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Open Access Without Authors Paying an APC? Case Studies from Publishers Working with Librarians and Funders on New OA Business Models
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Open Access Without Authors Paying an APC? Case Studies from Publishers Working with Librarians and Funders on New OA Business Models
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TrendMD: TrendMD is proud to be a sponsor of this year's virtual conference, and we encourage everyone to take advantage of the special opportunities this moment has to offer, especially the Training B breakout session on Wednesday at 1:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. Our postage describing a 12 month randomized controlled study that showed how Training B increased citations. And lastly, drop by our marketplace gallery group at any time during the conference.
TrendMD: We look forward to seeing you there.
NIKUL PATEL: Fabulous. Hello, everyone. Good evening, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Just gonna pull up the sharing my screen with everyone to see my introductory slides. Can someone give me a thumbs up if they can see that from our fabulous speakers? Great.
NIKUL PATEL: So, welcome everyone. This is our educational session on open access without authors paying an APC? Question mark. Case studies on new OA business models. We've got some fabulous speakers here today. They'll all introduce themselves shortly. The format of the talk is going to be that each one of them are going to give a short presentation on the case studies they're going to present, then we're going to throw it over to the audience for questions.
NIKUL PATEL: I'll be scanning the website, so do put your questions there. But if you wouldn't mind, we'll actually address the questions once everyone's had a bit of a chance to go over their case study. Now, the thrust of the session has really been about the plurality of products, journals, customers that we have in the world, and where we're seeing sort of innovation in business models to kind of further open access.
NIKUL PATEL: And there's some really, really interesting case studies that the speakers are going to present today. So this second slide, just a quick reminder the code of conduct. You've seen it before on the website and I think Lauren, the president, noted it in her opening address. Of course, this is a respectful forum, both of our speakers and of each other.
NIKUL PATEL: And here's the helpful information, the hashtag should anyone feel compelled to tweet. But also, the recording will be available. And if you need any support, there's the email address. Fab. So I'll turn it over then to our first speaker, Claire, Claire Moulton. Claire, do you want to share your screen?
CLAIRE MOULTON: I do.
TrendMD: I'll stop mine. Take it away.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I'm going to talk about the transformative journal strategy and how it works alongside read and publish agreements. So I'm Claire Moulton. I'm the publisher at The Company of Biologist's. OK, my slides aren't progressing. Hang on a moment.
NIKUL PATEL: I find it more useful if you share your screen rather than the slides. I've found that to be sometimes helpful.
CLAIRE MOULTON: There we go. OK, so The Company of Biologists have been offering open access options since 2004 based on the APC model. But since 2019, we've been part of the so-called SPA-OPS initiative, working with librarians and funders to explore transparency and different transformative models. In 2020, we were the first ever journalist to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S alongside implementing our new read and publish agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So transformative journals have to make a public commitment to transition to full open access as soon as possible, and no later than when 75% of research content is OA. They also have to gradually increase the share of open access content each year. Our target is to increase by 5% each year over the next four years. The read and publish agreements have, obviously, a read component, which is like a subscription, and a publish component, which means that corresponding authors at participating institutes can publish open access without having to pay a fee.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And we've gone for transparent pricing and generous terms, so our agreements are uncapped, which means that authors don't discover that there's a threshold at some point in the year where the office ceases to be in effect. So that gives more certainty to everybody. In terms of moving to read and publish agreements, individual institutions want it to be as easy as possible, so we've gone for a simple addendum to their existing subscription contract.
CLAIRE MOULTON: But the Consortia wants us to be more flexible. So most of them focused on our three hybrid journals, but others want to include our two open access journals as well. Most of them will cost free processes for their authors, and we've worked very hard at a pain free workflow. But others prefer a shared funding model if others already have alternative funding rates. And we've had really great feedback from librarians about our willingness to experiment with a transition to open access.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And just to recap, the two approaches really work hand in hand. So the read and publish agreements are what will help us to grow our open access percentage, and that will allow us to fulfill our transformative journal commitments to grow 5% year on year. But the transformative journal status is what gives us time. It's compliant with authors funds mandates, and that gives us a number of years over which we can grow our read and publish coverage across institutes and countries.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I'm going to take a little look at what difference it can actually make for our authors. So in this chart, I'm showing the percentage of open access research content for our three hybrid journals. The first two journals, shown in green, showed an increase over the past decade to around 15% to 20% open access, and then they've plateaued there. And this largely reflects the patterns of funding mandates in this area.
CLAIRE MOULTON: The third journal, shown in orange, has never got above 4% open access. So it has the same policies, the same APCs, as the other journals, but the funds in this area haven't mandated open access and haven't provided funds for open access publishing. And so the authors haven't chosen open access. So I'm going to focus on this third journal and show you what has happened as we've reached out with our read and publish agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So in 2020, we had just three consortia agreements covering the UK, Ireland, and Israel. And you can see that the journal has managed to increase the percentage of open access to 6%. But in 2021, we've expanded quite a lot. So we have two new consortia agreements with the Max Planck Digital Library and the University of California, but lots of individual institutional agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So we now have over 200 institutes participating in 17 countries. And you can see from the first quarter of 2021 that we got up to 12% open access on this journal, the vast majority of those being authors taking up the read and publish option. So we've had fantastic feedback. I've been doing interviews with authors, and they talk about the relief, really, that what they wanted to be able to publish open access, but they just weren't able to pay a fee.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And so this has made a huge difference to them. And I just wanted to add that we've recently announced an agreement with EIFL that will help us support all this from developing and transition economies. But I'm not going to say anything more about that because Romy's going to talk about EIFL in a moment. So is the transformative approach working for us?
CLAIRE MOULTON: There are certainly lots of positives. The transformative journals means that we are compliant with fund mandates, which helps our authors to publish with us. Through the read and publish agreement, we've got happy librarians and very happy authors not having to pay a fee. It aligns with our mission to support biologists and also secures a baseline income for quality publishing for the coming years.
CLAIRE MOULTON: But there are certainly challenges as well. Read and publish agreements are incredibly time consuming with lots of manual work, so we've had to expand our team and increase our costs. And it's also quite hard to gain attention when you're a small not for profit organization. So a huge thank you to those librarians who set aside time as well as money to support us in this initiative.
CLAIRE MOULTON: Thank you very much.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Claire. Appreciate the timekeeping as well. So next on our list is Kamran Naim from CERN. Kamran if you're all right to share your screen as well.
KAMRAN NAIM: All right, Nicole, can you hear me? All right, well good evening, everyone. My name is Kamran Naim and it's a pleasure to be on this panel, and thank you to SSP for the invitation. So I'm happy to be here today to talk about a couple of different collective approaches for open access and to be on this panel about non APC based approaches. So why do these matter? One of the really significant reasons to pursue APC based models is to create a more equitable playing field.
KAMRAN NAIM: And as we know, many OA journals have APCs that can range between a couple of thousand, and now we know, as much as over $11,000. That amount is a lot for most authors in most countries, and you can only imagine how exclusionary that might feel for researchers in the LMICs. Read and publish deals are great.
KAMRAN NAIM: It's encouraging to see more of these. But they do primarily serve the interests of authors that are affiliated with institutions in countries that can afford these deals. So as much as it's encouraging to see increased numbers of our own deals, they don't really do a whole lot to serve the needs of the LMIC researchers and instead give authors from those institutions the increased advantages compared to trying to keep a more equitable playing field.
KAMRAN NAIM: Waivers are not a sustainable, or I like to use the term dignified, solution. As much as waivers can help authors publishing an APC based journal without a fee, having to have a system where researchers around the world need to ask, essentially, for charity I don't believe this is a dignified solution. And we should be designing for dignity and working for models that can avoid those kinds of, yeah, those kinds of situations.
KAMRAN NAIM: So when we're talking about the conversion of subscription journals to open access, a lot of people kind of bring up this whole tragedy of the common. So they say, OK, yeah, you can try and attempt to convert your subscriber base to open, but eventually, what will happen is that support will wain over time. Once the research is open, institutions don't have incentives to continue to participate, and you'll have this kind of tragedy of the commons.
KAMRAN NAIM: Now, I'd like to argue that instead, actually, what we may have in scholarly publishing right now is a tragedy of the anti-commons, where the imposition of excessive property rights on intellectual resources or on academic journals results in socially sub-optimal use of scientific knowledge. And we've seen somewhat of a recognition of that around COVID-19 and how there is a consensus among the community that we really had to bring resources into the open domain in order to accelerate towards solutions.
KAMRAN NAIM: So you know, why it took COVID to get to that point and why we can't do that moving forward is, I think, the question at the moment. So what we're really talking about now is collective action. So how can we get institutions from around the world to use the subscribe to journals, to work to support open resources? And what collective action theory tells us is that you can leverage group affinity among actors, but that only really works for small, socially cohesive groups.
KAMRAN NAIM: And the lack of cohesion across subscribers, particularly for publishers whose subscription base is maybe global, can limit the extent to which you can rely on per group behavior-- so altruism, reciprocity, or social incentives. And so for a global group, what might be required is segmenting the subscriber base into numerous subgroups. And that means that there's a huge cost to organizing and administering collective funding.
KAMRAN NAIM: The actions of members are coordinated and visible to each other. You can use social dynamics and cohesion to limit or prevent free writing. So to talk about a couple of models that use the major mechanisms to stimulate collective action-- and these come, really, from theoretical work that was established by Mancur Olson and the logic of collective action, which says that you can sustain public resources, and you can sustain the private provision of public resources, by leveraging group affinity and social incentives, you can induce institutions to participate through their own economic self-interest, and you can either work through coercion or government regulation.
KAMRAN NAIM: I'm not going to touch on those two. But the first one I'm going to talk about is leveraging social dynamics and disciplinary cohesion. Now, the sponsoring consortia for open access publishing in particle physics, SCOAP3 is a global collaboration of over 3,000 libraries, research institutions, and funding agencies, now across 44 countries. It's been operating since 2014 and has a participatory governance model where the actions of all actors are visible to one another.
