Trends in Scholarly Publishing
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The document summarizes information presented at an ETH Zurich event on trends in scholarly publishing. It discusses resources held by the ETH library, rising journal prices, usage statistics, open access models, mandates and copyright issues. Open access refers to literature that is digital, online and free of charge. It allows users to download, copy, distribute and print articles. The "green road" involves self-archiving articles in repositories, while the "gold road" refers to publishing in open access journals which may charge article processing fees.
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Trends in Scholarly Publishing
- 1. ETH Zurich Information Event organised by ETH-Bibliothek and VMI 5 February 2013 Dr. Arlette Piguet Barbara Hirschmann ETH-Bibliothek 1 TRENDS IN SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
- 3. RESOURCES AND DOCUMENTS HELD BY THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK Collections: Architecture, Civil Engineering, Engineering Sciences, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, System-oriented Natural Sciences, Management and Social Sciences Journals electronic format 3 current, printed format 13 900 5 330 Databases 149 Books, reference works e-Books printed papers (monographs and bound volumes) 86 000 2 838 000 Dissertations, reports documents ETH E-Collection reports und microfiches 25 800 2 213 000 Maps incl. plans 402 000 … … …
- 4. 4 ACQUISITIONS BUDGET OF THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK 14% 9% 3% 13% 60% journals (online and print) databases e-books monographs and serials other
- 5. 5 JOURNAL PRICES Journal of applied polymer science $ $ Science Impact Factor: 1.54 $ = $ Impact Factor: 1.3 = Journal of non-crystalline solids $ Impact Factor: 31,2 $
- 6. 6 THE SERIALS CRISIS Annual US journal price increases compared to Consumer Price Index (CPI). Source: http://allenpress.com/system/files/pdfs/library/2012_AP_JPS.pdf
- 7. 4,000,000 3,500,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 7 USAGE OF PRODUCTS OF THE ETH-BIBLIOTHEK 0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Loans (printed documents) Document delivery Accesses databases Accesses licensed electronic journals Accesses ETH E-Collection Accesses e-books
- 8. 8 THE COST OF KNOWLEDGE Source: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
- 9. Who is responsible for quality control for open access publications? 9 OPEN ACCESS: STATEMENTS, QUESTIONS AND FIERS «We are in the hands of the publishers.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) Who pays for an open access publication? «Ein Artikel muss im Web of Science zitiert werden, sonst ist es verlorene Literatur.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) «Es darf nicht zum Zwang werden, man sollte die Wahl haben.» (Umfrage ETH-Bibliothek, 2012) How works peer review with open access? How can an open access publications reach a suitable reputation? With open access copyright is in danger. Why should I publish open access?
- 10. What is Open Access? 10 OPEN ACCESS accessible without costs for the reader «Open access […] literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.» (Peter Suber, 2012) possibility to reuse • Download • Copy • Distribute • Print • Search • …
- 11. Traditional Publication Cycle 11 OPEN ACCESS Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library
- 12. Traditional Publication Cycle 12 OPEN ACCESS Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library peer review layout, copy-editing distribution delivery selection & acquistion Paid by taxpayer Paid by taxpayer
- 13. Open Access – The Green Road 13 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Author (as producer) Publisher (as recipient) delivery Publication in Bookseller / Library Supplier Author Library Peer Review layout, copy-editing distribution selection & acquistion Repository
- 14. Self-Archiving in Open Access repositories 14 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Institutional Repository Disciplinary Repository OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) • Physics • Mathematics • Computer Science • Quantitative Biology • Quantitative Finance • Statistics
- 15. 15 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD
- 16. 16 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Persistent Identifier Version control Free of charge
- 17. 17 OPEN ACCESS – THE GREEN ROAD Persistent Identifier (DOI) Long term archiving Free of charge Up-to-date download statistics Metadata transfer to E-Citations When publishing in ETH E-Collection you comply with Open Access mandates of ETH Zurich, SNSF, and the European Commission!
- 18. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Publishing in Open Access Journals • Quality Control (Peer Review) • Different funding mechanisms 18 • Article Processing Charges • Author retains Copyright (standard licence: CC-BY)
- 19. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Open Access – The Golden Road 1. Choose a Journal 2. Avoid publishing with predatory OA Publishers: 19 – Beall’s List: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ – OASPA: Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
- 20. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Funding $ 500,- • Research Funds • ETH Zurich memberships $ 800,- $ 1760,- • Open Access Option («Hybrid Journals»): Not financed by ETH 20 Zurich! e.g. Springer Open Choice, Elsevier Sponsored Articles, Wiley Online Open, ….
