This document presents a librarian's perspective on open access (OA) publishing, highlighting its evolution, definitions, and the regulatory landscape in the UK. It discusses various stakeholders' views, including those of academics, institutions, and publishers, along with the financial implications and compliance challenges posed by policies like those from RCUK and HEFCE. The document aims to advocate for open access by outlining its benefits for research accessibility and the broader academic community.

1. Open Access
(from one librarian’s
perspective)
@OpenResLDN – 19 January 2015
Chris Banks
@chrisbanks
Director of Library Services
Imperial College London

2. A note about this presentation
This is generalised and personalised view formed through experience
working at two UK HEIs, through involvement in national and international
discussions, and from my readings of a tiny fraction of the OA literature
out there
The presentation attempts to look at things in the round: from the policy
perspective, that of academics in different disciplines, from the institutional
perspective (everything from operational to academic reward systems),
from the perspectives of publishers and learned societies. It also looks
briefly at standards and systems developments
Today’s focus is on the publication research findings. We can cover
research data another time!

3. The traditional funding / finding / publishing / using cycle
• Funder/institution funds research
• Researcher writes up findings of research
• Researcher chooses best journal to publish
• (other) researchers undertake (free) peer review of article
• Journal editor says “yes, we’ll publish”
• Researcher says “yippee”
• Publisher says “sign this before we publish”
• Researcher says “Oh, all right then” and all too frequently signs away ©
• Publisher publishes research
• Publisher sells research to institutions, funders, and to other academics
• Researcher cannot (legally)
• Make research available on their website or through their repository
• Distribute copies to class
• Etc.
• Research is not openly available. Top publishers (and shareholders) benefit
and also further exploit rights obtained through © assignation

4. Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)
“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make
possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the
willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their
research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry
and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good
they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-
reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access
to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious
minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate
research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor
and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be,
and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual
conversation and quest for knowledge”
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

5. Definition of Open Access
• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free
of most copyright and licensing restrictions
• OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view
fees) and permission barriers (most copyright and licensing
restrictions)
Peter Suber, Open Access Overview http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

6. OA is not new – it is 20 years old

7. Open access is usually described by colour
Gold
• Open access immediately
on publication
• Publisher’s version via the
publisher’s website
• May be a hybrid journal or
a wholly “Pure Gold” OA
journal
• A payment normally is
made – APC (article
processing charge)
Green
• Author’s version (should be
the final peer reviewed
text)
• Published in a disciplinary
or institutional repository
• Time elapse between
publication of publisher
version & OA version
anything up to 36 months

8. Many journals have gold and green options
Gold = immediate availability to the world,
easily found via publisher/journal website.
Hybrid Gold = subscription journal with both
Green and Gold (APC) options
Green = (potentially) delayed publication to the
world and not (currently) always easy to find.
Normally not the publisher’s version

9. POLICY ENVIRONMENT

10. Research Councils UK (RCUK) Policy
• From 2005 RCUK sought to encourage open access
publishing
• The focus was on the academic
• Article Processing Charges could be paid from
grants
• But
• Low take up by academics.

11. Wellcome Trust and Open Access
• From 2006 Wellcome fund APCs
• Also mandate deposit in PubMedCentral
• Currently compliance sits at around 70% (only)
• Wellcome are now implementing sanctions for those
non compliant academics seeking further grants

12. Accelerating OA in the UK: the Finch Report
• 2011: Dame Janet Finch was commissioned to lead a group to explore
how to accelerate the adoption of Open Access to publicly funded
research
• Summer 2012 “the Finch Report” Published
• Author-pays model preferred and Publication Fund set up to
encourage adoption of OA by explicitly funding APCs for immediate
CC-BY publication where possible
• September 2012: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
endorses the report (and allocates £10m pump prime funding)
• Autumn 2012 RCUK announces new policy to take effect April 2013
• Institutions awarded funding on the basis of Research Council grant
income to support the payment of APCs on journal articles and
conference proceedings where RCUK acknowledged as funder
• Target 45% in the first year- assumed APC £2000

13. Followed swiftly by: HEFCE policy for post REF2014
• HEFCE REF policy published on 31st March 2014
states that for any journal article or conference
proceeding accepted for publication in a volume with
an ISSN from 1 April 2016 to be eligible for the next
REF [REF2020?] the Final Author Version/Accepted
Author Manuscript must have been deposited in an
institutional or subject repository and made
discoverable within three months of acceptance
for publication.

