An attempt to capture the OA debate between Alma Swan and Steve Hall

In the red corner: Alma Swan's vision for the future of scholarly communication, and how we might get there: researchers and others can have immediate, fully-linked, reusable, repurposable, no charge, no barriers access to the corpus. Researchers and others wishing to access research outputs (datasets, grey lit as well as journals etc) should be able to roam freely through, picking and choosing what they read and use. Technologies should be able to do the same thing, to help advance research. OA is the answer because: 1, access gaps for researchers will widen as library budgets are further straitened and big deals are cancelled; 2, professional, practitioner, educational communities and private citizens also have an interest and need for this material; PubMed Central's stats show that 40% of usage comes from (what they call) "citizens". Immediate access is important - we must not delay the dissemination of knowledge.

In the blue corner: Steve Hall (IOP) says publishers provide services to authors, editors, readers and librarians but above all to authors - registering, validating, disseminating research. Authors don't pay for these services, libraries do - through subscriptions / licences to journals. This has become a problem as research output has grown (partic in e.g. China), but library budgets have decreased. The big deal still has a role, but multiple business models will be needed to maintain existing level of access in academia, and to extend access elsewhere. Open access is 2 different solutions (green and gold) that can't co-exist. Green OA seeks to make research papers freely available without contributing to their costs. Embargoes allow publishers to recoup their investment but don't widen access; ditching embargoes is unsustainable. Gold OA does contribute to costs of publishing, and makes content immediately and widely available, but funding is haphazard at the moment - we need a collaborative community response. It's still not clear whether OA will deliver savings (Hall dismisses Houghton's study and points to a more "real world" RIN one). IOP is going hybrid and will take fees from gold OA into account when setting budgets and pricing.

Alma agrees with Steve on the issue of scaleability (research output is growing, we need a per-article model) but argues that green is not "unfunded" given the hidden costs covered by academic contribution. Steve responds that publishers charge for the management of the peer review process, not for the piece that is delivered by academia, and cites examples of journals that have seen their subscriptions cannibalised by green OA or delayed access. He argues that depositing manuscripts in a repository is not comparable to publishing, since these manuscripts don't have e.g. reference linking.

Alma says stats show that mandates very quickly achieve 60% deposit, whereas voluntary deposit is about 30%. In 5 years, with more policies, we will be approaching an acceptable level of OA. Several journals have made content freely available online but have seen subscriptions rise, because of broader international visibility. Physics publishers have co-existed for years with ArXiv - what impact has that had on subscriptions in the last 20 years?

Steven cites Harvard's mandate as having achieved only 20% deposit. Policies need to be global and for example China is unlikely to adopt. Publishers are quietly ready to engage with gold OA. Over half of Elsevier's journals are already hybrid. What gets in the way is the continuing fight over short embargo green access. If funders keep pushing it, and publishers keep resisting, the stand off does no-one any good. Better to bring a collection of stakeholders together to review how to facilitate gold OA more quickly. Re. ArXiv, these are pre-prints (not peer reviewed - original author manuscript) and very few journals are comprehensively covered. It is more difficult to make new sales of a journal if a librarian knows most of it is freely available elsewhere.

Alma says that there are several other universities to cite that counter the Harvard example. If mandates aren't working, why are publishers so keen to lobby against them? We cannot ask for gold mandates (no university will do it, not many funders will countenance) so need to pursue policies for green. Publishers will incur costs in transitioning to a per article cost system - each publisher has to decide whether that future is viable.

Unfortunately, not enough time was left for questions from the floor - I bet there were plenty :(

Helen Muir's "UKSG 2010, Librarians and Open Access"

I promised you more snapshots of UKSG conference summaries, and here's one from Helen Muir, Research Support Librarian at Queen Margaret University (excerpted from Helen's post here). Helen's piece adds further useful examples from experience to some of the issues discussed at the conference.

I attended UKSG on Tuesday 13th April, and the first 3 speakers (Dorothea Salo, Eelco Ferwerda and Jill Russell) were all keen advocates of open access, and from what I could gather, open access had been discussed during the previous day also. Jill's presentation included details of the pilot project that she has been involved with at the University of Birmingham where three colleges have been allocated funding to publish their research findings following a gold open access publishing model. At my own institution, following the gold route has already been disregarded - we simply do not have the funds to both pay for journals subscriptions and pay for researchers to publish with journals as well, and despite funder mandates to make research publicly available, I know that researchers here are not as yet keeping money aside to pay an open access publication fee. I imagine that this is the case for most other institutions, indeed Jill was quick to point out that her institution could not afford to pay these fees for the majority of researchers there, leaving some of those not taking part in the pilot somewhat disgruntled.

