'Academic Spring' discusses the current open access debate in scholarly publishing, highlighting the significant profits made by publishers and the increasing burden on university libraries. It emphasizes the challenges faced by researchers in accessing published work, the influence of commercial interests, and the potential benefits of open access models for enhancing research visibility. This document also critiques traditional publishing practices and explores alternative publishing methods, while encouraging a rethinking of scholarly communication and the role of technology in the publishing landscape.

1. 'Academic spring' or media hype? The
open access debate and what it means
for researchers

3. How often do you encounter that sort of screen?
Have you ever bought the article at the price offered? How often have
you even momentarily considered doing so?
JSTOR report turning away 150 million access requests a year
WHY do you encounter that sort of screen? SHOULD you encounter
that sort of screen?
”The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing
submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing
manuscripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating
journals; and of course archiving. And the end result acts as a calling
card and mark of quality, helping readers find content that is relevant
to them and is trusted.” - Graham Taylor, UK Publisher’s Association
Profits are what keep this system turning. But what are the scale of
these profits?

5. £724m profit from revenues of £2b in 2010 = 36% of revenue taken as
profit
“There is the scale of those profits, regularly and consistently over 35%.
In most other markets this would be a signal of market failure [...]
Making 40% in one year is the sign of a company ahead of the curve,
but in a functioning market returns usually hover around 5-15% when
averaged over time” - Cameron Neylon
How did this come about?
As publishing companies get larger through mergers and acquisitions,
scholarly publishing is increasingly dominated by major commercial
players which are able to use their market power to raise prices.
“Although there are over 2,000 publishers of academic journals, no
other publisher beyond the big three accounts for more than a 3%
share of the journal market. Moreover, the big three control the most
prestigious journals with the largest circulations.” - McGuigan and
Russell

6. Commercial publishers play a role in publishing over 60% of all peer
reviewed journals.
Case study: English-language Economics journals
30 English-language journals in 1960, mainly published by not-
for-profit publishers.
By 1980, 120 journals were evenly divided between not-for-
profits and commercials.
By 2000, there were 300 journals, more than two-thirds of which
were published by commercial firms.
The bargaining power of libraries is weak because they are acting on
behalf of faculty - an economy of prestige means that libraries MUST
acquire certain journals.

7. The costs imposed on university libraries by publishers have risen
continuously.
This increase has vastly outstripped both inflation AND the quantity of
journal provision.
Many of the bulk deals which are responsible for expansion in the
quantity of journal provision have built-in price increases of 5% or
more a year.
The Research Information Network calculated after a 2009 survey that
the fall in the value of the pound had brought a further increase in
costs of over 15% for many universities.
Given that a decade of growth in budgets is now giving way to
expected cuts across the sector, something has to give up.
The steady growth of journal costs calls into question the
sustainability of current levels of journal provision.

8. “Annual cost for
journals from
these providers now
approaches $3.75M”
“Some journals cost
as much as $40,000
per year, others in
the tens of
thousands”
“Prices for online
content from two
providers have
increased by about
145% over the
past six years”
“Even though
scholarly output
continues to grow
and publishing can
be expensive, profit
margins of 35% and
more suggest that
the prices we must
pay do not solely
result from an
increasing supply of
new articles”

9. As if that weren’t enough...
Commercial publishing is reliant on unpaid labour in the form of
editors and reviewers
The social structures of both the modern university and of commercial
publishing have combined to crystallise a structure of perverse career
incentives - is increasing scholarly output a good thing?
Public funds are being used to undertake research yet the results of
this research are often far from public
Researchers are being pressured to demonstrate ‘impact’ yet their
research is rarely available to those outside academia.
The length of the process from submission to publication curtails the
relevance of academic debate
The fragmentation of the knowledge system means that much time is
waste accessing papers even when they are available

10. The ranking given by ‘Generation Y’ researchers in 2011 to access issues as a constraint on their research.
This shows mean ranking on a scale from 1 to 5 with 5 being the most severe.
Source: JISC Researchers of Tomorrow

11. How do you deal with these issues?
47% of the Generation Y doctoral researchers ask a colleague
elsewhere to get the article for them e.g. facebook, twitter, e-
mail
43% said they make do with the abstract
This impedes the quality of research i.e. either ignoring an
otherwise desirable paper or making do with the abstract
Or it adds to the TIME costs created by paywalls
The time taken to ask for a paper and someone else to send it
might be insignificant but it is significant over the system as a
whole.