KAMRAN NAIM: There is a sense of cohesion of the actors working together to support high energy physics. So there's that element of social cohesion around the discipline that works in this model, and it's been-- it has admittedly, because it's a global collective involving countries from all over the world, there is a larger organizing cost to that.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that cost is effectively met by CERN in its organization and administration of SCOAP3. But the collective has operated since 2014. We have converted 90% of all of the articles of hydrophysics across 11 journals with partnerships from commercial publishers, society publishers, even born-OA publishers. And although there's only participation from 44 countries, we've enabled APC free authorship for authors from over 120 countries.
KAMRAN NAIM: And so everyone contributes to the model based on their share of the global research in high energy physics. And as such, all costs are covered, so for authors, all you have to do is submit your work to the journal, and it's published without an APC. The subscribe to open model, on the other hand, is a publisher-driven model, which leverages economic self-interest to induce collective action.
KAMRAN NAIM: So it was developed initially by Raym Crow and utilized by annual reviews-- initially piloted by annual reviews, but now there's a subscribe to open collective group, which is bringing together all the different publishers that are trying this out now. So EMS press and the IWA, political journals. And essentially, what they're trying to do is to utilize the existing subscription business and procurement process.
KAMRAN NAIM: So taking the existing model that funded their journals and essentially tweaking it to see if you can use the relationships you have with libraries to transition content to open. So the model aims to preserve a vendor-customer relationship. It doesn't ask for altruistic, collective contribution. Importantly, it provides an adequate incentive for institutions to participate.
KAMRAN NAIM: So under the subscribe to open model as it's implemented by annual reviews, participants in the model are offered a discount, and they're also given free access to the backfile. It's only guaranteed open access to-- the next year's content is only guaranteed with full participation, and the offer needs to occur annually to ensure that institutions continue to participate over time.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that's what really helps kind of make the model sustainable. I'll pass on now to my colleague from PLUS who will also talk about a model which is similarly based on collective action principles.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Kamran. And thank you for doing some of my job for me. Andy.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Thanks, Kamran. Can everybody see my screen? Is it showing the presenter mode or is it showing the--
NIKUL PATEL: I think seemingly, the presenter mode.
ANDY UTTERBACK: How's that?
NIKUL PATEL: Better.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Yeah, so it's really nice to be here. This is my first SSP. I'm a newbie here. So it's been fun to see all these familiar faces around that I know. I'm with the Public Library of Science. I'm the business development manager, and I'll be talking today about our collective action model, which we call community action publishing. So it's really important to take a step backwards and think about the problem that we were trying to solve with community action publishing.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Because I think that there's a real theme with the idea that different journals and different publications require different things to really succeed. If you're moving away from APCs in a born-OA environment. So the real problem that we were thinking about when we were thinking about community action publishing is specifically about selective publishing. So, for some context, community action publishing is only available for two of the 12 PLOT journals at the moment.
ANDY UTTERBACK: It will soon be available for three. And for the longest time-- but for the purposes of this talk, we're only speaking about PLOS medicine and PLOS biology. And for a very long time, we've been cross-subsidizing the costs to produce articles in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology to keep them at $3000 APCs, which actually doesn't cover the cost that it takes to produce an article in either of these journals.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And we've been using the-- that's largely because of their highly selective aspect where there's an acceptance rate floating around 10% to 15%. So we've been using the revenue from other journals to keep that APC low, but it still wasn't enough. So this is sort of the context with which we were sort of thinking about community action publishing. So I'll try and-- this is a much longer presentation to talk about the intricacies of CAP, but I'll try and keep it in a nutshell.
ANDY UTTERBACK: So it's a tiered system. When an institution approaches us and says, hey, we'd like to cover the cost of APCs for unlimited publishing in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology, we go and we look up their publication history over a five year time period to see how many authors they had in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology that were either contributing or corresponding authors, which is a really unique aspect of CAP, I believe.
ANDY UTTERBACK: I'll just pop through all these. So the fees that you see over on the right are the annual costs for each of the tiers, which, as I mentioned, were based on their publishing history from both their corresponding and contributing authors. We also did some math, and we've publicly shared the costs in margin for both PLOS medicine and PLOS biology on our website.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And so once we get enough membership in the community action publishing model for either journal to reach those publicly posted targets, we give the community back the money, the additional revenue, to be added on-- to subtract from their annual invoice that they get for participating in the CAP membership fee. Research for life countries, or institutions from research for life countries, rather, are automatic members of this model.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And there are also additional sort of quirks such as the-- if corresponding authors from an institution that is not a member, but a-- flip that. If a contributing author is from an institution that is a member, but a corresponding author is, there will be a discount provided to the cost to cover the non member fee for publishing in those journals. So again, that's sort of CAP in a nutshell.
ANDY UTTERBACK: I'm happy to unpack it if anyone would like to go into more detail. But for now-- So again, with the theme of thinking about different journals thriving for different models, and thriving under different models, we do have several different non APC models. And we have one called flat fee and one that's yet to be named, which I don't know when that will be publicly announced, but it's in the works at the moment.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And even though all of these different journals sort of-- we found different models to work better with them, they all have shared principles which are largely about transparency, the integration of cost, sort of the plan as this price transparency framework, and then really building this in collaboration with the community and making sure that we get input and feedback before we make any decisions. And then the weak point, as I'm sure all of us know, is largely surrounded by data hygiene.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Institutional disambiguation when it comes to author affiliation is such a challenge when it comes to affiliating people correctly with the amount of publications that are attributed to a given institution, whether that be a medical school or a branch campus or whatever it might be. The amount of time that you put in to getting good data is only as successful as your model is going to be. Yeah, that's-- again, happy to go into more detail about community action publishing, but it looks like my 5 minute timer just went off, so I'll pass it on to Romy.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Andy.
ROMY BEARD: I was on. Can you see my screen? And you can hear me, perfect. OK. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I'm the last one. I'm really glad everyone stuck to their time. I was worried there would be nothing left for me.
ROMY BEARD: So my name is Romy Beard, and I'm the EIFL licensing program manager. And in case you're not familiar with EIFL, it's a nonprofit organization that works with libraries and library consortia in developing in traditional economy countries. So EIFL stands for Electronic Information For Libraries. And there's four different EIFL programs. They've got a program about public library innovation, public library copyright, and then there's the open access program, which is managed by my colleague [INAUDIBLE] [? Kuchma. ?] And I'll briefly talk about the non APC models in this aspect because they've not been mentioned.
ROMY BEARD: So one of the things the open access program does, among other things, is support local publishing in countries through capacity building and policy advice. And most of the journals published in this way are published by local institutions or libraries, and they don't charge APCs. In terms of business models, they're funded through institutions, library support, so library staff being able to spend time on these journals, and some government funding as well.
ROMY BEARD: And I've put some links here to some examples of those types of models from EIFL partner countries, which are available in the slides if someone wants to look at them later. And then the fourth program is the licensing program, which is the program that I manage. And traditionally, since EIFL started 20 years ago, the licensing program has been negotiating access to paywalled content.
ROMY BEARD: But over the last few years, they've also included open access publishing terms and negotiations with publishers. So the way it works is that we negotiate umbrella agreements with publishers so it could be free access, discounted access. And when we started doing the APC agreements, a lot of these, initially, were waivers and discounts off article processing charges. But increasingly, we now also have non APC models, which I'll talk in a bit more detail in a minute.
ROMY BEARD: But before we go there, I just thought it might be useful to touch on the APC based models and what the issues are. And I've listed a number here. Waivers can be really cumbersome to claim. Often, discounts aren't enough. If you earn $400 a month, and you're being asked to pay 50% of $4,000, it just doesn't work. And also, hybrid journals are excluded, which doesn't make it equitable.
ROMY BEARD: If you want to make it equitable and give everyone the same, you should also have an option for hybrid journals. And you can't just say no, you have the option to pay it, to not pay the APC and publish behind the paywall, because then open access, in that aspect, is not equitable. And I thought I'd give you an example of something that happened this morning. I got an email from our life licensing coordinator in Ghana. He forwarded me a message from an author who wanted to-- his article had been accepted to be published with a big publisher, and he was asking for some help.
ROMY BEARD: He was trying to claim a waiver. And he was giving different publishing options. And the option to publish in open access would have cost him $4,250, $3500 open access fees, and $750 open access pages fees. So this particular publisher, EIFL doesn't have an agreement with, but obviously, we try to help anyway even if there's publishers we don't work with.
ROMY BEARD: So I looked at the publisher policy. They offered automatic waivers for corresponding authors from Ghana for fully open access journals. This happened to be a fully open access journal, so I thought, great, they should get a waiver. But then, if you looked at the details, it was actually not an automatic recognition. It was the author has to claim it during the submission process or during one of the processes, they have to claim it.
ROMY BEARD: But no further information about what box do you need to tick, what does this mean, no other communication. So obviously, this author missed it. They didn't claim it, and possibly aren't going to get the waiver. I don't know yet. I hope they will. But that goes to show one of the examples of why there is a problem.
ROMY BEARD: Now, for the non APC models, we have a few examples like that. So we have an agreement, an umbrella agreement, with Cambridge University Press, which includes some publish and read offers for some countries, who can then decide to take up on that. In this case, it's a paid fee that covers publishing and reading. And we have uptake from six countries-- Latvia, Lithuania, Fiji, Moldova, Palestine, and Estonia, and Ghana will be joining that soon as well.
ROMY BEARD: And then, we have some free region publish agreements with European Respiratory Society, International Water Association, and the Company of Biologists that Claire mentioned. That's really great because there no fee attached to this, so it's free reading and free publishing. And also, automatic recognition. So there's no need to tick a box, to claim a waiver. It just happens automatically and smoothly-- at least, that's the plan.
ROMY BEARD: I think there's still some challenges that we are working on-- communication to authors, Clare mentioned this as well, raising awareness about these open access publishing options, about these journals. If it's small publishers, it might not be as well known, and we want to make sure authors are aware of all these opportunities. In the cases where it's not free read and publish, then budget is always an issue in the countries that we work in.
ROMY BEARD: And sometimes, it's actually an issue of saying the fact that we're paying for publishing can be a problem. So there might be money to pay for subscriptions, but because there's a different label on it, that can be an issue. And then, it's all nice and good to have these agreements in place, but what actually happens in reality?
