- Good afternoon.
I'm Billie Peterson-Lugo
from the Baylor University Libraries,
and I'd like to welcome everyone,
both those who are here present in the room
and our virtual participants to this presentation
"Mythbusters: Debunking Misconceptions, Half Truths
"and Outright Lies about Open Access Scholarly Publishing!"
Before we start the presentation,
I'd like to give a little bit of housekeeping information.
Particularly for our virtual audience,
if you have technological issues,
please send a message through the chat window,
and we'll try to help you out that way.
Also send any of your questions through the chat window.
We will most likely answer questions as we go along.
So if you do have questions,
just go ahead and send them,
and we'll get those answered for you.
We've already put up in the chat area
that if you want to tweet about the presentation,
you can use the hashtag TDL OA Myths,
and the slides are also available
at tinyurl.com/TDLOAMyths.
This presentation is being recorded,
and we'll announce and provide a link to the recording
when it's ready.
And that will be at the Texas Scholarly Communication Blog.
And now what I would like to do
is introduce today's presenter, Debra Hanken Kurtz,
Executive Director of the Texas Digital Library
and Kristi Park, Marketing Manager
at the Texas Digital Library.
Before I turn it over to them,
I want to take this opportunity
to express our gratitude for their willingness
to be here today with us
and to partner with us during Open Access Week.
And here are Debra and Kristi.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Billie,
and thank you all for inviting us.
It's an honor and a privilege to be here with you today
to talk about Open Access.
We are doing kind of a followup
to last spring's ACRL Road Show,
"Scholarly Communications
"from Understanding to Engagement."
And that was held here again May 2nd,
and it was a partnership with Baylor University,
SMU and McLennan Community College.
And so we're grateful to you again for this opportunity.
So the Texas Digital Library
is a consortium of 20 academic libraries
across the state of Texas.
And we are champions of Open Access.
We provide infrastructure services at scale
to facilitate that work on those campuses.
And some of the services we offer are,
they're all open source.
We host Vireo,
which is our own software for managing the workflow
around the submission and publication
of electronic theses and dissertations.
We also host a number of DSpace institutional repositories
for our membership.
And one other service we provide is OJS,
Open Journal System, publishing hosting services
for open journal systems,
and all that is an effort to promote Open Access
and to facilitate and further elevate the profile
of our membership and help to facilitate their missions,
research teaching and learning missions on their campuses
continue on.
Thanks, Kristi.
So let's start with this premise,
that scholarship and research are essential
and that equal access to that knowledge
is something to which we should all strive.
As you can see from this quote from Anthony Panizzi,
who was a librarian in the mid 18th, 19th century,
excuse me.
He was a champion of Open Access,
and he believed that (audio blurs)
regardless of his or her ability to pay for them.
We believe that the academy has a responsibility
to make research as openly accessible as possible.
And we'll talk about some international movements
and also some efforts closer to home
that are, that promote Open Access.
- So before we move into debunking myths,
we're going to start off with talking about
what Open Access actually is.
What is it?
And so there are many different definitions of Open Access,
but this is one that we like.
It's from Peter Suber
who's a national recognized voice on Open Access,
now at Harvard University.
And he says, "Open access literature is digital, online,
"free of charge and free of most copyright
"and licensing restrictions."
So there are a few kind of key components to this definition
that I'll pull out here.
One is, has to do with technology.
So internet technology is key to this movement
towards Open Access.
Methods of publication that were efficient and sensible
in a world where print publication was king
may not make so much sense anymore,
but we're still kind of stuck with antiquated habits
and antiquated practices that we can't seem to shake.
The second component that I want to draw out here
has to do with money.
So maybe that's really the first component,
the first and the last component.
Open-access literature is free of charge.
It's free to read.
No subscription fee.
It's not free to produce,
and we'll talk a little bit more about that later,
but it is, the goal is to make it free to access.
And the third component here is the permission to reuse.
So typically scholarly communications resources
that are Open Access
in varying degrees have removed restrictions
that allow users to download, reprint, reproduce,
distribute, and in some cases actually make derivative works
and distribute those derivative works
as long as the original author is properly attributed.
So as I said, there are lots of definitions,
but this one captures what I think is most important.
It's free, it's free to reuse, and it's digital and online.
So this is what we're talking about.
The question then becomes, how do we get there?
And so there are in the Open Access world,
two different paths to Open Access that we talk about
different flavors of Open Access,
but the goal is the same with each one.
It's free online access to the scholarly literature.
So the first one,
I'll mention them both here briefly,
and then we'll talk a little bit more about them
in more depth.
The first path to Open Access that we talk about
is Green Open Access.
And I don't know how these terms got their names.
I don't know why it's green, but so it is.
And by Green Open Access,
we're referring to self-archiving research
in an Open Access digital repository.
The other path to Open Access is referred to
as Gold Open Access.
And this refers to publishing in Open Access journals.
(background noises)
(women laughing)
I planned that out, yeah.
So the one distinction that I find helpful
in thinking about these two different paths to Open Access
is the question who's responsible?
Who's in charge of making this happen?
