The Life and Death of an Open Access Journal: Q&A with Librarian Marcus Banks

Librarians have been at the forefront of the open access movement since the beginning, not least because in 1998 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Today SPARC is arguably the world’s most active and influential OA advocacy organisation.

Marcus Banks

It is important to note that librarians’ interest in open access grew primarily out of their frustration with the so-called “serials crisis” — the phenomenon that has seen the cost of scholarly journals consistently grow at a higher rate than library serials budgets.

SPARC’s initial strategy, therefore, was to encourage the growth of new low-cost, non-profit, subscription journals able to compete with the increasingly expensive ones produced by profit-hungry commercial publishers. As SPARC’s then Enterprise Director Rick Johnson wrote in 2000, “In 1998, after years of mounting frustration with high and fast-rising commercial journal prices, a group of libraries formally launched SPARC to promote competition in the scholarly publishing marketplace. The idea was to use libraries’ buying power to nurture the creation of high-quality, low-priced publication outlets for peer-reviewed scientific, technical, and medical research.”

In the wake of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (an event attended by Johnson), however, SPARC began to focus more and more of its efforts on open access. The assumption was that this would not only allow research to be made freely available, but finally resolve the affordability problem faced by the research community. As the BOAI text expressed it, “the overall costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination.”

Ironically, despite their high profile advocacy for open access many librarians have proved strangely reluctant to practice what they preach, and as late as last year calls were still being made for the profession to start “walking the talk”.  

On the other hand, many librarians have embraced OA, particularly medical librarians. In 2001, for instance, the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) began to make its content freely available on the Internet. And in 2003 Charles Greenberg, then at the Yale University Medical Library, launched an open access journal with BioMed Central called Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL). One of the first to join the editorial board (and later to take over as Editor-in-Chief) was Marcus Banks, who was then working at the US National Library of Medicine.

Four years later, however, BDL became a victim of BMC’s decision to increase the cost of the article-processing charges (APCs) it levies. This meant that few librarians were able to afford to publish in the journal any longer, and submissions began to dry up. Despite several attempts to move BDL to a different publishing platform, in 2008 Banks had to make the hard decision to cease publishing the journal.

What do we learn from BDL’sshort life? In advocating for pay-to-publish gold OA did open access advocates underestimate how much it costs to publish a journal? Or have publishers simply been able to capture open access and use it to further ramp up what many believe to be their excessive profits? Why has JMLA continued to prosper under open access while BDL has withered and died? Was BDL unable to compete with JMLA on a level playing field? Could the demise of BDL have been avoided?  What, if anything, does the journal’s fate tell us about the future of open access?

I discuss these and other questions with Banks below. The issue of affordability, it seems to me, is particularly apposite, as librarians are having to confront the harsh truth that, far from reducing the costs of scholarly communication, open access appears more likely to increasethem.

It turns out that Banks has an interesting perspective on this issue. As he puts it, “At the risk of frustrating many librarian colleagues, I must say that the framing of open access as a means of saving money has been and remains a serious strategic error.”

He adds, “A fully open access world may not save any money and could cost more than we pay now — this world would include publication charges as well as payments for tools that mined and sorted the now completely open literature. That’s fine with me, because in this world we’d be getting better value for money.”

The interview begins …

RP: Can you say something about your background and career to date?

MB: I have been a librarian since 2002. My first position after earning my Masters of Library and Information Science was as an Associate Fellow at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), from 2002-2004. During this time NLM was developing PubMed Central (PMC) as a freely accessible digital archive of biomedical literature.

Growth at PMC was slow, as deposits to it were voluntary — this was years before PMC became the required repository under the terms of the NIH Public Access Policy. Publishers rightly worried that a fully open access archive would challenge their business model, a concern that persists today.

Watching this debate unfold raised my awareness of the various agendas in scholarly publishing, as well as of the potential for open access publishing to expand the reach of biomedical literature.

RP: What are you doing currently?