ROMY BEARD: Are these automatic waivers being given? Is more content being published in open access? That's our goal. So we're looking into that. We're doing our preliminary analysis of articles that have been published in open access. And so far, based on the publisher reports I've received, about 50% of the articles that were published in open access from eligible countries and publishers came through EIFL agreements.
ROMY BEARD: And we saw an increase of 35% more articles published in open access in 2020 versus 2019. So we've had a lot more agreements starting in 2020. So that's a fantastic increase, and very positive that what we're doing is making a difference. And that's everything. Then, we're handing over to questions.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Romy. And thanks for-- what a way to end your talk their with some pretty fantastic numbers. So we've had a couple of questions come through. We're going to take it over to the floor. I have a few questions myself if we sort of run out of them, but I don't think we will somehow. The first one's actually more of a statement, and it's directed toward you, Kamran. It's from Rick Anderson.
NIKUL PATEL: I'll read it out in its fullness because I think it's important to do so, but I think you might want to respond, potentially. So, he writes, "Free writing could be the result of a lack of progress opportunity or commitment, but it can also be a result of disagreement within the group, as to whether the program in question is the right one. So in other words, when members of a group decline to contribute to an OA program, it's not necessarily that they agreed with the program but aren't sufficiently moved to contribute.
NIKUL PATEL: It may be that they don't think the OA program in question is the right one to pursue." Now, I thought I might give you the opportunity to respond if you'd like to.
KAMRAN NAIM: Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't disagree with what he's saying. And sure, yeah, I mean, certainly, that's up to the participants right? So I think at least as far as SCOAP3 goes, and as I work on that right now, I'm happy to talk about that. The OA program has been consistent with over 3,000 participants, and in terms of numbers, we only see-- have only seen the numbers grow over time.
KAMRAN NAIM: So that, to me, is super encouraging, that even a resource that's been available for, what is it, close to seven years now? Or we're now in our seventh year? That libraries have consistently continued to support the initiative and that actually, it's bringing new institutions in as well. So yeah, obviously librarians can and should put their money towards programs that reflect their values.
KAMRAN NAIM: And if an OA program doesn't align with what they want to invest in, then there's no reason why they should participate.
NIKUL PATEL: I'm interested to know, if it's SCOAP3, have you had any of that sort of anecdotal evidence that someone has declined to participate because they didn't feel that it was the right OA program or otherwise?
KAMRAN NAIM: I mean, not really. It's actually quite contrary. We bring in new members into the consortia. Most recently, the IRL consortium in Ireland joined, and their institutions have been benefiting from the sub 3 program since its outset, publishing articles and having them covered for free. Obviously, through your authorship, free readership to the high energy physics content.
KAMRAN NAIM: But they joined the consortia. And so, rather than seeing attrition, we see libraries more interested in investing in open programs, and long may that trend continue.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you. Claire, now again, another question from Rick, but are your authors allowed to select any license they wish, or are they required to do CCBI.
CLAIRE MOULTON: We do only offer CCBI. We did look at the range of options, and I think, in an ideal world, you might offer the range, but we found that it was quite a lot of systems set up for us to offer the range. And I think that what our experience was that we had a journal that we flipped from subscription to open access, and I think we kind of dragged our heels. We kind of did CCBI and DSA, and then we did we kind of became more and more open, and so we ended up with CCBI.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And I think the feeling of our directors was that if we were going for open access, we should go straight for CCBI this time.
NIKUL PATEL: I actually have a follow on, Claire, which is, specifically with JEB, because that was a really compelling graph where you're over 12% now, in OA? What is it, sorry. Because they're sort of free to publish and people being able to have their open access without having to coordinate an APC themselves. I'm really curious as to what happens with JEB when it hits that threshold of flipping, especially given that you said that not all of your agreements currently include fully open access journals.
NIKUL PATEL: What happens when it becomes a fully open access product?
CLAIRE MOULTON: Yeah, I think it's-- obviously, that's the question for all of these models is what happens next? And I think that that's why this is such an interesting discussion. And I hope that's what we're going to comment on. I think that we're hoping that over the period of the transformative journals, which takes us to like 31st of December, 2024, that we've grown our read and publish agreement significantly so that we can actually rely on that for open access revenue and open access growth.
CLAIRE MOULTON: I would say, if a JEB is the furthest away from that flip point of 75%, but even with the other journals growing by 5% each year, we wouldn't quite get there. And so I think that we'll have some interesting decisions. I actually don't know what's going to happen in 2025, but what I would say is that The Company of Biologists is going to be 100 years old in 2025, and we would really like to be announcing some very positive news.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I know that we're very much looking for a success in this model. And we just have to decide what percentage OA we flip, when the timing is right. You know, we've seen such an enormous growth in our read and publish from 2020 to 2021. It could be that just accelerates and that it's very obvious earlier than the end of that period that we should be flipping.
NIKUL PATEL: Yeah, there's an interesting inflation point for your, because-- I guess the point of the rest of my question was that it might well be exponentially. JEB has gone from 4% to 12% through the accelerant. This is where they're sort of sitting out on, their 3x might go 3x next year. And you end up at the inflection point much sooner than we--
CLAIRE MOULTON: I also think there's a bit of at what point does read and publish actually become subscribe to open? So if the journal flips to OA, but you're still using essentially read and publish agreements, then that's really subscribe to open. So I think that all of these models start to merge in the future.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Claire. Andy, a question for you from John Long which is about the two journals in question, PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine. Does that mean that they won't be subsidized anymore in the CAP model?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That's correct. That's the goal over. The next few years, we are going to be raising the non member fees to the point where they cover their costs of production to encourage people to join the CAP model. And similarly, we are going to be, on December 31, 2024, much like Claire, we'll be re-evaluating the CAP tiering system and reclassifying people based on what their tiers were in the previous three years.
NIKUL PATEL: And to increase the value into the model, because, of course, it is just the two journals at the moment. I think they'll potentially plan to the more and, of course, you just launched a bunch. To be able to feel the model, do you need to be able to add journals to it to be able to sort of make sure that everyone is sort of participating?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That is a good question. You don't, because each journal has its own separate target that it's trying to reach, and each journal can be sort of pick and mixed by different institutions. So if a particular institution is top heavy in medical research, but doesn't really do much in biology, they can opt just to join the PLOS medicine community action sort of community. But there is sort of an interesting aspect to that in that if you want the model to succeed sort of as PLOS, in a way that you contribute to the success of collective action publishing models, it certainly is-- the success is based upon the way that those interact with one another, I suppose.
ANDY UTTERBACK: But yeah, from the institutional perspective, you don't need to get all three in order to sign up for one of them.
NIKUL PATEL: And then, Romy, a question for you. It's interested in your presentation. You were talking about capacity building and some policy advice to members, if I'm remembering correctly. What sort of form did that take?
ROMY BEARD: This is actually not what I do, but it's my colleague, [INAUDIBLE] [? Kushma, ?] who manages the open access program. So I won't be able to answer that question in detail. I believe that she helps set up publishing in those areas if someone needs support, or how can they make sure that the journal meets certain criteria. So she's basically there to do support.
NIKUL PATEL: Fabulous. Thank you. Hopefully, we can-- potentially, that's something to come, if anyone's interested. Perhaps we can reach out. Now, Matt writes, "As publishers gain experience and have more ideas of what has or hasn't worked, are you finding it is growing easier and faster to negotiate these new transitional agreements? Or is it still very bespoke and time consuming for each group or organization?" I think I'll go to Kamran to begin with.
NIKUL PATEL: Perhaps you can give some insight both on scope and S2O.
KAMRAN NAIM: I'm sorry, [INAUDIBLE] I have to admit, I'm having some-- I had a little audio trouble as you were speaking, so I kind of missed right there at the middle of your question. So if you wouldn't meant repeating it for me?
NIKUL PATEL: Yeah. Really, I was just asking, as we're getting a bit more experience, and of course experience is slightly, you know, SCOAP being seven years old, but actually some of these other endeavors being a lot younger, whether with each one, you're finding it easier to negotiate these transitional agreements now a few people have gone over the wall as it were?
KAMRAN NAIM: You know, I think that's a good question. I think it'd be interesting to hear from the publishers, really. During the time that I was working on subscribe to open and annual reviews, I'll say that it was really the kind of the pilot of that model, and yeah, I think in the early days, the company had to do a lot of work across all of the sales teams to consult with librarians and to socialize the model.
KAMRAN NAIM: And it took some effort. I think now that there's a community of practice with other publishers taking on the model, that maybe, it'll get easier, and it's kind of awareness around the model and exactly how it works, which obviously is not super clear, because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around subscribe to open and the basic principles around it and how it works.
KAMRAN NAIM: And I'm hoping with time, it's going to get easier. I mean, SCOAP3 in itself is a relatively unique model. I wish other disciplines had kind of taken it on, but we can also recognize that not a lot of other disciplines have a certain like entity that can coordinate folks on a global scale. So yeah, I think this is a question that's better posed to Claire or Andy.
NIKUL PATEL: Actually, before we do go to Claire and Andy, I'd be interested in Romy's perspective from negotiating, coordinating the deals that you have for your consortia.
ROMY BEARD: It's definitely getting easier as we do more of these agreements, I would say, because well what we've done as well as we went along was to come up with a list of principles of what do we want to achieve with these agreements, what our criteria, and maybe sticking to those principles a bit more than at the start. We would have been giving in on some things, so something I go to [INAUDIBLE] recognition.
ROMY BEARD: And so now, I think almost all the agreements that we have is something we've been fighting for whereas at the start, some publishers weren't able to accommodate that from a systems point of view. They couldn't. But now things are changing, so that is getting better. But also, the more agreements you have, you have a little bit more power to negotiate. You can say, well, all these publishers have done that with us.
ROMY BEARD: Have a look at these agreements. So it does get easier, definitely.
NIKUL PATEL: Then in one of the publishers you've successfully negotiated with, Claire, you might be able to tell us about your experiences. You said already that it's been quite a labor intensive endeavor?
