Back in 2001, while still a professor of philosophy at Earlham College, Suber undertook a sabbatical from his teaching duties mainly with the intention of focusing on his academic research. During this time, he became increasingly interested in the web’s power for sharing scholarly writing, starting his own weekly newsletter on the subject. As the popularity of the newsletter rapidly grew, so too did Suber’s interest in open access, leading him to spend ‘every hour of my work day, plus many other hours’ working on the topic. The newsletter soon became a blog entitled ‘Open Access News’, from which most of the book’s contents are taken. Suber left Earlham in 2003 and has worked full-time on open access ever since.

The book covers Suber’s writings from the early days of the newsletter through to 2011 – a time of huge change for open access to knowledge across the world. During this time, open access went from being an extremely niche activity to something that is near impossible for the average researcher to ignore. The book features sections on the case for OA, understandings of OA, disciplinary differences and what the future might hold, all written in an approachable and conversational style.

For policymakers, there is a whole section on funder and university policies for open access that contextualises Suber’s excellent guide (co-authored with his colleague Stuart Shieber) on Good Practices for University Open-Access Policies. Harvard’s 2008 open-access policy was the first OA policy in an American university and the first faculty-led (rather than administrator-led) policy.

Coupled with his concise introductory 2012 book Open Access (also MIT Press) the two works should offer an excellent introduction and a compelling case for open access publishing.

Open Access to research data is fast becoming recognised as complementary to Open Access to research publications, both key components of Open Science. While the PASTEUR4OA project targets the development and reinforcement of Open Access strategies and policies for research publications, the project also encourages the development of such policies for research data

This briefing paper provides an overview of the current situation with regards to Open Access to research data. It considers the benefits and challenges of opening up research data with a particular focus on current funder and institutional policy developments in Europe and further afield and shares resources and initiatives for further study. The paper is available from http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/resources.

“Open access publications are easy to access and theoretically accessible to anyone with an Internet connection”, Mark Muehlhaeusler

On the event’s homepage, the term Open Access is highlighted as it refers to “literature and research that is digital, online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. Nevertheless, Meggan Houlihan and Mark Muehlhaeusler felt the need to start by explaining the term in more details in the first session of the event.

In the next session, Nicholas Cop from SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online), gave an introduction their bibliographic database of open access journals. SciELO initially started in Brazil, 15 years ago, yet it now have presence in 12 countries most of them are in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Mr. Cop also shed the light about the status of Open Access in that region by showing some statistics. For example, in Chile, 88% of the journals are Open Access ones. Similarly, in Brazil, 63% of the articles there are OA. On SciELO’s blog there is also a study about academic journal publication models in Brazil and Spain. SciELO is meant to make it easier for anyone to search in all the member OA journals from one place. They also noticed that the language barrier for researches done in Spanish or Portuguese are limiting the access to the papers published in the OA journals there, thus they translate the papers’ abstracts. Mr. Cop also spoke about a new project they are working on to promote OA books and to allow ways for easier citations between papers and e-books.

Later on, Iryna Kuchma of Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), spoke about 4 more projects and case studies. She started with EIFL, a not-for-profit organisation that works with libraries to enable access to digital information in developing and transition countries. Their Open Access program focuses on building capacity to launch open access repositories and to ensure their long-term sustainability, and empowering librarians and library professionals, scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates. She then introduced three other projects, OASPA, COAR and NDLTD.

The next session was a panel discussion that focused on the state of Open Access in the Arab world. The panel was moderated by Nadine Weheba and Ramy Aziz, and there were 5 panelists, Seif Abou Zeid from Tahrir Academy, Hala Essalmawi from Creative Commons Egypt, Ahmed Hussein from Open Egypt, Mandy Taha, an open access consultant, and yours truly from Open Knowledge Egypt. Seif spoke about their aim in Tahrir Academy to make university courses as well as other educational and skill sharing videos available to everyone for free. He emphasised on the importance of adopting an open license, such as Creative Commons, as opposed to many of the existing MOOC websites. Hala Essalmawi then moved to the legal aspects of OA, and how they worked in Creative Commons Egypt, not only to translate the license, but also to adapt it to the Egyptian laws. She also highlighted the positive and negative aspects of the Egyptian IP laws, and their relations to the OA goals. Since Open Egypt advocate for the use of Free and Open Source Software in Egypt, Ahmed Hussein went on to make analogies between Open Access and Open Source, how the culture of sharing and openness has helped the latter to develop in the recent years. He then called for building directories for OA journals in the region. Then, during my talk, I prefered to draw a picture about the status of OA in the region through some numbers. Then I highlighted the importance of OA, not only to make the access to research results costless, but also to make it more accessible. I used the language barrier as an example to show how the lack of free license may prevent people from translating existing researches published in foreign languages. I then had my share of analogies, by comparing OA to Open Data, and how openness here doesn’t stop at the legal aspects, but it also has to provide technical openness so that not only humans can read the published researches, but also machines for data analyses and search engines. There were discussions among the panelists and with the audience about the concepts discussed, and the case studies shown from the region. One of the discussions was taken home by Maha Bali after the session, where she continued the discussion on her blog.

