D is for Dragon

Here's the fourth one in the series.  My wife told me I should put some of our other kids in the book as well and not just the youngest.  Sounded like a fine idea to me so now my daughter is getting eaten by a dragon.  Any ideas for E?  I've got a few but I'm still open to suggestions.  Enjoy.

Alexander Grossmann on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Alexander Grossmann

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A below is with Alexander Grossmann. Earlier this year Grossmann took up a post as Professor of Publishing Management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences. To do so he gave up a job as Vice President at the scholarly publisher De Gruyter, returning to research after ten years in the publishing industry. In that time he also served as Managing Director at Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna and as Director of physics publishing at Wiley. 

Prior to his stint in publishing, Grossmann held posts as a researcher and lecturer at the Jülich Research Centre, the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and the University of Tübingen.

Few if any OA advocates will know Grossmann, but publishers surely will. Jacek Ciesielski, Vice President Open Access at De Gruyter and CEO Versita, emailed me this comment: “I have known Alexander for some ten years now and we have had a number of different business relationships during his times at Wiley, Springer and De Gruyter.”

Ciesielski added, “You enjoy working in an industry when you enjoy working with its people. Alexander makes me truly enjoy being an academic publisher. He is one of the nicest and kindest people I have met in the industry. He is also someone with a profound understanding of the research community, and of scholarly publishing; and he is always receptive and open to new ideas and trends.”

And it is clearly his openness to new ideas and trends, combined with frustration at the way legacy publishers are responding to OA, which has persuaded Grossmann to combine his new academic post with a different kind of publishing role, as President of a privately owned OA venture called ScienceOpen. Co-founded with Tibor Tscheke, the new venture, says Grossmann, will feed into and help his future research.

ScienceOpen is a “research and publishing network” designed to allow researchers to share scientific information, both formally by publishing articles, and informally by reviewing their colleagues’ work, providing endorsements and comments, and updating their own papers.

Essentially, it will offer a publishing service that will also enable post-publication peer review, and which will be embedded in a social networking environment. A beta site will go live next month, and submissions will start to be accepted in November. Once the service is properly up and running researchers will be charged around $800 to publish a full article (Although there will be no publication fees this year).

Imprisoned

Having had experience of both the research environment and of academic publishing, Grossmann has an interesting perspective on OA. Above all, he understands all too well the fear that OA has engendered in publishing houses. And now that he has left traditional publishing behind he is able to view the challenges that scholarly publishers face more objectively than his former colleagues still working in the industry.

Readers must reach their own conclusions, but what struck me in what Grossmann has to say in the Q&A that follows is that, whatever their wishes and intentions, legacy publishers seem to be prisoners of their past — imprisoned by the business model of academic publishing they have inherited, imprisoned by their shareholders (where they work in a public company), but above all imprisoned by their need to maintain the high profit levels to which scholarly publishers have become accustomed. It is the latter that publishers believe OA now threatens and which they so fear.

By Grossmann’s account, while appearing to respond positively to OA, publishers are in reality like rabbits caught in the head beams of an approaching automobile. They are more inclined to freeze into inaction than leap into an uncertain future. Certainly they seem unable to confront the huge changes that the new networked environment is demanding of them. As Grossmann puts it, “I have the impression that there is no publishing house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their business models which would be required to actively pursue an open access publishing concept … The yearly drop in subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.”

Grossmann also paints a picture of a research community struggling to move forward. With their library budgets eaten up by “big deal” subscription contracts, research institutions simply do not have the wherewithal to pay for Gold OA, other than on a small scale. “As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move forward with OA,” says Grossmann.

Whatever the accuracy of Grossmann’s analysis, we cannot but note that it is a less upbeat picture of the current state of Open Access than OA advocates are inclined to paint — e.g. by SPARC’s Heather Joseph in an earlier Q&A in this series.

Not convinced

So what could break this seeming impasse? Green OA advocates argue that the answer is self-evident: Researchers should continue to publish in subscription journals and then self-archive their papers — thereby forcing publishers to downsize their operations and embrace OA wholesale, rather than tinkering with it in a piecemeal fashion as they are currently doing.

Grossmann, however, is not convinced. Green OA, he suggests, should be viewed as having been no more than “the first response of the publishing industry to the new legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies”. What is required today, he says, is for “one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research content.”

In other words, to move forward Grossmann believes it is essential to free up money by cancelling big deals. For this reason, he says, the main focus of the OA movement today should be on encouraging and supporting libraries to “reallocate a part of the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA publications.”

Something further is needed too, he adds. New ways of publishing and distributing research need to be introduced — novel new services like PeerJ and F1000, for instance. “[I]t is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual scientific disciplines,” he says. “Rather, both the visibility and acceptance of OA concepts among the scholarly community worldwide needs to be increased. The development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many scholarly disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the reasons why I launched the project.”

