Name:
Innovation for sustainability in open access Recording
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Innovation for sustainability in open access Recording
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Upload Date:
2022-11-17T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SPEAKER: OK, good morning, everyone. Thanks very much for getting up bright and early for our session this morning. So today we're going to talk about some of the innovation and sustainability issues around open access. And we're going to take that from the perspective of a variety of different actors that are involved in scholarly communications and research. So we've got a panel today featuring a number of great speakers.
SPEAKER: We have Rachel Bruce, from UKRI, giving us the perspective of a research funder. We have Jason Price, from SCELC, giving us the consortial perspective; Richard Gallagher, from Annual Reviews, giving us the publisher perspective; and finally, Yvonne Campfens, talking about the infrastructural needs and developments that can assist with driving open access to the future. But why are we talking about this?
SPEAKER: So at ACS, we do believe that open access is very much the future. And to that end, we publish 12 fully open access journals and over 60 transformative journals. For those of you that aren't necessarily familiar with transformative journals, they're a form of hybrid journal that has made an overt commitment towards the transition. And so year by year, they will seek to grow the volume of open access content, both in absolute and relative terms.
SPEAKER: And aligned with that, we're also signing significant numbers of transformative agreements with institutions around the world. So we now have transformative agreements with over 560 institutions. But what's driving that-- and it will come as no surprise to anyone-- the Plan S, which has been spoken about for years in great detail, is a significant driver of this, particularly the requirement under Plan S for all research that is sponsored by one of the 28 funders as part of the coalition to be made immediately open access with a stated preference for gold OA, but also with the rights retention strategy available.
SPEAKER: This has significant support from European funders. Although, it is becoming increasingly more international as we see Australian and other research funders coming on board. And that's now being paired with the Nelson memo, which I'm sure everyone has heard a lot about over the last few days-- I know I certainly have-- which again, while not, strictly speaking, an open access mandate because it doesn't require the liberal licensing that would be traditionally associated with open access, it's certainly likely to drive similar changes within the scholarly communications world in the United States for federally funded research.
SPEAKER: So with that background laid out, I'm now going to hand over to our first speaker, who is joining us remotely. And so that will be Rachel Bruce, giving us the funder perspective. Over to you.
RACHEL BRUCE: Is that all working now?
SPEAKER: Yes.
RACHEL BRUCE: Great. OK, so thank you very much, Chris-- and just to say thank you very much to ACS for arranging and running this session. And of course, I wish I could be in Charleston. It just didn't work out. I've always wanted to join that conference. So perhaps another time. So I'm going to talk about the development and, I suppose, our strategy in delivery of the UK Research and Innovation new open access policy.
RACHEL BRUCE: Briefly, what is UK Research and Innovation? So we are the largest public funder in the United Kingdom for research. And we fund all disciplines and also have an innovation agency, which stimulates activities between academia and industry. Our budget varies depending on the economic context. But it varies between 7 billion UK pounds to 9 billion, depending.
RACHEL BRUCE: So next slide, please. So first off, to state the obvious, of course, open access has been around for a long time. And the UK government has had a commitment to the principle that publicly funded research should be accessible to all. And they reaffirmed that in their R&D roadmap that they published in 2020 and made a bold statement that open research practices would be encouraged, but actually through the mandate of open publication and then broader open practices, to be supported and incentivized.
RACHEL BRUCE: So really just, I suppose, UKRI is one of the key delivery agents of the government's ambitions in open research around that attainment of public value. And I should say, that UKRI's mission, whilst yes, we've got lots of universities and we have funding agencies, our goal is actually for research to benefit society.
RACHEL BRUCE: And that's why open access is really important to us. Next slide, please. So in terms of the development of our new, updated open access policy, just as a bit of context, we have had open access policies for our public research funding in the UK since 2005. But a joined up open access policy for all of the research that comes under UK research and innovation was introduced back in 2012.
