Tag: Gold

Do you open or close the doors to your research?

17th August 2020

In the context of a global pandemic, it may seem like focusing on licensing is an inappropriate and administrative fixation, far removed from the priority list of researchers and academics attempting to  conduct their business under difficult conditions. Following on from our introduction to the emerging Gold open access publishing opportunities that the University is now supporting, in this post, we will demonstrate that this is the right time to think about the licensing of academic outputs in more detail. 

Diversity of forms in academic publishing 

Far from being limited to journal articles and scholarly monographs, there are  diverse range of publishing cultures in the academy, with many simultaneously coexisting across disciplinary boundaries. For example, creative practice often produces works in forms  such as performances, exhibitions, videos, sound and many others. Some of these work, such as audio production, for example,  may been produced digitally with custom built software. Here we can begin to see where multiple outputs may actually be being produced and published. 

Software development and audio production differ not only in content, but also in publishing culture and dissemination practices. For example, artefacts such as music recordings are most commonly issued under standard copyright. However, software development has common practices of openly sharing underlying code. Free or open-source software makes use of open licenses such as GPL which allows code to be reused by others in ways as stipulated in the licence. These different cultural publishing practices serve various functions for various stakeholders, but their divergence is quite dramatic.  

Legacy workflows 

The majority of the University’s scholarly and research outputs are textual outputs such as journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and monographs. The publishing culture in these formats is traditionally much more akin to audio publishing than software or code. The legacy workflow commonly involved transferring copyright from the author to the publisher. The publisher would then make agreements with the University to provide bundles of journals, including the outputs of our researchers, to our registered users. 

This workflow has proven economically unviable as prices have increased despite demand increasing during a period of economic growth and austerity. However, many research funders have been frustrated that the outputs they have helped to fund are paywalled, minimising their potential impact as only those with access to the walled garden can engage with them. However, it can be reductive to reduce the complexity of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication to rudimentary economics.  

Impact and context 

If scholarly publishing was more closely aligned with the models of publishing across free and open-source software publishing, this could allow for more effective dissemination, and to help maximise the opportunities for research impact across society for multiple interested communities beyond the academy. 

The idea of open access scholarly publishing (or Gold open access publishing) has its own diverse histories but since the UK’s Research Councils and other funders (such as the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, etc.) have mandates with strong preferences for Gold open access with Creative Commons licenses, open access has dramatically grown. 

Compliance with such policies is mandatory and as such monitored. This has yielded significant growth, whereby a greater proportion of the total scholarly output is accessible to wider publics. In the context of a global pandemic, open access to research it vital for global communities of researchers to have universal access to studies and data. But this does not just apply to STEM!  

By continuing to paywall humanities and social science research, the academy can be interpreted as supporting the status quo by allowing only the privileged to access vital research and scholarship. With many scholars actively involved in regional, national, and international challenges to the many political and social issues currently facing the world, there is a very real issue to be address regarding the systems of prestige that underpin the legacy workflows that are themselves predicated on the ownership of rights and the limitations that  are put upon such explications of knowledge in the protection of the owner’s copyright. 

The door may be ajar

The world of scholarly publishing is in a process of change, and this is why the University is participating in the emerging ‘transformative deals’ with publishers such as Wiley, Sage, and Springer Nature. Unlike the old models where subscriptions provided access, the new deals include Gold open access publishing opportunities, and we have already use these to make articles published openly and thus accessible to anyone with a connection to the internet. We have also liaised with individual academics to optimise the licensing options and apply licenses that maximise the potential to achieve impact. 

Open licensing

Please note that there appears to be an issue with the required plugin for the video embedded below. In the meantime, please view the video at: https://players.brightcove.net/3806881048001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6171430413001

With various policies mandating various form of open licensing, and with digital publishing cultures offering new opportunities for increasing impact, we welcome the opportunity to discuss licensing with you! Please do get in touch to arrange anything from informal conversations or training sessions. 

