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OpenGLAM Initiative and Its Latest Project

The Open Knowledge Foundation runs an open-humanities initiative called OpenGLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), which allows open access to the digital collections of licensed cultural institutions. Some of the institutions accessible through their site contain resources on subjects as wide-ranging as sound recordings, comic strips and fine art. They also list diverse datasets from institutions in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.

OpenGLAM provides workshops (that they call ‘projects’, which makes it sound fun and like something you-and-a-friend would like to do) to promote OA in the humanities. They create apps (such as the Bardomatic, which invites users to read and recognize Shakespeare quotations ) and sites like the interactive timelines that chart the Western Front World War I, Medieval Philosophers  and general war history.

OpenGLAM’s latest project sounds equally interesting: Sam Leon, one of their Project Managers, has put out a call-to-arms for anyone to recreate Oxford and Stanford Universities’ Mapping the Republic of Letters. First of all, go check that out if you haven’t already: ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ provides a visual representation of the journey taken by the letters passing between historical figures. OpenGLAM is setting the challenge that anyone - you, me, students, academics, bloggers - can create one of their own by scanning and geomapping historical letters. As Leon writes: “I want to see a million 'Mapping the Republic of Letters' projects… I want the underlying tools to be open source and well documented and perhaps, most importantly, I want the underlying data, that collection of metadata about who sent what, when to be open for everyone to use and add to.”

The project runs until the 28^th of May, 2013. Read more about it here.

It's Good to Have Options

Oxford University has created an alternative RCUK open access decision tree. You can see it here and download the slide pack, which comes with various versions of the tree: simple, detailed and one for group study with helpful questions.

Open Access and the Costs and Benefits for Scholarly Associations as Small Publishers

In their article assessing the future of academic publishing, Beverungen et al. claim that “the global market for professional, social science and humanities publishing [is] worth close to $10 billion”[1]. Furthermore, they state that

Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons (including Blackwell), Springer Science + Business Media, Wolters Kluwer, Holtzbrinck and Informa (including Routledge and Taylor and Francis) are the biggest professional journal publishers with a market share of 36% in 2009[2].

The profit levels in academic publishing range between 30-40%, which is a margin unheard of in almost any other commercial sector[3]. These levels of income are based on the confluence of costless labour (editorial work, proof-reading, copy-editing, marketing and promotion, original copy creation, etc.), with the subsidy provided by public higher education funding for the authors living costs, the cost of journal subscriptions, individual and/or institutions paying for scholarly association membership. This means that public funding is paying multiple times, at a number of different points along the production process, for the cost of producing any given article.

The shift to open access publishing is a rationalisation of the current model of multiple payments across the publishing process to a single payment at the beginning. For scholarly associations, this shift in income stream can appear as a dire threat to their existence. In order to explain that open access does not threaten the scholarly association as such, I will now examine some of the economic implications for these bodies.

The summary of the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models report, by John Houghton, Charles Oppenheim et al., outlines where the costs fall in the subscription based, open access and self-archived repository models for scholarly communication.

They open with the statement that “advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional models of scholarly publishing, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control and publish information”[4]. By examining the costs and benefits of alternative models for research publications this report advocates that the long-term reduction in cost for accessing research will offset any transitional costs in implementing open access.

The authors of the report argue that any given scholarly communication follows 5 key moments in its life cycle:

i.                     Fund research and research communication;

ii.                   Perform research and communicate the results;

iii.                  Publish scientific and scholarly works;

iv.                 Facilitate dissemination, retrieval and preservation; and

v.                   Study publications and apply the knowledge.[5]

For the authors of the report

This extended scholarly communication process model provides a foundation for a detailed identification of the actors, activities, objects, and functions of involved in the entire scholarly communication process[6].

The mapping of the process of scholarly communication enables a thorough understanding of how to account for the costs and benefits of certain models of production. The report concludes by stating that

It seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they are likely to be positive for both open access publishing and self-archiving alternatives (i.e. Gold OA) and for parallel subscription publishing and self-archiving (i.e. Green OA).[7]

The report outlined the following about the current publishing ecology:

• The estimated average cost of producing a scholarly article (this includes costing the author's time spent writing, the cost of managing peer-reviewing processes, as well as publisher related costs, etc.) is said to be £9600.
• The same calculation applied to monographs produces the amount of £88,600 per publication.

