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Oxford-style Debate: Has the Open Access Movement Failed?
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Oxford-style Debate: Has the Open Access Movement Failed?
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Segment:0 .
Say Thanks for so many people showing up. Why don't you come in. We still have plenty of seats. I'm Jesse Slater. I'm one of your co-chairs for the annual meeting program committee. I've been introduced a few times, but I'm happy to be here representing science journals and triple A's.
I hope you have all enjoyed the conference so far. One of the comments I keep getting is that there were too many choices, which I love to hear. I'm really excited and I hope people take advantage of the fact that we record the sessions and you go home. Do you get a little break and check out everything through the Whova app. I want to say again, big Thank you to everyone online.
I'm quite jealous of you because for the next week I'm just not going to talk to anyone. And so you've gotten that experience already. So now we're excited to close out this year's annual meeting with an Oxford style debate moderated by Dr. Penelope Lewis. Penelope is the chief publishing officer for AIP publishing, where she's responsible for the strategic growth of a diverse portfolio of highly respected journals, books, and other products aimed at advancing the global physical science community.
Prior to joining AIP publishing in February 2021, Penelope held senior level roles at the American Chemical Society publications division, including editorial director and chief scientist, strategic planning and analysis. Penelope combines her experience in scholarly publishing with a deep appreciation of the scientific research landscape. She obtained a PhD in physical chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, where she studied nanotechnology and surface science.
She serves on the Crossref board of directors and the Association of American Publishers, professional and scholarly publishing executive council, and was the 2020 chair of SDM society day. Please welcome Penelope. Thank you, Jesse. All right. We made it to the end of the conference.
I really appreciate everybody being here, and I hope everyone had a really wonderful, productive conference. I know it's been a really packed three days, and I'm really delighted to welcome you to the closing plenary session, which is a debate on has the open access movement failed. So as Jesse mentioned, my name is Penelope Lewis. I'm chief publishing officer at AIP publishing, and I have the absolute honor of moderating this debate.
I'd like to start by first congratulating Melanie, Randy, everybody really who has been involved in organizing this conference, particularly the program chairs Tim Foley, Jesse Slater, excuse me, Tim Lloyd, Tim Lloyd, Aaron Foley and Jesse Slater. And also I would like to Thank Rick Anderson, who has previously moderated this debate in past years. And all of them have really been really instrumental in helping onboard me as the moderator for today.
So let's give them a quick round of applause, please. So let me run through how this is going to work today. This is an Oxford style debate, so we're going to start in a few minutes by presenting you all with a poll which you can answer in the app. Not yet. And with. And that will present the statement, the topic so everyone in this room is asked to please vote on the poll.
And so what we'll do is we'll be able to see then a general sentiment in the room of the position on this theme of whether the open access movement has failed. Then each of our debaters, whom I'll introduce in a second, will be allowed to present a 10 minute opening statement on the topic. Presenting their side after opening statements will then move to a shorter three minute response for each of them.
And then the fun really happens. We're going to open it up to questions and discussion from all of you. And this is where you all can enter into this debate. So unlike many of the other conference sessions, you're really not only free to but you're encouraged to make comments presenting your opinions as well. And so you can make statements either for or against the topic of the debate so that you can add your support to either side.
So I'm hoping that this is going to be a really robust discussion from everybody in the room as well. So finally at the end, we'll run the poll again and the winner of the debate will be declared by whomever moved more votes closer to their side. So that's how this is going to work. So it's really important, again, that you vote both at the beginning and at the end. And if for whatever reason, you don't vote at the beginning, please don't vote at the end.
So on to our debaters. I'd like to start by introducing Dr. Mike Taylor, who will be arguing in favor of the topic. So Mike wears several hats. He's a programmer with index data, which is a software company that creates open source tools and products for the library ecosystem. He's also a dinosaur paleontologist in his spare time and has described and named New dinosaurs.
And I have to make sure I get these pronounced right, including xenoposeidon, which means alien earthquake, God and brontomerus. Do I have that right. OK which means thunder, thighs, and our debater. Opposed to the statement is Jessica polka, who currently serves Dr. Jessica polka, I should say, who currently serves as program director for open science at the astera Institute, where she supports entrepreneurship to reinvent research communication.
She's also co-founder and was previously the executive director of asapbio, which is, as many of us a life sciences preprint platform. And Jessica also has a research background in systems biology and biochemistry. So before we run the poll and get started, I just want to clarify that today's theme and what we really mean by has the open access movement failed in the run up to this debate.
We've had many questions wondering why we're debating open access. So what I'd like to really clarify is that this is a debate about the open access movement, not on the merits of open access itself. The open access movement began with an aim of making scholarly knowledge and outputs more accessible to everyone. It's really evolved, as we all into a major topic within not only our scholarly publishing community, but really across the entire scholarly research ecosystem.
So again, to be clear, our speakers are not debating the merits of open access. Our focus today is in examining whether the movement advocating for open access has achieved its goals. So both Mike and Jessica will explore issues related to the open access movement like sustainability, accessibility and equity topics that are debated in conversations throughout our industry.
You probably had some of those conversations This week as well, and if you read the 2023 scholarly kitchen interview between Rick Anderson and Richard Poynter, you'll have seen one such example of that debate along with a really robust comments that followed that post. But today we're going to bring that provocative topic to the stage and approach this debate on the open access movement with open minds and a spirit of inquiry.
So let's get started with the poll. It should be showing up in your app and I think it will be showing on the screen shortly. Yeah Mike and Jessica, you would even each other out, I would imagine Yes Do we have the poll to show on the screen. OK, it's coming.
I think people should be able to still vote, though, right. Are people able to vote. OK I'm getting a thumbs up. Thank you. Here it is. Unfortunately, I cannot see it, so. We'll give it a few more seconds to make sure everybody has voted. Really ask him again.
It's anonymous. So asking everybody to please cast your vote. So has the open access movement failed, it looks like. We have, what is it. 100 Thank you. Thanks OK, so folks voting Yes, the open access movement has failed. We're still getting some. Votes I think we'll close it in 3, 2 1.
OK Yes, the open access movement has failed. We have 109 out of 253. And for no, we have 145. Sorry some people are still voting. 111 out of 256 and nos are 145 out of 256. So actually somewhat even. And with that, we will invite our first debater, Mike, to come to the stage. Mike, over to you.
Thank you so much for inviting me to do this. As I've looked through the program, all the other speakers of Vice President of this and senior director of that. And as I hear the CVS, everybody is on the boards of 100 things. I feel very outclassed on my business card and my job title, says software guy. And yet you've given me the best seat in the house for this debate.
Thank you. The motion before us is that the open access movement has failed to demonstrate the truth of this proposition. I have to identify what the open access movement actually is. And one of the problems that Rick pointed to pointed out in his scholarly kitchen interview is that there has never really been a single organization that represents the open access movement in the way that, for example, the Open Source Initiative represents its movement.
So we're going to look at four open access movements going back 30 years, but we'll skip over the world wide web itself, which, as you'll all remember, was started in 1991 with Tim berners-lee announcing it by saying the project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to everyone. So the first open access movement that we'll consider is Stephen Barnard's subversive proposal of 1994.
That's what he called it himself, calling on scholarly authors to self-archive their manuscripts in open repositories. This proposal led to the publication of a book and the development of the eprints repository software and the creation of the cogprints repository for cognitive sciences. But can it be said to have succeeded. To quote from the proposal, if every scholarly author in the world established a globally accessible archive for every piece of esoteric writing he did, the long heralded transition would follow suit almost immediately.
And measured against this vision of a global sweeping change, this open access movement surely failed. So now we consider a second open access movement. In 1999, Harold Varmus, who was then director of the National Institutes of Health, published a proposal called E Biomed and I'll quote from it. We envision a system for electronic publication in which existing journals, newly created journals and essentially unrestricted collection of scientific reports can be accessed and searched with great ease and without cost by anyone connected to the internet.
Now harnad subversive proposal had failed due to insufficient grassroots momentum. But the same fate could surely not befall e biomed, which was backed by the might of the US's biggest civilian research agency. But there was opposition, as those of you who've been around for a while will remember. In a welcoming editorial about e biomed, the Lancet noted, much of the biomedical publishing community is scrambling to defend itself against what it sees as an unprecedented acts of aggression.
Looking back, sadly, 10 years later, Varmus wrote this the most shrill opposition came disappointingly from the staffs of many respected scientific and medical societies. The for profit publishing houses were also unhappy and sent their lead lobbyist, the former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, to Capitol Hill to talk to members of my appropriations subcommittees, in other words, to get the NIH funded in retribution.
And the societies and the publishers got their way. E biomed was dead on arrival. 25 years on, it's so thoroughly forgotten that it's hard to find on the internet. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. It's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Harold Varmus. So that's open access movement failed utterly. A third open Access Initiative arrived in 2002, a conference that United 16 open access advocates with different perspectives and gave rise to the Budapest open Access Initiative, or boai, and its foundational document finished with this plea.
I'm quoting from a lot of documents here. We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access. Publisher opposition was significant. This very society hired the consultant Eric Dezenhall to discuss public relations strategies for discrediting open access, for example, equating subscription based publishing with peer review and messaging such as public access equals government censorship.
