The UK Publishers Association comments on the Finch Report

The eagerly awaited Finch Report was published on 18^th June. The Finch Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

Grayam Taylor of the Publishers Association

After due deliberation, the Committee concluded that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional journal model — which currently sees most research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be gradually discontinued.

The Finch Report has been welcomed by publishers and their trade associations (e.g. here, hereand here), and by research funders (e.g. hereand here). 

However, it has been received with a mixture of frustration, disbelief, and anger by some UK research universities, and by many OA advocates (e.g. here, hereand here).

What has dismayed critics is that in recommending the so-called gold route to OA (where researchers pay to publish in OA journals), rather than the green route (where they continue to publish in subscription journals at no cost, and then self-archive their papers in an institutional repository) the Finch Report appears to have condemned the research community to having to find an additional £50-60 million a year to publish its research, at a time when university budgets are under severe pressure.

Since much of this additional money is expected to go into the pockets of publishers, some have charged the Finch Committee with succumbing to lobbying.

Others maintainthat if the Finch recommendations are implemented the number of research papers published will have to be rationed.

What do publishers make of the criticisms? To find out, I contacted Graham Taylor, Director of Educational, Academic and Professional Publishing at the UK-based Publishers Association. Our email Q&A is below.

On lobbying

RP: The Finch Report recommends that all publicly funded research be made freely available on an Open Access basis, and that the traditional subscription model be phased out. The Publishers Association has welcomed the Report, describing it as a “’balanced package’ of recommendations for extending access to research outputs within the UK”.

By contrast, many in the OA movement have greeted the Report with dismay. Stevan Harnad, for instance, has described it as a product of “strong and palpable influence from the publishing lobby”, and a “fiasco”. Meanwhile, David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL, commented to me that, “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense”. He added, “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

What is it that critics of the Report like this are not seeing that publishers do see?

GT: In fact the report recommends that “a clear policy direction should be set towards support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as the main vehicle for the publication of research, especially when it is publicly funded”. In proposing that the UK “should embrace the transition to open access”, the report recognises that “the process itself will be complicated” and that “no single channel can on its own maximise research publications for the greatest number of people”.

It was not us who described the report as a ‘balanced package’, but Finch herself: “Our recommendations are presented as a balanced package, so it is critical that they are implemented in a balanced and sustainable way, with continuing close contact and dialogue between representatives in the key groups..” Most of the reaction to Finch that I have seen has been supportive, and we wait to hear what David Willetts will say to Janet Finch in reply.

The PA was instrumental in proposing to Willetts in March last year that a cross-sector representative stakeholder group might look at ways of extending access to GLOBAL research publications for the benefit of UK researchers, so Finch was always about more than OA for UK research.

The 12 members of the review group comprised delegates from the funders (HEFCE, Research Councils UK, Wellcome Trust), the learned societies (Society of Biology, Royal Graphical Society, Royal Society), the libraries (RLUK, British Library), research institutes, and publishers. The three publishers represented commercial, society and open access interests.

Finch herself said that her report “will bring substantial benefits both for researchers and everyone who has an interest in their work [it] shows how representatives of the different stakeholder groups can work together to that end.”

I am not aware that any of the delegates felt the need to post a dissenting opinion. I find it strange that publisher representatives tend to be described as a ‘lobby’. What description is appropriate for the other delegates?

And I don’t see how the relatively modest transition costs estimated in the report can be described as ‘crippling’ given the scale of costs required to support the UK research effort.

On costs

RP: Nevertheless, it is the issue of costs that appears to be the most controversial part of the Report. Finch estimates that if the recommendations are implemented it will cost an additional £50-60 million a year, although the Report concedes that this is an estimate only.

What is your view: if the Finch recommendations are implemented, how much additional money will the research community need to find, and how much of that money will go to paying publishers (rather than, says, funding institutional repositories etc.)? Will any of this additional money be a consequence of what OA advocates call “double dipping” by publishers?

GT: I am not qualified to comment on the transition cost estimate put up by Finch, other than to say that it must derive from the several recent economist reports sponsored by RIN, JISC and others. I have no doubt that the Finch secretariat, Michael Jubb of RIN, will have taken these reports into account.