CLAIRE MOULTON: Yes, it has been labor intensive. I think it is getting easier because everyone's just a little bit more familiar with what it's all about. But I think there are some initiatives about trying to create templates, or at least some sort of more transparent shared agreement so that it wasn't a difficult process every single time. But you know, those things are difficult. Trying to get so many people to agree to a template, I think, is going to be very hard.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And I think there's also-- having spoken to librarians-- I think there's some question about how the funding works within the institute. So I think that where, largely, funders are providing grants that used to pay for APCs. So those didn't necessarily stick with the library. And I think in Europe, I think that a number of institutes have tried to centralize those.
CLAIRE MOULTON: They've either had an open access fund or they've asked for contributions from heads of departments or something like that. But I think that that's not terribly widespread. And I think an institute might find themselves in a position that they say, well, you know, you're charging us the same amount that we'd have paid in the subscription and the APCs. But we didn't used to pay the APCs in the library, so they have to work out how that's going to work internally to square that circle.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I think that's also a challenge. But I think that because everyone's getting used to it, they are at least starting to try and find solutions for those sorts of things.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Claire. And then Andy, actually I lied. There are two questions for you, if you don't mind. Well, two questions, one you don't know of yet. One is about the sort of negotiating clients into your tiers into the CAP model. But also, Sarah Wallen asks about the data hygiene issues you mentioned and what the-- the biggest problems you're finding. And I imagine those two things go hand in hand.
NIKUL PATEL: If you're negotiating a tier, you need to know pretty well how many papers have been published by that institution, right?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That's exactly correct. The two are pretty much one in the same. I'll use an example of someone who has come aboard the CAP model, which is the Big Ten institutions, the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So it was a lot of data cleansing to try to get all of the branch campuses, medical schools, affiliated institutions, all attributed correctly to consider for tiering for each of the institutions.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Which then, you needed to bundle up into one price for the Big Ten. And so just going back and forth try to make sure that Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana University South Bend were being attributed correctly to Indiana University rather than whatever the problem might be. That was just a major spreadsheet pain. But similarly too, I'd like to comment on what Claire mentioned too, which is the author funding.
ANDY UTTERBACK: We've found that that's something that has been of interest to some libraries, something similar to it what the California model is where it keeps the author funding-- at least the option available for authors to contribute towards the cost of publishing. In one of our models, because we heard this comment a few times, we've worked out the ability to do so in our flat fee model kin the event that the author has a grant that has money set aside specifically for publishing costs.
ANDY UTTERBACK: We've worked out a way, and that was something that we didn't think about on the onset that people would be interested in. But through communication with librarians, through trial and error, we found a way to make that work.
NIKUL PATEL: So the two bottles kind of interact in some way, or at least have some sort of overlap. Interesting, actually, Andy, on that, because I'm thinking in the future, if you have contributory streams of revenue or other models-- let's say advertising, right? That might actually be achieved. Oh, well, I think PLOS does have a small amount of advertising. Does that then get offset-- if you were doing that for PLOS biology and PLOS medicine, because you're doing a cost plus margin endeavor, right?
NIKUL PATEL: Does that get fed in and then take off? Do people to see discounts because you've been able to generate advertise-- or another model?
ANDY UTTERBACK: Yeah, we've talked about that. And what will happen is that when we re-evaluate the tiering, I think we're also going to be re-evaluating the targets, which would be dependent upon the sort of-- if we have like an increase in productivity or we figure out how to streamline certain workflows better or whatever it might be, we lower the cost of production. The target would then shift to whatever it costs plus the 10% margin, or if we decided 5% margin, or whatever it might be.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And based on that whole sort of rethinking, I could see that playing a big part.
NIKUL PATEL: It's interesting. Sorry, I put you on the spot with a thing that's still pretty new, right?
ANDY UTTERBACK: We'll see what happens in the next three years.
NIKUL PATEL: That's fab. I'll just [INAUDIBLE] Just checking to see if we had any more questions. Great. I get all the time to myself, now. Kamran, actually, so SCOAP3 is a really, specifically, very interesting endeavor. A, because it's clearly demonstrably pretty successful in increasing the open access within the particular discipline.
NIKUL PATEL: I'm interested, from a person who's worked across many disciplines, why it's not easily replicable in others or maybe will be, and I'm curious as to the role of CERN in it all as a coordinating institution, whether you can speak to that a little bit.
KAMRAN NAIM: Sure. And so I think it's something I was trying to highlight in my presentation earlier. So typically, when you're talking about doing a collective action, you're doing it across the world. And a lot of institutions that for whom open access investment may not be at the top of their priority list. People may have different views or perspectives in that way. So in those kinds of situations where you have this kind of very diverse subscriber base, effectively, collective action can work, but it takes a lot of effort and investment.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that investment really, on the part of CERN, before SCOAP3 was launched, involved a brilliant physicist called Salvatore [INAUDIBLE] who helped to found the initiative, spending, I don't know, like six years on a plane traveling across all different member states getting people to buy into the initiative. And that kind of institutional support from CERN, that kind of investment of time and energy is something that is very difficult to do.
KAMRAN NAIM: And now, the role of CERN is really kind of the host organization for SCOAP3, so we have all of the contracts with the publishers. We receive the money from libraries, and so we kind of administer all of the contracts and make sure that publishers are delivering the services that the consortia is paying for. But yeah, and I think, in that sense, there's a lot to learn from SCOAP3.
KAMRAN NAIM: And I think the viability of collective models to transition content to OA has been demonstrated by SCOAP3. But I think what SCOAP3 also demonstrated is that doing this on a global scale does take a lot of investment, and relying on social cohesion or the disciplinary cohesion is actually somewhat difficult. And so instead, this is why you're seeing these collective models that instead leverage things like economic self-interest, which is what the subscribe to open model is based on.
KAMRAN NAIM: Which a publisher can utilize that to build a collective and avoid having to do all of this kind of investment and organizing around building a collective action. I don't know if I answered your questions.
NIKUL PATEL: It really did. But actually, completely contrary to the thrust of our session, which is a plurality of models, especially to enable open access, of the two that you just described, the sort of economic incentive one and then that sort of disciplinary cohesion, do you think that-- would you-- sort of picking up on what you said-- do you think, then, the economic incentive has more general applicability in the absence of CERN for every discipline?
NIKUL PATEL:
KAMRAN NAIM: Yes. That is the quick answer. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that the subscribe to open model has broad applicability. I mean, subscribe to open was developed for a specific publishing case, which was invited review journals. And if you read the publishing paper that Richard Gallagher, [INAUDIBLE] and myself published on the model itself, we have a pretty clear statement about this model wasn't built or designed to solve all of the problems with scholarly publishing, but that it could potentially be used in either disciplines that didn't have the funding to support the APCs or for publishers that may be more risk averse.
KAMRAN NAIM: And we particularly thought this might suit risk averse society publishers in trying to pursue a viable open access path. So I mean, in general, economic self-interest is a good lever for collective action. But like I said, the subscribe to open model-- by saying that, I don't want to say that subscribe to open model is for everyone.
NIKUL PATEL: And in fact, it's a particularly good thesis of why we came up with this session in the first place, which is that there are all sorts of products, all sorts of customers, and not one of these models presented today or even in the macro environment is going to sort of so solve everything.
KAMRAN NAIM: Absolutely. And I think, like you just said, given the diversity of research outputs and disciplinary factors, I think we do need to have a suitable diversity of models to support openness.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Kamran. Romy, we've got a few minutes left. I kind of wanted to give you a bit more space to talk about the waiver issue. And this is for authors from developing countries in transitional economies. You shared a particularly powerful anecdote there. You said it was Ghanean author, wasn't it, that had an odd experience with a publisher? I'm interested in how those conversations go.
NIKUL PATEL: Because, I think, for many, many years, writ large in this [INAUDIBLE] blocked a lot of the major publishers. Waivers have been our, quote unquote, tool to the equity, right? But clearly, there's something amiss there. I wonder if you might speak to it a little bit more?
ROMY BEARD: Yeah. I mean, what Kamran talked about at the very start about the kind of humanity of having to request a waiver, I don't come across any examples of people complaining about having to claim a waiver as such. Nobody that I speak to personally, but that's a limited experience, of course, has an issue with this having to claim a waiver or discount. It's more the practicality around it. And I think it's communication and making it that little bit harder-- this claiming.
ROMY BEARD: And there's numerous publishers, if I look at the website, that say automatic waiver, and then underneath it in small print, the author has to claim the waiver. So it's not automatic. They have to do something. They have to tick a box. One of our first agreements with a publisher, there was a code they have to remember. And often, I often negotiate these agreements that by the time the information reaches the author, the author doesn't even know what EIFL is, and they've forgotten about that.
ROMY BEARD: And when we then looked at reports, we found that a lot of them that were eligible for waivers hadn't claimed them because they didn't-- the information didn't reach them. So we try and do a lot of marketing. We have country-specific titlelists that we promote to authors that includes the eligible journals from all the publishers where we have agreements in place. And the reason we have agreements is that we can then promote that, and we know, this is valid for, ideally, three years.
ROMY BEARD: We know the publishers won't just make changes to this because they change their policy, or your country's moved from group A or group B. We can then work with that. And obviously, there's a lot of time invested. It's a small organization, so we only do it for the publishers where we have agreements in place. We put them on the list with subject search, so authors can search the lists and find relevant journals.
ROMY BEARD: And obviously, do marketing with our coordinators. I had a group call yesterday, and I get asked this question, "How can I find journals where there's only waivers?" And one is our list, but also, I refer them to the DOAJ, where you can search journals that don't charge APCs in general. So there's obviously that section as well, where they don't-- there's not a question of a waiver because it's journals that are APC free or diamond, so to speak.
ROMY BEARD: Yeah, but communication, I think, is the main issue.
NIKUL PATEL: Yes, thank you, Romy. Thank you all to all our panelists. And we're virtual, so we can't give a proper round of applause, but imagine it. We're all giving you a very large round of applause. That sort of brings us up to our hour. Thank you for everyone that came along, and thanks to SSP for hosting the session. Appreciate it all. Thank you very much.
KAMRAN NAIM: Thank you, everybody.
ROMY BEARD: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]
KAMRAN NAIM: Thanks, everyone.
Segment:0 .