 

The Q&A begins

Q: As I understand it, you were until recently Vice President at the scholarly publisher De Gruyter, and you have previously worked for Springer and for Wiley. You left De Gruyter earlier this year in order to start your own OA publishing business ScienceOpen — which I believe will be launched in September. What motivated you to give up a steady job and start out on the risky path of running your own business? Was it a desire to be your own boss and make a lot of money? What it because you do not believe that traditional publishers are best placed to offer OA publishing services, or was it something else?

A: Before I decided to leave De Gruyter publishers and the traditional publishing industry altogether, I was appointed as professor of publishing management at the University for Applied Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

Within the framework of that academic position, I will have the opportunity to research and develop new ideas and concepts for the future of publishing, as well as the responsibility to prepare students for that future. Thus I consider the new OA project ScienceOpen as part of this exercise to explore new modes of scholarly communication and publishing. When brainstorming ideas for a new communication and publishing platform for scientists, I bring my experience of almost twenty years in both active research and publishing to the table.

Over the years I was listening carefully to the authors and editors of our scientific journals. Unfortunately one lesson I learned after more than a decade in scholarly publishing is that fewer and fewer scientists regard publishing houses as their partners. With the pressures and constrictions of managing a publishing company, it became increasingly clear to me that a new concept for scholarly publishing could be not be implemented by a slight change or some modifications of the present business model and workflows. I had to ask myself where do I see publishing developing in the next 10 years and where does that leave me?

Fifteen years ago I was dissatisfied with what the textbook publishing industry had to offer academics, so I started my own small book publishing business. When I find myself thinking “there must be a better way”, I can’t sit idly by or let good ideas become watered down by corporate structures. I have to take the challenge in both hands.

Of course, one has to bear the entire risk associated with such a venture. Nevertheless, one has the freedom to develop the concept and run the business without compromises in terms of huge profit expectations from finance managers or lower emphasis on service for customers and partners. This is at least the spirit of what I would like to share with my students in Leipzig.

Q: How would you say that traditional scholarly publishers have responded to OA? What do you think, for instance, about their lobbying against OA, and what do you think of the current trend to make it increasingly difficult for researchers to self-archive their papers (e.g. by introducing self-archiving embargoes, or tightening the rules on existing embargoes).

A: I have the impression that there is no publishing house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their business models which would be required to actively pursue an open access publishing concept. However, the publishers are certainly aware of the PR value of Open Access and many are taking steps in this direction by founding new gold Open Access journals, offering hybrid models or acquiring OA companies. All attractive trimmings as long as the profit margins from subscription-based journals are not threatened. Active lobbying against OA takes place in parallel to these cosmetic offerings. 

I have been involved in many internal meetings with publishers since the early 2000s in which copyright issues, embargo periods, or self-archiving were heavily discussed. The Science/ Technology/Medicine (STM) sector has always been particularly demanding, and even within a publishing house one always remains an advocate for one’s authors — physicists were early proponents of open access with the ArXiv preprint database for example. I always tried to sensitize my colleagues to these demands — only a fair and transparent handling of access issues would result in a positive and persistent settlement between authors and publishers.

But at complete variance to my earlier expectations, publishers continue to tighten their rules, for instance for self-archiving and embargoing. The yearly drop in subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional experiments in Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.

One thing that would push authors to make the level of access to their paper a central consideration would be for funding bodies and universities to change their assessment standards to focus on article-level metrics rather than journal impact factors. There are unfortunately a lot of journals out there with only 20-30 subscribers, but even 200-300 libraries world-wide is not that much. If authors were rated on how often their paper is cited, they would definitely want as many people as possible to have the chance to read it. It is telling that no major publishers have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

The argument of low quality standards in open access journals is a standard one in the repertoire of traditional publishers. They know the value of a scientist’s reputation. However, the fact that a publication is considered as poor or excellent is not associated at all with the way in which the paper has been published: There are examples of journals which consistently contain excellent papers published by means of both subscription based and open access business models. Of the more than 20,000 subscription-based scholarly journals in STM subject fields there are a significant percentage of average or sometimes poor journals which simply means that these journals have a lower quality barrier when accepting manuscripts for publications.

On the other hand, there are only a few journals amongst the large volume which routinely publish outstanding or excellent papers. Not every journal has the standard of Nature, both in the subscription based and OA publishing models. So why should a different business model causally result in lower quality? That statement makes no sense but it has been continuously used in discussion about OA.

