Open Access publishing overview

Martin Weller

• Publishing is at the heart of what it means to be a scholar

• The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published in 1665

Publishing

Research

Authoring

Submission/Review

Rejection/Modification/Acceptance

Publication

Distribution

Parties

Funder

Author

Publisher

Libraries

Reader

£

£

£

Business

• $23 billion STM publishing

• Reed-elsevier $1.5B profit 2009

• UK 2007, writing = £1.6B, peer-review = £200M editing = £70M

• Library costs for journals increased 302% from 1986-2005

Wiley’s trucking parable

“the inventor began contacting shipping companies. But she could not believe what she heard. The truckers would deliver her goods, but only subject to the most unbelievable conditions:

• The inventor had to sign all the intellectual-property rights to her product over to the truckers.

• The truckers would keep all the profits from sales of the inventor’s product.

• The shipping deal had to be both exclusive and perpetual, never subject to review or cancellation.

Every shipping company she contacted gave the same response. Dejected, but unwilling to see the fruits of all her labor go to waste, she eventually relented and signed a contract with one of the companies.”

The squeeze

• Funders mandate (NIH 2008)

• Libraries withdrawing from Big Deal

• Open Access

What is open access?

“digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”

Two models

• Gold route – author pays OA journal

• Green route – author self-archives

Green OA

• What is an appropriate embargo?

• Does it dilute citation?

• Surer and faster (Harnad 2004)

• What version is archived?

Gold

• Fees range between $1000 to $3000 per article • Commercial publishers = $3400 per article. Non-

profit organisations, = $730 (Clarke 2007) • Deutsche Bank: ““We believe the publisher adds

relatively little value to the publishing process.  … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”

Advantages of OA

1. Early advantage – you can publish earlier in the research cycle

2. Arxiv advantage – a central repository (or common data standard) provide one main place for all publications.

3. Quality Bias - a self-selecting bias in that higher-quality articles are more likely to be self-archived in the early days but this effect would disappear as self-archiving approaches 100%.

4. Quality advantage - articles are judged on quality and not access differences.

5. Competitive advantage - self-archived papers have a competitive advantage over non-self-archived ones, in early days, although this effect would also reduce as the practice increases.

6. Usage advantage – OA articles are read more widely than non-OA ones.

(Harnad 2005)

The PLoS example

• Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/) 2003 they set themselves up as a non-profit, open access publisher.

• Creative Commons attribution licence

• Gold OA policy,

• sought to re-engineer the publication model.

Experimenting with peer review

• PLoS Biology/PLoS Medicine

• PLoS One – lightweight peer review

• PLoS Currents. Google Knol web based authoring tool, authors write directly into the system.

• PLoS Hubs

New models

• Zero cost journals

• Added value

• Journal comparison

Big question

<What is your aim when publishing?>

Why wouldn’t you publish open access?