From closed to Open Access This document summarizes how open access publishing is changing the way research is disseminated. It provides a brief history of scholarly publishing, outlines the benefits and limitations of traditional closed access models, and defines open access. Open access provides free online access to peer-reviewed research and is growing due to funder and institutional mandates. While it increases access and sharing, open access faces challenges around quality control and funding publication fees. The future may see greater open access support and alternative models like preprint servers and fluid embedded papers.

1. From closed to Open Access
Jay Patel
Publications Development Director
Dove Medical Press
June 13, 2013
How Open Access is changing the
way we publish

2. DISCLOSURE
Jay Patel is a full-time employee of Dove Medical
Press.
The opinions expressed here are my own and
not necessarily those of Dove Medical Press.

3. “Information wants to be free because it has
become so cheap to distribute, copy, and
recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be
expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable
to the recipient. That tension will not go away.”
Stuart Brand - The Media Lab: Inventing the Future
at MIT - 1987

4. A brief history
• January 1665 – Denis de Sallo’s Journal des Sçavans (world’s first
journal)
• March 1665 – Henry Oldenberg’s Philosophical Transactions
(world’s first research journal) licensed by Royal Society of London -
first recorded instance of ‘peer review’ by Council of the Royal
Society
• 1731 - Medical Essays and Observations, the first fully peer-
reviewed journal, is launched by the Royal Society of Edinburgh
• 1848 - The American Association for the Advancement of Science is
founded. AAAS publishes the journal Science and is the largest
general scientific society in the world
• 1869 - Nature publishes its first issue
• 1880 - Science publishes its first issue
• 1947 - Elsevier, the longtime publishing giant, launches its first
international journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta
Source: Ben Mudrak Scholarly Publishing: A Brief History Jan 26, 2013

5. A brief history
• 1990 - Postmodern Culture becomes the first online-only journal with no printed
version available
• 1991 - arXiv, the science pre-print server, is launched
• 2000 - BioMed Central published its first free online article
• 2002. Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) launched by the Open Society Institute
• 2002. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute committed itself to cover the publication
costs for fee-based open-access journals
• 2003 - The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is founded
• 2004 – Dove Medical Press is founded
• 2006 - PLOS ONE launched. As of December 2011, PLOS ONE was publishing 70 articles
per day!
• 2010 - The altmetrics manifesto, describing potential new ways to gauge the impact of
research beyond citations and impact factors, is written
• 2012 - Several innovative new journals, including F1000 Research, PeerJ, and eLife, are
launched. These new journals are experimenting with new forms of peer review, new
business models, and new funding sources
Source: Ben Mudrak Scholarly Publishing: A Brief History Jan 26, 2013
Peter Suber Timeline of the Open Access Movement Feb 9, 2009

6. Current state of scholarly publishing
• 25,000 scholarly journals
• 1.5 million articles/yr
• 3% annual growth
• 1 million unique authors/yr
• 10-15 million readers at more
than 10,000 institutions
• > 1.5 billion downloads
(2007/8)
• $8 billion - 2008 revenue
english STM journal publishing
Source: Mabe MA (2009):Scholarly Publishing. European
Review 17(1): 3-22

7. Conventional publication model
Researcher has
an idea, get
funding, conduct
research, gets a
result and writes
a papers
Submits paper to
a journal and
publisher
evaluates and
assigns peer-
reviewers
Paper is peer-
reviewed
Editor reviews
peer-reviewer
comments and
either accepts,
rejects or asks
for revisions
If accepted
journal publishes
paper on the
web and later in
print
If rejected submit to
another journal
Publisher retains copyright, sells
subscriptions or access, sells reprints,
charges for permissions

8. Benefits of the conventional model
• A proven model with 350 plus years of history
• Reliable scholarship
• Written by experts
• Stringent peer-review helps weed out junk
• Assessment has already been done
• People with high level filtering expertise, and
no search engine can match that
• Significant advances seen more easily

9. So where did OA come from?
Or the cons of the conventional model
• There are five strands to the OA argument:
– the library-funding crisis
– that lack of access impedes research
– the right to access publicly funded research
– the needs of the developing world (HINARI)
– the profits of scholarly societies and publishers
Source: Robinson A (2006):Open access: the view of a commercial publisher. Journal of
Thrombosis and Haemostasis 4(7): 1454-1460

10. What is Open Access?
• Accuracy not significance
• Digital
• Online
• Immediate
• Greater transparency
• Free to read
• Free of most copyright and
licensing restrictions
• Compatible with peer review,
prestige, quality, career-
advancement and indexing
• Not free to produce
Source: Peter Suber Open Access Overview