Q: Earlier in this Q&A series publishing consultant Joe Esposito suggested that Open Access will never be more than a niche activity. As he put it, OA will be “a useful, marginal activity that opens up a new class of customers through the author-pays model … OA is marginal in the sense that most research is performed at a small number of institutions. ‘Most’ is not the same thing as ‘all.’ Those institutions subscribe to most (not all) of the relevant materials. So by definition the access granted by OA is marginal to what researchers at the major institutions already have. Nothing wrong with working on the margins, but let’s call it what it is.” I assume this is not a view you share? But what are your expectations for OA in the long term?

A: Joe Esposito is absolutely right when he describes the present amount of OA publication in science as marginal. Depending on the statistics used, at present only 8.5 percent of all research published in journals appears to be available as immediate open access (Gold OA).

However, having established that fact as an observation of the present status, we should ask ourselves more frankly the reason for this. Many researches want their published paper to become openly accessible instantaneously. They know that they could attract more usage, and eventually get more citations, from better access to their publication. Nevertheless, many simply do not have the funds in their research budget to pay a publication fee. Ideally their library would be able to shift part of their budget from subscription-based access to open access.

For this a change in thinking about the role of the library will be necessary. Library budgets are often completely spent on big deals with the major publishing houses. Even mid-sized publishers often go empty-handed. The library knows exactly how much money will be spent for a certain package of journal content for the next forthcoming years, which is nice for them in terms of planning accuracy. However, they have almost no opportunity to change the basis of their subscription during the period of the contract.

For instance, libraries cannot cancel certain journals from the deal to save money (in fact they could ask, but they would still have to pay the same as for the full package in most cases). Nicely for publishing houses, the consortia deal or “big deal” model also contains a pricing cap which means the opposite of what it sounds: it increases automatically the costs per package per year by a certain percentage.

So let us focus on the simple statement: as long as libraries are obliged to manage their researchers’ budgets in “big” deals to access scientific content, as long as publishers keep those traditional business models, OA publishing on a larger scale than at present will be severely restricted.

Q: There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about Green and Gold OA. In light of recent developments (e.g. the OSTP Memorandum, the RCUK OA policy, the European Research Council Guidelines on OA and the new OA policy at the University of California) what are the respective roles that you expect Green and Gold OA to play going forward?

A: The introduction of “Green OA” should be considered simply as the first response of the publishing industry to the new legal requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies such as the National Institutions of Health (NIH) in the US. When it was first introduced I expected Green OA to be an intermediate concept to be replaced by a new business and publishing concept in general. At variance to this expectation, the concept has become established as something which shall exist forever. 

Certainly Green OA cannot be considered as meeting researchers’ demand for an easy way to immediately make their research freely available to everybody who is interested in accessing the results. All these attempts to move ahead should finally result in a single, fair, and transparent way to open access publishing.

The message behind any statement about OA should eventually be reduced to what we all understand open access to be: “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose”.

If we succeed in developing and implementing a business model which simply fulfils this sentence, we will have the key in our hands.

Q: What about Hybrid OA, which most of those in this Q&A series have expressed some concern about? What role do you expect to see Hybrid OA play going forward, and why is it invariably more expensive than pure Gold OA (after all, it allows a journal to increase the revenue it earns through “double-dipping”)?

A: I cannot see why we should continue to formulate new models which attempt to combine the classical subscription model with OA publishing. For a certain period of time it was legitimate to use hybrid models in order to immediately react to the demand for OA.

Today the transition process has moved on and both publishers and funding organizations should by now have had enough time to develop a new concept. However, I do not feel that such a concept is yet in place, and the present unsatisfactory situation will persist obviously as long as publishing houses and their business models do not change on a broad basis.

That said, for “middle class” subscription journals, the number of scientists willing to pay high fees for their paper to enjoy open access status is very low, so the problem is in many cases more a theoretical one.

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in Europe and internationally?

A: Worldwide there are very good, but eventually too few examples of successful OA publications: As a physicist, I have carefully observed for example the development of the first OA journal in this field, the New Journal of Physics (NJP) which was launched 15 years ago and obtained a respectable impact factor above 4.0 in 2013. There are also some very exciting new experiments going on such as the eLife journal or the PeerJ and F1000 Research initiatives.

But as long as there are only relatively few examples of successful OA journals visible for researchers, OA will not develop the widespread acceptance it needs. For example in China, where I regularly visited some leading institutions over the last few years, OA is not a topic at all, despite the fact that almost 40% of scholarly publications worldwide are expected to originate from China by the end of this decade.

Possibly it is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals in individual scientific disciplines. Rather, both the visibility and acceptance of OA concepts among the scholarly community worldwide needs to be increased. The development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many scholarly disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the reasons why I launched the project.

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

A: The OA movement should uniformly focus on supporting libraries to develop strategies to modify their budget policies. This should result in having more money available to be spent on OA at their institutions. At least it should be possible to reallocate a part of the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA publications.