And for Green Open Access,
we're talking about authors themselves
taking responsibility and taking the initiative
to make their own work openly accessible on the web,
either through institutional repositories
or on a personal website or whatever they choose to do.
With Gold Open Access, we're talking about publishers
actually taking the initiative to make the content
in their journals openly accessible.
But the important thing to remember here
is that these definitions are about methods
and about venues, but they're both aimed
at achieving the same goal:
open online access to the scholarly literature.
So we'll talk a little bit more about Gold first.
So an Open Access journal,
a Gold OA Journal is one that does not charge readers
to read it.
There are no subscription fees
and this could apply it to Open Access Monographs as well,
which is a more emerging field in Open Access publishing.
And for the most part,
OA Journals are much more likely
to let authors retain the copyright on their work.
As I mentioned before, OA Journals are free to read,
but they're not free to produce.
And so there are various business models
that have kind of grown up around OA publishing
to account for costs of producing scholarly journals.
One of the more common ones that you may be familiar with,
is an author processing charge
or article processing charge model
where the journal will charge a processing fee
for any article that it accepts for publication.
But it's important to remember that most OA Journals
do not charge anything.
They're perfectly free for authors.
They're free for readers.
They're free for everybody.
So here's some examples of Gold OA publishers.
And the first couple here, BioMed Central and Hindawi
are very large commercial publishers.
BMC is owned by Springer,
which is one of the big, you know,
the big guns in the scholarly publishing world.
Hindawi and BioMed Central between them
have hundreds of scientific titles that they publish
Open Access under a creative commons license.
The next two, PLOS and PeerJ, are both newer,
large publishers.
Both well, PLOS, is a nonprofit publisher,
and the Public Library of Science,
you may be familiar with PLOS Medicine, PLOS Biology,
or PLOS One,
these are all pretty prestigious, Open Access journals,
and PLOS One is kind of an interesting one
in that it started in 2008.
It was the first journal of its kind,
what's now kind of called a mega journal.
So it's a publishes across a wide variety of disciplines.
It doesn't have a very specific disciplinary focus,
and it publishes everything that passes peer review.
So it doesn't have the same kind of exclusivity
that a lot of journals do
where they rate things on their importance in the field.
What PLOS does, it says, hey, we're online.
We don't have to be limited by page, print pages anymore.
And so anything that contributes to the scholarly literature
that passes our test of scientific rigor,
we'll publish it.
And PeerJ is similar in that regard,
but PeerJ is even newer.
It started in 2012, and its business model
is even a little bit more out there.
Instead of charging author or article processing charges,
it charges a lifetime membership fee that's very affordable.
And under that lifetime membership fee,
authors can publish as many times as they want in PeerJ,
as long as their articles pass peer review.
And then finally the Texas Digital Library
participates in Gold Open Access publishing
by hosting a journal publishing platform
called Open Journals System.
And we do that for our member libraries
and the faculty researchers on their campuses.
We have about two dozen titles,
mostly smaller kind of niche journal titles.
And one of them here is the Journal of Analytic Theology,
which is in part managed by a faculty member
at Baylor Library.
So that's Gold Open Access.
Moving onto Green OA,
as we said before, Green OA is self-archiving.
Authors take the initiative to put a version
of their publication into an Open Access repository
or their own personal website.
And I say a version of their articles is important
because many commercial publishers,
most commercial publishers will not allow authors
just to put the final version of the article
up somewhere else, right?
They take that copyright for themselves,
but many of them will allow authors
to put another version of the work up
in an Open Access repository,
so that might be like a pre-print,
which is the pre peer reviewed version of the article
or a post print, which is, has been through peer review,
but it hasn't been formatted for the journal yet.
So these versions of the article
can go into Open Access repository.
Now it gets more complicated than that
because different journals and different publishers
have different policies for what they will allow.
So there are resources out there for finding out
what journal policies are regarding self archiving.
One of them is Sherpa Romeo
How many people know about Sherpa Romeo?
This is a website that is a directory
of journal policies,
and you can use it to look up any journal
and what its policies are for self-archiving,
whether you can set a pre-print
in an Open Access repository, et cetera.
So just a couple of examples of Green OA.
We have the first three are all subjects repositories
or disciplinary repositories.
So anybody can publish cognitive science work in CogPrints.
PubMed Central is the biomedical biases.
And arXiv, which is one of the most successful,
most probably well known of these pre-print repositories,
started out as a math and physics repository.
I think it's grown
to include some other disciplines as well.
And then a long with these subject repositories,
there's this vast ecosystem
of institutional repositories out there.
BEARdocs is the institutional repository at Baylor Library.
SMU has an institutional repository.
PDL hosts many of our members' institutional repositories
and facilitates green Open Access publishing in that way.
So I'm going to turn it over to Debra
to start busting myths.
- So we've met our first myth
that everybody has equal access
or access to all the resources they need.
For many of us, probably everyone in this room,
we had great access to a wealth of information
when we were undergraduates and graduate students
at our home institutions,
but there are some problems with this.
Not all institutions are funded the same,
and so that means that not all access is the same.
This is particularly problematic
with institutions of higher learning
who focus on teaching rather than research.