Right before the final session of the day, Ramy Aziz of PLoS, showed how he encourages his students in Cairo University to blog about what they study. He also highlighted how Open Access and scientific blogging can fight pseudoscience and help researchers follow new studies in their fields. Then in the final session of the day, Ryder Kouba presented the AUC’s Digital Archive and Research (DAR).

I wasn’t able to attend the second day, but from the feedback on twitter, it was clear that the panel about copyright was interesting. Later in the day, Maha Bali had a session about Open Education Resources, and the session was followed by a workshop by Mark Muehlhaeusler on Open Journal System (OJS).

What could the UK academic community do with £14.5 million? That is the same as the yearly tuition fees for over 1600 undergraduates paying £9,000 fees.

And that is what just 19 Universities in the UK are spending in total during a single year on journal subscriptions to a single publisher.

The act of publishing research has an intrinsic cost, and I don’t know anyone who claims otherwise. However, the key questions we as an academic community should be asking is how much this publishing process costs, and if we are receiving value for money.

But we can’t answer these questions. Because we don’t know how much academic publishing costs.

Historically, the costs of scientific research publication have been covered through subscriptions to academic journals in which the research has been published. Alternative business models are beginning to develop, but the majority of research around the world is still published in journals to which subscriptions are required.

Individual academics are largely protected from the costs of access to these journals. Libraries at universities are largely responsible for managing institution wide access to journals, and through JISC negotiate these subscription costs.

And then libraries are not allowed to tell anyone what these costs are. Libraries are placed under huge amounts of pressure not to release this data, and in the case of Elsevier, they are explicitly forbidden to by non-disclosure agreements in the contracts they have to sign.

Today, Tim Gowers has released data showing that 19 Russell Group Universities alone spend over £14.4 million (excluding VAT) on subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier alone. Without a doubt you should read his blog post which has far more detail and background; but the headline figures are:

*Joined the Russell Group two years ago.
**Information obtained by Sean Williams.

Data taken from Tim Gowers blog post found here

This data, acquired through Freedom of Information requests, has focussed upon the Russell Group, but excludes data from Imperial College London, London School of Economics and Political Science, Nottingham, Oxford, and Queen Mary University of London who declined to release their data. And many of these of these are unlikely to be be small spenders. This means that the total figure for the Russell Group will be significantly higher than the £14.4 million stated above.

Non-disclosure clauses, included by Elsevier within the contracts have previously prevented libraries from releasing this data, and even from discussing the figures with other libraries or academics within their own University, and the release of this data is likely to cause much comment among libraries and academics.

There are large differences between different institutions – for instance Exeter is paying roughly a sixth of the costs being paid by University College London, with UCL spending £1,381,380 (that’s the yearly fees from 150 undergraduates). As Tim mentions in his in-depth analysis, it’s interesting to note that the institutions paying the lowest fees are those institutions who have only recently joined the Russell Group.

While a bound physical copy was the only means of communicating written research over a distance, and was a huge development in 1665 with the publication of the first scientific journal, the ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society’, the idea of journal subscriptions in return for access to academic research is understandable. There were large infrastructure costs involved.

However, the Internet has created opportunity for significantly reduced distribution costs. Distributing ‘copies’ of digital work costs very little once initial costs have been covered, and given that this is the way many academics access research within the University, there is no justifiable reason why publishers should charge such widely different access fees to universities.

Journal subscriptions are not the only cost to Universities for publishing research. As a transition towards open access is made, author processing charges (APCs) are common; especially in the UK where the Research Councils, Wellcome Trust and other funders have mandated that academics make their research freely and openly available at point of publication.

However, this APC data is also not available, which means we can’t see how much money is flowing to publishers. And is is especially important in the case of many high profile and prestigious journals which are what are termed ‘hybrid journals’. These are journals in which some articles are freely available to read after receipt of an APC, but a subscription is still required to read the remainder.