As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move forward with OA. Although this task sounds of a technical nature, it seems to me to be the prerequisite to providing the necessary budget for more OA publishing today and in the future.

Q: Do you think that OA inevitably leads to conflict and disagreement between legacy publishers and the research community? Certainly in the wake of the failed attempt to get the Research Works Act passed in the US there appears to be growing disenchantment with traditional publishers amongst researchers (which you hinted at earlier). And in the first Q&A in this series, palaeontologist Mike Taylor argued that legacy publishers “are not our partners, they're our exploiters”. Is it that researchers, librarians and research funders expect more of publishers than they can reasonably deliver? Is it that the profits of scholarly publishers are, as critics argue, excessively high? Or is there some other reason for this disenchantment?

A: As reported in the current market surveyof STM journals the business in 2011 was valued at around $10 plus billion, with long-term stable growth rates and significant profit margins predicted. It is evident that nobody involved in a profitable business like that is going to simply withdraw any of their activities for moral or charitable reasons. As in any other industry, participants of an open market will only react either to changes in customer demand, or changes in the general conditions that constrain certain business practices.

To be very open: In a free market economy, it is legitimate for entrepreneurs or companies to achieve profits with their business. We should therefore not focus our discussion on the question of whether a certain profit margin is too high, which we do not do for most other industries in real life. Otherwise the discussion will never result in a constructive dialogue between partners. Therefore we should concentrate our common vision on the development of new business models in publishing to reflect the needs of the market, i.e. of researchers.

The publishing industry is in an ideal position to develop such a model because it has thousands of experienced and trained employees working for it. Unfortunately, this industry has made no serious attempt thus far to move toward that direction and obviously it continues with its strategy to decelerate rather than accelerate the transition to OA. I would have expected that one or more international publishers would have recognized a unique opportunity rather than waiting for somebody else to take that chance, possibly somebody else from outside the traditional publishing business.

In all this discussion, however, it is important that we do not lose sight of who the real customers are. Researchers develop the science behind a publication; they create a document to summarize that research; they maintain the level of scientific quality by peer-reviewing; in many cases they provide a final typeset version of their manuscript; they access and read the content; and finally they decide which content they need and which they do not. In order to enable scientists to continue doing these tasks as efficiently and straight-forwardly as possible, a professional partner (not necessarily what is today called a publisher) is needed, one that can provide the necessary technical and conceptual requirements.

With scientists doing so much of the work, it is easy to see why they might sometimes feel that publishers are taking them for granted, as discussions focussed on library budgets and government mandates do. And I have often heard the sentiment that publishers are not necessarily fighting for the rights of their authors.

Q: The seeds of the OA movement (certainly for librarians) lie in the so-called “serials crisis”, which is an affordability problem. It was this affordability problem that created the accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve. Yet Esposito believes that OA will be “additive, not substitutive”, suggesting that OA will see the costs of disseminating research increase rather than decrease. OA advocates, meanwhile, argue that OA will be less expensive than subscription publishing. What are your views on the question of costs? Does cost really matter anyway?

A: The present business models of subscription based publishing forces librarians to spend most of their budget or all of their budget on package deals with the major publishers. Just to illustrate the situation: For some libraries, in particular smaller libraries which cannot afford all the journals they need, publishers offer to take their whole budget to get access to the complete list of that publisher. As a result, no money is left to buy the publications of other publishing houses, or other content resources. However, those libraries accept that situation as the lesser evil.

It is apparent that such a situation and such a business practice is totally unacceptable in terms of providing researchers and their institutions with the freedom and flexibility to access the information they need for their work, and to make the outcome of that research available for everybody worldwide working on the same problem. I am confident that it simply requires one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research content.

Fortunately, the good news both for researchers and their institutions is that this change will result in a lower cost per article — as has been argued by other OA advocates. But this will only work efficiently if the OA publication fee costs some hundred dollars rather than several thousand.

Q: What are your expectations for OA over the next 12 months?

A: Having carefully observed how many new initiatives and platforms have been launched in the last 12 months offering OA publication I would expect to see more awareness of OA publishing, amongst both researchers and their institutions, and funding organisations.

As with most of the changes in the economy and in industry which we have experienced in the last few decades, a change starts smoothly and then impacts vigorously at a certain moment in the market. You can easily imagine what I mean if you consider the rise of the automobile at the beginning of the last century, the tremendous success of microcomputers in the eighties and of smart phones in the nineties, and finally the exponential growth in social networks over the last few years.

I expect that impact very soon and it is up to participants in the scholarly publishing business whether they experience it as a collapse of their traditional operations or as the beginning of a new era. 

———

Alexander Grossmann is professor of publishing management at the University for Applied Sciences, Leipzig, and President of ScienceOpen, a publishing and network start-up venture for scientists.

