Tullney, M. (2021). TIB becomes Major Development Partner of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/2021/02/16/tib-and-pkp/

1. Co-editor for Evidence Summaries at Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, a fully open journal hosted by the University of Alberta (Canada)
2. Engaged in the IFLA Document Delivery and Resource Sharing (DDRS) committee and the organization of the 16th ILDS conference, which takes place every two years. As part of this involvement, program subcommittee members (including myself and NTK’s Sasha Skenderija) created a “light” peer review process for conference papers and decided to publish our conference proceedings openly as an eBook using the existing NTK infrastructure, including a pre-existing repository and creation of an official cataloging record to improve access to the document.

While at times daunting (finding EBLIP peer reviewers during the summer at times seemed like climbing Mount Everest! And who knew some Czech ISBN rules date back to the mid-90s!), both experiences have left me with a clear understanding of what fully moving to an open access environment can mean, when members of various academic communities take it seriously. It all boils down to a community’s rolling up its sleeves and being serious about defining and implementing what scholarly communications/output mean to that particular community plus utilizing (and pushing to expand and improve) existing technological infrastructures.

When this work is done, everyone involved in the process learns: the educational benefits of really engaging in working behind-the-scenes on an open access journal or eBook (in any role: author, publisher, peer reviewer, copy editor, editor) are tremendous, and anyone with an Internet connection interested in the community’s outputs (note: there are still serious Digital Divide hurdles to be solved in this regard) can engage in discussion about the published output.

Stepping back: defining (seriously) what scholarly communications means to a community

I can understand why metrics defining what is considered to be “scholarly output” were developed (funders—including universities and not just grant funding agencies—must have fair and transparent guidelines for academic promotion and distribution of limited grant funding), but I know I’m not alone in feeling that such standards can be misinterpreted, can be overly inflexible, and can be “gamed” by certain players. In the end, each academic community defines its rules.

In terms of contributing to open access movements, it’s up to each academic community to do its soul-searching. Do we want everyone in the world to be able to access our efforts? Why do our journals charge article processing charges (APCs), if they charge them? Are the APCs fair? Will reducing APCs impact quality (or not)? If there’s money involved, where does all the money go?

If it’s hard for your community to answer such questions, it’s maybe time for the community to ask itself why.

Taking advantage of (and pushing to expand and improve) existing technological infrastructures

In thinking about APCs, if a community decides to handle behind-the-scenes work with volunteers (“paid” by learning to be better writers, reviewers, and editors; by gaining academic service activities to put on CVs and to talk about in annual reviews; fame and glory [j/k]), the only “cost” to providing open journal access is the technological infrastructure. EBLIP works with the Open Journal Systems (OJS), a Public Knowledge project, hosted by University of Alberta Libraries; for the ILDS eBook, we used a pre-existing library repository.

Many of these kinds of individual initiatives, at individual institutions or libraries, have sprung up over the past decade. They’re there for members of academic communities to take advantage of, but are often forgotten and/or limited to members of an individual institution. Sometimes, maybe too often, commercial solutions are more user friendly and have broader reach. If we’re serious about open access—and long-term access to information we can trust—maybe it’s time researchers and libraries start asking themselves better questions about solutions which already exist. Why does “Commercial Solution X” work better than our repositories? Are we fast enough to deliver new solutions that can compete with commercial ones? If we’re too slow, why is this the case? How can we do better?

Then there are the even bigger questions: What can we do to change the common issues we face—not just at our institution, but across our global academic community as a whole? How can we share resources to make our efforts accessible to all? How can we serve a greater good better? 

Such questions are easy to lose sight of in the day-to-day sea of academic activities. I’d argue it’s maybe time to stop getting jostled by the waves and to put our hands on the rudder.

The Office has also made public a recent presentation of the UC strategy to its leadership (link, with video, below).