- 21. 21 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Correlation of APCs with Journal’s Impact Factor Source: Theo Andrew (2012): Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue70/andrew.
- 22. 22 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 23. 23 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD 18.00% 16.00% 14.00% 12.00% 10.00% 8.00% 6.00% 4.00% 2.00% 0.00% 2008 2009 2010 2011 Delayed OA Hybrid OA In full immediate OA journals Source: based on Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 24. 24 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: Laakso and Björk BMC Medicine 2012, 10:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
- 25. OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Current Developments • Great Britain 25 • Research Councils UK: direct funding to Universities for financing APCs from 2013 • European Union • Horizon 2020: Possibility for funding of Article Processing Charges after project ends
- 26. New Publishing Models: Megajournals 26 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD Source: MacCallum CJ (2011) Why ONE Is More Than 5. PLoS Biol 9(12): e1001235. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001235
- 27. New Publishing Models 27 OPEN ACCESS – THE GOLDEN ROAD
- 28. OPEN ACCESS MANDATES The Open Access Movement & ETH 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to 28 Scientific Knowledge 2006 ETH Zurich signs Berlin Declaration 2008 ETH Zurich adopts Open Access Policy
- 29. ETH Zurich Open Access Policy (2008) 29 OPEN ACCESS MANDATES “The ETH Zurich requires of staff and postgraduate students to post electronic copies of any research papers that have been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (post-prints), theses and other scientific research output (monographs, reports, proceedings, videos etc.), to be made freely available as soon as possible into the institutional repository ETH E-Collection, if there are no legal objections. The ETH Zurich expects authors where possible, to retain their copyright. For detailed information see the rules of the ETH E-Collection.” “The ETH Zurich encourages their researchers to publish in a suitable Open Access journal where one exists and will cover a part of the publication costs.” www.open-access.ethz.ch
- 30. OPEN ACCESS MANDATES Open Access in EU-funded projects • FP7: Open-Access pilot • Grant agreements in seven areas contain special clause 39 30 «Open Access» • Articles originating from these projects must be deposited to an online repository latest 6 / 12 months after publication (sciences / social sciences & humanities) • Article Processing Charges are eligible (limited to duration of project)
- 31. OPEN ACCESS MANDATES Open Access Mandates – Current Developments European Union: 31 • from OA pilot in FP7 to OA mandate in Horizon 2020 United States: • NIH to withhold grant money to enforce OA policy
- 32. 32 OPEN ACCESS MANDATES Quelle: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/news/2012-12-12-JULIET-Upgrade.html [17.12.2012]
- 33. • Self-Archiving 33 • What is allowed? • How do I retain my rights? COPYRIGHT
- 34. COPYRIGHT “ETH Zurich requires of staff and postgraduate students to post electronic copies of any research papers [¨…] into the institutional repository ETH E-Collection, if there are no legal objections.” • Publishers usually allow some sort of 34 self-archiving • Where to look it up? • Copyright Transfer Agreement • SHERPA/RoMEO Database
- 35. 35 Which format? • Usually Postprint (= author’s manuscript after peer review) When? • Possible embargos between 2 and 24 months Where? • Author’s website • Institutional repository • Disciplinary repository
- 36. What does this mean? • Read the publication agreement with great care • Transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing • Publishing agreements are negotiable • Use the SPARC author addendum 36 COPYRIGHT “The ETH Zurich expects authors where possible, to retain their copyright.”
- 37. What does it mean for Preprints? 37 COPYRIGHT Preprint Postprint Publisher’s PDF Publisher’s Platform Copyright Transfer Agreement
- 38. A Vision for the future? 38 THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING Björn Brembs, Professor of Neurobiology, University of Regensburg Source: http://de.slideshare.net/brembs/some-technical-hurdles-towards-open-science Is a publishing system without journals feasible? • Peer Review? • Prestige? • Impact Factor?
