As in previous years, the conference is directed towards the interests of professional publishing organizations, independent publishers and university presses, as well as librarians, university administrators and other stakeholders.  Participants will have the opportunity to hear from many leading figures within the open access publishing environment.  The preliminary program for the event will be released shortly.

Registration and accommodation information for COASP 2013 can found on the conference website: http://oaspa.org/conference/

Early bird registration fees and reduced rates for OASPA and OAPEN members are available.

This new, innovative program recognizes individuals who have used, applied or remixed scientific research – published through Open Access – to innovate and make a difference in science, medicine, business, technology or society as a whole.

Three top awards of $30,000 each will be presented.  The nomination period is open from May 1 to June 15, 2013.  Winners will be announced in Washington, DC in October 2013, during an Open Access Week event hosted by SPARC and the World Bank.

For more information on the ASAP program and to make a nomination, please visit http://asap.plos.org/.   See also the Program rules at http://asap.plos.org/nominate/rules/.  Follow the ASAP Program on Twitter at #SciASAP.

As detailed in previous posts, each individual application to join OASPA is reviewed by a membership committee and board members to ensure that all of the membership criteria are met by the organization.  Additional background research is also carried out where appropriate and this may involve a deeper investigation of the background of the organization, or contacting editors or authors.   We continue to foster good relationships with other organizations that have a similar review procedure to ourselves.

The following table shows a breakdown of membership applications from 22^nd October 2012 to 31^st March 2013, since the last OASPA post regarding membership procedures.

Following the review process, recommendations are often made to applicants to help them to meet the membership criteria.  A good deal of time is invested into advising the applicant, tackling individual problems they may have and assisting them with technical queries relating to open access publishing.  In the case of smaller organizations who often lack a professional support team, this guidance can often be invaluable and difficult for them to obtain elsewhere, particularly for applicants from developing countries.

The recommendations are made regardless of whether the organization ultimately becomes a member and are aimed to assist the publisher in maintaining high standards in terms of processes and practices as well as the professionalism of the presentation and website.

This table below shows how many applicants have needed to revise processes or information on their websites before formally being admitted to OASPA between 22^nd October 2012 and 31^st March 2013.

Still the most frequent requirement for modification relates to licensing and how this information is displayed.  For smaller publishers and individuals especially, this can be an area that leads to much discussion.  OASPA recently published some frequently asked questions on licensing to help applicants negotiate this issue.  It may be that a different license needs to be adopted, or it needs to be added to published material or guidelines on the website.  Most often applicants are willing to make modifications to their website or reconsider their policies, but some applicants do choose not to resubmit their application, indicated as ‘Dropped’ in the following table, and a smaller number of applications are declined for the time being.

This data above is for all applications received, again from 22^nd October 2012 to March 31^st 2013, where a final decision has now been made.  Currently there are an additional 34 applications undergoing review by OASPA.  Applications show a broad geographic spread and a mix of large and small publishers, individuals/scholar publishers and non-publishing organisations.

Ongoing membership is conditional on continuing to adhere to our code of conduct and members are reviewed periodically to ensure that they still meet criteria.   The criteria themselves and assessment process are also under continual review to ensure that they meet the needs of the growing open access scholarly publishing community.

OASPA has a complaints procedure that will be followed should the activity of an OASPA member organization not be in line with the code of conduct.   Anyone with any concerns should contact us directly.

Paul has been working for the Hindawi Publishing Corporation since 2004, and currently serves as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. He was one of the original founders of OASPA and has been the Chair of OASPA’s annual conference (COASP) for the past four years. He also serves on the Board of Directors of CrossRef as well as the STM Association.

“I am very excited at the opportunity to lead OASPA,” said Paul. “Particularly since the organization has come to play an increasingly important role within the scholarly publishing ecosystem. I am incredibly grateful to Caroline for all of her hard work over the past five years in leading OASPA from the very first discussions between a small group of open access publishers, and for helping to turn it into one of the most important trade associations within the industry, currently representing more than 50 full voting members.”