The Budapest initiative would have needed a tidal wave of support to achieve escape velocity. But in the face of this opposition and institutional inertia, it only raised ripples. So the Budapest open Access Initiative failed. And there are so many more I could talk about. The public library of science launched in 2003 and its progressive stagnation from radical beginnings.
I could talk about the cost of knowledge petition that began in 2012 and started brightly, but ultimately only achieved free access to a handful of mathematical journals. But our time is limited, so I want to jump ahead to the fourth open access movements that we can discuss in detail. That is coalition S. It launched in 2018 as a group of 11 national funding research agencies, and they were quickly joined by the World Health Organization and hefty private funders like the Gates Foundation and the Harold Hughes Medical Institute.
The tagline on the coalition website summarizes the goal making full and immediate open access a reality. Now, surely if anyone could create a successful open access movement, it would be this powerful, wealthy, influential group. Coalition started by launching what they called plan S, which required open access for grant funded articles.
And it used a wrinkle in this requirement as leverage to transition subscription journals to open access. And I quote again, this time from their document guidance on the implementation of plan S. Authors publish open access with a CeCe BY license in a subscription journal that is covered by a transformative agreement, which has a clear and time specified commitment to a full, open access transition in 2023. Coalition MPs will initiate a formal review process that examines the effects of transformative agreements.
Well, in June 2023, coalition has published its analysis of the journals that had signed up to the transformative journals program. It showed that the number of journals in the program that had flipped to full open access was 1% 30% of journals were meeting their open access growth targets. 68% had failed to meet the targets that they had signed up to. A quarter of the enrolled journals had an open access rate of 10% or less.
The report says the fact that so many titles were unable to meet their open access growth targets suggests that for some publishers, the transition to full and immediate open access is unlikely to happen in a reasonable time frame. Later that year, coalitionist published a review titled five years of plans a journey towards full and immediate open access. Even the title feels like an admission of defeat.
Can you really have a journey towards something immediate. Well, the report affirms what the analysis had suggested, and I quote, based on progress reports and the very low open access transformation rate of transformative journals, coalitionists decided to end its financial support for transformative arrangements. So plan's goal of transforming subscription journals to open access failed.
In fact, all of these open access movements have failed. So where do we stand now. Going right back to the start and Stevan harnad subversive proposal. One of the things that said was this paper. Publishers will then either restructure themselves with the cooperation of the scholarly community or they will have to watch as peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic only publishers.
Now, that's still true, and I would say it represents the only real threat to open access has ever presented to publishers. I quoted earlier the report in which coalitionists decided to end its financial support for transformative agreements. But the report goes on to say this instead, coalitions will direct its efforts to more innovative and community driven, open access publishing.
It acknowledges the growing need for alternative, not for profit publishing models and is actively involved in European and global efforts for diamond open access. So plan S has failed. But coalition is pivoting. The world's richest research funders are getting together to build their own open access platforms, and that should be cause for publishers to carefully consider whether in their quest for short term gains, they've painted themselves into a corner.
We've looked at four open access movements Anne touched on several more. Every one of them has failed, and they have failed, mostly because of opposition, obstruction and short term opportunism on the part of publishers who had exchanged their original mission for shareholder value optimization. But each wave has washed further up the beach. So I'd like to finish with three questions for this group.
How many more open access movements will fail before one succeeds. When one does succeed, will it succeed with the help of publishers or despite them. And most importantly, will it succeed with publishers or without. But until that day comes, we can confidently say that the open access movement has failed.
The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding. Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access and this proportion is set to increase for three reasons. Number one, top down leadership. Number two, overdue attention to cost and equity. And number 3, new filters. First, top down leadership.
Richard Poynter argues that the movement has failed because ownership has been handed to universities and funders. To quote him. O was conceived as something that researchers would opt into. The assumption was that once the benefits of open access were explained to them, researchers would voluntarily embrace it, primarily by self-archiving their research in institutional preprint repositories.
But while many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few outside disciplines like physics proved willing to practice it voluntarily. Fundamental Charlie. I agree. Individual scholars are still too hamstrung by their incentives to act alone without the strength of collective action. Free thinking and individualism are prized in academia, with investigators evaluated based on how unique and iconoclastic their contributions are.
And in this competitive environment, sticking your head above the sand to question the rules of the game, the rules by which everyone who is evaluating you has succeeded is not a recipe for success. And this is why I am grateful that funders, governments and coalitions are finally stepping in at scale to change the rules. I believe it is the only pragmatic solution to a wicked problem.
I'll share some examples. When discussing coordinated support for open access, we have to begin where the movement began in Latin America, which has been leading the way in coordinated support for a quarter of a century. The publicly funded bibliographic database, Cielo, based in Brazil, has been providing free access to scholarly journals. There's now over 1.2 million articles from 1,600 journals in collections representing 16 different countries in South and Central America and Africa.
And in 2018, a coalition called America, which stands for open knowledge in Latin America in the Global South, launched to strengthen partnerships between academic institutions and publishing infrastructure. Over 400 journals, nearly 3,000 books and hundreds institutional repositories have joined. But even outside of Latin America in the last few years, we've seen prominent funders establish public access policies.
Europe has been making serious inroads since the establishment of the open access provisions of horizon 2020. And when coalition S formed in 2018, it represented an unprecedented commitment to coordinate among governments and philanthropic organizations in support of open access. In 2021, UNESCO released a recommendation on open science, elevating the cause to an international stage and providing strong moral imperative for individual governments to take action.
And in 2022, the United States White House Office of technology of Science and Technology Policy released the Nelson memo, which ensured zero embargo public access to federally funded literature. When this takes effect at the end of 2025, we're going to see even greater strides toward open access and open data. Second, we are seeing some movement on cost and equity that's long overdue, but at least it's happening.
The Declaration of the 2002 Budapest open Access Initiative suggested that open access publishing would lower costs and promote equity by, quote, sharing the learning of the rich with the poor and the poorer with the rich, which is a beautiful sentiment. But in fact, the concept of an article processing charge wasn't even imagined in the principles. Instead, the authors wrote, because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses.
There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose foundations and governments. Universities and laboratories. Endowments friends of the cause of open access. Profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other creative alternatives.
Unfortunately, the creative alternative, that is to say, the article processing charge created by the publishing industry is coming at a high cost apk's increased 50% from 2010 to 2019, and with individual APCs reaching into the six figures, it's no surprise that in 2022, American taxpayers were paying somewhere between $390 and $798 million annually to publish federally funded research. That's why it's so damaging that many recent policies like the Nelson memo and plans don't go far enough to reduce economic exploitation.
Instead, the Nelson memo directs federal agencies to quote, allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs as allowable expenses in all research budgets, which implies support for Article processing charges. This model creates major challenges for researchers without federal funds or other funds, to say nothing. Of those in low and middle income countries or in fields where resources are less plentiful. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
In May 2023, the European Union's council of ministers called for a no pay model in which costs for disseminating and evaluating research are paid directly by institutions and funders. This can be achieved in several ways, including with diamond open access journals coalition. Esa's responsible publishing proposal is another acknowledgment of the need for fundamental change and the new bill and Melinda Gates Foundation policy, which prevents the payment of APCs from Grant funds, is a strong signal that the system is being questioned.
Finally, the third reason open access will succeed. New filters. Richard Poynter questions the very benefits of having information publicly accessible. Given current developments around Mis and disinformation, he argues for having a membrane quote between scientific research and the chaotic mess of false and arbitrary information that swirls around the web.
Yes, preprints the financial incentives around open access and other forms of open publishing do tip the balance away from gatekeeping and toward inclusion. This means that the rate of spurious knowledge available is going to increase. However, it also lulls us out of a false sense of security in a system that never was equipped to form a foolproof defense against misinformation.
For proof of that can look back to the Wakefield paper or to the current paper mill crisis. Instead, we need a better immune system for misinformation. To me, this looks moving away from a model in which 2 to three invited peers who cannot possibly be experts in everything covered in a highly interdisciplinary paper with 30 co-authors arise to give their evaluation at a time when they are not at liberty to discuss the paper with their colleagues.
Then all the information about whether a paper is rigorous or interesting and to whom gets compressed down to a single value, the title of the journal in which it is published. Luckily, many journals are conducting transparent review in which the reports are published. But in order to create a system that is powerful enough to identify and correct problems in the literature, we need to disseminate research to large audiences before putting a stamp of approval on it.
We need to disentangle the functions of traditional journals into a published review curate model in which preprints and other means of sharing research are the first step in the entire community can then discuss the work together. And beyond that, we need to continue to experiment with new ways of organizing knowledge altogether. And this is what we are seeking to support at astera. For example, there are many exciting experiments in publishing that go beyond the traditional article integrating code with narratives like the notebooks now initiative from AGU micro publications, which are single figure papers, publishing individual modules that can be linked together, for example, with octopus stack creating, machine readable semantic nano publications that break down knowledge into triples, a subject predicate and object and discourse graphs that create knowledge graphs out of evidence and ideas and many others.
These threads are going to come together to create a future which knowledge is shared and interpreted in completely new ways. The success of the open access movement is going to both lay the foundation for and maximize the benefits of this technological transformation. While having heard everything Jessica said about trends in open access, it's on one level, difficult to find, much to disagree with.
