Schoolkids and the public in Kerala, India, digitized, proof-read and uploaded 150 rare and out-of-print books for the Malayam Wiki Library. What a great idea! The students and members of the public get to contribute to something that is real and of lasting value, not just some classroom exercise to mark and throw away, and the important work of digitization gets done.
There are a number of similar initiatives in India. Apparently the Digital Library of India "states that they are trying to digitize all the significant works of mankind"!
Good luck to them! What are your kids doing in their school?
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
Friday, July 18, 2014
Monday, July 07, 2014
Canada's supreme court decision, or aren't we all indigenous to this planet?
On June 26, 2014 Canada's Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on aboriginal title. In my opinion this was a very wise decision, and there is at least one part of this decision that I think merits global consideration. In brief, the Supreme Court decision subjects Aboriginal title to a responsibility to group interest and the enjoyment of the land by future generations. To me, this is perfectly appropriate but begs the question: why are non-aboriginal governments not held to this standard? I'd like to suggest that this concept should be expanded - to continue to recognize aboriginal title, but also to look at the world's entire human population as indigenous to the planet, and hold every government everywhere accountable for making decisions in the collective interest and for the benefit of future generations - and to include water along with land.
Quote from the Supreme Court decision:
Citation Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44
http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14246/index.do#_Toc391480045
Updated July 8 to correct spelling of "indigenous". Thanks to Douglas Carrall for spotting the error and letting me know.
Quote from the Supreme Court decision:
The nature of Aboriginal title is that it confers on the group that holds it the exclusive right to decide how the land is used and the right to benefit from those uses, subject to the restriction that the uses must be consistent with the group nature of the interest and the enjoyment of the land by future generations. Prior to establishment of title, the Crown is required to consult in good faith with any Aboriginal groups asserting title to the land about proposed uses of the land and, if appropriate, accommodate the interests of such claimant groups. The level of consultation and accommodation required varies with the strength of the Aboriginal group’s claim to the land and the seriousness of the potentially adverse effect upon the interest claimed.
Citation Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44
Date:
20140626
Docket:
34986
http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14246/index.do#_Toc391480045
Updated July 8 to correct spelling of "indigenous". Thanks to Douglas Carrall for spotting the error and letting me know.
Sunday, July 06, 2014
Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2014
The June 30, 2014 Dramatic Growth of Open Access celebrates the milestone of more than half a million articles funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health that are now freely accessible! After 3 years, the percentage of items found through a PubMed search funded by NIH rises to 71% (for NIH staff), 66% for NIH external funded research, and 31% for any article regardless of funding. At first glance, this looks a lot like evidence suggesting the NIH Public Access Policy is very effective, more than doubling the percentage of items freely available! Thanks to Jihane Salhab from the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons team for the charts, data gathering and analysis of PMC Free this quarter.
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series is a quarterly series (end of
March, June, September, and December) of key data illustrating the
growth of open access, with additional comments and analysis. The
series is available in open data and blogpost (commentary) editions.
The quarterly series began December 31, 2005, and is predated by a
peer-reviewed journal article featuring data as of February 2005. To
download the data or the rationale & method, see the Dramatic Growth
of Open Access dataverse. Morrison, Heather, 2014-03, "Dramatic Growth
of Open Access", http://hdl.handle.net/10864/10660 Morrison, Heather [Distributor] V1 [Version]. The rationale and method has not been updated; March 31 is the latest. If you are using the June 30, 2014 PMC Free data, please Morrison, Heather and Salhab, Jihane.
More highlights this quarter
By the numbers, it's usually the large, well-established and much used services that tend to impress. This quarter, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added 140 content providers and over 2 million documents for a total of over 3,000 content providers (illustrating the growth of the repository movement) and 62 million items (illustrating the growth of self-archiving). The Internet Archive gathered another 14 billion webpages for a total of 416 billion. The Electronic Journals library added another 958 journals that can be read free-of-charge for a total of over 45 thousand free journals. PubMedCentral added about 100 thousand free articles, for a total of over 3 million, and the number of journals actively contributing to PMC that now provide immediate free access grew by 63 to a total of 1,315. Searchable article growth in DOAJ was 75,000, bringing the total number of articles searchable by article in DOAJ to over 1.6 million.
