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A Beginner's Guide to Flipping to OA
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A Beginner's Guide to Flipping to OA
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Segment:0 .
JASON POINTE: Hello, and welcome to today's event, the first in SSP's 2022 webinar series. We're very pleased that you can join us today for our discussion on flipping journals to open access. My name is Jason Pointe. I'm the Publishing Director for the International Anesthesia Research Society and lead of the SSP education committee's webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank our 2022 education program sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens and Silverchair.
JASON POINTE: We're grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Your phones have been muted automatically, but please use the Q&A feature in Zoom at the bottom of your screen to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. There's also a chat feature that you can use to communicate with the speakers and other participants.
JASON POINTE: This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's broadcast. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape future SSP programming. Today's session will offer a practical discussion about flipping journals to open access. Our panelists are Susan King, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, Andrew Smeall, a Senior Director in the Partner Solutions Group at Wiley, Matt Giampoala, Vice President of Publications at the American Geophysical Union, and Lydia Tacx, Senior Director for Open Access Enablement Journal Indexation and Author Services at Elsevier.
JASON POINTE: It's now my pleasure to introduce Susan as our first speaker today.
SUSAN KING: Thank you very much, Jason, for the introduction, and let me just see if I can share my slides. Bear with me a second. Thank you. Can everybody see this? Let's see, slideshow. Yes, but let me just put it on slideshow. Oh gosh, you would have thought I'd managed to figure this out after so many years. Anyway, well, thank you very much for the introduction, Jason, and thanks very much for the opportunity to participate in this panel.
SUSAN KING: I feel a little bit humbled because compared to the other panelists, our move to open access is aspirational. We are not there yet. But I wanted just in this opening slide just to give you a little bit of snapshot about who we are and where we're headed and then just talk about how we think we are going to get there. So we are Rockefeller University Press. We're small.
SUSAN KING: We publish four journals. Most of them are quite old and quite venerable. One of them, Life Science Alliance, our most recent title, is launched in collaboration with EMBO and Cold Spring Harbor press and represents a totally gold OA journal. Also, it serves as a transfer journal for papers who are declined our journals and those of our partner publishers.
SUSAN KING: Not only are we small in number of titles, we're also small in the number of articles we publish. And you can see there that in our subscription stroke hybrid journals, Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of Experimental Medicine and Journal of General Physiology, collectively, we publish a little over 500 articles a year, which is tiny if you think about the number of articles that are indexed by PubMed every year, which I think is close to a million.
SUSAN KING: We do offer a gold OA option, and we've seen uptake there and growing uptake. You can see that most recently in 2021, just under a quarter of the articles we published were immediate open access. All other research articles are currently made free to read to all after six months. So we are committed to open access. Why? Because we think it's the right thing to do.
SUSAN KING: I'm a department of Rockefeller University, and there, if you will, motto or slogan is science for the benefit of humanity. And so I think we can all agree that open availability of the version of record to everybody is what we should be aspiring to, so we're on our pathway. Because of our commitment to open access, we secured transformative Journal Status from cOAlition S.
SUSAN KING: We've established transparent subscription pricing so that our subscribers no longer pay for articles that authors or funders have made open access immediately, and we're using Read and Publish agreements as a way to help grow our open access content as many publishers are doing. We do believe in full equity and diversity, and frankly, I do think that a gold APC route is ultimately not the route that is right-- writ large, actually, in terms of equity and diversity but specifically not for our organization given that we're small and heavily selective.
SUSAN KING: I do think that the models that have been adopted by Public Library of Science at their CAP model for PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine are actually a good model, maybe the right model for us to approach, and also Annual Reviews and other publishers subscribe to open model. How are we going to get there? How are we making it happen?
SUSAN KING: Well, as I said, we're looking at the moment of our universe of authoring and subscribing institutions. We are also tagging everything. We've always done this. We're a small publisher, 500 articles. We think it's important that our articles are discoverable in whatever way possible. So I would say to those out there, start tagging now. Tag funders, tag institutions, tag authors, tag credit rolls, tag everything you can.
SUSAN KING: I think this will help inform your business model, and it will also help you once you get to full open access and being able to report back to the various stakeholders of the impact and their contribution to open access. I think that's all I have for now for my opening remarks. Also, I've lost my talking points. So I really look forward to a really vigorous discussion. I will now if I can pass it over to Andrew, who's achieved what as I said at RUP we are hoping to achieve.
SUSAN KING: So I'm going to stop sharing my screen now, and Andrew, over to you.
JASON POINTE: And thank you, Susan. And just a reminder, everybody, please enter your questions in the Q&A feature. We will have a discussion period at the end and an opportunity to answer everybody's questions.
ANDREW SMEALL: Thank you, Susan. And hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. So I am going to pick up with a more specific look at gold OA workflow. I work at Wiley, but previously, my-- for most of my career, I was working at Hindawi. And I joined Wiley relatively recently in Hindawi acquisition. And Hindawi as a gold OA, a pure gold OA publisher has had the experience of flipping a lot of journals for ourselves and for partners from subscription to gold OA.
ANDREW SMEALL: So I'm going to talk at a very high level about the process we use to evaluate that and how we make that work. So first identifying journals where this will work. Gold OA, like Susan said, is not the right approach for every journal and for every field. And you need to know that authors in this field are going to be able to pay APCs. So generally speaking, gold OA works better in some fields like medicine and some of the physical sciences where there's more funding available for APCs.
ANDREW SMEALL: It doesn't necessarily work in other fields like SSH. Then you should look at the scope of the journal. And generally speaking, broader scope journals are going to work better as gold OA because gold OA journals have a growth motivation. They end up needing to grow because your revenue model has changed. And so you need to think where is-- what's the audience for this journal?
ANDREW SMEALL: Where is the author audience for this journal coming from? And does this journal have the right scope to appeal to enough authors to make it viable as a goal OA journal? That doesn't mean that it's not a-- that journals for niche audiences aren't viable, but gold OA is going to be more attractive as a commercial journal management perspective if there's a broader pool of authors for it to appeal to.
ANDREW SMEALL: Then look at the OA competitors in this field. Understand the journals that your authors are choosing to publish in besides your own. So where are they going? Are there established OA competitors? Are you going to face an uphill battle explaining OA to your authors? Are you going to find a bunch of authors that are already receptive to OA?
ANDREW SMEALL: Are you going to find that there's already an OA journal fulfilling their needs and potentially you're going to be in head to head competition with someone? I think these are all really important to understand before you make the choice to flip a journal. Then it's really important to know what indices matter to your authors and whether this journal is covered in those indices.
ANDREW SMEALL: So whether it's PubMed or Web of Science or Scopus, being covered in those indices is often very important and is a driving factor in journal choice and will lead to a very different marketing strategy depending on where your journal is in its lifecycle. All these questions are going to tell you how easy is this journal going to be to flip? How much work are you going to have to do to grow it or make a reputation for it versus how much is it just going to be successful from day one?
ANDREW SMEALL: And then the last thing you might want to consider is whether the journal has major sources of alternative revenue. And I mean here things like reprints, for example, or advertising relationships that might be changed by making the journal open. So maybe getting more eyeballs on the journal if it has a lot of revenue from advertising could be a good thing. But if it gets a lot of revenue from reprints where a change in the licensing strategy might affect that, I think these are important considerations.
ANDREW SMEALL: So once you've identified a journal, now start working with your own team or your support teams to make this transition. You know, OA often is going to come with a large increase in volumes. It might mean receiving submissions from new PIs, new geographies, places that your editors haven't worked with before.
ANDREW SMEALL: It will help you greatly. And this goes to what Susan said about tagging. It'll help you greatly the more you can standardize and normalize your workflows. The more that you are able to process every manuscript in the same way or in similar ways, that's going to help you handle the scale as your journal grows. So think about that. This is your chance to potentially change a few things to make your journal easier to manage.
ANDREW SMEALL: Then you need to think about collecting APCs. For a gold OA journal, this is a new step, potentially. And it's not always so easy. You have this kind of straightforward e-commerce process where you ask an author to check out and pay an invoice, but how do you calculate the price in that invoice? If you want to work with, say, Research4Life, you might want to make sure you have rules to discount certain invoices to zero.
ANDREW SMEALL: You might want to offer discounts for your editors and reviewers. You might need to charge in different currencies. You might need to account for tax regimes in different countries where you operate. And all these things get a bit complicated. And there's obviously third party systems you can use to support you here, but you need to think through your strategy.
ANDREW SMEALL: And you need to think through how you're going to do this and which people on your staff are going to be responsible for this accounting. Then you should consider license choices. Of course, there's the basic CC BY licenses, but there's many flavors of open access licenses that you can consider, and they come with different advantages. I mean, generally speaking, a more permissive license might make your life easier, fewer things to track and monitor, fewer complex agreements to sign and manage.
ANDREW SMEALL: But that's not always the case. Different licenses can have different commercial values, so consider your license. And then you need a plan to promote your content and attract researchers. Your marketing activities get a bit different with OA not only because you can now market the open content and attract eyeballs to it, which is a great advantage of OA, of course, but also because now part of your responsibility for acquiring revenue for your society or for your journal is to attract authors.
ANDREW SMEALL: And that's a different type of marketing activity than maybe you've had in the past in your team. Then I think it's really important to work with your editors. This can be the biggest challenge within OA flip is bringing your editors along, making sure they feel supported and engaged with this change and be ready to spend at least a month or two on this if not more.