- 39. Overlay Journals 39 THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING The «Episciences Project» (ArXiv Overlay Journals) “It’s a global vision of how the research community should work: we want to offer an alternative to traditional mathematics journals.” Jean-Pierre Demailly, Université de Grenoble
- 40. CHALLENGES REMAIN… • Open Access publishing is developing steadily, but 40 slowly • The financial aspects of Gold Open Access are not solved • Can financial savings be achieved? • Who will finance additional costs during the “transition period” • Can the power of the big publishers be cut down? • Green Open Access probably not to become a standard if it does not come with strong enforcement mechanisms
- 41. 41 CONTACTS www.open-access.ethz.ch http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch e-publishing@library.ethz.ch
Editor's Notes
- The ETH-Bibliothek is the largest scientific library in Switzerland and one of the leading scientific and technical libraries in Europe. It serves primarily staff and students at ETH Zurich, but is also open to the public. Total holdings: 7,6 Mio documents. Electronic journals: licensed or freely accessible Further documents: Electronic resources: 300’000 Images: electronic 170’000; printed a.o. formats: 1,8 Mio. audiovisual media: 6’500. Archive material, medals,… Most of the ressources ETH Library provides to it’s patrons are commercial publications. That means ETH Library has to pay for this information.
- In the fields of science and technology journal literature is the first information source for the researchers.
- Serials crisis: Annual increase of the journal prices above average Shrinking library budgets Is open access a solution for: Library budget problems? Access / paywall problems? Copyright permission problems? Reed Elsevier: Adjustes operating margin in %: 2007 – 2011: 31.7% 37.3%
- Perhaps you already asked yourself, why I – as a young scientist – should care about open access. For sure we won’t be able to give you full answers on all questions about open access. The main reason for it is, that the subject is often discussed very contrairiwise. But our aim of the next hour is to give you reasonalble information about the open access movement and the policy and support you can expect from ETH Zurich rsp. from ETH Library and the posibilities you have for pusblishing open access. We promise you that after this event you will be able to take part in discussions about open access. In the media and within the scientific community a lot of positive aspects are mentioned about open access: scientific communication will be much easier… Die Diskussionen zeigen, dass viele Wissenschaftler in finanzieller Hinsicht recht egoistisch denken und nur solange aufgeschlossen sind, bis sie ihr eigenes Forschungsbudget gefährdet sehen. Der Qualitätsaspekt wird u.a. bei neuen, unbekannten (Open Access) Veröffentlichungsplattformen ins Spiel gebracht, die versuchen, in Konkurrenz zu etablierten Verlagen zu treten – «The ETH-library should engage in assessing the quality of these publishers.» (D-ARCH) Open Access bedeutet schlechte Qualität Open Access ist etwas Modernes, da mache ich mit. Open Access Publikationen werden häufiger zitiert. Open Access heisst frei zugänglich. Open Access ist billig. Open Access bringt den Wissenschaftlern/Innen nichts
- In the following part of the presentation I am going to introduce you to the most important aspects of Open Access publishing and some of the recent trends that have emerged in this field. Definitions of Open Access usually highlight three aspects: Open Access literature is freely accessible over the internet It is free of charge – which does not mean that it comes without any costs, but it comes without costs for the reader And Open Access literature can be reused, because it is – or it should be – free of most copyright restrictions. This last point is important because if you have access to a work for reading but you want to translate it to another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining it with special software and so forth, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. However, if the copyright holder has used an open licence – like for example a creative commons licence – when publishing his work, you are free to copy, distribute or even adapt the work – the only condition being that you correctly attribute the work to its author. So, removing copyright restrictions is an import part of Open Access publishing and open licences play an important role in this process.
- For now, to understand how different models of Open Access Publishing work, we will first have a quick look at the traditional publication model in scholarly publishing and then see how different kinds of Open Access Publishing models have emerged as alternatives to this model.
- Traditionally, the scientific publication cycle is determined by four main actors: authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries. The publication cycle that you see here has essentially been the same for hundreds of years. Even with the advent of the internet and electronic publishing the underlying mechanisms didn’t change. Now, as you all know, this whole process from submitting a manuscript to the final publication can be quite time-consuming. First, the Peer Review process – the evaluation of an article by scientists from the same field - has to be organised and implemented. Then, the articles are typeset for a specific journal. The journals are distributed as bundles via a Library Supplier who arranges the licencing contracts with individual libraries or library consortia. And in the end, the article that you published might not even be accessible for everybody. Apart from the time aspect, there is also a financial aspect to be considered in this model: the authors of scientific articles are usually employed by public institutions. Their research output is therefore funded by taxpayers money. On the other hand, the library is forced to buy back this research output from publishers so that other scientists might read what their colleagues have written. So there is considerable investment of taxpayers money involved in this model. At the same time, as we have seen earlier, the profit that publishers can raise from this, are so high one blogger recently called them “obscene”.