And it is even greater problem in developing countries,
despite efforts of, with the UN like Kanari,
which is in the health industry,
Agora for agriculture, and these are UN brokered deals
with STEM publishers like Elsevier
that offer free or near free access to scholarly literature
for a hundred of the poorest countries in the world.
And not everybody who needs access
is affiliated with a university.
Finally, the explosion of information in the digital age
and the rising cost of publications
have made it difficult for institutions
even that are well-funded to be able to secure
all the resources that their constituents need.
So this is an example here of what happens
when researchers hit a paywall,
and we don't advise that you do this.
It breaks all sorts of copyright and licensing agreements,
but it highlights the problem.
The name of the hashtag is #icanhazpdf.
And the idea is that once a researcher hits a paywall,
they can tweet out the citation
and the hashtag #icanhazpdf,
and somebody in the Twitter-verse will send them a copy
of the document.
Again, we're not, we're not encouraging you to use.
However, I believe that it highlights the problem
that there is, it's global.
And it also indicates that researchers do believe
that there should be free and Open Access to research.
Probably a better option is the OA Button.
Many of you have probably heard about this.
This is created by researchers,
young researchers across the world.
And the way this works is
it's called a browser bookmarklet,
and you install it on your browser.
And when you hit the paywall,
you click a button, and it will record who you are,
what your profession is,
the citation and where you are in the world.
And then it creates this interactive map
that shows the problem,
where Open Access or where access to research
is a problem globally.
And so we encourage you.
They're coming out with a new version of this marklet
today I believe.
And so go back to your offices.
If you're on your device now, download the marklet,
and install it and use it.
Oh, one more.
So this is Dr. Erin McKiernan,
and she is a scientist in Mexico,
and she's an early career researcher.
Her work is primarily in experimental
and theoretical neuroscience.
And I saw her speak this year in Helsinki
at Open Repositories.
She's fantastic.
So she has pledged to publish only in Open Access Journals,
and it's cost her some in her career.
Her group is doing really important health research.
They work on, they're trying to find cures
for (audio blurs) disease,
cholera, dengue, HIV, malaria, tuberculosis.
So they're really trying to find cures to diseases
that are life threatening,
and these are to the right or to the right of the screen,
You can see the journal access for the institution she was,
I think she just recently left.
And compare that with,
I invite you to compare that
with your own collections budget and what goes on, you know,
what you can afford at your libraries.
I think in most cases, it's pretty telling.
And so for them, the limiting factor is cost.
- Okay,
so the next myth that we're going to talk about it is
a myth about quality of Open Access resources.
And it's kind of a two-parter,
so it takes kind of multiple forms.
One is that OA is equivalent to self-publishing.
That it's like, you know, just putting your work out there.
It doesn't undergo peer review.
It doesn't, there's no quality check on it.
And I think we've seen already
that there are many, many paths to Open Access,
one of them being publishing in an OA Journal,
and Open Access journals are no different
from traditional journals
in that they both have peer review in play,
or at least they can or they don't have to,
but it doesn't have anything to do with Open Access.
The second part of this myth is that,
sorry, oh yeah,
that OA journals are just of lower quality
than traditional subscription-based journals.
They may practice peer review, but not really,
and they're not prestigious.
They aren't good venues
for you to publish your scholarship in.
And many of them, according to this myth,
are just kind of fly by night operations
or even outright predatory journals.
In fact, we can see here in this next slide,
that many, many OA journals
are in fact highly respected and even prestigious outlets
for scholarly research.
By one metric,
which is the journal impact factor metric,
which is kind of a flawed metric in many ways,
but it's one that we all kind of recognize as important,
by that measure,
all of these Open Access journals listed here
have decent to good impact factors.
And in fact, across all disciplines,
there are high impact factor journals
that are options for publication for most researchers.
Nevertheless, the myth persists that OA journals
are across the board a bad, poor quality.
And this was seemingly backed up
by a so-called sting operation,
about a year ago,
it was written about by John Bohannan in "Science"
about a year ago,
where he sent a fake article
to a bunch of Open Access journal that he chose,
and a bunch of them, many of them, accepted the article
even with its kind of obvious flaws.
And so this caused a lot of hand-wringing
in the academic community and the Open Access community
in particular, but there were a couple of problems
with his sting.
One was that he didn't have a control group.
He only sent it to Open Access journals,
so there's no way of knowing
what traditional subscription journals
would have done with it.
And secondly, the list of journals he sent it to,
he drew from two sources,
one of which was this list of known predatory journals
that a librarian named Beall,
he's an academic librarian here in the U S.
And so he kind of self-selected a group of journals
that were going to get him the results that he wanted.
It's not a good thing that that happened, right?
It's not a good thing that there are a lot
of Open Access journals out there that would accept
a deeply flawed paper.
But I think it's important to remember that this happens,
this kind of quality breakdown
happens in traditional journals as well.
Take the story from about a Japanese researcher
who faked more than 200 scientific studies,
all of which got published
in various respectable, traditional
subscription-based journals.
So, you know, this is one story,
but this kind of thing happens.
Retractions happen,
retraction rates are going up right now across the board.