ANDREW SMEALL: Not all editors are at the same stage or have the same opinions about OA. They may not all agree that OA is the right path for this journal or that the flavor of OA you've chosen is the right path for this journal. And you need to work with them, support them, talk to them, listen to them because they're key to making your journal work. And so make sure you spend enough-- you leave enough time to work with your community.
ANDREW SMEALL: Don't announce something before you're ready and you know that your community is going to be behind it. Then finally, think about a launch date. Give yourself some time. Usually, you might do a flip, say, at the end of a volume so you can have a clean change from one volume to the next, but that means you need to leave yourself a buffer to announce this change to authors, get your editors trained and on board and start your marketing activities so that you can bring in authors on day one when you're ready to accept submissions to that journal.
ANDREW SMEALL: And then just generally, post-submission, what are we thinking about? What are we monitoring? You're making this investment in author marketing. How are you measuring the success of that? I mean, consider the metrics that authors are going to be asking you about. They want to know about quality. You know, of course, is the journal a reputable place to reach their peers?
ANDREW SMEALL: But of course, they care about speed, turnaround times. They care about the acceptance rate of the journal. They care about indexing status like I said before. And they care, of course, about price. And so these are all metrics that you should be monitoring. You should be looking at your competitor journals. You should be asking your authors for their opinions. And then your strategy for promoting your journal. How do you improve in these metrics?
ANDREW SMEALL: Where are you different from your competition, and where do you need to make adjustments? What are you offering of value to authors? As authors become your customers in gold OA, what are you offering them to attract them to your journal, whether it's a particular niche or scope, whether it's an advantage in terms of speed, you need to think about what your differentiating factors are. And then, of course, don't forget about your readers, I mean, because OA at the end of the day, that's the point, right?
ANDREW SMEALL: Get this research open. Make sure it's consumed. Make sure it has impact. And so don't forget about putting that research out there, helping authors promote themselves, making sure that the research is as widely read as possible. And that's all I'm going to say. So I will stop there, and I look forward to your questions.
JASON POINTE: Very good. Thank you, Andrew. And so Matt Giampoala is up next. And Matt, you've been following the Q&A. And if you would, I'd like you to-- I'd ask you, please, to try and answer one very important question that came up, which is what is gold OA? So just a quick primer on that would get us going, please.
MATT GIAMPOALA: All right, thanks for the softball question. So gold open access refers to one open access route which leads to immediate open availability of an article. And usually, it refers to having a Creative Commons license. And we call it gold because there is a payment on the front end of publishing, which is usually by the author or the author's funder or institution. So it is the gold road to open access, and it's in contrast to green open access and other flavors of open access.
MATT GIAMPOALA: But green open access in particular is one where you've got a subscription model or something like that behind the journal. But funders may require open sharing after a certain amount of time or deposit into certain archives to make long-term archiving and availability of the materials. So the gold is immediate open, usually paid on the front end by an institution or the author, and that's what we're mainly referring to when we're talking about transitioning to gold open access.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So and my name is Matt Giampoala. I'm the Vice President of Publications at AGU. AGU is the American Geophysical Union. We started out based in the United States, but we operate globally covering all Earth and space sciences. So the topics we cover range from climate change to tectonics to space physics to water resources, anything in between natural hazards. So we cover a lot of territory, not so much as Wiley and Elsevier, but as societies go, we cover a lot of ground.
MATT GIAMPOALA: Let's see if I can figure out how to advance my slide here. So just a little bit more background on AGU and our journals program. We now have 23 peer reviewed journals. 14 of those are subscription with open access options for full gold open access within those journals, and we have nine fully open access journal. So you're required to make a payment or receive a waiver in order to publish in those journals.
MATT GIAMPOALA: To make this work, we have over 750 editors and associate editors associated with our journals doing more than 18,000 peer reviews a year. And in 2021, we ended with about 17,000 submissions and over 8,000 papers published. We also in 2021, it looks like our estimates are we were about 41% immediate open access, and so we've had a large shift in open access in the past few years because we were only at 22% in 2019.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I'll talk about how we got there. But that's mainly due to starting new OA journals, transitioning a couple of OA journals and also transitional deals that our publishing partner, Wiley, has a range that is really shifting the percentage of open access within our hybrid subscription journals. So about 12% of our articles published were in fully open access journals last year, and our OA hybrid journals about 28% of the articles published in the hybrid subscription journals were the OA model.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I just wanted to highlight a few of the recent titles that we've launched in the past eight years. So Earth and Space Science, GeoHealth, AGU Advances, Perspectives of the Earth and Space Scientists and Community Science all launched as open access in the past eight years. Perspectives is actually diamond open access, so it's-- we don't charge a fee, and Community Science is our most recent and one I'm very excited about because it's really focusing on getting communities involved in solving the priorities for their communities using science.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And then the two that you're probably most interested in for this talk are Space Weather and what we call GQ, Geochemistry, Geophysics and Geosystems that have recently transitioned. GQ just officially flipped in January. So to take a step back, I just wanted to highlight some of the things that many societies are going through.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So our first journal, Terrestrial Magnetism launched in 1896. Eventually, it became the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1949 and divided into multiple sister journals over time. So you see 1980 was when we divided and we had Space Physics, Solid Earth and Oceans and we added-- we're now up to seven titles within the Journal of Geophysical Research.
MATT GIAMPOALA: Just to highlight that journals publishing, obviously, has existed for a long time and evolved over a long period of time. So we're entrenched in certain structures for how we sustain our revenue and operations and also the way we deliver the product within the journal articles to the readers. At the end of this portion of the timeline you see in 1991, the archive launched within physical sciences, which was a place for people to share preprints of articles ahead of publication and to archive them long-term.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So that really I think was the beginning of a shift of a revolution within scholarly publishing. And because of that revolution and what's been happening across the scholarly publishing industry, we've seen a lot of change in the past 20 or so years at AGU. So this GQ to which I mentioned we just flipped open access was really our first journal that was started as an online journal. It wasn't open access but was online first.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And then we moved away from print launching all these-- everything from Space Weather-- actually from JAMES on was launched as open access. So JAMES, Earth's Future, Earth and Space Science, Geohealth, and as I said Space Weather and GQ both flipped to open access. And by flip I mean we've transitioned the business model from a subscription business model to open access with an article publication charge for publication.
MATT GIAMPOALA: I also wanted to mention here we launched ESSOAr, which is our Earth and Space Science Open Archive, so that's our own preprint server devoted to Earth and space sciences, and we're also experimenting with open access books and all sorts of other ways of trying to make things as open as possible. I'm not going to go into the details that Andrew did on the process for flipping, but I thank you for all the input on the timelines.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I can speak to that because we've gone through it with a couple of journals now and we're going through it with a new one during the Q&A if people have questions on that. But as we've considered how to promote open access and in particular open science because open access is only one part of open science, these are sort of five areas that we keep in mind. So the first is balancing open access with sustainability and inclusion.
MATT GIAMPOALA: We need to have sustainability. We have to have long-term plans for continuing operations. And we also don't want promoting access to the final published product to make it so that we have fewer people being able to publish with us. We actually want to expand inclusion. And in some cases, an article publication charge, as Susan pointed out, may be an obstruction to people sharing their research.
MATT GIAMPOALA: There are others because there's uneven funding across the globe in general for doing research at all. The second one is to think about what do your authors need. And here's a few questions, but are-- do they need a version available for archiving or sharing sort of that green open access route? Do they need immediate open access? Do they need it within six months or a year?
MATT GIAMPOALA: What is their institution requiring? What is their funder requiring? Does the funder have a requirement for a particular copyright? Is it Creative Commons CC BY license, which is the most permissive for resharing and re-use, or is there some other requirement around copyright? And then I mentioned funder requirements, but is the funder actually giving funding to be able to pay for these charges to make the open access publishing work or not?
MATT GIAMPOALA: All important considerations. The next thing is I mentioned that what we've been focusing on is mainly starting new open access journals. And then we've now begun to transition a couple. So Space Weather we did now 2 and 1/2 years ago, and GQ just flipped to open access this year. So there's a couple of things to consider as you're doing a transition.
MATT GIAMPOALA: First is a cold calculation of what is the revenue per article we need to maintain our operations, and how does that compare to the average article publication charge you expect to charge the authors? So you can have a sticker price and then you can have discounts, waivers or other arrangements with institutions through transitional deals and republish deals.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So you have to actually not just look at the sticker price, you have to look at the amount you expect to be paid after the waivers and discounts are applied. And you also have to consider what's the fair allocation of those waivers. Susan I think referred to is there some sort of sliding scale, or maybe this was in our conversation before we started.
MATT GIAMPOALA: But if you're going to have waivers, Research4Life and the automatic waivers for certain countries with low gross domestic product don't cover all the need. So we have to figure out how we're going to apply those waivers fairly. And then I mentioned that we launched our preprint server, but another way we're addressing open access is early sharing of preprints.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And we at AGU allow sharing of the author except in manuscript as a preprint. And in some cases, that may get you where you need to go under that first-- second bullet there of what do the authors need to satisfy their funder or institution. They may just need to be able to share a preprint. And then the last consideration is not the focus of today's discussion, but I just want to put it in context.
MATT GIAMPOALA: We're working on fair data, sharing of data, sharing of code and reproducibility initiatives. And those all fall under the banner of open science along with open access to journal research articles. And I think that we need to make sure that we always keep that in consideration, that we need to move forward open science, and it's not always open access that's what gets you there.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And that's the end of my discussion, but I look forward to questions.
