Developments in Researcher-led, Open Access Publishing

brian.hole@ubiquitypress.com | www.ubiquitypress.com| @ubiquitypress
Developments in Researcher-led, Open Access Publishing
Brian Hole, Founder and CEO Caltech, October 9th 2017

 The ubiquity story
 Why
 What
 Who
 Current trends in OA
 The future

a short history
of ubiquity press

To return control of publishing to universities, libraries and
researchers, providing them with the infrastructure and support
to not only match but to outcompete the legacy publishers.
About Ubiquity Press
Background
Mission
 Spun out of University College London in 2012
 Researcher-led
 120+ years publishing experience
(BioMed Central, PLOS, Elsevier etc.)
 Current staff of 20, head office in London,
US office in Oakland
 Comprehensive approach: journals,
books, conferences, repositories, data, software, wetware…

The Social Contract
of Science
• Validation
• Dissemination
• Further development
Scientific Malpractice
• Data
• Results
• Software
• Hardware, wetware…
#@%$#@
% #@%$#
Source: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2015

Source: Washington Post, May 7 2013 / Imgur: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/07/map-more-
than-half-of-humanity-lives-within-this-circle/

Source: Nature News, 20 April 2011, DOI: 10.1038/472276a

We’re not there
yet

journals

Journals: transparent pricing, APC $500 (HSS) or $600 (STEM)

Journals: 2014

Journals: 2015

Journals: 2016

Publishing all research objects

books

Books: fully open, fairly priced

Rua: Full book production workflow

conferences

Ubiquity conference systems: publication-centric

partner presses

Full anti-plagiarism checking
Provision for open research data
and software archiving with all
publications
Rigorous peer review
Editorial guidance and training
Provision for open peer review
COPE membership for all editors
Close links with society’s ethics
committee
Research integrity

Bangla LAM
Nep Mongolia

No bird left behind!

current trends in
OA

More open source than open access
Repositories
Coalition of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
Focus on ‘next generation repositories’
Priority areas: discoverability, assessment, workflows
and impact
Ubiquity launching hosted repositories October 2017

Two full-featured options
Guarantee full transfer
Fully open source
FLEXIBLE
NO LOCK-IN

Fully hosted
Repository interactivity
High discoverability and impact
CLOUD
Zero IT costs
High performance
OPEN TO THE WORLD

Fully integrated with the ubiquity
partner press platform
No extra charge - included in the price
of the full platform
Unlimited storage
Journals, books, preprints, conferences,
data, software, etc.
INTEGRATED
FAIRLY-PRICED

Continued moves to decrease reliance on Impact Factor
Metrics and evaluation
Moves to help evaluate journals, improve image of OA
Journal
Publishing
Practices
and
Standards

HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the
European Open Science infrastructure)
Adding metrics more sensitive to actual usage, e.g.
annotations

Increase in open peer review
Peer review
But promising centralized services not reliable for community,
e.g. publons
Ubiquity producing ‘streamlined review’
Papers rejected on non-quality grounds (e.g. scope) can be
automatically passed with reviews to other suitable journals
About to be launched for psychology, linguistics, political
science and anthropology

Online, collaborative authoring tools are appearing, e.g.
Authorea, Overleaf
Open authoring
Ubiquity waiting on governance before integrating
Ubiquity integrating Substance through collaboration with the
Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

Legacy publishers have lobbied against the
right to electronically read even already
purchased content.
Text and data mining
Ubiquity has taken part in the EU-funded
FutureTDM project, to collect evidence of
the importance of TDM: www.futuretdm.eu
October release of the ubiquity platform will include bulk
download of PDF and XML for TDM, and links to profiles for
common TDM tools, e.g. ContentMine.

Ubiquity is committed to releasing its entire platform as OSS.
Open access goes with open source
Coko’s xpub journal platform only being worked on by OA
publishers now, to betterment of all:

New funding models
Consortium distribution model

A new consortium model
• Cost per library is the same as the average APC
from a large publisher (ca. €2,000)
• Participating libraries effectively purchase all
content from the partner network, and can
therefore accession it properly
• Full MARC records provided
• On-demand COUNTER reporting

All for the cost of one average APC
Consortium distribution model

Supporters pledge to pay anything from $1 to $100 per month
In return they are offered token rewards, e.g.
$20 Access to live webinars/Skype chats with authors
$5 Name mentioned on website
$10 Physical items like t-shirts
$1 standard supporter, website says “thank you”

Legacy publishers
This is purely window-dressing, as behind the scenes heavy
anti-open access and open science lobbying continues.
Working towards a transition to open access
"At Elsevier, we remain ready and willing to collaborate with all
stakeholders to advance the transition to an open access world. The
pace of change will ultimately be driven by researchers and the choices
they make about how they wish to disseminate their research outputs.
We can help them embrace open access by working closely with
funders and research institutions to move beyond advocacy to
possibility."
Gemma Hersh
Vice President, Policy and Communications

Community governance and trust
All institutional customers
Must demonstrate community
values and provide guarantees
Determine who we will integrate
and work with
STEERING BOARD
Vote on significant investment
or acquisition
PARTNERSHIP RULES

the future

Machine readability
• Standard article XML for text mining
• Machine readable articles with RDF/HTML5
• Copyright reform is critical
• Machine readable data citation

Broadening access through ubiquity
• Already adding all content to wikidata
• Adding contextual maps to content
• Central platform with summary video content

General predictions
• Forms of publication
/scholarly comm’s to
become completely
fluid
• A publishing ecosystem
rather than ‘publishers’
• A large-scale distributed effort to shift to full OA
• Everything will
explode/dissolve

Developments in Researcher-led, Open Access Publishing

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