Caroline Sutton, Publisher & Co-Founder of Co-Action Publishing, served as President of the OASPA Board from the official inception of the organization in 2008 and contributed to the original draft of the by-laws together with David Solomon.

On reaching the end of her term as OASPA President, Caroline said, “I am proud to have had the privilege to serve OASPA over the last five years. I feel the organization has made some major contributions towards establishing Open Access publishing as an accepted and viable element within scholarly communications and has helped to establish standards as both new and familiar organizations have ventured into this space. I look forward to continuing to work on behalf of OASPA in the future, now with a focus on policy issues.  Paul is an excellent choice as a successor and I will be supporting his efforts in any way I can.”

Caroline’s work on behalf of the organization will continue as she moves into a regular Board Member seat and leads OASPA’s Policy Committee.

Data for the above chart can be downloaded here: OASPA Members CC-BY Growth

A total of 252,418 articles were published with the CC-BY license during the period shown above.

Data was supplied by the following members of OASPA as number of CC-BY articles per year since implementation of the license by that publisher:

BioMed Central (2000-2012 which includes SpringerOpen 2011-2012), Hindawi (2006-2012), PLOS (2003-2012), Frontiers (2012 only), Leibniz-Institute for Psychology Information/ZPID (2012 only), American Institue of Physics (2011-2012), MDPI (2008-2012), ecancermedicalscience (2007-2012)

This chart will be updated periodically as publishers continue to contribute their data.

“Along with a growing number of public and private research funders worldwide, these three organizations recognise that the communication of research results is as fundamental a component of the research process as the experiments themselves”, says Mark Patterson, Managing Executive Editor for eLife.  “Disseminating new findings as widely and effectively as possible maximises the value of research investments and the establishment of eLife provides a new, open-access venue for the most important advances — from basic biological research through to applied, translational and clinical studies.”

From a new publication to a publisher that started business more over two centuries ago, OASPA are pleased to also have Taylor & Francis on board as a full voting member.  Taylor & Francis includes the well-known Routledge brand and has a network of offices around the world.  Through T&F Open they now publish a range of fully Open Access titles and Open Access hybrids.

OASPA is delighted to announce that 12 other new members have joined us in recent months. We are pleased to be working with the following organizations as we continue to strive for excellence in standards of open access scholarly publishing:

Publishers:
Living Reviews
Open Book Publishers
Portland Press

Other Organizations with Voting Rights:
California Digital Library
Greenhouse Associates, Inc.
OAPEN Foundation
OpenEdition

Associate Members:
CLOCKSS
Emerging Theatre Research
Institute of Historical Research
Quanta
Samtíð

For the OASPA Board,

Caroline Sutton, President

18 January 2013

Submitted by Caroline Sutton, OASPA President, on behalf of OASPA

KEY POINTS

• OASPA recognizes the interests of funders in seeking to maximize access to the results of research funded under their programmes.
• OASPA supports the RCUK policy support for gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available.
• OASPA supports the RCUK policy requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee.
• The APC levels per article that are assumed by the RCUK policy following the Report by the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, are reasonable and in line with the experiences of open access publishers.
• Infrastructural challenges exist (e.g. payment mechanisms), and are being addressed by the necessary stakeholders. OASPA is committed to engaging actively with stakeholders to resolve these.

INTRODUCTION

1. The Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association (OASPA) is pleased to respond to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee inquiry into open access.  As the first and primary association for publisher’s working in the field of open access publishing, OASPA  aims to expand open access publishing through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy and the promotion of innovation.

2.  OASPA was founded in 2008.  At the time only a small number of publishers were engaged with OA publishing. Today our membership includes a rapidly expanding list of publishers, including many of the larger legacy publishers such as Springer Science + Business, SAGE Publications and Wiley-Blackwell, as well as society publishers such as the Royal Society and Institute of Physics.