By percentage growth, it's the newest services starting off with nothing that have the greatest ability to impress. SCOAP3, the high energy physics full flip to open access global collaboration, started this January and nearly doubled the article count this quarter, to a total of over 2,000 articles. The Directory of Open Access Books added 6 publishers and 175 books for a total of 68 publishers and over 200 books.
Highwire Press added 8 completely free sites, for a total of 107 completely free sites, 8% growth this quarter (annual equivalent 32%).
Items of interest since March 31, 2014
Research Support, N.I.H. Extramural + Intramural |
Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural [pt] |
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt] |
No Limits (No distinction based on researcher) |
More highlights this quarter
By the numbers, it's usually the large, well-established and much used services that tend to impress. This quarter, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added 140 content providers and over 2 million documents for a total of over 3,000 content providers (illustrating the growth of the repository movement) and 62 million items (illustrating the growth of self-archiving). The Internet Archive gathered another 14 billion webpages for a total of 416 billion. The Electronic Journals library added another 958 journals that can be read free-of-charge for a total of over 45 thousand free journals. PubMedCentral added about 100 thousand free articles, for a total of over 3 million, and the number of journals actively contributing to PMC that now provide immediate free access grew by 63 to a total of 1,315. Searchable article growth in DOAJ was 75,000, bringing the total number of articles searchable by article in DOAJ to over 1.6 million.
By percentage growth, it's the newest services starting off with nothing that have the greatest ability to impress. SCOAP3, the high energy physics full flip to open access global collaboration, started this January and nearly doubled the article count this quarter, to a total of over 2,000 articles. The Directory of Open Access Books added 6 publishers and 175 books for a total of 68 publishers and over 200 books.
Highwire Press added 8 completely free sites, for a total of 107 completely free sites, 8% growth this quarter (annual equivalent 32%).
Items of interest since March 31, 2014
- Two milestones for the Open Access Tracking Project - 30,000 tagged resources in the project database and 20,000 in the project feed (thanks to Peter Suber)
- June 4: the home page for Peter Suber's MIT Press book Open Access passed the milestone of 100,000 page views (I highly recommend this as an excellent brief starting point for learning about OA).
Labels:
dramatic growth of open access
Saturday, July 05, 2014
Bravo to India's DBT/DST on proposing a new world standard for OA policy
Government
of India Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science and
Technology (DBT / DST) Proposed Open Access Policy
Comments
submitted by Heather Morrison to the Open Access Policy Committee and
cross-posted to Sustaining the Knowledge
Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ and The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/
Congratulations
to the Open Access Policy Committee for a proposed policy that can be
considered a new model for the world in almost every respect!
My
two suggestions to perfect this policy are as follows:
1. After
this sentence on page 1: “Grantees can make their papers open-access by
publishing in an open-access journal or, if they choose to publish in a
subscription journal, by posting the final accepted manuscript to an online
repository”, this sentence were added: “Grantees
who publish in an open-access journal should post the final published
manuscript to an online repository based in India”.
Rationale: journals and
publishers are free to come and go and change business models as they please. A
journal that is open access today could cease to exist, or be sold to a
publisher that uses a toll access business model in the future. The only way to
ensure ongoing open access to publicly funded research is through the use of
repositories under the direct or indirect control of the funding agency.
2. p.
2: “Suggest that the period of embargo be no greater than one year” – change
“Suggest” to “Insist”, and add this phrase: “Future revisions of this policy
will look to decreasing and eventually eliminating accommodation for publisher
embargoes”.