All of this has lead to me looking at open access from a different angle. In my own role, I am actively encouraging researchers at my institution to both publish their research following an open access model, and to deposit their work in our repository. I've been doing this for about a year and a half now, we have our open access mandate in place, and I thought that encouraging researchers to make their paper open access would eventually lead to the tipping point where open access journal publishing would overtake subscription based. It's a lot more complicated than that though, isn't it? As well as the researchers being convinced, there is also the much less talked about hurdle (and from what I've seen it's a big one) of librarians who are still happy to follow the subscription based journal publishing model. I don't mean this to be a criticism of library budget holders and serials librarians who are working very hard to negotiate with publishers to retain access to as many journal titles as they can with their ever-decreasing budgets. Academic libraries have students who are paying for their education, and expect to have access to journal articles, and academics who expect access to current research to do their jobs - the idea of just stopping paying subscriptions as an individual institution, or even as part of a consortium is unthinkable at present, when the backlash from students and academics at losing access to journals would be so great.

Discussion of open access does have to be opened up further to the whole academic and research library community, and not just remain mostly within the world of repository practitioners and developers. I also wonder about the effects of CILIP's reporting on open access to the wider library community, with another less-than-positive review in this month's Update entitled Open access could cost some universities dear, says Jisc report. (I'm not putting the link to this in here as CILIP members will know where to look, and for the rest of you CILIP Update is not open access - sorry.) Hopefully the more positive coverage that open access has received at UKSG10 will help to redress the balance of this.

Helen's post was commented on by Stevan Harnad, who concluded that "Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. ... Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals' contents are otherwise accessible [via green, not gold, OA] to a university's users." Helen's response adds further useful experience to this discssion (emphasis is mine):

I understand and support your argument fully, but also witness some drawbacks as well. Queen Margaret was a very early mandate adopter, but unfortunately this has not meant a dramatic increase in deposits in our repository. Indeed, most of the material that finds its way in gets there because I've actively searched for it, then chased researchers up for the papers. Only if I'm very lucky do I find a researcher who has kept a draft that the publishers copyright policies will allow me to put up following the green model. I do believe that the message is slowly getting through to some of our researchers however, and think that this is encouraging (I was sent a green OA paper today that I can deposit, but I have to honour a 6 month embargo first. The embargo is quite off-putting for some researchers and was a key reason for Birmingham piloting a gold model, according to Jill Russell at UKSG10).

One of my main concerns is my perception that librarians in academic libraries are not directing students and academics towards OA resources e.g. when the institution does not subscribe to a particular journal - it is not within our culture yet to explore databases of institutional repositories such as OAIster yet (I've not had a chance to have more than a quick glance at http://mimas.ac.uk/irs/demonstrator/ yet , but was very pleased to hear of its existence earlier today). It seem to me that I am contradicting myself when I recommend to students that they use the bibliographic databases for the best journal results, but then tell researchers that search engines such as Google will index their articles in the repository, thus making the accessible to a much wider audience. Searching for open access resources has to become an integral part of information search strategies.

Helen's posting and the resulting discussion add some additional nuances to the paper given at UKSG by Jill Russell, and the wider open access debate. Can readers of this blog add comments from their own experience? (And in this context I propose that we stick to experience / evidence-based comment since discussions elsewhere are giving sufficient focus to the theoretical aspects.)

(Syndicated with permission from http://libraryresearchsupport.blogspot.com/2010/04/uksg-2010-librarians-and-open-access.html.)

UKSG Conference Summary

This is the summary I put together for my SAGE colleagues. I am reposting here in case it is of use. Comments on theme omissions welcome.

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was held in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. Themes gleaned from the sessions and discussions I attended are summarised below. The very active twitter stream from the conference can be found here. I was amazed at the ability of delegates to listen, assimilate and then tweet or blog all at the same time!

Social Media

An increase in focus on Social Media and new ways of sharing information and research was very evident. There was a much higher engagement and understanding of newer communication channels. Interestingly, it was not younger researchers quoted as spending more time blogging or commenting online but more established researchers who have already secured a reputation and can afford to spend time in this way. They are contributing to knowledge and growth in their field but not just in the tradition of peer-reviewed high impact journals. An interesting development would be a unique researcher identifier such as ORCID which would help tie all researcher output together.

