University of California open access policy

The University of California recently announced that they are issuing a Presidential Open Access Policy that will cover all future scholarly articles published by UC employees.

The Presidential Open Access Policy extends the previous institutional open access policy which was adopted in 2013. The Presidential policy extends the 2013 Academic Senate Open Access Policy by covering all UC authors, including non-senate members. The new policy allows all UC authors to maintain legal control of their research outputs and also commits all UC authors to deposit their works in a repository for free public dissemination.

"The Presidential OA Policy represents the culmination of significant effort among UC faculty and staff to support increased access to their research publications, from the adoption of the first UC senate OA policy (UCSF) in 2012, to the establishment of the more comprehensive UC-wide Academic Senate policy in 2013." University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 licence.

Christopher Kelty, professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at UCLA explains the need for the new policy:

"Until now, tenure-track faculty have had the privilege of passing such policies to govern themselves, but at most universities, such faculty are a fraction of the people who do research and publish articles[...]Extending the same rights to those who aren’t part of a faculty governance system is an important and difficult step–I’m thrilled we have accomplished it.” University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 licence.

The UC's Open access policy creates a contract between the University and its authors that is prior to any contracts signed between authors and publishers. This means that UC authors can make their research open access via the University's repository, eScholarship, whilst also publishing in journals as normal. Authors are also granted rights of reuse under the UC open access policy that might otherwise be given over to publishers.

The University of California is a huge institution with nearly 200,000 employees and is responsible for over 2% of the world's research publications. UC clearly casts a large shadow, so this move represents a significant step in the evolution of scholarly research to open access.

Quotes are taken from University of California Office of Scholarly Communication Press release which was licensed under a CC BY 4.0 Licence. The press release can be found here: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking-presidential-oa-policy-covers-all-employees/

Open Data: Wiley to partner with Figshare

In recent years it has become increasingly important for researchers to publish the data underlying research. A search of Sherpa/Juliet (a search engine that compiles funder mandates and policies relating to open access) confirms this, revealing that there are 41 funders that require open access to research data, with a further 18 that encourage it.

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/stats.php?la=en&mode=advanced. © 2015, University of Nottingham .

The academic publisher Wiley has decided to take a proactive step to help authors meet the data requirements of their funders. Wiley is looking to support authors by integrating data sharing into the existing publication workflow. They are doing this by partnering with Figshare; a cloud based repository for academic research outputs, including data.

The new service offered by Wiley is currently being piloted by a number of journals and will be rolled out over the coming months. Wiley are also expected to release data citation and sharing policies during this time.

Open access in the United States: land of the free (access to research)

Yellowstone national park, © Quan Yuan/Getty Images

In 2013, a memo from John Holdren, director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House, was sent to all heads of executive departments and agencies:

“The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) hereby directs each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government. This includes any results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications that are based on research that directly arises from Federal funds” OSTP memo p.2

Affected agencies were to be responsible for coming up with a plan to open up research outputs as well as data in line with the agenda set out in the memorandum. Plans would be required to have a number of key elements: fostering public/private partnerships, improving public access to data, improving access to research through searching and archiving facilities, etc.

The memo asked agencies to ensure that the public are able to read, download, and analyse peer-reviewed manuscripts and final published versions within a suggested 12 month time frame. The twelve month time frame mirrors that of both Canada and China (blogged about previously). Agencies should also ensure that metadata for research is made publicly available immediately upon first publication with a link to where final versions are available.

The US National Institute of Health has required research outputs to be publicly available after 12 months since 2008. Recently the US Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) took steps to further implement the plans set out in the OSTP memo. The HSS plans are designed to increase public access to the results of publicly funded research across five of its operating divisions. These HSS divisions include: National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).

The HSS plans for public access to research involve two main areas:
•    Peer-reviewed outputs must be publicly available. Researchers funded by any of the 5 agencies will be required to deposit their publications in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.
•    Data must be publicly available. Researchers will be required to produce a data management plan outlining how their data will stored and shared.