Rationale
“Suggest” to “Insist”: the
experience of one early open access policy leader, the U.S. National Institutes
of Health, illustrated very well that certain publishers will take every
advantage of any policy loophole available. The 2004 policy merely requiring
open access had a dismal compliance rate; this changed dramatically with the
strong 2008 policy. If researchers have options, publishers will refuse open
access or demand longer embargoes. If policies are strong, publishers adjust as
can be easily observed through the Sherpa RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving service, which
illustrates the shifting landscape of scholarly publishing overall towards
compliance with open access policy as well as concessions for specific
policies.
“Decreasing and eventually
eliminating…publisher embargoes”: the purpose of permitting publisher embargoes
is to give the industry time to adjust. Publishers have now had more than a
decade to adjust to open access policies around the world, including many by
the world’s largest research funders. There are now close to 10,000 fully open
access peer-reviewed scholarly journals, employing a variety of business
models, including commercial operations that are quite successful financially.
There is no reason for publishers to continue to need the “training wheels”
support of embargo periods indefinitely.
There is no reason to delay
the advance of research by one year at every step. We need clean energy
solutions and answers to tough questions like climate change today. Since
scientific advance is incremental in nature, a one-year embargo at every step
towards an advance can mean an actual delay of many years in achieving a
breakthrough.
Particular strengths of this policy that I would like to
highlight:
p. 1: “DBT/DST
will not underwrite article processing charges levied by some journals”.
Bravo! The purpose of public funding of research is and
should be to facilitate the conduct of research, not to subsidize secondary
support services such as scholarly publishing. The priority for DBT/DST funding should be ensuring that
India’s research facilities are state of the art and providing salaries for
Indian researchers and support for Indian students.
Also, there are areas (with this policy being a good example)
where government policy is the best approach, and other areas that are best
left to the market. It is appropriate for governments to direct researchers
benefiting from public funding to make their work openly accessible. However,
there are reasons to leave business models to the market. One reason is that commercial
companies employing the article processing fee method are likely to be subject
to the same market forces that caused distortion in the subscriptions market,
and targeted government funding in this area could easily exacerbate the
problem. Another is that currently many publishers using the open access
article processing fee approach provide waivers for authors from developing
countries; this may even be the default. This information is from my research
in progress (my apologies that my data is not yet ready to share; it will be
posted as open data as soon as it is ready). If governments provide funding for
authors from developing countries for article processing fees, this concession
may well disappear and have a severe impact on authors without the benefit of
such funds.
p. 1: “The DBT/DST affirms the principle that the intrinsic
merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work
is published, should
be
considered
in
making
future
funding
decisions.
DBT/DST
does
not recommend the use of journal impact factors, as a surrogate measure of the
quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s
contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions”
Bravo! This is the approach recommended by the San Francisco Declaration on Research
Assessment http://am.ascb.org/dora/,
and an approach that I heartily support. Among other things, heavy reliance on
the impact factor as surrogate for quality of academic work has been a factor
in market distortion in scholarly publishing. Also, reliance on impact factor
has been an incentive for scholars to focus on topics of interest to high
impact factor journals generally based in developed countries. For scholars in
the developing world, this is an incentive to redirect focus from problems and
issues of local concern to topics of interest to the developed world. This has
also been a disincentive to development of local scholarly publishing systems.
The ease of publishing on the internet means that it is timely for scholars in
India and elsewhere to consider growing local scholarly publishing initiatives,
providing opportunities for local leadership, outlets for research on topics of
particular interest to India, and taking advantage of local currency and
economic conditions to get the best deal on publishing services.
Other strengths shared with previous open access policies:
·
The policy is required, not just requested
·
Strong incentives for compliance (compliance
considered in future funding and promotion requests)
·
Immediate deposit of final manuscript post peer
review is required, even when access must be delayed due to publisher embargoes
In summary, India’s DBT/DST proposed open access policy is
sound, innovative, and in my expert opinion, sets a new standard for the world.
The two recommendations for improvement is to ensure that all articles are
deposited in a local open access repository, including articles published in
open access journals (which may in future cease to exist, change ownership or
business model), and to insist on rather than suggest an embargo of no more
than one year with language indicating eventual elimination of embargoes.