It's certainly true that after decades in which the open access movement has lacked top down leadership, consortium is changing that, and it's doing it in the most compelling way through money. Now that funders in the consortium are saying they simply will not pay for transitional agreements now that they're starting to fund the development of alternative infrastructure, the old dictum follow the money gives us a pretty solid idea how that's going to end up.
It is also true that the shift away from author pays gold, open access to diamond, open access that is free at the point of use for both authors and readers. Promises to address the equity problems that have dogged some forms of open access in recent years. It's harder to predict how the growth of preprints will affect the integrity and trustworthiness of the scholarly record. Can they give us the same level of confidence that we currently have with traditionally peer reviewed papers.
We will need a significant cultural shift before preprints attract enough high quality post-publication reviews. Most editors would say today that soliciting reviewers is the most time consuming part of their role. Who will put in that time in a world of ubiquitous preprints? Still, these changes are coming. Now, I genuinely believe that every scholarly publisher was started with high ideals, with a calling and a mission to share knowledge with the world.
But inevitably, as organizations get bigger, they recruit senior leaders who don't share those ideals, whose focus is on shareholder value, or even on the next quarter's revenue. That's why we've repeatedly found ourselves in a position where publishers have opposed open access, even though it's the fulfillment of the mission that they started with. The challenge for these organizations is to get back to their roots, to the reason they came into existence in the first place.
And I really hope that time hasn't run out for big publishers to make this fundamental pivot and be part of the open access future. And yet, from a to B perspective, all of this is beside the point. The proposition of the debate is not an open access movement will succeed at some point in the future. We're not here to speculate on the future, but to evaluate the past.
And it's a simple matter of fact that up until now, every open access movement has failed. The subversive proposal e biomed. The Budapest open Access Initiative plus plans. So as you vote today on this specific motion, I say once more the open access movement has failed.
Zooming in to look at individual initiatives and manifestos. I'm in perfect agreement with Mike. He's identified many mistakes and missteps inside a larger movement. We're in agreement that some of them have even set progress back. But that does not mean that the movement as a whole has failed. We don't say that building a house has failed because it took more than one swing of a hammer.
Some of those Hammer swings may even have put a dent into the wall, but many of them have built something constructive, even if falling short of their original lofty goals, let's look at each of the four movements Mike has identified from this perspective, and I'll share how each of them has contributed to the ongoing success of the open access movement.
First, Steve Barnard's subversive proposal. As Mike said, the cogprints preprint server and eprints repository software emerged from what was essentially a blog post. If I wrote a blog post that achieved all those things, or even frankly, one pingback, I Pat myself on the back. The fact that we are still talking about this is evidence for how strongly these ideas reverberated throughout the community.
This means it was a critical step in changing the way researchers thought. Second, Harold Varmus e biomed proposal was way ahead of its time. The proposal was watered down. But eventually led to the creation of PubMed central, which is core to the preservation of biomedical literature and its critical infrastructure that allows authors to self-archive their publications.
This is important history. So Mike, let's draft the Wikipedia article together. Third, the Budapest open Access Initiative has 6,800 signatures and has been updated multiple times since its creation. This makes it an extremely potent vehicle for transmitting new thinking around open access to advocates around the world. And fourth plan S the low rate of journals flipping as a result of plans as transformative agreements would be failure if the story ended there.
But coalition S pivot away from transformative agreements is progress and its new proposal toward responsible publishing advances a bold vision. Authors are responsible for dissemination. All outputs are shared openly and immediately and can be integrated into research assessment. Quality control processes are transparent and community based and stakeholders commit to sustaining scholar led publishing.
I joined Mike in his hope that the publishing community supports this vision specifically by, number one, embracing outputs beyond the traditional journal article. Number two, building workflows based on pre printing. Number three, opening up not only access to publications, but the whole peer review process. And 4, moving toward sustainable business models that ensure equitable access to both read and publish with the support of publishers.
We will be able to quickly move together to finally declare the open access movement a success. OK well, Hello. OK, great. Thank you so much, Mike and Jessica. Whoops you made it under your time. And so now that we've heard both Mike and Jessica's opening statements and their responses, we will open it up to the floor for questions or comments.
And we've got a couple roving mics moving around the floor, so please don't be shy. OK let me start. It's from prof. But I'm speaking not as a prof. Founder, but as a particle physicist. Surprisingly, you failed to mention the earliest and the most successful open access movement, namely August of 1991, when Paul Ginsburg started what now is known as archive and what existed today at that time with very funny URL x external.gov, which would cause many of the measures to veto it because it looked like a porno site.
I was. I was there when my community actually debated that you should abandon all the journals and simply put these things on archive. And at that first month was like 50 submissions. Today it's 20,000 submissions per month. And my question to you is, it's not only historical, it's also, in your opinion, why it was successful.
So we lost the last part of that question. Can you just repeat the question again, please. If mine works, can you replicate. So the question was, can you replicate this success at a larger scale. Well, OK, I'm just going to keep talking until it just flips on.
There we go. So I didn't mention archive in my opening statement because it would have undermined my argument. I think there's a very practical reason why. Archive which has been so successful in maths, computer science, astronomy and physics hasn't spread further. And unfortunately it's as basic as this.
Researchers in those fields write in LaTeX and the rest of us don't. So I've tried to get collaborators in my field of paleontology to use something similar. They all just want to send Microsoft Word files back and forth, and archive just does not work well with those. So Yes, we can format stuff up as a PDF and submit that and I have done on a couple of occasions, but it does sort of feel like it's circulating around the edge of archive.
So for it to succeed at a larger scale across more fields, I think the solution will be for it to accept as first class citizens manuscripts in more formats. Well, hold on. Is this on. Yes OK, great. Yeah I think we are discounting the existence of preprint servers in many other disciplines like SSRN repec, an exchange network in economics, bioRxiv and meta archive.
About 10% of the literature on PubMed is now appearing on preprint servers like those mentioned and also research square. So while it may not be centralized in one place, it might not be as visible. I think the preprint movement as a whole is another resounding example of success. Yeah, I guess that's fair. All I'll say about archive is when I first saw it written down in my head, I was just pronouncing it bioRxiv.
That's just stuck. So that's what it's called to me. OK Thank you. Any other questions or comments. Here's one. Hi, I'm Sarah black from the American Society of plant biologists. I feel like a lot of the conversation around the open access movement really centers on the notion that authors are exploited with APCs and things like that.
And I'm obviously that is likely the case for many publishers, but for society, publishers and particularly for aspb, that's not the case. And we know I know that our APCs actually don't cover our cost to publish each paper, but that's not something that we necessarily put out there to the community. So authors aren't always aware of that we are actually investing in every single paper that is.
Excuse me, that's published. So on the flip side, our subscription revenue is what supports us bringing early career researchers to meetings to present research or funding fellowships in the summer for people to develop their research or learn more or be a mentee under someone else. And all of those programs would go away without our subscription revenue, because unless we quadruple our APCs, which we don't want to do as a society publisher, we would be in a precarious situation.
So how do you feel that the open access movement can address that for publishers who are not feeding a bottom line or shareholders. Yeah first, I want to say thank you for supporting scholars in your discipline. I do think that models like subscribe to open that don't require individual researchers to pay an article processing charge, but rather take advantage of this existing library.
Institutional support could be one way, and I think it would be interesting to learn more. I know that of course, there are challenges with negotiating those agreements, especially for smaller publishers. But I think that there's many good thing about the subscription model is really that it is institutional support. The where there the people who are ultimately paying and supporting for research, I would hope are the ones who are also supporting for its publishing.
And yeah, I think just in general to another point, this relates that editorial work is critical in getting people to peer review. I think that it's quite possible that we really need to have this kind of coordinated support in order to make review happen on preprints. So I think the question is, how can we get the funders and universities libraries to support these new forms of publishing.
Yeah so I think this is really a question about the affordability of open access. Mike, did you want to respond as well. No, I'm happy to leave that one with Jessica. That's fair. I see some questions. The mics are coming. Hi, I'm Alice Meadows from O'Briens cooperative.
I want to ask about open access and humanities, because I totally agree. And I'm delighted that it's succeeding pretty much. Or on their way to success with STEM and other subjects. But humanities is obviously very different. Kettle of fish. There's not much money there to start with. It's getting less and less. There's a lot of threats.
So I still struggle to see how open access can really succeed, at least in its current form, for the Humanities. Well, I'm a scientist, so I'm out of my area of expertise in answering that question. But I do know that the open library of humanities in the UK is doing a fine job and it's financially sustainable. So all I can say is I know it can be done, but how it's being done, I'm afraid I'm not the person to talk about it.
It seems like orcs, maybe. Hello Lisa janicke Hinchliffe at the University of Illinois. Thanks, Mike and Jessica for being willing to be on this stage for this. So I'd like to bring us back to the specific about the movement. I think, Jessica, you presented some very compelling statistics that open access is certainly thriving. But if we also think about the open access movement and what is core to that movement, it seems like a lot of these early discussions, et cetera, that would be defining of the movement had at its core the notion of author agency and that authors would be the ones who were sort of choosing where to put their works.
Et cetera. But it strikes me that much of the growth of open access is actually not been through author agency, but it's actually been through institutionalizing processes. Perhaps I'm even putting forward another provocation that a great deal of the success of the open access is due to the librarians movement to figure out ways to work with publishers. So I'd like to toss to both of you because at one level, if author agency was core to the success of the movement, then it seems like there might be a failure because it's succeeding by institutionalizing.