TrendMD: TrendMD is proud to be a sponsor of this year's virtual conference, and we encourage everyone to take advantage of the special opportunities this moment has to offer, especially the Training B breakout session on Wednesday at 1:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. Our postage describing a 12 month randomized controlled study that showed how Training B increased citations. And lastly, drop by our marketplace gallery group at any time during the conference.
TrendMD: We look forward to seeing you there.
NIKUL PATEL: Fabulous. Hello, everyone. Good evening, good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Just gonna pull up the sharing my screen with everyone to see my introductory slides. Can someone give me a thumbs up if they can see that from our fabulous speakers? Great.
NIKUL PATEL: So, welcome everyone. This is our educational session on open access without authors paying an APC? Question mark. Case studies on new OA business models. We've got some fabulous speakers here today. They'll all introduce themselves shortly. The format of the talk is going to be that each one of them are going to give a short presentation on the case studies they're going to present, then we're going to throw it over to the audience for questions.
NIKUL PATEL: I'll be scanning the website, so do put your questions there. But if you wouldn't mind, we'll actually address the questions once everyone's had a bit of a chance to go over their case study. Now, the thrust of the session has really been about the plurality of products, journals, customers that we have in the world, and where we're seeing sort of innovation in business models to kind of further open access.
NIKUL PATEL: And there's some really, really interesting case studies that the speakers are going to present today. So this second slide, just a quick reminder the code of conduct. You've seen it before on the website and I think Lauren, the president, noted it in her opening address. Of course, this is a respectful forum, both of our speakers and of each other.
NIKUL PATEL: And here's the helpful information, the hashtag should anyone feel compelled to tweet. But also, the recording will be available. And if you need any support, there's the email address. Fab. So I'll turn it over then to our first speaker, Claire, Claire Moulton. Claire, do you want to share your screen?
CLAIRE MOULTON: I do.
TrendMD: I'll stop mine. Take it away.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I'm going to talk about the transformative journal strategy and how it works alongside read and publish agreements. So I'm Claire Moulton. I'm the publisher at The Company of Biologist's. OK, my slides aren't progressing. Hang on a moment.
NIKUL PATEL: I find it more useful if you share your screen rather than the slides. I've found that to be sometimes helpful.
CLAIRE MOULTON: There we go. OK, so The Company of Biologists have been offering open access options since 2004 based on the APC model. But since 2019, we've been part of the so-called SPA-OPS initiative, working with librarians and funders to explore transparency and different transformative models. In 2020, we were the first ever journalist to be afforded Transformative Journal status by Plan S alongside implementing our new read and publish agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So transformative journals have to make a public commitment to transition to full open access as soon as possible, and no later than when 75% of research content is OA. They also have to gradually increase the share of open access content each year. Our target is to increase by 5% each year over the next four years. The read and publish agreements have, obviously, a read component, which is like a subscription, and a publish component, which means that corresponding authors at participating institutes can publish open access without having to pay a fee.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And we've gone for transparent pricing and generous terms, so our agreements are uncapped, which means that authors don't discover that there's a threshold at some point in the year where the office ceases to be in effect. So that gives more certainty to everybody. In terms of moving to read and publish agreements, individual institutions want it to be as easy as possible, so we've gone for a simple addendum to their existing subscription contract.
CLAIRE MOULTON: But the Consortia wants us to be more flexible. So most of them focused on our three hybrid journals, but others want to include our two open access journals as well. Most of them will cost free processes for their authors, and we've worked very hard at a pain free workflow. But others prefer a shared funding model if others already have alternative funding rates. And we've had really great feedback from librarians about our willingness to experiment with a transition to open access.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And just to recap, the two approaches really work hand in hand. So the read and publish agreements are what will help us to grow our open access percentage, and that will allow us to fulfill our transformative journal commitments to grow 5% year on year. But the transformative journal status is what gives us time. It's compliant with authors funds mandates, and that gives us a number of years over which we can grow our read and publish coverage across institutes and countries.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I'm going to take a little look at what difference it can actually make for our authors. So in this chart, I'm showing the percentage of open access research content for our three hybrid journals. The first two journals, shown in green, showed an increase over the past decade to around 15% to 20% open access, and then they've plateaued there. And this largely reflects the patterns of funding mandates in this area.
CLAIRE MOULTON: The third journal, shown in orange, has never got above 4% open access. So it has the same policies, the same APCs, as the other journals, but the funds in this area haven't mandated open access and haven't provided funds for open access publishing. And so the authors haven't chosen open access. So I'm going to focus on this third journal and show you what has happened as we've reached out with our read and publish agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So in 2020, we had just three consortia agreements covering the UK, Ireland, and Israel. And you can see that the journal has managed to increase the percentage of open access to 6%. But in 2021, we've expanded quite a lot. So we have two new consortia agreements with the Max Planck Digital Library and the University of California, but lots of individual institutional agreements.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So we now have over 200 institutes participating in 17 countries. And you can see from the first quarter of 2021 that we got up to 12% open access on this journal, the vast majority of those being authors taking up the read and publish option. So we've had fantastic feedback. I've been doing interviews with authors, and they talk about the relief, really, that what they wanted to be able to publish open access, but they just weren't able to pay a fee.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And so this has made a huge difference to them. And I just wanted to add that we've recently announced an agreement with EIFL that will help us support all this from developing and transition economies. But I'm not going to say anything more about that because Romy's going to talk about EIFL in a moment. So is the transformative approach working for us?
CLAIRE MOULTON: There are certainly lots of positives. The transformative journals means that we are compliant with fund mandates, which helps our authors to publish with us. Through the read and publish agreement, we've got happy librarians and very happy authors not having to pay a fee. It aligns with our mission to support biologists and also secures a baseline income for quality publishing for the coming years.
CLAIRE MOULTON: But there are certainly challenges as well. Read and publish agreements are incredibly time consuming with lots of manual work, so we've had to expand our team and increase our costs. And it's also quite hard to gain attention when you're a small not for profit organization. So a huge thank you to those librarians who set aside time as well as money to support us in this initiative.
CLAIRE MOULTON: Thank you very much.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Claire. Appreciate the timekeeping as well. So next on our list is Kamran Naim from CERN. Kamran if you're all right to share your screen as well.
KAMRAN NAIM: All right, Nicole, can you hear me? All right, well good evening, everyone. My name is Kamran Naim and it's a pleasure to be on this panel, and thank you to SSP for the invitation. So I'm happy to be here today to talk about a couple of different collective approaches for open access and to be on this panel about non APC based approaches. So why do these matter? One of the really significant reasons to pursue APC based models is to create a more equitable playing field.
KAMRAN NAIM: And as we know, many OA journals have APCs that can range between a couple of thousand, and now we know, as much as over $11,000. That amount is a lot for most authors in most countries, and you can only imagine how exclusionary that might feel for researchers in the LMICs. Read and publish deals are great.
KAMRAN NAIM: It's encouraging to see more of these. But they do primarily serve the interests of authors that are affiliated with institutions in countries that can afford these deals. So as much as it's encouraging to see increased numbers of our own deals, they don't really do a whole lot to serve the needs of the LMIC researchers and instead give authors from those institutions the increased advantages compared to trying to keep a more equitable playing field.
KAMRAN NAIM: Waivers are not a sustainable, or I like to use the term dignified, solution. As much as waivers can help authors publishing an APC based journal without a fee, having to have a system where researchers around the world need to ask, essentially, for charity I don't believe this is a dignified solution. And we should be designing for dignity and working for models that can avoid those kinds of, yeah, those kinds of situations.
KAMRAN NAIM: So when we're talking about the conversion of subscription journals to open access, a lot of people kind of bring up this whole tragedy of the common. So they say, OK, yeah, you can try and attempt to convert your subscriber base to open, but eventually, what will happen is that support will wain over time. Once the research is open, institutions don't have incentives to continue to participate, and you'll have this kind of tragedy of the commons.
KAMRAN NAIM: Now, I'd like to argue that instead, actually, what we may have in scholarly publishing right now is a tragedy of the anti-commons, where the imposition of excessive property rights on intellectual resources or on academic journals results in socially sub-optimal use of scientific knowledge. And we've seen somewhat of a recognition of that around COVID-19 and how there is a consensus among the community that we really had to bring resources into the open domain in order to accelerate towards solutions.
KAMRAN NAIM: So you know, why it took COVID to get to that point and why we can't do that moving forward is, I think, the question at the moment. So what we're really talking about now is collective action. So how can we get institutions from around the world to use the subscribe to journals, to work to support open resources? And what collective action theory tells us is that you can leverage group affinity among actors, but that only really works for small, socially cohesive groups.
KAMRAN NAIM: And the lack of cohesion across subscribers, particularly for publishers whose subscription base is maybe global, can limit the extent to which you can rely on per group behavior-- so altruism, reciprocity, or social incentives. And so for a global group, what might be required is segmenting the subscriber base into numerous subgroups. And that means that there's a huge cost to organizing and administering collective funding.
KAMRAN NAIM: The actions of members are coordinated and visible to each other. You can use social dynamics and cohesion to limit or prevent free writing. So to talk about a couple of models that use the major mechanisms to stimulate collective action-- and these come, really, from theoretical work that was established by Mancur Olson and the logic of collective action, which says that you can sustain public resources, and you can sustain the private provision of public resources, by leveraging group affinity and social incentives, you can induce institutions to participate through their own economic self-interest, and you can either work through coercion or government regulation.
KAMRAN NAIM: I'm not going to touch on those two. But the first one I'm going to talk about is leveraging social dynamics and disciplinary cohesion. Now, the sponsoring consortia for open access publishing in particle physics, SCOAP3 is a global collaboration of over 3,000 libraries, research institutions, and funding agencies, now across 44 countries. It's been operating since 2014 and has a participatory governance model where the actions of all actors are visible to one another.
KAMRAN NAIM: There is a sense of cohesion of the actors working together to support high energy physics. So there's that element of social cohesion around the discipline that works in this model, and it's been-- it has admittedly, because it's a global collective involving countries from all over the world, there is a larger organizing cost to that.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that cost is effectively met by CERN in its organization and administration of SCOAP3. But the collective has operated since 2014. We have converted 90% of all of the articles of hydrophysics across 11 journals with partnerships from commercial publishers, society publishers, even born-OA publishers. And although there's only participation from 44 countries, we've enabled APC free authorship for authors from over 120 countries.