6% of global research outputs derive from the UK, but if that is funded by APCs then the UK alone must cover that cost, which was previously spread over global subscriptions. Since the UK is a net exporter of research outputs, if we fund our own then the cost to the UK must rise, albeit quite modestly.

To apply the term ‘double dipping’ to this effect is a pejorative way of describing the hybrid journals with which most publishers now experiment. The APC element in these journals is still relatively low, less than 5%, but if the Finch recommendations are adopted in other jurisdictions this proportion will rise and over time the cost of subscriptions will fall.

Finch recognised this effect, pointing to “the importance of publishers’ providing clear information about the balance between the revenues provided in APCS and in subscriptions.”

RP: If pressed, OA advocates often concede that the additional costs they expect will probably be transitional costs alone, and that over time OA publishing will prove considerably cheaper than subscription publishing. Do you also expect OA publishing to be less costly than subscription publishing? If you do, then what do you believe the implications of that will be for publishers?

GT: Probably not. All publishing has costs, and the sunk, fixed, and platform costs associated with an effective publishing operation of a quality that the market expects will still be there, only the marginal and variable costs will change and supply side funding will bring its own costs as well.

The CEPA report for RINdid not anticipate significant cost reductions from a transition to open access. Whatever the benefits, I don’t see cost as the imperative. Publishers must live within the funds available in the market, and we can live with an OA market funded with APCs.

On Green and Gold

RP: What has also been controversial is Finch’s suggestion that institutional repositories are there simply to provide access to data and grey literature, and for preservation. OA advocates strongly disagree, and point out that repositories have provided almost all the UK’s OA literature to date.

Has Finch misunderstood the role of repositories, or do you also view the proper role of repositories being as Finch described it?

GT: I don’t recognise your use of “simply”, Finch used “particularly”. Clearly repositories can fulfil a variety of functions for the institutions that set them up, and Finch sees them as [playing] “a valuable role complementary to formal publishing”.

For a variety of reasons, practical, economic, technical, and sociological, I cannot see how repositories can take over as the primary channel for scholarly communication. Some advocates and evangelists disagree I know, but all I would say is that they have so far failed to convince their own constituency of that, and that all the evidence is that ‘Green’ is very slow to evolve. Isn’t it time to find another way?

RP: Speaking to The Bookseller in May you said, “Our position is we are already committed to working with ‘gold’ funding and we expect that to be a recommendation in the Finch group.” You added, “But we know where our red line is. ‘Green’ funding, which is dependent on another funding scheme, with a six-month embargo to publication, we cannot agree to, and we are soon to publish some research into the impact of ‘green’ open access funding.”

Is it merely the six month embargo that publishers object to, or do they reject the very notion of Green OA?

GT: I was speaking after David Willetts (the UK Science Minister) made a speech at the PA AGM that can be read here.  He anticipated some of the recommendations that were to appear later in the Finch report, although none of us had seen a final version at that stage.  

As I have already said, all publishing has costs, and these costs need to be recovered. If APCs are not available, then publishers need another model, and for the first 300 years in the life of journals that has been through subscriptions. Surely it is reasonable that publishers are allowed a sufficient time to recover their costs before a free version is posted to the internet?

The so-called ‘Green’ route to OA is entirely derivative of publishing costs being recovered elsewhere. We are very firmly of the belief that a minimum 12 month embargo is needed, and in some subjects such as mathematics probably longer. The ‘half lives’ of article downloads after publication make this very clear.

How can Green operate at all if there is no viable means left to fund the original publication and peer review?

We are not opposed to Green, but we are opposed to the imposition of short embargoes when the funder is not prepared to fund APCs.

On research and rants

RP: I assume the research you referred to when speaking to The Bookselleris the report you published with the ALPSP on June 1^st. This suggested that the potential effect of making journals free after a six-month embargo was that libraries would cancel 65% of their Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals, and 44% of their Scientific, Technical and Medical journals.

However, three days earlier, the PEER end of project conference had reported that there is no evidence of any harm to publishers as a result of embargoed green OA and indeed, it suggested, there is evidence of increased total usage as a result of green OA.

Why do you think these two studies come up with such different results, and which one in your view is more believable?

GT: They are not comparing like with like. Our short survey with ALPSP was an opinion piece. We commissioned a researcher to ask a single simple question to a sample of around 1,000 research librarians, hypothesising a world where the majority of the content of research journals was freely available within 6 months of publication, and asking if they would continue to subscribe.