Particular strengths highlighted are the refusal to provide funds for article
processing fees and the direction to consider the quality of the work, not the
impact factor of the journal in which it is published.
Respectfully,
Dr.
Heather Morrison
Assistant
Professor
École
des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
Master
of Information Studies (M.I.S.) program accredited by the American Library
Association
Maîtrise
en sciences de l’information (M.S.I.) accréditée par l’American Library
Association
University
of Ottawa
Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca
July
5, 2014
Labels:
open access policy
Monday, June 23, 2014
Sustaining the knowledge commons (open access scholarship)
It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge that Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has selected my proposal Sustaining the knowledge commons (open access scholarship) for funding in the amount of $71,000 Canadian for the period 2014 - 2016. This suite of research projects involves an open research approach; to facilitate sharing of knowledge in this area (both existing knowledge and new knowledge gained through this suite of research projects) I've created a new project blog, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons (open access scholarship) which can be found at sustainingknowledgecommons.org A summary of the research proposal has been posted on this new blog and is copied below for the convenience of readers of IJPE. Watch for more on this as the research unfolds.
Sustaining the
knowledge commons (open access scholarship)
Summary
Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge
and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (Suber, 2012). Open
access to the scholarly literature is a public good that will “accelerate
research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and
the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay
the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and
quest for knowledge” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002). Much has been
accomplished in transitioning scholarly works to open access in the past
decade. The Directory of Open Access
Journals lists about 10 thousand fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly
journals. The relatively new Directory of
Open Access Books lists over 1,500 open access scholarly monographs from
more than 50 publishers. There are thousands of open access archives around the
world, housing millions of documents. Hundreds of research funding agencies and
universities require open access to the results of research they support, as
listed in the Registry of Open Access
Material Archiving Policies. However, much remains to be done, and in
particular there is a need to address the challenge of ensuring sustainable
funding mechanisms for open access publishing, especially high-quality
publishing led by scholars that is free to prioritize the needs of scholars and
the public good (as opposed to the single bottom line of profit).
The proposed research would create a macro-level analysis on
the economics of an open access scholarly journal publishing system through the
examination of three separate but related areas of research: 1. a thorough
in-depth analysis on the article processing fees charged by some open access
journals; 2. an examination of the resources needed by small not-for-profit
scholar-led publishers (e.g. needs for editorial or technical support); and 3. supplementing
the work of Edgar & Willinsky (2010) that found an average revenue of $188
per article for journals using Open Journal Systems, by factoring in infrastructure
costs for journal hosting services. The proposed budget allocates over 80% to
research assistantships as this proposal is my first step towards the creation
of a research centre and the active participation of students is a crucial
first step to the research centre. In addition, the proposed research will help
university libraries to make prudent decisions to transition the underlying
economics of scholarly publishing (currently the vast majority of funding for
the system comes from university library budgets) from a subscriptions /
purchase to an open access basis. An open research approach to knowledge
dissemination will help journals and libraries struggling with the transition
early on in the process through sharing knowledge to date through a dedicated
website. This research falls under the SSHRC priority area Digital Economy. Knowledge gained through this project is expected
to benefit the other newer “open” movements, including open education, open
data and open government through the development of scenarios for transition
that might be worth considering in these other areas.
This proposal builds on research developed for my 2012
doctoral dissertation, Freedom for
scholarship in the internet age (Morrison, 2012) and published in First Monday (Morrison, 2013) that
strongly suggest a potential for transitioning to a scholarly communication
system that is more cost-effective than the current system as well as being
fully open access.
Objectives
The overarching objective is to understand how best to bring
about the transition of published scholarly works to a knowledge commons. The
knowledge commons is conceived of as a system where the world’s scholarly
knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere, to draw from and contribute to,
one that prioritizes the values and needs of scholars, scholarship, and the
public good, and is open to all by default, with exceptions as necessary to
accommodate other social values such as the right to individual privacy.