KAMRAN NAIM: And so everyone contributes to the model based on their share of the global research in high energy physics. And as such, all costs are covered, so for authors, all you have to do is submit your work to the journal, and it's published without an APC. The subscribe to open model, on the other hand, is a publisher-driven model, which leverages economic self-interest to induce collective action.
KAMRAN NAIM: So it was developed initially by Raym Crow and utilized by annual reviews-- initially piloted by annual reviews, but now there's a subscribe to open collective group, which is bringing together all the different publishers that are trying this out now. So EMS press and the IWA, political journals. And essentially, what they're trying to do is to utilize the existing subscription business and procurement process.
KAMRAN NAIM: So taking the existing model that funded their journals and essentially tweaking it to see if you can use the relationships you have with libraries to transition content to open. So the model aims to preserve a vendor-customer relationship. It doesn't ask for altruistic, collective contribution. Importantly, it provides an adequate incentive for institutions to participate.
KAMRAN NAIM: So under the subscribe to open model as it's implemented by annual reviews, participants in the model are offered a discount, and they're also given free access to the backfile. It's only guaranteed open access to-- the next year's content is only guaranteed with full participation, and the offer needs to occur annually to ensure that institutions continue to participate over time.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that's what really helps kind of make the model sustainable. I'll pass on now to my colleague from PLUS who will also talk about a model which is similarly based on collective action principles.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Kamran. And thank you for doing some of my job for me. Andy.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Thanks, Kamran. Can everybody see my screen? Is it showing the presenter mode or is it showing the--
NIKUL PATEL: I think seemingly, the presenter mode.
ANDY UTTERBACK: How's that?
NIKUL PATEL: Better.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Yeah, so it's really nice to be here. This is my first SSP. I'm a newbie here. So it's been fun to see all these familiar faces around that I know. I'm with the Public Library of Science. I'm the business development manager, and I'll be talking today about our collective action model, which we call community action publishing. So it's really important to take a step backwards and think about the problem that we were trying to solve with community action publishing.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Because I think that there's a real theme with the idea that different journals and different publications require different things to really succeed. If you're moving away from APCs in a born-OA environment. So the real problem that we were thinking about when we were thinking about community action publishing is specifically about selective publishing. So, for some context, community action publishing is only available for two of the 12 PLOT journals at the moment.
ANDY UTTERBACK: It will soon be available for three. And for the longest time-- but for the purposes of this talk, we're only speaking about PLOS medicine and PLOS biology. And for a very long time, we've been cross-subsidizing the costs to produce articles in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology to keep them at $3000 APCs, which actually doesn't cover the cost that it takes to produce an article in either of these journals.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And we've been using the-- that's largely because of their highly selective aspect where there's an acceptance rate floating around 10% to 15%. So we've been using the revenue from other journals to keep that APC low, but it still wasn't enough. So this is sort of the context with which we were sort of thinking about community action publishing. So I'll try and-- this is a much longer presentation to talk about the intricacies of CAP, but I'll try and keep it in a nutshell.
ANDY UTTERBACK: So it's a tiered system. When an institution approaches us and says, hey, we'd like to cover the cost of APCs for unlimited publishing in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology, we go and we look up their publication history over a five year time period to see how many authors they had in PLOS medicine and PLOS biology that were either contributing or corresponding authors, which is a really unique aspect of CAP, I believe.
ANDY UTTERBACK: I'll just pop through all these. So the fees that you see over on the right are the annual costs for each of the tiers, which, as I mentioned, were based on their publishing history from both their corresponding and contributing authors. We also did some math, and we've publicly shared the costs in margin for both PLOS medicine and PLOS biology on our website.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And so once we get enough membership in the community action publishing model for either journal to reach those publicly posted targets, we give the community back the money, the additional revenue, to be added on-- to subtract from their annual invoice that they get for participating in the CAP membership fee. Research for life countries, or institutions from research for life countries, rather, are automatic members of this model.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And there are also additional sort of quirks such as the-- if corresponding authors from an institution that is not a member, but a-- flip that. If a contributing author is from an institution that is a member, but a corresponding author is, there will be a discount provided to the cost to cover the non member fee for publishing in those journals. So again, that's sort of CAP in a nutshell.
ANDY UTTERBACK: I'm happy to unpack it if anyone would like to go into more detail. But for now-- So again, with the theme of thinking about different journals thriving for different models, and thriving under different models, we do have several different non APC models. And we have one called flat fee and one that's yet to be named, which I don't know when that will be publicly announced, but it's in the works at the moment.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And even though all of these different journals sort of-- we found different models to work better with them, they all have shared principles which are largely about transparency, the integration of cost, sort of the plan as this price transparency framework, and then really building this in collaboration with the community and making sure that we get input and feedback before we make any decisions. And then the weak point, as I'm sure all of us know, is largely surrounded by data hygiene.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Institutional disambiguation when it comes to author affiliation is such a challenge when it comes to affiliating people correctly with the amount of publications that are attributed to a given institution, whether that be a medical school or a branch campus or whatever it might be. The amount of time that you put in to getting good data is only as successful as your model is going to be. Yeah, that's-- again, happy to go into more detail about community action publishing, but it looks like my 5 minute timer just went off, so I'll pass it on to Romy.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Andy.
ROMY BEARD: I was on. Can you see my screen? And you can hear me, perfect. OK. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I'm the last one. I'm really glad everyone stuck to their time. I was worried there would be nothing left for me.
ROMY BEARD: So my name is Romy Beard, and I'm the EIFL licensing program manager. And in case you're not familiar with EIFL, it's a nonprofit organization that works with libraries and library consortia in developing in traditional economy countries. So EIFL stands for Electronic Information For Libraries. And there's four different EIFL programs. They've got a program about public library innovation, public library copyright, and then there's the open access program, which is managed by my colleague [INAUDIBLE] [? Kuchma. ?] And I'll briefly talk about the non APC models in this aspect because they've not been mentioned.
ROMY BEARD: So one of the things the open access program does, among other things, is support local publishing in countries through capacity building and policy advice. And most of the journals published in this way are published by local institutions or libraries, and they don't charge APCs. In terms of business models, they're funded through institutions, library support, so library staff being able to spend time on these journals, and some government funding as well.
ROMY BEARD: And I've put some links here to some examples of those types of models from EIFL partner countries, which are available in the slides if someone wants to look at them later. And then the fourth program is the licensing program, which is the program that I manage. And traditionally, since EIFL started 20 years ago, the licensing program has been negotiating access to paywalled content.
ROMY BEARD: But over the last few years, they've also included open access publishing terms and negotiations with publishers. So the way it works is that we negotiate umbrella agreements with publishers so it could be free access, discounted access. And when we started doing the APC agreements, a lot of these, initially, were waivers and discounts off article processing charges. But increasingly, we now also have non APC models, which I'll talk in a bit more detail in a minute.
ROMY BEARD: But before we go there, I just thought it might be useful to touch on the APC based models and what the issues are. And I've listed a number here. Waivers can be really cumbersome to claim. Often, discounts aren't enough. If you earn $400 a month, and you're being asked to pay 50% of $4,000, it just doesn't work. And also, hybrid journals are excluded, which doesn't make it equitable.
ROMY BEARD: If you want to make it equitable and give everyone the same, you should also have an option for hybrid journals. And you can't just say no, you have the option to pay it, to not pay the APC and publish behind the paywall, because then open access, in that aspect, is not equitable. And I thought I'd give you an example of something that happened this morning. I got an email from our life licensing coordinator in Ghana. He forwarded me a message from an author who wanted to-- his article had been accepted to be published with a big publisher, and he was asking for some help.
ROMY BEARD: He was trying to claim a waiver. And he was giving different publishing options. And the option to publish in open access would have cost him $4,250, $3500 open access fees, and $750 open access pages fees. So this particular publisher, EIFL doesn't have an agreement with, but obviously, we try to help anyway even if there's publishers we don't work with.
ROMY BEARD: So I looked at the publisher policy. They offered automatic waivers for corresponding authors from Ghana for fully open access journals. This happened to be a fully open access journal, so I thought, great, they should get a waiver. But then, if you looked at the details, it was actually not an automatic recognition. It was the author has to claim it during the submission process or during one of the processes, they have to claim it.
ROMY BEARD: But no further information about what box do you need to tick, what does this mean, no other communication. So obviously, this author missed it. They didn't claim it, and possibly aren't going to get the waiver. I don't know yet. I hope they will. But that goes to show one of the examples of why there is a problem.
ROMY BEARD: Now, for the non APC models, we have a few examples like that. So we have an agreement, an umbrella agreement, with Cambridge University Press, which includes some publish and read offers for some countries, who can then decide to take up on that. In this case, it's a paid fee that covers publishing and reading. And we have uptake from six countries-- Latvia, Lithuania, Fiji, Moldova, Palestine, and Estonia, and Ghana will be joining that soon as well.
ROMY BEARD: And then, we have some free region publish agreements with European Respiratory Society, International Water Association, and the Company of Biologists that Claire mentioned. That's really great because there no fee attached to this, so it's free reading and free publishing. And also, automatic recognition. So there's no need to tick a box, to claim a waiver. It just happens automatically and smoothly-- at least, that's the plan.
ROMY BEARD: I think there's still some challenges that we are working on-- communication to authors, Clare mentioned this as well, raising awareness about these open access publishing options, about these journals. If it's small publishers, it might not be as well known, and we want to make sure authors are aware of all these opportunities. In the cases where it's not free read and publish, then budget is always an issue in the countries that we work in.
ROMY BEARD: And sometimes, it's actually an issue of saying the fact that we're paying for publishing can be a problem. So there might be money to pay for subscriptions, but because there's a different label on it, that can be an issue. And then, it's all nice and good to have these agreements in place, but what actually happens in reality?
ROMY BEARD: Are these automatic waivers being given? Is more content being published in open access? That's our goal. So we're looking into that. We're doing our preliminary analysis of articles that have been published in open access. And so far, based on the publisher reports I've received, about 50% of the articles that were published in open access from eligible countries and publishers came through EIFL agreements.
