Name: New Directions in Open Access
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Description: New Directions in Open Access

Name: New Directions in Open Access

Description: New Directions in Open Access

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Segment:0 .

HEATHER STAINES: Welcome, everyone. It's great to see that participant number increasing. Very, very excited to be with you here today. We hope you had a wonderful lunch, and that you're digesting all of the great information that came from the morning sessions as well. I'm just going to take maybe another minute or so while those numbers are climbing before we introduce the session. It's been a while since we got together in person.
HEATHER STAINES: We all wish that we could be together now, but we'll see what we can do to make that an interactive session for you. Looking forward to meeting you in the chat. It was quite lively this morning, so no pressure. But I'll talk to you a little bit about the organization of the session. So let me open up my slides.
HEATHER STAINES: Let's get back. It's in the beginning up. I should have gone to the beginning of the session. Hang on a second. Don't look. Close your eyes. Welcome. We can edit that part out.
HEATHER STAINES: Welcome everyone to our session, new directions in open access. And thanks to the SSP New Directions planning committee, everyone who contributed to the planning behind the session, and to our sponsors as well. So we do have ample time for today's session, which I'm so excited about. And it's going to be divided into a couple of different parts. I'm going to do some introductions for our speakers, and then they're going to pair up into teams of two and they're going to have some conversations around OA that we think you'll find informative, regardless of what your background or knowledge level is about OA.
HEATHER STAINES: And then we'll take the last half hour of the session to do a picture round. And if you were eagle eye, you spotted some of the pictures there when I backed through the slides. So we have an amazing set of speakers today. Not all of them are visible on the screen. Alexa Colella from University of Illinois Press is going to be doing our behind the scenes magic.
HEATHER STAINES: She's going to keep her eye on the chat for questions or issues to be passed along to me and subsequently onto our speakers. And that's an important thing to note. We are planning for this to be a continuous conversation. So if you have questions, you should ask them the time that they occur to you, and we will try to feed them into the conversation as we can. If your questions do not get fed in in course of the session, perhaps some of our speakers are going to be able to join later for the networking session, and we can continue the conversation there.
HEATHER STAINES: So let me go into the different conversations. And it's occurring to me that I need to get to my notes documents. Hope this isn't going to blow up the whole thing. Forgive me for going out of that mode for just a moment. The first pair of our conversations today are going to be Kamran and John. I'm going to introduce everyone now so we can have a smooth transition around the conversations.
HEATHER STAINES: So Kamran Naim is head of Open Science at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known to many of us as CERN, where he leads a diverse portfolio of activities that aim to set the standards of a future of open science ecosystem. Among the activities that he is managing are operations of the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing and Particle Physics, better known by the briefer catchier SCOAP3 moniker.
HEATHER STAINES: A global collaboration, which is transition research output in the discipline of high energy physics to be almost entirely open access. Kamran holds a PhD from Stanford University on cooperative models to support open access publishing and continues to work to support global efforts to address information, inequity, and global health challenges. So we'll welcome Kamran. Joining Kamran first up in conversation will be John Sherer.
HEATHER STAINES: John was named the seventh director of the University of North Carolina Press all the way back in June 2012. During his time at the press, he's published two New York Times bestsellers and has been the recipient of several major foundation grants, including two grants of nearly one million each from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation to support new scale models for high quality monograph publications.
HEATHER STAINES: He's also the president of Longleaf Services, a provider of scaled publishing tools for university presses and other campus-based publishing initiatives. That will be our first pairing. Our second pairing for conversation will be Martin Eve and Susan Doerr. Susan is associate director of the University of Minnesota Press. She's got 24 years of experience in literary, corporate, and scholarly publishing and distribution.
HEATHER STAINES: During her 16 years of the press, she's led the development of the Digital Publishing program. She's expanded Minnesota's journals program and established systems that tripled annual fundraising support. Susan served on the AUPresses board of directors and is a past president and board member of the Minnesota Book Publishers Roundtable, Minnesota's book publishing association.
HEATHER STAINES: Susan is a co-founder of Manifold, a web-based platform for publishing scholarly works. And I know we'll be talking about that a bit. Susan will be having a conversation with Martin Paul Eve, who's professor of literature technology and publishing at Birkbeck, the University of London. He's founder of the Open Library of the Humanities, and he wrote the OA book, Open Access and the Humanities along with eight other OA monographs.
HEATHER STAINES: He's also a lead on the [INAUDIBLE] project for OA books. Our final pair for discussion will be Sara Rouhi and Raym Crow. Sara is the director of strategic partnerships at PLOS, where she focuses on new business models for sustainable inclusive open access publishing. In 2020, seem so far away, but yet so near, she launched a PLOS' first collective action business model for highly selective publishing called PLOS Community Action Publishing.
HEATHER STAINES: And so far, she solicited over 50 partners, probably more since she sent this bio in. Including consortia like the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Jisc, and CRKN. Her partnership work focuses on collaborating with values-aligned organizations to further process open science mission. Before her time at PLOS, many of you may know her from the time she managed business development at Digital Science for both Altmetric and the Dimensions Platform.
HEATHER STAINES: She's involved in so many volunteer and thought leadership capacities, including an at-large board member for SSP. In 2015, she received SSP's Emerging Leader Award. She writes and speaks frequently on open access and diversity and scholarly communications. She's a comedian and improviser in Washington, DC, which excites me so much. And she tweets about all things-- politics, open science, improv, and scholcomm at Twitter @RouhiRoo.
HEATHER STAINES: Many of you probably follow her already. And rounding out our speakers is Raym Crow. Raym is a Senior Consultant with the SPARC Consulting Group and principal of Chain Bridge Group, a consulting firm that provides publishing and sustainability planning services to learn in professional societies, University presses, academic libraries, and digital publishing projects. Crow-- Raym-- yeah, I'm reading, specializes in developing plans for funding model capable of supporting open resources, which we'll be hearing about.
HEATHER STAINES: He's been the architect of multiple open access models, including Subscribe to Open with annual reviews, plus his Community Action Publishing and Direct to Open with MIT Press. So let me go back to my presentation. And it always occurs to me, after I start speaking, that I have forgotten to introduce myself. So I will do that briefly. I'm Heather Staines.
HEATHER STAINES: Six months into my time with Delta Think, a senior consultant and director community engagement for the Open Access Data and Analytics Tool. Longtime listener, first time, caller, no, for SSP. Very excited. This is, I think, my third year on the New Directions planning committee. So when I thank that committee, I'm also thinking to myself, which is a little bit weird.
HEATHER STAINES: But that's OK. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to our first conversation peer pair, which are John and Kamran. Take it away.
JOHN SHERER: Thanks, Heather
KAMRAN NAIM: Thanks, Heather.
JOHN SHERER: Hi, Kamran. So I think the premise of our pairing is that we live on pretty opposite places on the spectrum of scholarly publishing. You're in the urgency and openness of scientific research. And I am what I like to call the stately and yet glacial elegance of humanities monograph publishing. And so what could we possibly have to learn from each other? And so what we're going to do here is we're just going to interview each other and ask each other a few questions.
JOHN SHERER: And it seems like the first thing outside of what Heather did in your bio. Could you just talk for a few minutes about the work that you do at CERN?
KAMRAN NAIM: Oh, sure. So my title is head of open science within the scientific information service at CERN. And CERN had an Open Access Policy in 2014. And effectively, the policy mandates that all research publications from CERN should be published open access and CC-BY. To date, our current adoption rate is about 95%-- variation between 90%, 95%.
KAMRAN NAIM: There's still a little bit just of the odd few publications that end up in CERN journals that remain closed, but the majority of publications are open. The largest chunk of those are via SCOAP3, as Heather mentioned earlier. So SCOAP3 is a global consortium, which has enabled us not to only make sense high-energy physics research openly available, but also has made practically 90% of research and the discipline open.
KAMRAN NAIM: It's been running also since 2014. And since then, we've published about 45,000 articles. It's a global partnerships. So 44 countries participate. It's a mix of not really primarily libraries. We also have a couple of different funding agencies and research labs from around the world. I think collectively, these institutions work through CERN to underwrite the open access publishing of research in high-energy physics.
