Are publishers "the enemy"?

  This interesting issue came up (again) at the Author ID Tutorial delivered within the 4th COAR Annual Meeting in Istanbul - and it might be useful to devote a couple of reflections to it here. This Author ID Tutorial was jointly delivered on May 8th by Titia van der Werf from OCLC and myself as part of an attractive set of four tutorials at the COAR event - with the selected topics for the tutorials being as good a hint on the way things are evolving around repositories as the workshops themselves.

ORCID was big on the Author ID tutorial, to the extent that the timeschedule for the activity had to be updated on the spot in order to make room for the large number of questions and reflections prompted by the ORCID presentation. I'd like to address one of these questions more thoroughly here, namely the reluctant attitude some very qualified colleagues show towards ORCID due to the fact that the initiative seems very much publisher-driven - this making it probably not that interesting for the scholarly community.

This is again about the antagonism between publishers and the academia, and about whether both communities may at some point overcome such antagonism - real or perceived, it does not make much difference - in order to jointly work for pursuing a common benefit. This discussion is certainly interesting since it goes to the heart of a critical issue that has traditionally prevented a deeper implementation of Open Access, namely the fact that both publishers and Open Access community see each other as "the enemy". Mike Taylor - to mention just one inspiring example - regularly writes in an eloquent fashion about the reasons why the scholarly community may consider publishers to be the enemy of knowledge dissemination. However, same way as a certain degree of (informal) agreement was reached at the COAR event that the fight between advocates of Green and Gold OA is a pointless diversion of energy and will only harm their common objective, it could very much be argued that making emphasis on the differences and the misbehaviours over the good practices in collaboration may result in blocking win-win cooperation opportunities.

It is true that publishers such as Elsevier and databases such as the TR Web of Science or Scopus are a big driver behind ORCID - although the fact that over 130,000 researchers worldwide have chosen to individually register their ORCIDs as of May 3rd should not be overlooked either. It is evident too that a widely implemented successful persistent author identifier scheme will benefit publishers very much - but it will benefit institutions and especially authors even more. There was again an agreement at the author ID tutorial that this is something that needs to be done, and when examining the wide range of previous attempts to achieve the goal of author and work identification and disambiguation, it becomes clear that having publishers involved in the initiative provides it a significantly larger chance of succeeding.

I have repeatedly written here about the encouraging effort the EC-funded PEER project did in bringing together publishers and Open Access repositories and how advisable it would be to try to further explore opportunities for collaboration - some of which are indeed being exploited, see for instance Wiley's direct involvement in the JISC-funded PREPARDE project for research data publishing. ORCID is certainly one of these opportunities and with all due respect to constructive dissent, it would be an exercise in shortsightedness to let it slip away.

Could the so-called Gold Rush result in Green reinforcement? (II)

  A post was published last December at the UKCoRR blog examining the question of whether Green Open Access could become mainstream at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as a result of the policies resulting from the Finch report and aiming to drive the scholarly communication model towards a Gold OA-based one. Buiding on the discusions held at the webinar "The Role of Institutional Repositories after the Finch Report" organised by the Repositories Support Project earlier that month, the post highlighted the role IR managers were to play in explaining the different options for policy compliance at HEIs and the relevant role deposit into institutional repositories would acquire as a result of the economic impossibility to make the whole institutional research output available via Gold Open Access.

A few months later, at a time when the RCUK Open Access policy is about to come into effect, preliminary strategies for ensuring compliance are being designed at HEIs. Driven by the RCUK policy statement that "The RCUK OA Block Grant is principally to support the payment of APCs. However, Research Organisations have the flexibility to use the block grant in the manner they consider will best deliver the RCUK Policy on Open Access, as long as the primary purpose to support the payment of APCs is fulfilled", institutions are wisely investing part of the Block Grant funding on enhancing their Green Open Access infrastructure (including human resources) and making sure their institutional repository will be ready to provide support for Open Access dissemination purposes to all researchers whose publications are not awarded Gold OA funding.

In an even more inspiring realisation of this leveraging policy, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) released last week the requirements it will apply for authors to be eligible for Gold Open Access funding (Spanish only). With the caveat that "due to limited resources, just one article per author will be allowed per year", these include the need to deposit the author's research outputs published in the last three years into the Digital.CSIC institutional repository in three months time since the funding for the payment of APCs has been awarded.

