In Support of Open Access, Jill Russell, University of Birmingham

Despite all of the excitement about open research and the possibilities of the semantic web, the “dead document is still the main unit of currency at most universities” says Jill Russell from the University of Birmingham, who is here to give an overview of her institution’s project to encourage its researchers to publish in open access publications.

Take-up of the green OA route (publishing in a subscription journal but depositing the article in the university’s institutional repository) has been typically slow at Birmingham, and there is a lot of confusion among researchers about what open access publishing - especially the green model - actually is. Gold open access (paying a publication fee so that the article is published as freely available to all) is better understood, and researchers are more willing to pay for the immediate publication that gold provides.

Russell and her colleagues ran a pilot project to communicate with grant holders and grant applicants to encourage them to budget for publishing costs as part of their research projects, and to offer administrative support. They identified the top funders and their policies on OA, focussing mainly on STM where OA already has more of a foothold. Throughout the project they were careful to stress that their researchers still had the choice to publish where they wished, OA or not.

The pilot quickly showed that they had underestimated costs, with the average publication fee being £1500, double their initial estimate of £700. Birmingham’s researchers publish between 3500 and 4000 papers a year, so publication fees to make them all OA would amount to £5 million annually. The budget is £120,000. From September 2009 to March 2010, twenty five articles were funded for gold OA by funding by a combination of Wellcome, MRC and EPSRC.

Birmingham has taken institutional memberships to BioMedCentral, PLoS and Nucleic Acids Research from OUP.

Researchers don’t care about the journal’s business model, just its profile. Articles have to be in PubMed, but many researchers not sure of difference between PubMedCentral and PubMed. The majority of top fifty journals in which University of Birmingham researchers publish do have some kind of OA policy, however many of these policies are extremely unclear, vary vastly from publisher to publisher and sometimes don’t make a great deal of sense (Russell gave an example where paying for gold OA didn’t allow them to deposit the article in their own IR). Publishers really need to make their OA policies clear.

Russell summarised by saying that OA fees are rising rapidly, but subscription fees are falling slowly, so they are not seeing any savings at the moment. If Birmingham were to switch to a complete OA model it would only benefit if publication fees were set at a maximum of £1000 per article.

• EDIT: view Jill Russell's slides (PDF)
  

Calling for New Editors for Serials

Long-standing Serials editors, Hazel Woodward (Cranfield University) and Helen Henderson (Ringgold) are planning on retiring at the end of the current volume in 2010. Consequently, UKSG is looking for expressions of interest for new co-Editors to step up to the plate and continue building on the legacy that they have established over the last decade.

Deadline is Feb 12th, and more information can be found here: http://www.uksg.org/serials/neweditors

You can get more information about the journal itself here: http://www.uksg.org/serials or at http://uksg.metapress.com (for details on the content). You could also email me if you would like further information before making an approach to UKSG in the first instance - bev.acreman@biomedcentral.com .

It's a great opportunity and would suit people who are dynamic, well connected and well travelled. Much like Hazel and Helen!

July issue of Serials now published

The Editorial Board of Serials thought it would be a good exercise to alert blog readers to the new issue of Serials which has just been published and contains many of the popular presentations from the recent conference (including T Scott Plutchak's and Melinda Kenneway's highly regarded papers). We've also included some of the breakout sessions, including Paul Harwood's briefing on the UK consortia landscape with a guide for librarians, publishers and intermediaries, and Nol Verhagen's briefing on "the licensing battlefield" from a consortium perspective.

Other papers concern the scholarly community in China, e-textbooks, the usage factors project, journal collection evaluation and much more..

Read it here (subscription or members only for current three issues) - http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0953-0460&volume=20&issue=2
Subscription information here: http://www.uksg.org/serials/subscribe

Let us know what you think!

Will the King's Horses be there if the parasite kills the host?

Sally Morris, Editor of Learned Publishing, was a welcome last-minute stand-in for the sadly indisposed Peter Banks, to whom the UKSG community sends its best wishes.

Morris' rhetoric is familiar to those who follow lib-license and other discussion lists, and her lobbying on behalf of publishers during her years as Secretary General of ALPSP has shown her to be a staunch defender of existing scholarly communication models. Today she reiterated for the uninitiated many of the points she has made so vociferously in the past, and cited again the wealth of evidence which ALPSP, amongst others, has gathered to help inform the Open Access debate. We were reminded of surveys demonstrating that librarians will cancel journal subscriptions if reliable alternatives are available (Beckett & Inger 2006), a potential outcome also recognised by funding agencies. Morris restated the reasons why the journal model is worth defending: chiefly, its facilitation of the peer review process (for which, thus far, alternatives such as Nature's admirable open peer review experiment have failed to substitute adequately); the huge contribution made by editing, both for readability but also for accuracy (in 5.5% of cases, editorial changes "materially altered the sense of the article" - Wates & Campbell, 2007) and to support interactivity (e.g. improving references in order that they will link).

Morris went on to debunk, again, the myths that journal publishing is a exclusively a greedy for-profit game, and that journal publication could instead be supported by other publishing programs or society activities. Raym Crow's 2006 data shows that more than half (55%) of journals are non-profit, while Baldwin (2004) demonstrated that the surpluses from journals support a variety of functions - keeping membership and conference fees down; education and bursaries; research funding; (it is also the case in many publishing houses that journal publication tends to support the more low-profit activity of book publication, rather than vice versa). Since 90% of society publishers only have one journal they would be at risk if their subscription revenues are cannibalised by OA, as would niche and low-profit journals.

But given the broader mandate of a UKSG plenary paper, and having covered the background, Morris now developed her position further, and towards some conclusions that perhaps one wouldn't have initially suspected. Whilst publishers do need to continue engaging with others in the scholarly community to ensure the risks and consequences of self-archiving are understood, they should also be proactively experimenting (for example with hybrid open access models) and avoiding regressive insistence on retaining the existing model. Morris also picked up on a concern felt by many - that scholarly communication is changing in many ways, and we need to ensure the open access issue is not clouding our awareness of other potential revolutions. She questioned how else publishers can add value, and suggested that we need to be clear about those functions of the journal important enough to retain - even if the model around those functions should evolve. Ultimately, we should allow for the possibility that publishers and journals may cease to exist - but we should be very clear that this is a desirable and practicable future before throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Humpty Dumpty was fine on the way down, cautioned Morris - it was only after he'd hit the ground that it turned out to be impossible to put him together again.

Nevermind the fact that we no longer have King's Horses and King's Men to help us should we turn out to regret a careless destruction of the journal model.