JASON POINTE: OK, thank you very much, Matt. Up next, Lydia, are you ready to go?
LYDIA TACX: OK, I'm going to--
MATT GIAMPOALA: Stop sharing. There you go.
LYDIA TACX: Thank you. So I can share now. Well, thank you for allowing me the chance to speak OK. So short background on-- my assumption is that you can all see my screen now. Short introduction of Elsevier. So we publish around 2,600 titles. They all offer a way to publish gold open access, including the 640 full gold OA journals we currently have.
LYDIA TACX: We've been launching, on average, around 100 open access journals in the last couple of years. We are also very committed to the transformative journals. We have a full list of 160 journals now that are transformative. And on top of that, of course, we have quite a number of transformative agreements that have large open access components. And just to mention a few, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, University of California, it's a growing number.
LYDIA TACX: So that helps also to publish gold open access under such a construction. In 2020, we published therein about 80,000 gold open access articles pay-to-publish, and that makes us one of the largest-- at least one of the fastest growing gold open access-- open access publishers in the world. I try to give you a brief understanding of how we select hybrid titles to go from hybrid to gold open access.
LYDIA TACX: And one of the questions already I saw was when do you start? Well, we are already thinking about the flips for next year. We call those journal flips. We're already thinking about the flips for next year. Why? Because there are-- and Andrew has alluded on this already and so has Matt, there are a lot of items to consider. So if you would ask me where to go for if you flip an existing title that is most likely already indexed, has-- is the decent site, then go and accelerate.
LYDIA TACX: Choose the title because your footprint is not that large yet and you want to accelerate the growth in those markets. Another one is that you need to go for markets where the gold open access uptake is high already. If it's low, then it's simply not going to work. You need to have enough authors who can pay the APC. And you need to focus on fields and journals where the volume is high because you will see, most likely, that the number of submissions may go down.
LYDIA TACX: At Elsevier-- and Matt has mentioned it already-- we also make use of Research4Life. Elsevier is one of the founding parents of Research4Life, which we apply automatically. So we detect author groups, and this ties into what Susan said. We tag those groups, we know the affiliations of the authors, we know the author names, we know their funders, et cetera. So if we see that the whole group is as we call group A, then we apply a waiver automatically in a gold open access journal.
LYDIA TACX: If there are some country B, so still the Global South but there is some money available, then we go for a 50% discount. Next to that, we have the open access waiving policy for gold open access journal, so gold in gold. If the author-- if the author group received no funding for the research-- and that's something we tag as well-- then on a case by case basis, we apply waivers.
LYDIA TACX: This is an Elsevier principle, and it also ties into why we were already thinking about the flips for next year. So we're going to work on the flips. We're going to do this year soon. We're already thinking about the next tranche. Why? Because we honor what we offer at submission. You always have to put your authors first.
LYDIA TACX: You are a hybrid title. By the time the author submits to the journal, then you can't change the rules of the games while you're playing. If you offer two choices at submission, then you have to have two choices after acceptance. We present the new business model option on and after the editorial cutoff date, so make sure that you always keep the author in mind.
LYDIA TACX: It also means that the larger the volume, the more you have to look at how many articles are still on the shelf. How fast is the journal in accepting articles? How short or how long is the review time? You have to make sure that you plan ahead, you know exactly what's happening in the journal. And if you would decide to flip a number of titles, then go for a journal-specific approach.
LYDIA TACX: Every journal is different. They have different editorial speeds. They might have a different issue pattern. Go for a journal-specific approach. What you will see is once you have decided to flip a title-- and what we do at Elsevier is we flip titles at the beginning of the year-- we communicate that-- and that ties into what Matt said.
LYDIA TACX: We communicate that way, way before the 1st of Jan. Because there is a full subscription volume which we've promised to our subscription customers, we wait until the 1st of Jan to really make the change. And that ties into to the question that when do you do what?
LYDIA TACX: When you flip a title, you will see that submissions might go down. Downloads might go up because they are-- it's easier to access the content. It does not necessarily result in a higher number of citations. The fact that more people can download the content and might read it doesn't mean that these are the same authors who will cite, the same readers who will cite your-- the research.
LYDIA TACX: About societies because that's what this slide is about, about societies, be transparent about the risks and the benefits. It's not an easy process. You need to work, indeed, with your editors. They need to be on board. You need to know exactly is there money in the market. We know that if you look at the open access uptake, if you look at the open access publications, it's life sciences, physical sciences, health sciences and social sciences.
LYDIA TACX: So be aware of the risks and the benefits. More people might read it. Not enough people, not enough researchers might have the money to pay the APC. So like I said, submissions might go down. What we see when we flip titles is that submissions, especially from the Global South, those are the submissions that go down. Acceptances and submissions from China tend to stay the same.
LYDIA TACX: At the end of the process after the editorial decision, we see that the changes in acceptance if you look at countries, following flips are limited. When you are dealing with societies, make sure that you're creative. Talk about then how to differently market the title. Special issues, we know they attract citations. Layman summaries, that is something we don't hear a lot from other publishing houses.
LYDIA TACX: It's something we always stress. It's nice to open an article, and it's nice that more authors, more readers can have access to the article. But still they might not understand it, so make it comprehensible. Try to include layman summary. And the third aspect, and that ties into what my co-presenters have said already, it is the standards and the tools you have at your disposal.
LYDIA TACX: The moment a journal goes from hybrid to full away, the moment an article is no longer subscription, it is gold open access, we expect somebody to pay. Gold open access means that we open up an article at the point of submission with a CC license in perpetuity, and somebody needs to pay. So in other words, the author becomes a consumer as well, and the expectations change.
LYDIA TACX: So the more bespoke the workflows are, the trickier it is to do it really right. Bespoke workflows manual workarounds are error-prone and time-consuming. So when discussing any flip with societies, make sure that they can make use of what you have already. It will enhance the author experience and in general create a better experience for the society as well.
LYDIA TACX: Happy to take your questions.
JASON POINTE: All right, thank you very much, Lydia. Thank you to all the panelists, and we do have some excellent questions. And I know some of them our panelists have already been tackling in the Q&A and the chat box, but I want to try and address as many or all of these as we can. I'm also really happy to see that we have a really varied audience today, which is fantastic. I mean, we have people that I recognize as being on the editorial side of things and the business side of things and even the executive leadership.
JASON POINTE: So I'm going to throw out there I want to cover a couple of questions. Matt, thank you for covering the definition of gold OA. But another question came up early on, and this refers back to Susan's presentation. So, Susan, I'll ask you to start and anybody else that wants to jump in. But tagging, could you explain what tagging is, how it's different from persistent identifiers and just speak again why it's so important.
SUSAN KING: Thank you. Absolutely happy to do that. I'm probably going to stumble on the technical aspect. And I think I saw some really quick responses in the chat there, Jason, to that. But yes, I guess from metadata tagging, I do think of persistent identifiers. I think of ways that both systems both internally and externally in terms of browsers and what have you can recognize funder name, institution and the like.
SUSAN KING: I think this is important both for internal workflows, as our panelists have spoken about, but also externally in terms of reach and being able to make your content more discoverable, being able to make it more reportable back to stakeholders, such as funders and institutions and also useful in considering syndication of content. If we are indeed-- and I think we are moving to a world where all content is available under a CC BY license, it's going to live on multiple platforms.
SUSAN KING: Using persistent identifiers I do believe will provide a way to be able to report back on the impact of that syndication. However, I do defer to the more technical people on this group to be able to answer this comment really more intelligently than I. But basically, it's like make sure your content is discoverable and reportable and hopefully reusable. I hope that helps, Jason.
JASON POINTE: It does. And I do want to step in, and I invite our other panelists to help answer this as well. But there is a distinction between-- the persistent identifier is that link, that identification of the article that remains the same throughout the article's life so that you're always going to be able to know that you're reaching and referring to that original article whereas the tagging is part of the metadata of the article.
JASON POINTE: And as you say, that helps enhance discoverability and recognition and tracking and attachment to all the various facets of the article, the authors, the funders, the institution, the research topics. They're both extremely important. There is a technical difference between the two. Any other comments on that, or do we move to the next topic, panelists?
JASON POINTE: OK, so we had a number of questions that had to do with the time horizon. And, you know, I thank all of the speakers because I think you each touched on various aspects of this. And I think in summary that there isn't one particular time horizon, that it's going to vary depending on the journal in different aspects. And it could be the size of the journal, the current business model of the journal, the opportunities available in the market and that there's also the culture shift.
JASON POINTE: So I think that Matt, you had some good comments that you posted in the chat, but I want to make sure that everybody can hear them. So would you mind reiterating what you answered in the chat about the timing for the shift and then about how you address the culture shift? And I'll tie into that-- sorry. I'm just going to tie a rider to that about there was a question in the Q&A as well about editors that still think of the bad old days and associate OA with predatory journals.
JASON POINTE: How do you include that in the culture shift?
MATT GIAMPOALA: Yeah. Well, and there certainly are predatory journals out there. So I would say Andrew and Lydia both touched on this. There's both a cultural shift and then there's the business model technical implications for how we receive article publication charges. And so my answer was on the cultural shift that you have to have with your editorial board and your community, you have to be having the conversations early.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And the editors have to be on board with what you're planning to do because I've certainly had situations even with the most recent flip where editors sort of went on social media and they're like, well, let's have a poll. We've already made this decision. It's already happening. But, you know, is this amount we're charging fair? Can you pay this amount?