Compliance monitorisation is becoming a key concern at HEIs as a result of these policies and attempts at having pilot systems in place for ensuring the reporting tools for policy compliance are available will shortly be carried out at pioneering institutions. In the meantime the whole move towards Gold and Green Open Access remains a daring experiment whose outcome -including the way researchers in different domains are willing to follow the policy guidelines- will be very interesting to follow in upcoming months. The Global Research Council meeting in Berlin next May 2013 will provide a good opportunity to agree on an international action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications – Open Access implementation is one of only two items on the agenda.

... and preaching to the non converted

  After quite a long time away from this blog due to various circumstances – with work overload probably being the most convincing one – I will try to catch up with various threads in the next day ot two – and I shall start the attempt with an answer to this request for explaining what Open Access is and what its aims are I was delivered from the interesting comments section of this “Whoops! Are Some Current Open Access Mandates Backfiring on the Intended Beneficiaries?” post by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen blog. This is my answer – I tried to keep it as concise as possible, apologies if it may still be a bit long.


I am probably too busy trying to overcome the numerous challenges that stand in the way of Open Access implementation myself to provide a too detailed and accurate description of what Open Access is and what its aims are, but I'll give it a go. Let me start by quoting the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2002):

"The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access".

According to this, Open Access means ensuring this possibility is realised, and worldwide dissemination of research outputs should indeed be a shared goal for institutions (and its libraries) and for publishers. It means that any researcher anywhere in the world may have the opportunity for the first time in history to freely share her research results (and this includes research data) with the whole research community and beyond. Whether this is achieved through the so-called Gold route (Open Access or hybrid journals) or via Open Access repositories (the Green route) is secondary to some extent - although not of course if business models are our sole concern here.

Open Access deals with the have and the have-nots (which does not just mean developed vs developing countries, but rather privileged vs underprivileged researchers in terms of having or not an institutional coverage for accessing the research information they require for carrying out their own research). And Open Access deals with whether a freely available author's final peer-reviewed manuscript might provide a useful alternative to the much-preferable version of record for those underprivileged researchers who can't or won't afford paying the fees required to read the papers that will allow them keep up-to-date with advances in their own research area.

Research funders are well aware of the challenge, especially those in the area of biomedical research, and Open Access mandates are their attempt to tackle the access issue in an area where many institutions both in rich and poor countries lack the (quite substantial) budgets required to provide their reseachers a comprehensive access to publications in toll-access journals. What about publishers? They are indeed adapting their business models to fit the Gold route by taking Article Processing Charges from authors as a prerequisite to making research papers available Open Access so they can meet the funders' mandates – which is fine. But this adaption to Open Access has not at all improved their image in the eyes of institutions (and many researchers in them), who suspect some not-so-subtle form of double-dipping is taking place since they still need to pay for their journal subscriptions on top of the APCs.

What could publishers then do to stop the fight?

The European PEER Project was a 3-yr STM Publisher Association-lead attempt to assess the impact of Open Access repositories on the 'European Research ecosystem'. This was technically carried out by delivering a large amount of final peer-reviewed author manuscripts into a cross-European institutional Open Access repository network.

Publisher participation ensured the right research article version was deposited, and the whole exercise was also useful for them: not only they were able to become aware of the relevance of sufficient metadata (a concept that CrossRef has later extended among the wider publisher community), but also to harmonise their interoperability standards through the use of the NLM DTD. Furthermore, the conclusions of the PEER project assessment carried out by CIBER Research Ltd was that not only publishers were not harmed by Open Access repositories, but rather on the contrary the paper download figures from journal pages at publisher websites were much improved by their availability as final manuscripts at repositories (since it's the version of record any researcher will prefer to read and cite unless of course they have no means to accessing it).

PEER was a one-time exercise, but it also delivered a proof of concept for cooperation between publishers and institutions in order to provide researchers the service they require for meeting the funders' mandates they are subject to. And in fact some sensible publishers are still interested – and taking subsequent steps in this direction – in delivering their authors the deposit service they require to meet the mandates. The way these sensible publishers see it, this is a means to offer researchers competitive advantages at journal selection time and will ensure a steady number of submissions in an increasingly competitive market framework for journals.

In the meantime the institutional Open Access community (which reached a critical mass quite a long time ago) is taking steps to ensure the repository systems become fit for purpose in order to meet funder requirements in terms of offering OA to the outputs of research projects funded by them. There are indeed technical as well as cultural/political challenges, in fact quite a number of them, but there is also a sustained and persistent effort to figure out the best ways to gradually address them. Institutional Research Committees are suddenly becoming aware (and this is the concern comment #2 addresses) that institutional research publishing budgets won't reach for providing Gold Open Access via payment of APCs for the whole institutional research output, so they're instead turning their eyes to their institutional Open Access repositories and wondering whether it could be the way of meeting funder mandates in a much cheaper fashion. At the same time, some funders are starting to rule hybrid journals out of their mandates for compliance purposes on order to avid the abovementioned risk of double-dipping.