Researchblogging is interesting, its focus is on serious posts about peer reviewed academic research. It has over 1200 blogs and has doubled in the last year. Adam Bly from Researchblogging explained that more collaborative science and the creation of new knowledge has the scientific information industry running to keep up. We’ll be contacting them to ensure posts on Sage content can be linked back to the original research.

Open Access

OA feels like it is slowly gaining traction as a publishing model. The vibe from various sessions was less if than when. Tony Hirst was emphatic on the new openness of communication channels. Why use traditional journal articles to share ideas he asked? If he or his colleagues do decide to publish an article it will be in OA jnls. However, no clear wide-ranging path for institutions to fund OA was apparent yet.

Usage

JISC Collections have secured funding to progress with the JISC usage stats portal or “make it real”. We'll be contacted for our input, the prototype involved data from Elsevier, OUP and Springer. Its aim is to present usage data in user-friendly ways for librarians and include new ways to benchmark usage. There is not clarity on confidentiality issues and was no resolution proposed on the question of the confidential nature of usage data. It’s early days.

Big Deals, Value & Pricing

An interesting session on value had Ted Bergstrom from UCSB explaining that he is securing information about big deal pricing so he can publish information about outliers in the public domain. His reason: “as citizens of the academic community, we are interested in helping librarians to understand the dynamic economic problem that they face and aiding them in negotiating effectively with large publishers. We plan to release a collection of information and analyses that will serve this purpose.” See his Big Deal Contract Project page.

As in previous years the mood seemed to be that the Big Deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions, but there was no clear way forward proposed still.

Carol Tenopir talked about developing real tools for librarians to demonstrate value of their collections. She pointed us to the ARL website for more information.

Jill emery from Texas talked about patron-driven ebook and journal article acquisition stating 'the age of the article is here'. She explained they need “aggregated article access”. She wants publishers to listen as they have to purchase “Just in time not just in case'.

Quality Metrics

Frustration with the reliance on the Impact Factor and the fact it ranks journals and not articles was apparent. There is a desire to produce new ranking metrics. the Australian Research Assessment is no longer using the Impact Factor we were told.

Pete Binfield (PLOS) ran a session on how they have introduced article-level metrics - it’s worth a look if you haven’t seen. They recognise they are very much at the beginning but are very keen to do whatever they can to help users decide which content is highly valued by the community. Also, these metrics not just about evaluation but to help users filter and discover articles of value.

Pete talked about how they have work to do on working out how to measure “influence”. It’s important to demonstrate influence beyond the scientific community. This ties in with our work to show the value of social science research. How do we ensure the research we publish is credited appropriately when it influences Government policy for instance?

As Hannah Whaley says on her blog: The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

Hannah Whaley's UKSG summary

Hannah Whaley is an Assistant Director in the University of Dundee’s Library and Learning Centre, with responsibility for Research and Systems. She specialises in system design, service development and innovation within HE teaching and research. Hannah recently wrote a great blog posting identifying key themes at this year's UKSG conference, and she's kindly agreed that we can syndicate her posting here. Read on for a snapshot of the conference from Hannah's point of view - does it tally with yours? More snapshots coming soon!

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was in Edinburgh this week, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. A number of themes started to recur through the sessions and discussions, as summarised:

• Big deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions
• We must move further towards open access, but it is not yet clear how
• Journal impact factor isn’t good enough anymore, we need to review the commentary and produce new ranking factors
• Linked information is nearly here, allowing informal and pre-publish conversations to be viewed and measured in a structured way on the web
• The age of the article is here, meaning metrics, usage and discoverability will increasingly be at article level rather than the ‘journal container’
• Just-in-time must replace just-in-case, as no one can maintain a full array of items that may only occasionally be required

The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud. However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

(Syndicated with permission from http://www.hannahwhaley.com/2010/04/18/uksg-main-themes/)

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)
  

Developing new models for OA monographs

Monograph sales have been declining since the '70s, says Eelco Ferwerda, Amsterdam University Press / OAPEN. One impact of this is that there are fewer outlets for authors, which can make it harder for some to get started in publishing. Open access monographs will benefit all stakeholders; increasing authors' visibilities and impact; enabling researchers to search and make connections across platforms.