ROMY BEARD: And we saw an increase of 35% more articles published in open access in 2020 versus 2019. So we've had a lot more agreements starting in 2020. So that's a fantastic increase, and very positive that what we're doing is making a difference. And that's everything. Then, we're handing over to questions.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you, Romy. And thanks for-- what a way to end your talk their with some pretty fantastic numbers. So we've had a couple of questions come through. We're going to take it over to the floor. I have a few questions myself if we sort of run out of them, but I don't think we will somehow. The first one's actually more of a statement, and it's directed toward you, Kamran. It's from Rick Anderson.
NIKUL PATEL: I'll read it out in its fullness because I think it's important to do so, but I think you might want to respond, potentially. So, he writes, "Free writing could be the result of a lack of progress opportunity or commitment, but it can also be a result of disagreement within the group, as to whether the program in question is the right one. So in other words, when members of a group decline to contribute to an OA program, it's not necessarily that they agreed with the program but aren't sufficiently moved to contribute.
NIKUL PATEL: It may be that they don't think the OA program in question is the right one to pursue." Now, I thought I might give you the opportunity to respond if you'd like to.
KAMRAN NAIM: Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't disagree with what he's saying. And sure, yeah, I mean, certainly, that's up to the participants right? So I think at least as far as SCOAP3 goes, and as I work on that right now, I'm happy to talk about that. The OA program has been consistent with over 3,000 participants, and in terms of numbers, we only see-- have only seen the numbers grow over time.
KAMRAN NAIM: So that, to me, is super encouraging, that even a resource that's been available for, what is it, close to seven years now? Or we're now in our seventh year? That libraries have consistently continued to support the initiative and that actually, it's bringing new institutions in as well. So yeah, obviously librarians can and should put their money towards programs that reflect their values.
KAMRAN NAIM: And if an OA program doesn't align with what they want to invest in, then there's no reason why they should participate.
NIKUL PATEL: I'm interested to know, if it's SCOAP3, have you had any of that sort of anecdotal evidence that someone has declined to participate because they didn't feel that it was the right OA program or otherwise?
KAMRAN NAIM: I mean, not really. It's actually quite contrary. We bring in new members into the consortia. Most recently, the IRL consortium in Ireland joined, and their institutions have been benefiting from the sub 3 program since its outset, publishing articles and having them covered for free. Obviously, through your authorship, free readership to the high energy physics content.
KAMRAN NAIM: But they joined the consortia. And so, rather than seeing attrition, we see libraries more interested in investing in open programs, and long may that trend continue.
NIKUL PATEL: Thank you. Claire, now again, another question from Rick, but are your authors allowed to select any license they wish, or are they required to do CCBI.
CLAIRE MOULTON: We do only offer CCBI. We did look at the range of options, and I think, in an ideal world, you might offer the range, but we found that it was quite a lot of systems set up for us to offer the range. And I think that what our experience was that we had a journal that we flipped from subscription to open access, and I think we kind of dragged our heels. We kind of did CCBI and DSA, and then we did we kind of became more and more open, and so we ended up with CCBI.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And I think the feeling of our directors was that if we were going for open access, we should go straight for CCBI this time.
NIKUL PATEL: I actually have a follow on, Claire, which is, specifically with JEB, because that was a really compelling graph where you're over 12% now, in OA? What is it, sorry. Because they're sort of free to publish and people being able to have their open access without having to coordinate an APC themselves. I'm really curious as to what happens with JEB when it hits that threshold of flipping, especially given that you said that not all of your agreements currently include fully open access journals.
NIKUL PATEL: What happens when it becomes a fully open access product?
CLAIRE MOULTON: Yeah, I think it's-- obviously, that's the question for all of these models is what happens next? And I think that that's why this is such an interesting discussion. And I hope that's what we're going to comment on. I think that we're hoping that over the period of the transformative journals, which takes us to like 31st of December, 2024, that we've grown our read and publish agreement significantly so that we can actually rely on that for open access revenue and open access growth.
CLAIRE MOULTON: I would say, if a JEB is the furthest away from that flip point of 75%, but even with the other journals growing by 5% each year, we wouldn't quite get there. And so I think that we'll have some interesting decisions. I actually don't know what's going to happen in 2025, but what I would say is that The Company of Biologists is going to be 100 years old in 2025, and we would really like to be announcing some very positive news.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I know that we're very much looking for a success in this model. And we just have to decide what percentage OA we flip, when the timing is right. You know, we've seen such an enormous growth in our read and publish from 2020 to 2021. It could be that just accelerates and that it's very obvious earlier than the end of that period that we should be flipping.
NIKUL PATEL: Yeah, there's an interesting inflation point for your, because-- I guess the point of the rest of my question was that it might well be exponentially. JEB has gone from 4% to 12% through the accelerant. This is where they're sort of sitting out on, their 3x might go 3x next year. And you end up at the inflection point much sooner than we--
CLAIRE MOULTON: I also think there's a bit of at what point does read and publish actually become subscribe to open? So if the journal flips to OA, but you're still using essentially read and publish agreements, then that's really subscribe to open. So I think that all of these models start to merge in the future.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Claire. Andy, a question for you from John Long which is about the two journals in question, PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine. Does that mean that they won't be subsidized anymore in the CAP model?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That's correct. That's the goal over. The next few years, we are going to be raising the non member fees to the point where they cover their costs of production to encourage people to join the CAP model. And similarly, we are going to be, on December 31, 2024, much like Claire, we'll be re-evaluating the CAP tiering system and reclassifying people based on what their tiers were in the previous three years.
NIKUL PATEL: And to increase the value into the model, because, of course, it is just the two journals at the moment. I think they'll potentially plan to the more and, of course, you just launched a bunch. To be able to feel the model, do you need to be able to add journals to it to be able to sort of make sure that everyone is sort of participating?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That is a good question. You don't, because each journal has its own separate target that it's trying to reach, and each journal can be sort of pick and mixed by different institutions. So if a particular institution is top heavy in medical research, but doesn't really do much in biology, they can opt just to join the PLOS medicine community action sort of community. But there is sort of an interesting aspect to that in that if you want the model to succeed sort of as PLOS, in a way that you contribute to the success of collective action publishing models, it certainly is-- the success is based upon the way that those interact with one another, I suppose.
ANDY UTTERBACK: But yeah, from the institutional perspective, you don't need to get all three in order to sign up for one of them.
NIKUL PATEL: And then, Romy, a question for you. It's interested in your presentation. You were talking about capacity building and some policy advice to members, if I'm remembering correctly. What sort of form did that take?
ROMY BEARD: This is actually not what I do, but it's my colleague, [INAUDIBLE] [? Kushma, ?] who manages the open access program. So I won't be able to answer that question in detail. I believe that she helps set up publishing in those areas if someone needs support, or how can they make sure that the journal meets certain criteria. So she's basically there to do support.
NIKUL PATEL: Fabulous. Thank you. Hopefully, we can-- potentially, that's something to come, if anyone's interested. Perhaps we can reach out. Now, Matt writes, "As publishers gain experience and have more ideas of what has or hasn't worked, are you finding it is growing easier and faster to negotiate these new transitional agreements? Or is it still very bespoke and time consuming for each group or organization?" I think I'll go to Kamran to begin with.
NIKUL PATEL: Perhaps you can give some insight both on scope and S2O.
KAMRAN NAIM: I'm sorry, [INAUDIBLE] I have to admit, I'm having some-- I had a little audio trouble as you were speaking, so I kind of missed right there at the middle of your question. So if you wouldn't meant repeating it for me?
NIKUL PATEL: Yeah. Really, I was just asking, as we're getting a bit more experience, and of course experience is slightly, you know, SCOAP being seven years old, but actually some of these other endeavors being a lot younger, whether with each one, you're finding it easier to negotiate these transitional agreements now a few people have gone over the wall as it were?
KAMRAN NAIM: You know, I think that's a good question. I think it'd be interesting to hear from the publishers, really. During the time that I was working on subscribe to open and annual reviews, I'll say that it was really the kind of the pilot of that model, and yeah, I think in the early days, the company had to do a lot of work across all of the sales teams to consult with librarians and to socialize the model.
KAMRAN NAIM: And it took some effort. I think now that there's a community of practice with other publishers taking on the model, that maybe, it'll get easier, and it's kind of awareness around the model and exactly how it works, which obviously is not super clear, because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding around subscribe to open and the basic principles around it and how it works.
KAMRAN NAIM: And I'm hoping with time, it's going to get easier. I mean, SCOAP3 in itself is a relatively unique model. I wish other disciplines had kind of taken it on, but we can also recognize that not a lot of other disciplines have a certain like entity that can coordinate folks on a global scale. So yeah, I think this is a question that's better posed to Claire or Andy.
NIKUL PATEL: Actually, before we do go to Claire and Andy, I'd be interested in Romy's perspective from negotiating, coordinating the deals that you have for your consortia.
ROMY BEARD: It's definitely getting easier as we do more of these agreements, I would say, because well what we've done as well as we went along was to come up with a list of principles of what do we want to achieve with these agreements, what our criteria, and maybe sticking to those principles a bit more than at the start. We would have been giving in on some things, so something I go to [INAUDIBLE] recognition.
ROMY BEARD: And so now, I think almost all the agreements that we have is something we've been fighting for whereas at the start, some publishers weren't able to accommodate that from a systems point of view. They couldn't. But now things are changing, so that is getting better. But also, the more agreements you have, you have a little bit more power to negotiate. You can say, well, all these publishers have done that with us.
ROMY BEARD: Have a look at these agreements. So it does get easier, definitely.
NIKUL PATEL: Then in one of the publishers you've successfully negotiated with, Claire, you might be able to tell us about your experiences. You said already that it's been quite a labor intensive endeavor?
CLAIRE MOULTON: Yes, it has been labor intensive. I think it is getting easier because everyone's just a little bit more familiar with what it's all about. But I think there are some initiatives about trying to create templates, or at least some sort of more transparent shared agreement so that it wasn't a difficult process every single time. But you know, those things are difficult. Trying to get so many people to agree to a template, I think, is going to be very hard.