3.  Membership is granted to those publishers who demonstrate a commitment to engaging actively with OA publishing, including the publication of at least one title that makes all original research immediately upon publication under a liberal license (see below), and who meet a list of quality assurance criteria (e.g. rich description of peer review process, full names and affiliations of board members, etc. see http://oaspa.org/membership/membership-procedures/).

4.  OASPA engages not only with the publishing community but is also working with other stakeholder groups such as SPARC Europe (board member), OAPEN (chair of advisory board), and OpenAIRE (member of advisory board) to develop the OA ecosystem.

Support for the current recommendations

5.  OASPA recognizes that the current House of Lords inquiry does not question the aims of the current policy but is investigating the current plans for implementation.

The report from the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research findings and the policy adopted by the RCUK set a clear policy direction in support of open access. OASPA particularly supports the following points:

• its choice of gold open access as the preferred model, with additional funds being made available;
• the requirement for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence to be used where Research Council funds are used to meet a gold open access fee.

Support for gold

6.  Gold OA is expanding quickly, both among the early pioneers of OA publishing as well as within the publishing sector more broadly, including by new actors in the sector. A study by Laakso and Björk published in BMC Medicine shows that gold OA (in immediate OA journals and published together with articles published under a hybrid option) have grown 16-fold between 2000 and 2011. Approximately 17% of the articles published during 2011 and indexed in Scopus are available under gold OA.(doi:10.1186/1741-7015-10-124)  (link http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124).

7.  As the RIN Report Heading for the Open Road made clear through its cost benefit analysis, green OA is reliant upon the current subscription system as a foundation. As noted by Dame Janet Finch in her testimony to the House of Lords Committee on 16 January 2013, this system is currently being disrupted.  OA publications are already biting at market shares that were earlier occupied by subscription titles and many publishers are experiencing subscription cancellations that are of concern from a business perspective.  In this context, Gold OA offers a business opportunity to publishers and more stable foundation for offering extended access in the long run.

8.  OASPA recognizes that publishers and scholarly societies have expressed concerns over the uncertainties associated with shifting business models (bearing in mind that an APC model is but one funding model). It is for this reason that OASPA invites members of the community to share knowledge and experiences at an annual conference dedicated to OA publishing.

Support for Licensing Requirements

9.  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 (CC-BY) to each and every publication. Among other things, the use of a CC-BY license 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.

10.  At OASPA, one of the criteria for membership is that a publisher must use a liberal license that encourages the reuse and distribution of content. We strongly encourage (but currently do not require) the use of the CC-BY license wherever possible. A CC-BY-NC license is also accepted.

11.  As emphasized by the early declarations on open access in Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin, open access is about more than access – open access removes access and reuse barriers, and thus has the potential to transform the literature into a much more powerful resource for research, education and innovation.

12.  The human genome project is a compelling demonstration of the power of open access to research, and reflects a well-established practice within the genome community to make research data publicly available for all reuses via resources such as GenBank.  It is also interesting that one of the early visionary articles about open access to literature (published in Science in 2001) was entitled “Building a GenBank of the published literature”, the creation of which would “encourage the development of new, more sophisticated, and valuable ways of using this information, much as GenBank has done for DNA sequences”.

13.  Also in the Social Sciences and Humanities the application of liberal licensing can offer as yet untapped advantages in scholarly advancement. Among others, the European Commission has supported projects in these subject areas that deal with developing a robost and integrated infrastructure for research outputs. Projects like CLARIN (Common language resources & technology infrastructure), DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastractures for the Arts), and CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data) are demonstrating the value of open access to outputs.

14.  One argument against applying liberal licenses within the Humanities has been that publications in many subject areas include images and other elements that are reproduced under permission from a copyright holder. As a solution to the issues this raises, open access publishers apply alternative licenses to the specific item within the overall publication to honour copyright conditions and permissions. The Wikimedia Foundation, among others, is also working in this area to address copyright concerns in relation to images.