The specific objective of the proposed research is to address
the question of how to transition the underlying economics of the system from a
subscriptions / purchase model to one that funds works at the production stage.
This research will develop a macro analysis of the economics of scholarly
publishing that demonstrates the potential to transition the global spend of
the world’s university libraries from support for subscriptions / publishing to
support for open access production and to achieve significant cost savings at
the same time. This issue was developed as part of my dissertation research
(Morrison, 2012) and subsequently published in First Monday (Morrison, 2013).
The proposed research will make it possible to develop more
accurate scenarios for the potential for overall transition of the scholarly
publishing system by collecting and analyzing data on key components of the
system: the current costs per article charged by existing open access
publishers; the necessary future costs based on the actual resource needs of
scholar-led publishers; and infrastructure costs for support services such as
university library and university press journal hosting services. A more
accurate economic analysis will assist university libraries with making the
case to collaborate to transition support for scholarly publishing from
subscriptions / purchase to support for production so that works can be open
access.
Context
The context section consists of several sub-sections,
covering the history and present of scholarly publishing, the theoretical
framework and major research to date on the three sub-projects.
Until the Second World War, scholarly societies published
nearly all scholarly journals (Mabe, 2003, 2011). Journals were published in
print and distributed to society members and subscribers, many of which were
university libraries. After the Second World War, the commercial sector became
involved in scholarly journal publishing, particularly in the area of science,
technology and medicine (STM), areas of scholarship that the commercial sector
in general had become interested in as technology was viewed as having the
potential to open up new areas for commercial exploitation (Price, 1963). In
the next few decades a “serials crisis” developed, as documented by the
Association of Research Libraries (1989). Even the largest university libraries
were no longer able to purchase all of the scholarly journals. Average journal
prices increased at rates above inflation year after year. During the same
period, scholarly monograph purchases by university libraries declined from
about 3 – 5,000 copies per monograph to about 300 – 500 copies per monograph,
causing a different kind of crisis in scholarly monograph publishing (Thompson,
2005). Brown (2007) describes a university press system in crisis.
This situation illustrates what I call irrational rationality (Morrison, 2012). Universities, through
their libraries, fund a system where a small number of very large commercial
publishers enjoy exceptional profits in the 30-40% range while in the same time
frame they reduce or eliminate the modest subsidies traditionally provided to
university presses. Every element of this system is rational. For-profit
corporations are expected to return maximum profits to their shareholders. In
tight financial times, it makes sense that universities cut services like
university presses that serve the whole system but are not essential to their
own operations. However, all of these rational elements add up to a system that
funds extraordinary profits for a few scholarly publishers while threatening
the existence of other scholarly publishers and even the careers of scholars
who need to publish monographs and find it increasingly difficult to do so
(Harley et al, 2010). The concept of irrational rationality builds on the
intellectual tradition initiated by Weber (1968) in the nineteenth century, Lukács
(1967) and Marcuse (1964) who articulated the difference between rationality
based on values and goal-oriented or instrumental rationality. A real world society-wide
example of this in modern society is the contrast between the common human
value of having an ongoing ecosystem capable of sustaining a high quality of
human life for ourselves and our children and our inaction on climate change,
identified by the World Economic Forum (2013) as one of the ten top global
trends for 2014.
