OASPA News and Commentary

This second OASPA Showcase features the journal Acta Crysallographica Section E published by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCR) based in the UK. The showcase, which comprises a short slideshow with accompanying audio, is presented by Peter Strickland, the Managing Editor for the IUCR.

Peter describes how Acta Crysallographica Section E started life as an online subscription journal in 2000 but after experimenting with a hybrid open access option from 2004-2007 became a fully open access journal in January 2008.  In part, the decision to move to open access was driven by the rapid growth in the journal which could not be supported with subscription revenue.

Acta Crysallographica Section E is now one of the largest open access peer-reviewed journals and publishes over 4000 articles each year.  The journal publishes short reports of new molecular structures along with all of the key supporting and interactive 3D views of the molecules.

Peter describes how the transition to open access was accompanied by a redesign of the journal and its processes.  This enabled the journal to remain true to its goal to publish as many new structures as possible, easily and cost-effectively.  The publication fee that supports the journal is only $150, but with the very structured and short article format, this is sufficient to fully sustain the journal.

Acta Crysallographica Section E is also one of the journals that will be featured at this year’s COASP conference in Tallinn, Estonia.  One of the themes that we will be exploring at the conference is how new and scalable approaches can lead to tremendously rapid growth of open access publishing.  Other featured journals will include PLoS ONE, BMJ Open, SAGE Open, G3 (from the Genetics Society of America) and Scientific Reports (from the Nature Publishing Group).  See you there!

The European Commission announced Friday (May 6^th) that it will hold a public hearing on May 30^th as part of preparations for a new Communication and Recommendation to be adopted by end of 2011 on access to and preservation of scientific information in the digital age. Upon receiving the invitation to join this meeting and present OASPA’s views, I could not help but reflect upon how much the open access publishing landscape has changed since the Commission presented its first Communication on scientific information in the digital age at a public meeting in February 2007.

It was in the same year as the Commission’s public meeting that OASPA’s founders first came together to begin discussing an industry association to give voice to and represent open access publishers. At the time, open access remained something of a curiosity to the wider publishing community; skepticism and outright criticism of the open access publishing model was rife.

Today, the publishing landscape and discourse on open access publishing looks quite different to that of 2007. I personally could sense a change already at the Berlin 8 Conference in December 2009 in Paris. After delivering a few short remarks about the aims of open access publishing during a panel discussion, I was approached by several subscription publishers who largely agreed with what I had to say. A couple of publishers admitted that their organizations were likely to launch open access journals in the not so distant future given that it has become more challenging to launch new subscription titles. I had been prepared to defend open access publishing, but was pleasantly surprised that this was unnecessary.

In recent months, this sense that the winds of change had begun to blow has been replaced with more concrete evidence of change. Last week the Royal Society announced the launch of its first wholly open access title, Open Biology. In the press release announcing the launch, Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society was quoted as saying  “…The Royal Society is a strong supporter of open-access publishing and is pleased to launch its new journal which will draw on the high standards of the Society over its 350 year history of scientific publishing.”  The Royal Society’s launch comes on the heels of a number of similar open access announcements from publishers otherwise known for their subscription portfolios. To name just a few examples:

Nature Publishing Group – January 6 saw the announcement from the Nature Publishing Group regarding the launch of Scientific Reports, an open access publication that looks to be highly patterned on PLoS One. As noted by Mark Patterson in a presentation at the 2011 APE Conference in Berlin, this is but one of a number of mega journals or “PLoS One look alikes” that have been launched recently (see also BMJ Open, launched Summer 2010; SAGE Open, for the social sciences; AIP Advances from the American  Institute of Physics; G3 from the Genetics Society of America).

Wiley-Blackwell – In September 2010 Wiley-Blackwell announced that a Senior Open Access Marketing Professional, Natasha White, had been recruited. This announcement was followed up on February 1, 2011 with a press release to introduce Wiley Open Access, a new program of open access journals.

AP-ALPSP – The Publishers Association (PA) and ALPSP are jointly organizing a Publisher’s Forum March 31 with the title, “Open Access: the next ten years”. Notable in the announcement is the statement, “Open access is here to stay, and has the support of our key partners.”

The Royal Society, Nature Publishing Group and Wiley-Blackwell are not the first subscription publishers to engage with open access publishing over the past four years. In late 2007 SAGE entered into an agreement with the Hindawi Publishing Corporation to co-publish a portfolio of open access medical titles under the imprint SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research.  Then in October 2008 Springer Verlag acquired BioMed Central in the same week that OASPA was officially launched.  Since then, Springer Verlag has launched Springer Open, a suite of open access journals. SAGE was one of OASPA’s founders, and Springer joined the organization last year.