KAMRAN NAIM: And although there's only institutions from 44 countries that participate, we've been able to enable authorship from over 120 because we underwrite the articles directly. There's no-- there are no APCs for authors. And obviously, the content is published totally openly. So that's really been the history of SCOAP3.
KAMRAN NAIM: We'd like that it's an equitable model that charges no APCs. I think it's also proven that not everybody has to pay. There are-- and I think we'll get into these issues later on. But there are some actors in the scholarly publishing system who simply aren't able to access publishing as it stands now. And I think we've proven through SCOAP3 that you can have an equitable and inclusive global model.
KAMRAN NAIM: The other just quite exciting thing to mention now is that we have just launched SCOAP3 for books. And so that's an effort that we're-- it's a partnership with six different publishers where we've identified key texts in the discipline of high-energy physics and neighboring disciplines as well. So instrumentation, accelerator physics. And worked with publishers to transition important textbooks and monographs to OA.
KAMRAN NAIM: We've got about 100 books in the pipeline. Four have already been made openly available. We're partnering with the OA Open Library to support discovery and distribution. And for anyone who's interested, check out the SCOAP3 for books under collection on the OA Open Library. That's pretty much-- that's at least my open access stuff. I do a few other things, but that's the OA piece.
KAMRAN NAIM: So how about you, John? Tell me about your work.
JOHN SHERER: So I work at the University of North Carolina Press. And we're a typical Public University Press in North America. So we publish about 110 books a year and about 18 journals. Of our 110 or so books, probably 70 of them are probably monographs. So two-thirds or three-fourths of the list is pretty scholarly, pretty monographic. The economics of that are terrible.
JOHN SHERER: We've done the math. We think we lose about $20,000 every time I sign a contract for a monograph. So that's even in the traditional cost recovery where we're trying to get money from everybody that we know. But we have an endowment, and we sell regional trade books. And some of these bestsellers that Heather mentioned help fund the monograph list.
JOHN SHERER: Heather also mentioned that UNC Press owns something called Longleaf Services. So Longleaf is-- started as a distributor, doing things similar to what Hopkins Fulfilment does and [INAUDIBLE] Distribution. And we have expanded it to engage deeper earlier in the workflow stream to do more publishing services on behalf of University presses.
JOHN SHERER: So much of publishing is about scale and the university presses really struggle with scale. I was at Basic Books before I was here, and that was a $30 million company. And I was part of $150 million company. And then I come to UNC Press and I have to pick a royalty accounting software and I'm like, that's not what I signed up for. So we so we use Longleaf to try and develop a scale.
JOHN SHERER: And a couple of these grants that Heather mentioned as well are running through Longleaf, including the current one we're working on now, which is called the sustainable history monograph pilot. And so the idea behind that was we were going to take a university press monographs from-- I think we have a 24 participating presses. And they give us their manuscripts essentially at the copy editing stage and we create a standardized workflow that yields standardized outputs, which is what OA platforms want.
JOHN SHERER: But it's a pretty interventionist thing. Culturally, it's a real obstacle because university presses really like their physical formats and we spent a lot of time and resources on creating bespoke physical formats. And so Shrimp is trying to focus more on digital affordances. So we make people do things like DOIs and chapter-level metadata, and ORCIDs, things which presses don't normally do for their work.
JOHN SHERER: So we're trying to experiment with building a true digital first workflow that has the digital affordances that can yield better discoverability. The other thing that we're participating in is we are-- we're the PIs on Shrimp. We're just a partner on something called the Next Generation library Publishing Pilot, which is funded by Arcadia in the UK.
JOHN SHERER: And Shrimp is funded by Melon. And that is a project to build open source tools that lets campus-based units, mainly libraries, manage their own journal-- mainly journals, although there's other types of publishing that you can do there. And so it's really trying to wrest control from commercial partners and trying to see if you can return some of the work and the benefit to the campuses, and that is meant specifically as an OA program.
JOHN SHERER: So on the journal side we're looking at that, and Shrimp is an example on the book side of what we're trying to do. It's still pretty modest. Most of the people on this meeting know that open access monograph publishing has not taken the university press world by storm. There are a number of really fascinating pilots, but I would call them exactly that.
JOHN SHERER: They are pilots and they're a little bit on the margins of what most people say is their core work. I think everybody feels good about experimenting with it. We've done some surveys and there's two obstacles. One is the funding, so how do you-- when you remove some income streams, of which there is substantial for digital editions of monographs, how do you make up for that. And then it's cultural.
JOHN SHERER: A lot of authors are still-- especially historians and humanists-- are very concerned about a perception that OA is a different type, a different level of scholarship, which of course is not true and there's no evidence for. But it's profound and we found with our history monograph pilot in particular, the biggest obstacle is authors, especially tenure track authors who are being told by their peers don't do anything that sounds shiny and new, do the thing that I did 30 years ago.
JOHN SHERER: So it's an uphill battle. And I would say even at places that claim to be doing a lot of OA work. UNC, Michigan, California, lots of places, it's still-- is it 10% of their output, monographs? Probably not. So it's still-- we're at baby steps. We could talk about what some of those obstacles are. But anyway, that's kind of where we are.
JOHN SHERER: Can you talk a little bit more about the Scope 3 funding model for books? Because I'm now going to put you on the spot to figure out are there things that we can learn? Because you're obviously getting some momentum here.
KAMRAN NAIM: Yeah, honestly the funding model is pretty straightforward. This was a pilot initiative just to see if this would work. So we asked libraries that are part of this Scope 3 community if they would make a one time financial contribution to an initiative to flip the books in the discipline to being open.
KAMRAN NAIM: So we had a working group as we do, and that identified a kind of a target list of books to flip. And we then set out contacting publishers one by one to see what the appetite would be. The reality is is that we weren't so successful on our original list. We had a lot of publishers that just simply said, hey, the book that you've mentioned is one of the leading textbooks in the discipline, so no.
KAMRAN NAIM: It was a good thing it was on our list, but the reality was is that they would need to replace revenue and some of them were embarrassed to tell us how much they actually made on the book itself, which-- yeah, and one of them suggested that at least one of the books with seven figures, and so obviously that was something that we weren't going to be able to do. But we were able to work with a number of publishers on a percentage of the books that we had identified, but then they also suggested other books that would be ready to flip and so we iterated.
KAMRAN NAIM: And once we had a kind of financial package, we asked the libraries in the Scope 3 community if they would make one time voluntary contributions to a fund, and actually we raised more money than our initial target. Actually, we have a surplus in that fund of about 25% of our target. So we're going to go back and see if there are other books that we can include in the initiative.
KAMRAN NAIM: But these are all back list titles, so some of them are textbooks, most of them are monographs. Obviously we got into this whole world of textbooks are completely different ballgame. And what we realized is that the revenues that publishers get for textbooks are just so high it's just not feasible for many of them to even think about switching them to OA. It was an interesting.
KAMRAN NAIM: It was my first time working in books, and so it was a learning experience so I obviously feel like I do have a lot to learn from you. Yeah, and whether or not that there is much that can be learned from this approach. I think the thing is that at least even during COVID times when there's like a real financial crunch on universities, many of them were very willing to put some money aside for an OA books initiative.
KAMRAN NAIM: I think maybe also because having books freely available and accessible all around the world was pretty useful during COVID. I'm interested in how you're thinking of different revenue models for the books that you make for the books that you publish, and is there kind of a mix that you can do?
KAMRAN NAIM: I can't remember where I learned this, but someone once told me that if you have a print volume that typically has good sales that making an OA version doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to drop in print. So does that ring true for your discipline or for your press, I think. Is there a way that you can make content open but fund it through print sales?
JOHN SHERER: Yeah, it's a great question. And to be honest, nobody has quite tested it. It's still too early to know. There's a justifiable perception that a free digital edition might severely cannibalize print revenues, but there's also evidence that for humanists and especially for immersive reading like you do for a humanities monograph that there's a strong preference for print formats. And so it becomes a very interesting exercise when you talk about, could it be that making a digital edition open, that you think of it as a discoverability step and not as a UX.
