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.

Usage Factors - Break Out Session

Richard Gedye, Research Director Oxford Journals

The Usage Factor: How we can enhance the relevance of usage as an indicator of relative value?

6 years after the launch of COUNTER (which aimed to be consistent, credible and compatible) it seemed a good time to take stock and determine how successful it has been:

• Consistency - nearly 100 publishers and hosts are now producing the reports in standards
• Credibility - formal auditing process started in 2007 and details on compliance available on website
• Compatibility - reliable comparison of amount of use, but not meaningful measure of relative quality or value

Addressing the challenge - ISI impact factor compensates for size of journal in a way COUNTER doesn't; we (the UKSG) determined that we should seek an additional measure of utility/value: the usage factor.

Usage factor = total usage over period x published during period y

Is there a demand and would it be cost-effective?

Some initial evidence about the demand from CIBER survey on behalf of STM and the PA; authors in the survey were asked to comment on the statements: article downloads are a good measure of utility and citations are a good measure of utility -70% agreed re: article downloads were a useful measure - slightly more than agreed with that statement as opposed to author citations. Download metrics would have considerable credibility amongst author community; alternatives to the impact factor... would certainly be of great appeal to librarians and many publishers"

In 2007, UKSG and COUNTER commissioned research looking at ways in which journal quality is currently assessed and the degree to which additional metrics would be of value. The resulting report, following in depth interviews with librarians and authors

Advantages
- Useful counterweight to impact factors esp. A&H journals not well covered by ISI
- For journals with high use by those who are using it but not for citation purposes (more practical journals)
- Especially helpful for journals with relatively few articles
- Data available potentially sooner than with Impact Factors
- Useful to communicate usage information to journal owners in order to compare with other journals (where they are societies etc)

Issues to address
- Only COUNTER statistics should be used and not all publishers are COUNTER compliant
- COUNTER data needs to be made more robust
- would another global measure, such as usage half-life per journal or per discipline not be of greater value?
- Concern from those publishers with strong impact factors that this would adversely affect their rankings - this will favour lower quality journals
- This will stimulate publishers to inflate their usage by every means
- How would print usage be taken into account?
- needs to amalgamate usage from all available hosting sites
- Bigger publishers have huge resources selling licenses to institutions and consortia, societies and smaller publishers do not (research shows the more you drive up usage the more you drive up the impact factor)

Who should do the calculations?

"It would be difficult for librarians to consolidate global usage statistics? Could not the publishers do this?" Publishers fed back that they would like control over the process- centralizing it would add considerable cost to the industry... Publishers on the whole were unwilling to provide their stats to a third party, but willing to have their own calculations audited... 84% of publishers were willing to calculate and publish their Usage Factors - 8% said "no", 8% "perhaps"; details needed were how would you define total usage; specified usage period and the total number of articles

What are the optimal values to measure?

Having done initial interviews, we widened it out to a web based survey - similar results to CIBER report - ~70% of authors would welcome the measures; strongest in biomedical sciences, least in arts and humanities

For librarians came in at number 2 in terms of its importance in selecting new journals (IFs were number 4); for renewing existing journals it came in at number 3, below feedback from library users and usage; but above Price, cost per download, impact factor and reputations/status of publisher.

Recommendations from the report - that the UF concept be developed further with a view to testing it as a practical implementable measure of journal quality value and status and if satisfactory results were obtained from the investigations and tests we would then need to scale up and test the system for a couple of years behind the scenes to ensure it would scale up.

In 2007 we began testing and modelling the UF concept with real data - 6 publishers, 1 aggregator, and 1 hosting service formed the Project Steering Group

Plan is that usage logs will be converted to some form of uniform standard report for third party analysis - RFP being drafted for third parties to bid for the work involved - RFP to be published later this month - still need to agree uniform standard report and details to ensure data consistency, integrity and fitness for purpose - e.g. measuring number of "items" published; assigning a correct publication year for each item (e-first can be up to 2 years ahead of "print"); excluding spiders and crawlers etc

Summer 2008, we hope to deliver a report which outlines potential usage measures which can be assessed and recommend which ones are robust enough to scale up, and any changes that publishers need to make to make the UF reliable and comparable... to propose ways in which it can be audited.

Further information at http://www.uksg.org/usagefactors or contact richard.gedye@oxfordjournals.org

Q: How do you define usage?
A: by adopting COUNTER definition - the number of successful requests for full text items (ANSI answers in the 200s and one in the 300s which covers downloading from your own cache)

Q: does this take into account purpose of downloads
A: no, and it can't - measures how much something is desired or wanted, not why. Shibboleth might be able to look at sub-dividing usage into audience type (under grads, faculty etc) - data protection may cause problems here

Q: With the expected rise of data and text mining, will this activity be excluded?
A: this is a question for COUNTER rather than the Usage Factor project; they are aware of the increase in non-traditional usage such as pre-fetching articles by Google etc. It does have to be acknowledged and scoped. Nature has a separate version solely for data mining where all the words are in the wrong order so that only a machine can read it

Q: any of the libraries are using ERM systems which are COUNTER compliant where they locally host material
A: publishers would be keen on libraries becoming COUNTER compliant and feeding this usage back to them

Q: How would you take account of "illegal" downloads?
A: raises a number of questions: assume you mean someone getting around a publishers access management system? Publishers have a built in interest in putting a stop to these; most illegal downloads come from rogue activity within existing institutional customers- robots to download large number of articles etc. COUNTER already can catch most of this and it is excluded; if it is an individual doing it manually, then we have statistical and technological means of stopping this. COUNTER need to address retrospective corrections once this abuse has been detected.

Q: as a collective activity between publishers and librarians, what is the audit process and will it be transparent/trustworthy
A: We don't know yet; one of the tasks for the appointed third party is to come up with recommendations for audits that will satisfy both libraries and publishers so that it is "properly benchmarkable". COUNTER has a relationship with ABC-e - the Audit Bureau of Circulation E Division who audit the COUNTER standards for reporting and advise on their development

Q: What about alternative versions of the articles?
A: Ebscohost are on board and of course publish their own versions of the articles; also on publishers' sites you can have an advanced version of the final articles. We are unlikely to look at author versions on Institutional Repositories, but PubMed Central will be an issue. There needs to be a technical solution to logging usage of distributed copies including authors' copies of articles.
Comment: - as use in IRs grow, these need to become COUNTER compliant and within scope, but small scale at the moment.

Q: what do you think the problem will be with eBooks etc - i.e. non-articles
A: could extend to this, but tricky with no continuity but should look again as they become more established- although perhaps perfect for major textbooks which is the closest parallel? Not much demand or impetus? Article downloads could impact authors careers, less so with books

Q: what happens if a publisher isn't COUNTER compliant (asked by a librarian)?
A: include a clause in the license agreement to encourage them to become compliant..

"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.