In most cases, OA monograph presses' business models cannot sustain them alone - they are subsidised e.g. by grants or institutional support. Business models include value added services and separate editions (one of which can be charged for). The OAPEN project is developing an OA publication model to improve accessibility and impact, create an OA library, engage stakeholders in the publication process, develop common funding models and standards, and build a platform that can shared with other presses. The project is broadly aimed at academic publishers in the humanities and social sciences, and hopes to create a network around a changing business model - the network already includes publishers of all shapes and sizes, old and new, commercial and NFP. "There is a lot of interest in the idea."

OAPEN's publication model will be a hybrid model - a free web version but also paid-for versions e.g. for specific ebook platforms. Authors will retain copyright, and the monograph's long-term availability will be assured both by the platform that is being developed and by an arrangement with the Dutch National Library. The model requires payment of publication fees - by research funders or institutions. "The library is already spending money on books, making choices between print and e-books, and thinking about open access models. Greco and Wharton suggest that libraries should use their existing acquisition budgets to fund open access publishing instead of buying books." Institutions should pay for OA to ensure effective dissemination and unrestricted access, to advance the spread of knowledge, and to ensure publication of peer-reviewed research results - because not all manuscripts that pass peer review are published, for economic reasons - which is a barrier to entry for young researchers.

OA books are a collaboration between publishers and funders. But how do you calculate the costs, particularly if you are creating a separate, paid-for print version? Ferwerda argues for only including basic marketing as part of the free e-book costs [will authors benefit sufficiently from / be happy with this lower level of service? In my experience many expect / hope that publishers will run glossy publicity campaigns for their books!]

Key OAPEN recommendations include HE institutes establishing dedicated budgets to which researchers can apply for publication funds. Next steps include a pilot to get funders on board; conversations are underway with organisations including JISC. Interested parties can join the OAPEN network - oapen.org.

From Timbuktu to Here

How many electronic journals will have the shelf-life of the famous texts of Timbuktu, which are still readable and preserved today? This question set the theme for the session on Access and Preservation for Electronic Journals, led by Terry Morrow.

Continued access to journals is a shared problem, Morrow argues - everyone who gains a benefit from the availability of e-journals should take a part in solving the problem. The specific problems for e-journals are:

• Continued access after a subscription has been cancelled, but does subscription = ownership?
• What do you save? Articles are often built on the fly from various components, including complex metadata files.
  
• Technology: don't assume that PDF will be around for ever.

Preservation is never a free option, but can be viewed as insurance cover for the future. These costs will be ongoing, not one off so a full risk analysis against costs should be done before preservation decisions are made.

The current economic climate is making the loss of journals very real with concerns about loss of vulnerable publishers and the ability to maintain subscriptions: the impact of the euro exchange rate on UK subscriptions is causing problems now for institutions.

Chris Rusbridge via the power of twitter and blogging poses the fact that this is a very real problem. There are a variety of different scenarios outlined by Chris with regard to the loss of journals, but the crux of the question is - who is responsible for taking the action to preserve journals. This ties in with questions from the room about how do we assess the value of the journals. A serious question for attendees at UKSG.

A range of preservation systems were described: LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, e-Depot, OCLC ECO, and British Library developments. Managing the trigger events for all of these systems and the roles and the responsibilities for all the stakeholders are different in each system.

There is a challenge for all of the attendees at UKSG to answer the question, am I responsible?

2020: a publishing odyssey

Ahmed Hindawi opened the afternoon plenary session by talking about the "three big changes" that will affect scholarly publishing in the next ten years. He started by looking at other types of publishing and the issues facing those industries:

Newspapers have traditionally had reader payments and advertising revenues, but lose reader revenue when they go online and make their content freely available. Per-page revenue is a fraction of what it was. But newspaper publishers made the decision to go free, and did so because the content they publish is reproduced in many places. This would result in price wars that would only end at zero anyway. There are some exceptions - the Wall Street Journal has managed to keep subscribers because its content is differentiated.

Trade book publishers are just starting to embrace digital. Challenges: no print, less need for publishers? Anyone can get a digital book into a book store, when they couldn't with print. 30m out of print books are "coming back from the dead" and becoming available online - the long tail will vie for space with the new titles.

The music industry has seen well-documented problems with piracy.