The economic benefits of moving to open access manifest in the following ways[8]:

•       The cost of being active in the field of scholarly publishing is equivalent to around £5.4 billion in the UK in 2007.
• The cost of having had all of the research output of 2007 published via an open access route would have been £1.2 billion. 
• Therefore, moving to a totally open access model would potentially save £4.2 billion per year (based on 2007 figures).

The shift to open access, whilst incurring transitional costs as well as shifting towards an author pays model, will result in a longer term reduction in the costs of subscription payments. This will free substantial amounts of money for financing research itself. The burden will shift away from the current pressure on institutions to pay for expensive subscription costs.

John Willinsky outlines the stakes at play for the scholarly association, with regard to the emergence of the trend towards open access

The scholarly association has been at the heart of academic journal publishing and it now faces a critical decision around which path to take. Although many journals operate independently of these associations, these organisations represent the vast majority of researchers, reviewers, and editors, in their efforts to advance the state of scholarship and research. While many scholarly associations have turned their journals over to commercial publishers, a small, but still significant, number of associations are offering complete or partial open access to their publications.[9]

Due to the rising prevalence of electronic journals and their use in delivering open access content, Willinsky states that

The scholarly associations need to rethink their role and services, rather than holding on as long as possible to a publishing model whose time may well be passing. This is the time to bring the scholarly and economic, the ethical and intellectual, aspects before the membership, as the change in publishing mediums could well alter the nature of the scholarly association.[10]

Wallinsky offers up an example of what a shift to open access would mean for the financial or economic realities for the scholarly association;

If a $100 is lost in subscription revenues with open access publishing and as much is cut from publication costs or made from a different source, the net effect is no change to the association’s resources. As it turns out, the average publication cost is $874,897 (including newsletters, brochures, etc., as well as the journal), while the average publishing revenue recouped by the associations is $659,159.[11]

The overall costs of running the publishing for a scholarly association is not fully recouped by the pay for access output of the association. With the introduction of open access, and the reduction in costs of production it will cause, the association has the possibility to offset the losses from the ending of journal subscriptions. In his article, Willinsky produces a table outlining the costs involved in scholarly society publications.

The economic changes that the introduction of open access may have upon small, scholarly press will not only alter the business model for scholarly societies, but can also result in the transformation of these bodies into something new.

For Beverungen et al., the transformation of scholarly communication in general creates opportunities to mutate the model for delivery of scholarly research. They outline 4 possible avenues where new models of communication may emerge:

• Open access repositories
• Fair trade publishing
• University presses
• Self-organised open publishing

These 4 models are equivalent to the following 4 styles of delivery:

• The depositing of original research into open access repositories.
• The making of payments to authors for their works by the academic publishers.
• Reducing costs of production by moving publishing ‘in-house’ to the universities themselves. 
• Harnessing the ‘free labour’ of academics already required under the current system, but side-stepping the publishing industry by implementing an independent publishing culture with completely cost independence access at its heart.[13]

There is, as such, no hard-and-fast reason to follow any assumption that the 4 styles of delivery are mutually exclusive. Rather, understanding them as part of an ecology of processes that reinforce, or wax and wane, in relationship to each other allows us to conceive of a strategic direction for the creation of innovative forms of scholarly communication.

For example, the current Research Councils UK mandate requires all publicly funded research to be published as open access and under a creative commons licence. Under this new regime, once an article has been published it can be republished in another format. Universities could harness their own institutional repositories by encouraging academics and students to self-organise the creation of publications drawing upon the open access output held within. It could also be possible to divert small amounts of funding in order to give access to early career academics and research students to important paid career development opportunities.

By doing this, the researchers would be able to use the prestige and/or recognition of institutions and/or departments to generate interest in the works outside of the traditional publishing structures. This would, over time, shift the balance towards the self-organisation of publishing by researchers, thus making academics determine the distribution and recognition of ‘impact’ without cost presenting itself as a barrier for either authors or readers.