MATT GIAMPOALA: And they can go out to social media and other places with not the full information, and they can kind of undermine the flip. And in fact, in this case, we had the-- it was an associate editor had the wrong price point because it was-- they said it was $3,000 and we weren't charging $3,000 to anyone. So you have to have the conversations. They have to know the reasoning behind why it's happening, and they have to be on board.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And you have to answer their questions, even if they're not-- even if there's not full unanimous agreement that this is the right thing to do. And then the second part-- and I'm sure Andrew and Lydia can speak to this even better than I can, but I have had experience with it. So you have to know how long you typically take to peer review and accept an article for publication and get it published.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So if that's four months, then you need to be telling people at least four months ahead of time that if they're submitting on this day, they need to agree that they're either going to pay for an article publication charge or they're going to request a waiver because four months from now on January 1, their article is going to publish. And it's going to need to have a fee paid by someone, right?
MATT GIAMPOALA: And if your review time is longer than that, then you need to tell them six months from then because there will always be a window of time where people kind of-- you make the announcement and people have already got a submission in progress, and you don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, well, you submitted before there was a charge, and now we're going to give you a charge.
LYDIA TACX: Exactly.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So we always end up-- there could be 10, 20 depending on the size of your journal or many papers that get an automatic waiver just because of this transition period because they kind of were articles that were in process before the announcement was made.
LYDIA TACX: Exactly. And they take sometimes longer, and then there is no way to publish subscription anymore and then you waive those articles indeed because that ties in with the principle that you always put the author first. You can't change the rules of the games while playing, yeah. That's all I can say.
ANDREW SMEALL: I would agree. I think maybe publishers tend to overestimate the difficulty of the technical and system switches. They are important changes you have to make, but we have tools to solve those. And you can actually technically set up a journal to do away in a matter of weeks. It's not all that hard at the end of the day. But on the other hand, they vastly underestimate the amount of communication and preparation that you have to do.
ANDREW SMEALL: And so like Lydia was saying, starting now and aiming to flip things on January 1 of next year, you know, taking the better part of a year to just make sure you have time to talk to your editors, support them, bring them on board and then plenty of time to announce the change early, set a submission cut off date and handle everything. So, you know, you could do it in a month, but you're probably talking at least six months.
ANDREW SMEALL: And it'll depend on journal by journal.
JASON POINTE: Yeah, and we've had a lot of discussion about educating and preparing on the editorial side, but could any of you please speak to the authors and educating the authors because I know in my experience of this, a lot of the authors don't really know and understand the differences between the various licensing options for open access and don't really know and understand, therefore, which license might fit their needs.
JASON POINTE: I know Matt and Lydia you both specifically spoke to this about making sure that you understand the author's needs. So, you know, what steps need to be taken as far as making sure that your author audience is educated?
LYDIA TACX: What we do is we use transparency in the end to end journey. And like all of our publishing houses involved in this webinar is we communicate both on the journal home page, we communicate on our publisher's pages, and we communicate in the end to end journey the moment the author selects a license. And Elsevier is about author choice. And we try to keep it as simple as possible for the author by having two licenses, the license that allows commercial reuse and a license that does not allow commercial reuse, so the CC BY-NC-ND, and then we explain to the author what the differences are.
LYDIA TACX: And of course, like any other publishing house in this webinar, authors can also contact research for support. There's an author hub. We try to do everything we can to make it clear to the author. And at the same time, authors, at least in my view-- and Andrew and Matt can speak to this as well, they just want their article out there. They want to have it published as soon as possible after acceptance because they want to attract the eyeballs.
LYDIA TACX: They want to attract the citations. For authors, the CC license could be a second consideration. They just want the content out there.
JASON POINTE: That's right.
ANDREW SMEALL: I would add everything you said was spot on, Lydia. And oftentimes, there's three parties to this transaction. There's the author, there's the publisher, and there's also the funder. And many times, the author just wants their research to be read and published and get credit for their research, but the publisher is helping the author comply with increasingly complex asks from the funder. And it's not always intuitive, you know, why you might choose a non-commercial license or a license that allows-- a more permissive license like CC BY.
ANDREW SMEALL: And sometimes the author might think, oh well, more restrictive license, that's good for me, right? And then you need to explain, no, maybe not. Maybe you want your research to be used as widely as possible, and maybe there is a big potential impact for your research in the commercial space. And you want to allow that impact. I guess what I'm saying is oftentimes that working with funders can be quite helpful here too to realize that this research is often publicly funded.
ANDREW SMEALL: You want to make sure that the benefits then ultimately accrue to the taxpayer or the public that's funding this research, and you're helping authors satisfy that requirement from their funders.
LYDIA TACX: Yeah, I fully agree. In the many transformative agreements we have, we indeed work with three parties and author with two parties, both the party paying the APC and the fact that we have author choice. And we indicate as clearly as possible you have a choice of licenses. It's the author choice. Your funder, however, really wants you to use this specific license.
LYDIA TACX: And we see in the author feedback. We also see it in the license choice that the moment you indicate this clearly, authors will go with that preferred license.
JASON POINTE: Great. Thank you. I've got a question-- we have at least one society executive director on the call today. And they asked a very good question that's fundamental for that audience. For societies and associations, how do they ascertain the market potential in the business model before considering OA?
JASON POINTE: Who should they go to? In this case, I believe that the society is-- that their journals are published with Wiley, so my recommendation would be to go to their publisher. But, you know, what are the recommendations from our panel? What resources are there, especially if a society isn't published, if they're self-publishing or if they're not with one of the large commercial publishers like Wiley or elsewhere.
JASON POINTE: Matt.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So speaking as a publishing executive at a society, so yeah, your publishing partner can help there. And if you don't have a publishing partner or you're self-publishing, you probably have access to this information directly. But the biggest thing is to look at the number of articles that have funding associated with them. And we're doing that right now with a third transition to OA that we're looking at.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And this is one of our flagship journals. There's only 6% of articles that aren't listing funding. So that makes it pretty likely that we'll be able to get some form of payment from most of the people submitting and publishing in that journal. But this can vary greatly. And you have to figure out who your authors are, where they're located around the world. The balance of global authorship is important and understanding why they have funding.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And if they have funding, it doesn't always mean they have funding for open access charges. It could mean that they just have funding to do their research, but it is a starting point. And then just to mention the other-- the first one we did, Space Weather, that one was one where we identified that in that particular field, there's a lot of companies that publish, so industry authors.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And to them, the payment was not a barrier at all. So that was a very obvious first choice for us to do for an open access transition.
JASON POINTE: OK, Susan.
SUSAN KING: Yes, I just wanted to second what Matt said in terms of know your author base. But for us also, one of the things that we're doing is also tying that to our subscriber base, looking to see-- and it's not directly an overlap. There is an overlap, but it's not 100%. So I think absolutely knowing the community that is both at this time committed to supporting publication in your journals, which may be institutional subscribers and also whether your authors are coming.
SUSAN KING: And one question I think that for the panelists there is perhaps what role-- if there's time, Jason, I would posit what role do they see for institutions in supporting open access beyond funders and authors?
JASON POINTE: I think that's a pretty broad question. That speaks to some of the other models that are available, but Matt seems game to jump in.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So I just wanted to add one other thing that I should have said that Susan reminded me of. So one other thing we did and everyone should do when they're considering this is survey your authors. We have journals within the AG portfolio that there's a passionate constituency to move to open access. And even they may be largely based in certain countries that are overtly represented on our editorial boards.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So for one journal, we had this group just telling us we had to be open access right away, but then we did the survey and we asked authors and we say, well, are you more likely to publish or less likely to publish if the journal is open access and there's a fee? And more than half the people say they're less likely to publish. So that is an important consideration too.
MATT GIAMPOALA: I don't think I answered your other question, but hopefully someone else will.
JASON POINTE: Well, I think--
ANDREW SMEALL: I can talk about institutions for a second. I guess we're almost out of time, but yeah, it's actually a really good point. It's oftentimes not just a three-party transaction, like I said earlier, but it can be a multi-party transaction where you have an institution involved, you have a funder involved, you have an author involved. And I think institutions are under a lot of pressure with the complexity of OA and transitional agreements. These institutions are-- their authors would like to publish and read thousands of journals.
ANDREW SMEALL: And the institutions are being asked to increasingly be an intermediary in a relationship with many, many publishers and many, many different societies. And it's difficult to manage that complexity. And so as a publisher, we work to provide tools that help make it easier for institutions to sometimes pay all or part of an APC on behalf of an author at least to track where authors are publishing and also to manage transitional agreements and their role in those type of institution publisher agreements.
JASON POINTE: OK, thank you very much. I think we could go on for forever. I wish we had 90 minutes for today's webinar. But I'd like to thank all of our attendees. You've helped contribute to make this a very informative session. Thank you to our panel for an engaging discussion. I think there were-- pardon the pun, but I am a father-- a lot of gold nuggets to be mined in this.
JASON POINTE: And of course, thanks again to our 2022 education sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens and Silverchair. You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback. It helps us determine topics for future events. And please check out the SSP website for information on future SSP events, such as those shown here, including our March 16 webinar, "Current Trends in Peer Review." And register for the 44th annual meeting in Chicago.