MB: My most recent position was as the Director of Library/Academic & Instructional Innovation at Samuel Merritt Universityin Oakland, California. Since then my wife and I have returned to the Chicago area for both personal and professional reasons. I am currently pursuing employment while building a consulting practice devoted to transformation in scholarly communication. Even with “gainful employment” I would continue the consulting.

RP: You said that the growing debate about scholarly communication made you aware of the potential for open access publishing. You were later involved in the creation of an open access journal called Biomedical Digital Libraries, which I think was launched in 2004 but ceased operations in 2007. Can you say what your role at the journal was, why the journal was created, and why it did not succeed?

MB: Charles Greenberg, then at the medical library of Yale, launched Biomedical Digital Libraries (BDL) at the Medical Library Association meeting in May 2003. It was an open access title published by BioMed Central (BMC). His first task was to recruit an editorial board, and I joined in as an Associate Editor. Our first papers appeared in 2004. As Charlie moved on to other projects, I became co-editor and then sole Editor-in-Chief in 2006.

Charlie really believed that librarians, as vocal proponents of open access, should practice what they preach by launching a digital open access journal. At this time our association publication, the Journal of the Medical Library Association(JMLA), was becoming open access and thus was also "walking the walk." But JMLA kept a print production schedule even though articles also appeared online (this is not the case anymore, there are early release online articles).

We offered rapid peer review and publication as soon as the article was ready. We also had a larger core author base than JMLA — data mining papers from computer scientists would have been very welcome in BDL. That said, the majority of our authors came from academic libraries.

BMC published BDLfor 4 years. During the beginning of that tenure many academic institutions provided generous memberships that fully, or mostly, covered the author's cost of publication in BMC titles. Librarians do not generally have large research budgets that can cover OA publishing fees, so this was vital to our primary author base. (JMLA publication was then, and is still, free of cost to authors.) BMC’s institutional membership costs were affordable, and predictable, in those first years. The costs were flat each year, and easy to budget.

Then BMC went to a scaled model, in which the cost of an institutional membership would rise in proportion to how many BMC publications from a given institution appeared each year. (This has likely changed significantly by now, this was the situation in 2006-2007). The more you publish, the more you pay, and there was no way in advance to know what the final bill would be.

This caused library directors, who generally paid for the BMC memberships, to cancel them in large numbers. Once those memberships went away so too did publication subsidies. Our primary author base, which was not in a position to pay more than $1,000 per paper to publish, dried up. The journal stopped publication on BMC as of the end of 2007. 

Although in some respects this is a “failure,” we did some interesting things. Along the way we went to open rather than anonymous peer review, which is still a fairly novel approach. We also published papers about “altmetrics” years before that term existed. It was a good run.

RP: I know that in 2007 a number of institutions cancelled their BMC membership, including Yale, citing “skyrocketing” increases. Do you think perhaps when they began to advocate for pay-to-publish gold OA open access advocates underestimated the cost of publishing a journal, or are those who argue that publishers overcharge nearer the mark?

MB: I’d have to side with the argument that publishers overcharge, including open access publishers. The PeerJ innovation shows that smaller charges can sustain a quality journal, and most of the journals listed in the DOAJ have no publication charges and yet they exist.

The fact that traditional publishers absorbed OA titles into their portfolios — like Springer with BioMed Central in 2008 — shows that there is a profit margin in OA. This is not completely bad; the world needs commerce, and at least the profitable OA titles are available to all online readers while the profitable subscription titles are restricted. But I’m not convinced that the author fees charged by some OA publishers reflect the actual costs of publication.

What do we learn?

RP: To what extent do you feel that BDL’s fate was a consequence of the field in which it published — librarianship?

MB: Not much. Many librarians have tenure obligations and are required to publish. JMLA continues to thrive, as do other library journals. In a way BDL was an outlier publication in BMC, a library-focused journal on a platform that generally published hard science.

RP: After it ceased operating as a BioMed Central journal you tried to transfer BDL to an Open Journal Systems platform, and then to the University of California’s eScholarship platform. Why did neither of these attempts succeed either?