We got around 200 responses and the results can be read here. We don’t claim this to be definitive or statistically significant, we didn’t control for all the variables, but the answers speak for themselves and it does paint a stark picture of the hazards of Green as a single club solution.

PEER however is a much more sophisticated four-year longitudinal observatory funded by the EC into the impact of a network of repositories on user behaviour and on the 300 journals that agreed to contribute content. The results can be read here.

PEER was able to demonstrate that stakeholders holding divergent views at the beginning of the project were able to collaborate effectively on a complex project. It stands as a practical testament to the work involved in making a network of green repositories function, including the need to set up a depot to feed in the content contributed by publishers.

Authors were invited to deposit their own content for 50% of the articles. The publishers did it for them for the other 50%. The result was 170 articles posted via the author route, and 11,800 by the publisher route. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that researchers do not see it as their role to self-archive.

The access statistics also tell a story: 8% via PEER repositories, 92% via publisher platforms. Perhaps readers prefer the version of record to the basic text in the repository version. All parties seemed to emerge from PEER with a preference for the funded, gold route, although that was not the objective of the exercise.

RP: The day the Finch Report was released the Daily Mail published an article warning, that “thousands of jobs could be placed at risk” if its recommendations were implemented. The paper added, “One leading publishing group said the move to provide all of Britain’s academic output online for nothing could destroy a £1billion industry that employs 10,000 people here and in its overseas operations.”

The OA movement reacted angrily to the news story. Subsequently, the Publishers Association, ALPSP, STM and Elsevier have all denied having anything to do with its publication.

But I wonder if you could say whether you agree with critics of the story that it was biased and misinformed — A “misinformed rant”, as Cameron Neylon put it?

GT: Why pick on this hilariously misinformed and one-eyed piece of journalism (“a report commissioned by No 10 Downing Street sociologist Janet Finch”) among all the other coverage of Finch?

I was still on holiday at the time so it certainly wasn’t me, and everyone I know has denied all knowledge.

Perhaps someone close to the review group did not like the conclusions and wanted to work a spoiler. Perhaps we should not believe all we read in the papers. I don’t think it made a fig of difference other than to discredit the organ involved. We used to wrap our chips in this kind of thing, now unfortunately it stays on the record.

Why not read what Janet Finch herself had to say in the Times, or this unusually sober piece in the Guardian?

Rant? I’ve seen a few of those elsewhere, and on the whole have learnt to enjoy them for what they are, an opportunity for a more considered response. 

On rationing

RP: Commenting to the Times Higher Education, one of the professors who sat on the Finch Committee — AdamTickell — suggested that if the Report’s recommendations are implemented we can expect to see research funders rationing the number of papers published.

As he put it, “Quite a large number of people publish a huge volume of papers. If they were to reduce that, it may not make any significant difference to the integrity of the science base.”

I am thinking that perhaps research funders are reaching a similar conclusion. When I spoke to David Sweeney, HEFCE's director of research, innovation, and skills last year he said that it was not obvious to HEFCE “that a constraint on the volume of material published through the current scholarly system would be a bad thing and that is why, in our research assessment system, we only look at up to four outputs per academic.”

He added, “The amount of research deserving publication ‘for the record’ is much less than the amount deserving publication ‘for immediate debate within the community’ and whereas print journals have met both needs in the past the internet offers the prospect of decoupling the two, leading to a drop in the amount of material requiring/meriting the full peer review and professional editing service.”

Do you think that if the Finch recommendations are implanted it will lead to a rationing of the number of papers published? If so, what would be the implications for publishers?

GT: Allocating funding to the supply (author) side rather than the demand (reader) side will doubtless have some interesting and as yet unobserved sociological consequences. The dynamic of funding flows will change and with it the point of decision as to how those funds will be applied.

A consequence could well be a rationing of publication funds, potentially leading to a reduction in the quantity of papers submitted for publication in an entirely open access world.

I don’t think we will be in that world in the immediate future, but there would be a certain irony in the logical end of open science being less science.

But then all the drivers of scholarly communication will still be there: registration of conclusions, dissemination of results, the imprimatur of peer review, the need to archive, the prestige capital of being published. I don’t foresee Stalinist interventions choking off scholarly discourse any time soon.