Rather than analyze irrational rationality I propose a holistic
or systemic approach. This is illustrated by my macro level analysis of the
global spend on scholarly journal articles by university libraries
(approximately $5.6 billion annually) and the global production of articles
(approximately 1.5 million annually) (Morrison, 2013). In recent years the
commons has emerged or re-emerged as one potential alternative. A number of
scholars have written about the potential of information technologies to
facilitate enclosure of intellectual property as an emerging stage of
capitalism. In 1989, Mosco described this as the pay-per society in which emerges usage charges for things that used
to be free or charged for on a blanket basis as having the potential to
radically change society; Lessig (1999) makes similar arguments in Code: and other laws of cyberspace. Enzsenberger
(1974) described the potential of new media to facilitate a new more democratic
form of communication, while warning that social action would be necessary in
order for the technology to fulfill this function. Ostrom’s (2000)
groundbreaking Governing the commons
effectively debunks arguments against the impossibility of collaborative
approaches such as Hardin’s notion of the “tragedy of the market” and provides
substantive evidence of highly effective commons-based approaches. Heller
(1998) warns about the tragedy of the anti-commons. Bollier (2007), Boyle
(2003), Lessig (2004), Vaidhyanathan, and Hess & Ostrom (2007) discuss the
enclosure movement and the potential of the commons in terms of culture, knowledge
and information. Caffentzis (2012) focuses on the knowledge commons. In seeking
alternatives it may be wise to consider the perspectives of other societies
such as the first nations approach to intellectual property as articulated by
Young-Ing (2006) and the idea of the gift in traditional societies as
explicated by anthropologist Mauss (2002).
This research builds on macro analysis of the economics of
scholarly publishing conducted by the International Association of Scientific,
Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) designed for the purpose of business
planning for STM members (Ware & Mabe, 2012, 2009). The United Kingdom has
been a leader in conducting in-depth economic analysis of the scholarly
communication system at a national level. The Research Information Network
(2008) released the report Activities,
costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK. Houghton
and colleagues have conducted major macro-economic analysis of the potential
for transition to an open access system at a national level. The most in-depth
research, conducted in the UK, found that cost savings could be achieved with a
full switch to open access by the UK for its own research with 3 different
methods, with the smallest savings resulting from a full switch from
subscriptions-based to open access publishing, greater savings with open access
archiving, and the greatest potential savings through a more transformative
approach, using open access archives with a peer review overlay (Houghton et
al, 2009a, 2009b). This research also draws on global best estimates of the
world’s scholarly peer-reviewed journal production (Björk et al, 2008, 2010).
The third project in the overall proposal deals with research
on economic models for supporting open access, including Crow’s (2006) work on
publishing cooperatives, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition’s Income models for open
access: an overview of current practice (Crow, 2009), and an overview of innovative models for support for open access
focusing on collaborative support by libraries that I wrote as the literature
review for a national survey on library and university press publishing
(Taylor, Morrison, Owen, Vézina and Waller, 2013). One result of this survey
was a finding that Canadian university libraries would be willing to support a
number of different approaches to funding open access, with collaborative
approaches being the one option that all libraries would support to some
extent, and none would (a priori) oppose. Examples of collaborative models for
support including the ongoing work of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
to use library funding (similar to subscriptions) to build an endowment to fund
ongoing open access for this scholar-led encyclopedia (Sanville, 2005). Another
example: as of January 2014, the Sponsoring Consortium for Particle Physics
Publishing (2014) is implementing a new fully open access publishing system for
all articles in high energy physics,
a remarkable accomplishment involving global cooperation among libraries and
negotiations with all publishers involved in this area.
A key element for the macro analysis of the economics of
scholarly publishing is the average cost per peer-reviewed journal article.
Previous research indicates a wide range of actual costs, with Willinsky
reporting a range from 0 to $20,000 per article (Willinsky, 2006). The low end
of the range is made possible by the large percentage of work contributed by academics
on a voluntary basis by scholars. Harvard’s Shieber (2012) explains how the
high-impact peer-reviewed Journal of
Machine Learning manages on $10 per article. My macro analysis (Morrison,
2013) illustrates the importance of this key element. If the average cost per
article in an open access environment were $1,350 (the current cost per article
for publishing in PLoS ONE), then libraries could fund a global system at one
third the current global library spend. Even at an average cost of $2,000 -
$3,000, substantial savings are possible. However, at an average of $5,000, the
system would cost more than at present.