JASON POINTE: Registration is now open. Today's discussion was recorded, and all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SSP website. This concludes our session today. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
JASON POINTE: Hello, and welcome to today's event, the first in SSP's 2022 webinar series. We're very pleased that you can join us today for our discussion on flipping journals to open access. My name is Jason Pointe. I'm the Publishing Director for the International Anesthesia Research Society and lead of the SSP education committee's webinars working group. Before we get started, I want to thank our 2022 education program sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens and Silverchair.
JASON POINTE: We're grateful for their support. I also have a few housekeeping items to review. Your phones have been muted automatically, but please use the Q&A feature in Zoom at the bottom of your screen to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. There's also a chat feature that you can use to communicate with the speakers and other participants.
JASON POINTE: This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's broadcast. At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help us shape future SSP programming. Today's session will offer a practical discussion about flipping journals to open access. Our panelists are Susan King, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, Andrew Smeall, a Senior Director in the Partner Solutions Group at Wiley, Matt Giampoala, Vice President of Publications at the American Geophysical Union, and Lydia Tacx, Senior Director for Open Access Enablement Journal Indexation and Author Services at Elsevier.
JASON POINTE: It's now my pleasure to introduce Susan as our first speaker today.
SUSAN KING: Thank you very much, Jason, for the introduction, and let me just see if I can share my slides. Bear with me a second. Thank you. Can everybody see this? Let's see, slideshow. Yes, but let me just put it on slideshow. Oh gosh, you would have thought I'd managed to figure this out after so many years. Anyway, well, thank you very much for the introduction, Jason, and thanks very much for the opportunity to participate in this panel.
SUSAN KING: I feel a little bit humbled because compared to the other panelists, our move to open access is aspirational. We are not there yet. But I wanted just in this opening slide just to give you a little bit of snapshot about who we are and where we're headed and then just talk about how we think we are going to get there. So we are Rockefeller University Press. We're small.
SUSAN KING: We publish four journals. Most of them are quite old and quite venerable. One of them, Life Science Alliance, our most recent title, is launched in collaboration with EMBO and Cold Spring Harbor press and represents a totally gold OA journal. Also, it serves as a transfer journal for papers who are declined our journals and those of our partner publishers.
SUSAN KING: Not only are we small in number of titles, we're also small in the number of articles we publish. And you can see there that in our subscription stroke hybrid journals, Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of Experimental Medicine and Journal of General Physiology, collectively, we publish a little over 500 articles a year, which is tiny if you think about the number of articles that are indexed by PubMed every year, which I think is close to a million.
SUSAN KING: We do offer a gold OA option, and we've seen uptake there and growing uptake. You can see that most recently in 2021, just under a quarter of the articles we published were immediate open access. All other research articles are currently made free to read to all after six months. So we are committed to open access. Why? Because we think it's the right thing to do.
SUSAN KING: I'm a department of Rockefeller University, and there, if you will, motto or slogan is science for the benefit of humanity. And so I think we can all agree that open availability of the version of record to everybody is what we should be aspiring to, so we're on our pathway. Because of our commitment to open access, we secured transformative Journal Status from cOAlition S.
SUSAN KING: We've established transparent subscription pricing so that our subscribers no longer pay for articles that authors or funders have made open access immediately, and we're using Read and Publish agreements as a way to help grow our open access content as many publishers are doing. We do believe in full equity and diversity, and frankly, I do think that a gold APC route is ultimately not the route that is right-- writ large, actually, in terms of equity and diversity but specifically not for our organization given that we're small and heavily selective.
SUSAN KING: I do think that the models that have been adopted by Public Library of Science at their CAP model for PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine are actually a good model, maybe the right model for us to approach, and also Annual Reviews and other publishers subscribe to open model. How are we going to get there? How are we making it happen?
SUSAN KING: Well, as I said, we're looking at the moment of our universe of authoring and subscribing institutions. We are also tagging everything. We've always done this. We're a small publisher, 500 articles. We think it's important that our articles are discoverable in whatever way possible. So I would say to those out there, start tagging now. Tag funders, tag institutions, tag authors, tag credit rolls, tag everything you can.
SUSAN KING: I think this will help inform your business model, and it will also help you once you get to full open access and being able to report back to the various stakeholders of the impact and their contribution to open access. I think that's all I have for now for my opening remarks. Also, I've lost my talking points. So I really look forward to a really vigorous discussion. I will now if I can pass it over to Andrew, who's achieved what as I said at RUP we are hoping to achieve.
SUSAN KING: So I'm going to stop sharing my screen now, and Andrew, over to you.
JASON POINTE: And thank you, Susan. And just a reminder, everybody, please enter your questions in the Q&A feature. We will have a discussion period at the end and an opportunity to answer everybody's questions.
ANDREW SMEALL: Thank you, Susan. And hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. So I am going to pick up with a more specific look at gold OA workflow. I work at Wiley, but previously, my-- for most of my career, I was working at Hindawi. And I joined Wiley relatively recently in Hindawi acquisition. And Hindawi as a gold OA, a pure gold OA publisher has had the experience of flipping a lot of journals for ourselves and for partners from subscription to gold OA.
ANDREW SMEALL: So I'm going to talk at a very high level about the process we use to evaluate that and how we make that work. So first identifying journals where this will work. Gold OA, like Susan said, is not the right approach for every journal and for every field. And you need to know that authors in this field are going to be able to pay APCs. So generally speaking, gold OA works better in some fields like medicine and some of the physical sciences where there's more funding available for APCs.
ANDREW SMEALL: It doesn't necessarily work in other fields like SSH. Then you should look at the scope of the journal. And generally speaking, broader scope journals are going to work better as gold OA because gold OA journals have a growth motivation. They end up needing to grow because your revenue model has changed. And so you need to think where is-- what's the audience for this journal?
ANDREW SMEALL: Where is the author audience for this journal coming from? And does this journal have the right scope to appeal to enough authors to make it viable as a goal OA journal? That doesn't mean that it's not a-- that journals for niche audiences aren't viable, but gold OA is going to be more attractive as a commercial journal management perspective if there's a broader pool of authors for it to appeal to.
ANDREW SMEALL: Then look at the OA competitors in this field. Understand the journals that your authors are choosing to publish in besides your own. So where are they going? Are there established OA competitors? Are you going to face an uphill battle explaining OA to your authors? Are you going to find a bunch of authors that are already receptive to OA?
ANDREW SMEALL: Are you going to find that there's already an OA journal fulfilling their needs and potentially you're going to be in head to head competition with someone? I think these are all really important to understand before you make the choice to flip a journal. Then it's really important to know what indices matter to your authors and whether this journal is covered in those indices.
ANDREW SMEALL: So whether it's PubMed or Web of Science or Scopus, being covered in those indices is often very important and is a driving factor in journal choice and will lead to a very different marketing strategy depending on where your journal is in its lifecycle. All these questions are going to tell you how easy is this journal going to be to flip? How much work are you going to have to do to grow it or make a reputation for it versus how much is it just going to be successful from day one?
ANDREW SMEALL: And then the last thing you might want to consider is whether the journal has major sources of alternative revenue. And I mean here things like reprints, for example, or advertising relationships that might be changed by making the journal open. So maybe getting more eyeballs on the journal if it has a lot of revenue from advertising could be a good thing. But if it gets a lot of revenue from reprints where a change in the licensing strategy might affect that, I think these are important considerations.
ANDREW SMEALL: So once you've identified a journal, now start working with your own team or your support teams to make this transition. You know, OA often is going to come with a large increase in volumes. It might mean receiving submissions from new PIs, new geographies, places that your editors haven't worked with before.
ANDREW SMEALL: It will help you greatly. And this goes to what Susan said about tagging. It'll help you greatly the more you can standardize and normalize your workflows. The more that you are able to process every manuscript in the same way or in similar ways, that's going to help you handle the scale as your journal grows. So think about that. This is your chance to potentially change a few things to make your journal easier to manage.
ANDREW SMEALL: Then you need to think about collecting APCs. For a gold OA journal, this is a new step, potentially. And it's not always so easy. You have this kind of straightforward e-commerce process where you ask an author to check out and pay an invoice, but how do you calculate the price in that invoice? If you want to work with, say, Research4Life, you might want to make sure you have rules to discount certain invoices to zero.
ANDREW SMEALL: You might want to offer discounts for your editors and reviewers. You might need to charge in different currencies. You might need to account for tax regimes in different countries where you operate. And all these things get a bit complicated. And there's obviously third party systems you can use to support you here, but you need to think through your strategy.
ANDREW SMEALL: And you need to think through how you're going to do this and which people on your staff are going to be responsible for this accounting. Then you should consider license choices. Of course, there's the basic CC BY licenses, but there's many flavors of open access licenses that you can consider, and they come with different advantages. I mean, generally speaking, a more permissive license might make your life easier, fewer things to track and monitor, fewer complex agreements to sign and manage.
ANDREW SMEALL: But that's not always the case. Different licenses can have different commercial values, so consider your license. And then you need a plan to promote your content and attract researchers. Your marketing activities get a bit different with OA not only because you can now market the open content and attract eyeballs to it, which is a great advantage of OA, of course, but also because now part of your responsibility for acquiring revenue for your society or for your journal is to attract authors.
ANDREW SMEALL: And that's a different type of marketing activity than maybe you've had in the past in your team. Then I think it's really important to work with your editors. This can be the biggest challenge within OA flip is bringing your editors along, making sure they feel supported and engaged with this change and be ready to spend at least a month or two on this if not more.