Now, I really want to agree with you because it supports my proposition. First of all, I absolutely want to acknowledge librarians who have been so crucial in so many areas and who I think often feel a bit marginalized in open access discussions they shouldn't be. But actually, I have to quibble with your historical analysis. When I think about the three great declarations that really launched the open access movement as we think of it, Budapest, I mentioned earlier, and also Berlin and Bethesda.
I don't recall there being much in those about author agency. I think the vision that guided them all was much more to do with all this knowledge that we generate in the academic world being available to the world with authors almost bit part players if you like. And the same could be said of publishers that the goal, as I at least read it at the time, was much more to do with. Knowledge to the world than it was to do with author empowerment.
And as an author myself, I'm not that bothered about being empowered. Actually, I care more about people being able to read my stuff. And I'd like to make sure Jessica has an opportunity to respond to that, since it's sort of against what her position. Yeah, I do. I do acknowledge that for an individual author, it's incredibly challenging.
Certainly in my own experience as a postdoc, experiencing pressures to advice, direct advice to publish wherever would get me would get me the most opportunities for funding and for jobs. It seems like you're falling on your own sword to have high principles about open access when perhaps as a postdoc you're just trying to ensure that you're going to have the ability to continue working in research.
And so I think that the author agency is and the idea that authors would lead this movement individually by making these individual decisions is very noble. But I think it's ultimately unrealistic and that having policies that help to transform the system at a larger scale is necessary and useful. Yeah, I'd have to agree. I would have loved.
Is it all right if I answer this again. I would have loved it if in the early 2000 there had been a great uprising, individual academics all saying, Yes, this is what we're going to do. We have to admit that it didn't happen. But equally, I welcome here The way that funders are now just looking at this and saying, well, this is no good. We just need to get where we're going. And if we had to do it by saying you can only have our money if you do it our way, I think is actually perfectly reasonable.
Did you have another comment, Lisa, or just a brief one. Maybe you could tell. I'll just encourage Mike to at some point go back and read the two strategies in the Budapest open Access Initiative, which say, I am a librarian. So, you look up your citations. The first strategy is that scholars will need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles.
And the second is that scholars need the means to launch a new generation. So these scholars were the actors envisioned within the Budapest. I bow to your facts. I think Lisa is supporting your side, so I genuinely can't tell anymore. I think we have another comment. Yes, Hi.
My name is Ryan ray from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I have a metaphor and then also a question. So I think a lot of the publishing industry and then open access in specific is sort of like a restaurant that everybody is invited to. And then the bill comes and then everybody is sort of in a standoff asking who's going to pay the bill. So my question related to that is we've had a lot of mentioned the Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical.
Those folks are sort of like wealthy patrons looking to maybe influence policy or have some say over the direction of open access. And I sort of wonder how both sides feel about the movements potentially being co-opted by some of these actors. It seems like open access is sort of trying to approach some sort of Communist utopia where everybody's happy and everybody's reading the articles and nobody has to pay for it.
So just curious what you think of folks like the Gates Foundation kind of actively managing policy. Well, I mean, when you think about what it costs to run a medical study, someone like the Gates Foundation or the Howard Hughes is putting in millions to pay for it to happen. And then it seems kind of silly to think they wouldn't pay a couple of thousand more to ensure it's published in a form where it reaches its greatest effect.
And obviously they made the effort to do that initially in a way that used publishers existing journals. And it looks like they're now having to pivot away from that. I do think there are legitimate questions to be asked about the humanities. As somebody mentioned earlier, where we're not talking about grants in the millions to study Finnegans Wake, and I don't honestly have good answers to that.
Jessica, would you like to respond to. How has the movement been co-opted? Yeah, I mean, I would say that funders who I wouldn't even point to gates and Howard Hughes, I would point to CCI or other funders, are aligning Science Across Parkinson's, which are new funders who don't even have the history of prior policies doing truly radical things like requiring preprints.
And I think that these demonstration cases are going to allow other funders to understand the impacts of that those experiments. So I see them as not co-opting, but rather leading the way with a unique power. And I think that those experiments are incredibly valuable. Regarding the restaurant where the bill comes and no one no one pays.
There's already enough. The money is already in the system to support publishing. It's coming from funders, it's coming from institutions. And I think the question becomes, how can we ensure that the new model allows everyone to publish and read with the maximum benefit can be achieved from the model, the money that's already in the system. And I think if ever there was a time when people felt publishing could be done at no cost, I think those days are long gone.
Nobody thinks that. So I think we have time for one more. I'm looking I think we have time for one more question. This is a question from the online chat. We have a lot of questions and comments here about the funding of scholarly publishing. And someone asks, we must be careful that library funds go to a model given the diminishing power of library budgets.
It seems to me that for OAC to succeed as a movement, the call for information to be free to access at the point of need for all readers, we will have to rethink the scholarly publishing and research as a for profit endeavor. Would you like to comment on that. My comment is that I agree. Yeah in general, I think that a lot of I do agree with a lot of the sentiments in toward responsible publishing proposal that focusing on the mission and scholar led initiatives will certainly help in aligning with what you just said.
Thank you. So I think that will call it and excuse me. So first of all, Thank you so much. Switch to this one. Thank you so much to Mike and Jessica for agreeing to be our willing debaters up here. I think they both did an excellent job. And Thank you also to all of you, both in the room and on the chat who engaged so well in this discussion.
I think it's a really important one and I'm sure we could go on many, many more minutes talking, many more hours talking about it. So now what we're going to do is we're going to run the poll again and give us all an opportunity to see whether Mike or Jessica swayed us. Just as a reminder when we did the first poll, we had 44% of you voting for the proposition and 56% against.
So we're going to open it up again now and see who swayed more votes. Thank you. We'll give people a couple of minutes to do this.
OK still several. We had 256 when we started. So there's. It's a horse race. Those saying, no, we're just a little bit slower on the uptake. OK we're missing about 50 votes still. So, gosh, this is quite tense, actually.
What does the winner get. Honor and glory and bragging rights. We're still waiting for about 50 votes. Unless people please do vote.
Slowly trickling in. OK I think I'm going to have to say that the people who haven't voted either are undecided or they've left. So with that, it looks like. Mike what's happening. I know. OK Yes, it does look like Mike has swayed more votes. He is at 114 votes versus 98, whereas before he was behind.
So, no, it's still going. OK I'm not going to call it. This is worse than election night. It's exactly 50/50. But remember the 50/50. And yeah, so the winner of the debate is the one who sways more people compared to the initial poll. So with 50/50 now, roughly, we're going to declare Mike the winner.
I think so. There is actually a prize. It's a beautiful SSP shirt. So in addition to bragging rights, Mike gets to take home this lovely t-shirt. But let's please do Thank both Mike and Jessica. I think they really.
I think they really demonstrated how positive discourse and constructive discourse can help to really sway opinions and sway sentiments. So thank you very much to both of them. And Thank you to all of you. And Thanks to Penelope for her wonderful job in moderating these debates.
If you haven't attended an Oxford style debate before, the format might be a little bit new to you. But a lot of work goes into this in advance, so some of them really put the time in and I think it shows. So thank you to our speakers today as well as everyone in the audience who has spoken or moderated. We really enjoy your contribution. And for those of you here today and those who are making their way out, as well as our virtual attendees, congratulations, you've made it through a quite chilly environment.
You're here at SSP, so hopefully you'll be able to warm up over the coming days. I would like to. The slides are not up, but I would like to recognize our sponsors and exhibitors. Just imagine them in your mind. They're so great. Look at all of them. Imagine your logo next year up there in everyone's mind.
You can't pay for that kind of publicity. Direct mind advertising. Thank you. Thanks again to our wonderful program chairs, Tim Lloyd, Aaron Foley and Jessica Slater. As well as our annual meeting program committee, who are probably going to go out and collapse somewhere in a heap tonight.
So wish them well. Recordings of all of the sessions will be available in the app within 48 hours. And I did mention our virtual attendees, but I want to mention them again because you can imagine it's quite a different experience and being here. So you can actually go into the app and watch some sessions to pretend you're going back in time in our virtual attendees.
So again, you can't really get that just any place. Next year's meeting. Save the date. Get your phones out now is going to be May 28 to 30th in beautiful Baltimore, Maryland. Don't forget that in addition to this wonderful meeting and every event that is around it, SSP offers year round webinars and the hybrid new direction seminar in DC and online, and I've been working on the new direction seminar for quite some time, so it's one of my favorites.
October 1 and second this year at the wonderful AGU headquarters, which is a wonderful, wonderful Marvel of sustainability and wonderful activities in DC surrounding that. Please, please, please complete your meeting evaluations. We depend on those data points moving forward to make changes, especially if you have suggestions for different models of sessions or maybe more. Coffee is one that I've heard before, but without your data from the meeting evaluation, we don't have that data to take forward.
So thank you for that. I know it takes some time. And for anyone who is sticking around until tomorrow in the meeting app in Whova, if you've not been there yet, you're really missing out. There is a variety of activities, suggestions and I know some folks have put some requests in there that they're going to still be around for tomorrow and for tonight.
So if you're looking for something to do, do go into Whova. Check in with folks. You can extend your annual meeting, joy, just a little bit longer. So thank you. We'll see you next year in Baltimore, if not sooner.