The landscape keeps hastily evolving and it seems further adaption will be required both from publishers and institutions. This could ideally happen through cooperation and not through struggle, but there seem to be too many prejudices and too little efforts out there for a constructive dialogue to take place in a sustainable way.

Discussing ORCID... and the Gold vs Green controversy

  A new GrandIR technical session was held on Sep 6th at the Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC) in Barcelona. This new workshop was devoted to Author IDs and ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) and brought together representatives from the various stakeholders concerned by the launch of the ORCID service, to take place next Oct 15th. The event programme included ORCID themselves (Martin Fenner, Chair of the ORCID Outreach Working Group), National author ID initiatives (Amanda Hill, Names Project UK), funders (Gerry Lawson, Natural Environment Research Council, NERC), National Research Offices (David Arellano, Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, FECYT) and publishers/vendors (Philip Purnell, Thomson Reuters). Each of the speakers delivered a presentation (files are downloadable from the session programme) and a round table was held afterwards in order to discuss the requirements for an universal author identifier as well as its implications and challenges.

A summary of the session discussions follows:

- ORCID service is set to be launched Oct 15th. Martin Fenner provided an up-to-date view of the ORCID interface as it stands right now, although -he mentioned- it keeps evolving every day.

- ORCID business model is currently being established along the following lines: the service will be free for individual authors/researchers, and there will be a fee for institutions, to be classified as small or large. Charge for small ones will be $4,000 per year. Overlay services will gradually be made available.

- ORCID will run different strategies for buiding up an author database: (free) individual registration for authors, collective registration for institutions (for a fee), collection & upgrade from other existing author IDs - such as ThomsonReuters ResearcherID, Scopus Author Identifier, arXiv, etc.

- ORCID duplication may result from overlapping registration strategies - some dissambiguation work should be required to clear those. ORCID won't be providing this service (at least not at launchtime, although possibly later on), so this might be a potential role for National Author ID projects (such as Names, DAI or Lattes) which lie closer to the authors.

- Two main workflows have been designed so far for promoting ORCID use: (i) Publisher Workflow, meaning publishers will request ORCIDs to authors at manuscript submission time, and (ii) Funder Workflow, by which funders will request ORCIDs to researchers at grant bid submission time. Several publishers are already working to enable ORCID collection, and research funders are happy to be able to work with a non-profit initiative instead of commercial providers.

- Institutions running a CRIS system will be better positioned for ORCID implementation, once the required datamodel updates are performed (euroCRIS CERIF TG is currently working on CERIF datamodel enhancement in order to bring persistent identifiers into the system). For those HEIs not running CRIS Systems (for which CERIF is incidentally not a requirement), Institutional Repositories may as well play a key role for ORCID implementation purposes.

- There are a number of author ID-related services that ORCID will not aim to provide. Among these, organisation IDs, citations, usage or other value-added services. ORCID actually aims to provide a basic feature (namely author identifier plus attached publications) on top of which other stakeholders are expected to build value-added services. ThomsonReuters ResearcherID (as well as other commercial or national author ID services) is therefore not planned to be superseded by ORCID, but they will co-exist instead.

- One month away from service launch, there are several important factors that remain unclear, such as the service takeup by authors, the project timeschedule or the level of duplication that may result from overlapping registration strategies. Strategies for service dissemination among the research community remain also to be defined to some extent. However, meetings like the one held in Barcelona or the upcoming one at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin will certainly support awareness-raising among the research community.

Finally, the meeting in Barcelona also offered the opportunity to discuss with Gerry Lawson, UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), whether the RCUK policy for promoting Gold OA as a default option for complying with their Open Access policy turned the Research Council into "traitors" to the Open Access movement. When offered the opportunity to discuss their view, he said the Coucils were by no means opposed to Green OA - only after ten years work, repositories were still not complying the funders' requirements for tracking Open Access outputs and payments.

Discussions on the default Gold OA direction the UK has taken following the release of the Finch Report should also account for this current reporting shortcomings in Green OA infrastructures. At the same time, requests for turning the RCUK OA Policy a more balanced supporting tool for both Gold and Green OA seem indeed reasonable enough.