ANDREW SMEALL: Not all editors are at the same stage or have the same opinions about OA. They may not all agree that OA is the right path for this journal or that the flavor of OA you've chosen is the right path for this journal. And you need to work with them, support them, talk to them, listen to them because they're key to making your journal work. And so make sure you spend enough-- you leave enough time to work with your community.
ANDREW SMEALL: Don't announce something before you're ready and you know that your community is going to be behind it. Then finally, think about a launch date. Give yourself some time. Usually, you might do a flip, say, at the end of a volume so you can have a clean change from one volume to the next, but that means you need to leave yourself a buffer to announce this change to authors, get your editors trained and on board and start your marketing activities so that you can bring in authors on day one when you're ready to accept submissions to that journal.
ANDREW SMEALL: And then just generally, post-submission, what are we thinking about? What are we monitoring? You're making this investment in author marketing. How are you measuring the success of that? I mean, consider the metrics that authors are going to be asking you about. They want to know about quality. You know, of course, is the journal a reputable place to reach their peers?
ANDREW SMEALL: But of course, they care about speed, turnaround times. They care about the acceptance rate of the journal. They care about indexing status like I said before. And they care, of course, about price. And so these are all metrics that you should be monitoring. You should be looking at your competitor journals. You should be asking your authors for their opinions. And then your strategy for promoting your journal. How do you improve in these metrics?
ANDREW SMEALL: Where are you different from your competition, and where do you need to make adjustments? What are you offering of value to authors? As authors become your customers in gold OA, what are you offering them to attract them to your journal, whether it's a particular niche or scope, whether it's an advantage in terms of speed, you need to think about what your differentiating factors are. And then, of course, don't forget about your readers, I mean, because OA at the end of the day, that's the point, right?
ANDREW SMEALL: Get this research open. Make sure it's consumed. Make sure it has impact. And so don't forget about putting that research out there, helping authors promote themselves, making sure that the research is as widely read as possible. And that's all I'm going to say. So I will stop there, and I look forward to your questions.
JASON POINTE: Very good. Thank you, Andrew. And so Matt Giampoala is up next. And Matt, you've been following the Q&A. And if you would, I'd like you to-- I'd ask you, please, to try and answer one very important question that came up, which is what is gold OA? So just a quick primer on that would get us going, please.
MATT GIAMPOALA: All right, thanks for the softball question. So gold open access refers to one open access route which leads to immediate open availability of an article. And usually, it refers to having a Creative Commons license. And we call it gold because there is a payment on the front end of publishing, which is usually by the author or the author's funder or institution. So it is the gold road to open access, and it's in contrast to green open access and other flavors of open access.
MATT GIAMPOALA: But green open access in particular is one where you've got a subscription model or something like that behind the journal. But funders may require open sharing after a certain amount of time or deposit into certain archives to make long-term archiving and availability of the materials. So the gold is immediate open, usually paid on the front end by an institution or the author, and that's what we're mainly referring to when we're talking about transitioning to gold open access.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So and my name is Matt Giampoala. I'm the Vice President of Publications at AGU. AGU is the American Geophysical Union. We started out based in the United States, but we operate globally covering all Earth and space sciences. So the topics we cover range from climate change to tectonics to space physics to water resources, anything in between natural hazards. So we cover a lot of territory, not so much as Wiley and Elsevier, but as societies go, we cover a lot of ground.
MATT GIAMPOALA: Let's see if I can figure out how to advance my slide here. So just a little bit more background on AGU and our journals program. We now have 23 peer reviewed journals. 14 of those are subscription with open access options for full gold open access within those journals, and we have nine fully open access journal. So you're required to make a payment or receive a waiver in order to publish in those journals.
MATT GIAMPOALA: To make this work, we have over 750 editors and associate editors associated with our journals doing more than 18,000 peer reviews a year. And in 2021, we ended with about 17,000 submissions and over 8,000 papers published. We also in 2021, it looks like our estimates are we were about 41% immediate open access, and so we've had a large shift in open access in the past few years because we were only at 22% in 2019.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I'll talk about how we got there. But that's mainly due to starting new OA journals, transitioning a couple of OA journals and also transitional deals that our publishing partner, Wiley, has a range that is really shifting the percentage of open access within our hybrid subscription journals. So about 12% of our articles published were in fully open access journals last year, and our OA hybrid journals about 28% of the articles published in the hybrid subscription journals were the OA model.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I just wanted to highlight a few of the recent titles that we've launched in the past eight years. So Earth and Space Science, GeoHealth, AGU Advances, Perspectives of the Earth and Space Scientists and Community Science all launched as open access in the past eight years. Perspectives is actually diamond open access, so it's-- we don't charge a fee, and Community Science is our most recent and one I'm very excited about because it's really focusing on getting communities involved in solving the priorities for their communities using science.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And then the two that you're probably most interested in for this talk are Space Weather and what we call GQ, Geochemistry, Geophysics and Geosystems that have recently transitioned. GQ just officially flipped in January. So to take a step back, I just wanted to highlight some of the things that many societies are going through.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So our first journal, Terrestrial Magnetism launched in 1896. Eventually, it became the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1949 and divided into multiple sister journals over time. So you see 1980 was when we divided and we had Space Physics, Solid Earth and Oceans and we added-- we're now up to seven titles within the Journal of Geophysical Research.
MATT GIAMPOALA: Just to highlight that journals publishing, obviously, has existed for a long time and evolved over a long period of time. So we're entrenched in certain structures for how we sustain our revenue and operations and also the way we deliver the product within the journal articles to the readers. At the end of this portion of the timeline you see in 1991, the archive launched within physical sciences, which was a place for people to share preprints of articles ahead of publication and to archive them long-term.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So that really I think was the beginning of a shift of a revolution within scholarly publishing. And because of that revolution and what's been happening across the scholarly publishing industry, we've seen a lot of change in the past 20 or so years at AGU. So this GQ to which I mentioned we just flipped open access was really our first journal that was started as an online journal. It wasn't open access but was online first.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And then we moved away from print launching all these-- everything from Space Weather-- actually from JAMES on was launched as open access. So JAMES, Earth's Future, Earth and Space Science, Geohealth, and as I said Space Weather and GQ both flipped to open access. And by flip I mean we've transitioned the business model from a subscription business model to open access with an article publication charge for publication.
MATT GIAMPOALA: I also wanted to mention here we launched ESSOAr, which is our Earth and Space Science Open Archive, so that's our own preprint server devoted to Earth and space sciences, and we're also experimenting with open access books and all sorts of other ways of trying to make things as open as possible. I'm not going to go into the details that Andrew did on the process for flipping, but I thank you for all the input on the timelines.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And I can speak to that because we've gone through it with a couple of journals now and we're going through it with a new one during the Q&A if people have questions on that. But as we've considered how to promote open access and in particular open science because open access is only one part of open science, these are sort of five areas that we keep in mind. So the first is balancing open access with sustainability and inclusion.
MATT GIAMPOALA: We need to have sustainability. We have to have long-term plans for continuing operations. And we also don't want promoting access to the final published product to make it so that we have fewer people being able to publish with us. We actually want to expand inclusion. And in some cases, an article publication charge, as Susan pointed out, may be an obstruction to people sharing their research.
MATT GIAMPOALA: There are others because there's uneven funding across the globe in general for doing research at all. The second one is to think about what do your authors need. And here's a few questions, but are-- do they need a version available for archiving or sharing sort of that green open access route? Do they need immediate open access? Do they need it within six months or a year?
MATT GIAMPOALA: What is their institution requiring? What is their funder requiring? Does the funder have a requirement for a particular copyright? Is it Creative Commons CC BY license, which is the most permissive for resharing and re-use, or is there some other requirement around copyright? And then I mentioned funder requirements, but is the funder actually giving funding to be able to pay for these charges to make the open access publishing work or not?
MATT GIAMPOALA: All important considerations. The next thing is I mentioned that what we've been focusing on is mainly starting new open access journals. And then we've now begun to transition a couple. So Space Weather we did now 2 and 1/2 years ago, and GQ just flipped to open access this year. So there's a couple of things to consider as you're doing a transition.
MATT GIAMPOALA: First is a cold calculation of what is the revenue per article we need to maintain our operations, and how does that compare to the average article publication charge you expect to charge the authors? So you can have a sticker price and then you can have discounts, waivers or other arrangements with institutions through transitional deals and republish deals.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So you have to actually not just look at the sticker price, you have to look at the amount you expect to be paid after the waivers and discounts are applied. And you also have to consider what's the fair allocation of those waivers. Susan I think referred to is there some sort of sliding scale, or maybe this was in our conversation before we started.
MATT GIAMPOALA: But if you're going to have waivers, Research4Life and the automatic waivers for certain countries with low gross domestic product don't cover all the need. So we have to figure out how we're going to apply those waivers fairly. And then I mentioned that we launched our preprint server, but another way we're addressing open access is early sharing of preprints.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And we at AGU allow sharing of the author except in manuscript as a preprint. And in some cases, that may get you where you need to go under that first-- second bullet there of what do the authors need to satisfy their funder or institution. They may just need to be able to share a preprint. And then the last consideration is not the focus of today's discussion, but I just want to put it in context.
MATT GIAMPOALA: We're working on fair data, sharing of data, sharing of code and reproducibility initiatives. And those all fall under the banner of open science along with open access to journal research articles. And I think that we need to make sure that we always keep that in consideration, that we need to move forward open science, and it's not always open access that's what gets you there.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And that's the end of my discussion, but I look forward to questions.
