Name:
A Commercial Publisher's view of Plan S
Description:
A Commercial Publisher's view of Plan S
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T00H11M15S
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Upload Date:
2022-04-28T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
NEIL APPLETON: Thank you for inviting me today, excited to be here. And in some ways, I think you might hear quite similar things from us as a group. But there'll be differentiation, I'm sure, in elements of it. I'll give a generic commercial, publisher's view of Plan S. Some of it will be Elsevier specific. I don't always agree with party line. In this case, I'm very much aligned. So what I'm going to talk about today, certainly, I believe very strongly in.
NEIL APPLETON: The interesting thing for me about this environment-- and we often talk about it-- our environment, climate, landscape, et cetera-- is how diverse and how complex our environment is. This is actually-- this is another Appleton. This is my cousin Sam. He's the youth coordinator for Extinction Rebellion UK. I'm very proud of, very supportive of Sam. But I bring them up for a couple of different reasons.
NEIL APPLETON: One is that they also are dealing with an ecosystem that is changing. And the other is that XR do something really interesting, which is they don't pretend to know the answer. They know that the environment is so complex that the answer is going to be multi-modal. It's going to involve a very complex net of stakeholders. It's going to involve a long evolution towards that end result. And they don't know what that answer is.
NEIL APPLETON: They do know that they're looking for engagement. They're looking for action. They're looking for community leadership. And they take a principles-driven approach to that. So I'll get to Plan S, but I do want to talk about principles, first, that guide us and what we want to do in our scientific publishing. And I'll go via open access to get there.
NEIL APPLETON: So open science-- the core principles of open science are well-known-- inclusion, collaboration, transparency. From an inclusion perspective-- standards, tech, and platforms that help researchers access, share, work together. They matter. From a collaboration perspective-- the more we drive investment into enabling people to work and learn together, the faster the flywheel of science becomes.
NEIL APPLETON: And from a transparency perspective-- we pour investment into activities, platforms, tech that drive outcomes in reproducibility, and data, in methods sharing. And these are your authors, your members, pushing forward on real frontiers of science, of collaboration, of sharing. And let's not diminish or forget the value of these when we talk business models.
NEIL APPLETON: On OA, about which we are also extremely enthusiastic, it's worth reflecting on the-- as Sam did, actually-- on the complexity of the OA ecosystem and the diversity of interests to be satisfied. In the broader publications environment, OA is growing and accelerating. It's at 20% share by our count, lots of different ways you can count. 80%, of course, in subscription is a significant number.
NEIL APPLETON: But the OA proportion is notable as an absolute and as a trend. It is not going away. Now, of course, the diversity is against significant and it's given indication of the geographic diversity. It's actually very hard. Most countries permit gold OA. Some actually directly fund it, most don't. Most authors will go gold.
NEIL APPLETON: Some will go green. Some don't have that option. It's just fundamentally complex. And then when you layer over the funder perspective-- and again, Sam alluded to this-- good luck navigating the funding body complexity. As an author, particularly, but also as a society generally. The domain diversity is equally complex, as I think Catherine was going to allude to.
NEIL APPLETON: Jane may mention it in her notes. But overall, I and we at Elsevier are extremely optimistic about OA. 85% of our journals have a gold option. 100% are green. 70% of our launches in the last three years are gold OA. Our society's over index on that. At the end of the last year, we were launching one gold OA journal every three working days.
NEIL APPLETON: We are really serious about taking the opportunity to be heavily in the open science and the OA space. With that said, let's step in to Plan S. So we absolutely welcome the latest guidance. It pushed the door ajar, I guess, to hybrid journals, although you'll regret that, that is a self-funded route. We thoroughly and completely endorse the unconstrained support for gold OA.
NEIL APPLETON: This is from my boss Felipe, who runs Elsevier Journals. Richard Horton in the Lancet, likewise, embraces and commits to Plan S. But he also sounds a warning about the preservation of brand value and protecting the use of publishing as a platform for good. And I'll come back to that. But listening more to the community, let me try and synthesize what we hear in terms of challenge and opportunity with Plan S.
NEIL APPLETON: From an author perspective, the ones that I hold most dear are the first two. And we hear a lot about the context of the exclusion of research produced in the global south. We also, in the context of some of the institutional country deals that are being constructed on the par or wrap basis, see walls being erected that mean that it's more difficult for authors to collaborate across boundaries, and particularly difficult for non-funded authors to claim primary authorship.
NEIL APPLETON: That is not inclusion. And that is not collaboration. And those are the guiding lights for us from that open science perspective. Moving to society concerns more specifically, clearly there are some existential challenges here. And for brevity, let's look at these in the context of Plan S end-state rather than worrying about the 2024 dates and so on and so forth.
NEIL APPLETON: Ultimately, the implication is an elimination of subscription revenue or at least reducing that to subscriptions built on the non-research elements of your journals. The whole-scale diminution of commercial revenue, particularly in the health sciences markets-- this is really fundamentally serious. That will transition to digital, but that transition is not going to be a $1 for $1.
NEIL APPLETON: It also implies that the member benefit of the journal is, at best, limited to the editorial, the comment, the letters, et cetera. And the last challenge here is vital. If you take a cost-plus view of your publishing activity, you lose all of that brand value that is associated with that. And you lose the ability to reinvest that surplus in all of the activities that we were discussing this morning. Now as a commercial publisher, we can weather much of this storm.
NEIL APPLETON: We have a diversity of customers that support subscription. We're very international. You saw the 80-20 that currently exist on subs versus OA. We serve a lot of authors who are not Plan S constrained. We can invest in best-in-class ad serving technology that helps us move that commercial revenue from print to digital. It's not going to be one-for-one for us either, but it's easier for us to.
NEIL APPLETON: As a society, we recognize that, that is very challenging. And to keep pace with those requirements and capabilities, is challenging. And the impact for you is just not as evenly distributed as it is for us. It's more volatile, and in some cases, more amplified. That said, from an opportunity perspective, some super cool stuff that comes with Plan S that we should advocate for-- the main point for me is fundamentally that these opportunities-- they don't require Plan S to get there.
NEIL APPLETON: There are other ways to get there. You can lead. You can lead the charge to deliver these opportunities. And you don't have to do it within a Plan S framework. The partial benefits are almost pseudo benefits really that come with compliance. But before I overstay my welcome, I'll wrap up. I'll go back to my cousin Sam. So like Extinction Rebellion, we don't know the answers.
NEIL APPLETON: And as in climate, the answer is not going to be one-size-fits-all. It will be multi-speed. It will be multi-business model. It should be flexible enough to accommodate good author outcomes, no matter where you come from and how your funding has evolved. And it should accommodate a wealth of outcomes for society executives as well, different business models being the right ones for different societies.
NEIL APPLETON: For us, it has to be principles driven. And those principles will be open science principles. That should accommodate institutions being able to pay to read as well as pay to publish. It can accommodate Plan S in parts of the ecosystem, preferably with some adjustment in incentives to include and collaborate. So I don't see Plan S fundamentally existential for us.
NEIL APPLETON: I do see it as putting pressure on different parts of our business. I understand that it's existential for some, but not all in this room. But I come back to and we'll close with Richard Horton's point in the Lancet. You are not neutral publishing platforms. You're fundamentally not neutral. You stand for a value far beyond publication, campaigning for advancing research and practice, for engaging community, for generating content that serves that community, for driving your mission and your values.
NEIL APPLETON: And it's vital to protect that through personal, corporate, trade body advocacy. And I really hope that meetings like this help encourage us to really embrace that. And I'll close there. [APPLAUSE]