- However, in the last 10 – 15 years, many institutions and libraries have built their own publishing platforms which are usually called repositories. If we look at the role of repositories in the publication cycle, publishing via a repository means bypassing publishers and booksellers because the author submits his paper directly to a library’s repository. This kind of publishing is done in parallel to publishing via the traditional model – in some disciplines authors submit their papers to a repository BEFORE publishing it with a scientific journal in others they submit it afterwards. But still – publishing your paper in a repository usually accelerates the publishing, dissemination and reception process AND it can give you a much wider audience for your research since anybody who has an internet connection can access your paper.
- Publishing in a repository is also often called self-archiving or the «green road» to Open Access Publishing – there are two possibilities for a researcher to do this: Either in an institutional repository or in a disciplinary repository (which by the way are very often also run by libraries or consortia of libraries). In the case of ETH Zurich there is our Institutional Repository – the ETH E-Collection – where every scientist that is affiliated to ETH Zurich can publish his papers. And in your case, you also have the possibility of publishing on the arXiv – which is actually one of the most used and proliferating disciplinary repositories that we have. There is also a registry of all institutional and disciplinary repositories on a website called OpenDOAR. When you publish your articles in a repository there are some important copyright issues that you have to keep in mind – I will come back to this later in the presentation.
- When we talk about the «green road» to Open Access Publishing – why don’t we take into consideration the many papers that scientists publish on their websites and that are also openly available to everybody? Of course, publishing your paper on your personal website is better than nothing. But there are some problems attached to it: One of them is citability and long term access. These publications do no usually have a persistent identifier and too often sites migrate to another place and links vanish. So if you cite such an article in your paper, there is no way you can assure your readers can have access to it to verify its content.
- On the other hand in a repository like arXiv every article that you upload is assigned a Persistent Identifier – which means that even if the site migrates to another server with new URLs – you and your readers will be able to locate the article. Another advantage of publishing on the arXiv is Version Control. This is something that is more important in some disciplines than in others. But if you need this functionality arXiv serves you very well.
- Publishing in ETH E-Collection also gives you a handful of advantages compared to other sites. Every publication is assigned a DOI, we store all publications not only in E-Collection but also transfer them to a long term archive; publication is free of charge; you can get up-date download statistics for your papers AND there is the possibility of automatically transferring the metadata of your publication to ETH E-Citations – which means you don’t have to enter them again there. Maybe most importantly for the future: When publishing in ETH E-Collection you fully comply with the Open Access mandates of your home institution, namely ETH Zurich, and the mandates of two important research funders, namely the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the European Commission. I will come back to this point later in the presentation.
- First, I would like to detail some points about the so-called «Golden Road» of Open Access Publishing. When you publish on the «Golden Road», this means that the first place to publish your work is an Open Access Publisher. When we talk about Open Access Publishers we usually mean scientific publishers, that do have a Peer Review system in place. They can have different revenues and funding mechanisms. Some OA Journals are supported by universities, scholarly societies or other institutions and don’t charges any fees. But many, especially the ones owned be scientific publishers like Springer or Elsevier, do charge so called Article Processing Charges to authors to finance their enterprise. Usually, when you publish with an Open Access Journal, you retain the full copyright to your article, which means that you can without problem publish it again in another place – something that might be problematic when you publish with a conventional subscription publisher.
- There are some helpful websites and databases that you can you use, when you are not already familiar with the Open Access Publishers in your discipline. The most comprehensive database of Open Access Journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals. It currently lists more than 8500 journals. It can be difficult however to choose a journal from this huge database if you don’t know what you are looking for. So a better way to find a journal might still be to ask your colleagues about renowned journals in your field and have thorough look at where the papers that are most relevant to your work have been published. Of course, like with conventional journals, the impact factor might also be an important criteria. One thing that emerged only recently and that has to do with the Open Access business model – which is based on charging Article Processing Charges to scientists – is the emergence of predatory Open Access publishers. I cannot elaborate on this here but there is an excellent blog on this topic by an American librarian called Jeffrey Beall and he has a list of potentially predatory publishers – which basically exist only for making profit from Article Charges. So a good thing, before you publish in any Open Access Journal, would be to check your journal against Beall’s list. Or, you can also have a look at the website of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which has a high quality standard for publishers to become members.