“A major focus over the coming year will be the policy development processes necessary to turn these plans into practice.  Several agencies, such as FDA, AHRQ and ASPR, will be developing public access policies for the first time. Other agencies, such as NIH and CDC, will be updating existing policies [...] We look forward to working together with all of the stakeholders to increase the usability of health research funded by HHS, and to creating an information ecosystem that will catalyze improvements in health and healthcare for all Americans.” HSS idea lab blog

Individual action plans can be found here:
•    NIH’s Public Access Plan
•    FDA’s Public Access Plan
•    CDC’s Public Access Plan
•    AHRQ’s Public Access Plan
•    ASPR’s Public Access Plan

Sources:
http://www.hhs.gov/open/public-access/index.html
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announces-open-access-policy.html
http://www.hhs.gov/idealab/2015/02/27/hhs-expands-approach-making-research-results-freely-available-public/

Open Access in Canada: “It’s all about choice”

© Copyright 2014 – Canadian Science Publishing.

“[O]pen access is a worldwide phenomenon. However, the urgency of implementation has greater impetus in some nations because of strong OA mandates from large, centralised funders.” Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities, p.5. CC BY-SA 4.0

The OA mandates from large funders that Martin Paul Eve mentions in the quote above no doubt refers, at least in part, to RCUK and Wellcome trust open access mandates that have helped to drive OA in the UK. The pace of change gained even greater urgency after HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) released its open access policy for the next Research Excellence Framework. In many respects the UK can be seen to be leading the way in open access, however there are many international initiatives happening as well. So, over the next couple of weeks we will be sharing some international developments in open access. First up is Canada where there have been recent developments akin to those in the UK with large centralised funders mandating OA for papers resulting from funded research.

In Canada there are three main state sponsored funding bodies:

“The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (“the Agencies”) are federal granting agencies that promote and support research, research training and innovation within Canada. As publicly funded organizations, the Agencies have a fundamental interest in promoting the availability of findings that result from the research they fund, including research publications and data, to the widest possible audience, and at the earliest possible opportunity. Societal advancement is made possible through widespread and barrier-free access to cutting-edge research and knowledge, enabling researchers, scholars, clinicians, policymakers, private sector and not-for-profit organizations and the public to use and build on this knowledge.” Government of Canada, Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications Science.gc.ca*

All grants awarded after May 2015 (and all grants from 1st January 2008 for CIHR funded authors) are required to comply with the harmonised open access policy of the three funders. Grant holders will be required to make peer-reviewed journal articles freely available within 12 months of publication. Authors can choose “green” open access and deposit their accepted manuscript in an online repository, or authors can choose to publish in a journal that offers immediate open access via the “gold” route.

There are similarities between the Canadian funding agencies' OA policy and the RCUK open access policy, but there are divergences as well. One such difference is where RCUK stipulate an embargo of between 6 and 24 months depending on which of the 7 research councils has funded the research, the Canadian OA policy stipulates that only a 12 month embargo is allowed. The two policies differ in their approach to APC payments as well; unlike RCUK who have elected to supply UK institutions with funds to pay for immediate “gold” open access, in the Canadian model the cost of OA publishing can come directly from the grant as an eligible expense.

The Canadian funding agencies' open access policy is predicated on the firm belief that spreading the reach and impact of academic research is beneficial to society, both at home and abroad. Aligning the open access policy of the Agencies with international funding agencies such as RCUK was a principal concern.

“Momentum for open access has been growing as numerous funding agencies and institutions worldwide implement open access policies. The Agencies strongly support open access to research results which promotes the principle of knowledge sharing and mobilization – an essential objective of academia. As research and scholarship become increasingly multi-disciplinary and collaborative, both domestically and internationally, the Agencies are working to facilitate research partnerships by harmonizing domestic policies and aligning with the global movement to open access.” Government of Canada, Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications Science.gc.ca*

The UK is not going it alone, and to paraphrase the Canadian funding agencies, open access is a global movement. Over the next few weeks we will highlight other countries around the world that are actively making commitments to open access.