Golden opportunities? Emerging opportunities to expand access to Gold open access (OA) publishing

3rd July 2020

The evolution of the OA policy landscape is showing no signs of rest. With the implementation of plan S just months away, many of the legacy academic and scholarly publishers are busy amending their agreements with universities to ensure that they are compliant with plan S. Since UKRI- including all of the UK’s Research Councils- and others funders such as the Wellcome Trust are signatories of plan S, there is a clear intention for integral stakeholders to progress the existing OA landscape that has already been heavily shaped by existing policies.

What does this mean? 

The plan S principles intend to bring about “make full and immediate open access a reality.” Whilst the Green route to open access is explicitly supported, much of the orientation of the initiative is framed around traditional publication through journals, and in particular through the Gold route. 

Various business models support Gold OA publication. The APC (article processing charge) model has been the most widely implemented model by many of the legacy publishers. This means that the funding of Gold open access publication often relies on a payment on a per-article basis.

However, as universities traditionally pay subscriptions to publishers for access to scholarly materials, such monies have not been relieved from existing costs in the scholarly communication workflows. Indeed, universities may well have an increased total cost by the inclusion of APCs due to the simultaneous payments for access and publication within the same hybrid title, a phenomenon often referred to as ‘double dipping’. 

For funded research, access to funds to cover APCs is often provided in order to meet their stated mandates around Gold OA publication. However, for research that is not produced as a result of grants from specific funders may feel have more limited access to publish via the Gold method in journals of their interest due to a lack of funding to cover high APC costs. 

Changing practices 

As such, plan S requires some publishers to amend their operations and the deals that they offer to universities. The University has started to take advantage of some of these ‘transformative agreements’ that cover both the traditional access aspect of the publisher’s offering, but also a Gold OA publishing aspect. Such transformative deals were already offered by publishers such as Springer, and the University maintain their read and publish deal.

The University has recently signed Wiley’s read and publish deal, meaning that we can support our researchers to publish via Gold OA with Wiley without incurring APCs (please follow the links for further details on some of the limitations of the deal.) This means that works published through these deals are freely available to all immediately upon publication without barriers to access via the internet. The works are published under Creative Commons licenses (which we will generally recommend a preference for CC BY 4.0 in order to maximise reuse value and optimise the potential for increasing impact, but we will have a new blog post on this for you very soon!)  

The University is currently addressing other appropriate read and publish deals that are emerging in order to offer greater value to our communities of researchers. Sage are currently offering such a deal and this is being appraised by colleagues with experience in both the library and within Research Development Services (GRE). 

A mixed landscape 

The funding of OA publication is still a very diverse landscape. Many creative and experimental operations that are aiming to find stable revenue streams that are more equitable. For instance, the Open Library of Humanities are a pure Gold OA publisher, and they have never been funded through APCs. Instead, they offer the opportunity for universities to participate in a low-cost ‘partnership scheme’. This has provided stability, and allowed great value for money to be offered. 

Gold open access publishing in other areas, however, is still a major challenge for many. The evolution of electronic books has been far more stymied than that of the electric journal or journal articles. Proprietary formats, access credit models, and digital rights management (DRM) are just some of the many differences. Scaling monograph and book publishing to Gold open access has, as such, been incredibly slow.  

The Open Book Publishers and punctum books are two open access book publishers that offer viable OA publishing a in this area, and the initiatives such as the COPIM project aim to investigate how this area may be developed to broaden and deepen the open landscape for scholarly publication. 

Stability in unstable times? 

The landscape for Gold OA is still nascent, and there are many reasonable critiques of of the emerging policies and commercial offerings from some publishers, along with the political context in which the shift towards open access publication is occurring within. 

The complexities surrounding all of this can seem alienating and even frustrating for researchers that simply want to share their work with various communities. We want support your scholarly communication activities, and as such, we are always available to ask about anything and help take some of the administrative load that the contemporary scenario may yield.