In summary, the session was very useful for disseminating the current state of the ORCID initiative on the verge of its being released and for discussing its implications and challenges for organisations and initiatives potentially involved in its roll out as a service to researchers and the wider community. Some additional session outcomes are starting to surface as requests for further ORCID dissemination at given universities in Spain - more information on this will be provided in due time. The ORCID Service launch meeting in Berlin next October will also provide new insights on the service that will be dutily reported.

Video recordings of the interventions will shortly be made available at the UOC O2 Institutional Repository. A useful session summary in Spanish has also been published by Elvira Santamaria at the EPI Blog.

Interesting times for Open Access

  Quite a heated discussion in Open Access circles has followed the recent release of the Finch Report on expanding access to published research findings in the UK and the endorsement by the UK Govenment and funders of its recommendation for making Gold Open Access the default standard for future scientific communication. The day after the UK Government announced it was assuming all but one Finch Report recommendations, the EC also adopted the Communication "Towards better access to scientific information: Boosting the benefits of public investments in research", in which a wider implementation of Open Access -both Gold and Green- to research publications and data was set as a goal for present FP7 and future Horizon2020 European research programmes.

Although usually welcoming its implicit support of Open Access to research outputs, the Finch Report has been heavily criticized within the Open Access movement for not acknowledging the opportunities the available OA repository network and Green OA in general offer to achieve extended access to research publications. The cost of the proposed transition to a Gold OA model was claimed to be disproportionate and most fervid critics dubbed the Finch Report a result of sheer publisher lobbying, while moderate ones pointed out the proposed transition model was unfit for international adoption, especially in developing countries.

However, proposing Gold OA as a default model for extending access to research is hardly a new argument. A couple of months ago at the PEER End-of-Project conference in Brussels -which incidentally had a wide number of publishers in the audience while practically no representatives of repository projects attended the event despite PEER involving both communities- the project managers highlighted one of PEER's main conclusions being that Green OA was not sufficiently popular among research authors and could therefore not be considered the best way for making research outputs widely available. Even if this conclusion may be considered biased and has also been extensively discussed, it is a fact that many researchers from various disciplines do not like open access repositories.

Some of the most conspicuous voices within the Open Access movement do however seem to favour [otherwise perfectly justified] protest against Green OA not being accounted for over self-criticism and analysis of what the reasons are for researchers' frequent preference for open access journals instead of repositories and what steps could be taken in order to overcome such repository shortcomings. Besides criticism of the very expensive alternatives, a clearer lobbying effort would also be desirable for explaining evidence-based advantages of Green OA and the lines the repository community is currently working at in order to improve the user experience. There are very ambitious indeed repository-related projects going on at the moment -such as the UK RepositoryNet+ or OpenAIRE in the EU- aiming to enhance currently existing repository networks so they'll best suit researchers' needs by building upon already large previous experience.

Having had the chance to extensively discuss with researchers what they do and what they don't like about repositories, there seem to be evident issues in the way these platforms have been developed that justify current distrust of them as sound research information sources by a significant numer of authors. Two of the main among these are the lack of metadata harmonisation and the lack of information about work versions filed in the repositories. Although their number is growing and various efforts are under way to improve this, still very few repositories are presently offering harmonised information about funding agencies and projects associated to specific papers or about the version of such papers that is filed in the repository. Other than that, insufficient information is available on the funder policy compliance rates and a significant effort remains to be done in the field of repository usage, where testing repository vs publisher usage for a given work could be quite revealing. All these lines are currently being dealt with by the abovementioned projects, and there will be interesting breakthroughs in coming months around repositories and Green OA.

As for Gold OA, its strong backing by funders and the Government in the UK -as well as implicitly by publishers- opens the door for a gradual transition process (to be mainly but not only tested in the UK as for now) from a subscription-based model to another one relying on Author Processing Charges (APCs), to be increasingly dealt with at institutional level. Two main shortly-arriving outcomes of this transition process should be: (i) new publishing business models for institutional funding of access to research papers -with the RSC 'Gold for Gold' initiative showing the way ahead- and (ii) some standard way of dealing with APCs at institutional level being proposed - with the JISC/Wellcome Trust call for proposals regarding a role in managing payment of Open Access APCs being a first step along that line and initiatives such as Open Access Key (OAK) starting to offer such required services.

These are undoubtedly very interesting times for following Open Access evolution -and the increasing impact of OA-related news in general-purpose media is a good evidence for that- and from a look at the detailed picture of Open Access in the UK recently provided by Nature it's not hard to conclude that Green OA and repositories are here to stay and that the transition process to a Gold OA-based publishing model is set to be a long and winding road.