RACHEL BRUCE: So really this new policy was really just about updating that one. And the context is that the 2012 policy had a target of 75% immediate open access by 2016. And we fell way short of that. We were only hitting just over 50% immediate open access in 2016. So the review to update the policy actually started in 2018.
RACHEL BRUCE: And it was extensive, and extensive because, although everybody said that they wanted open access and that immediate open access was the goal, there were always ifs and buts. And those ifs and buts came from all range of stakeholders, be they researchers, research organizations, or publishers. So the review was extensive, very thorough. We had independent economic assessments undertaken.
RACHEL BRUCE: And we did undertake a public consultation. Next slide, please. So just to briefly, because we haven't got much time, go over the outcome-- so the policy is as simple as possible really. It is immediate open access to peer-reviewed research articles. And it's for those submitted for publication from the 1st of April, 2022.
RACHEL BRUCE: So that's when the policy was enacted. And it's the CC BY license. Although, we allow an exception on ND case by case. The approach that we've taken is really to define the full public value and public good. We want immediate open access. And we want a license that conforms to academic norms but allows re-use and maximum open access, hence CC BY.
RACHEL BRUCE: So it's really quite a simple policy requirement. But in order to reach that requirement, we've been as permissive as possible in terms of the routes to open access. So what we call in our policy route one, that would be what we know of as gold open access and the version of record. And route two, so often what's known as green open access-- so we accept the author-accepted manuscript to be immediately open access.
RACHEL BRUCE: And that is in compliance with the policy. And then of course, there are various different ways in which you can get there. So our policy, overall, on research articles is quite aligned with Plan S. It's not 100% aligned with every single detail. We have a few local differences. But overall, it's heading in the same direction and a very similar strategy, but all evidence-based in terms of reaching those decisions.
RACHEL BRUCE: Also in the review, we asked the question, should we extend our open access requirements to include a broader range of disciplines and essential outputs there? So just the next slide, please-- and so in summary, we did conclude to extend our open access requirements to long-form publications, so monographs, edited collections, and book chapters.
RACHEL BRUCE: And there are slight different requirements there. So there is an embargo of 12 months and also a whole range of CC licenses are acceptable with a range of different exceptions around third-party materials. I think another important point in terms of our context is whilst we were developing an open access policy for UKRI-funded research, we have also worked in concert with those University-devolved funders in the United Kingdom that oversee an exercise, which some of you have heard of, I'm sure, the research evaluation framework, which actually pertains to all of the research activity in universities.
RACHEL BRUCE: And it assesses the quality of that research. And so we have worked with those funders so we are as aligned as possible in terms of any open access requirements that they might introduce. Next slide, please. So this is really the key one about our policy considerations. And whilst there were many considerations, I think these are the four critical ones, from a funder perspective.
RACHEL BRUCE: So one was author choice. So we needed to ensure and wanted to ensure that whatever policy we ended up with wasn't going to unreasonably reduce publishing options for our researchers. Affordability-- so we appreciate open access is going to cost. What is reasonable? And also, how can we manage the escalating cost that we had witnessed and use our levers, I suppose, to drive value for money?
RACHEL BRUCE: And then sustainability-- so also concerned with sustainability of the publishing industry and market. Again, that links, of course, to author choice. And then equality was an important consideration. And from a lot of angles, but I suppose the one nearest to home was making sure that all researchers and all types of research organizations were able to participate in the policy and comply with the policy.
RACHEL BRUCE: But we did also look at broader issues, such as low- and middle-income countries and are considering those broader equity issues around scholarly communication. So in summary, for author choice, we concluded, when we looked at the patterns, actually, it's a risk we could take. We estimated, when we were seeing the way in which some of the agreements were developing between publishers and universities and colleges, that about to 80% of the venues that UKRI authors publish in would be compliant and eligible for our open access funding.