Prior to taking on his current academic appointment, and co-founding his new business, Grossmann worked both as a physicist and a publisher. For 10 years he worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Jülich Research Centre, the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and the University of Tübingen.

Then in 2001 he entered the scholarly publishing industry, working first at Wiley-VCH and Wiley-Blackwell (where he was Director for Wiley’s physics publishing branch worldwide), and subsequently at Springer (as Managing Director) and then De Gruyter (as a Vice President). During his period as a publisher Grossmann dealt with all areas of scholarly publishing.

~~

Earlier contributors to this series include palaeontologist Mike Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, former librarian Fred Friend, SPARC director Heather Joseph, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito, de facto leader of the Open Access movement Peter Suber, and Open Access Advocacy leader at the Latin American Council on Social Sciences (CLACSO) Dominique Babini.

The full list of those taking part in the series is here.

C is for Cthulhu

It took way too long to get this one done.  Hopefully I can move more quickly through the rest.  Enjoy.

IEEE’s Anthony Durniak on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Anthony Durniak

The tenth in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA) the Q&A below is with IEEE’s Anthony Durniak. Durniak leads the professional staff that operate IEEE’s publishing and online information services. He is also responsible for IEEE Spectrum, the organisation’s flagship monthly magazine of technology trends and insight, and The Proceedings of the IEEE, the organisation’s leading scholarly journal.

Incorporated in 1896, and headquartered in New York City, IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is a non-profit corporation and professional association. It has more than 425,000 members in more than 160 countries, about 51.4% of whom reside in the United States. Membership consists of engineers, scientists, and allied professionals whose technical interests are rooted in electrical and computer sciences, engineering, and related disciplines.

IEEE publishes around 160 journals, magazines and conference proceedings from the more than 1,300 conferences and workshops it holds each year. As such, it publishes nearly a third of the world’s technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics.

IEEE is, therefore, a scholarly publisher, although not a commercial publisher but a learned society. However, it does work in co-operation with commercial publisher John Wiley and Sons, Inc. to produce technical books, monographs, guides, and textbooks.

Today all IEEE content since 1913 is available in digital format and the IEEE Xplore digital subscription library contains more than 3.5 million articles produced from all of IEEE’s periodicals and annual conferences. It also includes technical standards, e-books from the IEEE Press-Wiley joint imprint, and publications from other technical societies.

Initial scepticism and concern

Like most legacy publishers, IEEE’s initial response to Open Access was a mixture of scepticism and concern. In 2004, for instance, Durniak warnedthe American Library Association Annual Conference that “Free open access runs the risk of destroying professional societies.”

By 2007, however, IEEE could no longer ignore the growing calls for OA. That year it published its Principles of Scholarly Publishing, a response, it said, to the US National Institutes of Health Public Access mandate and growing requests from the library community for IEEE to state its position on OA.

Amongst other things, The Principles of Scholarly Publishing included the statement, “IEEE liberally grants to its authors the right to post their own content for free public access on the author's own web site or their employer's institutional repository.” In other words, it supported Green OA, or self-archiving.

But with OA continuing to gain mindshare IEEE realised it would need to do more, so last year it launched four Gold OA journals — IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, IEEE Photonics Journal, and IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.

And this year IEEE announced a new three-part OA program, which consists of its Gold OA journals, its decisionto offer Hybrid OAfor all its peer-reviewed journals, and the launchof a new PLOS ONE-style mega journal called IEEE Access.

In the process of embracing Gold OA, however, IEEE has retreated a little on Green OA, changingthe conditions under which authors can self-archive. Specifically, researchers can no longer self-archive the published version of their paper, only the final accepted manuscript.

“We did this to be fair to the authors who are now paying article processing charges (APCs) to make their article available open access,” Durniak explains. “Those article processing charges cover the expenses of several value added steps — from the peer review to the value added copy-editing, page formatting, and reference checking. Authors who pay those APCs can refer anyone to our web site where readers can immediately obtain for free the final published version of the OA article. Authors who go the traditional route and let the subscription pay all the costs can now post their final accepted manuscript on their own website.”

That would seem to be fair enough. Nevertheless, IEEE’s approach to OA has attracted critics. In May, for instance, Peter Brett, a researcher at the Surrey Space Centre, published a poston his blog entitled “The IEEE does not do Open Access”. Brett’s complaint was that IEEE does not permit reuse of the OA articles it publishes (i.e. it does not use the CC-BY licence), and it still requires authors to sign over copyright in their papers to IEEE (OA publishers like BioMed Centraland PLOS, by contrast, use CC-BY and allow authors to retain copyright).

