Name:
Getting to Yes... With Data: Data Transparency in OA Business Models Recording
Description:
Getting to Yes... With Data: Data Transparency in OA Business Models Recording
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/a0919d47-52da-4eb7-bab1-e381c636840a/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=FMNlT2WkMMUW9fNptUfZxD7oCRnYtWOIw1DDh921GAE%3D&st=2024-04-29T15%3A08%3A19Z&se=2024-04-29T19%3A13%3A19Z&sp=r
Duration:
T00H42M32S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/a0919d47-52da-4eb7-bab1-e381c636840a
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/a0919d47-52da-4eb7-bab1-e381c636840a/Session 63.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=1xSUEiM8LUy0CMwmH9plOoqWTqVeWi4S9LaAyly0ybU%3D&st=2024-04-29T15%3A08%3A20Z&se=2024-04-29T17%3A13%3A20Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2022-11-17T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
CASEY PICKERING: Welcome to today's session, Getting to Yes with Data-- Data Transparency and OA Business Models. I'm Casey Pickering with Copyright Clearance Center. Publishers, institutions, and funders are committed to experimenting with new business models to advance OA programs. But as these groups collaborate to create first of their kind deals, questions of transparency can arise, especially around the data that's driving the agreement terms.
CASEY PICKERING: And as we all know, for new OA business models to really move forward, data transparency and efficiency is really critical for the building and maintaining trust between institutions and publishers. In our session today, our panelists will discuss how they work with their partners to bring OA agreements to life. They're going to discuss tools and processes that they've helped-- that have helped them, lessons they have learned, and how focus on transparency and data has propelled them forward.
CASEY PICKERING: So I'm thrilled to introduce our speakers today. To my left is Jason Price. Jason is the research and scholarly communication director at the statewide California Electronic Library Consortium. Welcome, Jason. Next to Jason in the middle is Steven Heffner. Steven is the managing director of publications at IEEE.
CASEY PICKERING: Welcome, Steven. And last but certainly not least is Graham Anderson. Graham is the head of publishing operations at The Royal Society. So I just want to say thank you all so much for coming to our session. And we are going to not have any slides today. And we are going to focus on just having a conversation between our publishing representatives and consortia representative about, really, the importance of collaboration.
CASEY PICKERING: So let's kick off the panel with a question for Jason. Jason, can you just tell the room a little bit more about your current OA agreement strategy and really what expectations you have of publishers as you begin working together for a deal? And specifically, what is the factor that data plays in these expectations?
JASON PRICE: OK, as far as our OA agreement strategy goes, our transitional agreements need to be library cost neutral, automated, and cover as much open publication as possible. More broadly, we've got a list of nine goals at scelc.libguides.com/TAs. These were developed by a 12-library task force and prioritized by our membership as a whole. I encourage you to take a look, so.
JASON PRICE: But we'll focus on these three today. We define library cost neutral as fitting within the standard historical annual increase for each particular package. Sometimes agreements are also subsidized by available author grant funding, though those are paid directly by the author. As far as automation goes, we prefer article funding to be automatically approved. And there's some differences in our consortium versus some others in this.
JASON PRICE: We don't want to spend time reviewing every article for author eligibility. Instead, we trust the publisher systems and verify that they're accurate enough by reviewing published article reports after the fact. Covering as much open publication as possible ideally means uncapped corresponding author article publication in both fully open and hybrid journals.
JASON PRICE: It's important to cover both the fully open and hybrid journals for a number of reasons. But one that we focus on is-- the transition is to take those hybrid journals into becoming fully open journals. And so if we're not also supporting those, we're not able to invest in open publication into the future. Article number caps are often a necessary evil. When necessary, those caps should be based on how much we spend on the current subscription as well as how much we publish.
JASON PRICE: We could do a whole session on concerns and possibilities around caps. So I'll resist the temptation to go further with that. But suffice it to say that they create significant ongoing data needs. So as for the role that data plays, our needs really fall into three specificity categories, three kinds of data. One is institution level, journal level, and the third is article level.