MB: These attempts occurred in 2008. Their main advantage was no author fees for publication. But by this time I had maintained my own blog for three years, almost as long as my time with BDL. I was finding blogging to be a more effective means of sharing insights and research about librarianship, which at the time sported a vibrant "biblioblogosphere." So I argued that library journals should evolve into blogs, something that is still possible today although the credentialing power of formal publication cannot be discounted.

Given my circa-2008 feelings about the potential of blogs I became disinterested in propping up the journal model. Meanwhile, our editorial board members had moved on to other projects.

RP: Where do you stand today on the issue of whether journals should be replaced by blogs?

MB: Conceptually I still believe that a well-managed community blog could serve the same function as a journal, and disseminate new insights more quickly than a journal. Culturally, though, there is still tremendous branding and credentialing power from getting a paper in the “right” journal.

Given this I see blogs as complementary or additive to journals for academic publishing, at least at the present time. That said, in some cases blog posts will also be part of the scholarly record. OCLC has done great work recently on preparing a Framework for the Evolving Scholarly Record, which makes this same point about how new content types are now part of the record.

RP: Your vison of journals evolving into blogs is subject-specific right? It wouldn’t be realistic to publish, say, general medical papers on blogs?

MB: Indeed, receptivity to non-standard scholarly items such as blog posts is subject-specific. General medical journals are likely to assume, and value, their established forms for years to come. I must note, though, that one of the principal justifications for this established form is because of the ostensible power of peer review to sort the wheat from the chaff. This is despite evidence that pre-publication peer review can be too cautious and slow.

As Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated, we are more afraid of losing what we know (in this case, peer review) than we are excited about embracing what we do not yet understand (in this case, different ways to do science).

RP: How did you plan to cover the costs of publishing BDL on OJS?

MB: We were hosted by Scholarly Exchange, which initially offered hosting free for a year (as I recall) and then with affordable rates after that. Within that first year I made the switch to the University of California eScholarshipplatform, which was permanently free as long as it had sponsorship by a University of California entity (which we had from UC San Francisco.)

It appears that Scholarly Exchange is still operating, although their web site has not been updated for a few years.

RP: What do we learn from the failure of BDL to prosper in terms both of open access and of scholarly communication more generally?

MB: Although leading OA titles like those from BMC or PLOS charge author fees, many of the titles that appear in the Directory of Open Access journals do not, as I noted earlier. I also pointed out that there are now new funding models, such as PeerJ’s lifetime memberships.

So the question of financing for open access titles — and what exactly this financing supports (is it the actual publication? or the shareholders of companies with OA in their portfolios?) — is an unsettled area that will probably always be vexed. At least the traditional subscription model, for all of its shortcomings, is able to sustain an enterprise.

That said, the PeerJ innovation shows there is enough energy behind OA to be entrepreneurial. And I feel that within the next decade or two immediate OA to biomedical content, with no publication embargos, will be required by law. If this is true the funding streams to support such a law will materialise.

Costs

RP: Based on your experience then, how much would you say its costs to publish an open access journal?

MB: I’ll need to dodge this question somewhat, as my experience as the editor at BDL was removed from the balance sheets available to BMC. All I knew was that I had a set number of author fee waivers I could grant each year, which I generally used for authors from less-wealthy nations. I relied on the balance of authors to come from institutions that mostly (or ideally, completely) subsidised publication.

Beyond my experience, the reported figures for publishing articles open access vary widely. Outsell’s average cost for a publishing an OA article in 2011 was $660, but during that same year Nature reported that it would cost $30,000-$40,000 per paper to go completely OA. This figure beggars belief, no matter how selective a journal may be.

Less insidious are claims from many publishers that it is hard to isolate the mean cost of publishing an open access paper, as these costs are absorbed within complex business entities and/or cross-sudsidised by other parts of a publishing enterprise (as at PLOS, where PLOS One papers underwrite papers in other journals.)