So I think, you know, our position is that this happens
on both sides of the Open Access, non Open Access divide
and Kevin Smith,
he's the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke.
He was here for the ACRL on roadshow in May.
He says it very well, that "Open access is not more prone
"to abuse than any other type of publishing."
And he goes on to say,
"We need to connect the dots and realize that both systems,
"both traditional and Open Access can be abused
"just as all systems devised by human agents can be."
So, you know, OA journal publishing's relatively new.
It's maturing right now.
It's getting better all the time.
But you know, we all know, we all know about the internet.
It lowers the barriers to entry
for publication of content online.
And so that kind of opens the door for some bad actors
to have bad practices,
but there are ways to mitigate those risks
and to educate ourselves and help each other
to make the choices about where we publish
and where we put our dollars,
and to help each other navigate this new environment
just as we learned to navigate the old one.
So one way to, I think, do this
and improve the quality of Open Access journals
is by encouraging more participation
in Gold Open Access publishing
and to facilitate the production
of more Open Access journals on reputable platforms.
And this is one that the Texas Digital Library
promotes and supports.
We host this journal publishing platform
called Open Journal Systems,
which was developed as open source software
by the Public Knowledge Project.
And we host this platform for, as I mentioned before,
about two dozen scholarly journals
across the state of Texas.
And there are thousands of these installations worldwide.
And the journal software helps with every stage
of the refereed publishing process, including peer review.
So it makes peer review possible.
It makes it easier to manage.
It also helps content get found through some optimizations
for indexing that content in Google Scholar
and indexers like CrossRef.
So not only does it help you manage
the administration of the journal,
it makes it more likely that that content will get found,
that it will be more visible.
And as a result, one hopes get more citations
for the journal, which is, you know,
one of the important indicators of quality.
- So our third myth that we'd like to bust
is that you lose or maintain copyright.
So first of all, anytime you author a work,
you automatically retain the copyright of your work
as soon as you create it.
Even if you don't register it,
even if you don't include a copyright page
or a copyright statement.
The same options exist when publishing
through an Open Access journal as when you are,
when an article is published
through a traditional subscription model.
The author may in some cases be able to retain copyright
or may be required to grant the journal publisher copyright.
But in either case, the article is still copyrighted.
Many, but not all Open Access journals
have liberal policies.
And we've talked a little bit about those.
You may be able to put some pre-prints
in your own institutional repository.
As an author and a copyright holder,
if you wish to clearly instruct readers
about what you authorize them to do,
you can attach a creative commons license.
There's some other ways to exert control over your work
to make sure you get credit for it.
You can register for an ORCID ID,
and ORCID ID's are persistent identifiers.
They link an author to his or her work,
to datasets for public presentations.
It disambiguates names.
So John Smith and John E. Smith and John F. Smith
all get credited appropriately.
For research funders, ORCID can unambiguously
link these researchers to their work and to funding programs
that provided the support.
And this is, understanding this impact is vital input
into future funding strategy.
Another way you can identify your work
and make sure you are cited
is by getting your library to register for EZID,
and EZID's work similar to ORCIDs,
but they link, they make it easy to create and manage
unique long-term identifiers for anything
including published text or data.
You can store citation metadata for identifiers
in a variety of formats and update current URL locations
so citation links are never broken.
- All right, so myth number four,
I think that the kind of the root
of the anxiety over copyright is at least in part
about anxiety, about control over your work
and control over your career
and how you're going to move forward with that.
And this myth,
which is about thesis and dissertation publishing
is kind of rooted in the same anxiety I think.
As you may know, over the last decade or decade and a half,
there's been this movement towards publishing
theses and dissertations digitally and online
rather than, you know, printing them and binding them
and putting them on a shelf in the library
where they're sometimes but not often accessed
through inter library loan or other means.
And in fact, 117 institutions worldwide
have an OA mandate for theses and dissertations.
And for the most part, these theses and dissertations
that get pushed through digitally
and published in digital repositories are Open Access.
The Texas Digital Library has been involved
with increasing the prominence and visibility
of graduate student scholarship since our very beginning
as an organization.
So we've developed an open source software application
called Vireo, which facilitates this whole process.
Students can submit their thesis online.
It goes to the graduate school
and then eventually gets published
into an institutional repository.
Since 2008, when the first deployment for Vireo started
in production, we've published
or facilitated the publication of tens of thousand
of theses and dissertations in Open Access repositories.
And that represents a wealth of scholarship and research
that is otherwise kind of hidden, largely hidden,
and now it's discoverable online and useful,
but with that added visibility comes some anxiety.
People can actually see it and use it
including publishers
who might want to publish your first book.
And so, especially in the humanities fields,
there's this anxiety about future publications,
especially in the humanities fields
where monograph publishing is so important.
And that first book is so important.
The concern is that if the dissertation
is widely available online
through an Open Access repository,
that a publisher will not want to even look at it
as a potential first book for publication,
so and by extension then,
publishing your thesis or dissertation online
is a bad career move.
This myth is pretty well articulated by a pronouncement
from the American Historical Association
that the AHA made last year, a little over a year ago,
where they requested that institutions allow
for a six year embargo on all thesis and dissertation
OA publication.