14. HEFCE policy eclipses all other policies for UK academics
Image courtesy of John Norman, CUL

15. There is good news (HEFCE)
• Repositories can respect embargo periods – academics can create a
compliant “closed deposit” on acceptance.
• “Closed deposits must be discoverable” – i.e. the metadata must be
discoverable
• “Closed deposits will be admissible to the REF”

16. HEFCE and RCUK policies seen together
• From 2016, for a Journal/Conference proceeding publication to be
eligible for submission to the next REF it must meet the following
minimum criteria:
• Have a discoverable metadata record in a repository within 3 months
of acceptance for publication
• Have a closed deposit FAV/AAM in the repository within 3 months of
acceptance for publication
• BUT if the research was funded by RCUK/Wellcome/Horizon2020 then
the following criteria must also be met:
• Output must be available as an Open Access publication (either
Gold or Green).
• If Gold: immediately upon publication, and with the relevant
license (e.g. CC-BY)
• If Green: within the embargo period set by the funder

17. INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

18. • Senior academic leadership is essential to effect behavioural change
• High level committees drawn from Research VP, Research Office,
Policy, Strategy, Library, ICT + relevant academic representation
• Advocacy, Advocacy, Advocacy – the message is still not widely
understood
• Challenges with multiple policies which are not wholly aligned,
particularly cross-border policies

20. Many Universities have established OA mandates
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/library/subjectsandsupport/spiral/oamandate

21. ACADEMIC RESPONSES

22. Responses vary by discipline but broadly speaking look like this:
• Sciences & Medicine likely most engaged
• Engineering and Maths less so
• Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – even less so
Individual responses
• On a spectrum between passionately engaged and
unaware/disinterested/opposed
• Academics are still rewarded by publication in high impact journals, so
minimal motivation to change behaviours
• Academics (and their institutions) like the elitism of publishing in high
impact journals
• Beleaguered: yet more constraints, more reporting requirements,
perceived less time for research, perceived less funding for research

23. PUBLISHER RESPONSES

24. A different (and threatening?) business model
• Even with the
development of the
technology, the journal
publishing model has
evolved relatively little in
the last 350 years!

25. Anxious to protect and grow revenue streams

26. • UK funding is “transitional” but some evidence suggests publishers are
welcoming a growth in hybrid gold
• Challenge with license applications – some publishers will accept APC
payments but allow the academic to choose a non compliant license
• New publishing business models are emerging = exciting as well as
temporarily disruptive
• “Pure Gold” does not necessarily mean low impact factor (e.g. PLoS)
• New government-led research into monograph publishing
• Some quality monograph publishers actively engaging in OA schemes
(e.g. Knowledge Unlatched)

27. LIBRARY ACTIVITIES

28. Library roles to support OA
• Contributing to the work of institutional implementation groups
• Awareness raising amongst colleagues
• Awareness raising amongst academics and students
• Working with other departments, including ICT and Research Office,
on the requirements for management of the process
• Maintenance of web pages, FAQs and links
• Running the service to manage the payment of Article Processing
Charges (and learning from that process)
• Working collectively to influence publishers
• Working collectively to develop shared resources
• Working collectively to develop/ implement standards (e.g. ORCID,
FundRef, DataCite, RIOXX)
• Working with systems developers to simplify and integrate processes

29. Open Access Funds managed at Imperial 2013-14
• Wellcome £216,000
• RCUK fund: £1,150,458
• Imperial College Fund: £650,000

32. Library support by type of OA
Gold
• Management and allocation
of the publication funds
• Supporting academics to
ensure funder compliance
• Record keeping and reporting
• Working with colleagues on
workflows and systems to
manage many transactions
• Checking whether the
publisher has published OA
and attached correct license
Green
• Support for self-archiving
in the institutional
repository
• Repository developments
to ensure metadata is
discoverable
• Metrics (downloads,
altmetrics, etc)
• “request” button for closed
deposits

33. Open Access workflow: a pre-HEFCE example

34. Metrics and the demonstration of the impact of OA

35. Article level metrics

36. The Library goal: making it as easy and attractive as
possible for authors to comply, deposit and get cited
People
• Be more pro-active about collecting
author versions of papers (e.g. at
time of request of APC)
• Consider a mediated service
Engage via Symplectic notifications
• Encourage academics to challenge
publishers about the green options
• Consider in-house publishing
options
• Institutional subscription to ORCID –
making automation of processes
much simpler - now rolled out to all
Imperial researchers
• Consider which licensing options
might increase flexibility of deposit
Systems
• Consider making Symplectic Elements
the single point of deposit, and simplify
the interface
• Automated population of SPIRAL with
metadata and harvested articles
• Development of SPIRAL to support the
next REF (e.g. working with publishers)
• Develop and visualise metrics and
bibliometrics
• Interoperability between systems is
necessary, as are version control tools
• Upgrade Sherpa Romeo to:
• Standardise publishers’ license texts
to deliver meaning
• Develop a Institutional Repository
Specific API

37. Challenges
• Scalability of processing, both for gold and to support
green self-deposit
• Creating a touch point with the repository for
FAV/AAM to meet the new HEFCE requirements –
easy for those applying for APCs but challenging for
those with no intention to publish Gold OA
• Working with publishers to achieve “offsetting” deals
• Enduring hybrid gold – affordability question
• Academic reward systems not contributing to
behaviour change

39. Picture sources
Slide 1: Having the cake too soon? slubdresden, CC BY
Slide 14: John Norman, Cambridge University Library. Used with
permission.
Slide 24: Le Blog du Bibliophile, des Bibliophiles, de la Bibliophilie et des
Livres Anciens