JASON PRICE: So starting with more traditional institution level statistics, we need to look at COUNTER 5 usage for the past three to five years in order to address historical read value. If it's a new agreement, we also need historical pricing going far enough back to calculate or assess cost neutrality. At the journal level, we're looking at the publishing model of each journal and need to know that hybrid, fully open it, access, or not included as well as the list price APCs for the included journals.
JASON PRICE: And finally, at the article level-- and this is, of course, the most important part-- we need the three- to five-year publishing history, including all of the underlying article metadata from across all of the participating institutions. Article types important because we want to know what's covered. And we want to see which ones are a part of it. And also, ideally, we would get the APCs that have been paid, although we don't always get that.
JASON PRICE: And typically, SCELC at least can live without it because those APCs in the wild don't affect our agreement pricing. Eventually, we roll much of this underlying data up into averages and totals. But we need the details in order to start to evaluate the offer and to perform due diligence as we're preparing to take on an agreement. For more detail on the way agreement needs because there's a lot of other kinds of data that can be helpful that I can't go into here.
JASON PRICE: See bit.ly/sparkDAWG. That's lowercase spark uppercase DAWBG-- I'm sorry, DAWG, which showcases the work of the Spark data analysis working group. It's a rich set of resources describing the types of data and where it can be found and gathered around journal negotiation in today's OA-focused world.
CASEY PICKERING: Awesome. Thank you, Jason. And, Steven, can you just react a little bit to Jason's comments? What the requirements that the consortia is looking for from a publisher? What is IEEE doing to meet these requirements for collaboration?
STEVEN HEFFNER: Yeah, thank you, Casey. In general, what I'm going to say is pretty much repetitive of what we just heard. We are committed to supporting these deals to make them successful for both parties. IEEE is very interested in making sure that transformative deals work for the scholarly communities that we serve. And we're committed to making sure that the institutions that are serving those scholars are getting what they are paying for.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Certainly, usage data, as it has been in the past, will always be a piece of the data package that we provide at the beginning of dealmaking. But we'd like to also make sure that it's understood in terms of which things are behind a paywall and which things are open access so that you can see the trend over time, whether usage is drastically increasing in the OA world. That is a nontrivial problem, actually, because so much content is available in venues that we are not able to track very well.
STEVEN HEFFNER: So we'll work with our library partners to figure out what level of detail is required there. On the published portion, that's the read portion, you know? And certainly, historical trends there and pricing, et cetera, as you mentioned, Jason. On the read portion, we've typically been going back three to four years in terms of publishing output from an institution and trying to look exactly at which things arrived in the portfolio as opposed to other venues, let's say a different publisher's venues in our fields of interest.
STEVEN HEFFNER: We also want to try to give some breadth of understanding of which fields of interest. IEEE, as a fairly broad one, yes, we're engineering. And yes, we're electrical engineering. But it's everything from aerospace to computer science to power and energy and control systems. So trying to understand which pieces of the portfolio are of particular interest to a university. We want to make sure that that scholarly output distribution is well understood too.
STEVEN HEFFNER: And now, our experience, which is still limited it shows that the last three to four years are fairly predictive of the scholarly output from a group. Now, the broader the consortium-- you've got quite a big one. [CHUCKLES] So we don't know how well that data might hold up over time. But we'll see. But I think for the main research institutions-- and we've done a handful of deals at this point, not many more than that.
STEVEN HEFFNER: We're fairly comfortable with the first and second year scholarly output matching, what we were anticipating. I'll leave that at that because that's what we're providing now. I'd love when-- I know we're going to get to a piece of the conversation about renewals and discussing what kind of tracking we'll be doing. So I'll leave the rest of that for the second round.
CASEY PICKERING: All right. Thank you, Steven. And, Graham, does Steven's comments resonate with you? I know you mentioned sometimes there are additional challenges for a smaller publisher. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that might affect your ability to collaborate and provide the data necessary?
GRAHAM ANDERSON: Yeah, so the Royal Society is a small publisher. We have 10 journals. So the challenge for us was to find a model that would be simple and transparent to implement and explain and also to find a model that would work for us worldwide. We found that to be read and publish. We found that to be the most transparent and sustainable for us in terms of constructing the pricing and providing the data as well.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: Having one model meant it was straightforward to present the data as a reading fee and a publishing fee. And that was based on the published output from an institution. Again, this brought up some interesting conversations around APCs in the wild. But ultimately, every price is bespoke to an institution. So all of our deals have bespoke pricing.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: Being able to present data often led to very good conversations with libraries and consortia. And, again, that was often around the articles that have been paid in the wild. So in different territories, perhaps the overall spend with the Royal Society was higher than the library had anticipated. And we were able to provide the data to back all of that up. As a small society publisher, a lot of the data we had been held in our own spreadsheets.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: We weren't necessarily very automated at that point. As we've had more deals that we have in place, we've had to invest in systems and processes to back that up as we scale up the activities around transformative agreements. We use RightsLink to handle the workflow for read and publish articles and other APC charges so we can now report from that system. And we've been doing this now for two years.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: So we're in our second year going into our third year. We have over 330 deals in place. So we've had to quickly adapt the way we provide the data and support the data to the institutions. And we've got many more in the pipeline for next year as well.
CASEY PICKERING: Thank you so much, Graham. And so like Steven say, we've talked about the need to be transparent when creating a new agreement. But that's, obviously, not where the transparency and data needs stop. So there are continued needs once a deal is in place and when you want to discuss renewing that deal. So, Jason, can you just kick us off, telling us a little bit about what's needed once the agreement is in place and moving it forward?
JASON PRICE: Yeah, more-- or maybe less than transparency, I think here, we're really talking about data exchange. The value of these agreements is important for everyone to know and to be able to track. And so it's really how do we get the data that we need to value the agreements as well as we can. Libraries and consortia need regular access to data that's necessary for due diligence and, actually, as often as monthly during the term. So the standard at this point, rough standard is a quarterly reports that list the articles that have been published away under the agreement.
JASON PRICE: But what's key here is what's missing from those lists. So the most obvious are key data elements like list price APC when it's not included or Creative Commons license type, those sorts of things. There's not really a standard yet in terms of what data elements should be included. But we're working on figuring that out along the way. But to me, the maybe most interesting and least obvious category is the most important.
JASON PRICE: We need to know which articles are not being published openly under the agreement as a result of the agreement. These include articles from eligible journals where authors have opted out of OA publishing as well as articles that don't qualify because of their designated article type. So CCC and publisher systems in some cases usually have these data. And they're an important part of making sure that institutions are getting the most out of their transitional agreement investments.
JASON PRICE: There's another even more challenging set of articles, which may be significant and are really a challenge to identify. And that's articles that should have been identified as covered under the agreement but weren't flagged during the author submission process and then were missed by the process. If you think about the fact that your average APC is $3,000, let's say, that's the price of a single one-year subscription of an individual title from the past.
JASON PRICE: And so if you're missing multiple ones of those, that should have been identified and included and weren't, that really affects the value of the agreement, particularly for small institutions that may publish less. So from the consortial perspective. And here, I'm actually thinking directly about the CCC RightsLink institutional portal, we need the publisher to be able to grant libraries and consortia access to the full range of reports that the publisher can pull from those systems or at least a selectable subset of them.
JASON PRICE: One key functionality that seems to be missing from consortia reporting that it may be relatively obvious is the parent-child relationship. So as the consortial parent, we can see the individual institutions that are a part of a particular agreement. But we can't necessarily pull a report that includes all of the dozens of underlying participants. I'm told that publishers all are able to do this.
JASON PRICE: Our interface or system doesn't do that right now. And then finally, when we're measuring success on an annual basis, we need the same kinds of things that we did when we started up the agreement. COUNTER 5 controlled usage and APC cost avoidance by institution that allows us to calculate a modified what I'm calling or would have called a read cost per controlled use. So it takes into account just the usage of the articles that have to be paid for, at least on the publisher site.
JASON PRICE: And it discounts the value of the publishing so that your read cost per controlled use would go down. But what I really like to be able to do-- and this is pushing us out a little more. I don't think it's anything anybody can do right now. But it's to be able to measure global usage at the article level to provide the impact of open publication for the specific articles that we have been funded under the agreement.
JASON PRICE: So my understanding is that COUNTER compliant platforms are collecting this data and that there's a huge amount of usage that's not covered under anyone's IP ranges. And we know that usage is out there being able to measure and show that that usage as part of the product of our investment in these agreements is really important. And since that data is actually there at this point, maybe it's not too heavy a lift to hope that it can be packaged in a manageable format and shared with institutions and authors.
JASON PRICE: And I know the folks at COUNTER are thinking about this and what that looks like going forward. So I'm excited about being able to move past the old cost per user or a modified cost per use and to saying, well, look, we're investing in publishing here. How do we show the value of our specific publishing?
CASEY PICKERING: Yeah, thank you.
STEVEN HEFFNER: I'll pick up on that because that's my fundamental question is what is the value of these deals to the institution. We get a little nervous around things like measuring how many articles from scholars at that institution were published in our portfolio because, let's maybe be very clear, these reading publish deals are not a pay to play. You're not opening up our portfolio for your scholars to publish in.
STEVEN HEFFNER: We still have a rigorous rejection rate. And if the faculty is not producing good enough science, it's not going to show up in our journals, regardless of whether we've got a deal or not. So let's make sure that we read correctly what is happening at the end of a term, how many APCs have been paid, et cetera. That is part of the story. But I like this formulation that you've got, Jason, which is that you're also partially paying for a transformation of the entire environment and making sure that those articles that were covered in the agreement and published in our portfolio have the widest possible distribution and visibility and discoverability, et cetera, for the scholars at the institution.
STEVEN HEFFNER: So I think those are important distinctions. The other one I will I was going to mention was-- let's see. Yeah, should we be looking at rejection rates too? This is a question. I mean, we can look at submissions and say how many things came in from the institution and maybe where did those articles end up.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Did they end up in the IEEE portfolio? Did they end up in a Springer Nature journal, et cetera? That might be of interest as well as you judge how the various deals that you're making relate to each other, not just the one-to-one relationship. And then I think-- yeah, finally, we are a little concerned about-- and this is a little bit off topic. But I think it's something important is we're looking at OA tourism as an issue for our portfolio and our management.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Would that we got $3,000 an article, by the way. That's not our APC but significantly lower. But we're seeing where-- already, we're seeing geographic OA tourism, that is authors are all of a sudden named in a author list. And they're from a research for life country or low-income country where they have significantly discounted APCs. And we don't have enough read and published deals yet.
STEVEN HEFFNER: But we are also want to monitor to make sure that significantly discounted APCs from certain institutions do not make that just an attractive outlet for one or two authors to show up at. If the whole ecosystem is going to transform, we want to support that. But we do not want to do it in these selected unsustainable ways.
CASEY PICKERING: Interesting, thanks. And, Graham, do you have some thoughts on this?