JASON POINTE: OK, thank you very much, Matt. Up next, Lydia, are you ready to go?
LYDIA TACX: OK, I'm going to--
MATT GIAMPOALA: Stop sharing. There you go.
LYDIA TACX: Thank you. So I can share now. Well, thank you for allowing me the chance to speak OK. So short background on-- my assumption is that you can all see my screen now. Short introduction of Elsevier. So we publish around 2,600 titles. They all offer a way to publish gold open access, including the 640 full gold OA journals we currently have.
LYDIA TACX: We've been launching, on average, around 100 open access journals in the last couple of years. We are also very committed to the transformative journals. We have a full list of 160 journals now that are transformative. And on top of that, of course, we have quite a number of transformative agreements that have large open access components. And just to mention a few, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, University of California, it's a growing number.
LYDIA TACX: So that helps also to publish gold open access under such a construction. In 2020, we published therein about 80,000 gold open access articles pay-to-publish, and that makes us one of the largest-- at least one of the fastest growing gold open access-- open access publishers in the world. I try to give you a brief understanding of how we select hybrid titles to go from hybrid to gold open access.
LYDIA TACX: And one of the questions already I saw was when do you start? Well, we are already thinking about the flips for next year. We call those journal flips. We're already thinking about the flips for next year. Why? Because there are-- and Andrew has alluded on this already and so has Matt, there are a lot of items to consider. So if you would ask me where to go for if you flip an existing title that is most likely already indexed, has-- is the decent site, then go and accelerate.
LYDIA TACX: Choose the title because your footprint is not that large yet and you want to accelerate the growth in those markets. Another one is that you need to go for markets where the gold open access uptake is high already. If it's low, then it's simply not going to work. You need to have enough authors who can pay the APC. And you need to focus on fields and journals where the volume is high because you will see, most likely, that the number of submissions may go down.
LYDIA TACX: At Elsevier-- and Matt has mentioned it already-- we also make use of Research4Life. Elsevier is one of the founding parents of Research4Life, which we apply automatically. So we detect author groups, and this ties into what Susan said. We tag those groups, we know the affiliations of the authors, we know the author names, we know their funders, et cetera. So if we see that the whole group is as we call group A, then we apply a waiver automatically in a gold open access journal.
LYDIA TACX: If there are some country B, so still the Global South but there is some money available, then we go for a 50% discount. Next to that, we have the open access waiving policy for gold open access journal, so gold in gold. If the author-- if the author group received no funding for the research-- and that's something we tag as well-- then on a case by case basis, we apply waivers.
LYDIA TACX: This is an Elsevier principle, and it also ties into why we were already thinking about the flips for next year. So we're going to work on the flips. We're going to do this year soon. We're already thinking about the next tranche. Why? Because we honor what we offer at submission. You always have to put your authors first.
LYDIA TACX: You are a hybrid title. By the time the author submits to the journal, then you can't change the rules of the games while you're playing. If you offer two choices at submission, then you have to have two choices after acceptance. We present the new business model option on and after the editorial cutoff date, so make sure that you always keep the author in mind.
LYDIA TACX: It also means that the larger the volume, the more you have to look at how many articles are still on the shelf. How fast is the journal in accepting articles? How short or how long is the review time? You have to make sure that you plan ahead, you know exactly what's happening in the journal. And if you would decide to flip a number of titles, then go for a journal-specific approach.
LYDIA TACX: Every journal is different. They have different editorial speeds. They might have a different issue pattern. Go for a journal-specific approach. What you will see is once you have decided to flip a title-- and what we do at Elsevier is we flip titles at the beginning of the year-- we communicate that-- and that ties into what Matt said.
LYDIA TACX: We communicate that way, way before the 1st of Jan. Because there is a full subscription volume which we've promised to our subscription customers, we wait until the 1st of Jan to really make the change. And that ties into to the question that when do you do what?
LYDIA TACX: When you flip a title, you will see that submissions might go down. Downloads might go up because they are-- it's easier to access the content. It does not necessarily result in a higher number of citations. The fact that more people can download the content and might read it doesn't mean that these are the same authors who will cite, the same readers who will cite your-- the research.
LYDIA TACX: About societies because that's what this slide is about, about societies, be transparent about the risks and the benefits. It's not an easy process. You need to work, indeed, with your editors. They need to be on board. You need to know exactly is there money in the market. We know that if you look at the open access uptake, if you look at the open access publications, it's life sciences, physical sciences, health sciences and social sciences.
LYDIA TACX: So be aware of the risks and the benefits. More people might read it. Not enough people, not enough researchers might have the money to pay the APC. So like I said, submissions might go down. What we see when we flip titles is that submissions, especially from the Global South, those are the submissions that go down. Acceptances and submissions from China tend to stay the same.
LYDIA TACX: At the end of the process after the editorial decision, we see that the changes in acceptance if you look at countries, following flips are limited. When you are dealing with societies, make sure that you're creative. Talk about then how to differently market the title. Special issues, we know they attract citations. Layman summaries, that is something we don't hear a lot from other publishing houses.
LYDIA TACX: It's something we always stress. It's nice to open an article, and it's nice that more authors, more readers can have access to the article. But still they might not understand it, so make it comprehensible. Try to include layman summary. And the third aspect, and that ties into what my co-presenters have said already, it is the standards and the tools you have at your disposal.
LYDIA TACX: The moment a journal goes from hybrid to full away, the moment an article is no longer subscription, it is gold open access, we expect somebody to pay. Gold open access means that we open up an article at the point of submission with a CC license in perpetuity, and somebody needs to pay. So in other words, the author becomes a consumer as well, and the expectations change.
LYDIA TACX: So the more bespoke the workflows are, the trickier it is to do it really right. Bespoke workflows manual workarounds are error-prone and time-consuming. So when discussing any flip with societies, make sure that they can make use of what you have already. It will enhance the author experience and in general create a better experience for the society as well.
LYDIA TACX: Happy to take your questions.
JASON POINTE: All right, thank you very much, Lydia. Thank you to all the panelists, and we do have some excellent questions. And I know some of them our panelists have already been tackling in the Q&A and the chat box, but I want to try and address as many or all of these as we can. I'm also really happy to see that we have a really varied audience today, which is fantastic. I mean, we have people that I recognize as being on the editorial side of things and the business side of things and even the executive leadership.
JASON POINTE: So I'm going to throw out there I want to cover a couple of questions. Matt, thank you for covering the definition of gold OA. But another question came up early on, and this refers back to Susan's presentation. So, Susan, I'll ask you to start and anybody else that wants to jump in. But tagging, could you explain what tagging is, how it's different from persistent identifiers and just speak again why it's so important.
SUSAN KING: Thank you. Absolutely happy to do that. I'm probably going to stumble on the technical aspect. And I think I saw some really quick responses in the chat there, Jason, to that. But yes, I guess from metadata tagging, I do think of persistent identifiers. I think of ways that both systems both internally and externally in terms of browsers and what have you can recognize funder name, institution and the like.
SUSAN KING: I think this is important both for internal workflows, as our panelists have spoken about, but also externally in terms of reach and being able to make your content more discoverable, being able to make it more reportable back to stakeholders, such as funders and institutions and also useful in considering syndication of content. If we are indeed-- and I think we are moving to a world where all content is available under a CC BY license, it's going to live on multiple platforms.
SUSAN KING: Using persistent identifiers I do believe will provide a way to be able to report back on the impact of that syndication. However, I do defer to the more technical people on this group to be able to answer this comment really more intelligently than I. But basically, it's like make sure your content is discoverable and reportable and hopefully reusable. I hope that helps, Jason.
JASON POINTE: It does. And I do want to step in, and I invite our other panelists to help answer this as well. But there is a distinction between-- the persistent identifier is that link, that identification of the article that remains the same throughout the article's life so that you're always going to be able to know that you're reaching and referring to that original article whereas the tagging is part of the metadata of the article.
JASON POINTE: And as you say, that helps enhance discoverability and recognition and tracking and attachment to all the various facets of the article, the authors, the funders, the institution, the research topics. They're both extremely important. There is a technical difference between the two. Any other comments on that, or do we move to the next topic, panelists?
JASON POINTE: OK, so we had a number of questions that had to do with the time horizon. And, you know, I thank all of the speakers because I think you each touched on various aspects of this. And I think in summary that there isn't one particular time horizon, that it's going to vary depending on the journal in different aspects. And it could be the size of the journal, the current business model of the journal, the opportunities available in the market and that there's also the culture shift.
JASON POINTE: So I think that Matt, you had some good comments that you posted in the chat, but I want to make sure that everybody can hear them. So would you mind reiterating what you answered in the chat about the timing for the shift and then about how you address the culture shift? And I'll tie into that-- sorry. I'm just going to tie a rider to that about there was a question in the Q&A as well about editors that still think of the bad old days and associate OA with predatory journals.
JASON POINTE: How do you include that in the culture shift?
MATT GIAMPOALA: Yeah. Well, and there certainly are predatory journals out there. So I would say Andrew and Lydia both touched on this. There's both a cultural shift and then there's the business model technical implications for how we receive article publication charges. And so my answer was on the cultural shift that you have to have with your editorial board and your community, you have to be having the conversations early.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And the editors have to be on board with what you're planning to do because I've certainly had situations even with the most recent flip where editors sort of went on social media and they're like, well, let's have a poll. We've already made this decision. It's already happening. But, you know, is this amount we're charging fair? Can you pay this amount?