But even this explanation is unsatisfactory. My view aligns with Andrew Odlyzko’s, which is that article publication costs of $400/article should be sufficient. Any figure appreciably higher than that is likely a reflection of a publication’s perceived non-substitutability in the market, and not the actual costs of publication.

RP: I assume Nature’s figures are based not on how much it costs to publish a journal, but on what Nature estimates it would need to charge in order to maintain its current revenues if it migrated to an OA model. In 2004 Richard Charkin, then CEO of Macmillan, put it this way to British MPs: “in order to replace [Nature’s] revenues you would have to charge the author somewhere between £10,000 and £30,000 because the costs of editorial design and support are so high.” Be that as it may, you said that most of the journals in the DOAJ have no publication charges. I wonder how indicative that is of how OA publishing is likely to develop in the future. First, to get an accurate picture one would presumably need to count the number of papers published that require payment of an APC, not the number of journals? Second, do you not think that we will see the traditional commercial publishers take control of the OA publishing market — that is certainly how I interpret the recent blog post by the Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley. (See Table 3 in particular) What is your view?

MB: Charkin’s quote assumes that all of the incumbent practices from the print-based publishing model must be maintained in their entirety, and in perpetuity, even in a digital-only publishing environment. The Odlyzko paper I cited above proposes many ways that digital publishing can be made more cost-effective and efficient.

As to Kiley’s post I read it somewhat differently — his main critique is with the practices of hybrid journals, which charge much higher average APCs than fully open access journals. That conclusion reinforces the similar finding of Solomon and Bjork in their Wellcome study one year ago. I think that, if every journal were fully open access, APCs would be lower on average and thus funder dollars would stretch further.

But maybe that is a distinction without much consequence, as your main point is that commercial publishers are likely to exploit the move to open access as a vibrant profit center. I agree, and in principle this does not concern me. At least in this universe publisher profits would support immediately available OA literature, rather than the two-tiered, embargoed system we have now.

That said, in my perfect universe the prices publishers charged to produce open access articles would be regulated just like electricity or water rates. In the main bioscience publishers are offering research that derives from government or non-profit funds that are meant to improve public health, which would be the legal basis for such a regulatory scheme.

Of course such a prospect is very dim, given the political climate against government regulation that is particularly virulent in the US right now. And even in a pro-regulatory environment publishers would point to their multinational character as proof of being impossible to corral since capital knows no borders.

Short of regulation, funder pressure to drive down the cost of APCs (perhaps via APCs caps at hybrid journals, as Kiley references in his post) may work. And if that does work, regulation won’t be needed.

RP: What do you think the implications would be if the transition to open access saw no reduction in the overall cost of scholarly communication? I know you have argued that open access is not about solving the serials crisis, but if we are to believe librarians scholarly communication is in the grip of a serious, and long-standing, affordability problem. If open access cannot offer cost savings then presumably that problem could only intensify in an OA environment surely?

MB: At the risk of frustrating many librarian colleagues, I must say that the framing of open access as a means of saving money has been and remains a serious strategic error.

As Stewart Brand said, information wants to be free and expensive at the same time. Publishing only on the free side of the equation has enabled librarians to be painted as free-loaders who don’t wish to pay for valuable products. It has also spawned publisher propaganda that the role of librarians should simply be to increase their budget bids so that everything can continue as normal.

A fully open access world may not save any money and could cost more than we pay now—this world would include publication charges as well as payments for tools that mined and sorted the now completely open literature. That’s fine with me, because in this world we’d be getting better value for money.

Sense of injustice?

RP: Just to confirm: JMLA is now an open access journal? I could not find a web page for the journal?

MB: JMLA is currently open access. The web site is here.