11. Three flavors of OA
• Gold Open Access
– pay-to-publish (66% of OA
journals do not charge)
• Green Open Access
– self-archiving (60% of time
researchers can archive right
away, no embargo)
• Hybrid Open Access
– some of the articles are open
access

12. Source: Richard Van Noorden Open access: The true
cost of science publishing – Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-
of-science-publishing-1.12676

13. OA by the numbers
• OA journals (Gold OA)
– 8,817. March 27, 2013. The number of peer-reviewed OA journals
listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
– 1,461 (or 16.6%). March 27, 2013. The number of CC-BY licensed
journals in the DOAJ
– 5,858 (or 66.4%). March 27, 2013. The number of no-fee journals in
the DOAJ
– 3.4. February 5, 2013. Average number of new journals added each
day in 2012 to the DOAJ
– 181. June 6, 2013. Number of publishers offering hybrid OA options
according to SHERPA
Source: Peter Suber Open Access Directory - http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_by_the_numbers

14. OA by the numbers
• OA repositories (Green OA)
– 2,256. February 10, 2013. Number of OA, OAI-compliant repositories listed by
OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).
– 1,100 / 25,000,000 records. February 10, 2013. Numbers of OA, OAI-compliant
contributors / records harvested (indexed and searched) by OAIster.
– 2,600,000. February 10, 2013. Number of free full-text articles on deposit at
PubMed Central.
• 1217. February 10, 2013. Number of journals depositing all articles in
PubMed Central.
• 247. February 10, 2013. Number of journals depositing NIH-funded
articles in PubMed Central.
– 10. March 15, 2005. Average number of minutes it takes to self-archive one
article, according to Les Carr and Stevan Harnad, Keystroke Economy: A Study
of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
Source: Peter Suber Open Access Directory - http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_by_the_numbers

15. OA copyright licenses
• Attribution
CC BY
• Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA
• Attribution-NoDerivs
CC BY-ND
• Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC
• Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND
SOURCE: OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION
Source: John Wilbanks Licence restrictions: A fool's errand - Nature -
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7442/full/495440a.html

16. Source: Richard Van Noorden Open access: The true cost of science publishing – Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

17. Publishers costs of OA
• Hindawi – published 22,000 papers in 2012 at a
cost of $290/article
• Ubiquity Press – average costs ar $300/article
• PeerJ – costs are in “low hundreds of dollars” per
article
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
– need to charge $3,700/article to cover costs if
OA
• Nature – estimates internal costs at $30K - $40K
per article
Source: Richard Van Noorden Open access: The true cost of science publishing – Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

18. How is OA changing the way we publish
• Governments, funders and academic institutions are making funds
available for OA through grants, OA funds or buying memberships
through publishers
• These same groups mandate that articles be made OA immediately
or after an embargo period (typically 12 months)
– 172 institutional mandates, 37 sub-institutional mandates and 81 funder mandates
(ROARMAP - http://roarmap.eprints.org/)
– NIH, Institute of Education Sciences, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, RCUK,
European Research Council, Inserm, Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical
Institute, Max Planck Society, MIT, Harvard, University of California , Columbia,
NYU, Stanford
• A growing number of conventional publishers are offering OA
options (June 6, 2013 - 181 according to SHERPA RoMEO -
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html)

19. How is OA changing the way we publish
• OA has led to the decoupling of the journal and the article
– Impact factor is loosing its impact
– Article level metrics
– Greater prestige for the article
• Authors are retaining copyright and greater control over their own
research
• Reduced article peer-review, processing and publication timelines
• Increased use of enhanced media, social media, sharing and re-use
• Feedback is immediate and discussion is open to all
• Allows for greater experimentation
– Pre-print servers (arXiv)
– Post publication peer review (F1000 Research)
– Open peer review (BMJ Open)
– Publish referee reports (EMBO, BMC)

20. Limitations of OA
• Prestige - base evaluation and the value of
researcher and research on citation indices and
the Journal Impact Factor
• Quality control – not all OA publishers are equal
• APCs (Article Processing Charges) – not all
researchers can finance their publications, need
for increased funding
• Fewer options among journals with status/high
impact factor

21. What does the future hold?
• Greater funding and support for OA (gold and
green)
• Reduction or an all out elimination of embargos
• Fluid papers not static PDFs
– “Paper of the future” embedded with media, raw data
and analysis tools1
– Article of the future
http://www.articleofthefuture.com/
• eBay for scientific research, highest bidder gets
the paper
Source: 1. Michael Eisen The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing, March 28, 2013 -
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346