No data is currently made available that shows how much UK academics are paying to publish in an open access fashion, either in pure open access journals, or these ‘hybrid journals’. However, data released last month shows that in 2012-2013 alone, the Wellcome Trust alone spent over £1 million on articles published in Elsevier journals – of which nearly 95% was in journals to which an academic library had to also pay a subscription.

And yet this is only a small piece of the picture; we still don’t know how much is being spent on APCs by other public funded research streams such as from the Research Councils or HEFCE.

In a time of decreasing research funding from Government (given UK inflation rates the flat-line research budget results in a real terms cut), and increased onus on students as a source of income, what is an acceptable cost for publication of research? Be that cost met through journal subscriptions or an open access business model. And to whom should we be paying that money?

These conversations are rarely had; partly through lack of information, and partly through the disinterest of many academics. And traditional publishers such as Elsevier benefit significantly and exploit the disinterest of many academics in this space. They take work largely funded by the taxpayer, carried out within publicly funded institutions, and then sell it back to this institution, and every other willing/able institution around the world. And then actively work to prevent libraries from releasing information that may begin to establish a competitive market in this space.

To an advantage of many millions of pounds a year. Elsevier alone is charging £14.4 million to 19 universities in the UK – and will be gaining literally millions more from the other 100 universities in the country. They are also gaining millions of pounds in APCs.

And that’s just one publisher. There are countless other traditional publishers to whom academic libraries pay subscriptions; Wiley, Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and Springer just to name a few. And none of this data is out there. No-one knows how much money is being drained from the academic university budgets (either from research grants, or indirect money received through HEFCE grants or student tuition fees) to the financial benefit of these for-profit publishers.

We need to get a full picture of the costs of academic publishing – both the costs incurred through journal subscriptions and through APCs. While the focus of Tim’s work has been Elsevier, I’ve submitted Freedom of Information requests to Russell Group Universities asking for journal subscription data for Wiley, Oxford University Press and Springer, and I’ll be making this data available if/when it is released. I will also provide information where libraries do not honour their obligations under FOI, do not accept that this information is in the public interest, and what reasons are they give.

And it is without doubt in the public interest to have data that can show the cost of publication made openly available. Without this, there can be no development of competitive markets in either subscriptions or APCs. A chilling effect, created by commercial publishers and non-disclosure clauses, requiring a lack of transparency cannot serve anything other than other than the business interests of traditional publishers.

This is a guest post by Ranjit Goswami, Dean (Academics) and (Officiating) Director of Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Nagpur, India. Ranjit also volunteer as one of the Indian Country Editors for the Open Data Census.

Developing nations, more so India, increasingly face a challenge in prioritizing its goals. One thing that increasingly becomes relevant in this context, in the present age of open knowledge, is the relevance of subscription-journals in dissipation and diffusion of knowledge in a developing society. Young Aaron Swartz from Harvard had made an effort to change it, that did cost him his life; most developed nations have realized research funded by tax-payers money should be made freely available to tax-payers, but awareness on these issues are at quite pathetic levels in India – both at policy level and among members of academic community.

Before one looks at the problem, a contextual understanding is needed. Today, a lot of research is done globally, including some of it in India, and its importance in transforming nations and society is increasingly getting its due recognition across nations. Quantum of original application oriented research, applicable specifically to the developing world, is a small part of overall global research. Some of it is done locally in India too, in spite of two obvious constraints developing nations face: (1) lack of funds, and (2) lack of capability and/or capacity.

Tax-funded research should be freely available

This article argues that research outcomes, done in India with Indian tax-payers money, are to be freely available to all Indians, for better diffusion. Unfortunately, the present practice is quite opposite.

The lack of diffusion of knowledge becomes evident in absence of any planned efforts, to make the research done in local context available in open platforms. Here when one looks at the academic community in India, due to the older mindset where research score and importance is given only for publishing research papers in journals, often even in journals of questionable quality, faculty members are encouraged to publish in subscription-journals. Open access journals are considered untouchables. Faculty members mostly do not keep a version of the publication to be freely accessible – be it in their own institute’s website, or in other formats online. More than 99% of Indian higher educational institutes do not have any open-access research content in their websites.

Simultaneously, a lot of academic scams get reported, more from India, as measuring research contribution is a difficult task. Faculty members often fall prey to short-cuts of institute’s research policy, in this age of mushrooming journals.