RP:  Thank you for your time.

Calvin and Hobbes....sort of

When I was a kid I had a favorite stuffed animal (still have him actually).  He was one of those sock monkeys and I named him mike.  I still have him up on my drawing desk and he makes me smile just being there.  Putting him and me in a calvin and hobbes-esque setting seemed like a fun excersise and something fun for me.  boy, Bill Watterson was a genius.  He gets more life out of one line of ink than I usually can in a whole drawing.  Enjoy.

The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

Last week I published an interview with David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL).  

Commenting on the interview on the Liblicense mailing list Anthony Watkinson said, “My impression is those pressing for OA, at least among the library sector and even within UCL, have moved on. A roadmap has been produced by the information officers of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). This organisation is chaired by none other than Paul Ayris of UCL, an Open Access advocate.”

Watkinson is a former Wiley-Blackwell publisher, a consultant to the Publishers Association, and now a part-time senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at UCL.

Paul Ayris, Direct of UCL Library Services

My curiosity piqued I contacted Paul Ayris, Director of UCL Library Services, and asked him if he thought the LERU Roadmap was at variance with what Price had said to me in the interview?

Ayris replied, “UCL’s position, as outlined in your interview with Professor Price, is to my mind in line with the LERU Roadmap, whose composition I co-ordinated. True, the Roadmap does not mention National Licensing approaches, but it does show the benefits and challenges of the Gold and Green routes to Open Access and the requirements that both lay on Universities.”

Ayris offered to write a guest post aligning the Finch Report with the LERU Roadmap. I agreed, and publish it below. 

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The Finch Report in a global Open Access landscape

By Paul Ayris 

The Finch Report, which was  recently published in the UK, has caused a storm of comment, even controversy. Responses have been lined up behind the barricades of either Green or Gold Open Access (OA), and predictions have been made about the destruction of the UK publishing industry. 

Universities and research funders rightly worry about the implications of the funding burden that full implementation of the Finch recommendations would lay on them. There is much heat, but where is the light?

The Finch Report is, in many ways, an academic study of what the authors feel is the future trajectory of scholarly publishing to support research, teaching and learning, public engagement and enterprise. It’s a laudable and important attempt to establish a leadership role for the UK in Open Access — a country that produces around 6% of the global research output. 

The Finch vision is for a fully Gold OA world, where Green OA repositories take on a role as a supporting player for grey literature and to support University marketing. National licences to commercial content are suggested as a short term win, to bring about equality of access across UK HE, and to embrace new sectors such as the NHS and SMEs.

Where does the Finch view sit in a global OA world? A new report by John Houghton and Alma Swan, financed by the JISC and to be published imminently, takes a different look at the OA debate. 

Houghton and Swan have undertaken detailed economic modelling, something missing from Finch, to compare the costs of Green and Gold Open Access if a university unilaterally opted for either of these routes, or if the whole world changed to either Green or Gold. 

Their analysis tells us a lot about the difficulties of transition to a fully OA environment. Their conclusion is that, for universities, at the present time the most cost effective route is for a University to opt for Green OA. Should the whole world turn OA, then their modelling supports Finch, in that the biggest saving for a University would come from Gold (Chart 23 in the forthcoming Report).

This is an important recognition of the difficulties of transition. One of the weaknesses in Finch is that it does not adequately model the transition to OA or the time it might take to achieve. 

Another recent publication, which also acknowledges the difficulties of transition, is the LERU Roadmap Towards Open Access. This document was published in June 2011 by the League of European Research Universities as an Advice paper for its members, and indeed for all European Universities. 

The Roadmap was well received in Germany, with a glowing tribute in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The document identifies signs and pathways for both the Green and Gold routes to OA, and the benefits and challenges of all approaches. 

A survey of European research universities found that Green approaches were more deeply embedded there than Gold. The Roadmap therefore paints a realistic picture of what faces a European research university in their attempts to embrace OA.

In this context, what is the significance of the Finch Report? It is visionary, bold and well-intentioned. But there are gaps. It fails to appreciate the difficulties of transition to OA here and now. 

Taken with the Houghton and Swan, and the LERU work, a different trajectory for the future of OA can be said to emerge. This is more nuanced than Finch suggests. 

In the short term, a scaled up version of Green OA, linked to extended national licencing, would help solve the problems of access to content that Finch quite rightly is trying to address. 