Scholarly journals publishing doesn't have these problems: unlike newspapers, the content of scholarly journals is highly differentiated, and you're unlikely to just go and read a different article if the one you want is too expensive or behind access control. Scholarly journals are bought by organisations, so there's still a "middle man" in the sale as compared to author to reader trade book sales. And piracy isn't a big issue.

The three changes that Ahmed predicts will affect scholarly publishing:

1. Open access vs toll
2. The journal as a brand on author side
3. The journal as a brand on the librarian side
   

(Blogs and wikis have their place, but won't significantly impact scholarly publishing..)

Drivers for open access

• Recognition of merits of OA by researchers
• Serials crisis = difficult to expand toll publications
• Green open access - publishers will realise gold is more secure and more financially viable.
  

The journal as brand on author side

• Citation databases could lead to the creation of author impact factors that become more important than journal impact factors
• This highlights the need for author identifiers! Scopus, Researcher ID, Contributor ID.
  

Journal as brand on library side

• Budgets - librarians can't consider individual titles, and will go for Big Deals instead when budgets are tight.

So, five possible futures for scholarly publishing.

1. The Near Past
Journals are toll access, and are important to authors and librarians. It's what we have or have just had, and has resulted in the serials crisis

Possible Future 2: Here comes the Big Deal
Journals are toll, are important to authors, but are in big deals and their brands are not important to libraries. Will see consolidations. Unlikely?
Should expect intervention from external markets.

Possible Future 3: Journal commmoditization
Journals are toll, but lose their brands on the author side. Publishers will have to work hard to keep authors. Publishers will accept more manuscripts (all that are factually correct). New pricing models will emerge - based on subject and downloads. Will be an ongoing market price, so competition for profit will be all about saving costs

Possible Future 4: Open Access
Journals still have a strong brand with authors, but libraries don't need to purchase journals. High impact journals will be able to demand higher author publishing charges. Will be more competition between journals and publishers.

Possible Future 5: Commoditization 2.0
Open access and lost journal brand on author side. All journals are like PLoS ONE journals, publishing all rigorous artlcles. A&I databases will be only place to navigate content.

What will materialize will be more complex than any one of these examples. Open Access is important, but isn't the only issue. Commoditization can bring benefits. Scholarly journals have many stakeholders. It's important to be as "humble and objective as possible" and consider all of the stakeholders. There will be winners and losers.

Publishing and Communication of Chinese Scholarly Journals - Ruoxi Li, Chongqing Normal University

Ruoxi Li will be talking today both to let the international scholarly publishing community know more about the Open Access Archive Initiative.

Growth & Development Context
Over last 10 years there have been huge changes in the publishing of scholarly works in China.

• 405,000 STM papers were published developed in 2006
• 172,00 papers produced in China were included in SCI, EI and ISTP in 2006 (second ranked country in world)
• 5387 STM journals registered in China by 1st May 2005 (number only second to US publishing number).

Many of the Chinese universities have moved from pure teaching to teaching and research type institutions. Therefore more Chinese government funding for research.

60% of laboritories and key laboritories were set up in universities and graduate students was 978,600 in 2005; of these 191,300 were Ph.D. candidates - hence ballooning in number of published papers.

Of the STM papers published in China domestically 60.1% were funded by universities or state (I think) the rest being funded elswhere.

668 Chinese university journals in natural science within 1129 total academic titles are a typical example. They have a common feature of their names: Journal of [university name]. These titles are non-profit and general in nature and focus on the academic achievements of the sponsering university. Most content derived from own faculty and students in this type of journal.

The publishing model of these journals though is out of date:

• Not focused on one or a few subjects
• "Thousands of people have the same face" - look very similar to other journals - duplication of effort and wasting of resources.
  
• "One publisher, one journal" business model - does not compete in a market economy
• Domestic circulation often low (500 copies/issue for many titles)
• Difficulty in getting high quality contributions - though an explosion of papers, over the last 10 years the Chinese research community have encouraged the publishing of high quality papers in journals that are international in scope. Also the general journals compete with domestic specialist papers. Generally they have lowered their standards and have become a publishing body for their junior faculty members and developing students.
  
• Lower impact of journal (graph show comparison with specialised journals, much less impact for generalist titles).
  

Not very integrated or open:

• Few have international editorial boards
• Few have homepages
• Many do not even have a basic link to their sponsoring universities
• Very few published in English.
  

However most journals began pre-1980 and have a lot of expertise in scholarly communication. Without market pressures though they do not have the pressure to open up.