Facing academic challenges

India, in its journey to be an to an open knowledge society, faces diverse academic challenges. Experienced faculty members feel, that making their course outlines available in the public domain would lead to others copying from it; whereas younger faculty members see subscription journal publishing as the only way to build a CV. The common ill-founded perception is that top journals would not accept your paper if you make a version of it freely available. All of above act counter-productive to knowledge diffusion in a poor country like India. The Government of India has often talked about open course materials, but in most government funded higher educational institutes, one seldom sees even a course outline in public domain, let alone research output.
Question therefore is: For public funded universities and institutes, why should any Indian user have to cough up large sums of money again to access their research output? And it is an open truth that – barring a very few universities and institutes – most Indian colleges, universities and research organizations or even practitioners cannot afford the money required to pay for subscribing most well-known journal databases, or afford individual articles therein.

It would not be wrong to say that out of thirty-thousand plus higher educational institutes, not even one per cent has a library access comparable to institutes in developed nations. And academic research output, more in social science areas, need not be used only for academic purposes. Practitioners – farmers, practicing doctors, would-be entrepreneurs, professional managers and many others may benefit from access to this research, but unfortunately almost none of them would be ready or able to shell out $20+ for a few pages by viewing only the abstract, in a country where around 70% of people live below $2 a day income levels.

Ranking is given higher priority than societal benefit

Academic contribution in public domain through open and useful knowledge, therefore, is a neglected area in India. Although, over the last few years, we have seen OECD nations, including China, increasingly encouraging open-access publishing by academic community; in India – in its obsession with university ranks where most institutes fare poorly, we are on reverse gear. Director of one of India’s best institutes have suggested why such obsessions are ill-founded, but the perceptions to practices are quite opposite.

It is, therefore, not rare to see a researcher getting additional monetary rewards for publishing in top-category subscription journals, with no attempt whatsoever – be it from researcher, institute or policy-makers – to make a copy of that research available online, free of cost. Irony is, that additional reward money again comes from taxpayers.

Unfortunately, existing age-old policies to practices are appreciated by media and policy-makers alike, as the nation desperately wants to show to the world that the nation publishes in subscription journals. Point here is: nothing wrong with producing in journals, encourage it even more for top journals, but also make a copy freely available online to any of the billion-plus Indians who may need that paper.

Incentives to produce usable research

In case of India, more in its publicly funded academic to research institutes, we have neither been able to produce many top category subscription-journal papers, nor have we been able to make whatever research output we generate freely available online. On quality of management research, The Economist, in a recent article stated that faculty members worldwide ‘have too little incentive to produce usable research. Oceans of papers with little genuine insight are published in obscure periodicals that no manager would ever dream of reading.’ This perfectly fits in India too. It is high time we look at real impact of management and social science research, rather than the journal impact factors. Real impact is bigger when papers are openly accessible.

Developing and resource deficit nations like India, who need open access the most, thereby further lose out in present knowledge economy. It is time that Government and academic community recognizes the problem, and ensures locally done research is not merely published for academic referencing, but made available for use to any other researcher or practitioner in India, free of cost.

Knowledge creation is important. Equally important is diffusion of that knowledge. In India, efforts to resources have been deployed on knowledge creation, without integrative thinking on its diffusion. In the age of Internet and open access, this needs to change.

I would like to use this blog to highlight some of the presentations and events of Berlin11 in relation to the developments of 2013. First of all the Berlin11 conference was the first ever that hosted a satellite conference aimed at young scientists. This reflects the increasing support for open access with the young generation of scientists. One of the highlights here was the presentation of Jack Andraka, a 16 year old scholar who told his story on the role of open access for him and his development of a innovative test for pancreatic cancer.

Another highlight of the Satellite Conference was the launch of the OpenAccess Button which collects instances where people cannot access information because of toll barriers AND even suggests ways on how to find the information elsewhere in e.g. open access repositories (link here).

At the main conference Mike Taylor, a scientist and open access advocate from the UK, gave a compelling talk on why the open access movement needs idealists and why the (also economic) benefits of open access far outweigh the cost (slideshare via this link). Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liege, told of his solution for getting scientists to submit their articles to the university repository: only those articles deposited count for tenure and promotion. Robert Darnton, professor at Harvard University, had a fascinating presentation on the building of the Digital Public Library of America which gives access to over 5,5 million items from libraries, archives and museums.

Slide of Robert Darnton’s presentation at Berlin11.

Marin Dacos from OpenEdition, France introduced OpenEdition the major European portal for digital publications, including books, in human and social sciences. Glyn Moody, science journalist from the UK, gave a captivating talk called ‘Half a Revolution’  on the history of the internet, open source software and open access publications. He made a very strong plea for open access without embargo calling it zero embargo now: ZEN. The slides of his talk are available here. David Willetts, Minister from the UK, explained the UK government’s policy for Open Access and as a side-line announced the imminent launch of an Science WIKI platform.