15.  The largest OA publishers (BioMed Central, PLOS, and Hindawi) have between them already published hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed articles under the CC-BY license and in doing so have created high-quality sustainable businesses.  Major established publishers, such as Springer and Wiley-Blackwell, whose businesses have been built on subscription models, have also recently embraced CC-BY for their open access content.  As the open access corpus grows, new services, commercial and non-commercial, will be built on top of open access literature, and publishers that impose no limit on the reach and impact of the work that they publish (thanks to their use of the liberal CC-BY license) will be the most attractive option for authors.

16.  OASPA has expressed its support for Creative Commons Licensing (either CC-BY or, as a second-best choice, CC-BY-NC) in other policy contexts (the European Commission and the United States, notably) as 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.

Addressing concerns and challenges raised about the RCUK policy

APC levels

17.  OASPA feels that the information on APC levels upon which RCUK recommendations are based is reasonable. The Wellcome Trust, as noted in the report “Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications” has the longest and broadest experience of funding APCs. Elsewhere, results of a study by Björk & Solomon showed that the average APC level by journal is 906 USD, with averages varying across fields (DOI: 10.1002/asi.22673). Further figures in the same study, support the calculations within the working group’s report.

18.  Concerns have been raised that the UK will be funding OA for other countries by being a first mover. Further criticism has been raised that the allocated funds will not be sufficient. In this context it may be worth noting that most OA publishers are able to split payments between more than one funding body or institution. The Open Access Key system (a third party payment aggregator that many OA publishers are partnering with) also allows for split payments.

Infrastructural issues

19.  As yet the full infrastructure for gold OA has not been established. OASPA is currently cooperating with other stakeholders on three issues that are critical to address: payment mechanisms, metrics, and quality control.  While all three of these areas pose challenges, concrete steps are being taken.

20.  In particular, the emergence of intermediaries in this area, with systems built on the input of experienced OA publishers and institutions who have managed central funds, contributes to reducing what could otherwise amount to an unmanageable number of micro payments. OASPA is aware that JISC is involved in investigating means of managing the RCUK funds allocated for gold OA.

21.  The development of alternative metrics for measuring impact as well as a standard for reporting such measures will be key to evaluating the value of publishing services in future. OA publishers have begun to discuss these issues and are working to make progress towards solutions that will be of value to the broader community.

22.  It is particularly in relation to infrastructural issues that OASPA agrees with the argument that there is a need to bring stakeholders together at this time in order to manage change as the publication eco system evolves. OASPA would support and be happy to be involved in any attempts to make the infrastructure for OA and payment of APCs easier for authors, HEIs and publishers.

Variations across fields

23.  Some stakeholders have argued that the RCUK policy as it currently stands does not take account of the differences between scholarly subject areas; noting in particular that the policy ignores the realities of the Social Sciences and Humanities.

24.  OASPA recognizes that the uptake of OA varies across subject areas.  For this reason, it is important that the RCUK policy also allows for alternatives to publishing gold OA. The possibility to take advantage of author archiving (green) provides a secondary route of compliance that will likely be important for journals in the social sciences and humanities , for example.

25.  At the same time, OASPA would argue that the RCUK policy speaks to an argument against OA in the Humanities that has been raised earlier. Namely, that funding levels in the Humanities do not allow for adoption of gold OA. OASPA applauds the RCUK policy for providing funding across all fields of scholarship which it supports. This may also provide a context for some journals in fields that are underrepresented in the OA publishing market to experiment with OA.

Learned Societies will be damaged by the policy

26.  OASPA recognizes the concerns of scholarly societies for whom journal income has become an important source of income for other important society activities.  In particular for those societies whose primary income is derived from a subscription-based journal, a consideration of OA and move to gold OA cannot be taken lightly.

27.  Given the difficult situation many societies face, it is important that the RCUK policy provides for a green option as well as allowing for a hybrid solution (i.e. offering authors a choice of gold for the individual article in exchange for a payment). Indeed many society titles already offer a hybrid option.

28.  PLoS, BioMed Central, Springer, Co-Action Publishing and Copernicus Publications have all gained experience from working with scholarly societies to transition journals to gold OA. In some cases, particularly for smaller and medium sized societies, the transition has resulted in the same or a better financial situation in relation to the journal.