*Quotations are reproduced from an official work that was published by the Government of Canada. The reproduction has not been produced in affiliation with or with the endorsement of the Government of Canada.

Collabra: a new journal that pays reviewers

Copyright Collabra

University of California Press will soon launch a new fully open access mega-journal* called Collabra. The new journal is set to launch in March 2015 alongside a new open access book program called Luminos:

“As part of the world’s greatest public research university we knew that we needed to make a significant investment to meet the changing publishing and dissemination needs of our audiences,” said Alison Mudditt, Director of UC Press. “These programs have been shaped by hundreds of conversations with faculty, librarians, and other key stakeholders. With Luminos, we will combine the global reach and visibility of OA with our unwavering commitment to publishing superior scholarship to create a speedboat, not a life raft, that will carry monographs forward and allow them to remain a vital resource.” University of California Press

Collabra is a fully open access journal that requires authors to pay APC charges in order to get papers published. This charge covers the cost of production, as well as operating costs, staff wages, etc. In most fully open access journals there is significant profit to be made through APCs and these margins are increased as reviewers are traditionally unpaid. It is sometimes said that unpaid reviewing is simply part and parcel of academic culture, however the innovative payment scheme of Collabra proves that this doesn’t have to be the case. At Collabra, the APC costs $875, $250 of which goes towards paying the reviewers. The reviewers can then decide what they would like to do with the money. They can choose to keep the money, put the money into an APC waiver fund for researchers unable to pay the fee, or pay it forward to their institution’s open access APC fund.

“The journal model is not just about paying reviewers but also about directing some of the value generated back into the research community.” Collabra

We approached Dan Morgan, the Digital Science Publisher at Collabra for a quick explanation of the Collabra process:

"By assigning a percentage of the APC for the research community, Collabra spreads revenue and tangibly shows the value of this work, creating a true partnership. Collabra is enabling the research community to decide what to do with this value that it generates. Reviewers and editors can elect to pay themselves, or pay it forward to the Collabra waiver fund, or their institution's OA fund - in the latter instances creating more OA opportunities for more people. We'd love it if they did that, but importantly it is their choice, and not ours." Dan Morgan

Dan recently spoke at FORCE 2015, a conference centred on highlighting new trends in research communication and e-scholarship. His Creative Commons licensed presentation is available for free on figshare here: http://figshare.com/articles/Introducing_Collabra_OA_Journal_from_University_of_California_Press/1305201

Traditional publishing practice sees value directed solely back to the publisher (Dan Morgan)

So, the journal will put more emphasis on the value added by academics, who mostly work for free for publishers when reviewing and editing. By offering an APC waiver the journal can also serve as an open access publishing platform to those “priced-out” by the often high APC charges demanded by publishers.

Collabra will focus on three main disciplines at launch: life and biomedical sciences, ecology and environmental science, and social and behavioural sciences. To find out more about Collabra why not visit the website (http://www.collabraoa.org/), or share your thoughts and opinions using their twitter handle @CollabraOA (https://twitter.com/collabraoa).

*A mega-journal is a journal that has a number of key characteristics. It will be fully Open Access (with no subscription options), it will not judge articles based on perceived importance, instead judgement will be based on “scientific, methodological and ethical soundness and credibility” http://www.collabraoa.org/faq.php#article-processing-charges. Mega journals also often have a fairly broad coverage. A good example of a scholarly mega-journal is PLoS one http://www.plosone.org/

**We extend a special thanks to Dan Morgan and Lorraine Weston of Collabra for providing information and permission to reuse image and video content

The Repository: helping to feed the impact of research

Over the years, the OARPS team has spent a great deal of time acquiring academic manuscripts and releasing them to the world through the repository.