GRAHAM ANDERSON: Yeah, I would say it's probably useful to discuss those expectations at the start of the deal or even before you've signed the deal. It may be that a smaller publisher such as Royal Society may not be able to provide the data as perhaps a larger commercial publisher might be able to do that. That might be to do with the systems they use or a number of people they have in their team. So I'd like to think that people can discuss what's critical and then what's nice to have.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: And then, obviously, we'll try to provide what is critical. It's also probably helpful to find out what systems the publisher is using, if they're using RightsLink or the OA Switchboard. That can really help with reporting. At Royal Society, we commit to supplying the data at six months and then a full year. But we also run some checks in-house every quarter as well. So if we find that an author from an institution that has a deal hasn't opted in, we'll write to that author to make them aware and try to encourage them by letting them know that they can opt in at that point.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: If they do, then, obviously, we can go back and make that open access retrospectively. That takes a bit of time for us to do. We don't find that many each quarter. But it's good for housekeeping to do that so that when we provide the six month and 12 month, it's at least as up to date as it can be. I would say that the support doesn't stop when the deal is done.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: So I think the publishers are here to help the library but also the author throughout the process. We want the deals to work as much as you do. We want to shift and transform as we go along. So yeah, we're definitely here to help them support.
CASEY PICKERING: Excellent. And through an early conversations we had, I think Stephen said this is all new and we're all working through this. And as you can tell, there are lots of things that are wanted and are getting worked toward. Can you just talk a little bit about maybe-- anyone on the panel, just talk about not everyone has an agreement, and you have to start somewhere. What are some things you can do to get ready to start, to embark.
CASEY PICKERING: Maybe, Graham, you could kick us off since you just started a couple of years ago? What are the basics that you need to get started?
GRAHAM ANDERSON: For publisher?
CASEY PICKERING: Yes.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: I think reviewing your data. I think reviewing your longer term plan. There's probably some work around that communication piece internally about what your plans are, what your objectives are. It's not a quick process. We've been doing it for a couple of years now. And there's a few more years to go. We have some journals that are transformative journals. So they will flip to be fully open access at the point they hit the 75% threshold.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: So we imagine that will happen in the next few years. So we have to build that into our thinking and planning as well. So yeah, it's not a quick process.
CASEY PICKERING: And what about you, Jason, from a consortium perspective?
JASON PRICE: Well, what I'll say is I think we need to work on agreements that are not based on existing large package publisher and existing spend. Those are the easier ones because the money is already there to do it. And there's a critical mass of libraries that if they can get these benefits are showing some great appreciation of being able to participate and support their authors and publishing open, particularly our smaller libraries who probably couldn't participate in these kinds of agreements on their own.
JASON PRICE: But there are many other collections, smaller publishers, those sorts of things, society publishers, which are folks are asking about. It's harder to figure out how to get those going. It's the same sorts of underlying data. But it's also a recognition that sometimes, there's got to be some way to support whatever open publishing is already happening. So that cost neutrality that I pitched for it at the start, it's based partly on the nature of the institutions in my consortium which are largely pay more to read than they would to publish, if you count the number of articles that they publish versus the amount that they're paying per year.
JASON PRICE: But it's also based on large publisher deals where there are that-- there's that room to make that happen. We are exploring in the multipayor space, how to bring in some author funding where that funding is available while trying to retain the capacity to publish for articles of those who aren't grant funded in order to bring in that money in ways that aren't on the backs of the libraries.
JASON PRICE: But ultimately, how do we start right now as coming from most of our libraries with how do we do it without it costing the library more? And so we have to think about that, look at the numbers, and figure out where there are enough-- there's a critical mass to do the-- yeah.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Yeah, I mean, complexity and cost, that is the fundamental problem. So when it comes to what we're doing to start and be prepared for a scale-up of these kinds of deals is we've made some serious investments in a publishing data warehouse in the organization so that we're collecting all of the data, whether we know whether we're going to need it or not, some of these nuances. But certainly, have it all in one place where we can understand better the publishing behavior of our author communities.