That's a long time.
And you can see here that they believe
that increasing number of university presses
are reluctance to offer publishing contracts
to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations
have been freely available by online sources.
I think the concern is understandable
when we're talking about people's careers,
but the evidence for this is not remotely conclusive,
at least at this point.
These quotations on the next slide
come from a July 2013 article in C&RL
called "Do Open Access ETDs
"Diminish Publishing Opportunities
"in the Social Sciences and Humanities?"
And this article reported on a survey
that a group of researchers did
of scholarly university presses asking them
if somebody comes to you with a book proposal
related to a thesis and dissertation
that's already available Open Access, what do you do?
And what they found was that a vast majority of publishers
don't have any kind of blanket policy
that would preclude consideration
of openly available theses and dissertations.
In fact, the percentage of publishers
who said they would not under any circumstances
consider revised versions of manuscripts based on OA ETDs
was less than 10%, so a very small minority of publishers.
And this is because as you can see in this last quotation
publishers know that a book or journal article
undergoes pretty serious adaptation and revision
before it becomes a book, and a thesis or a dissertation
is not a book.
It's not even a book manuscript.
It undergoes a lot of work before it becomes a book.
So at TDL, we believe that the fears
about the inability to publish are at least at this point,
not well-founded, but they are understandable.
And we, well, we encourage Open Access publishing.
Just lay the cards on the table.
That said, we don't make any policy
for our member institutions.
We leave it up to each of our members
to decide how to handle this question
and what they will allow their students and faculty to do.
And we developed Vireo to be as flexible as possible
in meeting the different needs of students and institutions.
So for instance, Vireo has a very flexible embargo system.
So institutions can set up any number of embargo periods
that are options for students
when they're selecting their thesis or dissertation.
And these institutions can work with their graduate offices
and the faculty mentors who are advising students
about what they should do with their thesis or dissertation
to help them make the best decision.
We think it's really important for students, mentors,
graduate offices, to really work together
and think about policies
and think about what's best for them and their careers.
And I'll just submit that,
there is Billie's lovely face,
and this resource available on the Baylor Library's website
about the embargo policy that Baylor University Library's,
each institution has its own.
And I know that Billie and others at the libraries
would be more than happy to discuss or answer questions
about those policies at any point.
- Okay, so the fifth myth,
OA threatens academic freedom,
and this myth has its origin in response to the Finch report
from the UK, and the Finch report recommended
that recommends mandating Gold Open Access.
So there's some truth to the myth,
but there's also a lot of misconception.
Researchers argue that it limits the researcher's choices
in where to publish, which is true because it's a mandate.
However, many publishers allow authors
to publish preprints to OA repositories,
as we've already stated.
Researchers also argue that funding for research
would be depleted as resources were directed to
from providing access to their research
to providing or funding the actual publication.
And there is some truth to that.
If the institutions don't have funding
for processing the author's publication process,
but it sort of ignores this idea
that if more institutions would mandate Gold OA,
or at least if they would participate more,
libraries and the institutions of higher learning
could shift their budgets from subscriptions
to funding the publication process,
helping to fund the publication process
for these researchers.
Let's see.
Although the methods originated in the UK,
we talk about it here because Open Access
is a global concern, and free and Open Access to research
we believe is a human right.
- So hopefully we cleared up
some misconceptions about Open Access.
And we want to communicate again that, you know,
Open Access is a choice in most circumstances.
And it's a complicated one in an academic environment
where publishing and where, you know,
where are you published is as important as it is
for most academics.
So after all this, you may, one may ask oneself,
if I don't get any points for publishing Open Access,
then why should I care about Open Access?
And I will give you a few reasons.
So one is that you should care
because access to scholarship and research
should not be only for the privileged few.
You know, we believe like Anthony Panizzi did
in the mid 19th century
that regardless of your ability to pay,
you should have access to this knowledge
and that making that knowledge accessible
is the best way to further the human condition,
to further human knowledge and to, you know,
make the world a better place.
We think you should care
because you may increase your citations
if you publish Open Access.
There's some evidence, it's a little inconclusive,
but some evidence that publishing Open Access
will make your work more visible, and as a result,
you will get more citations for your work.
And it's definitely the case,
that you will increase the visibility of your work.
You will get more downloads, more mentions,
more people will be reading what you've written,
and that's a good thing in and of itself.
You should care because while scam journals exist,
good ones exist too.
And you should care because greater participation
means higher quality.
So you make it better.
And the more reputable academics publish Open Access
or move their journals to Open Access platforms,
the higher, the greater the quality will be
across the board.
And finally, you should care about Open Access
because it's happening.
This is at least part of the future of scholarly publishing.
And we'll see, on the next few slides
that it's really been growing at at pretty fast rates
over the last decade.
So this next slide shows the strong growth
in the number of Open Access journals over the last decade.
You can see that's a pretty steep rise,
kind of leveled off in the last couple of years,
but there are now more than 10,000 fully Open Access
peer reviewed scholarly journals,
that represents about a third of all peer reviewed journals.
And these are published all over the world in 100 countries.
And this next graph shows the number of searchable articles
in these journals.