---

[1] (Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)

[2] (Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)

[3] (Beverungen et al., 2012: 931)

[4] (Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 1)

[5] (Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)

[6] (Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 2)

[7] (Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009: 14)

[8] (Houghton and Oppenheim et al, 2009)

[9] (Willinsky, 2005: 5)

[10] (Willinsky, 2005: 21)

[11] (Wllinsky, 2005: 14)

[12] (Willinsky, 2005: 7)

[13] (Beverungen et al., 2012)

Bibliography

Beverungen, Armin, Steffen Böhm and Christopher Land, The poverty of journal publishing. Organization, 19(6), 2012 Sage. Pp. 929-938

Houghton, John, Charles Oppenheim, Anne Morris, Clare Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Mark Summers, and Adrian Gourlay, Economic implications of alternative Scholarly Publishing Models (JISC, Loughborough: 2009)

Willinsky, John, Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing. Journal of Digital Information, North America, 4, feb. 2006. Available at: <http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/104/103>. Date accessed: 11 Apr. 2013.

Academics engaging with Open Access

There was lively debate about open access implementation at the School of Business and Management's Research Workshop in April 2013, following earlier sessions on research grants. QM's Open Access Transition team also presented on RCUK’s revised open access policy to a staff meeting of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies in April.

Cupcakes sweeten the message

 Particular food for thought:

• Whether the academic community has had enough input and influence on the way in which open access has been established; that whilst they write and review the material they perhaps have not had the same level of influence on the way that open access has been developed.

• Perceptions of author’s rights, particularly that authors may have more rights than they think, so may have the right to deposit their work in QMRO or another repository, e.g. a book chapter published without the author signing a contract.

• Whether there are sufficient reputable open access journals in which to publish. 

• Affordability of Article Publication Charges (APCs) and the process of deciding which article is funded.

• HEFCE's proposal to require items submitted to REF 2020 to be open access.

• Whether there should be an institutional mandate instead of asking researchers to make decisions about Gold (author pays) or Green (self deposit).

• The role of a journal editor and a wish for some institutional guidance on open access.
  

We hope we helped alleviate some concerns. We have some further bookings to attend meetings or hold events but are keen to schedule visits to other Schools if they wish.

Post written by Daphne Dashfield, Open Access Transition Officer.

Principles of Open Access and Open Access Publishing: the module is ready!

Today sees the launch of Queen Mary University's RDF100 module ‘Principles of Open Access and Open Access Publishing’.  The module is listed under ‘Learning Support / Library’ in QMplus and has been designed to give postgraduate and early career researchers a practical overview of the principles of Open Access (OA), specifically open access publishing of research output. Topics covered include: the history and principles of OA and debates surrounding it; funder mandates on OA and tools to support researchers with compliance; copyright and licences in relation to author rights and user permissions; guidance on publishing a paper in Open Access publications; and institutional tools that support researchers in making their research output OA.

It is possible to login as a guest and not be a QM user, though some features will then be inaccessible (the quizzes, for example). Happy reading!

RCUK has changed their open access guidelines for the second time this year

Released in July 2012, the original policy announced that there would be short embargo periods for green open access: 6 months in the sciences, and (temporarily) 12 months for humanities and social sciences. In response, publishers argued that they could lose library subscriptions. The Lords Science and Technology Committee criticized the policy:
 
“RCUK did not consult or communicate effectively with key stakeholders in the publishing and academic communities when implementing its open access policy…There are still many unknowns concerning the impact of the open access policy, which is why RCUK must commit to a wide ranging review of its policy in 2014, 2016 and before it expects full compliance in 2018. We heard significant concern about the policy’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, and are pleased that RCUK are both aware of these concerns and prepared to act on them.”

RCUK’s initial revisions, released on 6 March, 2013, were not met with much enthusiasm. These changes included longer embargo periods for green open access: a more-satisfying-to-publishers-timeframe of 24 months.

Also integrated into the revised regulations was a decision tree produced by the Publisher’s Association. This stipulated that – if APC funds were available via the universities - authors should always choose the gold route over green.

The decision tree was criticized as “confusing”, with publishers and the RCUK disagreeing about what exactly was meant. This bewilderment was the catalyst for further amendments, released on 8 April, 2013, which still included the decision tree but conceded that gold was preferred but not required. Further changes are described in the Times Higher Education article “RCUK Changes Open-Access Guidance Yet Again”. 

RCUK is now saying that they will consider various issues relating to the embargo periods, for instance, disciplines might need varying time to implement embargos and general policy changes.  They have also released an FAQ pertaining to the policy and have stated that “further points on the policy made by stakeholders will be considered as part of the 2014 review”.