STEVEN HEFFNER: That's a big one. The other one I would suggest is something that we've talked about as an industry a little bit is-- and just the beginnings of it-- COUNTER and COUNTER compliance was a joint effort in standards that totally make sense and totally worked. Some of the things that you're referring to, Jason, around author output or scholarly output, there is no standardization for what's being collected.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Is there a regime required that is analogous to COUNTER that we can put together so that we all know and trust that we're gathering the same data in the same way? So I think that that's something that the industry is talking about. But I mean, to be candid about it, I think that we are less interested in funding that as robustly as we were for COUNTER. And we'll probably want to work with academics and non academic consumers of our information to develop something meaningful there.
CASEY PICKERING: Yeah, that's really interesting. And with all of the change, the infrastructure and your building needs to change too. I'm just interested-- maybe, Graham, you could kick us off as a smaller publisher with these changes and with needing to focus more on data maybe than ever before in these changing models. How have you been able to do that with the teams you have? And just talk us through a little bit about your strategy internally.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: So we've had to invest in different systems and processes. So the team hasn't changed as such. But maybe what they're doing has changed. So we're working with RightsLink as I mentioned. We're also sending our data to OA Switchboard. We find that's a good way for people to get real-time reporting. And that means that the team can then spend a bit more time doing the things to support the deals we have rather than perhaps doing the manual APC invoicing we used to do in-house.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: That's now taken care of elsewhere. So our team hasn't changed, although the activities that they are doing have probably changed.
CASEY PICKERING: Is that the same for you, Jason, in the consortia?
JASON PRICE: Yeah, I suppose so, although I think we are our three transformative or s agreements at this point. So it's still early days. But I think I'm noticing a trend where there is data-- the data is out there. It's a question of where it is and how many different systems is it in and how hard is it to pull together on a regular basis. And I do think we have an opportunity to work with the Copyright Clearance Center and RightsLink as a place where we know there are a number of publishers working and managing these things.
JASON PRICE: And there is data in there that's not accessible as broadly as that might be. So I think having conversation coming together, thinking about what it would take to improve that and make it easier. Because if we don't have to ask you, you don't have to spend the time to do it. And we have that data available as needed. And when you need it and how you need it is variable, depending on when you have a question, when you realize there are some institutions that as a licensing unit aren't the same as a publishing unit.
JASON PRICE: They've got all these underlying publishing units that you didn't properly cover. And you need to look at that data. I figure that out. Being able to do that and track that well, I think the systems are there a little bit. And we need to work together to try and develop them. And I think there's a place now for maybe coming out of the Charleston Conference where a few of the more active consortia that are working with RightsLink through RightsLink.
JASON PRICE: Publishers through RightsLink can get together and say, OK, how can we fix this? Because I think there's significant place where that's not too hard to do, so.
CASEY PICKERING: Yeah, I'll say yes to that. [LAUGHTER] I was actually going to chime in earlier when Jason was mentioning a couple of things that consortia really need when it comes to the RightsLink institutional portal, the need to be able to see the member institutions, the more granular detail there, and more regular reporting. I mean, that is certainly not the first time that we've heard that.
CASEY PICKERING: And on our 2023 planning-- but I love the idea of the really just a-- RightsLink is not just for publishers. It's for institutions. It's for funders. And it's really for authors. So any time we can collaborate together to make systems work across the ecosystem is an opportunity. That's a good one.
CASEY PICKERING: So absolutely. All right, well, I'm going to-- I think I'm going to open it up to questions. Jennifer here in the blue shirt is going to have the mic. Is anyone have any questions they want to start us off with? I see a question over here.
ROY KAUFMAN: Thanks. Hi. Roy Kaufman, CCC. Thank you guys for the panel. It's wonderful. I have a question gets into maybe, Steven, your data warehouse or definitely touches on the publish side of publishing read which is, to what extent historically have you been looking at authors other than the corresponding authors as you build the deals?
ROY KAUFMAN: And how do you anticipate that's going to change, especially with new mandates in the United States which are going to apply to all authors on the manuscript? So really broad question, how is that going to change your math? How is that going to change your data strategy? How is that going to change things?