In the longer term, the Gold OA vision of Finch (the Goldfinch) may well become the predominant model. But for this to work, the whole of the world needs to turn OA, and that is not going to happen tomorrow, nor any time soon.

The Finch Report is therefore an important marker on the road to OA, but in itself it is not the whole story.

The Finch Report: UCL’s David Price Responds

The much-awaited report from the Finch Committee was published today. The Committee, headed up by Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at the University of Manchester, was set up last year by UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts, and tasked with establishing how access to research could be expanded.

David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research)

The good news: the Report recommends that all publicly funded research should be made freely available on an Open Access (OA) basis, and that the traditional model — which currently sees much research locked behind a subscription paywall — should be phased out.

The bad news: the Report estimates that this will require the higher education sector to find an extra £50-60 million a year to disseminate its research.  

The bulk of this extra money will be needed in order to pay for researchers to publish in so-called Gold OA and Hybrid OA journals. Instead of billing readers for access to research papers, as subscription journals do, OA journals bill authors, or their funders or institutions, for publishing papers — by means of article-processing charges (APCs).

These charges range from $305 to $3,930 per article, and are the price publishers demand for making research papers freely available on the Internet.

Some have greeted the Report with enthusiasm. Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, the world's second largest private funder, commented. “We are delighted that the Finch Report encourages the UK to embrace open access, something that we at the Wellcome Trust feel very strongly about. There is a real groundswell of opinion in support of open access in the UK, the USA, Europe and beyond and this is a real opportunity for the UK to lead the way.”

Others are far less enthusiastic, arguing that by failing to support and promote Green OA (aka self-archiving), the Committee missed an important opportunity to push for a more cost-effective solution.

With Green OA, authors continue to publish in subscription journals (without payment), but make their papers freely available on the Internet by self-archiving them in an institutional repository— usually after an embargo period intended to allow the publisher to recoup the publication costs through the subscription.

Many OA advocates believe that Green OA is a much less costly route to OA. Publishers dislike it intensely.

A hard place

“The Finch Report is a successful case of lobbying by publishers to protect the interests of publishing at the expense of the interests of research and the public that funds research,” argues University of Southampton cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad. “The Finch Report proposes doing precisely what the US Research Works Act (RWA) — since discredited and withdrawn — failed to do: to push ‘Green’ OA self-archiving (by authors, and Green OA self-archiving mandates by authors’ funders and institutions) off the UK policy agenda as inadequate and ineffective and, to boot, likely to destroy both publishing and peer review — and to replace them instead with a vague, slow evolution toward ‘Gold’ OA publishing, at the publishers’ pace and price.”

Whatever one’s views about the conclusions reached by the Finch Committee, and whatever one feels about the relative merits of Green and Gold OA (see here for instance), if the Report’s recommendations are implemented it will put UK universities in a hard place. For it is they who will have to find much of the extra money needed, at a time when their budgets are already under huge pressure.

Unsurprisingly, therefore the Vice-Provost (Research) at University College London (UCL) David Price is not best pleased. “The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense,” he told me. “Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?”

Price’s message to David Willetts is simple: more work needs to be done to find an adequate solution. “Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to get the best transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world,” he suggests. “The Finch recommendations are only part of the answer.”

For more of Price’s views read on.

Q&A with David Price

RP:  Did UCL have a representative on the Finch Committee?

DP: No, but we did submit recommendations, and I was asked to comment on a draft.

RP:  So was UCL represented by a national university body then?

DP: We were not “represented”, but Adam Tickell, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Birmingham, was on the Committee and he kept Russell GroupHEIs in the loop.

RP:  Would it be accurate to say that you support the principle of Open Access, but you have reservations about the recommendations in the Finch Report?

DP:Yes, that is correct.

RP:  What (from your perspective) are the most significant recommendations made in the Report?

DP:The one which would have the most effect is that for a move to Gold OA.

RP: This is the recommendation that Gold OA become the “main vehicle” for the publication of research?

DP:Yes. Economic modelling shows that, for research universities, the Green route to OA is more cost effective than the Gold. Under Gold Research Councils and Universities will have to find millions of pounds in existing budgets to fund OA charges. That means that some things will have to stop to make the necessary monies available.