- As I mentioned before, most Gold Open Access journals do not come for free. Here are some examples for Article Processing Charges: The recently launched Forum of Mathematics from Cambridge University Press charges 500 Dollars. SpringerOpen charges 800 Dollars for publishing in the Journal of Cloud Computing. The New Journal of Physics charges 1760 Dollars. This money is usually taken from research funds. We do not have a central fund for paying Open Access fees at ETH. However, as part of a trial project the ETH-Bibliothek has signed membership agreements with the Open Access publishers Springer Open, BioMed Central and PLOS. So, currently, if you publish with either one of these publishers and the first author of the article is affiliated with ETH, you will not have to pay any charges. However, we also have to say that we don’t really see how this publishing and funding model could become a standard model for the future: Because every OA membership comes with additional expenses for the library - but at the same time we cannot cancel any of the existing journal subscriptions. Another topic are the so-called hybrid journals: Springer, and also other publishers like Elsevier or Wiley, also have an Open Access publishing option called «Open Choice» or «Sponsored Articles» or something similar. This option is offered for subscription based journals: You can pay an Open Access charge for your article – then only this one article will be freely available while the other articles in the journal are still behind the pay-wall. For the library this means, that we still have to pay the subscription to this journal. So in the end, OA publishing in hybrid journals will always lead to higher total costs for institutions and libraries. That is why ETH does not support these kind of OA articles.
- Another point why hybrid journals are to be seen critically is because they usually charge even higher article charges than fully Open Access journals. This chart shows the correlation between Article Processing Charges and the Journal’s Impact Factor. The red ones are hybrid journals, the green ones are Open Access Journals. We can see two things here: The most expensive journals are hybrid journals There is a correlation between Article Processing Charges and Impact Factor Some critics of the Golden Road of Open Access publishing have argued that if this model of OA publishing will be the norm, in the future there might be something like a luxury segment of Open Access Publishing, where only researchers from the best – say the richest – institutions can afford to publish in the most important journals.
- We don’t know if this will happen, but we do know that Open Access Journals that charge an article-processing charge are the ones that have grown most in the last years. In this chart green is the number of articles published in hybrid journals or journals with delayed open access, dark blue are articles in Open Access Journals without an article processing charge, and light blue are articles in Open Access Journals with article processing charge. If the trend shown in this chart continues, the question “Who pays for Article Processing Charges” will become even more urgent to answer in the coming years.
- In general, compared to the total number of articles published in scientific journals, the proportion of Open Access articles has increased – although not rapidly - over the last years. A 2012 study which used data from Scopus and the Web of Science, says that the proportion of articles published in full immediate Open Access journals has grown from around 6 percent in 2008 to around 8 percent in 2011. These are the red parts in the columns. The orange parts are articles in subscription journals that give Open Access to their content after a certain period of time.
- We also should keep clearly in mind that gold Open Access publishing is more common in some fields than it others. Even within STM disciplines there is a big difference in the number of articles published in gold Open Access Journals from field to field, with Biomedicine being at the forefront of all other disciplines. And in the humanities the situation differs even more: because until now there are only very few successful models for Open Access publishing of monographs (books).
- So, will Gold Open Access Publishing be the model of the future? There are some stakeholders who certainly think that it will. Of course to publishers the gold Open Access model seams much more appealing than the green model. Gold Open Access Publishing does not actually change the role of the publisher in the publication cycle. It only means switching from a subscription based pricing model to a business model based on article processing charges. In the UK, an intensive discussion on Gold and Green Open Access Publishing was generated last year. This was because Research Councils UK, the Umbrella organisation for many research funding organisations, released its Open Access policy which states a clear preference for Gold Open Access Publishing over the Green Road. They also announced that they would give direct funding to universities to cover Article Processing Charges, so that authors could comply with their policy. On the other hand, the European Union does not have any plans to show a direct preference for either the Golden or the Green Road of Open Access Publishing. However they do plan to change the modus for the funding of Article Processing Charge: In their next research framework program “Horizon 2020” APCs will be eligible for funding even after the project has ended.