When I raised this issue with Durniak in May he replied, “We believe ours is a balanced approach that is in the interest of both authors who create these works, as well as the general public that consumes them. We listen to many of our authors’ concerns about issues such as plagiarism. Approximately 20 percent of authors who responded to a recent IEEE survey, in fact, indicated they’ve had work plagiarized or infringed. At this time, we believe a copyright transfer represents the best option for protecting intellectual property and guarding against plagiarism and other inappropriate uses of the work

OA advocates like Harvard’s Stuart Shieber, however, disputepublisher claims that assigning copyright to them protects researchers from plagiarism. “Pursuing plagiarists is a matter of calling their behavior out for what it is, with the concomitant professional opprobrium and dishonor that such behavior deserves. Publishers should feel free to help with that social process; they don’t need any rights to do so.”

In response to Brett’s criticism of IEEE’s failure to embrace CC-BY, Durniak told me, “We at the IEEE acknowledge that open access is an evolving publishing model and as such is subject to much debate. But the IEEE is not alone in resisting the rush to the CC-BY Creative Commons license. Indeed you recently reported about the position of the Rockefeller University Press, which also avoids using the CC-BY license.”

The analogy with Rockefeller University Press, however, is probably not apposite since RUP has chosen not to offer any Gold OA options, and so receives no article-processing fees. In resisting CC-BY, RUP is simply seeking to protect its subscription income, even though it makes all the papers it publishers Green OA after only a six-month embargo.

Elsewhere, last December professor of software engineering at St Andrews UniversityIan Sommerville responded to IEEE’s Hybrid OA trialby posting a note on his blog entitled, “The IEEE simply doesn’t get open access publishing”. Sommerville suggested that the very notion of Hybrid OA was “complete nonsense”, since “Either a journal is open access — available freely to all or it isn’t. There is no halfway house that makes sense”.

Sommerville added that if the real cost of publishing an article was $3,000 then, “it looks to me like the IEEE is a pretty inefficient organization.”

It may be that IEEE has come to agree that $3,000 is too high, since it subsequently decided to discountits Hybrid OA fees by $1,250 (41%). Explains Durniak, “$3,000 is what we in the US would call the ‘list price’ for the Article Processing Charge for the hybrid option in our traditional journals. We reduced the APC to $1,750 in order to encourage participation in the new Open Access plan we introduced this year.”

He added, “It is our intention to leave it at $1,750 at least through 2014.”

The APC for IEEE Access is also $1,750, as is the APC for The Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine. The other topical OA journals charge $1,350.

Noteworthy

That then is some background. What about Durniaks’s answers in the Q&A below?

Two things struck me. First, it is clear that there is still a great deal of anxiety amongst publishers (especially learned societies) about the financial implications of OA, especially Green OA. On a number of occasions Durniak stresses the need for a “sustainable” system. The concern at the moment, he explains, “is the attempt by some to insist that articles funded by the traditional subscription model be made available by green OA after some embargo period. That is the approach being advocated by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

The specific danger, he adds, is that “If the waiting time for free article access is too short, readers will stop buying subscriptions and instead wait for the free articles to arrive. That will inevitably force many publishers — especially small scholarly associations — to stop publishing. That is why the IEEE has recommended to OSTP that the embargo period for its public access program be 24 months.”

This is an oft-repeated claim made by publishers. To date, however, they have failed to provide any convincing data to demonstrate that their fear is real, although they have tried. Consider, for instance, a report published last year by the UK Publishers Association and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). This claimed that libraries would cancel 65% of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and 44% of Scientific, Technical and Medical journal subscriptions if the papers published in them were freely available after a 6-month embargo. When I interviewedALPSP chief executive Audrey McCulloch, however, it was far from clear to me that such a threat had been demonstrated.

The second thing to strike me in what Durniak has to say is that IEEE has not seen many requests from the developing world for Gold OA. “One reason for this may be that authors in the developing world can already publish for free in our traditional journals,” suggests Durniak. He adds, “Furthermore, we will offer waivers of APCs in cases where authors can show financial hardship.”

He continues, “From the readers’ point of view, we think most people who need our content already have it through subscriptions by local universities. IEEE’s prices for its traditional subscription journals already have special discounts for the lesser developed countries and for academic consortia.”

This is an interesting point. Certainly it could be argued that the Gold OA pay-to-publish model has little or nothing to offer researchers in the developing world, even if they could afford it. As Durniak points out, under the traditional subscription model they can read the contents of journals at a discounted price (although some deny that these discounts are what publishers claim them to be), and if they want to publish in them they can do so without charge, and without the need to request a fee waiver. They can then make the papers OA by self-archiving them as Green OA.