STEVEN HEFFNER: Well, it's going to be a nightmare. [LAUGHTER] But we are already looking at that, obviously, as we're trying to figure out implications of the OSTP memo. And the broad interpretation of potentially all scholars on a paper being subject to a mandate from US government funders is daunting. I think it brings up-- and we are-- this is why we build the data warehouse-- so that we can do that.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Again, nontrivial, though. I mean, disambiguation of authors and which institutions that they belong to and what the interpretations of grant funding from a US agency mean. Like, if I bought-- if NASA paid for the laptops on the last project, does the next research being done on those laptops also count as government-funded research? We don't know.
STEVEN HEFFNER: But I think it comes to this is we're trying to pull together as much information as we can about the authors pools that we have. We understand where they're coming from, et cetera. But we really do not want to be in the business of policing our own researchers and authors. That is it-- to some degree, it is up to them to know whether their institution has a read and publish deal and they can claim rights under it, or whether they have certain rights to discounts based on their geographic location or their society membership or the like.
STEVEN HEFFNER: It's very difficult for us to commit to, yeah, policing, basically making sure that the researchers are doing the right thing. It's already hard enough for us to make sure the researchers are doing the right thing from a scientific perspective, much less an administrative perspective. So that is going to be a huge challenge. Yeah.
STEVEN HEFFNER: I'd love to know what expectations would be. Here.
JASON PRICE: So I'm glad you brought up the all authors on an article piece. There is, I think, an economic argument why being able to identify those and potentially distribute information about open copies to libraries is really worth doing. So if you think about the general rule, which seems to apply to many of the cases where I've looked at it, that there are 70%-- so the smaller institutions that publish about 30% of the total that's out there as corresponding authors, they currently pay 70% of the subscription costs across large-- when you group large groups of libraries together.
JASON PRICE: And so there is a transition. We are transitioning the economic model toward publishing being the value that libraries and institutions are receiving. In that case, if you're an institution that is participating and funding a subscription right now and you have, let's say, six articles from a particular smaller publisher from the past year but none of them come from corresponding authors, then you don't see any value for participation in that agreement on the publishing side, even though there clearly is value because your researcher's content is being open.
JASON PRICE: You might want to know about and be able to track that content, add that into faculty web pages, if you can drive that through your institutional repository. So moving in this direction is mind-boggling. And it sounds really hard. And I hear the nightmare piece. But for us, if to the extent we want to try to sustain the value of participating and slow the potential exodus or the expected exodus over time of the smaller institutions that are not getting as much value from these agreements, we need to be able to show where that value is.
JASON PRICE: For some of them, most of that value exists in the other authors, the non corresponding authors. So the plus model that actually does that is amazing. But economically, I see why it would be really hard more broadly. But we want to be able to have that data, share that data, use that data to show value, but also to actually help the libraries show value and showcase their researchers' content.
JASON PRICE: So that, for me-- I mean, that's one of the-- it's the one thing I wanted to be able to say. And you asked a good question. Let me add it in because I think it's important. And so if OSTP drives us there, from my perspective, from the set of institutions that we serve, it would be a good thing, even though it won't be an easy thing.
CASEY PICKERING: Thank you. Any more questions? I think we have a questioner here. Hi.
AMY HARRIS: Hi. Amy Harris, MIT Press. And I don't know. This might be an aside. Coming from a publisher where we're interested in equitable models, I'm interested to hear if you can talk more about the kind of data transparency you would like for a publisher who's interested in CAP. And I probably need to talk to you, Jason, because we are-- we're interested to know if we could make that kind of thing work.
AMY HARRIS: We're also absolutely enamored with S2O. Is there information, are there data points that you would like for those OA models, just generally? Thank you. Sorry it was a big question.
STEVEN HEFFNER: [INAUDIBLE] S2O or CAP.