So we're now at over 1.7 million articles in OA Journals
across the world.
And then finally the growth of Open Access repositories,
the Green OA options.
So there are now more than 2,700 OA repositories
according to OpenDOAR which tracks these things
containing approximately 64 million documents
of various types.
Not all of them are Open Access
in those Open Access repositories, but most of them are.
- So Open Access is happening,
and increasingly federal funders are requiring
that the result of taxpayer funded research
be made publicly and openly available.
On February 22nd in 2013, the White House issued a directive
that required federal agencies with annual spending
with more than $1 million on research and development
to develop plans to make the publications
that flow from this research openly available to the public
within a year of publication.
And there are a couple of initiatives indicated here
that rose in their response.
CHORUS, the Clearinghouse for the Open Research
of the United States is the first initiative
of the not-for-profit group COAR,
and it leverages existing technologies
and open technologies to facilitate compliance,
to provide optimized search and dashboard services,
and also there's some archiving and preservation services.
And it makes the publisher infrastructure
the conduit for access to these research materials.
The next effort is SHARE,
and this is the library and higher ed response.
It also leverages existing technologies,
and SHARE just had their first annual summit
last week in DC.
I participate on the technical working group.
At that meeting, they demoed the notification system.
The notification system basically tells researchers
when there has been new data, new data sets
or new journal articles published to repositories.
20 institutions across the nation participated.
One of them is from Texas, UT Austin.
And I am working with the SHARE group
to get more of the TDL and other libraries in Texas
to participate in that pilot project.
- There are also some,
a number of institutional policies that have been popping up
over the last few years to encourage Open Access publishing.
And the first of these, well,
there are several institutions,
well, back up.
There are a number of institutional mandates,
mandates for Open Access publishing
at institutions of higher learning.
The first of these was Harvard, the first in the US,
and then in Texas,
the University of North Texas and Trinity University
both have Open Access mandates.
And these require that researchers
make their peer reviewed journal publications
openly available by self-archiving, Green OA,
their final peer review draft
in an institutional or disciplinary repository,
or they need to publish it in a Gold OA journal.
There are 228 of these mandates across the world.
And I want to mention about that last bullet point
that another method for encouraging Open Access publication
is one that Texas A&M libraries has undertaken,
and that's the creation of an Open Access Fund
that they created in partnership
with their Office of Sponsored Projects, I think,
and that fund is available to faculty members
who want to publish in Open Access journals
but have to pay those article processing charges.
They can apply for money out of that fund
to cover the charges.
Another way that Open Access is happening
is through Project Collective Action,
organizations and individuals coming together
to try new methods of publication
or to encourage Open Access publishing in various way.
So I'm going to go over just a couple.
And the first one is SCOAP3,
this stands for Sponsoring, this is a mouthful,
Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing
in Particle Physics.
So three Ps there at the end.
This is a partnership with thousands of libraries,
research centers and some funding agencies
to turn certain traditional journals
into Open Access journals,
and these are all journals in high energy physics.
It does this with the,
through the libraries centrally paying the publishers
to fund Open Access publication.
And the idea is that as that happens,
subscription fees will go down.
The cost of publication will go down.
Subscription fees will go down
for those who are still paying the regular way.
And once they save all that money,
the other libraries will then continue paying
into that central fund,
and eventually it will be Open Access for everybody.
There are many institutions across the state of Texas
involved in SCOAP3.
Baylor is one, Rice, A&M, Texas Tech, UNT,
many of the UT system schools are involved with it
and are all participating in SCOAP3.
Another one of these initiatives is Knowledge Unlatched,
and this is another one that Baylor is part of.
This is a really interesting experiment in a way
to facilitate Open Access monograph publishing.
And the way this will work is the libraries pay in
and share the payment of a single title fee to a publisher
in return for the book being made Open Access
under a Creative Commons License.
So the title fee is a set cost,
but the more libraries pay in,
the lower that per library fee is,
and the goal is to, you know,
just keep adding more Open Access titles
through this method.
It's a really interesting, unique model.
It's going to be interesting to see how it works.
Debra has mentioned SHARE already as a collaborative effort
to facilitate open data publishing.
And then finally there is a proposal out there right now
for First-books Subventions.
And this is, the Association of Research Libraries
and the Association of American Universities
that have come together to propose a model
for subsidizing the cost of publication for first books,
those first monographs that new faculty have to publish
in order to get tenure, and this is rooted in Open Access.
So institutions will have a fund,
sort of like that open access funds at A&M library.
That fund will be used to pay publishers
to cover the costs of monograph publishing
for those first books.
We'll see, that's one to keep an eye on, I think.
- Okay, so we're issuing a challenge.
We don't want you to be afraid.
We want you to be informed.
There are several ways you can participate
and promote Open Access.
First of all, you can register for ORCID,
an ORCID ID for yourself,
so that you can link all your research to you
and trace it and get credit for it.
We encourage you to also work with the faculty,
with your faculty contacts, with student researchers,
to get them to register for ORCID IDs.
You can work with your library to secure EZIDs
for datasets and research that they provide access to.
We also challenge you to help communicate the access problem
by installing the OA button marklet and using it.