MATT GIAMPOALA: And they can go out to social media and other places with not the full information, and they can kind of undermine the flip. And in fact, in this case, we had the-- it was an associate editor had the wrong price point because it was-- they said it was $3,000 and we weren't charging $3,000 to anyone. So you have to have the conversations. They have to know the reasoning behind why it's happening, and they have to be on board.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And you have to answer their questions, even if they're not-- even if there's not full unanimous agreement that this is the right thing to do. And then the second part-- and I'm sure Andrew and Lydia can speak to this even better than I can, but I have had experience with it. So you have to know how long you typically take to peer review and accept an article for publication and get it published.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So if that's four months, then you need to be telling people at least four months ahead of time that if they're submitting on this day, they need to agree that they're either going to pay for an article publication charge or they're going to request a waiver because four months from now on January 1, their article is going to publish. And it's going to need to have a fee paid by someone, right?
MATT GIAMPOALA: And if your review time is longer than that, then you need to tell them six months from then because there will always be a window of time where people kind of-- you make the announcement and people have already got a submission in progress, and you don't want to pull the rug out from under them and say, well, you submitted before there was a charge, and now we're going to give you a charge.
LYDIA TACX: Exactly.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So we always end up-- there could be 10, 20 depending on the size of your journal or many papers that get an automatic waiver just because of this transition period because they kind of were articles that were in process before the announcement was made.
LYDIA TACX: Exactly. And they take sometimes longer, and then there is no way to publish subscription anymore and then you waive those articles indeed because that ties in with the principle that you always put the author first. You can't change the rules of the games while playing, yeah. That's all I can say.
ANDREW SMEALL: I would agree. I think maybe publishers tend to overestimate the difficulty of the technical and system switches. They are important changes you have to make, but we have tools to solve those. And you can actually technically set up a journal to do away in a matter of weeks. It's not all that hard at the end of the day. But on the other hand, they vastly underestimate the amount of communication and preparation that you have to do.
ANDREW SMEALL: And so like Lydia was saying, starting now and aiming to flip things on January 1 of next year, you know, taking the better part of a year to just make sure you have time to talk to your editors, support them, bring them on board and then plenty of time to announce the change early, set a submission cut off date and handle everything. So, you know, you could do it in a month, but you're probably talking at least six months.
ANDREW SMEALL: And it'll depend on journal by journal.
JASON POINTE: Yeah, and we've had a lot of discussion about educating and preparing on the editorial side, but could any of you please speak to the authors and educating the authors because I know in my experience of this, a lot of the authors don't really know and understand the differences between the various licensing options for open access and don't really know and understand, therefore, which license might fit their needs.
JASON POINTE: I know Matt and Lydia you both specifically spoke to this about making sure that you understand the author's needs. So, you know, what steps need to be taken as far as making sure that your author audience is educated?
LYDIA TACX: What we do is we use transparency in the end to end journey. And like all of our publishing houses involved in this webinar is we communicate both on the journal home page, we communicate on our publisher's pages, and we communicate in the end to end journey the moment the author selects a license. And Elsevier is about author choice. And we try to keep it as simple as possible for the author by having two licenses, the license that allows commercial reuse and a license that does not allow commercial reuse, so the CC BY-NC-ND, and then we explain to the author what the differences are.
LYDIA TACX: And of course, like any other publishing house in this webinar, authors can also contact research for support. There's an author hub. We try to do everything we can to make it clear to the author. And at the same time, authors, at least in my view-- and Andrew and Matt can speak to this as well, they just want their article out there. They want to have it published as soon as possible after acceptance because they want to attract the eyeballs.
LYDIA TACX: They want to attract the citations. For authors, the CC license could be a second consideration. They just want the content out there.
JASON POINTE: That's right.
ANDREW SMEALL: I would add everything you said was spot on, Lydia. And oftentimes, there's three parties to this transaction. There's the author, there's the publisher, and there's also the funder. And many times, the author just wants their research to be read and published and get credit for their research, but the publisher is helping the author comply with increasingly complex asks from the funder. And it's not always intuitive, you know, why you might choose a non-commercial license or a license that allows-- a more permissive license like CC BY.
ANDREW SMEALL: And sometimes the author might think, oh well, more restrictive license, that's good for me, right? And then you need to explain, no, maybe not. Maybe you want your research to be used as widely as possible, and maybe there is a big potential impact for your research in the commercial space. And you want to allow that impact. I guess what I'm saying is oftentimes that working with funders can be quite helpful here too to realize that this research is often publicly funded.
ANDREW SMEALL: You want to make sure that the benefits then ultimately accrue to the taxpayer or the public that's funding this research, and you're helping authors satisfy that requirement from their funders.
LYDIA TACX: Yeah, I fully agree. In the many transformative agreements we have, we indeed work with three parties and author with two parties, both the party paying the APC and the fact that we have author choice. And we indicate as clearly as possible you have a choice of licenses. It's the author choice. Your funder, however, really wants you to use this specific license.
LYDIA TACX: And we see in the author feedback. We also see it in the license choice that the moment you indicate this clearly, authors will go with that preferred license.
JASON POINTE: Great. Thank you. I've got a question-- we have at least one society executive director on the call today. And they asked a very good question that's fundamental for that audience. For societies and associations, how do they ascertain the market potential in the business model before considering OA?
JASON POINTE: Who should they go to? In this case, I believe that the society is-- that their journals are published with Wiley, so my recommendation would be to go to their publisher. But, you know, what are the recommendations from our panel? What resources are there, especially if a society isn't published, if they're self-publishing or if they're not with one of the large commercial publishers like Wiley or elsewhere.
JASON POINTE: Matt.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So speaking as a publishing executive at a society, so yeah, your publishing partner can help there. And if you don't have a publishing partner or you're self-publishing, you probably have access to this information directly. But the biggest thing is to look at the number of articles that have funding associated with them. And we're doing that right now with a third transition to OA that we're looking at.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And this is one of our flagship journals. There's only 6% of articles that aren't listing funding. So that makes it pretty likely that we'll be able to get some form of payment from most of the people submitting and publishing in that journal. But this can vary greatly. And you have to figure out who your authors are, where they're located around the world. The balance of global authorship is important and understanding why they have funding.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And if they have funding, it doesn't always mean they have funding for open access charges. It could mean that they just have funding to do their research, but it is a starting point. And then just to mention the other-- the first one we did, Space Weather, that one was one where we identified that in that particular field, there's a lot of companies that publish, so industry authors.
MATT GIAMPOALA: And to them, the payment was not a barrier at all. So that was a very obvious first choice for us to do for an open access transition.
JASON POINTE: OK, Susan.
SUSAN KING: Yes, I just wanted to second what Matt said in terms of know your author base. But for us also, one of the things that we're doing is also tying that to our subscriber base, looking to see-- and it's not directly an overlap. There is an overlap, but it's not 100%. So I think absolutely knowing the community that is both at this time committed to supporting publication in your journals, which may be institutional subscribers and also whether your authors are coming.
SUSAN KING: And one question I think that for the panelists there is perhaps what role-- if there's time, Jason, I would posit what role do they see for institutions in supporting open access beyond funders and authors?
JASON POINTE: I think that's a pretty broad question. That speaks to some of the other models that are available, but Matt seems game to jump in.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So I just wanted to add one other thing that I should have said that Susan reminded me of. So one other thing we did and everyone should do when they're considering this is survey your authors. We have journals within the AG portfolio that there's a passionate constituency to move to open access. And even they may be largely based in certain countries that are overtly represented on our editorial boards.
MATT GIAMPOALA: So for one journal, we had this group just telling us we had to be open access right away, but then we did the survey and we asked authors and we say, well, are you more likely to publish or less likely to publish if the journal is open access and there's a fee? And more than half the people say they're less likely to publish. So that is an important consideration too.
MATT GIAMPOALA: I don't think I answered your other question, but hopefully someone else will.
JASON POINTE: Well, I think--
ANDREW SMEALL: I can talk about institutions for a second. I guess we're almost out of time, but yeah, it's actually a really good point. It's oftentimes not just a three-party transaction, like I said earlier, but it can be a multi-party transaction where you have an institution involved, you have a funder involved, you have an author involved. And I think institutions are under a lot of pressure with the complexity of OA and transitional agreements. These institutions are-- their authors would like to publish and read thousands of journals.
ANDREW SMEALL: And the institutions are being asked to increasingly be an intermediary in a relationship with many, many publishers and many, many different societies. And it's difficult to manage that complexity. And so as a publisher, we work to provide tools that help make it easier for institutions to sometimes pay all or part of an APC on behalf of an author at least to track where authors are publishing and also to manage transitional agreements and their role in those type of institution publisher agreements.
JASON POINTE: OK, thank you very much. I think we could go on for forever. I wish we had 90 minutes for today's webinar. But I'd like to thank all of our attendees. You've helped contribute to make this a very informative session. Thank you to our panel for an engaging discussion. I think there were-- pardon the pun, but I am a father-- a lot of gold nuggets to be mined in this.
JASON POINTE: And of course, thanks again to our 2022 education sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens and Silverchair. You will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback. It helps us determine topics for future events. And please check out the SSP website for information on future SSP events, such as those shown here, including our March 16 webinar, "Current Trends in Peer Review." And register for the 44th annual meeting in Chicago.
JASON POINTE: Registration is now open. Today's discussion was recorded, and all registrants will receive a link to the recording when it's posted on the SSP website. This concludes our session today. Thank you.
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The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
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Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
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