- Another interesting trend that emerged from Gold Open Access Publishing is the appearance and success of the so-called megajournals. Megajournals differ from other journals in that they publish articles from large disciplines or a group of disciplines rather than only highly specialised content. They are not as selective – which means they still review submitted articles for scientific rigour but they don’t select on the basis of potential impact or the size of the audience. It is usually cheaper to publish in megajournals. The first publisher to launch such a journal in 2006 was the Open Access publisher PLOS with its megajournal PLOS One. As you can see in the chart the number of articles published in PLOS One has increased rapidly since 2010. It took not very long for other publishers to recognize this trend and create their own megajournals. Springer has created one, Nature has its Scientific Reports and IEEE recently announced its new megajournal IEEE Access. Some Open Access advocates belief that megajournals are the future of scientific publishing. Others however see them as complementing specialised journals.
- While the megajournals that have been set up until now are all run by one of the already established big publishers, recently we also see some new independent publishers emerging on the scene with interesting new business models. There is PeerJ, a publishing platform that started in 2012 and is now inviting article submissions. They have a peer-reviewed scientific journal (PeerJ) and a preprint server (PeerJ PrePrints). They don’t charge article processing charges, but offer a lifetime membership for 99/199 or 299 Dollars. With these memberships you are entitled to publish a certain number of articles per year – on the condition that you also review at least one paper per year. Another new publishing initiative is eLife. It is an Open Access journal collaboratively run by three funding organisations: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max-Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. This initiative is interesting because it is the first example of three major funding institutions owning their own scientific journal. At the moment they do not charge any publishing fees. Since funders are important stakeholders in the Open Access debate it will be interesting to see how this develops. Then there is F1000 Research: This new publisher stands apart from others because it offers immediate publication of your article followed by an open post-publication peer review process. The don’t only publish full articles but also null or negative findings, case reports or data sets. Interestingly all of these new publishing endeavors emerged from Biomedicine and Life Sciences.
- I will now move to the next topic: Open Access Policies and Open Access Mandates In the last couple of years, more and more universities, research institutions and research funders have decided to demand that research output financed by these institutions, shall be made openly accessible. The Swiss National Science Foundation for example, has published their provisions on Open Access in 2007. ETH Zurich adopted its Open Access Policy in 2008. What I will show you here, is a quick summary of the events that led to the adoption of an Open Access Policy at ETH Zurich. The first prominent initiative that emerged from the so-called Open Access movement was the Budapest Open Access Initiative. This is a declaration on Open Access that was drafted and adopted at an event organised by the Open Society Institute in 2002. In 2003 another declaration was issued at a meeting in Berlin. This so-called Berlin declaration on Open Access is often cited as the most important milestone of the Open Access movement. It has been signed until now by over 400 research institutions. ETH Zurich signed it in 2006 and two years later, in 2008, it adopted its own Open Access policy.
- In this policy it is explicitly stated that ETH requires all their staff to publish copies of their peer-reviewed articles, theses and other research output in E-Collection, the only constraint being that “there are no legal objections”. Also, you are required to retain your copyright where possible. I will discuss these copyright issues in the next part of the presentation. In the second paragraph of the policy, ETH researchers are encouraged to publish in Open Access Journals. There is a small but important difference here that you need to notice for understanding the ETH open access strategy: You are REQUIRED to deposit your papers in ETH E-Collection. You are ENCOURAGED to publish in OA journals. In other words: ETH strongly supports the Green Road to OA publishing and the E-Collection has been chosen as the implementation instrument for its Open Access strategy.
- As I mentioned before, not only universities, but also research funders, have issued recommendations on Open Access. One of these funders is the European Commission. The framework program under which current EU-funded research projects are sponsored is the so called FP7, the seventh Framework Program. Under this program the Commission launched in 2008 an «Open Access Pilot», which means that they determined seven areas or disciplines where Open Access Publishing had already reached a certain point of acceptance and included a special clause in the grant agreements for projects in these areas. This special clause states that articles or other publications originating from theses projects must either be published in a peer-reviewed Open Access Journal or be deposited to an online repository not later than 6 months after publication (or 12 months if it is in the social sciences and humanities). When you publish in an OA journal, Article Processing Charges are eligible for funding. Now there is a new Framework Program for research and innovation under way – I already mentioned it, it is called Horizon 2020 and will be in place from 2014 to 2020.