Financial implications

RP: So if the Gold OA recommendation is implemented what exactly would be the financial implications for UCL?

DP:UCL would have to re-model existing budgets to find the monies to fund APCs, where the researcher is not funded by a research grant. Modelling by economic experts shows that this is millions of pounds.

RP:  What budgets do you anticipate would have to be cut in order to find the extra money?

DP: No consideration has been given to this question.

RP:  Would the impact on the humanities be different from the impact on the sciences?

DP: Yes. The Finch recommendations are not good news for the Humanities, whose unit of publication is characteristically the research monograph. Who will publish Gold OA monographs, and who will pay for them?

RP:  Can you clarify where the extra expense will come from: is it that universities will find they have (for a period of time at least) to pay both subscriptions and APCs? What OA advocates call “double dipping”?

DP: Unless subscription prices come down as Gold OA fees are paid, then Universities will have to pay twice — to help cover Gold OA APCs and for subscription to the journal.

RP:  Publishers are claiming (e.g. here) that the Finch Report could destroy a £1billion industry that employs 10,000 people here and in its overseas operations. How does that claim square with your belief that universities would end up paying publishers more?

DP: No comment, as UCL has not seen the evidence which the publishers would use to back their claim.

RP:  Do you think you are in a minority in your concerns about the Finch Report, or are most UK universities, or at least other Russell Group universities, likely to be similarly concerned?

DP:Most Russell Group Universities will have the same concerns, because we all face the same challenges.

RP:  To get back to basics for a minute, what is the problem that OA is intended to solve?

DP:The problem is that researchers can find material on the Internet, but not necessarily access the full-text.

RP:  You feel the Finch recommendations fall short of addressing this problem?

DP: The result of the Finch recommendations would be to cripple university systems with extra expense. Finch is certainly a cure to the problem of access, but is it not a cure which is actually worse than the disease?

Different scenario

RP: An OA advocate said to me, “Every which way to provide access is recommended in the Finch Report (at additional cost to the UK) except the solution we have been promoting for the past decade or so — Open Access.” I assumed they meant Green OA. Would it have made more sense for the Finch Committee to recommend that Green OA become the main vehicle for achieving OA?

DP:What Finch should have done is to model Green and Gold together, to see which works out cheaper. A forthcoming report from the JISC’s Open Access Implementation Group on the impact of APC charges on universities does this — and comes up with a different scenario to Finch.

RP:  Can you say in broad outline how the JISC scenario differs?

DP:It is cheaper for universities, on current economic modelling. And Green OA is more in line with the stipulations of the EU Horizon 2020 funding programme.

RP: One thing that puzzles me is that UCL and the other Russell Group universities have in recent years invested a significant amount of money in institutional repositories to support Green OA; and they have introduced policies to promote self-archiving. As a result, these repositories have provided almost all the UK’s OA literature to date. Yet the Finch Report appears to be recommending that they now be consigned to a role of providing access to data and grey literature only, and for preservation. Has the Finch study overlooked or ignored the investments made in repositories, and the role that they could play in providing OA do you think?

DP: Yes. Repositories can indeed be used for marketing, and to promote grey literature — reports, theses. But there is a scenario where they can carry the whole of a university’s research output and make that available in OA at a fraction of the cost of Gold OA.

National licensing

RP:  Why do you think the Finch Committee came up with the recommendations it did? Do you feel it understood the issues adequately?

DP: UCL is keen to promote the idea of a true national license. Finch goes part of the way to address this for various sectors — but this is not a true national license. Finch says that a fully national license for commercial content would be too expensive. But where is the economic modelling to prove this? Finch provides none. So it is a missed opportunity, as national licensing is a transitional step to an OA world.

RP: How would the national licensing model you refer to work? It might seem to imply some form of “big deal” arrangement. Is that correct?

DP: National licences are the preferred way forward in the immediate future for many Russell Group Universities. They exist in other European countries. For an agreed amount, publishers allow access to their content by all sectors in society. UCL sees this as a transition step to full Open Access. Initial discussions suggest that the cost of national licensing would be cheaper than the Gold OA Finch is recommending.

RP: Many OA advocates maintain that open access is a much cheaper way of publishing research, and so promises financial savings for universities. Might it be that the cost increases you anticipate from the Finch Report would be only transitional, and that in the long run universities would realise significant financial gains? Indeed, I think this is what the Finch Report anticipates. No gain without pain perhaps?