Edgar and Willinsky’s (2010) survey of over 900 journals
using the open source software Open Journal Systems found an average spend of
$188 per article. This suggests that in addition to prioritizing scholarship
this “renaissance of scholar-led publishing” described by the authors might be
a great deal more affordable than the current system as well. The proposed
research builds on the work of Edgar and Willinsky, aiming for a more accurate
costing taking into account such elements as the cost of universities’ hosting
and support of journals, as well as whether these new journals have factored in
the necessary resources for
sustainable open access publishing in the long term. For example, do these
journals reporting such low costs have all of the resources needed to sustain
their journals in the long term, or is there an over-reliance on volunteer
labour with the potential for burn-out? If this is the case, what resources could
be provided (copyediting, teaching relief, technical support and training,
etc.) that would prevent this from happening? Currently I am conducting
preliminary interviews designed to develop one or more focus groups and survey
research and several interviewees to date have expressed their perspective that
this research is very much needed.
This project draws on existing and emerging research on
costs of the production of scholarly journal articles, including a major report
conducted by the Wellcome Trust (2004) on the cost of open access journals, a
body of research based on print journals relying on subscriptions as reported
by Tenopir & King (1998), and the data gathered by the Sherpa RoMEO service
on publisher open access article processing charges (based on publisher
self-reported average prices and with an emphasis on UK-based publishers and
the commercial sector). This project will supplement and extend existing
knowledge about costs of producing scholarly journals articles through sampling
open access article processing fees of journals listed in the Directory of Open
Access Journals, a broader and more international set than that included in the
Sherpa RoMEO list, and by triangulating data from interviews, focus groups, surveys
of scholarly publishers and infrastructure costs from case studies of
university hosting and support services to develop a more accurate range of
scholarly journal production costs.
A mixed methods approach is used
because the macro level analysis of the potential for economic transition to
support open access publishing requires several different types of variables.
Open Access Article Processing Charges
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a vetted list of
about 10 thousand fully open access (articles freely available on publication) peer-reviewed
journals. About a quarter of these journals charge article processing fees,
with a small percentage charging article processing fees on a conditional basis
(about two-thirds do not charge article processing fees). DOAJ notes whether
journals charge article processing fees and provides a URL to look up
information, but does not list the amount. A copy of the DOAJ list of journals
charging article processing fees was made in November 2013 and the process of
looking up the amounts was initiated in December 2013. Preliminary results
indicate a skewed distribution with most of these journals published by
relatively large publishers (20 or more journals charging article processing
fees) or very small publishers (1 to 3 journals, with 1 being the most frequent
number of journals). A stratified random sampling method is used to ensure that
a selection of journals from large, medium and small publishers is included.
Preliminary analysis indicates a much more complex situation than anticipated.
While some journals have a straightforward article processing fee, a large
portion have variable fees depending on such variables as location of author,
membership in a society and article length. There is a wide range of article
processing fees, from about $20 US per article to $5,000 per article. The
purposes of this portion of the overall project are to capture another set of
data for comparative purposes, a step which is advisable as some charges may
change (e.g. one publisher, providing a complete set of article processing
fees, advised that some of the journals’ charges might be changed the following
month, and one rationale for this research is to track the possibility of the
commercial sector raising prices at rates above inflation as happened with
subscriptions), and to complete the in-depth analysis of existing charges.
Examples of questions to be explored include whether some of the journals
listed as charging article processing fees are actually producing both print
and online open access journals, with traditional page charges for the print
version and no open access article processing fee. Preliminary analysis
suggests that this is the case for at least some of the journals.
Resource Requirements for Small Scholar-Led Journals in an Open Access
Environment
This project builds on preliminary research in the form of
informal interviews with editors of small scholarly journals currently
underway. Responses to date for a call for participation sent to select
scholarly publishers’ and open access listservs (Canadian Association of
Learned Journals, Scholarly for Scholarly Publishers, Global Open Access List)
indicate a keen interest among publishers in the results of this research.
Inductive methodology will be used to develop one or more focus groups with
publishers from the qualitative results of this research, to be held in
conjunction with the annual general meetings / conferences of the publishers’
associations, and an online survey to be sent to stratified samples of open
access and non-open-access scholar-led journals (i.e. scholarly society and
independent scholar-led journals).