Segment:0 .
Say Thanks for so many people showing up. Why don't you come in. We still have plenty of seats. I'm Jesse Slater. I'm one of your co-chairs for the annual meeting program committee. I've been introduced a few times, but I'm happy to be here representing science journals and triple A's.
I hope you have all enjoyed the conference so far. One of the comments I keep getting is that there were too many choices, which I love to hear. I'm really excited and I hope people take advantage of the fact that we record the sessions and you go home. Do you get a little break and check out everything through the Whova app. I want to say again, big Thank you to everyone online.
I'm quite jealous of you because for the next week I'm just not going to talk to anyone. And so you've gotten that experience already. So now we're excited to close out this year's annual meeting with an Oxford style debate moderated by Dr. Penelope Lewis. Penelope is the chief publishing officer for AIP publishing, where she's responsible for the strategic growth of a diverse portfolio of highly respected journals, books, and other products aimed at advancing the global physical science community.
Prior to joining AIP publishing in February 2021, Penelope held senior level roles at the American Chemical Society publications division, including editorial director and chief scientist, strategic planning and analysis. Penelope combines her experience in scholarly publishing with a deep appreciation of the scientific research landscape. She obtained a PhD in physical chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, where she studied nanotechnology and surface science.
She serves on the Crossref board of directors and the Association of American Publishers, professional and scholarly publishing executive council, and was the 2020 chair of SDM society day. Please welcome Penelope. Thank you, Jesse. All right. We made it to the end of the conference.
I really appreciate everybody being here, and I hope everyone had a really wonderful, productive conference. I know it's been a really packed three days, and I'm really delighted to welcome you to the closing plenary session, which is a debate on has the open access movement failed. So as Jesse mentioned, my name is Penelope Lewis. I'm chief publishing officer at AIP publishing, and I have the absolute honor of moderating this debate.
I'd like to start by first congratulating Melanie, Randy, everybody really who has been involved in organizing this conference, particularly the program chairs Tim Foley, Jesse Slater, excuse me, Tim Lloyd, Tim Lloyd, Aaron Foley and Jesse Slater. And also I would like to Thank Rick Anderson, who has previously moderated this debate in past years. And all of them have really been really instrumental in helping onboard me as the moderator for today.
So let's give them a quick round of applause, please. So let me run through how this is going to work today. This is an Oxford style debate, so we're going to start in a few minutes by presenting you all with a poll which you can answer in the app. Not yet. And with. And that will present the statement, the topic so everyone in this room is asked to please vote on the poll.
And so what we'll do is we'll be able to see then a general sentiment in the room of the position on this theme of whether the open access movement has failed. Then each of our debaters, whom I'll introduce in a second, will be allowed to present a 10 minute opening statement on the topic. Presenting their side after opening statements will then move to a shorter three minute response for each of them.
And then the fun really happens. We're going to open it up to questions and discussion from all of you. And this is where you all can enter into this debate. So unlike many of the other conference sessions, you're really not only free to but you're encouraged to make comments presenting your opinions as well. And so you can make statements either for or against the topic of the debate so that you can add your support to either side.
So I'm hoping that this is going to be a really robust discussion from everybody in the room as well. So finally at the end, we'll run the poll again and the winner of the debate will be declared by whomever moved more votes closer to their side. So that's how this is going to work. So it's really important, again, that you vote both at the beginning and at the end. And if for whatever reason, you don't vote at the beginning, please don't vote at the end.
So on to our debaters. I'd like to start by introducing Dr. Mike Taylor, who will be arguing in favor of the topic. So Mike wears several hats. He's a programmer with index data, which is a software company that creates open source tools and products for the library ecosystem. He's also a dinosaur paleontologist in his spare time and has described and named New dinosaurs.
And I have to make sure I get these pronounced right, including xenoposeidon, which means alien earthquake, God and brontomerus. Do I have that right. OK which means thunder, thighs, and our debater. Opposed to the statement is Jessica polka, who currently serves Dr. Jessica polka, I should say, who currently serves as program director for open science at the astera Institute, where she supports entrepreneurship to reinvent research communication.
She's also co-founder and was previously the executive director of asapbio, which is, as many of us a life sciences preprint platform. And Jessica also has a research background in systems biology and biochemistry. So before we run the poll and get started, I just want to clarify that today's theme and what we really mean by has the open access movement failed in the run up to this debate.
We've had many questions wondering why we're debating open access. So what I'd like to really clarify is that this is a debate about the open access movement, not on the merits of open access itself. The open access movement began with an aim of making scholarly knowledge and outputs more accessible to everyone. It's really evolved, as we all into a major topic within not only our scholarly publishing community, but really across the entire scholarly research ecosystem.
So again, to be clear, our speakers are not debating the merits of open access. Our focus today is in examining whether the movement advocating for open access has achieved its goals. So both Mike and Jessica will explore issues related to the open access movement like sustainability, accessibility and equity topics that are debated in conversations throughout our industry.
You probably had some of those conversations This week as well, and if you read the 2023 scholarly kitchen interview between Rick Anderson and Richard Poynter, you'll have seen one such example of that debate along with a really robust comments that followed that post. But today we're going to bring that provocative topic to the stage and approach this debate on the open access movement with open minds and a spirit of inquiry.
So let's get started with the poll. It should be showing up in your app and I think it will be showing on the screen shortly. Yeah Mike and Jessica, you would even each other out, I would imagine Yes Do we have the poll to show on the screen. OK, it's coming.
I think people should be able to still vote, though, right. Are people able to vote. OK I'm getting a thumbs up. Thank you. Here it is. Unfortunately, I cannot see it, so. We'll give it a few more seconds to make sure everybody has voted. Really ask him again.
It's anonymous. So asking everybody to please cast your vote. So has the open access movement failed, it looks like. We have, what is it. 100 Thank you. Thanks OK, so folks voting Yes, the open access movement has failed. We're still getting some. Votes I think we'll close it in 3, 2 1.
OK Yes, the open access movement has failed. We have 109 out of 253. And for no, we have 145. Sorry some people are still voting. 111 out of 256 and nos are 145 out of 256. So actually somewhat even. And with that, we will invite our first debater, Mike, to come to the stage. Mike, over to you.
Thank you so much for inviting me to do this. As I've looked through the program, all the other speakers of Vice President of this and senior director of that. And as I hear the CVS, everybody is on the boards of 100 things. I feel very outclassed on my business card and my job title, says software guy. And yet you've given me the best seat in the house for this debate.
Thank you. The motion before us is that the open access movement has failed to demonstrate the truth of this proposition. I have to identify what the open access movement actually is. And one of the problems that Rick pointed to pointed out in his scholarly kitchen interview is that there has never really been a single organization that represents the open access movement in the way that, for example, the Open Source Initiative represents its movement.
So we're going to look at four open access movements going back 30 years, but we'll skip over the world wide web itself, which, as you'll all remember, was started in 1991 with Tim berners-lee announcing it by saying the project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to everyone. So the first open access movement that we'll consider is Stephen Barnard's subversive proposal of 1994.
That's what he called it himself, calling on scholarly authors to self-archive their manuscripts in open repositories. This proposal led to the publication of a book and the development of the eprints repository software and the creation of the cogprints repository for cognitive sciences. But can it be said to have succeeded. To quote from the proposal, if every scholarly author in the world established a globally accessible archive for every piece of esoteric writing he did, the long heralded transition would follow suit almost immediately.
And measured against this vision of a global sweeping change, this open access movement surely failed. So now we consider a second open access movement. In 1999, Harold Varmus, who was then director of the National Institutes of Health, published a proposal called E Biomed and I'll quote from it. We envision a system for electronic publication in which existing journals, newly created journals and essentially unrestricted collection of scientific reports can be accessed and searched with great ease and without cost by anyone connected to the internet.
Now harnad subversive proposal had failed due to insufficient grassroots momentum. But the same fate could surely not befall e biomed, which was backed by the might of the US's biggest civilian research agency. But there was opposition, as those of you who've been around for a while will remember. In a welcoming editorial about e biomed, the Lancet noted, much of the biomedical publishing community is scrambling to defend itself against what it sees as an unprecedented acts of aggression.
Looking back, sadly, 10 years later, Varmus wrote this the most shrill opposition came disappointingly from the staffs of many respected scientific and medical societies. The for profit publishing houses were also unhappy and sent their lead lobbyist, the former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, to Capitol Hill to talk to members of my appropriations subcommittees, in other words, to get the NIH funded in retribution.
And the societies and the publishers got their way. E biomed was dead on arrival. 25 years on, it's so thoroughly forgotten that it's hard to find on the internet. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. It's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Harold Varmus. So that's open access movement failed utterly. A third open Access Initiative arrived in 2002, a conference that United 16 open access advocates with different perspectives and gave rise to the Budapest open Access Initiative, or boai, and its foundational document finished with this plea.
I'm quoting from a lot of documents here. We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access. Publisher opposition was significant. This very society hired the consultant Eric Dezenhall to discuss public relations strategies for discrediting open access, for example, equating subscription based publishing with peer review and messaging such as public access equals government censorship.
The Budapest initiative would have needed a tidal wave of support to achieve escape velocity. But in the face of this opposition and institutional inertia, it only raised ripples. So the Budapest open Access Initiative failed. And there are so many more I could talk about. The public library of science launched in 2003 and its progressive stagnation from radical beginnings.