Much of our current work involves assisting academics with complying with funder open access mandates. For instance, the RCUK mandate states that RCUK funded research papers should be made Open Access either by choosing "Gold" and paying an APC charge, or by choosing "Green" and uploading the accepted manuscript of the final article to Pure (and then the library can transfer the paper to the repository).

Presently, the team focus has incorporated the new HEFCE open access policy for the next REF as well. The HEFCE open access policy states that in order to be eligible, the accepted manuscripts of articles and conference proceedings (with an ISSN) must be deposited in a repository. The HEFCE open access policy does not come into effect until 2016, but we are tying to push the message now so that we are 100% compliant by that point.

With both these cases the result is more content in the repository. But with deposit being imposed from on high the other benefits of depositing can sometimes play second fiddle. In light if this, we have chosen to show some of the usage metrics from a recent article in the repository. We hope this demonstrates that archiving in the repository can greatly benefit the Impact of research.

A great example is The meanings of chimpanzee gestures which received a lot of media attention when it was published. The authors deposited the accepted manuscript for the article into Pure, which then allowed the OARPS team to get the manuscript into the repository.

Here are some of the repository usage stats for the article:

With statistics like this you have to read between the lines a little bit, but one thing they definitely show is that the article received a lot of attention in July (this was when the article was being covered in the media). Crucially, the stats also tell us that the vast majority of those visiting the page ended up downloading the document. This reliably indicates that the majority of people visiting the page did not have access to the publisher version.

So, with the manuscript in the repository a wider range of people, who do not have a subscription to the journal, can read the full article. This means it can be distributed more widely through society, thus widening the reach of the paper and helping to feed the impact of the research.

Elsevier: a look inside a publishing leviathan

To our enduring frustration, much of the academic publishing process is hidden from view unless of course you are having a paper published. At first thought this makes perfect sense, especially as an information overload is an affliction best avoided. However, for us in the OARPS (Open Access and Research Publications Support) team such information is extremely valuable. As we commented in a previous post, having detailed information about the payments process can increase the effectiveness of the service we offer. This is why we were so pleased when our close liaison with authors meant we were able to see screen shots of the publishing process at Elsevier.

Firstly, the author is sent a link to this page, where they can add additional details like funder codes and Open Access payments, as well as sign the publishing agreement. Crucially, this link can also be sent to us and a member of the OARPS team will complete the subsequent steps and sign on behalf of the author.

The author is then required to enter information about funding. This is hugely important in order to ensure that the research output is compliant with funders' open access policies. It is also very encouraging to see the prominence given to grant numbers as this is a further requirement made by many funders. However, as the screenshot shows this can be a daunting form to complete.

 

It's great to see that the system automatically prompts authors to select a particular license that complies with the chosen funder's policies (in this case an RCUK research council was chosen). However, troublingly authors are able to circumvent the funder's preferred option by choosing one of the other 2 Creative Commons licenses available, neither of which are acceptable to RCUK research councils. What is perhaps more troubling is the use of the word "preferred", when it should really say "required".

 

The author will then have to agree to the rights statement and publishing agreements, after which they will be given an order summary:

Armed with this sort of information we can better support researchers who come to us with questions as we can talk them through the process and see exactly what they see.

We would like to extend a special thank you to our confidential informant for providing us with this information, keep safe out there.

4000 items milestone: Featured researcher: Dr Tomasz Kamusella, School of History

Tomasz is a frequent depositor in our research information system, Pure and, as an author of foreign language publications, often helps Library staff interpret their copyright. In the last of our blogs to mark 4000 items in Research@StAndrews:FullText he agreed to a brief interview about his research and to share his views on Open Access in scholarly communication.

Dr Tomasz Kamusella

What is your research area?