GRAHAM ANDERSON: Nothing for us to add on subscribe to open. I mean, we had a look at that when we were deciding which model to go for. And we plumbed for read and publish. So yeah, nothing to add on subscribe to open.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Yeah, subscribe to open is difficult for IEEE. A very large portion of our subscriber base is industry. So that subscribe to open accounts on a bit of altruism from your customers, which we don't necessarily see from Microsoft. So yeah. [LAUGHTER]
JASON PRICE: And so less than data that would make those more likely, I think it continues to need to be some value, selfish value for libraries that are investing in a subscribe to open type model. Because at some point, it's very difficult to justify at the institutional level continued investment, especially for-- and I think of the smaller library space-- libraries that can't afford to license some of the basic things that they really need that they're going to have a hard time continuing to support an agreement when the content that's there-- when there isn't a value they can point to.
JASON PRICE: And, in fact, they have procurement issues around that as well. So I think showing that selfish value is not just Microsoft. That means institutions at the top, particularly pros and administrators who are dealing with the money at that level. I think there needs to be value that you can show to them from these agreements and participating in SO2 And so that's-- in that example, that's one where how do you build in some ongoing value there.
JASON PRICE: For libraries, same kind of thing. It's almost the same answer as the last one. How do we prove the ongoing value there? So I think that's more a model question than a data question to start with. Yeah.
CASEY PICKERING: Great, thank you. Any more questions today? Oh, I see one right there.
CHRIS BOX: Hi. I'm Chris Box from Karger. A question, I think, to Jason, but happy if Steven and Graham wanted to answer as well. I think you were talking about the general rules which you use to guide negotiations for the consortium and how you use the data around those. I wonder if you could just reflect a bit on-- I think what you're talking about there is that the consortium level.
CHRIS BOX: And I just wonder about the challenge when you get down to individual members, particularly when we bring in a public element. I guess you see very different levels of demand amongst the individual members. And I wonder how you manage that from a data perspective with the individual members and if there are different ways, which you might apply it at that level versus at the consortium level.
JASON PRICE: Yeah, so for us, one of the reasons that it's extremely helpful to have either an uncapped agreement or an agreement where we don't think we will reach the cap is that we can then apply one number across all of the underlying institutions and the consortium. The ultimate longer term test for all of these transitional agreements is one that we're beginning to get to and other consortia who have more transformative agreements in other parts of the world where the individual libraries are paying for those agreements.
JASON PRICE: The question is, how do we transition those costs? And so we look at the numbers. We acknowledge that they exist in terms of the variation and how much publishing there is. There might be a one quarter of the libraries that don't publish any articles in a given year, less than one as an average. And some that don't publish any within the history of that agreement.
JASON PRICE: How do we adjust costs over time in ways that are fair and also sustainable? So to some extent, if we're switching to a publishing-based model or chart where the costs are based on publishing, that has to shift costs. And that process is beginning to do that as something we're looking at and consortia are looking at.
JASON PRICE: But it's also a very difficult one. So there's not an easy answer to what we're doing about it, except that my sense is that needs to happen. And one of the ways that we can support it happening is bringing in direct author funding when it's available. So the way to allow a shift that is more sustainable and a sustainable speed and also doesn't make that a zero sum game for those libraries when you have to transition, then it's zero sum.
JASON PRICE: That's not unfortunate. If you've got additional money coming in and potentially coming in via those larger institutions that might publish more, then you can manage the transition. So it was not a hot topic at a recent discussion of consortia about these agreements because it's still a hard thing to do. And I don't think we've made as much progress on that yet. But getting those agreements in place in the first place then allows us to begin to work together to do that.
JASON PRICE: And that's what we do. We try to be transparent work, with our institutions, figure out what's fair, what we can sustain, and how it can move in the right direction.
CASEY PICKERING: Thank you very much. Well, that brings us to the end of our session today. I just want to take a moment and thank our fabulous panelists today for a really insightful conversation. [APPLAUSE] I hope everyone has a great conference and a great day. Thank you very much.
STEVEN HEFFNER: Thank you.