Ulrich Pöschl of the university of Mainz, Germany, elaborated on the need for other systems of peer-review and public discussions on published articles. The standard peer-review system has become so flawed that we urgently need to find ways to replace this scientific quality measure with new methods of quality assessment. He gave a talk at Berlin11 very similar to the one he gave at the ALPSP seminar on the future of peer-review in London 1 week earlier. He puts his ideas on interactive open access publishing to practice in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. According to Pöschl a new multi-stage peer-review system in combination with Open Access will lead to improved scientific quality assurance. The process of interactive open access publishing  has 2-stages: rapid publication of a discussion paper, public peer review and interactive discussion,  2) review completion and publication of the Final Paper.  The use of a discussion paper guarantees rapid publication, open access enables public peer-review and discussion with a large number of participants, and the number of individual reviews possible in this system is a build-in quality assurance for the final paper. Interestingly, quality assessment using this scheme can also incorporate altmetrics and other measures of impact assessment.

Slide of Ulrich Pöschl ‘s presentation at Berlin11

Two main topics during the conference were the call for immediate unrestricted access,  Zero Embargo Now (Glyn Moody) and the call for a new scientific quality assessment system (many speakers). The current quality assessment systen focuses on where you publish (rewarding publication in high impact journals) and on the number of publications (the ‘publish or perish’ ). A general feeling on what such a new assessment should look like is summarized in a key message from the presentation that Cameron Neylon gave : “it should not be that important where and how much you publish but rather what and what quality you publish”.

I would add to this that in a sense in DOES matter where you publish, namely as far as you publish your work open access allowing for unrestricted re-use. One of the main problems here is how to create the right incentives for scientists to publish open access. We have seen one possible solution in the idea given by Bernard Rentier (see above). In addition a completely refurbished assessment system could provide the right incentives when this system takes into account access, re-use, (social) impact and quality of publications. The current scientific culture with its emphasis on quantity and status is slowly but surely undermining the quality of science, because quantity is fundamentally different from quality. In their need to publish as much as possible as quickly as possible, scientists often duplicate results and/or publish results prematurely. Extreme cases of fabricated  results are also seen and it is especially when these cases are found out that the reputation of science suffers. The conventional peer-review system used for quality assessment has proven to be insufficiently robust to prevent this, and new forms of peer-review and other methods are being developed to replace it (see for instance  F1000).

The prioritization of publishing and doing research has had  a very negative impact on education and the quality of research.  It was for this reason that Science in Transition was founded in October 2013 in Amsterdam. The initiators felt that “science does not work as it should” and that something ought to be done about it. The central message again is that the pressure to publish is detrimental to education, and that the quality of science and its reputation is compromised by the current systems and judging scientific output by the number of publications. The full text of the position paper can be read here.

In a TV interview on Dec 30, 2013 Robbert Dijkgraaf, president of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study put it this way:

“we have to judge science more by its value than by the number [of scientific output]”.

That there is growing awareness of the need for change in the area of scientific quality assessment is also illustrated by these citations taken from the New Year’s speech of the rector of the University of Amsterdam, prof. van den Boom: “More publications is not always better”,  and “we have to think hard on alternatives for the evaluation of research”. ( full speech can be seen here). In the two months that have passed since Berlin11, Open Access and the Quality of Science have received considerable public media attention. The German magazine “Die Zeit’’ for example has published a set of articles in its first issue of 2014 on ‘how to save science’.  A new case of (self) plagiarism has led to heated discussions in Dutch newspapers on the uncertain quality of science and the possibilities of fraud.  The president of the organization of Dutch universities, Karl Dittrich has announced that starting Jan 2015 more emphasis will be put on quality, away from quantity of scientific publications in the evaluation of scientists and universities.

The Dutch state secretary for research and education Sander Dekker previously already had stated that scientific results should be published in open access journals as of 2016, even by law if scientists will not abide out of free will. Also on the issue of Open Access, the US congress in Jan 2014 approved the so-called 2014 omnibus appropriations legislation. This policy shall require public, free access to each paper based on researches even partially funded by a federal agency, submitted to any peer-review journal, no later than 12 months after the publication. Although this move towards open access is great news, the drawback here is that the bill only deals with free access, the issue of re=use and copyright is left in the open. Also, the 12 month embargo period is not in line with open access in the sense of the Berlin declaration. So it is a step forward but there still is a long way to go, as Mike Taylor says it in his latest blog post.

Let me conclude this blog by a small prediction: that 2014 will be the year that scientific output will be judged less and less by how much and where one has published, and more and more by what and in what (accessible and re-usable) form one publishes his/ hers results.