• University of California Office of Scholarly Communications (2019). Negotiating with scholarly journal publishers: A toolkit from the University of California. Retrieved from https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-negotiations/negotiating-with-scholarly-journal-publishers-a-toolkit/
• Waibel, Günter (2019). Update on open access and academic journal contracts: a presentation to the UC Board of Regents’ Academic and Student Affairs Committee. Retrieved from https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2019/07/update-on-open-access-and-academic-journal-contracts/

…California, through its cancellation, has nevertheless maintained its position unambiguously. It does not need ongoing journal subscriptions through ScienceDirect. Put another way: A major customer’s perceived value in the product offering has declined. Elsevier apparently no longer has the pricing power it once could assert.

Leakage

The source of the value decline is no mystery. Joe Esposito argued more than a year ago that ‘Sci-Hub is an unacknowledged reserve army prepared to enter the battle with publishers,’ noting elsewhere in the piece that time “is not on Elsevier’s side.”

But Sci-Hub is not alone. Sci-Hub is one of a series of services through which content is ‘leaking’ out of publisher sites through to users. While some of these sites are illicit and pirate, others like SSRN and institutional repositories are accepted parts of the ecosystem, and still others are like ResearchGate, whose intentions vary by observer.

Read more at: Schonfeld, R. (2019). Is the Value of the Big Deal in Decline? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/03/07/value-big-deal-leakage/

But many of us in the library community worry about the accessibility of such tools to institutions without the funds to purchase them in terms of making more pressure on libraries to provide such services – pressure on institutions which may already be falling behind the wealthy institutions because of budgetary pressures due to subscription journal increases and other factors, expanding the effects of the digital divide. What would stop people in such cases from continuing to use P2P servers to access content their libraries cannot purchase or which are not available via open access? I cannot imagine that, in these cases, such libraries will be able to “disrupt the disrupters,” as promoted in the webinar follow-up email. AA will need critical subscription mass.

It can also mean, for wealthy institutions, that once the “lock” happens, subscription to the tool becomes difficult to discontinue in the future. And if there are only one or two good players in this space (and not a fully competitive marketplace, as currently appears to be the case), this always opens up the door to steep future fee increases and, at some point, threats to a long-term funding model, on the library side. But of course, the end users might not care about such worries. Should they?

It’s not just librarians who are concerned about big mergers and marketplace “consolidation”; smaller academic society publishers, too, are facing similar issues, as seen in an article by Angela Cochran from the American Society of Civil Engineers in The Scholarly Kitchen:

I am concerned about what I will call ‘lock out.’ As some librarians are concerned about their faculty, students, and institutions being ‘locked in’ to one particular publisher’s services, I am concerned about society and small publishers being ‘locked out’ of critical technology services.

She discusses these issues in relation to Wiley and Elsevier:

Many of us on the Atypon platform were varying degrees of concerned about the sale to Wiley. The concerns were entirely about a publisher owning the platform that housed the content of many other publishers. We are faced with the same situation now that Elsevier has bought Aries Systems. A publisher that competes with many of Aries Systems’ customers, now owns the submission and production system used by these publishers.

For some of us, like my organization (American Society of Civil Engineers), it’s a double-whammy. Our platform with all of its content and user data is owned by Wiley. Our submission system with all of our author and editorial data is owned by Elsevier.

Read the full article, “Clowns to the Left of Me…Jokers to the Right,” at: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/06/clowns-left-jokers-right-independent-publisher-age-mergers-acquisitions/

• Press Release

I will have someone on staff attend one of the upcoming webinars about the service and report more here in the coming weeks.

2. …& a brand new resource from the US National Academies: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25116/open-science-by-design-realizing-a-vision-for-21st-century

Holtzbrinck also holds a majority share in SpringerNature, as Roger Schonfeld detailed for The Scholarly Kitchen in October 2017 together with an analysis of a possible scholarly publishing “duoply”:

Any kind of acquisition of Digital Science would leave Springer Nature and Elsevier with many of the pieces of a research workflow business in combination with publishing operations and platforms. There are a number of differences between the two workflow businesses and publishing operations, but the fundamentals would be that the two largest scientific publishers, and the two largest open access publishers, would also be the two largest scientific workflow providers. This would reinforce the emerging marketplace dynamics as one leading towards duopoly.

Watch this space.

Additional Reading

Schonfeld, Roger (2017). Who Owns Digital Science? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/10/23/ownership-digital-science/

Why Was Springer Nature’s IPO Withdrawn?