OASPA News and Commentary

Background
This comment is submitted on behalf of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA. OASPA is a membership organization for scholarly publishers engaged in Open Access scholarly journal publishing (see www.oaspa.org). Our membership includes recognized non-profit organizations such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), University Presses such as Utrecht University Library, Igitur, for-profit publishers such as BioMed Central and the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, as well as smaller publishing organizations and a large number of scholar publishers (scholars or small groups of scholars who are self-publishing a journal). Our membership also includes mixed model publishers such as Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, and the BMJ Group, who manage portfolios that include both open access journals as well as subscription-based journals. Our members are based in the United States as well as many other countries, but all publish manuscripts produced by American researchers, many of whom have received federal funding from the United States Government.

OASPA has not had an opportunity to submit comments during the earlier phases of this discussion, but is pleased to offer our general comments on the nine aspects of public access that have been addressed. These comments reflect OASPA’s general position in relation to public access to research. This position is strictly in relationship to open access journals publishing. We recognize that some of our members may wish to submit comments on these questions in relation to their subscription journal programs, either independently or through other associations.

Free re-use is as important as free access

OASPA defines an open access journal as a journal that provides immediate access to original research at no cost and is free from access barriers (i.e. no subscription or need to register), and grants users re-use rights, at least for non-commercial purposes, and ideally for all commercial purposes as well. Our members must comply with this definition as well as to a Code of Conduct that covers ethical and practical issues (see http://www.oaspa.org/conduct.php) of publishing. OASPA believes this definition can offer a standard for recognizing serious open access publishers that provide maximum benefit to the scientific community and tax payers. As an example, we have learned that Harvard University, a co-founder of the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0914_compact.html), has adopted the OASPA criteria as a basis for considering whether a publisher’s publication fee will be covered by its central funds.

One of the key motivations of Open Access publishing is to maximize the potential impact of any piece of published research by removing any barrier to access or reuse of that work. The best way to achieve that is to attach a Creative Commons Attribution license to each and every publication. Among other things, the use of a CCAL assures that researchers and institutions are free to post the final published version of that work in any repository, archive, etc., removing concerns about the circulation of multiple versions of a particular article. Moreover, from an Open Access publishing perspective, archives and repositories also provide additional channels for disseminating authors’ work and encouraging re-use, leading to greater impact.

The role of open access publishers is to support dissemination

OASPA members meet the demands of the scholarly community by providing outlets for publications and managing these publications. From an open access publisher perspective, our role is to provide a valuable service to our clients (scholarly authors) in part by ensuring appropriate peer review, a clean layout, typesetting and XML mark-up to facilitate various publishing and archiving standards, disseminating that article to the greatest extent possible in order to achieve maximum impact for the author, enhancing an author’s visibility, and preservation of the work. The activities involved in the publishing system have been mapped by Bo-Christer Björk and colleagues at http://www.oacs.shh.fi/; this same model provided the basis for the JISC Report: Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models; http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx). To assist authors in complying with policies such as that of the NIH is part of our role as this contributes to the broadest possible dissemination, as well as the preservation, of scholarly research outputs.

Recommendation: Free access policies should be grounded in article publishing in journals

Publishing articles in journals remains the key means of disseminating, registering and validating findings for scholars in most fields (the Arts & Humanities might be an exception. See e.g.: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htm). As noted in a January 4 blog post by Michael Clarke, publishing in journals also remains the primary vehicle for validation, filtration and designation. We would agree with Clarke that although technological advances have altered scholarly publishing in many ways, the tradition of publishing scientific articles in journals has not been seriously disrupted and is unlikely to become so for some time. This is evidenced by the growing number of open access journals published by scholars themselves. As such, free access policies should be aligned with scholarly journal publishing rather than seeking an alternative publishing system. Publishing in open access journals is not incompatible with depositing work in repositories and archives. Publishing and archiving are complimentary activities that fulfill different roles in the scholarly communication system.

Recommendation: Free access policies should support open access publishing

We would encourage any public access policy to include publishing research in open access journals as one outlet for complying with public access demands.
To support publication in open access journals one must recognize that publishing activities do require resources. Some OASPA members charge publication fees (or article processing fees) to cover the costs of managing the publication of articles in their OA journals. Other members are able to offer free publication to authors because of their own volunteer efforts or external support from institutions. In the case of university libraries that provide publishing platforms to independent journal editorial teams, funding and other resources can derive from a variety of sources.

We highly encourage funders and policy-makers to explicitly allow grant monies to be used to cover open access publication charges. Moreover, we encourage policy-makers to provide extra funding to institutions covered by federal funding to establish central funds for those researchers who are not currently working under a specific grant that would cover such open access charges. The policies developed by the Wellcome Trust in the UK, for example, include the provision of funds for researchers wishing to publish in open-access journals (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Spotlight-issues/Open-access/Policy/index.htm).

Recommendations related to compliance

Should a public access policy provide for funding to cover open access charges, OASPA would encourage the adoption of formal guidelines regarding the nature of the publication and the publisher. As noted above, OASPA hopes that its membership criteria can be used as a baseline for making such an evaluation. Such a measure helps to ensure that authors publish with reputable publishers who strive to take advantage of the dissemination opportunities afforded by open access to achieve the greatest possible impact.

Open access is moving much more slowly within the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities than in fields such as Biology and Medicine. OASPA would argue that a policy to support publishing in open access journals should be applied to all fields of research.

As noted above, OASPA favors Creative Commons Licensing (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC) and would highly encourage any public access policy to provide funding for open access publication charges, and to require the use of a Creative Common License or similar license. Again, this assures that researchers and institutions are clear about their rights and are free to post the final published version of a work in any repository, archive, etc., and avoids the dissemination of multiple versions of an article.

Where national archives or subject archives such as PubMed Central (PMC) exist, most open access publishers are happy to assist authors or deposit published articles on their behalf. It should be noted, however, that smaller publishers can encounter financial difficulties in complying with archiving policies as that of PMC, for example, which requires an XML-DTD that by and large only professional typesetters are able to deliver. Preparation of files in XML generally incurs a significant cost to most publishers.

Working with publishers, as well as publishers’ associations, can greatly assist with levels of compliance. Groups like OASPA can provide input on mechanisms and suggested policies on the one hand, and on the other hand disseminate requirements of different funders and governments to their members.

Recommendations on coordination of policy

OASPA would suggest that common policies – at least at the level of a particular discipline – affecting researchers receiving federal funding would enable publishers to best support researchers in complying with those policies. Coordination at a Federal level can provide for common practices. Simplicity and consistency of policies and recommended practices will also encourage compliance.

Should a policy on public access to research in the United States include provision for open access publication fees, OASPA would suggest that an agency working with processing these fees examine the mechanisms by which such payments would be approved and paid for both under current conditions as well as in light of possible expansion of open access publishing activity in the future. These issues, however, have not been fully explored.

OASPA is currently working through a sub-committee on financing of open access publications to write a white paper on guidelines for publishers who handle open access publication fees. We are also looking to engage with funders and university institutions who manage central funding to identify appropriate and manageable mechanisms for handling these fees within an overall system to meet both present and future needs. We would invite any US agency involved in this area to join our discussions.

We applaud the Obama administration for consulting broadly with the scholarly communications community to develop policies that align aims and current practices.

With respect, on behalf of OASPA,
Caroline Sutton
President, OASPA
Caroline.Sutton@co-action.net

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.