Also know your rights as an author.
You can visit the copyright pages
and also do some investigation
in creative commons licensing,
and then finally make your own work openly accessible,
either Green or Gold.
Thank you very much.
We're happy to take questions right now,
and thanks to our wonderful host.
We've enjoyed being here,
and we look forward to your questions.
(audience applauding)
(man quietly asking question)
- It varies pretty widely.
I mean, it can be, oh yeah, that's a good idea.
So Tim asked how much
is an article processing charge generally?
And I think they start in the, you know,
around a few hundred dollars, but they can go up to,
I think the PLOS journals are somewhere around $2,900,
something like that.
I don't know.
Somebody else may know more precisely,
but they can be pretty hefty.
But those by and large, those fees are covered
through funding agencies or institutional funds.
Very, it's not always the author who has to pay that
out of pocket, and I think I heard Erin McKiernan last week
who Debra talked about
talking about those author processing charges.
She has no funds really.
She's kind of on her own,
but she has found ways
around those article processing charges in various ways.
A lot of journal publishers will work with you
to kind of make sure that that article processing charge
isn't what keeps you from publishing in their journal.
- Is there a difference in how professional journals
versus open access journals have funds available
to pay reviewers,
and if so how much they're about to pay reviewers?
And does that affect the quality of peer review
that you can provide and therefore the quality
of the journal itself?
- Well, that's an interesting question.
The question was about paying peer reviewers,
and how much do most peer reviewers get paid?
- The difference between Open Access?
- Yeah, so specifically
the difference between OA and traditional journals.
And my understanding is that peer reviewers don't get paid
no matter what.
This is a service that academics provide
as part of their professional life.
And so a lot of journal publishing happens
kind of on the backs of academics
so then, you know, our libraries then have to pay
a lot of money to get that back.
- I guess that would lead to the next question,
which would be whether more qualified academics
might be more inclined to be reviewing
for the traditional journals at this point?
That would be seen more legit kind of standard journals
which then would again come back around to Tim's question
about whether there might be a result
in terms of the overall quality of the journals,
of the OA journals?
- Yeah, that's a good, that's an interesting point.
So the comment was that,
that academics and kind of blue chip academics
might be more willing to serve in that peer review capacity
for the traditional journals.
I don't have any data on that, but it sounds reasonable.
I think most academics are still much more comfortable
publishing in traditional subscription-based journals,
and it would follow that they'd be more comfortable
providing peer review,
but since they don't get paid either way,
it might not make much difference.
I don't know.
- Yeah, I think that also, I mean,
Kristi kind of covered too the misconceptions around
peer review, and there are, you know,
there are good and bad actors in both areas.
And if we can work to change the funding model again
so that there is greater incentive for researchers
to publish Open Access, then we can help address that.
But I think that there's more speculation
about the quality than is actually warranted.
(woman quietly talking)
- Yes, and,
(woman quietly talking)
- Are those researchers, the statement was that
that one of the audience knows a lot of researchers,
- Well, not a lot. (audience laughing)
- I would say, knows researchers
who will only peer review for Open Access,
and my question for you is are those in the STEM fields
or is it kind of?
(woman quietly talking)
- Well, yeah, and Erin McKiernan,
is one of those researchers.
She's a neuroscience researcher
who has vowed not to do any peer review
for total access journals.
And there are various pledges, and I can't remember
what any of them are called right now,
but there are pledges out there that you can sign onto
that say, I will publish my work Open Access.
I will not provide peer review for total access journals,
- Or be an editor for.
- Or be an editor as Billie said
for a traditional subscription-based journal.
And these are ways that faculty and the academy
can put pressure on publishers
to convert more and more journals into open access journals.
And there's a lot of pressure in the UK,
more so in Europe than in the US.
A lot of pressure in the UK to convert journals
into Open Access Journals.
- I think so, and I think that the international,
a lot of international groups
are a little bit further along.
So last week at the SHARE Summit,
we had Kathleen Shearer who was there from OpenAir,
and she was describing efforts in Canada and elsewhere
where there's greater government funding.
And so they have the resources, first of all,
and I think also the mandate
to make data more openly accessible,
but it's really a global concern.
And so, you know, I think hopefully with some pressure
from international groups,
we'll, the United States will come more in line
with international standards.
- You mentioned people can dictate publishing,
and you quoted a survey that said that less 10%
of the journals will not under any circumstances
share publications, and that was a good thing,
but how many, what percentage said that Open Access
or (audio blurs) would make them more reluctant
or make them more cautious about publishing?
- I don't have the exact numbers in front of me,
but the question or the choice that they had
to answer the question were more along the lines of
we will never under any circumstances consider,
we would consider them case by case,
or we would always consider an Open Access
thesis or dissertation, or we would never, we wouldn't,
we wouldn't bar it from consideration
because it's an Open Access dissertation.
So I don't think the survey asked specifically
what you're asking about,
but it did, there's that 10%
who said never under any circumstances,
then there's the vast majority
who said yes, absolutely we would consider it,
or yes, but we would consider it on a case-by-case basis.
I don't know if that answered your question.