- In Horizon 2020 the European Commission will move from its pilot project to a real Open Access mandate for all EU-funded projects. The actual terms for this are not yet published, but the new mandate will certainly be more comprehensive and targeted. For example, Article Processing Charges for publishing in Open Access Journals will be eligible for funding even after the project has ended. Also, while in FP7 researchers were required to make their «best effort» to publish Open Access, in Horizon 2020 there will be an OBLIGATION to provide Open Access. This obligation will be valid for all peer-reviewed publications in all areas of research, and the accepted embargo for publication will remain at 6 or 12 months. Additionally the Commission will launch a pilot for Open Access to research data – so, depending on the research field, projects might also be obligated to publish datasets in openly accessible repositories. The new EU mandate in Horizon 2020 is at the moment probably the most interesting development to watch concerning Open Access mandates in Europe. But in the United States, some research funders are already a step further. The NIH – the National Institutes of Health – have already had a quite strong Open Access mandate in place since 2008 demanding of researchers to deposit all their published articles in PubMed Central. But still, the compliance rate with their mandate stagnated at around 75 percent. So, in November 2012 NIH announced that they will start enforcing compliance with its Open Access mandate by withholding grant money.
- This step has not been made by other institutions. In fact, compliance with Open Access mandates in many institutions and research projects is quite low. But this is probably going to change: When other research funders follow the example of NIH and put in place strong enforcement mechanisms, compliance rates and therefore Open Access to research results will obviously increase. What is already quite obvious from the chart you can see here, is that more and more institutions and funders are issueing mandates or policies on Open Access every year. I believe that the policy decisions that research funders are going to take will be very important for the future development of Open Access publishing.
- In the next part of the presentation we will touch on some copyright issues that are associated with Open Access publishing. Two questions that often arise in this context are: Am I allowed to self-archive my paper after publishing it in a journal? What can I do to retain my right to self-archiving when signing a publishing contract?
- The answer to the first question: «Am I allowed to self-archive my paper?» is usually yes. In fact, if you are employed by ETH you are even required to do so. Of course, there are some exceptions: The ETH Open Access Policy states, that you are exempted from the requirement of self-archiving when there are «legal objections». A «legal objection» is for example the fact, that you don’t own the copyright of your article any more because you gave it to a journal publisher. But, and this is the important part, even in the case that you signed away your copyright to a publisher, you usually still have the possibility to self-archive your paper in a repository because most scientific publishers explicitly allow some sort of self-archiving. The best source, where you can look up which sort of self-archiving is allowed by your publisher, is the copyright transfer agreement, sometimes also called “licence to publish”. This document clearly states which sort of self-archiving is allowed by your publisher. There is also a very helpful database of publishers’ policies on self-archiving, called the “Sherpa/Romeo”- Database where you can search for publishers or certain journals and find out about their self-archiving guidelines.
- This is an example of an entry in the Sherpa/Romeo Database for a Springer Journal. The entry gives you information on which format of your article you are allowed to self-archive. The most common thing is that publishers allow you to publish a post-print of your article. A post-print is the final manuscript version of your article after peer-review, but before it is typeset by the publisher. Some publishers, like Springer in this example, also allow publishing a pre-print, which would be the manuscript version before peer-review. Most publishers however do not allow self-archiving the publisher’s version of the article. The entry also contains information on possible embargos. Some publishers allow self-archiving only after a certain period of time after the original publication in their journal. Embargoes can be somewhere between 2 and 24 months. The database also gives you information on where you are allowed to self-archive your paper. This can be either on your website, or in a repository. The conclusion that you should draw from all this is: Never delete the manuscript version of your article. If you only keep the publisher’s PDF, you will most certainly not be able to publish it Open Access.