RACHEL BRUCE: Affordability, we could see patterns and, increasingly, the transition of agreements being taken up. And they were actually helping to manage cost and in some cases, actually, really driving down cost. But they were definitely increasing open access publishing. And so that was, if you like, our permissive approach-- is very permissive at any rate.
RACHEL BRUCE: But there is one restriction, and that is the hybrid publication. In order to use UKRI funding, that hybrid publication needs to be in an agreement approved via the Jisc community governance, i.e., the university and colleges governance, for transitional agreements or transformative journals. Sustainability-- UK is only a small part of the global market.
RACHEL BRUCE: And analysis showed both our economic analysis that we commissioned, but also other analysis that really, even if you took a fairly radical, fully open access approach, the impact on the market would be very, very minimal. And for equality, really, as I say, it was about making sure all organizations had access and researchers could participate. But we also did undertake quite detailed EDI, so Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity assessment.
RACHEL BRUCE: And we also undertook work with other UK funders to examine lower- and middle-income countries and their expectations with regards to open access. And so throughout the policy, there are various exceptions, but also supporting actions to try and address that. Next slide, please.
SPEAKER: Can we wrap it up in the next few minutes, please? Thank you.
RACHEL BRUCE: Yeah. So one of the key things, in order to address those policy concerns, was also making sure that we made some form of investment in change. And so we have provided funding to Jisc to scale up their capacity to scale up agreements for open access so that a range of different research organizations and a full range of different types of publishers can participate and develop open access agreements that are in line with that policy.
RACHEL BRUCE: Next slide, please. So this one just shows that there's a whole range of agreements. And I think the key point here is that whilst we see transitional agreements as one of the core agents of change to sustainable open access, we're also seeing, increasingly, other types of models, such as collective action, increasing. And then the next slide, please.
RACHEL BRUCE: So on this one, just really to show that everything is moving in the right direction-- and what we've done is, and what Jisc has done, and our strategy has been, we've analyzed the patterns of UKRI authors over the past 10 years. And that has then helped to focus the Jisc activity, in terms of negotiations and agreements with publishers.
RACHEL BRUCE: So for example, their negotiation activity would normally focus on the 12 big publishers. But when you look at where all of our authors publish, you're looking at 388 publishers. And so the activity has been scaled up to address that whole range. And things are moving in the right direction. So as you can see, we've now got nearly 92% of articles that would fall within that analysis, as being UKRI, as being compliant, and also eligible for UKRI funds.
RACHEL BRUCE: Next slide, which I'll skip-- so if we just go on to miss the policy compliance status journals. And then just the final slide is this one. So obviously, the other thing that gets asked quite a lot is, what about my discipline? How would this look for arts and humanities, et cetera? And in actual fact, the analysis that we've done, by subject, actually shows that compliant and eligible options are available to a reasonable degree across all disciplines that we're concerned with.
RACHEL BRUCE: And so we're continuing, obviously, to update and analyze as we move forward. And that is me. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER: Thank you, Rachel. Next, we'll hear from Jason Price, giving the consortial perspective.
JASON PRICE: Thanks. So next slide-- one way to pursue sustainability in an increasingly open access world is to shift institutional support from "paying to read" toward "paying to publish." I'm going to describe one agreement and kind of show how it's designed to do that and what its effect will be if it works out. In 2022, the California State University system and SCELC, representing 20 private institutions in California, and the University of California system entered into a read and publish agreement with ACS.
JASON PRICE: One major motive motivator for this joint effort was leveraging the diversity in the research intensity across these groups, across the so-called "read to publish" spectrum. Here we can see this diversity by contrasting the top bar, which shows the distribution of subscription or reading fees across the three group, to the bottom bar, which reflects publication rates. So you can see that while the subscription fees are relatively equally distributed, publishing is not.
JASON PRICE: So under this, looking at it this way, the CSU, in red, and SCELC, in gold, are on the read end of the spectrum because they pay a greater-- or fund a greater-- proportion of the total subscription fees than the proportion of which they publish, so the total number of articles across the three groups. Whereas, the UC is on the opposite end, funding about a third, but publishing close to 80% of those articles.