“Mixed Model Publishers” are probably the fastest growing group of OASPA members. One of the first mixed model publishers to join OASPA was Oxford University Press, a forerunner in testing the waters of open access with Nucleic Acids Research, and openly sharing the financial and other results of uptake. OUP has since then launched full open access journals. Similarly IOP has launched a number of open access titles. To these publishers, we can also add the BMJ Group.

Some of the early criticism of open access publishing pointed to a lack of sustainable business models. In this context it is also worth noting that since 2007 the Public Library of Science has demonstrated a positive financial result, and BioMed Central became profitable. The financial stability of these publishers can be added to that of Hindawi Publishing Corporation and Medknow. Smaller enterprises such as Copernicus Publications and Co-Action Publishing have also demonstrated that open access models can provide the basis for a successful small or medium enterprise.

Recent events together with the incremental changes that have taken place over the last decade lead me to believe that a wider group of publishers are now embracing the notion that there is nothing radical about open access publishing and that there can be viable business models to support it. OASPA welcomes this change. From the start, we have sought to engage in practical discussions of how to move open access publishing forward. With the growth in mixed model publishers, there is no longer a need to argue for the credibility or viability of open access. The discourse has moved beyond this. We can now get down to the business of further working out business models, developing standards, leveraging opportunities afforded by open access content, working with third parties to develop new services, etc. With a greater number of publishers involved in these efforts, we can better envision solutions across communities.

The 3^rd Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) will take place on Sept 21-23 2011 in Tallinn, Estonia.  Here we will continue discussions that were earlier initiated on business models (both APC models and other models), on standards, on content distribution, and other topics that have a unique open access angle. Many publishers and societies considering open access may wish to join a special workshop on Journal Transition, which will be held the first day of the conference in association with the Knowledge Exchange. Last year we welcomed a number of publishers who are now more openly embracing open access to COASP. I look forward to meeting these publishers again as well as new publisher faces and other stakeholders, whose input is needed as we take next steps.

Caroline Sutton

President, OASPA

OASPA is pleased to announce that we have come to an agreement with CrossRef  on an Association-sponsored membership on behalf of our scholar publishers. The agreement enables our scholar publisher members to register Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) without needing to become individual members of CrossRef. All scholar publisher members of OASPA may now register up to 50 DOIs per year, at no charge.

The use of DOIs is a standard OASPA wishes to promote. DOIs are important in an electronic environment as they provide  individual articles with a permanent ‘home’ (a post office box, if you like), which remains constant regardles of whether URL locations should be altered. The cost of participating in CrossRef has been a barrier earlier for many scholar publishers and we believe this agreement will make it easier for this group to ensure visibility for the work they publish.

Scholar publishers who are already members of OASPA should contact info@oaspa.org for more information. To join OASPA and take advantage of this opportunity, visit our website at www.oaspa.org .

For more about CrossRef, see http://www.crossref.org/

On behalf of the OASPA board,

Caroline Sutton, President

To mark Open Access Week in 2010, OASPA is launching a series  of presentations about open-access projects and journals – the OASPA Showcase.  These will be  freely available and will form a valuable resource for teaching and learning  about successes in open-access publishing.  We are particularly interested  to focus on projects that might not be so well known outside of their immediate  communities, and where the experience might be broadly relevant for open-access  publishing.  We would be delighted to receive suggestions for future  presentations.

One of the key membership groups within OASPA is the  scholar publisher group.  There are thousands of such publishers in the  academy, and many of these journals have become important publication venues  although they are not published by a conventional publishing organization.  Many such journals also rely on freely available open-source software such as  Open Journal Systems produced by the Public Knowledge Project.

Our first  OASPA Showcase features the Journal of Medical Internet Research, which has been  published for more than 10 years, under the editorial leadership of Gunther  Eysenbach, also one of the founders of OASPA.  Gunther provides a thorough  history of his journal, including information about the aims and mission of the  journal, the operational infrastructure, and various editorial innovations and  experimentation.  There is much in this presentation that will be of  interest to open-access publishers everywhere.

We look forward to future OASPA  Showcases and wellcome your suggestions. A number of presentations are now lined up and we will announce them as they become available through this blog and other channels.

On behalf of OASPA,

Mark Patterson & Caroline Sutton

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