29.  Among the resources that might be useful to societies considering gold OA is a list that Peter Suber and Caroline Sutton have made freely available covering journals that have moved to gold OA. This list currently contains nearly 700 titles.  The OAIG has funded a project aimed at developing resources for societies considering gold OA. These resources are due for publication within the next couple of months.

Relationship between gold and green

30.  From an Open Access publishing perspective, archives and repositories provide channels for disseminating authors’ work and encouraging re-use, leading to greater impact. When published under an appropriate licence, the final published version of an article can be deposited within an institutional or subject repository immediately upon publication.  OA publishers generally provide support to authors in depositing their articles as well as providing automatic deposit on behalf of authors.

31.  As a society dedicated to developing gold OA, OASPA refrains from offering opinion on embargo periods.

Rushing in to Open Access

32.  As a reaction to the limited discussion and debate of the National Working Group’s report, before the RCUK policy was adopted, it has been argued that the Council is “rushing in to Open Access”. While the current surge in debate over the Councils’ policy may well indicate that a greater debate period was desired by many actors, it is worth noting that Open Access, and gold OA, have been debated for over a decade. The issues and concerns that are being raised in current discourse are unsurprising and echo those that have been aired for a number of years. Gold OA was established over 10 years (with earlier examples of single journals going back to the mid -1980s, using bitnet for distribution).

Sustaining peer review and high-quality editorial work

33.  Throughout the debate on OA claims have been made that gold OA is not compatible with quality editorial work or peer review. In the worst case scenario presented, authors may engage in vanity publishing as the APC model is corrupt and leads publishers to accept everything and anything for publication. This myth has largely been debunked over the last few years. In addition to the stringent membership criteria OASPA applies (and which has been adopted by a number of funding bodies and central fund managers), most OA publishers have established mechanisms to separate financial decisions (for waivers) from editorial decisions (to publish). Editorial quality is not dependent on business model.

34.  Often quality is conflated with prestige. While a new journal may offer high quality editorial practices from day 1, prestige takes time to build up. Now that open access publishing is over a decade old, a growing number of Open Access journals have rapidly become leaders in their fields in terms of impact factor, etc.

First mover disadvantage?

35.  A second concern that has been raised is the notion that the UK stands to suffer as a first mover; UK research will be available to the world, but the UK shall not be rewarded with the same access to global research, at least initially. While understandable, this concern ignores fact that a healthy research sector requires that the output of the research should be widely read and cited around the world – this provides the key to fruitful international cooperation. So, increasing the global visibility of the output of UK research will itself benefit the UK research sector. It would certainly be unfortunate if the global scientific publishing system were to be stuck with a non-optimal model in terms of access and impact because no country was prepared to act first.

36.  The leadership shown by the Wellcome Trust and NIH in unilaterally implementing open access policies rapidly resulted in adoption of similar policies by many other organizations worldwide,  RCUK’s recent efforts to add impetus to the move to gold OA seem poised to have  a similar influence on policy in Europe, the US, and the rest of the world. The Global Research Council is due to hold its inaugural global summit meeting in May 2013, and “agree on an action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications” is one of the two key topics for discussion, http://www.globalresearchcouncil.org/meetings .

For the first time, 2012 saw the 4^th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) feature an afternoon of sessions entirely dedicated to Open Access books. In his introduction, OAPEN’s Eelco Ferwerda highlighted that with this year’s milestones – the launch of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), PKP’s Open Monograph Press, and Springer’s announcement of SpringerOpen books – the time for Open Access monograph publishing has arrived, culminating in Open Access books being made part of the program at COASP.

Things are speeding up for books, Ferwerda remarked. However, there are still a lot of unknowns: What will be the main business model for Open Access books? Under what license should they be published? What do the stakeholders in scholarly communication—the authors, libraries, funders and publishers—think about Open Access monographs? The afternoon thus set out to explore emerging business and publishing models for Open Access books, and current research on user and stakeholder needs.