DP: Economic modelling does show significant savings in the whole publishing system if the whole world were 100% OA. But these savings fall in different parts of the system, not necessarily on University budgets. In the current economic climate, Universities have to look their position in the short term, as well as the long.

Only part of the answer

RP: What do you think those who disagree with the Finch recommendations can/should do? Will you be formally registering your personal objections?

DP:UCL will make its position clear in a number of fora — the Russell Group, in news briefings such as this one.

RP: Do you expect that the recommendations will eventually be implemented, whatever objections might be raised by the research community?

DP:UCL expects an honest and open debate, where the weaknesses in the present recommendations can be laid bare.

RP:  Might the Finch Report have the effect of souring the research community’s appetite for OA?

DP:Yes, in certain areas.

RP:  What is your message to the man who set up the Finch Committee, David Willetts?

DP:Listen to UCL’s response to Finch and carry on talking to get the best transitional model from where we are now to a fully OA world. The Finch recommendations are only part of the answer.

Director of UCL Library Services Paul Ayris comments on the Finch Report here

Conductor

Just started drawing and this is what came out.  You never can tell.  enjoy.

A New Declaration of Rights: Open Content Mining

In a recent investment report, analyst Claudio Aspesiconcluded that a new front had opened up in the Open Access (OA) debate. Writing in April, Aspesi noted that academics are “increasingly protesting the limitations to the usage of the information and data contained in the articles published through subscription models, and — in particular — to the practice of text mining articles.” Aspesi is right, and a central figure in this battleground is University of Cambridge chemist Peter Murray-Rust. A long-time advocate for open data, Murray-Rust is now spearheading an initiative to draft a “Content Mining Declaration”. What is the background to this?

Peter Murray-Rust

When I interviewed Peter Murray-Rust in 2008, he expressed considerable frustration at the difficulties he was experiencing in trying to extract and reuse the data published in scholarly journals — even where his university had paid an electronic licence to access the content. 

What Murray-Rust wanted to do, he explained, was to capture the “embedded data” contained in the tables, charts, and images published in science papers, along with the “supplemental information” that often accompanies papers. To do this, he had developed a variety of software tools to mine large quantities of digital text. Having extracted the data he then wanted to aggregate them, compare them, input them into programs, use them to create predictive models, and reuse them in a variety of other ways.

However, he was having huge problems achieving this, not because of any technical issue, but because of uncertainty over copyright and publishers’ insistence that a licence to read journals does not encompass the right to mine them with software.

To add to Murray-Rust’s frustration, many of his colleagues were either unsympathetic or uncomprehending. Even more galling, the Open Access movement — which should have been a natural ally — was more interested in making papers freely available to eyeballs, than to software. Even papers published in OA journals, he noted, are often released under licences that do not come with reuse rights.

In pursuit of his dream, Murray-Rust became a formative voice in the creation of the open data movement. Open data, Murray-Rust explained to me in 2008, is data “free of any restraint on access and on reuse.”  Recently, however, governments have tended to lead the way in urging for open data, spawning a generation of data wranglers; open scientific information has often lagged behind, but is now beginning to be seen as a central issue.

Four years later Murray-Rust is still frustrated. He is not, however, a man to give up, and he continues his advocacy today under the rubric of “open content mining”. Essentially, this is text mining plus. As Murray-Rust explains today, he views the mining of scholarly journals as a hierarchical activity, with content mining encompassing not just the mining of text and data, but other types of content too, including images, tables, graphs, audio, and video.

Simply using the term “text mining”, he adds, “might imply that anything other than text should be protected by the ‘content provider’. However, I and others can extract factual information from a wide range of material.”

The good news is that the research community is finally beginning to understand what Murray-Rust has been “banging on about” for all these years, as are research funders and governments, and Murray-Rust believes the door to what he wants is finally beginning to open.

However, he says, it is imperative that text mining advocates push hard at that open door if they want to achieve their objectives. To this end, Murray-Rust recently convened an ad hoc group of interested parties to draft what he calls a “Content Mining Declaration” (disclosure: I am a member of the group).

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If you wish to read the rest of the article, and a short Q&A with Murray-Rust, please click on the link below. 

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the rest of the text (as a PDF file) click HERE.