JASON PRICE: So what I'm going to show you is how this agreement is designed to shift that even distribution on the top in the direction of more funding coming from institutions and authors that publish more. Next slide. So I mentioned authors. One of the key ways that this works is through the multi-payer model, which many of you may be familiar with, that the UC system has a lot of experience with on a number of their agreements.
JASON PRICE: The way this works is there is an accepted manuscript. The author then has the choice to publish open access or choose closed access. If they choose open access, then there's an additional choice point where they're asked if they have available author grant funding. If they have that funding, they pay a discounted APC, and the article is made OA. If they do not have grant funding that supports publication, then the subscription fees that the libraries are paying offset the cost of open publication.
JASON PRICE: So all of the articles that the authors choose to publish open access are made OA. Next slide, please. So what is the impact of the way that we've set up this agreement on funding and on income and that sort of thing? That's what I'll try to address here. So if you-- using that same color scheme, the bottom three sections represent those read fees from the UC and CSU and SCELC.
JASON PRICE: They go up 3% a year by virtue of the agreement. That's similar to past annual increases. So that number is fixed as part of the agreement. But what you can see here is that the green section illustrates the amount of income that is predicted to come from author grant-funded APCs. So where do these predictions come from? They come from the history and the data that the UC system has.
JASON PRICE: So this is Mat. Mat Wilmott figured out how to put this approach together. And this is what the agreement is built on. It takes into account that the OA uptake in these agreements typically starts around 40% or 45%. So in that first year, in 2022, half of the authors make that first choice to publish it open access. And then of those 45%, just 20% of those-- so one out of five-- funds out of their grant.
JASON PRICE: So that's where the green section comes from if you look at the total income for the agreement, if it follows as predicted. And so when you stack that up, that's a 17% increase in the first year and then moderates to between 7% and 9% in the following years. But slowly, as the OA uptake increases and the grant publication funding increases, there is additional support from author funding.
JASON PRICE: So the orange part of this represents the part of the articles that the APCs that are waived, that are covered under the subscription, by the subscription dollars that the libraries across the diversity of libraries are committing to this agreement. Next slide, please. So if we meet those percentages-- and that's part of what there are check-ins.
JASON PRICE: That is the way this agreement works, is that we need to meet them along the way. That will shift the funding, overall, in the way that you see here. So that the top bar and the bottom bar are the same from the first slide. But as you can see, as we add in author funding, that 1% and the 4% and the 19%, in the center bar, that shifts the total that is funded by the three groups and their institutions and authors in the direction of more of it being supported by institutions and authors that publish more.
JASON PRICE: So this is one example of an agreement that's designed to actually do that, to shift that funding to make it sustainable in the long run.
SPEAKER: Thank you very much. Next, we have Richard Gallagher, from Annual Reviews, to give the publisher perspective.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: Thanks, Chris. Diversity of presentation styles-- [LAUGHS] someone online, someone sit, and someone stand. This is more "a" publisher perspective rather than "the" publisher perspective. I'll just very briefly talk about subscribe to open. It's a simple model where we would like to retain our customers in exactly the same way as they've supported Annual Reviews for many, many years. The difference being that when we collect revenue, if we get sufficient revenue to cover the cost of the journal, the journals are published without a paywall.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: So it's open access. If we have a so-called free rider problem and some institutions decide that, for whatever reason, they will take the risk of not subscribing, we will not achieve sufficient revenue to publish the journals open access. And we'll retain the paywall. And unfortunately, then we'd be going back to all the customers and saying, that didn't work.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: We would like to revert to the paywall model of publishing. So let me tell you, from the perspective of a publisher, what's good and what's bad about this. There was a really great session yesterday, where Curtis Brundy gave a very succinct and interesting perspective from a library. And he said it was simple, equitable, and fast, from the point of view of the library. It's more complicated for the publisher.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: It is conceptually very simple. And there are no fees for authors or readers. So I think that falls into the criteria of diamond open access. But it might be some other precious stone. I don't know. It's equitable. So subscribe to open applies equally to readers and authors all over the world and applies equally to all disciplines.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: Importantly, for us, since we publish quite a number of social sciences journals, they will move as readily to open access as the molecular biology and biomedical titles that we publish. It converts the entire journal. It's not, certain articles are free and others behind the paywall. If it works, the entire journal moves to open access.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: From our point of view and the library's point of view, it's revenue neutral. It doesn't cost us anything to not have a paywall. It doesn't save us anything either. So you shouldn't look for us saving costs on this. But it's absolutely revenue neutral. We believe that it maximizes the impact of the library budgets that are already committed to supporting annual reviews, for instance, because you're making it available more broadly than just within your institution.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: It uses the existing processes and relationships-- if you like your salesperson, if you're part of a consortium. Consortiums are wonderful organizations for us to deal with. And for libraries, they're an incredibly important part of this-- subscription agents as well. So it uses existing relationships. And we also don't want to take the support of subscribing institutions for granted.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: So we do have a package of benefits that only subscribing institutions receive. As well as there being really nice features, there are some, what you might call, bugs, to this subscribe to open system. The main one is that when you're using an APC model or a written publish model, you work either article by article or institution by institution.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: For subscribe to open, we need to engage with our entire subscriber base. We need to get them all in agreement and aligned before we can really be certain that we're going to move to subscribe to open. So it's a real headache, getting that organizational in place. The upside is if it works, it converts the entire journal, everything, to open, without any additional fees.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: So it's more complicated on the front end for the publishers. There's this question of vulnerability to free writing. All I'll say about that is that we've, so far, had pilot projects where on 22 different occasions, we've offered subscribe to open to our customers. And in every one of those cases, we've retained the subscriber base such that they've all successfully converted to open access. We're in the process now of offering all 51 of our titles under subscribe to open for 2023.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: And just to give you some sense of how that's going, the only way we can judge it is to look at where we are in the 2023 sales cycle and compare it to where we were at this time in 2022, 2021, and so forth. And we are seeing that we are at least in the position that we were in in previous years. So far, it looks like we're on track to be able to convert the journals.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: But I don't want to take that for granted. It does require a shared sense of commitment and responsibility. That's definitely a feature, not a bug. And in the fullness of time, we hope that other organizations of publishers will propose subscribe to open programs. There was an exciting announcement a couple of days ago from Project MUSE.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: And this will open up in a very meaningful way, journals, at a time, in an equitable way. There's people from all different fields-- can publish open access. It also involves-- and I think this is important from the perspective of inclusion-- a subscriber in Santiago or a subscriber in Kuala Lumpur is absolutely as important to us in this subscribe to open program as Stanford or Harvard or Oxford.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: This provides equity for the library community throughout the world to be part of and have a voice in the conversion to open access. I don't think that APCs in written publish provide that same opportunity. So I'm going to stop there because Yvonne needs to have some time as well. I was going to mention another innovation, which is the community of practice.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: If you're interested in subscribe to open, please think about joining this. There's a monthly meeting. It's on the first Thursday of the month. For me, it's at 7:00 AM because I'm on the West Coast. I've not missed a meeting. It's just that interesting. It's a great group. You can contribute your criticisms, your support.