After the introduction, Lars Bjørnshauge, SPARC Europe Director of European Library Relations, chaired the first session on funding and publication Models for OA Books. In the first of 3 funding models, Marin Dacos presented OpenEdition Freemium in which the basic services are free (i.e. basic access to books) and advanced premium subscription services (i.e. freemium = free + premium) finance the entire platform. This offer, Dacos exlains, guarantees maximum distribution of academic texts via free-access, while financing the publication activity through the premium services. The model has been recently proposed to libraries, who, according to Dacos, have been positive in their feedback. OpenEdition books will be launched at the end of the year. More than 50% of the books on this platform will be available Open Access where the remaining 50% will be available for different forms of unlocking (e.g. unglue.it or Knowledge Unlatched).

Next, Frances Pinter presented Knowledge Unlatched, a not-for-profit company established to work with a new business model that uses international library consortium purchasing to enable sustainable Open Access publishing. Pinter outlined the pilot project due to start in 2013. Secure collective payments will be insured for first digital publication, paying for the fixed costs. Pinter used an ice cream metaphor to describe the model: the scoop is the free content, the cone is print books, and the premium bespoke version for libraries and ereaders, and then there is the sundae: enhanced ebooks that offer more than just the text. Member libraries are eligible for discounts on premium versions, which will function as the incentive to become a member. The costs to libraries will reduce as the project grows.

Finally, Doris Haslinger talked about the FWF (Austrian Science Fund or Wissenschaftsfonds) initiative for funding Open Access books. Since it has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities 2003, an active Open Access policy for FWF-funded projects has been established. Their reasoning behind supporting Open Access is based on the idea that you shouldn’t require Open Access without funding it. The FWF has two different funding programs for supporting the publication of scientific outcomes; it offers funds for peer reviewed scientific publications, and for stand-alone (book) publications.

The second part of the Open Access Books session focused on publishing models. Kathy Killoh offered the perspective of a small university publisher: Athabasca University Press, the first Open Access press in Canada established in 2007. As a non-traditional scholarly press, AU Press has strived to preserve the processes and character of a traditional press with the goal of maintaining high-quality peer-reviewed products, while embracing Open Access and the rapidly changing e-publishing world. What drives them is the desire to increase the dissemination of knowledge, a wish to avoid commoditisation, privatization and corporate control of knowledge, and the public right to access. Killoh argues that we need to get away from commercial revenue business models. AU press builds on Athabasca University’s 1% solution, where the university reserves 1% of their budget for publishing as it is seen as a core activity of the university. Killoh advocates that funding and support for Open Access book publishing needs to come from institutions. We need a reallocation of funds. This requires a change in thinking, where scholarly publishing needs to be valued more by institutions.

Bettina Goerner talked about SpringerOpen, which started with journals in 2010 and has recently expanded with Open Access books. Springer already has a successful ebook program, where its ebook collection consists of more than 50,000 titles. This program is driven by ebook sales and Springer depends for their revenue on these sales. However, they are also selling printed books. For Springer the sales strategy is thus very important. SpringerOpen books covers all scientific disciplines, where the establishment of quality follows the processes of traditional books. Their business model works via an APC model (article processing charge), based on average book costs of 15000 Euros. The APCS are needed to balance electronic revenues (the ebook isn’t sold) and to balance part of the print sales (where the print books of the Open Access titles are priced lower). An Open Access membership program covers SpringerOpen Books, where member authors are entitled to a 15% loyalty discount. To the argument that fees are not fair on authors with less financial backing, Goerner replied that authors could still choose to publish in the traditional model. She also emphasised the need to give waivers to certain poorer countries, to ensure that they are not turned away.