12. The
Campaign

13. The Research Works Act: “No
Federal agency may adopt,
implement, maintain, continue,
or otherwise engage in any
policy, program, or other activity
that--(1) causes, permits, or
authorises network
dissemination of any private-
sector research work without the
prior consent of the publisher of
such work; or (2) requires that
any actual or prospective author,
or the employer of such an
actual or prospective author,
assent to network dissemination
of a private-sector research
work.”
It was an attempt to prevent
PUBLIC funding bodies from
mandating that PUBLICLY
funded research be made
available to, er, the
PUBLIC...
Elsevier dropped their support
for the RWA but denied it had
anything to do with the petition.

14. The Alternatives

15. “What is Open Access?”
Providing unrestricted digital access to peer reviewed scholarly research
The role of digital technology - the only costs involved in distributing
exact copies are infrastructural
Open Access potentially increases research impact - it DEFINITELY
increases research visibility and downloads
Open Access is attracting large scale institutional support
“We believe open access provides the best opportunity to maximise the
return on our investment. Why would we spend £600 million a year on
research, the outputs of research would be behind a pay wall? It doesn’t
make sense” - Robert Kiley, Wellcome Trust
Wellcome want to “create an atmosphere and an environment where
sharing research outputs, making them open and publicly available,
makes good sense to the researcher”

16. “My department spends about £5bn each year
funding academic research – and it is because we
believe in the fundamental importance of this
research that we have protected the science
budget for the whole of this parliament.”
“Moving from an era in which taxpayer-funded
academic articles are stuck behind paywalls for
much of their life to one in which they are
available free of charge will not be easy. There
are clear trade-offs. If those funding research pay
open-access journals in advance, where will this
leave individual researchers who can't cover the
cost? If we improve the world's access to British
research, what might we get in response? Does a
preference for open access mean different
incentives for different disciplines?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/01/open-
free-access-academic-research

17. Pervasive
confusions &
uncertainties
about Open
Access
Source: JISC Researchers
of Tomorrow

18. Gold Open Access
Authors pay the publishing costs upfront i.e. researchers pay
publishers for opening up access to their papers
Wellcome Trust found that this amounted to $2,500 per paper on
average for a sample of 4000 they funded
Normally per article published but some per manuscript or per author
Funds from either institutions or funding bodies
But what about independent researchers? Risk of vicious cycle when
you need publications to win a job and/or research funding
Some have alleged that potential conflicts of interest can exist in gold
open access models e.g. corporate sponsorship of author fees
Does this resolve the problem? Or does it allow a broken system to
continue while transferring the costs from libraries to authors and
universities?

19. Green Open Access
Authors self-archive papers in open-access repositories (either a university
archives or a central forum) usually after an embargo period
Sometimes pre-print publication, sometimes peer reviewed post-print
This involves a much more radical rethinking of scholarly communication -
it also challenges the business model, even with an embargo
When publishing costs were much higher, it made sense to FILTER prior
to publication. With digital technology, does this still hold true?
“The order of things in broadcast is ‘filter, then publish’. The order in
communities is ‘publish, then filter’. If you go to a dinner party, you don’t
submit your potential comments to the hosts, so that they can tell you
which ones are good enough to air before the group, but this is how
broadcast works every day. Writers submit their stories in advance, to be
edited or rejected before the public ever sees them. Participants in a
community, by contrast, say what they have to say, and the good is sorted
from the mediocre after the fact.” - Clay Shirky