JOHN SHERER: And so people aren't replacing the experience of reading digital versus analog, but they are much more likely to find out about a book, to engage with it sufficiently such that they might say, well, I just I want to read all 90,000 words of this and I'm not going to do it on a screen for all the reasons that might be obvious. The question about-- it's interesting to hear you talk about your program kind of takes books that were already published and kind of flips them to open.
JOHN SHERER: So there is nothing approaching kind of consensus about what an OA fee should be, but there are some of these front list programs that get five figures for dollars like $10,000 to $15,000. So Tome, Knowledge Unlatched are both trying to get in that kind of low five figure area. The National Endowment for the Humanities has an interesting program where if it's a book where they funded the research they're asking publishers to accept $5,000 to open a book three years after it was published.
JOHN SHERER: So you have some cost recovery time during those first three years to kind of make your money and then you get $5,000 as a bonus to open it downstream. It's interesting because I found that people struggle to answer the question about what is an OA subsidy for? Is it just monograph publishing is super hard and because I lose $20,000 you should pay me lots of money to make it easier?
JOHN SHERER: Or is it actually a hedge against the risk, the financial risk, of making a book open? And so I'm super transparent about our revenue. On a humanities monograph we make about 20-- for a specialized monograph-- we make about $20,000, and between two to 4,000 of that is digital. So if someone comes to me and says John, I'll give you $5,000 to open that book. First of all, that $5,000 is more than all the digital income I was expecting on it, but then it comes to the question so what happens to the long term print?
JOHN SHERER: Does print take a 10% or 20% hit, or is this crazy notion of print actually becomes more desirable because you made it. So it needs to be studied to understand it because lots of stubbornness about OA is based on this kind of assumption that it's going to just kill your print revenue and then the whole thing kind of breaks down.
HEATHER STAINES: Great conversation, guys. Before we move over into Susan and Martin, I just wanted to give them the opportunity if there were things that they wanted to respond to that you guys have mentioned so far. Martin?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I think we could probably spend our entire time just responding to the richness there, but several things struck me. This whole tenure track thing is in some ways a red herring. The idea that junior scholars, if you just do what everybody else is doing, will succeed-- you need to distinguish yourself as somebody in that position, you need to show you're exceptional. And I don't blow my trumpet, but as an early career scholar, I got incensed by the fact that there wasn't digital availability of my work for free.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Made that a point in my career, and was the youngest full professor of English in the UK. It depends on how you see this as an opportunity or a threat, and I think if we can start to change this dialogue among early career scholars, actually there's enthusiasm for their work doing something in the world rather than just being something sold behind a paywall so they get tenure. And that's the kind of change of discourse we need.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Susan's been making some notes, I know she might have something to say about the OA and print relation as well.
SUSAN DOERR: So when you asked does open access cause a drop in print sales, and John's point that it's a little too early to tell is true because we haven't done a good study on that. But just anecdotal information, there's a series that we make at Minnesota that is almost entirely open access, it's called Forerunners. They're just little 35,000 words pamphlet essays, and some of those have sold in print more than 4,000 copies, even as they're freely available open access online.
SUSAN DOERR: And there are a lot of reasons for that because they're topical, they get good social media conversation, and other things. But nonetheless, these anecdotal stories to us show that it's worth studying, first of all. And second of all, it is not necessarily the case that you'll see a drop in print sales just because it's freely available to read online.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I mean what--
HEATHER STAINES: Oh, go ahead, Martin.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: An interesting point is that, I'm sorry to say but most books are already available illegally online, so we actually have quite a good case study of whether print sales are still viable.
JOHN SHERER: That's very true. I always joke that if you type in one of my titles into Google, free PDF automatically fills into the search. You don't even have to like claim to be looking for it, it just--
HEATHER STAINES: Well, I know no one is leaving the audience for today's session to go in and do that. I want to transition over to Martin and Sara but don't worry John and Kamran are going to be back in the not too distant future. We'll feed them back into the conversation. Thanks, guys.
KAMRAN NAIM: Thank you.
HEATHER STAINES: Martin and Susan, take it away.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: So we're probably less opposed than the previous pair made out. I'm a humanities scholar and Susan has been doing a lot of work around format experimentation and shift, in a way. But I think where we want to start was to think a little bit about what it means to make traditional outputs open versus what it means to take advantage of the kind of affordances that John gestured towards of the digital space, and what that shift might look like.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Is that an accurate starting point Susan?
SUSAN DOERR: I think absolutely that is. One of the things that is exciting, at least for a publisher and I hope for scholars as well, is that the things that you can do in a digital network online environment are more expansive than what you can do in the print format. While print is extremely portable, it is fixed. There's a fixity to the object that a digital publication isn't bound by. So I think that's a really exciting and new direction and we might see more and more of that emerge as scholars are given the space to be able to publish in these new modes.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: To some extent I want to come back in a kind of devil's advocate type way around that in that we know that publishing is never just the altruistic knowledge dissemination vehicle we want. And it also slots into, as we've already gestured towards, these academic processes of accreditation where a print fixed object that has a scarcity cost associated with it works quite well as a correlate of the scarcity of the hiring and promotion procedures.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: And so there's something kind of intention with the dynamic potentiality of the digital space and the fixed we have in print that serves us better in the accreditation space.
SUSAN DOERR: But I think that while that may be somewhat true, that isn't necessarily how scholars are working. They are putting so much material into social media. They're putting material into their blogs. There's a lot of digital work that is going on and perhaps it's not being counted as it should, and that's the conversation that we should move towards. And so I think for us as scholarly publishers and for any publisher really, that our job is to figure out ways to integrate some of this other work.
SUSAN DOERR: And that's exciting to us, too, because it gives us the opportunity to learn and expand. And one might say what we want are readers. We want to reach the most readers we can around the world and we have different modes of access. And so digital affords us an open access, especially affords us a way to reach perhaps the highest proportion of readers and get away from the scarcity that also limits the dissemination of the knowledge that is part of our mission.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: It's kind of interesting that one of the things I hear when I have these conversations with people who aren't having them every day is about-- they talk about this being technological determinism, and they say well, you've built the platforms that do this and then you just want us to adapt our scholarship to fit this standardized flow. And it kind of frustrates me that they don't have the historical perspective that the book is also a historical determinant on what they're doing at the moment.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: The codex is a technology as much as any other that has shaped how we produce scholarship in our disciplines, these humanities disciplines, to date. There is a technological determinism at work before you even get there, but that has become so naturalized that the digital is seen as the alien technological determinism and the book is seen as the natural home. So there sort of needs to be a bit of a denaturing of that assumption if we're going to really be able to take these affordances and go with them.
SUSAN DOERR: And so what you describe may be true but then it brings forward a few challenges, because one of the things that makes the scale of publishing possible is process and workflow. And so that technological determinism does have a replicable and scalable workflow with it. So going into these experimental modes requires investment and it requires training, which is another investment in people rather than in platforms.
SUSAN DOERR: And it also requires scholars to do different work, and I'll give you one example. For instance, many of us are focused on accessibility for readers with different abilities, and that requires a whole new set of metadata that aren't part of our traditional workflows, and that metadata can't be created solely by the publishers. It has to be a partnership between the scholar, writer and the publisher because you as the scholar have the knowledge and we as the publisher can help with the workflow, right?
SUSAN DOERR: There's a partnership there. But all of these new modes, new experiments, then turn us to the question of what sort of investment is required to allow us to work in these new modes in a way that does sustain in the long term? It can't just be a super shiny, new, but then something that will fade and go away because nobody could figure out how to support it. So there's a challenge there, like how do we do that?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I've often said that the uniqueness of artifacts that we produce in scholarly publishing is directly inversely proportional to the preservability of those artifacts. And everyone has this idea of digital abundance being unlimited. The digital imagination tends towards proliferation. But the problem is that every time you proliferate away from any standardized workflow, as I think you were gesturing towards, you need somebody uniquely to work on ensuring that artifact is continually accessible over a decadal time span, for instance.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: And it falls apart and you basically end up with yes, we've got a new format that might have the kind of incrementalism you're looking at, but it still needs to be standardized and it still needs to regularize its subject into something that can be curated and cared for in a standardized way so we can continue to get a hold of it. So yeah, I agree with you that there are limits to what the imagination should be allowed to do in this digital space.
SUSAN DOERR: Well, and when you talk about preserve ability, for instance, I think that what this really speaks to is the need for an era of hybridity where we are producing these things simultaneously. I think the traditional outputs-- we have mechanisms to preserve these things. So let's keep doing them, too. Can we have an era where we're doing both simultaneously while we figure out the systems that will make the experimentalism sustainable, right?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I thought it was interesting what you said about training as well, because it's very easy to imagine that all of our outreach needs to be on the side of authors and producers and publishers and the people who do the work of getting this stuff into the systems. But I think in [? Katherine ?] [? Hales' ?] talks about teaching e-literatures and she says that she has to tell her students they need to spend the same amount of time reading online hypertext literatures as they would do a conventional novel for her classes.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: And it requires a different type of thinking, perhaps, than usual web mentality to think of deep scholarship that requires engagement. I think we need reader training as well in navigating these new structures and formats.
SUSAN DOERR: I would agree with that. So as a creator of Manifold, which is an online reading platform, the idea behind that was to have a long form deep reading experience on the web. So we spend a lot of time on the US, the design, and the reading interface. But it does require that readers are willing to read on this device in this way. There is an aspect of this about readers, will they follow us even if we have these new experimental modes?
SUSAN DOERR: Will they come with us? And we're finding that they will, but that there are probably going to be limits and there's probably going to be adjustment. So what you say is absolutely right. It's not just about us and the systems but it's about ultimately the readers, because isn't that who we're doing all this work for?
HEATHER STAINES: If I can jump in-- I'm sorry-- we have a question. Which I think Martin, you're an author, and Susan obviously worked closely with authors. In the era of print on demand, nothing really goes out of print anymore. So there was a question about whether in this world of OA, at a certain point authors might get rights reversions back to either make their own open version or the like. I'm not sure, I sort of feel like I've heard inklings about that, and maybe you can talk about that while I invite Sara and Raym to also join in.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: The rights reversion stuff is quite complex and works differently under different copyright regimes in different jurisdictions with different permission structures. I've gone through a process in the past year and a half of buying back the rights to my early monographs that were not open access because I've got a grant fund that would let me do it, but it involved a subsidy to the publisher.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: It was, as John said, never quite clear what proportion of their costs that was covering when they'd already sold things before, and there were all these challenges of libraries having purchased a book that then subsequently was made open, and whether that actually constituted a violation of trust with them with their relationship with the publisher and so forth. So it's a great idea thinking of the vast back catalog of human history and publication and whether we could make that digitally available.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I think there are lots of complexities and pitfalls in the actual negotiation of it on the ground.
SUSAN DOERR: And Heather, to answer your question, we're seeing fewer authors necessarily asking for their rights back so much is asking if we can proceed with an open access edition of their book, even if it's an older book that's been available for a while. And we've been amenable to that. Generally though, like Martin said, we do ask for a subsidy because most of these books still are selling. They are still contributing income to the press and to our program.
SUSAN DOERR: And so we look at how can we offset that future loss, presuming there would be a future loss by having an open access edition available.
HEATHER STAINES: So I'd like to invite Sara and Raym, if there are things that Martin and Susan mentioned that you wanted to follow up on? Raym?
RAYM CROW: Sure, this is a little bit of a digression, but I'd be interested in your perspectives on platforms for making open monographs-- open access books, especially monographs-- discoverable and visible. There are different approaches, I'd be interested to hear, especially in the context of what you're talking about technological evolution. But what are your thoughts on that?
RAYM CROW:
SUSAN DOERR: Yeah, I'll speak to that. So I think a lot of us, especially in the University Press community, but in publishing, we're taking an everywhere approach. So we'll make it available in as many places as possible if it's open access, because you want to meet readers where they want to go. And so participating in as many of these platforms-- so the JSTOR, the [INAUDIBLE] my own Manifold. There's an APL [INAUDIBLE] collection out of the University of Michigan.
SUSAN DOERR: The more places you participate, the more likely you are to find readers where they are. So we are trying to reach as many of them as we can.
HEATHER STAINES: Martin?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I mean, the other thing I'll say on that is that from a dissemination point of view, that makes so much sense and is great for people being able to get hold of it. From a demonstrating what good OA can do, getting some metric data, and showing the impact, it becomes a total distributed nightmare. And it becomes very difficult to say anything meaningful about the usage on this, if it were ever possible to say anything meaningful about the usage on these artifacts.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: But we've hit that problem all the time between unlimited dissemination and distribution versus centralization and control.
HEATHER STAINES: Sara-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] Go ahead.
SUSAN DOERR: Go ahead. I was going to say that speaks to a need for a centralized data track where we're all sharing our data so that we can bring it all into one place. I'll let you all speak to that.
HEATHER STAINES: Yeah, Sara, any follow ons for Martin and Susan?
SARA ROUHI: Well, just on that point about the more open it is, the harder it is to identify metrics, that's something we're struggling with right now. There's this push and pull for counter compliant metrics for native OA publishers and wanting to really meet that need while it's at the same time pushing ourselves and libraries to have that conversation about but what does that actually tell you about anything? Understanding that the vast majority of how your work is accessed is never going to be through an IP authenticated path that we can evaluate and tell you a story about.
SARA ROUHI: So I think there's a lot of work to do there around rethinking those kinds of metrics. We're trying.
HEATHER STAINES: Great, so thanks Martin and Susan, and don't worry again, folks, they'll be back. Sara and Raym, take it away.
SARA ROUHI: Hey, Raym.
RAYM CROW: Hey, Sara, how's it going?
SARA ROUHI: Good, how are you? Sorry I had to move locations. So I'm in a new spot.
RAYM CROW: OK, there's a lot happening there. So I thought we would-- we're going to talk about was open models rely not just on their design and on the presentation of them by the publisher, but also on how they're created by libraries and consortia and through other sales channels. So I thought it'd be interesting to explore that. Since you've been doing this obviously recently, in your experience, what are some of the benefits and challenges of working with consortia to introduce a new open model?
SARA ROUHI: Yeah, so many. I think the main one that we start from is just the problem of scale. As a small publisher that doesn't have-- before I joined PLOS there was almost no infrastructure to support any kind of publisher to library financial relationship. It is very rudimentary, and we've been doing a lot of work in the last two years to change that. And so in addition to not having the internal infrastructure, we certainly didn't have the relationships and the footprint, resource-wise, to just reach a lot of institutions at one time.
SARA ROUHI: So the obvious benefit that comes with a consortial relationship and partnership is the reach and the access to a lot of organizations by a unified, consistent channel. So that is the scaling. The help with scaling is really important there, and part of the reason we've seen a lot of traction with our new non-APC models has been thanks to organizations like JISC and CRL in the US and CRKN in Canada.
SARA ROUHI: Being willing to take a chance on a different model that is going to be harder to explain, harder to fit into the framework of conversations that they're trying to have with their members, but credit to all of those consortia for taking that on. The challenge is every consortia is different. And so Greg Eow at Center for Research Libraries is trying to radically transform the publishing landscape.
SARA ROUHI: Other libraries-- other consortia are essentially buying clubs that are trying to get the best deal, and those are two different conversations. And that can be a challenge in some ways, but we can get into that, into detail.
RAYM CROW: OK. You talk about the differences across consortias, you have the regional ones, North America versus Western and northern Europe, and other parts of the world. Have you found that the mission-- open mission orientation of some of the consortia-- does it translate into actual behavior in terms of adopting models? Not to put you on the spot here or call anybody out, but I would just be interested to know how consistent that is or whether that actually helps.
SARA ROUHI: I think that's-- it's funny, I wouldn't even make that a consortial versus individual library distinction. My experience in the last 18 months of consulting both with consortias and libraries around these new models is there's a spectrum, right? There are these activists libraries and/or consortia that, as a function of their membership, their resources, their clout, can take very aggressive open stands.
SARA ROUHI: So whether that's CDL, just saying we're canceling Elsevier, we have the clout to do it. We have the money to do it. We're doing that. An individual institution like that would be like an MIT, the same thing. We're going to take a position and move the money around to fit that position. So that's the one extreme, the activist institutions.
SARA ROUHI: And then on the other extreme, both at the consortial and individual level, are very transactional organizations that fundamentally want to get a better price, a lower price, at least a revenue-neutral price. Which is a really challenging conversation to have as a native OA publisher when you've never asked them for money before ever, so everything is new money.
SARA ROUHI: So you're already asking them for more than they're willing to give in a lot of cases, particularly when a library has never spent money on any kind of publishing cost, as you find in the US. So it's interesting. JISC, for example, really wanted a partner early because they really wanted-- there was mission alignment between what they wanted to do in terms of equity and where PLOS was at.
SARA ROUHI: Definitely it had other consortia say, we're mission-aligned with you, but when the rubber hits the road the numbers aren't the numbers they want. And so you end up having this-- you're trying to have on the one hand, a kind of existential conversation about the way the marketplace should look, but then you're getting into the weeds on sort of transactional discounting and behaviors that very much-- and you know this better than anyone, Raym-- with for example, community action publishing at PLOS.
SARA ROUHI: That is a collective action model that is predicated on everyone contributing their fair share. And so you can't transactionally discount such that a consortia can turn around to its members and go look what we got for you, we got you this amazing deal. They can't really get much of an amazing deal because it would undermine the model. So it's been really interesting to see what organizations effectively have to walk away in situations like that because the tension around the philosophical or moral imperative and the dollars.
SARA ROUHI: Often on the more transactional end, it's the dollars that kind of drive it. So I think that spectrum is often what I'm working on. And most places fall in between, but there's really times where you have to have a kind of awkward conversation where you go, I hear you, I get that you don't see any benefit if your members get basically the same price on their own, but the model is built that way. And so it's interesting to see how organizations-- what side of that line they fall on.
RAYM CROW: Yeah. It's certainly one of the tensions we deal with in designing these kinds of models, because as you know, with open resources you need some way to induce institutions to participate, to contribute. And if they're open-- so one of the more standard ways of doing it is with private benefits that are exclusive to people that contribute. And even in the otherwise collective model it looks like a market transaction.
RAYM CROW: And because it looks like a market transaction it's treated like a market transaction. And so there's this kind of-- I don't know if it's vicious, but there's certainly a cycle where you basically get stuck there and it's hard to get out of. And it's also expensive to try to coordinate basically a collective funding based on pro-group, pro-collective behavior, as opposed to some kind of private benefit.
RAYM CROW: Especially if it's a recurring kind of [INAUDIBLE]
SARA ROUHI: Well, I wanted to ask you about that, actually. Obviously we work together on community action publishing. Direct to Open is taking off-- Subscribe to Open. How did you think about that in the construct of-- and those are obviously different models, I acknowledge the answer is not going to be the same for all three. But I'd be curious how you thought about that problem, and then how your publisher partner pushed back.
SARA ROUHI: Because definitely things you were like, we should do this, and I was like, Raym, we can't do that. So I'm curious what that was like on your end as you're trying to think through it.
RAYM CROW: Well, first, like you said, the situation differs in terms of the type of resource, whether it's a journal, or a monograph, or something else. Whether it's recurring or not, and that affects the nature of the audience. And so the first thing I tend to do is try to unpack all of that. So we have the design parameters for we did this for PLOS, did it for MIT, and [INAUDIBLE] Basically, what is it we're trying to achieve and what problem are we trying to solve?
RAYM CROW: Because they're similar, but they're different for all of those-- in all the situations. And if you basically have a situation where-- you have to identify what group you're going to go after. Who are you targeting to contribute? Because if it's everybody then that's your loss, because it's just too expensive, and you have to have some way to focus.
RAYM CROW: A good example is Subscribe to Open focuses on the subscriber base, existing subscribers who have demonstrated value at a specific price point. But if you don't have that, you have to define it. And so same thing with the Direct to Open. What are the institutions that are likely to contribute. So that really helps you define what the model is going to look like in terms of how you're going to go after, what the mechanisms are going to be to get them to participate.
RAYM CROW: You look at what levers you have to motivate participation. The hardest thing is-- it's open, it's always been open, it's never going to be anything but open. So it's not that you can basically say, well, we'll make open provision of it contingent on adequate support. You don't. And so that's a heavier lift, it obviously can be done, but it basically has to be designed to address those issues.
RAYM CROW: Where if you're basically saying Direct to Open uses this approach, Subscribe to Open uses this approach, that if a given set of conditions are satisfied then it'll be open, then that gives you some leverage. And then you can also add additional benefits that really make it a work [INAUDIBLE]
SARA ROUHI: But in that context, how did consortia-- because in some ways PLOS Community Action Publishing, CAP, was easier to get consortia to understand because it's still fundamentally was an annual fee for a service. And it didn't really-- there was no subscriber base to parse out, but it feels like Subscribe to Open and Direct to Open, because of that component, I can see consortia getting a little wrapped around the axle on that.
SARA ROUHI: How has that translated-- if you know. I realize you're not the one actually necessarily talking to consortia on that particular-- Kamran might know, actually, how it went with that. But did that piece make it more complex than consortia were kind of willing to engage with?
RAYM CROW: Yeah, it can't be. Because any new model, and Martin knows this from experience as well, it's harder to explain. It takes-- and it depends on the nature of the sales channel, for lack of a better term, whether you're going to consortia, whether it's direct sales, whether it's to agents, what level of engagement you have to explain the offer. Subscribe to Open at one level, for example, it's conceptually simple.
RAYM CROW: But we know in practice sometimes it can be a little bit more confusing. People see what they want to see, and so even though it basically is based on private benefits, it's perceived by a lot of libraries as being a collective model, and that's-- it's benign because they're happy, they like collective models, and they feel good about that. At the same time, there's a risk there because if some institutions or subscribers think that they can adopt a strategy of not participating.
RAYM CROW: And so this is where things get complicated, especially when you have a large, diverse subscriber base or supporter base. You need different kinds of framing and presentation to different segments of the audience.
HEATHER STAINES: Great. I've invited all of our speakers back. And Martin, you've been kind of active in the chat. You want to pick up on the thread of the conversation?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Yeah, I just second a lot of what Raym said about the costs of coordination and the overheads that are frequently not realized. I think people look particularly at the success of archive and just imagine that it just happened, that suddenly they had hundreds of people paying them. It's not true at all, and it wasn't true for us when we built the Open Library of Humanities. It required dedicated labor, outreach coordination, jurisdictional thinking as well.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: German institutions, I've just put us in the chat, really struggle-- public German universities-- to support collective funding models that do not have a rivalrous benefit to their own institution, for reasons of taxpayer justification on what they're spending their resources on. And so it's a very complex, international issue getting these models that seem more equitable to work. I think it's good that we have so many people making them work.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: We need to do that. But it's not just build it and they will come, and you have to think quite carefully about the context within which you're operating.
KAMRAN NAIM: I can just add to that as well. Yeah, I mean Scope 3, sure, it's been super successful, it's been running for a number of years. But it took Salvatore [INAUDIBLE] years of being on the road and flying around and talking to consortia and talking to funding agencies to try and basically build this collective effort and you know I think as Martin has described, and Raym as well, the broader the base of supporters, the more challenging it is to get people to act in a coordinated way.
KAMRAN NAIM: The question that I keep being asked is OK, well, how does-- how do these models scale? And I think that this is something that I'm sure Sara has been asked and you know people ask about Subscribe to Open as well. It's nice to see your little community of practice emerging around Subscribe to Open. My question for Raym and for Sara is, how do you see the scaling of these different collective approaches?
KAMRAN NAIM: And also, it's a second question, but are we bombarding librarians with more and somewhat complicated models to wrap their heads around when they're already suffering from OA fatigue?
RAYM CROW: Well, hopefully not. But one of the objective, as you know better than most, with Subscribe to Open is to minimize the disruption. To use the existing procurement processes in the same mindset. It is a subscription model, it reverts to a subscription-- or never leaves being a subscription if it doesn't satisfy the participation requirements. And so the idea there is you don't need to do anything.
RAYM CROW: That's why it was referred to as flipping for so long, is if we all just kept paying everything would be fine, but of course that doesn't work. So we need some way to ensure that momentum and that inertia, if you will.
SARA ROUHI: For us, the scaling is on two fronts. One is on the model, maintenance and development. Raym helped us conceptualize it and frame it, but every three years, depending on the model, it has to be kind of reset. That's a huge lift both in terms of the actual work in spreadsheets, but it's also huge problems with terrible metadata, huge problems with institutional disk disambiguation that we're trying to prep for now because we know it's coming in three years.
SARA ROUHI: And then the other scaling issue is the getting the word out, communicating the models, explaining them to institutions globally who have some affinity for equitable models and others that could not care less and that's not where they're at. And so the consortia are really helpful there in a lot of cases, but there's definitely two prongs. There's the communicating and buying into the model, and then there's the ongoing maintenance of the model for us that are proving to be a challenge.
SARA ROUHI: We're going to be spending a lot of next year thinking that through so that we can make sure they're sustainable over the long term.
KAMRAN NAIM: Here's an idea, perhaps we should be sharing our list of supporters. Obviously we have a set of institutions that have been supporting Scope 3 for a number of years and are committed. Maybe we should be doing this kind of sharing across different models even with Open Library of the Humanities and with Community Action Publishing to see, OK, well what are these-- Actually I know Raym was doing some work earlier in the year around pro-collective collective institutions.
KAMRAN NAIM: So I don't know if Raym, if you're at liberty to talk a little bit more about that, but maybe this is an opportunity for us to coordinate a little bit.
RAYM CROW: Sure. The data is pretty messy, but what I did is I went and looked at 30, approximately 35 open resources that basically have a voluntary contribution type model, that is, that the whatever private benefit they were providing wasn't really commensurate with what the fee was. So for a lot of services it was an altruistic payment. And what I was looking at is what are the subscriber-- the supporter bases look like.
RAYM CROW: What kind of-- how many institutions support how many things. And ultimately I had to set Scope 3 aside because it was the outlier, obviously, in so many ways. But that's-- I won't surprise a lot of people who work in these kind of areas. And these weren't just publishing-- these are things that include DSpace and others, open source software programs and things like that.
RAYM CROW: But a lot of the things that people are familiar with. And I'll try to clean this data up so I can share it more broadly, but it showed was that there was-- and I focused on North America, just to make it-- because that was best for the nature of what I was looking at the time. And there-- relatively few institutions contribute to a lot of open resources.
RAYM CROW: We like to think that everyone's queuing up to say, well, how can we help? And a lot of them are, they are supportive, but there aren't thousands of institutions worldwide that are supporting these things, and not even hundreds of institutions worldwide for a lot of them. And so I think we just need to be realistic about that.
HEATHER STAINES: Raym, it sounds like we could have a whole session just on building the models. So you know me, stay tuned for a call for future programming. I do want to move us along to the final portion of the session, and thanks, everyone, for being so active in the chat. So this is the picture round, which is a riff on some old school PowerPoint karaoke, those you may have come across back in olden times when SSP had a reception.
HEATHER STAINES: And we have actually gotten together and agreed on some of the topics in advance, although the speakers don't necessarily know the order. But what we intend to do is pop up a picture that's going to depict some aspect of OA, new directions in OA, and each of the speakers will have a brief opportunity to respond, and we'll get through as many other pictures as we can. So let's go with platforms and tools, and I'm just going to randomly call on people.
HEATHER STAINES: Martin.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: OK, so, platforms and tools. At the Open Library of Humanities a few years ago, we decided to build our own platform from scratch. It sounds like a terrible idea. There's already x number of platforms out there, why do you want to add another standard to it? The challenge for me is that most platforms tend to go through a similar lifecycle, which is an exciting period of innovation and flexibility where the world is your oyster, your flavor of the month, you can do what you like.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: And then you settle into a period of regularization. You settle into a period where your code base becomes unmanageable for anyone who hasn't worked on it before, and that cycle can kind of repeat itself. I took huge inspiration from open journal systems when I first learned of it. It was what introduced me to open access was accidentally stumbling across the platform. So these things are incredibly important in getting things in front of people.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: But there's also-- it's a constantly regenerating ecosystem of exciting, I think, technological possibilities and cycles of rebirth and so on. So I got into platform development kind of by mistake thinking we'll just do it better than everyone else, and then realize that everyone's going to be subject to those same kind of laws of regularity and cyclical decay.
HEATHER STAINES: Susan?
SUSAN DOERR: Well, as a platform creator I suppose I understand that we've been in our period of excitement at the Manifold platform for the past five or six years now, and moving into regularization in our next phase here. I think that it's really important, though, that we continue to develop these new tools, because with it comes new ways of publishing and new opportunities for those who want to publish in networks and online content.
SUSAN DOERR: But one of the challenges with these platforms and tools is the ongoing sustainability. So it's not just the code base gets unmanageable, but how do we continue to invest in them so that they are sustainable and they persist and that they update with the web? We've talked about supporting open access publishing, but I think we also need to look at the tools that we're using as part of that conversation of support.
SUSAN DOERR: And I don't know that we've switched, as a community, to how are we going to continue to invest in the platforms that have been created so that they persist with the content.
HEATHER STAINES: John?
JOHN SHERER: Well, I'm glad that smart people like Martin and Susan are building platforms, because we're not good at it. But I will say they're much needed. Because what we discovered through our pilot is that, in particular metadata and discoverability, in book publishing is driven by the demands of retailers. So we basically do what Amazon tells us to do so that Amazon can sell our books. We do what Muse and JSTOR and other people tell us to do.
JOHN SHERER: And the incentives to drive sales are different than the incentives to make books openly discoverable. In fact, they're almost-- the retailers are kind of doing a tease. They want to give you just enough content so that you'll hit the Buy button, whereas we want to get people to engage much more deeply. And I'm really worried about without that kind of center of gravity pulling us and demanding us to do these things, who is the motivator to do it?
JOHN SHERER: Is that the author, is it the publisher, or is it the platform provider? And so until someone comes along and tells OA publishers this is what you need to do and here are the pathways that you need to do it, it's a very ragged system. We frankly underestimated the value that intermediaries like EBSCO and ProQuest play in terms of disseminating metadata, because they're going to get a sales commission later on.
JOHN SHERER: But if we've taken away their incentive to get a sales commission, what's their incentive to distribute metadata? And so you actually run the risk of distributing metadata more poorly for open access than you do for paywalled content. So it's a very important thing. So keep working on it, Martin and Susan.
HEATHER STAINES: Yeah, Sara, you have a long background in tools.
SARA ROUHI: Oh god, the first thing that came to me when this popped up was they're not free. They're not free and they're not cheap. Probably because I just came off of a webinar yesterday where someone raised, well, peer review is free, so why is publishing expensive? So maybe I have PTSD from that. I guess what this raised for me, is there's a tension. We've definitely seen it at PLOS and you see at other places too, where you're so eager-- you, being all of us-- we're so eager to support open efforts, that they're just immediate.
SARA ROUHI: If it's open, it's good. And if it's a commercial, god forbid from a for-profit entity, it's bad. So why are you using the for-profit solution instead of the open solution? And the reality is not all open solutions are good ones. Not all commercial solutions are bad. So I've been spending a lot of time thinking about which battle is worth fighting there?
SARA ROUHI: And there's a baby walking by, so I'll leave that as my final comment on that.
HEATHER STAINES: Raym, platforms and tools, or should we move to the next one?
RAYM CROW: I'll make a quick comment about this. To Susan's point, there needs-- these platforms are often developed with grant funding, but they're not without necessarily provision for how they're going to be sustainable on a ongoing basis with operating funding. And so they'll often work some kind of membership model that's based on voluntary contributions which leads inevitably to chronic under-funding and not being able to perform and compete with commercial operators, as Sara said.
RAYM CROW: So I'll just make a plug for a Spark project that's looking to design an open resource fund, collective open resource fund, for infrastructure that supports Open, including NGLP on the publishing platform side.
HEATHER STAINES: Thanks, is that SCOSS, Raym?
RAYM CROW: No, it's just Spark.
HEATHER STAINES: Spark, OK. Great. To APC or to not APC? Who wants to start?
SARA ROUHI: I'll go. This is where you stand is where you sit, or however that thing goes. I'm really struck by the conversations that you have regionally where organizations sit on this. And as much as we bang the drum for equitable inclusivity, that is just not a priority for everyone. And there's a real kind of moment of oh, when you're talking to a well-resourced consortium in a well-resourced part of the world where you speak to the work around those models.
SARA ROUHI: And it's just crickets followed by we would like to pay exactly what we paid in the past but we'd like to get more stuff for it. You're like wow, that's where this conversation landed, all right. So to APC are not APC is-- there's the we all care about everyone else until it's our thing, and when it's our thing. It's amazing how many places are like you know what?
SARA ROUHI: We've spent years and millions underwriting this kind of model. It works really great for us, really not interested that it doesn't work for other people. And then conversely, there's the other end of the spectrum. So yeah, I think that this is a piece that we'll have to unpack more, is to what extent is it OK that there are going to be very privileged parts of the globe and institutions that are happy to opt out of this conversation entirely because they don't need to engage with it.
HEATHER STAINES: Mm-hmm. Kamran?
KAMRAN NAIM: All right. Sara gave a really good, nuanced answer. Obviously, maybe she's working in certain scenarios, but my general position is to not APC. And I think it just comes from the principle that when we-- the subscription system was so exclusionary because only people that were able to choose institutions were able to pay, only those people were able to read.
KAMRAN NAIM: And now we would be APC-based open access rate, we're almost creating a more pernicious barrier because folks aren't able to participate in the global scientific conversation unless they pay an APC. Obviously people then still choose to publish closed. The privilege thing, it's interesting. My sister is a physician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and also does a bunch of research.
KAMRAN NAIM: Even she brings up APCs as a problem and some of the reasons why she doesn't publish her papers. Every time she publishes a paper I'm like, oh my god, so excited. And then I hesitate to share it on Twitter because it's closed. And I ask her about it and she says, oh well, the cost of publishing OA are just too high. So I really think that we need to move away from APC-based.
KAMRAN NAIM: So I'm a huge fan, obviously, of collective models, and want to be able to remove these barriers completely.
HEATHER STAINES: Great. We've already touched upon it, and I need to put in like my disclaimer here, let's get spicy but remember there is a code of conduct. We wanted to make sure that this session today didn't come across as just an unabashedly non-reflective OA kind of rah rah session. And I think so many of our speakers have touched on issues around equity and the like, but we want to ask those hard questions.
HEATHER STAINES: So who's got a hard question that they want to either ask or address? John?
JOHN SHERER: So the thing that gets me in trouble, even within my own organization, is in reference to something I said upfront, which is the expense that we invest in the creation of physical products and what we know to be true is that for specialized monographs, so much engagement and discoverability happens-- all discoverability-- but a lot of engagement happens digitally and the print is kind of an afterthought. But the workflow, the investment in personnel, in materials, is all about print.
JOHN SHERER: It's print first and then we literally create a digital edition from the print-ready PDF. I'm sorry, I got to close my window because of course it's lawn mowing time at UNC. And so when we introduce standardization into our [INAUDIBLE] program, it's the thing that made people the most uncomfortable in our participating publishers was no, this is what we do as publishers.
JOHN SHERER: We create these-- not the scholarship, we create the objects that the scholarships are writing in. I'm always super clear about this. I think at UNC Press a third of our list should be standardized, digital first, openly discoverable OA. That's my goal. And most of what we do is still make lots of bespoke beautiful objects, I got a whole bunch of them over there, you can see them.
JOHN SHERER: So I'm not talking about burning down the system. So what I'd like to do is like identify a type of scholarship that is better published with true digital first investments. And frankly, I think it can be faster, less expensive, and more effectively discovered. That's my spicy comment.
HEATHER STAINES: Raym, you want to get in on that?
RAYM CROW: Well, not on that specifically. I guess if this basically covers just anything that might be--
HEATHER STAINES: Anything spicy. Sara was nudging you in the chat, so--
RAYM CROW: That's not--
SARA ROUHI: Sorry, Raym. Sorry
RAYM CROW: Yeah, she's--
SARA ROUHI: Well, while you're thinking, Raym, can I tag team off John?
RAYM CROW: Please.
SARA ROUHI: So that's fascinating. And being a failed academic myself, it's triggering, in a way. But I really tend to think that as long as academia is predicated on status and the last vestiges of feudalism, you don't get away from this problem. Because you didn't develop a mental health disorder and spend eight months of your life-- eight years, excuse me-- of your life doing something to not have the physical book at the end of it.
SARA ROUHI: My parents frequently will be like, see that PhD we did? Here's the bound book. There's a sense of I suffered for this, and there's generational trauma that happens, because of course your PI had a horrible experience, and you're going to have exactly the same experience they had because that's-- there's a lot of dark stuff that's embedded around the status of how scholars think about disseminating their work.
SARA ROUHI: Their work is an extension of themselves. And I tend to lean towards burning it down in some ways because those things, you'll never get anyone to like admit that that's what's driving some of that. But it's deep and it's pernicious, and it prevents us moving the needle on some of this stuff. But I can tell you, if I hadn't failed in my PhD I absolutely would demand some kind of object that I can wave around to say this is what all that pain was for.
SARA ROUHI: Rant over, sorry.
HEATHER STAINES: Raym and then Martin.
RAYM CROW: Yeah, on something completely different, I would just note that the topic that Sara and I were talking about, how libraries respond to open models. And again, there's a lot of rhetoric around support for open resources, but we have to do a better job of actually marshaling that support and channeling it in a way that's effective. I guess the only thing that's at all spicy about this is that I'm saying that there's a responsibility on the side of libraries as well as the publishers that are providing alternative models, which is to be receptive to them.
RAYM CROW: And to try to amplify them and accelerate the uptake of them as opposed to, again, treating everything as though it's a market transaction, which is really a major obstacle to progress.
HEATHER STAINES: Yeah, Martin?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: So I was going to come back to the previous point and say that one of the challenges is that if different publishers go down different routes, that's where you really get the status hierarchy segregation between those entities. And people will go to the publisher that can be shown to invest the most in producing, say, a physical material book, because as I said before it acts as a correlate to the scarcity of the number of academic posts that are available.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: So if you can get Harvard University Press to publish your book and they've shown that they've invested in creating the print copy while other experimental digital press has just done the digital version, this becomes something that can be used to differentiate between those and it becomes a problem in its own right. But I was going to come on to a different point, actually, which was about something I hinted at in the chat that the historical discourse around open access and the rationale that's given for it often centers around the affordability crisis, the serials crisis in publishing, and the fact that we've seen hyper-inflationary cost increases since 1986 in library purchasing economies.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: The problem is that if people think that open access is going to magically fix that overnight, they're much mistaken. Much of the labor of publishing has not disappeared just because we're doing things digitally. There are costs that still need to be paid. What we can fix is the access gap at less wealthy institutions, but it's going to depend on people continuing to pay.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Now you can argue that there might be ways that publishers can do this more cheaply, certain costs can be cut out of it, certain profit margins could be eroded. But at the end of the day, there is actually only a certain point down to which that can go beyond which you're really devaluing a type of labor that academics do not want to do themselves, and that's what it comes down to, is the people who argue hard that every cost in publishing should be cut out and that publishers do no work, et cetera.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: Honestly, they haven't spoken to any academics who do not have any clue about the technicalities of publishing and do not want to do it themselves on the ground. So that's my spicy point.
HEATHER STAINES: I've got two hands up and I did not see who put their hand up first. Kamran go and then-- or Susan and then Kamran?
KAMRAN NAIM: Mine dovetails off of what Martin just said. His point is very well taken. I think the thing that has been concerning me a little bit recently, and we're seeing this a little bit more in the data around open, and there was also in the last briefing paper that went out recently on the OA market. So we were all concerned about the oligopolistic conditions in the subscription business, and there was a fantastic PLOS One paper by the reviewer and his group a few years ago on it.
KAMRAN NAIM: But I think what we're seeing now in OA is that the same commercial players are the ones that are controlling-- the ones that control the majority of content in the subscription business are the ones that are controlling the majority of content in OA. And yeah, it may be that those are the ones that are delivering value, but I think if we want to avoid some of the pitfalls of having control of the market in the hands of a few-- thank you Martin-- a few players, this is something that we really need to be mindful of and watch out for.
KAMRAN NAIM: So this is me waving the warning flag.
HEATHER STAINES: Susan?
SUSAN DOERR: So I think this is where books diverge from journals a little bit. But one of the roles of university press is in helping writers learn to be writers. Helping scholars with their first book and really investing time, and I think this is a hidden cost. There's a lot of time that goes into both the copy editing and the work with an acquisitions editor and developing a manuscript, and especially a dissertation, into a book, which is fundamentally different than a dissertation.
SUSAN DOERR: And that doesn't go away if it's digital or print, and that doesn't go away if it's open access or not. That investment is required to make a good publication. And this gets to reputation, but that's a cost that fixed, if you will, regardless of mode. And it doesn't often get talked about.
HEATHER STAINES: Great. We're getting close on time. I want to do one more, which we're already segueing into, which is tolerance for change. Raym, you've been quieter, I'm not sure if you ducked away because you're off camera, but you work with a lot of publishers building out these models. Any impressions on what our tolerance to change is? Tolerance for change?
RAYM CROW: Tolerance on the part of publishers as opposed to library?
HEATHER STAINES: It could be on anyone, but yeah. In the system. Tolerance for change in the system.
RAYM CROW: Yeah, from the publisher's perspective, it's important to recognize that especially when you're evaluating an open model, it's not a matter of maximizing surplus. You're trying to balance-- they're already balancing mission with revenue, and that's going to take a-- when you're evaluating open models as opposed to a subscription model for a journal publisher, you have to take those issues into account.
RAYM CROW: So that you realize, OK, on one side there may be some revenue risk, but what it basically is a cost, if you will, for greater mission fulfillment in terms of more open. On the side of libraries in terms of tolerance for change it's-- a lot of the things you see in Europe where there's an affection for read and publish agreements and for plan S is that they want everything to look like a read and publish agreement, and even if it has nothing to do with that.
RAYM CROW: And so sometimes it means have to either modify the model to make it so they can publish their authors open access, and that doesn't-- you can't always modify a model to make that kind of thing happen. So it would be great if libraries and consortia in those areas could be more flexible in terms of their policies.
HEATHER STAINES: Great. I'm a historian as many of you know. And I know, John, you mentioned in a planning call that the sustainable history monograph program, the discipline of history was selected because historians are notorious for not wanting to change. Any input on that in the few minutes we have left?
JOHN SHERER: Yeah, you're exactly right, Heather. We deliberately chose that discipline because-- and it's actually one where publishing is least broken. History monographs usually sell more than literary theory ones, sorry Martin. But we wanted to do an intervention, because we thought if we can fix it for history then we can fix it for other disciplines. But we also knew that historians like to read their printed books, and so one of the things that, and we haven't quite done that yet, is test this.
JOHN SHERER: OK, we've done all these books digitally, but what happens to the print activity and the print sales? So it's one of the things that we're hoping to test. And I will just say, I know I sometimes sound very cynical and I'm not-- the community of university presses are eager to see change happen. They realize that we're in slightly kind of a declension narrative overall, and that there needs to be a better way to do it.
JOHN SHERER: But the costs are real, and so that's where the caution comes from. So I just want to express there is tolerance for change, it just has to be very careful.
HEATHER STAINES: Susan, I see you nodding.
SUSAN DOERR: Well, one of the things about tolerance for change is capacity for change. Because when we move into open access, some other work comes up that we've never had to take on before. Suddenly we have to think about preservation. And it's metadata, it's activity, it's where does this go, because we've never been responsible for that. We are now responsible for metadata for accessibility, which sounds like a small thing, but it's really huge.
SUSAN DOERR: And these are all new work for us in order to make these formats accessible to people in an open access environment. And so we may have tolerance, but we may not have capacity.
HEATHER STAINES: About one more minute. Sara, anything to add?
SARA ROUHI: I'll just say, having my last publisher role, which is 1,000 years ago, be with a subscription publisher, I was so excited to re-engage with libraries coming from PLOS and hear yes so much. I was expecting a lot of no's given the heavy lift that we were asking for in terms of supporting models that are new, and taking a chance, and using money that didn't exist before. And then COVID hits and you're like, this is never going to work.
SARA ROUHI: And then to actually hear so much yes and so much enthusiastic yes, it's been quite overwhelming in that respect, so that's what that made me think of.
HEATHER STAINES: Right, Kamran, I'm not sure if you're hand's still up from before, but brief response?
KAMRAN NAIM: Sorry, I need to do better about lowering. I think what this conversation, particularly Raym's comments made me think about was the work that transitioning society publishers to open access has been doing in consulting with society. We had a number of publishers approach us and they're interested in exploring a way in, we would do detailed consultations with them around different models.
KAMRAN NAIM: And society publishers are all really interested in preserving the surplus that they use for different society activities. And that tends to be the biggest barrier to their real adoption and exploration of OA because they just see it as an existential risk to most of the society activities. But I think that when we talk to libraries about it, what they say is to the extent that the work, the conferences and meetings, or whatever the other activities are that a society runs, if there's transparency around the expenditures on them and that they understand that work also goes into improving the publishing from the society.
KAMRAN NAIM: And so I think it's one of those things where greater transparency will overcome some of these barriers.
HEATHER STAINES: Martin, you took your hand down. Do you still want to jump in?
MARTIN PAUL EVE: I'll just say, as a positive note, that I have colleagues who never once thought that their work would have any traction with anybody outside their little subfield, and that was what they thought scholarship was all about. Who did their first deposit of a green OA article and had emails from the general public come in. And they turn around with their eyes open in excitement and their tolerance to change has instantly gone up by 100-fold just in that moment.
MARTIN PAUL EVE: And I think we do see those advances and it's easy to lose track of them when we get into this space, but we should take those positives where they come. And I'm seeing them more and more at the moment among academics.
HEATHER STAINES: Great. I always like to end on a positive note. And with that, thank you so much to all of our speakers, and I hope that the format wasn't too confusing or wacky. Please send your feedback. And thanks again to the planning committee and to Alexa who did a great job sending things forward. Look forward to the rest of the new direction seminar, and I'm handing over to Mary Beth to close.
MARY BETH: Hi, thanks Heather and thanks speakers. That was wonderful. We'll be back online tomorrow starting at 9:30 AM Eastern time. Let's also thank our sponsors again. Access Innovations, Atypon, Cadmore, eJournal Press, Impact Journals, Jack Farrell and Associates, Silverchair, Straive, and Taylor and Francis F1000. If you missed a session today, not to worry. They will be available on the Pathable platform through February, I believe, and you will be able to access them at your convenience as a registrant to the conference.
MARY BETH: So if you'd like to network with some of your fellow attendees and some of our sponsors, we invite you to join us in the Remo platform for some informal discussion and also just some networking. Grab a drink and come over and say hello. That concludes our session today, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Bye.
SARA ROUHI: Great to see everyone, thank you.
HEATHER STAINES: Bye-bye.
SUSAN DOERR: Bye.
KAMRAN NAIM: Thank you.

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