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: You can ask questions. And I really think that it's a real model for publishers, funders, consortia, managers, librarians, researchers, all to get together around a common goal of moving the literature to open access in a sustainable and very rapid fashion. So thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: And as our final speaker, Yvonne Campfens, from OA Switchboard.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: Thank you, Chris and ACS. And I'm very happy and honored to be speaking in this innovation and sustainability session about the infrastructure component. Well, if anything has become clear this week, I think it's that the journal subscription world is transitioning into an OA article economy. And the theme of metadata, the importance of PIDs, and standardization has come up in many of the sessions that I attended.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: The infrastructure that has been built over decades to support the old world, so to speak, is not immediately ready for the new world. And what do we mean with infrastructure? It's the foundation for the research ecosystem to function well. And this is, first and foremost, about the researchers who get a grant, who does research, who shares and discusses their results.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: And the purpose of the infrastructure is to enable connections to be made between all these components. Therefore, there are building blocks, PIDs, Persistent Identifiers, and there is providers of infrastructure and standards. Now, over time, our community, especially in the old world-- and that's where we are today-- has organized itself to develop the foundational layer, consisting of building blocks, the PIDs, and organizations fulfilling a core function.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: These open, community-led initiatives and standards have been created in order to provide essential core services to all-- to all entities in the global scholarly ecosystem, commercial and non-commercial entities alike. Persistent identifiers, such as DOIs, ORCIDs, RORs, as well as initiatives such as COUNTER, Crossref, DOAJ, and DOH Switchboard, share a common purpose in enabling robust connections to be made between research grants, projects, outputs, organizations, and individuals.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: Open APIs and interoperability are key to this end. All these open infrastructure initiatives collaborate rather than compete with one another because they serve a collective basis for innovation by both commercial and non-commercial entities. And this opens the door for services fulfilling a specific need to be built on top. There, as opposed to the foundational layer, competition and commercial solutions are likely to drive innovation and bring costs down, which is good for everybody.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: So you can see a continuum, both on the side of the persistent identifiers as well as the standards and infrastructure providers. For the PIDs, on the left side, more or less, support for the FAIR principles. On the right-hand side, for the providers, more or less, support for the POSI principles, the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. And an important principle-- we don't have time today, but one of my favorite topics.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: You'll come and find me to talk about it-- is financial sustainability for these foundational initiatives. If I have two minutes?
SPEAKER: Two minutes.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: Two minutes, awesome. Then I will talk a little bit about Switchboard, but that was not the topic. It was infrastructure. And I wanted to show you where we fit in. The Switchboard is one of these foundational layers, a central metadata exchange hub. We're aiming for standardization. I had first meetings here this week. I'm very hopeful and encouraged and excited that we're going to try and turn this into an ISO standard.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: The protocol that has been developed with the community, funders, researchers, and publishers, to exchange metadata, is in place, is operational, and it's maturing. So it's time to define a standard together. What is super important to Switchboard is built by and for the people who use it, and it's leveraged with existing PIDs. We're not reinventing the wheel.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: We're using everything that's out there. It simplifies the many-to-many relationships. I think you've probably seen many product pitches this week. So I want to mention a couple of integrations and other providers that are building on top. Jisc Monitor isn't even on here-- in the UK, used by many institutions. EBSCO Panorama, I've had talks here with people from [? Horosivic. ?] Oable, we have clients, the Weizmann Institute in Israel, who's both using Oable as well as the OA Switchboard.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: ChronosHub is being used by the National Funder in Luxembourg, also the National Consortium in Luxembourg. And they're also using the Switchboard and consortium managers used by BIBSAM in Sweden, as well as members of the Dutch Consortium. So just to illustrate, the list, I think, is endless. And this is proving exactly the point why the Switchboards come about-- multiple portals, platforms, processes, and systems.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: And what you want is standardization to just exchange the data. And that's the only thing the Switchboard does. What you do with it can be really exciting. This is my last slide. This is just a potential. It's not part of the Switchboard. But I wanted to maybe inspire you a bit, also in light of the OSTP memo.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: If you have these standardized data-- and I've talked to many institutions who have data scientists or who use Power BI or Tableau or any kind of analytics and visualization tools to monitor their publishing activities on a regular basis and justify their research strategies and maybe also even define which publishers they want to talk to to explore deals, to negotiate and oversee existing agreements and calculate return on investment and exploring your OA strategies, policies, and business models.