Thousands of editors are able to act as a team under the leadership of SCUJNS (the Society of China University Journals in Natural Sciences). This is a body looking at integrating and opening content in a digital environment. A first attempt at an open access journal has done well but a widely successful programme of changing to more open integrated journals has not emerged automatically. However a new model has emerged focusing on runing a repository to be populated with pre-prints for every journal. This will allow an exchange platform and Open Access and OAI-PMH compliant

Sciencepaper Online
Non profit site providing access to pre-print scholarly articles. Reviewers can publish research results free of charge. papers receive peer review if authors request it. Since 2003 it has attracted 130,000 users (about 8000 visits per day). This is supported by Ministry of Education (Chinese Government).

E-Journal Archive Of Chongqing
Non-profit OA repository for journals in Chongqing as well as some other regions. It will include an English interface to allow international usage.

Paper Open http://www.paperopen.cn
Launched earlier this year this is an OA search engine collating searching for papers all over the world. Free to use. More than 400,000 OA papers are in the Beta version of the database. It will hopefully go on to hold 6 million papers by July 2008.

Elsevier and Springer have initiated projects to co-operate with some Chinese University journals with the journal publishers taking responsibility for language development.

As academic publishers we have responsibility to open up China to the world.

Ruoxi Li hopes that this means that Chinese Scholarly Journals will now be as successful as the Olympians that will shortly be competing in Beijing.

Q & A

Q: How does this initiative fit with the Chinese Academy of Sciences?
A: Ruoxi Li asked to think about this later and talk to the questioner later.

The second speaker (Ananda T. Byrappa of General Electric) for Plenary Session 2 has not appeared so will not be speaking. Exhibition viewing time therefore begins early.

"The old git slot:": a life in scholarly publishing flashing before our eyes

"I've drawn the old git slot," said John Cox ruefully as he took the stage, and then proceeded to confirm that judgement by listing the plethora of modern office necessities not yet invented when he started in publishing, and bemoaning the "witless wonders" that are our modern youth.

Yet plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Scholarly publishing is essentially the same industry as it was when UKSG was founded 30 years ago - and in fact the principles on which publishing rested 300 years ago are still relevant today. Even commercial publishing has been around longer than we think; Cox cited examples from the 18th and 19th centuries. And back at the beginning of Cox's career, journal publishing was rudely healthy. Librarians had ample funding and researchers' appetites for information were not yet overwhelmed. But social changes began to limit the growth of libraries' budgets such that journals began to be cancelled and success for new journals was not so immediate (as Paul Calow noted in yesterday's "Financial Imperatives" session, it now takes 7 years for a new title to break even).

Then along came a spider ... or, in fact, its Web. The shift from print to online may not yet be complete, but about 90% of scholarly journals are now online, and this has changed the way that libraries and publishers do business together - for example, with consortial purchasing. One consequence of online publishing is the hunger for Open Access - an unproven business model which has not yet shown itself to be sustainable, says Cox, particularly across the broader and non-scientific literature. Further, as Sally Morris had noted this morning, the Open Archive movement is potentially damaging to the scholarly journal; the world's 850 institutional repositories may currently be scantly populated (with academics actually admitting they are "distinctly unwilling" to deposit), but they are being supported by a number of major funding agencies, and may yet grow sufficiently to change the current landscape.

Cox took a detour at this point to acknowledge the effect on scholarly communications of Google, "the search engine of choice for most of us" (albeit propounding the common misconception that the search giant has indexed "most journals" in Google Scholar ). Google is getting closer and closer to us and will "shape the development of our industry over the next 5 to 10 years", having already revolutionised things with its page rank algorithm.

The future for publishers, therefore, is in the functionality within which they wrap their content. If the research itself is freely available - and easily discoverable - elsewhere, publishers have to differentiate themselves with truly useful features (e.g. supporting datasets, taxonomies, community facilities). Cox praises OECD's SourceOECD for using the capabilities of online to add massive value over the print, and Alexander Street Press for building communities in the humanities - demonstrating the value across different sectors.

Web 2.0 "will bring further changes", of which user-generated content and folksonomies have most relevance to scholarly publishing. They represent the value-adds which can differentiate publisher platforms from institutional repositories - if publishers are willing or able to make the necessary investment in technology, and to make the transition to being service providers rather than manufacturers.

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.