I could talk about the cost of knowledge petition that began in 2012 and started brightly, but ultimately only achieved free access to a handful of mathematical journals. But our time is limited, so I want to jump ahead to the fourth open access movements that we can discuss in detail. That is coalition S. It launched in 2018 as a group of 11 national funding research agencies, and they were quickly joined by the World Health Organization and hefty private funders like the Gates Foundation and the Harold Hughes Medical Institute.
The tagline on the coalition website summarizes the goal making full and immediate open access a reality. Now, surely if anyone could create a successful open access movement, it would be this powerful, wealthy, influential group. Coalition started by launching what they called plan S, which required open access for grant funded articles.
And it used a wrinkle in this requirement as leverage to transition subscription journals to open access. And I quote again, this time from their document guidance on the implementation of plan S. Authors publish open access with a CeCe BY license in a subscription journal that is covered by a transformative agreement, which has a clear and time specified commitment to a full, open access transition in 2023. Coalition MPs will initiate a formal review process that examines the effects of transformative agreements.
Well, in June 2023, coalition has published its analysis of the journals that had signed up to the transformative journals program. It showed that the number of journals in the program that had flipped to full open access was 1% 30% of journals were meeting their open access growth targets. 68% had failed to meet the targets that they had signed up to. A quarter of the enrolled journals had an open access rate of 10% or less.
The report says the fact that so many titles were unable to meet their open access growth targets suggests that for some publishers, the transition to full and immediate open access is unlikely to happen in a reasonable time frame. Later that year, coalitionist published a review titled five years of plans a journey towards full and immediate open access. Even the title feels like an admission of defeat.
Can you really have a journey towards something immediate. Well, the report affirms what the analysis had suggested, and I quote, based on progress reports and the very low open access transformation rate of transformative journals, coalitionists decided to end its financial support for transformative arrangements. So plan's goal of transforming subscription journals to open access failed.
In fact, all of these open access movements have failed. So where do we stand now. Going right back to the start and Stevan harnad subversive proposal. One of the things that said was this paper. Publishers will then either restructure themselves with the cooperation of the scholarly community or they will have to watch as peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic only publishers.
Now, that's still true, and I would say it represents the only real threat to open access has ever presented to publishers. I quoted earlier the report in which coalitionists decided to end its financial support for transformative agreements. But the report goes on to say this instead, coalitions will direct its efforts to more innovative and community driven, open access publishing.
It acknowledges the growing need for alternative, not for profit publishing models and is actively involved in European and global efforts for diamond open access. So plan S has failed. But coalition is pivoting. The world's richest research funders are getting together to build their own open access platforms, and that should be cause for publishers to carefully consider whether in their quest for short term gains, they've painted themselves into a corner.
We've looked at four open access movements Anne touched on several more. Every one of them has failed, and they have failed, mostly because of opposition, obstruction and short term opportunism on the part of publishers who had exchanged their original mission for shareholder value optimization. But each wave has washed further up the beach. So I'd like to finish with three questions for this group.
How many more open access movements will fail before one succeeds. When one does succeed, will it succeed with the help of publishers or despite them. And most importantly, will it succeed with publishers or without. But until that day comes, we can confidently say that the open access movement has failed.
The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding. Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access and this proportion is set to increase for three reasons. Number one, top down leadership. Number two, overdue attention to cost and equity. And number 3, new filters. First, top down leadership.
Richard Poynter argues that the movement has failed because ownership has been handed to universities and funders. To quote him. O was conceived as something that researchers would opt into. The assumption was that once the benefits of open access were explained to them, researchers would voluntarily embrace it, primarily by self-archiving their research in institutional preprint repositories.
But while many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few outside disciplines like physics proved willing to practice it voluntarily. Fundamental Charlie. I agree. Individual scholars are still too hamstrung by their incentives to act alone without the strength of collective action. Free thinking and individualism are prized in academia, with investigators evaluated based on how unique and iconoclastic their contributions are.
And in this competitive environment, sticking your head above the sand to question the rules of the game, the rules by which everyone who is evaluating you has succeeded is not a recipe for success. And this is why I am grateful that funders, governments and coalitions are finally stepping in at scale to change the rules. I believe it is the only pragmatic solution to a wicked problem.
I'll share some examples. When discussing coordinated support for open access, we have to begin where the movement began in Latin America, which has been leading the way in coordinated support for a quarter of a century. The publicly funded bibliographic database, Cielo, based in Brazil, has been providing free access to scholarly journals. There's now over 1.2 million articles from 1,600 journals in collections representing 16 different countries in South and Central America and Africa.
And in 2018, a coalition called America, which stands for open knowledge in Latin America in the Global South, launched to strengthen partnerships between academic institutions and publishing infrastructure. Over 400 journals, nearly 3,000 books and hundreds institutional repositories have joined. But even outside of Latin America in the last few years, we've seen prominent funders establish public access policies.
Europe has been making serious inroads since the establishment of the open access provisions of horizon 2020. And when coalition S formed in 2018, it represented an unprecedented commitment to coordinate among governments and philanthropic organizations in support of open access. In 2021, UNESCO released a recommendation on open science, elevating the cause to an international stage and providing strong moral imperative for individual governments to take action.
And in 2022, the United States White House Office of technology of Science and Technology Policy released the Nelson memo, which ensured zero embargo public access to federally funded literature. When this takes effect at the end of 2025, we're going to see even greater strides toward open access and open data. Second, we are seeing some movement on cost and equity that's long overdue, but at least it's happening.
The Declaration of the 2002 Budapest open Access Initiative suggested that open access publishing would lower costs and promote equity by, quote, sharing the learning of the rich with the poor and the poorer with the rich, which is a beautiful sentiment. But in fact, the concept of an article processing charge wasn't even imagined in the principles. Instead, the authors wrote, because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses.
There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose foundations and governments. Universities and laboratories. Endowments friends of the cause of open access. Profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other creative alternatives.
Unfortunately, the creative alternative, that is to say, the article processing charge created by the publishing industry is coming at a high cost apk's increased 50% from 2010 to 2019, and with individual APCs reaching into the six figures, it's no surprise that in 2022, American taxpayers were paying somewhere between $390 and $798 million annually to publish federally funded research. That's why it's so damaging that many recent policies like the Nelson memo and plans don't go far enough to reduce economic exploitation.
Instead, the Nelson memo directs federal agencies to quote, allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs as allowable expenses in all research budgets, which implies support for Article processing charges. This model creates major challenges for researchers without federal funds or other funds, to say nothing. Of those in low and middle income countries or in fields where resources are less plentiful. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
In May 2023, the European Union's council of ministers called for a no pay model in which costs for disseminating and evaluating research are paid directly by institutions and funders. This can be achieved in several ways, including with diamond open access journals coalition. Esa's responsible publishing proposal is another acknowledgment of the need for fundamental change and the new bill and Melinda Gates Foundation policy, which prevents the payment of APCs from Grant funds, is a strong signal that the system is being questioned.
Finally, the third reason open access will succeed. New filters. Richard Poynter questions the very benefits of having information publicly accessible. Given current developments around Mis and disinformation, he argues for having a membrane quote between scientific research and the chaotic mess of false and arbitrary information that swirls around the web.
Yes, preprints the financial incentives around open access and other forms of open publishing do tip the balance away from gatekeeping and toward inclusion. This means that the rate of spurious knowledge available is going to increase. However, it also lulls us out of a false sense of security in a system that never was equipped to form a foolproof defense against misinformation.
For proof of that can look back to the Wakefield paper or to the current paper mill crisis. Instead, we need a better immune system for misinformation. To me, this looks moving away from a model in which 2 to three invited peers who cannot possibly be experts in everything covered in a highly interdisciplinary paper with 30 co-authors arise to give their evaluation at a time when they are not at liberty to discuss the paper with their colleagues.
Then all the information about whether a paper is rigorous or interesting and to whom gets compressed down to a single value, the title of the journal in which it is published. Luckily, many journals are conducting transparent review in which the reports are published. But in order to create a system that is powerful enough to identify and correct problems in the literature, we need to disseminate research to large audiences before putting a stamp of approval on it.
We need to disentangle the functions of traditional journals into a published review curate model in which preprints and other means of sharing research are the first step in the entire community can then discuss the work together. And beyond that, we need to continue to experiment with new ways of organizing knowledge altogether. And this is what we are seeking to support at astera. For example, there are many exciting experiments in publishing that go beyond the traditional article integrating code with narratives like the notebooks now initiative from AGU micro publications, which are single figure papers, publishing individual modules that can be linked together, for example, with octopus stack creating, machine readable semantic nano publications that break down knowledge into triples, a subject predicate and object and discourse graphs that create knowledge graphs out of evidence and ideas and many others.
These threads are going to come together to create a future which knowledge is shared and interpreted in completely new ways. The success of the open access movement is going to both lay the foundation for and maximize the benefits of this technological transformation. While having heard everything Jessica said about trends in open access, it's on one level, difficult to find, much to disagree with.
It's certainly true that after decades in which the open access movement has lacked top down leadership, consortium is changing that, and it's doing it in the most compelling way through money. Now that funders in the consortium are saying they simply will not pay for transitional agreements now that they're starting to fund the development of alternative infrastructure, the old dictum follow the money gives us a pretty solid idea how that's going to end up.