CLAIRE MOULTON: And I think there's also-- having spoken to librarians-- I think there's some question about how the funding works within the institute. So I think that where, largely, funders are providing grants that used to pay for APCs. So those didn't necessarily stick with the library. And I think in Europe, I think that a number of institutes have tried to centralize those.
CLAIRE MOULTON: They've either had an open access fund or they've asked for contributions from heads of departments or something like that. But I think that that's not terribly widespread. And I think an institute might find themselves in a position that they say, well, you know, you're charging us the same amount that we'd have paid in the subscription and the APCs. But we didn't used to pay the APCs in the library, so they have to work out how that's going to work internally to square that circle.
CLAIRE MOULTON: So I think that's also a challenge. But I think that because everyone's getting used to it, they are at least starting to try and find solutions for those sorts of things.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Claire. And then Andy, actually I lied. There are two questions for you, if you don't mind. Well, two questions, one you don't know of yet. One is about the sort of negotiating clients into your tiers into the CAP model. But also, Sarah Wallen asks about the data hygiene issues you mentioned and what the-- the biggest problems you're finding. And I imagine those two things go hand in hand.
NIKUL PATEL: If you're negotiating a tier, you need to know pretty well how many papers have been published by that institution, right?
ANDY UTTERBACK: That's exactly correct. The two are pretty much one in the same. I'll use an example of someone who has come aboard the CAP model, which is the Big Ten institutions, the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So it was a lot of data cleansing to try to get all of the branch campuses, medical schools, affiliated institutions, all attributed correctly to consider for tiering for each of the institutions.
ANDY UTTERBACK: Which then, you needed to bundle up into one price for the Big Ten. And so just going back and forth try to make sure that Indiana University Bloomington and Indiana University South Bend were being attributed correctly to Indiana University rather than whatever the problem might be. That was just a major spreadsheet pain. But similarly too, I'd like to comment on what Claire mentioned too, which is the author funding.
ANDY UTTERBACK: We've found that that's something that has been of interest to some libraries, something similar to it what the California model is where it keeps the author funding-- at least the option available for authors to contribute towards the cost of publishing. In one of our models, because we heard this comment a few times, we've worked out the ability to do so in our flat fee model kin the event that the author has a grant that has money set aside specifically for publishing costs.
ANDY UTTERBACK: We've worked out a way, and that was something that we didn't think about on the onset that people would be interested in. But through communication with librarians, through trial and error, we found a way to make that work.
NIKUL PATEL: So the two bottles kind of interact in some way, or at least have some sort of overlap. Interesting, actually, Andy, on that, because I'm thinking in the future, if you have contributory streams of revenue or other models-- let's say advertising, right? That might actually be achieved. Oh, well, I think PLOS does have a small amount of advertising. Does that then get offset-- if you were doing that for PLOS biology and PLOS medicine, because you're doing a cost plus margin endeavor, right?
NIKUL PATEL: Does that get fed in and then take off? Do people to see discounts because you've been able to generate advertise-- or another model?
ANDY UTTERBACK: Yeah, we've talked about that. And what will happen is that when we re-evaluate the tiering, I think we're also going to be re-evaluating the targets, which would be dependent upon the sort of-- if we have like an increase in productivity or we figure out how to streamline certain workflows better or whatever it might be, we lower the cost of production. The target would then shift to whatever it costs plus the 10% margin, or if we decided 5% margin, or whatever it might be.
ANDY UTTERBACK: And based on that whole sort of rethinking, I could see that playing a big part.
NIKUL PATEL: It's interesting. Sorry, I put you on the spot with a thing that's still pretty new, right?
ANDY UTTERBACK: We'll see what happens in the next three years.
NIKUL PATEL: That's fab. I'll just [INAUDIBLE] Just checking to see if we had any more questions. Great. I get all the time to myself, now. Kamran, actually, so SCOAP3 is a really, specifically, very interesting endeavor. A, because it's clearly demonstrably pretty successful in increasing the open access within the particular discipline.
NIKUL PATEL: I'm interested, from a person who's worked across many disciplines, why it's not easily replicable in others or maybe will be, and I'm curious as to the role of CERN in it all as a coordinating institution, whether you can speak to that a little bit.
KAMRAN NAIM: Sure. And so I think it's something I was trying to highlight in my presentation earlier. So typically, when you're talking about doing a collective action, you're doing it across the world. And a lot of institutions that for whom open access investment may not be at the top of their priority list. People may have different views or perspectives in that way. So in those kinds of situations where you have this kind of very diverse subscriber base, effectively, collective action can work, but it takes a lot of effort and investment.
KAMRAN NAIM: And that investment really, on the part of CERN, before SCOAP3 was launched, involved a brilliant physicist called Salvatore [INAUDIBLE] who helped to found the initiative, spending, I don't know, like six years on a plane traveling across all different member states getting people to buy into the initiative. And that kind of institutional support from CERN, that kind of investment of time and energy is something that is very difficult to do.
KAMRAN NAIM: And now, the role of CERN is really kind of the host organization for SCOAP3, so we have all of the contracts with the publishers. We receive the money from libraries, and so we kind of administer all of the contracts and make sure that publishers are delivering the services that the consortia is paying for. But yeah, and I think, in that sense, there's a lot to learn from SCOAP3.
KAMRAN NAIM: And I think the viability of collective models to transition content to OA has been demonstrated by SCOAP3. But I think what SCOAP3 also demonstrated is that doing this on a global scale does take a lot of investment, and relying on social cohesion or the disciplinary cohesion is actually somewhat difficult. And so instead, this is why you're seeing these collective models that instead leverage things like economic self-interest, which is what the subscribe to open model is based on.
KAMRAN NAIM: Which a publisher can utilize that to build a collective and avoid having to do all of this kind of investment and organizing around building a collective action. I don't know if I answered your questions.
NIKUL PATEL: It really did. But actually, completely contrary to the thrust of our session, which is a plurality of models, especially to enable open access, of the two that you just described, the sort of economic incentive one and then that sort of disciplinary cohesion, do you think that-- would you-- sort of picking up on what you said-- do you think, then, the economic incentive has more general applicability in the absence of CERN for every discipline?
NIKUL PATEL:
KAMRAN NAIM: Yes. That is the quick answer. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that the subscribe to open model has broad applicability. I mean, subscribe to open was developed for a specific publishing case, which was invited review journals. And if you read the publishing paper that Richard Gallagher, [INAUDIBLE] and myself published on the model itself, we have a pretty clear statement about this model wasn't built or designed to solve all of the problems with scholarly publishing, but that it could potentially be used in either disciplines that didn't have the funding to support the APCs or for publishers that may be more risk averse.
KAMRAN NAIM: And we particularly thought this might suit risk averse society publishers in trying to pursue a viable open access path. So I mean, in general, economic self-interest is a good lever for collective action. But like I said, the subscribe to open model-- by saying that, I don't want to say that subscribe to open model is for everyone.
NIKUL PATEL: And in fact, it's a particularly good thesis of why we came up with this session in the first place, which is that there are all sorts of products, all sorts of customers, and not one of these models presented today or even in the macro environment is going to sort of so solve everything.
KAMRAN NAIM: Absolutely. And I think, like you just said, given the diversity of research outputs and disciplinary factors, I think we do need to have a suitable diversity of models to support openness.
NIKUL PATEL: Thanks, Kamran. Romy, we've got a few minutes left. I kind of wanted to give you a bit more space to talk about the waiver issue. And this is for authors from developing countries in transitional economies. You shared a particularly powerful anecdote there. You said it was Ghanean author, wasn't it, that had an odd experience with a publisher? I'm interested in how those conversations go.
NIKUL PATEL: Because, I think, for many, many years, writ large in this [INAUDIBLE] blocked a lot of the major publishers. Waivers have been our, quote unquote, tool to the equity, right? But clearly, there's something amiss there. I wonder if you might speak to it a little bit more?
ROMY BEARD: Yeah. I mean, what Kamran talked about at the very start about the kind of humanity of having to request a waiver, I don't come across any examples of people complaining about having to claim a waiver as such. Nobody that I speak to personally, but that's a limited experience, of course, has an issue with this having to claim a waiver or discount. It's more the practicality around it. And I think it's communication and making it that little bit harder-- this claiming.
ROMY BEARD: And there's numerous publishers, if I look at the website, that say automatic waiver, and then underneath it in small print, the author has to claim the waiver. So it's not automatic. They have to do something. They have to tick a box. One of our first agreements with a publisher, there was a code they have to remember. And often, I often negotiate these agreements that by the time the information reaches the author, the author doesn't even know what EIFL is, and they've forgotten about that.
ROMY BEARD: And when we then looked at reports, we found that a lot of them that were eligible for waivers hadn't claimed them because they didn't-- the information didn't reach them. So we try and do a lot of marketing. We have country-specific titlelists that we promote to authors that includes the eligible journals from all the publishers where we have agreements in place. And the reason we have agreements is that we can then promote that, and we know, this is valid for, ideally, three years.
ROMY BEARD: We know the publishers won't just make changes to this because they change their policy, or your country's moved from group A or group B. We can then work with that. And obviously, there's a lot of time invested. It's a small organization, so we only do it for the publishers where we have agreements in place. We put them on the list with subject search, so authors can search the lists and find relevant journals.
ROMY BEARD: And obviously, do marketing with our coordinators. I had a group call yesterday, and I get asked this question, "How can I find journals where there's only waivers?" And one is our list, but also, I refer them to the DOAJ, where you can search journals that don't charge APCs in general. So there's obviously that section as well, where they don't-- there's not a question of a waiver because it's journals that are APC free or diamond, so to speak.
ROMY BEARD: Yeah, but communication, I think, is the main issue.
NIKUL PATEL: Yes, thank you, Romy. Thank you all to all our panelists. And we're virtual, so we can't give a proper round of applause, but imagine it. We're all giving you a very large round of applause. That sort of brings us up to our hour. Thank you for everyone that came along, and thanks to SSP for hosting the session. Appreciate it all. Thank you very much.
KAMRAN NAIM: Thank you, everybody.
ROMY BEARD: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE]
KAMRAN NAIM: Thanks, everyone.
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