20. Critique
“The Open Access movement should be seen for what it is – nothing
more but nothing less than a consumerist revolt, academic style ...
Nothing in this dispute bears on questions concerning how one might
democratise knowledge production itself” - Steve Fuller, University of
Warwick
“Technologists also believe that publishing is transportable — anyone
can be a publisher ... I may think I’m a good cook because I can
occasionally prepare a surprisingly tasty meal on a Sunday night by
following someone else’s recipe and using the right ingredients, but
that by no means translates into my ability to create, finance, run,
and manage a restaurant. If you’re a “cooking technologist,” you think
all you need is an oven, pans, and ingredients.” - Kent Anderson, The
Scholarly Kitchen

21. The
Consequences

22. Scholarly Publishing and the Prestige
Economy
As scholarly output continues to expand, the efficacy of scholarly
communication in general declines
It’s unlikely anyone outside the academy will read us but it’s
increasingly unlikely anyone WITHIN the academy will read us
Communicating vs Credentialing? Resources are allocated on the basis
of the status hierarchies encoded into the publishing system
But these are profoundly fallible -> a journal’s prestige as a cypher for
intellectual quality, impact factor as a cypher for, well, making an
impact
These serve a real purpose (filtering) but they also perpetuate a state
of affairs which, in part, makes filtering necessary
This structural dimension grants these problems an intractability which
is sometimes insufficiently acknowledged in debates about reform

23. At root it’s a WEIRD business model...
“Publishers have a mediating role in the
industry. They collect, package and
disseminate the articles produced by faculty
authors. The primary user of the journals is
the very same group that produced journal
content – faculty of colleges and universities.
After journal content is consumed by the
faculty/scholars, new knowledge and research
is produced and continues the cycle.”
McGuigan and Russell (2008)
And this weird business model has very real day-to-day consequences for researchers...

24. Do we definitely need the intermediaries?
Other spheres of cultural production have seen radically disruptive
processes of disintermediation.
Self-archiving -> are your publications deposited in an institutional
repository? Do you make them available online? Pre prints and post prints
- technicalities of copyright and personal choice.
One option is DIY journal publishing
Open source software like Open Journal Systems and DPubS mean
startup and running costs are lower than ever before
Quality control is built into these systems - they still need (unpaid) editors
& reviewers but dynamics of participation can be very different.
However there are inevitable limits to how sustainable and generalisable
this kind of DIY activity can be.
Without allocation of resources, quality WILL suffer. Institutional support
is needed

25. The University ePress?
Libraries would be the main financial beneficiaries of the reduced
journal costs ensuing from a move away from commercial publishing.
Digitisation programmes and repository initiatives have left a body of
expertise within libraries directly applicable to ePublishing.
Exciting trends in this direction in North American and Australian higher
education
The Digital Change programme at the University of Warwick spent
much of this year exploring the viability of setting up a digital press
It’s possible, though far from certain, UK higher education could follow
Strategic benefits to universities - particularly the early adopters
There may also be a role for professional associations and non-profit
collectives

26. Why do you publish?
Career progression - CV + REF
Influencing debates in your area
Sharing ideas with a wider audience
The options for (1) have narrowed, options for (2) and (3) have
expanded
Increasing necessity to be reflexive i.e. forming your OWN publishing
plan, guided by your own concerns, rather than accepting common
sense.
Balancing values against instrumentality when planning publishing
Keeping up to date with these issues: the landscape is changing rapidly
Having an online presence & using it to promote your work - uncertain
where publishing will go but digital dimensions seem assured

27. Online Reading
LSE Impact Blog - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/
Cameron Neylon- http://cameronneylon.net/
The Scholarly Kitchen - http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/
Bjorn Brembs - http://bjoern.brembs.net/
Stephen Curry - http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/
Scholarly Publishing Bundle - http://bundlr.com/b/scholarly-publishing-
open-access-and-the-academic-spring