PEER End of Project Conference: a few reflections

  The fact that the PEER European Project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) has managed to establish a fruitful communication channel between publishers and repositories was repeatedly highlighted along the PEER End of Project Conference held last Tue May 29th in Brussels. This ability for fostering a successful collaboration between stakeholders initially at conflicting positions is undoubtedly one of the main PEER outcomes and it would be good news for the Open Access movement as a whole if these communication channels could remain open in the future. As Norbert Lossau put it, favouring pragmatism over ideology could be very useful for jointly outlining evolving business models.

The second most important achievement of the PEER project was being able to establish a tested publisher-repository transfer infrastructure which can be deployed beyond the project. A good number of PEER components and technical findings -such as the PEER Depot dark archive, adoption of the TEI format as an unique metadata interchange standard or SWORD as standard transfer protocol, the way usage is dealt with or the use of the GROBID component for automatic metadata extraction- are potentially re-usable for other ongoing or future publisher-driven transfer initiatives and especially valuable for automatic item transfer into repositories within an hegemonic Gold Open Access scenario that was also frequently predicted along the meeting.

Additional publisher-driven deposit initiatives such as Japanese 'Zoological Science meets Institutional Repositories' were mentioned along the conference as well as COAR involvement in the interoperability strand pottentially offering opportunities for follow-up work. Besides that, the JISC-funded SONEX Group has repeatedly underlined along its analysis of deposit use-case scenarios the strong workflow similarities between PEER and the JISC Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) Project carried out at EDINA in Edinburgh. The RJ Broker feature -which performs a very similar role to the PEER Depot 'moulinette'- is currently being enhanced and will shortly be offered as a service through the UK RepositoryNet+ Project.

The figures associated to the PEER project are certainly impressive: 53,000 stage-two manuscripts (aka post-prints in SHERPA RoMEO terminology) from 241 journals published by 12 mainstream publishers were processed by the PEER Depot resulting in 22,500 EU manuscript deposits (including embargoed papers) released into six different IRs plus into a long-term preservation archive at the KB in The Hague. Two submission routes were designed: automatic publisher-driven deposit and 11,800 invitations to authors for self-archiving their papers, the latter one resulting in just 170 author deposits (or 0.2% of total PEER deposits).

The large difference between deposit figures associated to the two deposit routes led PEER researchers to conclude that authors sympathise with OA but don't see self-archiving as their task, therefore "Green OA not being the key road to optimal scholar information systems". The PEER Usage research -one of the three research team projects within the PEER Research strand along with Behavioural and Economics research- proved also that although current findings reflect the position of a relatively early stage in PEER development, Open Access repositories are not really a threat to publishers (thus confirming the so-called "no effect" publisher hypothesis). In fact, making pre-prints visible in PEER repositories actually generates more traffic to publisher sites, although the ever growing rates of publisher downloads make it hard to supply an accurate measurement of the impact on publishers of post-print availability in repositories. Ian Rowlands from CIBER Research Ltd estimated that publisher full-text downloads increased by 11.4% as a result of earlier version of papers being available at the IR.

Gold vs Green OA

While testing Green Open Access and its economic consequences for the publishing ecosystem in Europe was the main PEER goal and Green OA was the preferred workline when the Project started back in Sep 2008, the Gold Open Access route seems nowadays to be winning hearts and minds of those trying to promote access to research output on a wide basis. PEER has produced quite a number of evidences on the fact that Green OA does not harm journals nor publishers, but in the meantime attention has shifted to Gold Open Access and hybrid journals as a way to ensure that final publisher/PDF versions of the papers are made available.

This is probably the strongest argument in favour of Gold OA, but there are also very good ones that support Green OA. As a result, a lively debate is taking place these days inside the Open Access community on which OA model should receive main support from the government bodies. Many voices argue as well that both models should co-exist, as the research output coverage will be wider as a consequence. And there is finally an important fact to be accounted for after watching PEER result of 99.8 vs 0.2% automatic vs author-driven deposit: author self-archiving rates should not be systematically used as reliable indicators of the strength of Green OA, since there is nowadays a wealth of alternative ways to populate repositories that do not imply self-archiving obligations for authors. In fact CRIS systems, their integration with IRs and the resulting alternative workflows for content ingest into repositories were not mentioned at all last Tuesday despite having already been proved effective by a recently released UKOLN report. When trying to offer a fair estimation of Green OA relevance based on the wider deposit picture, the contribution to repository population from these alternative workflows should also be considered.