Infrastructure costs estimate
3-4 case studies of library publishing services will be
conducted, representing different types and sizes of library journal hosting
services. For example, the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL)
provides a collaborative journal hosting service for member libraries, while
many other university libraries in Canada and elsewhere offer services targeted
to their individual faculty members. An attempt will be made to include at
least one larger centralized service and one individual institutional service,
as well as organizations offering a slightly different package of services.
Macro analysis of costs for a global shift to open access
Results of these three research projects, in addition to
other relevant information gleaned through an ongoing review of the scholarly
literature and monitoring of related initiatives, such as the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Councils’ Aid to
Scholarly Journals Program and the Canadian Association of Research
Libraries’ open access group, will be used to develop cost projections for a
global shift to open access based on the range of needed costs uncovered in the
study.
Thursday, June 05, 2014
Informa / Taylor & Francis' 35.7% / 218 million USD profits
Informa, the multinational conglomerate owner of publishing brands including Taylor & Francis & Routledge, report that their academic publishing division earned an adjusted operating margin (profit) of 35.7% in 2013, or approximately 218 million USD in profits.
from Informa 2013 Annual Report:
http://www.informa.com/Documents/Investor%20Relations/Annual%20Report%202013/Informa%20plc%20Annual%20Report%20Accounts%202013.pdf
p.20:
Academic publishing: 367.1 million GBP = 616 million USD
Adjusted operating profit: 130.9 million GBP = 218 million USD
Adjusted operating margin 35.7%
Of course, that's after paying expenses - such as paying the basic salary of 770,000 GBP (1.3 million USD) to the Executive Director (p. 56) (not counting benefits, of course - like 25% of base salary towards pension and the 20,000 GBP car allowance.
from Informa 2013 Annual Report:
http://www.informa.com/Documents/Investor%20Relations/Annual%20Report%202013/Informa%20plc%20Annual%20Report%20Accounts%202013.pdf
p.20:
Academic publishing: 367.1 million GBP = 616 million USD
Adjusted operating profit: 130.9 million GBP = 218 million USD
Adjusted operating margin 35.7%
Of course, that's after paying expenses - such as paying the basic salary of 770,000 GBP (1.3 million USD) to the Executive Director (p. 56) (not counting benefits, of course - like 25% of base salary towards pension and the 20,000 GBP car allowance.
Tri-council open access policy consultation results available
The tri-council has just published the results of the open access policy consultation. The final policy is anticipated to be released this fall.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Ontario: let's prioritize our universities, our youth and our future
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Following is a message that I have sent to my local candidates in the upcoming Ontario election. In my opinion it is timely for my generation to ask some tough questions about the appropriateness of the burdens we place on our young, and to ask ourselves instead to shoulder our own responsibilities towards the next and coming generations. (For friends in the library community - similar arguments can be made for supporting libraries. My perspective is that all of us advocating for the public good can be most effective if we work together and support the broader principles and causes in addition to the specific ones we feel most passionate about or responsible for).
Dear candidates:
It is timely for Ontario and Canada at large to prioritize
our universities, our youth and our future. Healthy economies and communities
need a well-educated population and leading-edge research to develop the
knowledge, skills and businesses necessary to meet the challenges of the near
and far future of this province. While Canada expects our youth to
"invest" in their future, paying high tuition fees and often racking
up debt, other countries provide free or very low-cost higher education, and in
some cases even full scholarships for students to study in other countries
(like Canada). What kind of society places its burdens on its young? Not, I
argue, a society that is thinking about its future. Let us all acknowledge and
take responsibility for the next and coming generations.
It is no accident that the world's major economic
superpowers such as the U.S. and the U.K. invest heavily in academic research.
New knowledge inspires new ideas, problem-solving, new technologies and
businesses. A strong and healthy university system, one capable of recruiting
and retaining the best and brightest by supporting attractive academic
positions and the associated research, is a wise investment for a strong and
healthy future for Ontario in our rapidly changing global knowledge society and
economy.
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