Lastly Margo Bargheer talked about her experiences at Göttingen University Press. She explained how the publishing scene in Germany is made up of small and medium enterprises. There are about 20 University Presses in Germany, operating under the control of their mother institution. They are defined to be a public service, which means they don’t pay income tax. In this scene Open Access is almost a must-do, Bargheer explains. At GUP, daily business blends into the university services, where they are very dependent on these for their over-all functioning. GUP’s overhead is covered by the library and the university, where the library decided it would be good for the university to set up an Open Access press. Revenues come from book sales and author fees. Each publication is subsidised for 50% by the university, which they find reasonable. In this respect GUP can be seen to do embedded publishing: in the university for the university. This model has cost saving potentials, and the press is a form of branding for the institution. The drawbacks of this model are however that every turn of the tide in the university affects the press directly. There are dangers of vanity publishing, and the true costs of publishing might be too high or remains unknown. Furthermore, innovation or change is difficult to establish due to the economy of scale and the specific context that determines the publishing process and model.

Next, a session chaired by Eelco Ferwerda focussing on how stakeholders see Open Access books. Caren Milloy presented the first results of OAPEN-UK, a four-year research project that is exploring an Open Access model for publishing HSS monographs in collaboration with publishers, research funders, researchers and institutions. Milloy reported the results of a survey of 700 academics undertaken in Spring 2012 with a focus on their attitudes towards and perceptions of creative commons licensing, the services their publishers provide, open access business models and the impacts of open access on the scholarly environment.

Janneke Adema presented the first outcomes of the Directory of Open Access books (DOAB) user needs research, zooming in on the main discussion points of the online discussion amongst stakeholders that DOAB organised in July, and on some preliminary results of the DOAB survey amongst stakeholders. Results showed a wide array of opinions related to quality, licensing of Open Access books and Open Access funding models, where standards and prescriptive models were on the one hand applauded to create trust and quality insurance, but on the other hand critiqued for their inflexibility and their potential stifling of innovation and critique.  The DOAB user needs report has now been released and is available at the DOAB blog.

During the final panel discussion, a set of questions was addressed focusing on what the requirements for Open Access books should be. Should there for instance be a specific format for Open Access books (such as html, xml, PDF)? Should users be able to download Open Access books or is it sufficient if you can read them online (i.e. Google Books)? What sort of license is required in the case of Open Access books? What sort of quality control would be required for Open Access books? And are there minimum requirements in any of these areas? The discussion also focused on the potential role of OASPA in establishing standards for Open Access book publishing, and on whether in the future the book will converge with journal articles in an Open Access world.

The presentations have all been recorded and are now available on OASPA’s website.

OASPA thanks Janneke for her work on this summary of the OA books sessions.

As emphasized by the early declarations on open access in Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin, open access is about more than access – open access removes access and reuse barriers, and thus has the potential to transform the literature into a much more powerful resource for research, education and innovation.   The field of genomics provides a prime example of open access in action.

In June 2011, the Battelle Technology Partnership published a report that estimated the economic impacts of the human genome project.  The headline findings were that a $3.8billion investment by the US government towards determining the sequence of the human genome helped to drive approximately $800billion in economic output and the creation of over 300,000 jobs.  Critical to the success of this initiative was making the scientific outputs – the sequence data themselves – openly available to researchers and industry alike to use without restriction.

The human genome project is a compelling demonstration of the power of open access to research, and reflects a well-established practice within the genome community to make research data publicly available for all reuses via resources such as GenBank.  It is also interesting that one of the early visionary articles about open access to literature (published in Science in 2001) was entitled “Building a GenBank of the published literature”, the creation of which would “encourage the development of new, more sophisticated, and valuable ways of using this information, much as GenBank has done for DNA sequences”.

To fully realise that potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed.  The Creative Commons licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this.  Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

The most liberal Creative Commons license is CC-BY, which allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed.  Other Creative Commons licenses allow for three possible restrictions to be imposed in addition to the requirement for attribution.  In keeping with its tagline “some rights reserved”, these are: No Commercial use (NC), No Derivatives (ND) and Share-Alike (SA).  Each type of restriction has its uses, for certain types of content and certain types of sharing.  But the emerging consensus on the adoption of CC-BY reflects the fact that any of these restrictions needlessly limits the possible reuse of published research.

No Derivatives. Derived use is fundamental to the way in which scholarly research builds on what has gone before. One of the many benefits of open access publishing is that elements such as figures from a published research article can be reused, with attribution, as part of teaching material, or in other published works, without needing to request permission of the publisher. Similarly, article translations, image libraries, case report databases, text-mining enhancements and data visualizations are all examples of how additional value can be created by allowing derivative use.

No Commercial use. There are two key problems with a no commercial use restriction.  The first is that the definition of what constitutes commercial use is necessarily fuzzy, and so any license which restricts commercial use creates a haze of doubt around various uses that may or may not be at risk of being considered commercial, and in doing so acts as a general discouragement to reuse (http://www.samuelabram.com/noncommercial).  More importantly, perhaps, scientific research is not funded by taxpayers and companies purely to serve as a resource to further academic discussion and debate. A major justification for the large-scale research investment is that it will produce new knowledge, the application of which will help to develop and enrich our society.  Enabling the commercial sector to have access to and freedom to reuse the findings of published research (as exemplified by the human genome project) is a natural way to seek to achieve these ends.  See also: NC considered harmful

Share-Alike. Material distributed under a share-alike license can be used to create and distribute derivative works, but only if those works are shared under the same Share-Alike license.  Such licenses are sometime referred to as Viral licenses, as “the licenses spread a continuing use of the licenses in its derivatives”.  However, while such licenses can be extremely helpful in building up a collection of content, they also have downsides in terms of the limitations they place on reuse.  For example, material distributed within a Share-Alike article could only be combined and redistributed with other share-alike content.  In contrast, CC-BY content can be combined with any content, and redistributed according to the terms of that other content, as long as CC-BY’s own attribution requirement is respected.  This makes CC-BY something like a Universal Donor blood-type in that it has maximal compatibility.

Given the ways in which additional restrictions can limit the reach and impact of research outputs, OASPA therefore strongly encourages the use of the CC-BY license, rather than one of the more restrictive licenses or indeed a license that is ‘functionally equivalent’ to CC-BY.   We encourage the use of CC licenses, because they are very well established legal tools, and have the benefits of simplicity, machine-readability and interoperability.  Importantly, many elements of internet infrastructure ‘understand’ CC licensing, and can display and filter content appropriately, based on this machine-readable license information (eg Flickr), in a way that is unlikely to be practical for ad hoc, publisher-specific licenses.  For example, Wikipedia moved to Creative Commons licensing in 2007, specifically to benefit from this interoperability. (A side-benefit of OA publishing under CC-BY is that all content published in this way is fully compatible with being included/excerpted/quoted in Wikipedia).  Similarly, the UK Government worked with Creative Commons to make its open data license interoperable with CC BY.

With the building momentum towards open access to research, new and established publishers are launching new open access publications and initiatives.  Many are adopting the CC-BY license, but some publishers are choosing to use more restrictive CC licenses, in particular the non-commercial license.  Various reasons are given for this, most notably that exclusive retention of the commercial rights means that the publisher can benefit from commercial reprint sales, the revenue from which can be particularly significant in medical journals, or sales to other aggregation services providing access to content.  It is argued that such additional sources of revenue help to keep publication fees at a lower level.  OASPA includes, and will currently still admit, members who use the NC restriction (but not the SA or ND restrictions).

Nevertheless, CC-BY is now emerging as the gold standard for OA publishing, particularly in STM fields.  The three largest OA publishers (BioMed Central, PLOS, and Hindawi) all use this license and have created high-quality sustainable businesses.  Major publishers, such as Springer and Wiley-Blackwell, whose businesses have been built on subscription models are moving steadily in the same direction.  As the open access corpus grows, new services, commercial and non-commercial, will be built on top of open access literature, and publishers that impose no limit on the reach and impact of the work that they publish (as enshrined in the CC-BY license) will be the most attractive option for authors.