The problem, however, is that if publishers like IEEE extend their Green embargoes to 24 months (or more), developing world researchers would seem somewhat less likely to opt for OA, since Green OA at 24 months is hardly OA, and they would surely be reluctant to request a Gold OA waiver if there is no guarantee of getting one. In its FAQ IEEE says, “Article processing charges may be waived in cases of hardship — each case will be considered individually”. That is not a guarantee. 

On the other hand, as Dominique Babini points out in her Q&A, researchers in Latin America and Africa may be more interested in taking their own road to OA. 

But please read the Q&A below and see what Durniak has to say. 

Earlier contributors to this series include palaeontologist Mike Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, former librarian Fred Friend, SPARC director Heather Joseph, publishing consultant Joseph Esposito, Portuguese librarian Eloy Rodrigues, Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group Danny Kingsley, de facto leader of the Open Access movement Peter Suber, and Open Access Advocacy leader at the Latin American Council on Social Sciences (CLACSO) Dominique Babini.

The Q&A begins

Q: When and why did IEEE embrace Open Access?

A: We first acknowledged it in 2007 when the volunteer leaders of the IEEE drafted our Principles of Scholarly Publishing. At that time, we recognized that various communities may require different channels for delivering the results of their scientific and technical activities, one of which would be open access.

Equally important, those principles stated that all conceivable ways of knowledge dissemination must rely on a self-sustaining business model. IEEE believes this is necessary to preserve the editorial integrity of the content and protect the publishing process from undue influence by any government or commercial agendas. At that time, IEEE began some small experiments with open access.

In response to increasing requests from our members and authors, as well as the organizations that fund their work, IEEE introduced a comprehensive, three-part open access program in 2013.

First, it introduced several fully open access journals in specific topical areas of interest. These journals are completely supported by article processing charges (APCs).

The second part of this program is to offer the option for any author whose article is accepted for publication in one of our traditional journals to pay an APC and have their article available open access. Since the rest of the journal is still supported by subscriptions, we refer to this as the hybrid approach. All IEEE journals are hybrid journals, except those that are fully OA.

And third is our new mega journal, called IEEE Access, which is also completely open access, and focused on multi-disciplinary articles, especially those dealing with applied topics.

Q: Do you think that OA inevitably leads to conflict and disagreement between publishers and the research community? On his blog, for instance, Peter Brett, a researcher at the Surrey Space Centre, argues, “The IEEE claims to offer ‘fully Open Access’ publishing options to all of their authors. In fact, they offer no such thing.” I assume you would disagree with Brett’s conclusion, but why do you think publishers are so frequently criticised, if not demonised, by researchers when the topic of Open Access comes up? (In the first of this series, for instance, Mike Taylor describes publishers as “exploiters” rather than partners). Is it that researchers, librarians and research funders expect more of publishers than they can reasonably deliver in terms of OA, or is there some other reason?

A: In a word, NO. Researches, authors, librarians, and publishers all basically want the same thing — to identify the best articles and package them for convenient delivery to the widest possible audience so that their content can ultimately benefit humanity.

It is personally frustrating when conversations about how to financially support those goals more often than not become contentious. The answer won’t be the same for every researcher — for some, the traditional publishing model will be the most-desirable route because, for example, it may be important for them to build their reputations by publishing in a journal with an established name. For others, they may decide that “Gold OA” supported by APCs is the best option because they want to pay to publish with a specific organization that can offer certain services. And others will choose the Green OA option because they deem it cost-effective.

All options offer benefits … and all have drawbacks as well. In our case, it’s a delicate balancing act between meeting the needs and requests of our author community, and maintaining a sustainable publishing model that will continue to provide information to the research communities, as IEEE has done for the past century.

Not everyone sees the work behind the scenes for that balancing act — they just see that we’re charging fees, and so it’s easy to want to criticize the approach.

Q: There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should play. From the perspective of publishers, what would you say should be the respective roles of Green and Gold OA today, and why?

A: There’s no silver-bullet solution to providing the best access to research. Each has its place and authors and readers need to be prepared for different experiences.

For several years now, IEEE allowed Green OA by permitting authors to post the final accepted version of their papers on their personal websites or their employers’. This approach varies in the time it takes authors to post their works and readers must search a variety of personal and institutional websites to find the content.

Gold OA, on the other hand, is similar to traditional subscription-based publishing in that it is handled by organizations that specialize in publishing. As a result, authors and readers can expect predictable speed of posting, convenient retrieval, and are ensured the integrity of the content.

In terms of the whole industry, the danger at the moment is the attempt by some to insist that articles funded by the traditional subscription model be made available by green OA after some embargo period. That is the approach being advocatedby the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

If the waiting time for free article access is too short, readers will stop buying subscriptions and instead wait for the free articles to arrive. That will inevitably force many publishers — especially small scholarly associations — to stop publishing. That is why the IEEE has recommended to OSTPthat the embargo period for its public access program be 24 months.