My research is interdisciplinary with a focus on social reality in modern Central and Eastern Europe, its history and the mechanisms of its politics and language. I publish roughly 50:50 in English and Polish with translations of my work from these languages into German and Japanese and some translations from English to Russian.  So my work has a deep multilingual emphasis.  St Andrews is very strong in this area.  For example, it is home to one of the best centres in Arabic and Persianstudies. 

How is Open Access relevant to your research?

Well, I am uploading to Pure, but do not apply for money.   During my Fellowship in the Kluge Center for Scholars at the Library of Congress in 2003-2004, where I researched for my book The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe, scholars had discussions with James Hadley Billington, Librarian of Congress about the value of digital scholarship. Without my Fellowship and library access a lot of electronic and print resources would not have been available for this research project of mine. They had all kinds of books from Central Europe in their collection, which in the region are dispersed among numerous libraries in different countries. Personally, I am fearful of electronic books - paper books tend to survive. I have no problem with accessing print, but I have problems with e-books and, if possible, I usually end up printing them out!  The size of fonts in modern scholarly books seems to be getting smaller, but I can enlarge these on pdf printouts. But the practice does not seem ecologically viable. I wish publishers would produce books to the same quality as they did in Britain half a century ago, or still do in continental Europe or China.

I understand about Open Access, but I don’t think it’s working in the US, Europe, Russia or elsewhere in the English-speaking world. I understand that it’s important for post-2014 REF admissibility, but I’m really confused, as there seems to be no clear message on the issue.

I don't know about the financial side of it.  Journal publishers seem to be coming up with all sorts of financial constructs - it's as much confusing as the myriad of train fare tariffs in Britain.  In the West prices are astronomical. I would rather buy monographs although, again, they are expensive in the English speaking academic publishing world. Outside of this sphere of influence they tend to be much cheaper and of better quality as books (i.e. printed with the use of a good-sized font on white high-quality paper and sewn rather than glued), for instance, in Austria, Slovakia or Estonia. 

What about impact and reaching a wider audience?

I’m afraid it’s another sign of the “business-ification” of scholarly publishing. Universities are becoming another business operation. It’s the end of Universities as we know them!  Seriously though, we are in danger of forgetting about the broader public good and students’ contribution to it throughout their entire life after graduation.  Now it’s all about short-term profit and loss, which is a mistake. I am not aware of any enterprises thriving for five or eight centuries, as many European universities do. Should academia succumb to this logic, not a single university operating nowadays will make it to the 22^nd century.

I am sympathetic to Open Access in its role of democratising access to knowledge. When we were asked about book digitisation at the Library of Congress, most agreed that the Library, as in many ways a depository of human knowledge, has a responsibility of making it available to the world. The free-over-the-internet dimension emerged as a very important instrument of enabling people from poorer countries with less supplied libraries to have equal access to scholarship.  It is all about equality of opportunities.

Platforms (bundles) are overpriced in the English-speaking world. It's just a rip-off. I don't understand the variety of tariffs and end users are confused and worried about choosing something that is not optimal. Similar platforms carrying journals in a variety languages, produced outside the Anglophone world, are often available, at least in the sphere of the humanities and social sciences, for a fraction of the US or British price, as is the case of CEEOL - Central and Eastern European Online Library (www.ceeol.com), available from our Library.

I have not heard of the various licences that might be available, such as Creative Commons.  I just want to do my research. Copyright is not so jealously guarded outside of North America and Western Europe. There is often no formal copyright transfer taking place.  Journals are primarily run as disseminators of knowledge. But it's changing rapidly - for instance now there are contracts and word limits in most Polish-language journals, the standardisation stifling variety and creativity. In this respect the Library’s help* with copyright issues and making my research papers – published or not – available via Pure is most welcome and appreciated. 

What are your personal views on Open Access?

