Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes
[email protected]
Introduction & disclosure
• Publisher at John Wiley & Sons, Oxford
• Run a list of medical journals
• Conflicts of interest
– employee and stock holder at Wiley
– Wiley publishes ~2,000 journals under various business models
Overview
• About you?
• Some context…
– The functions of research journals
– The role of journal publishers
– The economics of journal publishing
• The open access paradigm
– Drivers of change
– Open access models
– Arguments for and against
– Funders’ mandates and policies
• What does this mean for me?
About you?
Since January 2011, how many journal articles have you
authored/co-authored and had published?
a) None
b) 1
c) 2
d) 3–5
e) >5
About you?
How often do you access the journal literature?
a) Daily
b) Weekly
c) Monthly
d) Annually
e) Never
About you?
Getting access to the literature that I need is:
a) Challenging
b) Frustrating from time-to-time
c) Straightforward
Why do journals still exist?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665
The functions of research journals
1. Dissemination
mechanism for sharing new information
2. Registration
mechanism for registering credit for discoveries
3. Filtration
filter good research from bad
4. Validation
validate research through quality control
“Just as a washing machine has a quality kite-mark, peer review is a kind of quality mark for science.
It tells you that the research has been conducted and presented to a standard that other scientists
accept. At the same time, it is not saying that the research is perfect (nor that a washing machine will
never break down).”
Sense About Science
5. Designation
publication bestows professional credit
“Authorship is the foundation of our system for judging academic value and assigning reward.
Citation provides the intellectual credit that fuels promotion and career success; it gives an
independent estimate of a researcher’s contribution to science.”
Richard Horton, The Lancet
Growth in article output
Annual growth article output (1996–2008)
The journal operation
content
readers
marketing
distribution
production
manuscripts
peer-review
authors
The role of journal publishers
• No charges levied on authors
• Content behind a paywall
• ‘Reader-pays’
• Customer segments
– institutional libraries: subscriptions, site licenses
– individuals: subscriptions, pay-per-view
content
reader-pays
marketing
distribution
production
manuscripts
peer-review
The traditional economic model
Drivers of change
Economy?
Internet?
growing mismatch
between rates of
investment in
research compared
with information
budgets
infrastructure for
instantaneous, broad
and low-cost
distribution of content
Open
access?
denying access to
information at a
time when
technology has
made the notion of
almost unlimited
access a real
possibility
What is open access?
• Unrestricted online access to journal content
• Open access content is freely available online:
– without payment or access barriers such as registration
– immediately on publication
– in perpetuity
– without restrictions on its (reasonable) reuse
• An attribute of individual articles not necessarily journals
Why should I care about open access?
• You believe it will benefit you through greater visibility and use
of your work leading to more citations and increased reputation
• You believe it will benefit others and/or society at large
• You are required by your research funder or employer to
engage with open access
Two varieties of open access
GOLD
GREEN
• Open access publications
• Self-archiving
• Hybrid/partial open access
publications
GOLD
Fully open access journals
• Do not rely on subscriptions or other kinds of payments by
readers/libraries to cover operational costs and can thus make their
content freely available
• ‘Author-pays’
– revenue source is to levy a per-article publication charge (APC)
• APCs typically range from $1000 to $3000
marketing
distribution
production
manuscripts
peer-review
author-pays
• DOAJ lists 8300 journals
content
Hybrid and partially open access journals
• Hybrid open access
– Subscription journals that allow authors to make individual articles
OA in return for an APC
• Partial open access
– Journals in which research articles are open access whilst access to
other types of content (e.g., review articles or journalistic content)
requires a subscription
• Delayed open access
– Subscription journals that make their content open access after a set
period (usually 12 months)
GOLD
Self-archiving
• Publish in traditional journal and deposit a version of article in
an open repository
• Subject-based repositories
– arXiv
– PubMed Central
• Institutional repositories
– Warwick Research Archive Portal
• Usually embargo periods
• What version?
– Post-print
– Pre-print
– SHERPA RoMEO website—http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
GREEN
Arguments in favour of open access
• Greater accessibility > greater visibility > increased impact of
research
– Correlation between open access and number of times an article is
downloaded and cited
• Accelerate progress of research > industrial innovation >
national competitiveness
• The public should have right to access outputs of research
funded by taxpayer
• Open access allows machine-read data and text mining
Arguments against open access
• Sustainability of business model?
• Irresponsible to promote a move from a working system to an
unproven model
• Self-archiving
– parasitic on existing subscription journals
– when archiving reaches a critical point, libraries abandon paid
subscriptions in favour of free versions
– version control issues
• Open access publication
– APCs discriminate against those without research funding or at
poorer institutions
– financial incentive to accept poor quality work—the more articles
published the more revenue collected
Open access policies & mandates
• Adopted by HEIs, research funding agencies or governments
• Requires faculty or grant recipients to adopt some form of open
access
– NIH Public Access Policy (2008)
– The Wellcome Trust
RCUK policy
• Research Councils UK
– April 2013
– All grantees must publish open access
– Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY)
• Block grants to eligible UK HEIs to support payment of the
APCs
• Some details yet to be hammered out
HEFCE
• Distributes public money to HEIs
• Assesses quality of research in UK universities
– uses publication output/prestige as a quantitative measure
• Results inform allocation of funds
• Open access policy forthcoming
• Suggestion that future REF exercise will only assess open
access articles
How do I obtain APC funds?
• Most funders who mandate gold open access publication will
support APCs
• Academics claim grants directly from funding body
• Funders provide block grants to HEIs > academics claim grants
from employer
Some unintended consequences
• Redirects funders’ budgets from research grants to publishing
costs
• Increased costs for UK HEIs vs European/US competitors
• Increased costs for most research intensive HEIs (Russell
Group)
• Block grant model may cause institutions to ration absolute
publication numbers causing competition amongst colleagues
for access to publishing funds
• Impact on learned associations/societies
Questions