- Now we come to the second question: How do I retain my copyright? This is also a requirement that follows from the ETH Open Access policy. But what does it mean? First of all it means, that you should read your publication agreement with great care. If you don’t fully understand what it means as for your copyright, feel free to mail us a copy and we will be happy to have a look at it. Then remember that transferring copyright doesn’t have to be all or nothing: In the copyright transfer agreement you usually transfer either the exclusive rights to publication or a non-exclusive right to publication to the publisher. This little difference is most important. To retain your copyright means granting the publisher only a non-exclusive licence to publication. Of course the publishers also know this little difference and therefore usually you are asked to sign away all your rights. This means you will not be able to publish your text again somewhere else, except for self-archiving, as specified by the publisher. You should however remember that every agreement is negotiable. One possibility of negotiating your agreement is attaching an author addendum to it which states that you retain copyright even if stated otherwise in the publishing agreement. You can download such an addendum from the website of the American Association of Research Libraries. Of course it depends on you if you want to make the effort of maybe entering into lengthy negotiations about copyright issues with the publisher. Unluckily I cannot tell you any stories about authors that successfully and systematically negotiated their publishing agreements. It might be difficult because as an author who wants to publish in a certain journal you are not in the best negotiating position. But this is also about raising awareness. So if you really want to publish in a journal with very restrictive copyright principles, you could for example write an e-mail to a member of the editorial board. Very often they are not even aware of the restrictive copyright policy the publisher is employing. On the other hand, as I mentioned before, many publishers do allow you to deposit your manuscript in an Open Access repository. This option is still not used as much as it could by scientists. So maybe even more important than entering into negotiations with restrictive publishers would be to use all the possibilities that you have for depositing manuscripts in repositories.
- I know that, since most of you are from the Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics, you already have a very strong culture of depositing preprints on the arXiv. So one questions that might come up here, is: What does this mean for preprints? What happens to my copyright, if I posted a preprint on the arXiv and then go on to publish the paper in a journal? This is essentially not a question about copyright. First of all it is a question about publisher’s policy. A publisher might demand of an author that submitted articles have not been published anywhere else before. If you inform the publisher that your paper has been published on the arXiv and he decides to publish it anyway, that’s fine for both of you. But of course this does not free you from signing a Copyright Transfer Agreement with the publisher. So in the end, your preprint on the arXiv will still be available to everybody but you are not free anymore to publish your paper on other sites, most certainly not the publisher’s PDF, and other versions only as specified in the agreement.
- I have almost come to the end of my talk now. But I would like to make some final remarks on the challenges we see for any future publishing system based on Open Access. As one German Neurobiology Professor has recently pointed out, a scientific publishing system run by the scientific community itself, without any corporate publishers, is already technically feasible today. Technically, we can imagine that every research paper for example in mathematics is published on the arXiv or that institutional repositories publish their institution’s entire research output. But then, scientific publishing is not only a technical process. It also entails other factors like the peer review process or the prestige gained from publishing in a specific journal. Also, will there be an evaluation and impact measuring system that can replace the impact factor in the foreseeable future? The roles that journals play in the scientific communication process can not easily be replaced even if at first sight they seem to be an unnecessary remainder from the age of print.
- This is why a recent development in OA publishing seems quite interesting: Just a few weeks ago, a group of mathematicians from France announced that they will revitalise a concept that has already been discussed almost ten years ago: The concept of overlay journals. The idea of an overlay journal is to build a publication platform for peer-reviewed articles on top of a preprint server. Editing and refereeing for theses journals will be done voluntarily be academics – which is basically also the case in the current system. Copy-editing and typesetting will not be done by the journal but by the authors themselves. Each volume of a journal then basically exists of a list of links to articles on the arXiv that have been selected and peer-reviewed for this journal. The project is called the “Episciences Project” – it is still in its early stages but it will be interesting to see how it evolves.
- However, even if there are a lot promising and interesting initiatives going on, and ETH scientists will certainly engage in some of them, we also see that a lot of challenges remain for the future: First, we have been talking about Open Access for more than ten years now. We can see that OA publishing is gaining ground, but the pace of change it quite slow. Secondly, we have to state that the financial aspects of OA publishing are not solved at all. Gold Open Access journals do not automatically come with lower total costs than subscription journals. In fact, especially in a transition period from subscription to OA publishing, they are an additional financial burden for university libraries, since we cannot cancel any subscriptions in exchange. And even if we assume that all subscription journals will be converted to gold Open Access in the future, a simple calculation for ETH Zurich shows that the costs for Article Processing Charges could easily add up to over 10 million Euro a year. The Green Road to Open Access on the other hand could be a much more cost-effective way of making scholarly research output openly accessible. However, from the experience of the last years, we can see that it is very difficult to motivate researches to make their manuscripts openly accessible if they are not forced to by their funders – the complicated copyright restrictions being only one reason for this. So, in the end, it is in your hands, the hands of the scientists, to use more actively the possibilities for Open Access publishing that are already at your disposal. As for the different models of Open Access publishing that I have talked about today, it seems very likely that there is not one model that will win over the others in the coming years. Instead, it seems much more likely that we will have a complex situation with diverse publishing models that will continue to coexist well into the future.