Suspicion. I do peer review for free, as do my colleagues at other institutions. We do it for the sake of the public good. What do publishers do apart from setting and printing? An external editor of my work would also work for free and likewise I provide the same service. The Anglo-Saxon model has had a spill over effect and this might cause firewalls to be raised. I like the idea of Pure and Open Access; however, OA could end up as quite fractured and paradoxically reduce access, as I believe is the case with e-books.

We are in the European Union today, but most of my students’ knowledge stops at the Elbe, as if it were still the Cold war that ended a quarter of a century ago. It's structural, but we are dealing with two thirds of Europe. In comparison with holdings on Western Europe and the Soviet Union or Russia, there is rather little in our Library’s collections on the eastern half of the European Union. And it’s mostly written in English, German or French, not in the languages of the new EU member states. Rarely does a student realize that the EU is a union of 28 members, and the organisation has 24 official languages. Another example – until recently there was next to nothing about Belarus, a country of ten million inhabitants in the middle of Europe. If the University aspires to providing expertise to enterprises and politicians on the eastern half of the EU and the Union’s eastern neighbours, awareness of the multilingual aspects is essential for sensible research on the area as it is today. A lot of the research material isn't in English. Ideally, languages necessary for research purposes should be acquired strategically to a necessary level, which mainly is the low threshold of ‘for reading purposes.’ When you have access to e-texts in different languages you can easily triangulate their meaning via the languages you know with the use of such tools like Google Translate. When you have this menu of languages in Pure it should have all the languages of the EU. It's important for metadata. It's not of much help if it says “Other”. Unicode has keyboard layout provisions for over 600 languages in which books are published with the employment of numerous scripts. In the case of the EU, its official languages are written in the Union’s three official scripts (Greek, Cyrillic and Latin), and information on them is also very important for metadata and Open Access. I hope information on scripts and the possibility of using them when giving titles of texts will become available in Pure, too.

So, I don’t see Open Access just in terms of business models and compliance.  There are multilingual and structural barriers to research that is unrestricted to access and reuse that we also need to consider, as well as the implications for academic freedom.

The Library Open Access and Research Publications Support (OARPS) team would like to thank Tomasz for his time and sharing his views on Open Access.

*To find out how to deposit your own work in Pure, contact the team open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk!

Royal Society of Chemistry to gild Chemical Science

It was announced recently in a Royal Society of Chemistry press release that one of their leading journals, Chemical Science, is to go Gold Open Access in 2015. Not only that, but Chemical Science will be waiving open access charges (Article Processing Charges, or APCs) for 2 years.

"From January 2015 onwards, all new content in Chemical Science will be free for anyone to access. And to ease the transition to open access, the Royal Society of Chemistry is waiving all Article Processing Charges (APCs) for two years." (RSC Press release)

CC-BY-NS-SA 2.0 (Available here)

With an impact factor of over 8.3 Chemical Science is undoubtedly one of the leading scientific journals attracting a high level of citations. With this in mind it is encouraging to see a leading journal not only following a growing trend but advocating the open access cause as well. This is not new for the publisher, as 2 years ago the RSC introduced early policies to help authors pay for gold open access in lieu of institutional funding (covered in our blog here). The Royal Society of Chemistry President, Professor Dominic Tildesley, said that the announcement was: "a momentous step forward in sharing chemical science knowledge world-wide." He went on to say: "As the world's leading chemistry community and a not-for-profit organisation, our mission is to serve the best interests of chemistry and society, as we have done for over 170 years. There can be no better way to fulfil that mission than by taking our leading journal to Gold open access."

David Willetts, who recently resigned as Minister for Universities and Science, applauded the RSC pointing out the positive image the world has of UK chemistry research and fact that the UK is leading the way in terms of "applying open access principles".

There is sure to be more information forthcoming regarding the change to open access policy at Chemical Science. But at this early stage it is fair to speculate that waiving Article Processing Charges is likely to increase uptake in the journal as more people will wish to take advantage of the high impact factor coupled with the increased visibility gold open access offers.