Q: What about Hybrid OA. What role should that play?

A: IEEE’s policy is that we will provide all options as long as the author community uses them.

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA around the world?

A: The world is becoming more pragmatic about OA. The initial emotionally charged positions of both the OA advocates and the publishers have been replaced by realistic efforts to develop a sustainable system. IEEE’s three-prong OA program that I described earlier is a perfect example of that.

Q: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

A: It is the responsibility of the entire scholarly community, but especially learned society publishers, to preserve the integrity of the peer-review process and quality of manuscripts.

There is a concern in some quarters that article processing charges in Gold OA will tempt publishers to lower their standards in order to accept more articles and hence collect more money. To avoid even the minimal perception of that type of conflict of interest, we are closely monitoring the rejection rates of our open access publications. So far we are pleased to report that the rejection rates are in line with our traditional subscription-based journals.

We must all also be on the lookout for unscrupulous individuals who take advantage of open access to create derivative products without knowledge or approval of the authors. There have already been reports of new journals doing wholesale reprinting of OA Articles published by others in order to give the impression that they were legitimate.

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

A: Sustainability. Perhaps the volunteer leadership of IEEE worries about this issue more than most because they are engineers. By their nature and training, engineers focus on building systems that are robust, reliable, and economically viable. Examples of this range from your tablet computer, to the electric power grid, to the Internet itself. The publishing program at IEEE is just over 100 years old and has acquired an extremely high reputation in the scientific community as a source of unbiased and trusted information. We intend to keep it operating for at least another century with at least the same level of technical quality.

So IEEE is carefully monitoring its experiences in OA, in terms of objective measures of the impact of the published articles, as well speed of publication and quality of the review process. We will modify our programs as necessary going forward.

One can envision many scenarios where the OA system may not perform as expected. For example, consider the current challenges faced by governments around the world to control their spending. In the US, the budget sequestration has reduced the operating hours of numerous activities from national parks to control towers at small airports. Europe is in a similar situation. If the operating hours of a government operated repository are similarly reduced in times of fiscal stress, have we really opened up access?

Or take the challenges universities face from Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). These free educational alternatives will put pressure on their ability to raise tuition and grow their budgets. In that situation, would we see universities complaining about a “Crisis in Article Processing Charges" similar to the “Serials Budget Crisis” that has faced their libraries for more than a decade? All parties have a responsibility to work to ensure that open access stays truly open.

Q: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

A: We haven’t seen many requests from the developing world for OA. One reason for this may be that authors in the developing world can already publish for free in our traditional journals. Furthermore, we will offer waivers of APCs in cases where authors can show financial hardship.

From the readers’ point of view, we think most people who need our content already have it through subscriptions by local universities. IEEE’s prices for its traditional subscription journals already have special discounts for the lesser developed countries and for academic consortia.

Q: What are your expectations for OA in 2013?

A: This year will mark a point of inflection in the development of OA. As I explained earlier, the initial emotional debate has been replaced by serious programs to put realistic, sustainable systems in place.

Q: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: Cost always matters. After all, the entire OA movement started because of objections to the subscription prices of some scholarly journals.

But OA publishing will probably not be much less expensive as some hope. Right now some say OA “is an order of magnitude less expensive” than traditional publishing. But as the experience of the Public Library of Science has demonstrated, OA publishing is in the same range as traditional publishing.

Granted, in a totally OA world there are some expenses that can be eliminated. Expenses associated with subscription processing, licensing contract administration, and access control software obviously all go away. But the bulk of the necessary infrastructure to facilitate peer review, editorial preparation, online delivery, and the long-term maintenance of a digital archive remain.

More important, the researchers and authors expect ever-more elaborate features in the publishing process. Examples of these include interactive articles in HTML, consistent XML tagging to facilitate semantic analysis and text mining, the addition of videos and other multimedia illustrations, and now storage of related large data sets. These all cost money to provide and maintain for the long haul. So whichever system gains popularity — traditional subscription or OA — it will need to charge equitable prices to cover those expenses.

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Anthony Durniak, Staff Executive for Publications at IEEE, leads the professional staff that operate IEEE’s publishing and online information services. Trained as an electrical engineer, Durniak began his career as a science journalist, working as a reporter and editor at several magazines including Business Week. He became one of the pioneers in electronic publishing in the 1980s as part of a new product development team at McGraw-Hill. He then spent seven years at the American Chemical Society where he lead the team that put all of the ACS journals up on the Internet, before joining the IEEE in July 1998.

Durniak has an EE degree from The City College of New York and a Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University. He’s a senior member of IEEE. Active in the scholarly publishing industry, Durniak was a founding member of the board of directors of CrossRef, the industry consortium that developed innovative mechanisms for linking citations in journal articles. He also served on the board of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM).