate. And then when you go to build the models, mistakes at a micro level there really start to pile up when you're looking at thousands of papers and hundreds of institutions.
SARA ROUHI: So those two really rely on clean data and robust PIDs, which of course, don't often exist in a sort of systematic way. Then to AJ's point, you have to communicate what these are for. The new model fatigue is real. Institutions and libraries and consortia are talking to many publishers at a time. Every time we roll up with a new innovative model that we're excited about those communities have to synthesize well how does that fit with the models that we're already excuse me we're already familiar with and our systems are built to support and then reporting on the uptake of those models.
SARA ROUHI: It can be quite challenging as well. And then lastly, the challenge around regional approaches is real, right? What works in Europe, let's say, in northern Europe, does not have much appeal in the US and vice-versa. So the pain points a North American Library might articulate are very different. For example, in northern Europe, the entire infrastructure for managing open access is built on APCs.
SARA ROUHI: So any model that moves away from that is actually quite difficult for those regions to synthesize within the existing systems that they have. In North America, managing APCs and APC funding is very ad hoc. It's not resourced in the same way. So models that don't focus on that are actually much more appealing. So there's that need to tweak and adjust, based on regional priorities, in addition to the kind of operational and tactical challenges you have around things like data quality and PIDs.
SARA ROUHI: And just to underscore. I thought Josh did a really nice job of highlighting here. You need fair and open persistent identifiers for everything. For how the research is funded, what the projects are, down to the institutions, the individual authors. And of course, the paper, the data set, the piece of code, the protocol. All of that needs to be persistently mapped, so that you can report to researchers and institutions about what their outputs actually are.
SARA ROUHI: And that is far from comprehensive right now. Additionally, the systems interoperability from a publisher perspective is crucial. This is something I was not anticipating when I came into this work. And I have a newfound appreciation for all of these. Your submission platform needs to talk to your accounting system in a very specific kind of way. Whatever kind of CRM you use to track both your author and your institutional relationships needs to map well with both your accounting systems and your submission platforms.
SARA ROUHI: And then everything that's ingesting this around business intelligence and reporting, they all need to talk to each other. And when they don't have those persistent identifiers, the amount of manual work increases exponentially. And your data quality really starts to drop. So AJ's point around kind of that bespoke artisanal approach when you have a couple of papers works. And you can ensure therefore that the quality of the metadata and all of that is very high.
SARA ROUHI: Once you're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of papers, hundreds of thousands of authors, that's not scalable. And the cost and the weight that puts on any one player in the system, whether it's a publisher, a library, a service provider like Chronos, becomes really, really high. So an important one to fly. So for success in looking at new business models or just thinking about OA your organization, you need, at a very tactical level, really good metadata.
SARA ROUHI: Good data hygiene. Something we're all working on. And because you don't have it, and I've never met an institution that has it perfect, you have to be engaging transparently with your collaborators. And so we actually rely really, really strongly on our library partners to help us sift through our data. Figure out what's accurate.
SARA ROUHI: Figure out what's not. We're really grateful when our partners point out that something's not right or something doesn't look like it's coming from the right place. And then you have to be willing to go back, and fix it, and address what the issues were. Start again. We've been really grateful to our collaborators who do that with us.
SARA ROUHI: And it builds trust. We're not trying to hide anything from anyone. We're just acknowledging that the infrastructure underpinning the system still needs a lot of work, and we're all working on that together. So fundamentally, the next piece is really around communication, which is a whole separate piece from the infrastructure. But you really need to listen to-- when you're talking about new models or open access, generally, you really need to know your audience.
SARA ROUHI: Authors who just want to get published are coming from a very different place than consortia who are administering huge deals across many, many institutions. You need to be transparent about the process, not just the outcomes. How did we get to this model? How did we make the decision to do this? You need to be updating regularly on whether it's working.
SARA ROUHI: I think one of the reasons subscribed to open has been a really successful model that AJ mentioned is because of that commitment from the community to share how that's going. PLOS is trying to do the same with our community action publishing model, which is a different kind of collective action model. And then you need to know how deep to dive and when. This was a pain point that I spent all of 2020 learning about and I'm gonna try to devote 2022 to improving.
SARA ROUHI: PLOS's commitment to openness and transparency actually led us to dive into almost too much detail with consortia and library. Libraries actually waving their arms and saying, no, no, no. Like I don't need to know how that sell and that spreadsheet was calculated. I need you to zoom out. And so that has been a learning that we're taking away to make the pain point for our library and social partners easier on that front.
SARA ROUHI: And if you're asking anyone for feedback, libraries, another publisher, another vendor that's providing data, you have to actually use it. And if you're not going to use it, don't ask for it. There's a lot to learn in there. But again, eliminating pain points is about also respecting people's time. And that's an important piece. So I will leave it at that.
SARA ROUHI: Really excited for the conversation. Delighted to be part of this panel. And I will look forward to the discussion afterwards . With that, let me hand it over to Martin from Chronos.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So thank you, Sara. That was really great presentation and really interesting to see the different perspectives. So publishers and institution perspective and also just overview. So my presentation is trying to bring that little bit together, where we at ChronosHub as an intermediary, trying to streamline open access workflows across the research ecosystem. But I think we can also call this a story about despair versus the magic powers of FAIR.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And we'll see how we fare with that. So as we've seen from publishers and institutions' perspective, there are a lot of different challenges. And we know that open access overall is great. But as you've seen and heard, it's also a little bit of Pandora's box leading to increasing complexities, costs, and frustration. And how we see it, we have a lot of funders that introduce policies.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: They drive publishing preferences, make it difficult for authors to really where to publish in a way that is compliant with these policies. And as we have also seen, these policies drive publishers to develop new business models. And even for open access publishers, like PLOS, there are several different business models. And I think I've heard there are about 20 to different business models for open access today or different mechanisms, like APC, waivers and discounts, and transformative agreements, described to open, and so forth.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So this obviously makes it immensely difficult for institutions, as you heard from AJ. Manually going into a lot of different publisher dashboards and figure out which articles to approve as part of agreements, or just checking where to pay or pick up an invoice. But from our perspective, we see that the worse situation is really for the researchers. Because a lot of the work ends up on their shoulders. They manually have to fill in huge forms when they submit to publishers.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Then they have to submit more or less the same information again on the outputs of their grants when they report back to funders. And then as, again, we heard AJ talking about institutional repositories manually populating them in one way or the other. And so for us, this is really a situational despair because stakeholders do act very much in silos. The systems do not communicate very well with each other generally.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Which means that we have quite fragmented data, which means that we in turn have no real reliable analytics. So this is truly very time-consuming and costly for everyone involved. And in addition to that, we have quite important risks of being non-compliant with bad consequences for both authors and an institutions that increasingly also have to pay, for example, penalties to different funders. So there is hope though.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So if we're introducing FAIR, and I'm sure many of you are very familiar with FAIR. But as sort of little bit recap of those principles. They do give us hope to defeat this kind of situation of despair. So first of all, we need to make data findable, where the most important aspect is to have global unique identifiers. And as Sara pointed out, really for every entity. Not only for the articles, but of course also for the authors, organizations, data management plans, the grants, and so forth.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And making this accessible. And that's also possible, of course. APIs are there since quite some time. So we can have a communication from machine to machine. We also have a lot of different data formats, making it interoperable. And increasingly, we have data being published open access and with licenses that allow reuse, like CC BY and similar.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So all of that is great. And we see this really as the magic powers affair, enabling automation. So we heard in the previous presentations that there are, of course, many, many different systems out there. And the only way to ensure automation is to ensure that we can integrate the different systems with each other.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Now, this illustrates a little bit of our ChronosHub-specific perspective. But the principles apply to every other system out there in the research ecosystem. So we try to illustrate this through an author journey, where the author needs to select a journal that is relevant, and where they understand, and have it transparent what agreements that apply. For example, how much they have to pay if anything.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And if it is compliant with the different funding policies. We also want to facilitate submissions. You don't have to populate everything manually from scratch when you submit it into a peer review system. And then upon acceptance, we want to have a very streamlined process for dynamically assigning the right licenses based on, again, the different agreements. And processing these articles to automate approvals and do automated checks of various aspects, whether the author is really belonging to this institution, if there is a specific cap that needs to be applied, or if a grant funder is actually picking up the invoice when there is an APC involved.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And then dealing with payments. It goes into production. We need a lot of data for reporting. And then we want to re-use this data to automate repository deposits. So in this way, by having data FAIR in all these different systems, then we can truly automate the processes without the need for any manual retyping or manual validation even of the data, as it can be matched up one to one.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So not any story without a big but. So one big but is, of course, that not everyone is using these magic powers. And that's exactly what Josh and Sara also pointed out, that this is a truly collective effort. We will need to do our best to apply these principles. So looking at making data findable. Of course, it's great that more and more systems make use of global unique identifiers.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: But it's still not really systematic. There are a lot of entities, like grants, that do not get GUIs. And even when there are global unique identifiers, like ORCIDs that are being picked up more and more for authors, that's fantastic. But when we look at the data that we receive out of different systems, it's still just a small proportion of the authors that actually have an ORCID ID and not all of them.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And making data accessible, well, fantastic that we have APIs. But still not all publishers want to really make those APIs available. And so we still have quite a blocker there in order to access the data. And it's said for interoperability, we have many formats. Is there a possibility to maybe find a way to agree on a standard format?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: That would, of course, facilitate immensely going forward. And then a lot of content not with the CC BY or similar license. So when we look at that, the question overall that we have is, of course, how do we get more organizations to apply these FAIR principles? So these are a number of questions that would be great to continue to discuss also at this conference and probably also for a long time afterwards.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: But the question is can we mandate the use of global unique identifiers and do that for really all different entities? We heard how important it is with the PIDs. So why or why not? And can we establish a standard data exchange format? We have a lot of different formats. Some are more common among publishers, like XML. Various variations of that.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Institutions are using serif XML as another example of standard in exchange format. So can we join around a given standard? And can maybe NISO be part of this kind of standardization? And the third point here that we would think would be quite interesting to discuss is the possibility or the need to certify system's FAIRness. So is a system like ChronosHub really applying the FAIR principles?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And is that something that we may make all potential customers aware of in including simply a requirement when they do their evaluations of systems, that they have to follow the FAIR principles. A fourth point here is, can we incentivize organizations to provide APIs for others to integrate with? So taking the example of publishers and making their APIs available. Can we find incentives in terms of maybe enabling them to get more revenue or at least save a lot of time and effort?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Or potentially just be satisfied with providing a more or higher degree of customer satisfaction, seem to be able to deliver data to the institutions for re-use. And the last point here is do we want to look at the possibility of ensuring that data becomes fair upon inception? Sara and AJ and Josh obviously emphasize the fact that we want everyone to join in here. But can we get thousands of publishers thousands of institutions all to make their systems FAIR?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Or can we maybe find a shortcut in ensuring that systems that are upstream make data FAIR upon inception. That's what we at least a ChronosHub try to do. So when an author submits an article through the system, well, we have it linked up with unique identifiers for authors, organizations, funders, grants, and so forth. So we're not so dependent on other systems' downstream to also apply all the FAIR principles. We can still sort of automate these processes downstream.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So with that said, thank you very much for the attention here. And very much looking forward to continuing the discussion.
Segment:0 .
SIMONE TAYLOR: Welcome to NISO Plus 2022. This is a session on the pain points and implementation. Open access has grown to become a significant component of scholarly publishing. Yet its implementation, particularly in response to funding mandates, continues to be challenging at all stages of the workflow, from funding requirements through to publication. Our panel of experts will discuss core problems, including workflow, payments, and reporting, and offer potential solutions for which we invite your feedback in the discussion at the end of the presentations.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Starting us off, Josh Brown, co-founder of MoreBrains co-operative, who will provide an overview of dependencies and open access workflows, presenting a case study of persistent identifiers. AJ Boston, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University, will discuss the challenges librarians face in grappling with the administrative burden of changing policy in emerging business models. Sara Rouhi is director, strategic partnerships at PLOS, a born OA publisher and will walk us through a publisher perspective and the business models on offer.
SIMONE TAYLOR: Martin Jagerhorn, head of business development at ChronosHub, will conclude the presentation, focusing on the potential for FAIR principles to be standardized or more widely adopted. Let's get started. I'll now hand it over to Josh.
JOSH BROWN: Thank you, Simone. And thanks, everyone, for your attention. I'll just share my screen. Fantastic. Well, as Simone said, my name is Josh. I'm a co-founder for research and strategy at MoreBrains Cooperative. And today, I am going to talk about some unserved dependencies because I believe these dependencies across different actors in the open access landscape are a source of most of the pain points.
JOSH BROWN: And take a look at how these foundational gaps in information exchange, interoperability, and system connection are actually causing problems on using persistent identifiers as a case study. So just before I get started, I just have to acknowledge that this work was funded by a grant from Research England, one of the UK's national funders, and commissioned by Jisc. And I'd also like to thank all the experts from around the world who took part in the work that I'll be presenting today and are very generous with their expertise and knowledge.
JOSH BROWN: So why use identifiers as a case study? Well, I think this excerpt from a blog post by Yvonne Campfens of the Open Access Switchboard from December last year sums it up beautifully. And it's all about shared infrastructure. And as she says, PIDs are indispensable, and PIDs in article-level metadata are critical for solving real problems. And some of these problems and the absence of reliable and dependable PID connections are what I'll be talking about today.
JOSH BROWN: So for the work we're talking about, we have developed four ideal world PID-optimized workflows. So a vision of how the workflows that we have to deliver today, the activities that professionals are delivering all around the world, could be made better, automated, made more efficient, made easier with reliable source flows of metadata coming in from PID systems and out to PID registries, where they would then open for others to re-use.
JOSH BROWN: Now, we focused on a range of workflows. Funding, content publication, research data, and institutional research management. All of which, as you can imagine, drawing huge amounts of metadata and information about research activities that take place outside their core spheres. So this is an example of the process we went through. Now, you can see, this has been pretty intense.
JOSH BROWN: Each one of these columns represents a workshop. The first one in which we map out the activity. The second one in which we share a draft of how we've kind of optimized that using PIDs. And then iterations of that to get us to the final version. The four workflows we've created cover the entire research lifecycle. Now, if you think about that bit, you've developed a hypothesis.
JOSH BROWN: You begin to put together an idea for a project that is supported by an institution, that leads to funding. That leads to creating research collaborations, the generation of data, and reports, and publications of articles. And all of these things are fed back to the funder, to the institution, this really does cover the entire research lifecycle. And many, many actors from all the domains involved from publication, libraries, research managers, project managers, and of course, researchers themselves, both as investigators and as authors, I'm not going to go into the detail of all of these, but just to give you a sense of what the content is, we identify overall stages in each workflow.
JOSH BROWN: Generic activities that take place in this. An example there would be an applicant for a grant registering with the funder using their online system. And then these sticky notes in the third column indicate the PIDs that could be used to support that activity. So in this case, the researcher uses their ORCID. And then the fourth column on the right shows how those PIDs could or should be used to support that activity and make it more efficient.
JOSH BROWN: Now, we focused this analysis based-- as I said, this was funded by UK funders, so this is kind of comes from the UK national PID strategy. We focus this on five priority PIDs. Crossref DOIs for grants. ORCID IDs for people. Research Activity Identifiers for projects. Research Organization Registry Identifiers for organizations and Crossref and DataCite DOIs for outputs.
JOSH BROWN: And the key point I want to make is what these all have in common, is they are open infrastructures. And they provide FAIR that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable metadata. And that's really where the value for these workflows comes from, is in exchanging that metadata in a way that it can be reused with minimal barriers. So learning from these workflows, we can see that one principle we identified is that collecting and sharing information as early as possible maximizes the benefits from making that information available for re-use.
JOSH BROWN: So here, you see the application state there's a cluster of PIDs here on that second line. And all of those that represents data being pulled in and reused to automatically populate a funding application. The second red box is during the review, when the funders can reuse that information right down there to identify potential conflicts of interest with reviewers, provide contextual information about the funding applicant to the reviewer, and so on.
JOSH BROWN: So even from one stage to the next, there are benefits from sharing these as early as possible. Another point is it makes it very easy to identify dependencies. So taking the second line again, you can see that gathering application or CV profile data involves pulling data from all of these registries you can see in the third column. So that's a major dependency crunch point as it were.
JOSH BROWN: So to take an example of how these dependencies play out in real life, this is our content publication workflow. This is a little more involved and involves multiple stages across different stakeholders than some of our others. But you can see here, it takes in preprint servers, gold OA journals, toll access journals, and a range of repositories. And each of these blue boxes, there are various core research information infrastructures involved as well.
JOSH BROWN: So I had a wonderful morning mapping out some of these. This is not an exhaustive illustration of all of the dependencies that we were found. But this I thought was enough to make the point, which is that every single one of these purple arrows represents a dependency on somebody having already taken an action. You can see there are ones that move from repositories to journals, from journals to funders, from data repositories to preprint repositories, from institutions in all of their myriad actions.
JOSH BROWN: And this is where they're supporting things like APC payments, policy compliance checks. All of these dependencies which PIDs could be used to serve? Now, there are valuable intermediaries and facilitators who work across the landscape and put this information in and make these processes more efficient. But PIDs support their activities as well. And without this information available openly, it adds burden, and it slows things down.
JOSH BROWN: So here, you can see a brilliant example of that dependency I highlighted. There's a cluster of these purple arrows coming to the funder. And this is all about open access policies. Having a reliable grant identifier, which contains links to all metadata for a machine actionable, machine readable version of their open access policy makes a huge difference to workflows throughout the publication lifecycle.
JOSH BROWN: Now, a quick spot analysis of these shows we have a bit of a problem. A lot of these dependencies are not met. Now, here's a great one. That funder dependency is a cluster of red lines in this version of our diagram. This is where that information is not being made available. Machine readable, machine actionable open access policy information is an unserved dependency.
JOSH BROWN: Now, a lot of these dotted lines are sometimes served, but not consistently. That represents, I think, the scale of the waste that this represents. The scale of people having to engineer solutions to fill these gaps, repeated requests for information. So there are some lessons we can draw from the gaps in this diagram.
JOSH BROWN: One is let's just think about this and the implications of what those lines mean. They represent manual data entry. Multiple emails back and forth to request and share information and a lot of frustration. Now, as I said, there are players. There are partners. There are librarians, service providers, open access management platforms who do a lot streamlining these processes.
JOSH BROWN: But they can't do everything if the data just isn't there. And they need to ask for some additional data to be provided. And here's my second point. Every single one of those lines represents a waste of time, money, and expertise. The minds of all of these people could be better put to work providing more support to research and helping develop better systems and more efficiencies. However, there is a positive.
JOSH BROWN: All of these PIDs exist by definition. You saw that we were looking at existing identify systems in the design of the workflows. So this is all here, and it could be implemented. So my final call to all of us is everybody benefits if and only if everyone else does their bit. Nobody benefits until everybody benefits. Because all of those dependencies play across large and small players.
JOSH BROWN: We need better standards for metadata exchange between PID registries because the benefits come from reusing that metadata. And actually, the automations, the time savings, multiple times, every time that metadata is reused more than once, that's a multiplier on the benefits. And collectively, we need to lower the cost and difficulty of implementing these systems. And this is where standards and community bodies like NISO have a huge part to play in making it easier to leverage these critical infrastructures because as I said, nobody benefits until everybody else benefits.
JOSH BROWN: So those are my take-home slides. Thank you for your attention. I will stop sharing and pass over to AJ for his presentation.
AJ BOSTON: That was great, Josh. Thank you.
JOSH BROWN: Thanks, AJ.
AJ BOSTON: And let me just work through my Zoom share Implementation Pain Points, and we'll get started. All right. So hey, everybody. I am AJ Boston. I'm a scholarly communication librarian at Murray State University. And it's my pleasure to be able to speak with you all today. In this brief presentation, I want to provide you with a list of open access implementation pain points.
AJ BOSTON: And these are broken down into two categories. The first category is payment. And the related pain points of this category include who's going to pay and by how much? The second category is policy. And the related pain points in this category include what the hell does this mean? And who's going to explain it? And that's all of them.
AJ BOSTON: That's a comprehensive list of open access implementation pain points. And I look forward to answering your questions in the Q&A. OK. Joking a little bit there, but just a little. I do think many open access implementation pain points can basically be boiled down to these four. So let's go ahead and talk about them in a little bit more depth.
AJ BOSTON: Starting in the payment category, we begin with who's going to pay, and by how much? Even going back to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, there has not been consensus on a single way forward. The agreed outcome, I think it's safe to say, among open access advocates, has been to make more research literature open access. But that's what's been less agreed upon is who will pay, if not the reader, and by how much?
AJ BOSTON: So let's run through some of the ways that have been devised to redirect the payment source away from the individual reader. One of the first models we saw was the APC, where the author would pay to make their article open. Or more often, the author's funder or institution would pay on their behalf. You've probably seen some of the multifigure prices that big name journals charge.
AJ BOSTON: And so one pain point is simply that not everyone can afford this route. And the disparity there can only serve to increase inequity in the research landscape. A more recent open payment model is the so-called transformative agreement, where a library or institution pays its authors APCs and a bundle, along with subscription access to read these same journals. TAs are great options for authors at well-resourced institutions because authors don't have to think too hard about payment.
AJ BOSTON: And it's a great option for the partnering publishers because it guarantees cash flow and creates an incentive for funded authors to choose to submit to their journals over others. But again, a huge pain point is the increase of inequity between those who can pay and those who cannot. The next model I want to mention is the diamond or platinum open access journal, where the journal has some benefactor on their side, like a library or other host institution subsidizing cost, which allows any reader to read and any author to publish without paying a fee.
AJ BOSTON: I prefer to call this diamond. Others call it platinum. And whatever you want to call it, the pain point comes down to the ability to maintain sufficient funding. And let me also note that the whole color and minerals-based coding scheme for open access types, like green, gold, and bronze, that's a pain point all in itself.
AJ BOSTON: Next, a very new open model is subscribed to open, which is where a journal will open up a year's worth of articles, regardless of the author's funder or institution if an undisclosed level of subscribers are maintained. And I know I'm horribly oversimplifying this one and recommend you go read further about STO if you're unfamiliar with it.
AJ BOSTON: But the pain point here again comes down to maintaining sufficient funding. And then the final open model we'll discuss here is green open access. Rather than paying an article publishing fee to a non-diamond journal, authors are usually able to post their post print manuscript to an open access repository, provided that they correctly cite the publishing journal, as well as adhere to an embargo period if there is one.
AJ BOSTON: There's also the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, which in successful cases, will allow green deposit without embargo. And it's not the case with green open access that nobody has to pay anything. The option requires infrastructure related to the maintenance of a repository and its staffing. Both of which required funding, which of course, is the pain point.
AJ BOSTON: At a recent community call for the US repository network project, there was a Google jamboard for participants to share their IR-related challenges. And the results drove home the fact that funding and policy really are quite common challenges for repository folks. So just to reiterate this slide, there are several different ways that open access may be implemented. And each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
AJ BOSTON: But the commonality is that they all have payment-related pain points. The second commonality is that they have policy-related pain points, which brings us now to our next slide. Yes, policy. What the hell do these policies mean? And who is going to explain it to the authors? So let's talk about three open models from the previous slide, starting with the article processing charge.
AJ BOSTON: APCs. I asked the coffee lister for examples of their own pain points. For APCs, one librarian noted that simply explaining and answering where the money is for author's APCs as a burden. Another librarian at an R1 shared that she found APC payments to be a huge administrative and fiscal burden. In her words, she stated, chasing down and keeping track of all the documentation entailed and processing away fund applications and invoices as a headache.
AJ BOSTON: And frankly, I believe our time could be better spent elsewhere. But she didn't want to shut down the fund, since it did support many grad students and early career researchers who want to publish away, but have no grants or departmental funding. That same librarian also shared some headaches involved with transformative agreements. TAs.
AJ BOSTON: Again, in that librarians own words, she said, the variety and sheer number of business models that are emerging to support both OA journals and monographs is difficult to keep up with these days. She said she understands why so many are needed, but notes this involves a big learning curve, which is resulting in a very high burden in terms of both money and staff resources. Before I move on, I want to hold here to note that I've abbreviated the list on this slide, which could have been very long.
AJ BOSTON: One of the themes that appeared in my conversations around this topic was the sheer complexity of the whole open access situation, how it's increasingly difficult to create outreach materials that quickly and easily explain all this. It's difficult to assess and evaluate all the new business models. And as one of my respondents said, none of these models fit neatly into the way most collection folks would approach assessing a new purchase.
AJ BOSTON: It is important to ask with regards to these models what kind of behaviors and values do we want to support with our limited funds, and then how do we assess the OA content we support? And when it comes to open access content, regular use stats, they're just not very helpful. Now, the final OA implementation I want to talk about is near and dear to my heart.
AJ BOSTON: Green open access. There are many small pain points that one can experience in this space. Let me tell you about some of mine. My library has an open access policy that encourages library faculty to make their scholarship open access, which we've been working to get accepted at the university level. I tried to get the libraries to implement a mandate, but that has so far proved an insurmountable pain point.
AJ BOSTON: In any case, I have sign up for alerts that tell me when faculty from my institution have published. Our faculty region has set up a hashtag that promotes new scholarship that is also very helpful. But even between my different sources, I know that my picture of what is published at my school is incomplete in keeping on top of that as a hurdle. Once I do know someone has published, I'll reach out to them congratulate their new work, and then ask if I may deposit the work on their behalf into the repository.
AJ BOSTON: I'm in an OK position to do this kind of artisanal, small batch strategy because we're a small institution, and I'm on a ton of committees. But the pain points remain. Will they answer their email at all? Will they agree to allow me to deposit? What questions and potential misconceptions do they have about copyrights and the publisher's policies? And biggest of all, will they send me the correct version of their article.
AJ BOSTON: After I explain, no, that's the published copy you've sent me. I need your final copy without the logos, will they then send me the correct version of their article? Usually, 60-40 odds in favor that they will. And even in the best case scenario, this all takes about 10 to 20 minutes of my day, which is not a lot. But it adds up. And that's a pain point.
AJ BOSTON: In conclusion, I would ask the audience what they think could be done to mitigate or even wipe out one or more of these pain point categories. For instance, does a third party provider have the right model in mind to handle the paperwork? Oh, let me get those on the screen for you. I'm so sorry.
AJ BOSTON: Will the right campaign with the perfectly chosen words push all authors to deposit green or publish in diamond journals? Could there be a revolution around the corner with the academy-owned OA publishing supplants all current dominant forms of publishing? Could institutions coordinate transformative agreements in a way that extends subsidization of OA fees to all authors regardless of affiliation?
AJ BOSTON: Am I leading the witness with my hypotheticals? I don't know. Maybe. But I do want to hear your ideas for how to fix any of this. I'm going to go ahead and thank you very much for your time. And I'll leave the rest of this for further discussion. And I look forward to the chat. And I will now pass it on to Sara.
SARA ROUHI: Thanks, AJ. That was fantastic. Just sharing my screen now. I'm really happy to go after Josh and AJ because I think I tag team nicely with the points that they raised. And I'll be sharing the perspective from PLOS as a native open access publisher. My name is Sarah Rouhi, the director of strategic partnerships at PLOS.
SARA ROUHI: And my focus today is going to be pain points from the publisher perspective, but the overlap with what all of our speakers are going to address, I think, really speaks to the stakeholder-wide, cross-industry challenges. These are not siloed within any one type of organization within scholarly communications so at a very high level if you're not aware of PLOS, we've been open access from when we started in the early 2000s.
SARA ROUHI: We now have 12 titles with various levels of scope and levels of acceptance. PLOS One being the major and the first open access mega journal. Since I joined in 2019, PLOS has really prioritized moving away from just article processing charges. I appreciate the intro AJ provided around how those work. To look at more models and the process of exploring different business models has really revealed a whole new set of pain points for PLOS that we didn't know existed even a couple of years ago.
SARA ROUHI: So the four models that are not about charging individual authors are a very transactional model, where the libraries pay on behalf of the authors, which AJ described. There's never enough money for those. They can be quite burdensome to administer. Those library budgets that are dedicated to just paying one article at a time. Additionally, we have three other models.
SARA ROUHI: Our community action and publishing model as a collective action model. Our global equity model focuses on addressing equity challenges based on geographic location. And then our flat fee model for the remaining titles, including PLOS One, is really focused on reducing administrative burden. So these models were generated after talking to consortia and libraries globally for about nine months.
SARA ROUHI: And each one of them is tackling a different issue that PLOS is prioritizing as part of our mission. So the goals vary. The first really is around equity and inclusion. APCs are inherently exclusionary. So you may be as aligned with PLOS around our open science and open access goals. But you may not have even a couple hunded dollars to pay open access charge.
SARA ROUHI: And that's without talking about $11,000, $12,000 APCs which can exist in some places. So there's a fundamental barrier that APCs provide that we want to move away from. And in so doing, generate mixed revenue opportunities for PLOS, right? If we're just focusing on individual authors paying, if you want to talk about retail. We also want to have a kind of B2B model where we have revenue coming in from institutions, that allows authors to engage with PLOS without paying fees.
SARA ROUHI: These models really have to be built on what our actual costs are. So PLOS has been heavily involved in the Plan S price transparency work. So we can explain where our fees are coming from. And libraries obviously expect this if they want to partner with us. And then lastly, a lot of this work reduces the administrative burden that AJ identified because APCs are not the focus of the models.
SARA ROUHI: Essentially, all of them are basically one annual fee for unlimited publishing in PLOS titles. So this is what we're trying to do with the models. And it's once you get into the nitty gritty of how to do this that the pain points arise. And so there'll be a little bit of repetition here, but I'll try to give the publisher angle on this. So the first two challenges around any new model are really around gathering the data and identifying the problems that you want to solve.
SARA ROUHI: The data piece and the modeling piece really rely on persistent identifiers. You need your institutional affiliations to be accurate. You need your accounts of authors, either in the corresponding or contributing author position, to be accurate. And then when you go to build the models, mistakes at a micro level there really start to pile up when you're looking at thousands of papers and hundreds of institutions.
SARA ROUHI: So those two really rely on clean data and robust PIDs, which of course, don't often exist in a sort of systematic way. Then to AJ's point, you have to communicate what these are for. The new model fatigue is real. Institutions and libraries and consortia are talking to many publishers at a time. Every time we roll up with a new innovative model that we're excited about those communities have to synthesize well how does that fit with the models that we're already excuse me we're already familiar with and our systems are built to support and then reporting on the uptake of those models.
SARA ROUHI: It can be quite challenging as well. And then lastly, the challenge around regional approaches is real, right? What works in Europe, let's say, in northern Europe, does not have much appeal in the US and vice-versa. So the pain points a North American Library might articulate are very different. For example, in northern Europe, the entire infrastructure for managing open access is built on APCs.
SARA ROUHI: So any model that moves away from that is actually quite difficult for those regions to synthesize within the existing systems that they have. In North America, managing APCs and APC funding is very ad hoc. It's not resourced in the same way. So models that don't focus on that are actually much more appealing. So there's that need to tweak and adjust, based on regional priorities, in addition to the kind of operational and tactical challenges you have around things like data quality and PIDs.
SARA ROUHI: And just to underscore. I thought Josh did a really nice job of highlighting here. You need fair and open persistent identifiers for everything. For how the research is funded, what the projects are, down to the institutions, the individual authors. And of course, the paper, the data set, the piece of code, the protocol. All of that needs to be persistently mapped, so that you can report to researchers and institutions about what their outputs actually are.
SARA ROUHI: And that is far from comprehensive right now. Additionally, the systems interoperability from a publisher perspective is crucial. This is something I was not anticipating when I came into this work. And I have a newfound appreciation for all of these. Your submission platform needs to talk to your accounting system in a very specific kind of way. Whatever kind of CRM you use to track both your author and your institutional relationships needs to map well with both your accounting systems and your submission platforms.
SARA ROUHI: And then everything that's ingesting this around business intelligence and reporting, they all need to talk to each other. And when they don't have those persistent identifiers, the amount of manual work increases exponentially. And your data quality really starts to drop. So AJ's point around kind of that bespoke artisanal approach when you have a couple of papers works. And you can ensure therefore that the quality of the metadata and all of that is very high.
SARA ROUHI: Once you're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of papers, hundreds of thousands of authors, that's not scalable. And the cost and the weight that puts on any one player in the system, whether it's a publisher, a library, a service provider like Chronos, becomes really, really high. So an important one to fly. So for success in looking at new business models or just thinking about OA your organization, you need, at a very tactical level, really good metadata.
SARA ROUHI: Good data hygiene. Something we're all working on. And because you don't have it, and I've never met an institution that has it perfect, you have to be engaging transparently with your collaborators. And so we actually rely really, really strongly on our library partners to help us sift through our data. Figure out what's accurate.
SARA ROUHI: Figure out what's not. We're really grateful when our partners point out that something's not right or something doesn't look like it's coming from the right place. And then you have to be willing to go back, and fix it, and address what the issues were. Start again. We've been really grateful to our collaborators who do that with us.
SARA ROUHI: And it builds trust. We're not trying to hide anything from anyone. We're just acknowledging that the infrastructure underpinning the system still needs a lot of work, and we're all working on that together. So fundamentally, the next piece is really around communication, which is a whole separate piece from the infrastructure. But you really need to listen to-- when you're talking about new models or open access, generally, you really need to know your audience.
SARA ROUHI: Authors who just want to get published are coming from a very different place than consortia who are administering huge deals across many, many institutions. You need to be transparent about the process, not just the outcomes. How did we get to this model? How did we make the decision to do this? You need to be updating regularly on whether it's working.
SARA ROUHI: I think one of the reasons subscribed to open has been a really successful model that AJ mentioned is because of that commitment from the community to share how that's going. PLOS is trying to do the same with our community action publishing model, which is a different kind of collective action model. And then you need to know how deep to dive and when. This was a pain point that I spent all of 2020 learning about and I'm gonna try to devote 2022 to improving.
SARA ROUHI: PLOS's commitment to openness and transparency actually led us to dive into almost too much detail with consortia and library. Libraries actually waving their arms and saying, no, no, no. Like I don't need to know how that sell and that spreadsheet was calculated. I need you to zoom out. And so that has been a learning that we're taking away to make the pain point for our library and social partners easier on that front.
SARA ROUHI: And if you're asking anyone for feedback, libraries, another publisher, another vendor that's providing data, you have to actually use it. And if you're not going to use it, don't ask for it. There's a lot to learn in there. But again, eliminating pain points is about also respecting people's time. And that's an important piece. So I will leave it at that.
SARA ROUHI: Really excited for the conversation. Delighted to be part of this panel. And I will look forward to the discussion afterwards . With that, let me hand it over to Martin from Chronos.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So thank you, Sara. That was really great presentation and really interesting to see the different perspectives. So publishers and institution perspective and also just overview. So my presentation is trying to bring that little bit together, where we at ChronosHub as an intermediary, trying to streamline open access workflows across the research ecosystem. But I think we can also call this a story about despair versus the magic powers of FAIR.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And we'll see how we fare with that. So as we've seen from publishers and institutions' perspective, there are a lot of different challenges. And we know that open access overall is great. But as you've seen and heard, it's also a little bit of Pandora's box leading to increasing complexities, costs, and frustration. And how we see it, we have a lot of funders that introduce policies.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: They drive publishing preferences, make it difficult for authors to really where to publish in a way that is compliant with these policies. And as we have also seen, these policies drive publishers to develop new business models. And even for open access publishers, like PLOS, there are several different business models. And I think I've heard there are about 20 to different business models for open access today or different mechanisms, like APC, waivers and discounts, and transformative agreements, described to open, and so forth.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So this obviously makes it immensely difficult for institutions, as you heard from AJ. Manually going into a lot of different publisher dashboards and figure out which articles to approve as part of agreements, or just checking where to pay or pick up an invoice. But from our perspective, we see that the worse situation is really for the researchers. Because a lot of the work ends up on their shoulders. They manually have to fill in huge forms when they submit to publishers.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Then they have to submit more or less the same information again on the outputs of their grants when they report back to funders. And then as, again, we heard AJ talking about institutional repositories manually populating them in one way or the other. And so for us, this is really a situational despair because stakeholders do act very much in silos. The systems do not communicate very well with each other generally.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Which means that we have quite fragmented data, which means that we in turn have no real reliable analytics. So this is truly very time-consuming and costly for everyone involved. And in addition to that, we have quite important risks of being non-compliant with bad consequences for both authors and an institutions that increasingly also have to pay, for example, penalties to different funders. So there is hope though.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So if we're introducing FAIR, and I'm sure many of you are very familiar with FAIR. But as sort of little bit recap of those principles. They do give us hope to defeat this kind of situation of despair. So first of all, we need to make data findable, where the most important aspect is to have global unique identifiers. And as Sara pointed out, really for every entity. Not only for the articles, but of course also for the authors, organizations, data management plans, the grants, and so forth.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And making this accessible. And that's also possible, of course. APIs are there since quite some time. So we can have a communication from machine to machine. We also have a lot of different data formats, making it interoperable. And increasingly, we have data being published open access and with licenses that allow reuse, like CC BY and similar.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So all of that is great. And we see this really as the magic powers affair, enabling automation. So we heard in the previous presentations that there are, of course, many, many different systems out there. And the only way to ensure automation is to ensure that we can integrate the different systems with each other.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Now, this illustrates a little bit of our ChronosHub-specific perspective. But the principles apply to every other system out there in the research ecosystem. So we try to illustrate this through an author journey, where the author needs to select a journal that is relevant, and where they understand, and have it transparent what agreements that apply. For example, how much they have to pay if anything.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And if it is compliant with the different funding policies. We also want to facilitate submissions. You don't have to populate everything manually from scratch when you submit it into a peer review system. And then upon acceptance, we want to have a very streamlined process for dynamically assigning the right licenses based on, again, the different agreements. And processing these articles to automate approvals and do automated checks of various aspects, whether the author is really belonging to this institution, if there is a specific cap that needs to be applied, or if a grant funder is actually picking up the invoice when there is an APC involved.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And then dealing with payments. It goes into production. We need a lot of data for reporting. And then we want to re-use this data to automate repository deposits. So in this way, by having data FAIR in all these different systems, then we can truly automate the processes without the need for any manual retyping or manual validation even of the data, as it can be matched up one to one.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So not any story without a big but. So one big but is, of course, that not everyone is using these magic powers. And that's exactly what Josh and Sara also pointed out, that this is a truly collective effort. We will need to do our best to apply these principles. So looking at making data findable. Of course, it's great that more and more systems make use of global unique identifiers.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: But it's still not really systematic. There are a lot of entities, like grants, that do not get GUIs. And even when there are global unique identifiers, like ORCIDs that are being picked up more and more for authors, that's fantastic. But when we look at the data that we receive out of different systems, it's still just a small proportion of the authors that actually have an ORCID ID and not all of them.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And making data accessible, well, fantastic that we have APIs. But still not all publishers want to really make those APIs available. And so we still have quite a blocker there in order to access the data. And it's said for interoperability, we have many formats. Is there a possibility to maybe find a way to agree on a standard format?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: That would, of course, facilitate immensely going forward. And then a lot of content not with the CC BY or similar license. So when we look at that, the question overall that we have is, of course, how do we get more organizations to apply these FAIR principles? So these are a number of questions that would be great to continue to discuss also at this conference and probably also for a long time afterwards.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: But the question is can we mandate the use of global unique identifiers and do that for really all different entities? We heard how important it is with the PIDs. So why or why not? And can we establish a standard data exchange format? We have a lot of different formats. Some are more common among publishers, like XML. Various variations of that.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Institutions are using serif XML as another example of standard in exchange format. So can we join around a given standard? And can maybe NISO be part of this kind of standardization? And the third point here that we would think would be quite interesting to discuss is the possibility or the need to certify system's FAIRness. So is a system like ChronosHub really applying the FAIR principles?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: And is that something that we may make all potential customers aware of in including simply a requirement when they do their evaluations of systems, that they have to follow the FAIR principles. A fourth point here is, can we incentivize organizations to provide APIs for others to integrate with? So taking the example of publishers and making their APIs available. Can we find incentives in terms of maybe enabling them to get more revenue or at least save a lot of time and effort?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Or potentially just be satisfied with providing a more or higher degree of customer satisfaction, seem to be able to deliver data to the institutions for re-use. And the last point here is do we want to look at the possibility of ensuring that data becomes fair upon inception? Sara and AJ and Josh obviously emphasize the fact that we want everyone to join in here. But can we get thousands of publishers thousands of institutions all to make their systems FAIR?
MARTIN JAGERHORN: Or can we maybe find a shortcut in ensuring that systems that are upstream make data FAIR upon inception. That's what we at least a ChronosHub try to do. So when an author submits an article through the system, well, we have it linked up with unique identifiers for authors, organizations, funders, grants, and so forth. So we're not so dependent on other systems' downstream to also apply all the FAIR principles. We can still sort of automate these processes downstream.
MARTIN JAGERHORN: So with that said, thank you very much for the attention here. And very much looking forward to continuing the discussion.
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