It is also true that the shift away from author pays gold, open access to diamond, open access that is free at the point of use for both authors and readers. Promises to address the equity problems that have dogged some forms of open access in recent years. It's harder to predict how the growth of preprints will affect the integrity and trustworthiness of the scholarly record. Can they give us the same level of confidence that we currently have with traditionally peer reviewed papers.
We will need a significant cultural shift before preprints attract enough high quality post-publication reviews. Most editors would say today that soliciting reviewers is the most time consuming part of their role. Who will put in that time in a world of ubiquitous preprints? Still, these changes are coming. Now, I genuinely believe that every scholarly publisher was started with high ideals, with a calling and a mission to share knowledge with the world.
But inevitably, as organizations get bigger, they recruit senior leaders who don't share those ideals, whose focus is on shareholder value, or even on the next quarter's revenue. That's why we've repeatedly found ourselves in a position where publishers have opposed open access, even though it's the fulfillment of the mission that they started with. The challenge for these organizations is to get back to their roots, to the reason they came into existence in the first place.
And I really hope that time hasn't run out for big publishers to make this fundamental pivot and be part of the open access future. And yet, from a to B perspective, all of this is beside the point. The proposition of the debate is not an open access movement will succeed at some point in the future. We're not here to speculate on the future, but to evaluate the past.
And it's a simple matter of fact that up until now, every open access movement has failed. The subversive proposal e biomed. The Budapest open Access Initiative plus plans. So as you vote today on this specific motion, I say once more the open access movement has failed.
Zooming in to look at individual initiatives and manifestos. I'm in perfect agreement with Mike. He's identified many mistakes and missteps inside a larger movement. We're in agreement that some of them have even set progress back. But that does not mean that the movement as a whole has failed. We don't say that building a house has failed because it took more than one swing of a hammer.
Some of those Hammer swings may even have put a dent into the wall, but many of them have built something constructive, even if falling short of their original lofty goals, let's look at each of the four movements Mike has identified from this perspective, and I'll share how each of them has contributed to the ongoing success of the open access movement.
First, Steve Barnard's subversive proposal. As Mike said, the cogprints preprint server and eprints repository software emerged from what was essentially a blog post. If I wrote a blog post that achieved all those things, or even frankly, one pingback, I Pat myself on the back. The fact that we are still talking about this is evidence for how strongly these ideas reverberated throughout the community.
This means it was a critical step in changing the way researchers thought. Second, Harold Varmus e biomed proposal was way ahead of its time. The proposal was watered down. But eventually led to the creation of PubMed central, which is core to the preservation of biomedical literature and its critical infrastructure that allows authors to self-archive their publications.
This is important history. So Mike, let's draft the Wikipedia article together. Third, the Budapest open Access Initiative has 6,800 signatures and has been updated multiple times since its creation. This makes it an extremely potent vehicle for transmitting new thinking around open access to advocates around the world. And fourth plan S the low rate of journals flipping as a result of plans as transformative agreements would be failure if the story ended there.
But coalition S pivot away from transformative agreements is progress and its new proposal toward responsible publishing advances a bold vision. Authors are responsible for dissemination. All outputs are shared openly and immediately and can be integrated into research assessment. Quality control processes are transparent and community based and stakeholders commit to sustaining scholar led publishing.
I joined Mike in his hope that the publishing community supports this vision specifically by, number one, embracing outputs beyond the traditional journal article. Number two, building workflows based on pre printing. Number three, opening up not only access to publications, but the whole peer review process. And 4, moving toward sustainable business models that ensure equitable access to both read and publish with the support of publishers.
We will be able to quickly move together to finally declare the open access movement a success. OK well, Hello. OK, great. Thank you so much, Mike and Jessica. Whoops you made it under your time. And so now that we've heard both Mike and Jessica's opening statements and their responses, we will open it up to the floor for questions or comments.
And we've got a couple roving mics moving around the floor, so please don't be shy. OK let me start. It's from prof. But I'm speaking not as a prof. Founder, but as a particle physicist. Surprisingly, you failed to mention the earliest and the most successful open access movement, namely August of 1991, when Paul Ginsburg started what now is known as archive and what existed today at that time with very funny URL x external.gov, which would cause many of the measures to veto it because it looked like a porno site.
I was. I was there when my community actually debated that you should abandon all the journals and simply put these things on archive. And at that first month was like 50 submissions. Today it's 20,000 submissions per month. And my question to you is, it's not only historical, it's also, in your opinion, why it was successful.
So we lost the last part of that question. Can you just repeat the question again, please. If mine works, can you replicate. So the question was, can you replicate this success at a larger scale. Well, OK, I'm just going to keep talking until it just flips on.
There we go. So I didn't mention archive in my opening statement because it would have undermined my argument. I think there's a very practical reason why. Archive which has been so successful in maths, computer science, astronomy and physics hasn't spread further. And unfortunately it's as basic as this.
Researchers in those fields write in LaTeX and the rest of us don't. So I've tried to get collaborators in my field of paleontology to use something similar. They all just want to send Microsoft Word files back and forth, and archive just does not work well with those. So Yes, we can format stuff up as a PDF and submit that and I have done on a couple of occasions, but it does sort of feel like it's circulating around the edge of archive.
So for it to succeed at a larger scale across more fields, I think the solution will be for it to accept as first class citizens manuscripts in more formats. Well, hold on. Is this on. Yes OK, great. Yeah I think we are discounting the existence of preprint servers in many other disciplines like SSRN repec, an exchange network in economics, bioRxiv and meta archive.
About 10% of the literature on PubMed is now appearing on preprint servers like those mentioned and also research square. So while it may not be centralized in one place, it might not be as visible. I think the preprint movement as a whole is another resounding example of success. Yeah, I guess that's fair. All I'll say about archive is when I first saw it written down in my head, I was just pronouncing it bioRxiv.
That's just stuck. So that's what it's called to me. OK Thank you. Any other questions or comments. Here's one. Hi, I'm Sarah black from the American Society of plant biologists. I feel like a lot of the conversation around the open access movement really centers on the notion that authors are exploited with APCs and things like that.
And I'm obviously that is likely the case for many publishers, but for society, publishers and particularly for aspb, that's not the case. And we know I know that our APCs actually don't cover our cost to publish each paper, but that's not something that we necessarily put out there to the community. So authors aren't always aware of that we are actually investing in every single paper that is.
Excuse me, that's published. So on the flip side, our subscription revenue is what supports us bringing early career researchers to meetings to present research or funding fellowships in the summer for people to develop their research or learn more or be a mentee under someone else. And all of those programs would go away without our subscription revenue, because unless we quadruple our APCs, which we don't want to do as a society publisher, we would be in a precarious situation.
So how do you feel that the open access movement can address that for publishers who are not feeding a bottom line or shareholders. Yeah first, I want to say thank you for supporting scholars in your discipline. I do think that models like subscribe to open that don't require individual researchers to pay an article processing charge, but rather take advantage of this existing library.
Institutional support could be one way, and I think it would be interesting to learn more. I know that of course, there are challenges with negotiating those agreements, especially for smaller publishers. But I think that there's many good thing about the subscription model is really that it is institutional support. The where there the people who are ultimately paying and supporting for research, I would hope are the ones who are also supporting for its publishing.
And yeah, I think just in general to another point, this relates that editorial work is critical in getting people to peer review. I think that it's quite possible that we really need to have this kind of coordinated support in order to make review happen on preprints. So I think the question is, how can we get the funders and universities libraries to support these new forms of publishing.
Yeah so I think this is really a question about the affordability of open access. Mike, did you want to respond as well. No, I'm happy to leave that one with Jessica. That's fair. I see some questions. The mics are coming. Hi, I'm Alice Meadows from O'Briens cooperative.
I want to ask about open access and humanities, because I totally agree. And I'm delighted that it's succeeding pretty much. Or on their way to success with STEM and other subjects. But humanities is obviously very different. Kettle of fish. There's not much money there to start with. It's getting less and less. There's a lot of threats.
So I still struggle to see how open access can really succeed, at least in its current form, for the Humanities. Well, I'm a scientist, so I'm out of my area of expertise in answering that question. But I do know that the open library of humanities in the UK is doing a fine job and it's financially sustainable. So all I can say is I know it can be done, but how it's being done, I'm afraid I'm not the person to talk about it.
It seems like orcs, maybe. Hello Lisa janicke Hinchliffe at the University of Illinois. Thanks, Mike and Jessica for being willing to be on this stage for this. So I'd like to bring us back to the specific about the movement. I think, Jessica, you presented some very compelling statistics that open access is certainly thriving. But if we also think about the open access movement and what is core to that movement, it seems like a lot of these early discussions, et cetera, that would be defining of the movement had at its core the notion of author agency and that authors would be the ones who were sort of choosing where to put their works.
Et cetera. But it strikes me that much of the growth of open access is actually not been through author agency, but it's actually been through institutionalizing processes. Perhaps I'm even putting forward another provocation that a great deal of the success of the open access is due to the librarians movement to figure out ways to work with publishers. So I'd like to toss to both of you because at one level, if author agency was core to the success of the movement, then it seems like there might be a failure because it's succeeding by institutionalizing.
Now, I really want to agree with you because it supports my proposition. First of all, I absolutely want to acknowledge librarians who have been so crucial in so many areas and who I think often feel a bit marginalized in open access discussions they shouldn't be. But actually, I have to quibble with your historical analysis. When I think about the three great declarations that really launched the open access movement as we think of it, Budapest, I mentioned earlier, and also Berlin and Bethesda.
I don't recall there being much in those about author agency. I think the vision that guided them all was much more to do with all this knowledge that we generate in the academic world being available to the world with authors almost bit part players if you like. And the same could be said of publishers that the goal, as I at least read it at the time, was much more to do with. Knowledge to the world than it was to do with author empowerment.
And as an author myself, I'm not that bothered about being empowered. Actually, I care more about people being able to read my stuff. And I'd like to make sure Jessica has an opportunity to respond to that, since it's sort of against what her position. Yeah, I do. I do acknowledge that for an individual author, it's incredibly challenging.
Certainly in my own experience as a postdoc, experiencing pressures to advice, direct advice to publish wherever would get me would get me the most opportunities for funding and for jobs. It seems like you're falling on your own sword to have high principles about open access when perhaps as a postdoc you're just trying to ensure that you're going to have the ability to continue working in research.
And so I think that the author agency is and the idea that authors would lead this movement individually by making these individual decisions is very noble. But I think it's ultimately unrealistic and that having policies that help to transform the system at a larger scale is necessary and useful. Yeah, I'd have to agree. I would have loved.
Is it all right if I answer this again. I would have loved it if in the early 2000 there had been a great uprising, individual academics all saying, Yes, this is what we're going to do. We have to admit that it didn't happen. But equally, I welcome here The way that funders are now just looking at this and saying, well, this is no good. We just need to get where we're going. And if we had to do it by saying you can only have our money if you do it our way, I think is actually perfectly reasonable.
Did you have another comment, Lisa, or just a brief one. Maybe you could tell. I'll just encourage Mike to at some point go back and read the two strategies in the Budapest open Access Initiative, which say, I am a librarian. So, you look up your citations. The first strategy is that scholars will need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles.
And the second is that scholars need the means to launch a new generation. So these scholars were the actors envisioned within the Budapest. I bow to your facts. I think Lisa is supporting your side, so I genuinely can't tell anymore. I think we have another comment. Yes, Hi.
My name is Ryan ray from the American Academy of Pediatrics. I have a metaphor and then also a question. So I think a lot of the publishing industry and then open access in specific is sort of like a restaurant that everybody is invited to. And then the bill comes and then everybody is sort of in a standoff asking who's going to pay the bill. So my question related to that is we've had a lot of mentioned the Gates Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical.
Those folks are sort of like wealthy patrons looking to maybe influence policy or have some say over the direction of open access. And I sort of wonder how both sides feel about the movements potentially being co-opted by some of these actors. It seems like open access is sort of trying to approach some sort of Communist utopia where everybody's happy and everybody's reading the articles and nobody has to pay for it.
So just curious what you think of folks like the Gates Foundation kind of actively managing policy. Well, I mean, when you think about what it costs to run a medical study, someone like the Gates Foundation or the Howard Hughes is putting in millions to pay for it to happen. And then it seems kind of silly to think they wouldn't pay a couple of thousand more to ensure it's published in a form where it reaches its greatest effect.
And obviously they made the effort to do that initially in a way that used publishers existing journals. And it looks like they're now having to pivot away from that. I do think there are legitimate questions to be asked about the humanities. As somebody mentioned earlier, where we're not talking about grants in the millions to study Finnegans Wake, and I don't honestly have good answers to that.
Jessica, would you like to respond to. How has the movement been co-opted? Yeah, I mean, I would say that funders who I wouldn't even point to gates and Howard Hughes, I would point to CCI or other funders, are aligning Science Across Parkinson's, which are new funders who don't even have the history of prior policies doing truly radical things like requiring preprints.
And I think that these demonstration cases are going to allow other funders to understand the impacts of that those experiments. So I see them as not co-opting, but rather leading the way with a unique power. And I think that those experiments are incredibly valuable. Regarding the restaurant where the bill comes and no one no one pays.
There's already enough. The money is already in the system to support publishing. It's coming from funders, it's coming from institutions. And I think the question becomes, how can we ensure that the new model allows everyone to publish and read with the maximum benefit can be achieved from the model, the money that's already in the system. And I think if ever there was a time when people felt publishing could be done at no cost, I think those days are long gone.
Nobody thinks that. So I think we have time for one more. I'm looking I think we have time for one more question. This is a question from the online chat. We have a lot of questions and comments here about the funding of scholarly publishing. And someone asks, we must be careful that library funds go to a model given the diminishing power of library budgets.
It seems to me that for OAC to succeed as a movement, the call for information to be free to access at the point of need for all readers, we will have to rethink the scholarly publishing and research as a for profit endeavor. Would you like to comment on that. My comment is that I agree. Yeah in general, I think that a lot of I do agree with a lot of the sentiments in toward responsible publishing proposal that focusing on the mission and scholar led initiatives will certainly help in aligning with what you just said.
Thank you. So I think that will call it and excuse me. So first of all, Thank you so much. Switch to this one. Thank you so much to Mike and Jessica for agreeing to be our willing debaters up here. I think they both did an excellent job. And Thank you also to all of you, both in the room and on the chat who engaged so well in this discussion.
I think it's a really important one and I'm sure we could go on many, many more minutes talking, many more hours talking about it. So now what we're going to do is we're going to run the poll again and give us all an opportunity to see whether Mike or Jessica swayed us. Just as a reminder when we did the first poll, we had 44% of you voting for the proposition and 56% against.
So we're going to open it up again now and see who swayed more votes. Thank you. We'll give people a couple of minutes to do this.
OK still several. We had 256 when we started. So there's. It's a horse race. Those saying, no, we're just a little bit slower on the uptake. OK we're missing about 50 votes still. So, gosh, this is quite tense, actually.
What does the winner get. Honor and glory and bragging rights. We're still waiting for about 50 votes. Unless people please do vote.
Slowly trickling in. OK I think I'm going to have to say that the people who haven't voted either are undecided or they've left. So with that, it looks like. Mike what's happening. I know. OK Yes, it does look like Mike has swayed more votes. He is at 114 votes versus 98, whereas before he was behind.
So, no, it's still going. OK I'm not going to call it. This is worse than election night. It's exactly 50/50. But remember the 50/50. And yeah, so the winner of the debate is the one who sways more people compared to the initial poll. So with 50/50 now, roughly, we're going to declare Mike the winner.
I think so. There is actually a prize. It's a beautiful SSP shirt. So in addition to bragging rights, Mike gets to take home this lovely t-shirt. But let's please do Thank both Mike and Jessica. I think they really.
I think they really demonstrated how positive discourse and constructive discourse can help to really sway opinions and sway sentiments. So thank you very much to both of them. And Thank you to all of you. And Thanks to Penelope for her wonderful job in moderating these debates.
If you haven't attended an Oxford style debate before, the format might be a little bit new to you. But a lot of work goes into this in advance, so some of them really put the time in and I think it shows. So thank you to our speakers today as well as everyone in the audience who has spoken or moderated. We really enjoy your contribution. And for those of you here today and those who are making their way out, as well as our virtual attendees, congratulations, you've made it through a quite chilly environment.
You're here at SSP, so hopefully you'll be able to warm up over the coming days. I would like to. The slides are not up, but I would like to recognize our sponsors and exhibitors. Just imagine them in your mind. They're so great. Look at all of them. Imagine your logo next year up there in everyone's mind.
You can't pay for that kind of publicity. Direct mind advertising. Thank you. Thanks again to our wonderful program chairs, Tim Lloyd, Aaron Foley and Jessica Slater. As well as our annual meeting program committee, who are probably going to go out and collapse somewhere in a heap tonight.
So wish them well. Recordings of all of the sessions will be available in the app within 48 hours. And I did mention our virtual attendees, but I want to mention them again because you can imagine it's quite a different experience and being here. So you can actually go into the app and watch some sessions to pretend you're going back in time in our virtual attendees.
So again, you can't really get that just any place. Next year's meeting. Save the date. Get your phones out now is going to be May 28 to 30th in beautiful Baltimore, Maryland. Don't forget that in addition to this wonderful meeting and every event that is around it, SSP offers year round webinars and the hybrid new direction seminar in DC and online, and I've been working on the new direction seminar for quite some time, so it's one of my favorites.
October 1 and second this year at the wonderful AGU headquarters, which is a wonderful, wonderful Marvel of sustainability and wonderful activities in DC surrounding that. Please, please, please complete your meeting evaluations. We depend on those data points moving forward to make changes, especially if you have suggestions for different models of sessions or maybe more. Coffee is one that I've heard before, but without your data from the meeting evaluation, we don't have that data to take forward.
So thank you for that. I know it takes some time. And for anyone who is sticking around until tomorrow in the meeting app in Whova, if you've not been there yet, you're really missing out. There is a variety of activities, suggestions and I know some folks have put some requests in there that they're going to still be around for tomorrow and for tonight.
So if you're looking for something to do, do go into Whova. Check in with folks. You can extend your annual meeting, joy, just a little bit longer. So thank you. We'll see you next year in Baltimore, if not sooner.
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