YVONNE CAMPFENS: I thank you for your attention. [APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: Thank you very much. We only have a few minutes left. So I think that rather than going to a panel discussion, if we just go straight to a Q&A, if anyone has any questions, if they could please step up to the microphone so that they can be recorded. And if you could introduce yourself as well, of course.
ANTHONY WATKINSON: Getting up, suddenly, is bad for my legs, sorry. Anthony Watkinson, CIBER Research-- I'm very interested. Beautiful session, if I may say so, and very interesting. But my question is I'm working on early career researchers, or have been since 2016. They don't know anything about any of this stuff. Yvonne mentioned, for example, that she's in touch with the research community.
ANTHONY WATKINSON: But how do they get to know about what's going on?
SPEAKER: Would anyone like to take this, the communications aspect?
JASON PRICE: It's a hard one. I think that libraries are eager to provide value to authors by informing them about these agreements. The multi-payer model, actually, is designed to have authors and faculty learn about the impact of the cost of publishing and how that works. So in a lot of ways, it's learned by doing. It's hard to find time otherwise. Early career researchers, if they're publishing under these agreements, are going to learn in similar ways.
JASON PRICE: But it is a big challenge, especially depending on how close the organizations and those who are running the agreements are to the actual authors. So it's tough.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: I think it's a great question. We're obviously very interested in finding out about what young scientists are thinking because we want to be relevant in 20 years time. And we need to know how to be relevant to them. We do have occasional focus groups with young scientists. But that's only a small number. I think there is a real opportunity here for it to be part of the teaching curriculum. I mean, I think that how information is shared and, as we heard earlier, all of us are interested in societal benefit.
RICHARD GALLAGHER: And I think that should be part of what students are taught about, how the work of researchers is parlayed into social benefit. And that would include how we deal with making content open, both articles and data.
SPEAKER: And I think Rachel Bruce has a comment.
RACHEL BRUCE: Yeah, just a couple of things. I suppose my main thing to mention is I think what we have seen recently in the UK-- actually, may have witnessed this, but there has been a real effort between libraries and also the negotiation consortia to have discussions with researchers and to make sure that researchers are aware of the direction of travel and why it's important. And there's been a lot of town meetings that have really tried to engage researchers in the whole process, which has been required in order to really make the change.
RACHEL BRUCE: I mean, I think it was absolutely essential in making the change with our Elsevier agreement, for instance.
SPEAKER: And then I think we have time for one last question.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Hi, I'm Athena Hoeppner at the University of Central Florida. And I wish I had a more in-depth question that spanned the whole presentation set. But it's actually about Jason Price and the shift from the funding that looked like it was going a lot of spending by UC, shifting it over to spending by the smaller, or less publication-producing institutions. And it looked like CSU's expenses were really going to go up.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: So is that actually a shift in how much they should expect to spend? Or did I misinterpret that slide?
JASON PRICE: I think it's actually exactly the opposite. So the original case, the spending across the institutions, is a third, a third, a third.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: OK.
JASON PRICE: And then that next, second bar down, where the blue pieces that represent both the UC read fees and the author-supported APCs, that takes up-- it covers a greater proportion of the total then the others.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: OK.
JASON PRICE: So as those two pieces shrink-- that's what it's designed to do. And that's what having authors contribute does, is it automatically moves it in that direction because if there are more authors publishing from a particular area, there's more funding coming from them.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: OK, so the subscription spend is such a larger portion of the pot. I understand now. OK, great.
JASON PRICE: To start with. And so it's a slow migration. But this is a way to do it. And it's hard for me to see how we shift funding very effectively otherwise.
ATHENA HOEPPNER: Yes, shifting funding is always hard.
JASON PRICE: [LAUGHS]
SPEAKER: And with that, thank you all very much. And a round of applause for our speakers. [APPLAUSE]