(man quietly talking)
Well, the article has a lot more information
about everything they asked.
Billie, I don't know if you are familiar with it or not?
- I have read it, but so far enough ago
that I don't remember,
but I'll also say that
University of Oklahoma, they have done,
and I'm not sure, it will be awhile before it's published,
but what they've done is they've worked
with major tier one universities,
and they're trying to look at their dissertations
and repositories and the books that have been published
over a period of time.
And I'm hoping to get them to present here in February.
I don't know whether, they won't have their data ready yet,
but they might be able to talk about their process.
But I think that might be one of the best things
to come out because there is no hard data.
There really isn't good hard data.
- Yeah, and I'll just I'll repeat
for the visitors online.
Billie mentioned a University of Oklahoma effort
to investigate their pool
of open-access theses and dissertations,
along with some other institutions
and what percentage of those theses and dissertations
are actually published in books.
- Yeah, I don't know the details,
but I know that they're looking at dissertations
in Open Access in repositories and publications,
and they're looking at tier one institutions.
- Yeah, and that's why, I mean, Billie's right.
There's not a lot of just really hard data about that.
And that's why we say the evidence is inconclusive
at this point about whether or not this is a real concern.
It's just become a concern lately
because I feel like people kind of woke up and said,
we've been publishing dissertations online for 10 years now,
but like one day everybody woke up and thought,
wait a minute.
People can actually get to this stuff now.
And we think that it's good for students
to have their work out there.
It's better for them to be more visible
and for people to be able to see
what work they've been doing and to get the credit
for the work they've been doing early on in their careers.
But, you know, maybe the evidence will show
that it really is a concern, and we'll have to consider that
when more of these studies are done.
I think another piece of evidence that would be good to have
is do libraries purchase books
based on theses and dissertations?
Or do they just rely on the Open Access version
to give, and you, I think you've done some,
a little bit of work on that.
- My opinion is that libraries do
what they've always done.
Well, most libraries won't purchase something
that comes out as an unrevised dissertation,
period, end of report.
But I think, I think most libraries have their plans set up
so that if it meets this set of criteria,
we don't care if it came from a dissertation
as long as it was a revised dissertation,
and it fits in our collection.
- Right.
- I think where we've heard anecdotally
maybe some dissent is around creative writing programs.
- Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of concern around fine arts
and creative writing.
- I think that's the nature of (audio blurs)
changing the culture, and that (audio blurs)
Is, you know, for example, if every department,
a lot of departments don't have (audio blurs)
(man quietly talking)
- That's a really good question.
So the question was just briefly
is there a good tool for determining ,
what are good quality Open Access journals
or what the Open Access journals are in your field
say that have an impact factor or that kind of thing?
In my experience, and somebody else may know better than me,
but in my experience, not really.
I'll go back to Erin McKiernan one more time
who said this last week that she keeps a list,
and it's in her Figshare account.
Do you all know about Figshare?
The online repository for data sharing,
and she keeps all her presentations and everything in there.
She has a spreadsheet in there
where she has done her own research
about what are the Open Access journals in her field
that have good impact factors
that she would be willing to publish in.
And she recommends that researchers do the same
for their own discipline.
But there aren't, there's no, as far as I know,
global list anywhere that provides that.
That would be a great project for somebody.
(man quietly asking question)
- Oh gosh, I'm sure that David Carlson
would be happy to talk with Julian and others at SMU
about how they went about it.
There are some other models.
Harvard also has an example, and so I would start,
I would reach out to David Carlson.
- Yeah, David Carlson,
who's the Dean of libraries there
and Bruce Herbert
who's their Director of Scholarly Communications
kind of helps oversee that fund.
The amount, I think, I don't know.
So don't quote me,
but I think it's around $20,000 or something like that
in a year that they have available, and they,
people have to make applications to use it,
and then they can dispense it from there.
I don't know, I don't know any data
as far as how much they've actually dispensed out of it
or anything like that.
I could be wrong about the actual amount of the pool too.
- Any final questions?
- Any support from University presses?
- For Open Access.
Yes, it's complicated.
University presses are really strapped, right?
They're in a crisis of their own,
as far as publication goes.
I think some things like
that First-books Subventions Proposal,
that's something that has some support
from university presses
because it means there's a reliable source of funding
to fund publication of books.
And I think one of the problems,
one of the kind of vicious cycles that's been happening
is that libraries are tending to buy fewer monographs
because of the rising cost of the ethereal,
so then university presses publish far fewer monographs.
And then there's this crisis among the humanities faculty
who still have to publish a book somewhere.
And so I think proposals like that First-books Subvention
may garner some support from university presses,
- Knowledge Unlatched would be another.
- Yeah, yeah, and yeah,
Knowledge Unlatched is another possibility.
And I think there are presses that have experimented
with Open Access publishing.
There are university presses that have OA journals
that they support.
But you know, there's a lot of concern
among university presses
about what the future of monograph publishing looks like
if it's Open Access
because they're already under a lot of strain.
- Well, I think we're done.
We're just a little past our time.
I want to thank everybody for coming today.
I appreciate your attention.
And I particularly want to thank Debra and Kristi
for coming up here.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)