RP: The site you point to is a section of PubMed Central. So the journal doesn’t actually have its own site; it is publishing directly on PubMed Central. This, as you may know, has attracted criticism, notably from Kent Anderson on The Scholarly Kitchen. Anderson makes a number of points, but for our purposes let’s just consider his claim that this has allowed the MLA to save “between $200,000 and $500,000 (or more) in hosting costs” over a ten-year period. If he is right, it suggests to me that BDL was at a significant disadvantage from the start. After all, if its primary competitor had to pay no hosting costs then it was not really a level playing field for BDLwas it? Or would you question Anderson’s claim?

MB: Speaking as an author with several publications in JMLA, I see the merit in Anderson’s claim that JMLAhas unequal access to PMC servers vis-à-vis the access provided to other publishers. I’ll have to trust Anderson’s figures regarding the saved hosting costs, as he is a publisher and I am not.

That said, though, Anderson’s claim of JMLA “freeloading” can also be applied to subscription publishers who benefit extensively from the access-control mechanisms set up by universities. As the library director at Samuel Merritt University (SMU) I coordinated closely with my colleagues in Information Technology to ensure that only SMU affiliates had access to our licensed content.

We proactively alerted alumni that they could not access this content, because our licenses did not permit it. If any holes opened up within our walled resources, we closed them. This was all at our and IT’s expense; it is not as though publishers paid SMU for a “licensed content control specialist.”

In his piece Anderson goes to great lengths to detail an analogy about getting into a concert even though you have not paid for a ticket — something that may not cause identifiable harm, but is still unfair. At the outer limit of the analogy, a police officer is granting him the free ticket and then driving him to the concert too. What a sweet deal.

Alluding to JMLA, Anderson says, “Everyone else has to pay for these things, but I don’t. I’m literally getting a free ride.” Publishers enjoy such a free ride every day, in the form of uncompensated labour at universities to preserve subscription-based access arrangements.

RP: Actually I was more interested in your perspective as the former Editor-in-Chief of a journal that was not able to compete with JMLA. Assuming Anderson’s claims are correct, do you not feel a sense of injustice over the favoured treatment afforded JMLA? Might BDL have managed to survive if it had also been able to use PubMed Central as its publishing platform?

MB: Yes, if BDL had been on PMC it may have lasted longer and possibly still exist today. But it also could have lasted longer if we had attracted a wider author base of data scientists etc. I feel no sense of injustice. BDL was an experiment at the dawn of widespread open access publishing, and we learned some useful lessons from it.

As some commenters noted in response to Anderson’s post, the NLM has long had a unique relationship with MLA. To me this explains JMLA’s arrival on PMC; there was no smoking-gun plot of the kind Anderson conjures. He is on stronger ground with his criticisms of PMC’s more recent arrangement with eLife. However, by now PMC is the archive of record for the NIH Public Access Policy.

If NLM/PMC are tipping the scales in favour of open access they are on solid policy ground to do so. I’ve long marvelled at the fact that anything written by a government employee in the scope of their employment is public domain (with the exception of classified material, of course). But anything written by a government independent contractor — which is effectively what an NIH grantee is — can be privatised.

RP: From what you said earlier, I assume JMLA does not charge an APC. How then does it fund its operations?

MB: JMLA does not charge an APC. Any costs of its production are paid from Medical Library Association funds, which are principally derived from member dues and annual conference revenues.

RP: When I contacted Charles Greenberg about BDL he stressed that he did not have an opinion about JMLA and why it went open access, but he gave much the same reasons as you for the failure of BDL. He then said, “I think it would not surprise anyone that grants that cover open access APC charges do not go to librarians, though librarians are partners on more grants, such as CTSA grants that did not exist at the time of BDL's demise.” We could note that librarians are not the only group in academia who are discovering that grants to cover open access APC charges are not going to go to them. Do you think we could we see a growing number of researchers unable to publish their papers as a result? That is what this blog post by professor of behavioural and evolutionary ecology at UCLA Peter Nonacs would seem to portend?

                

MB: Nonacs’s post points to the structural deficiency of the author pays publishing model. As he notes, in the open access environment he now finds himself in the “new poor” along with (among others) librarians who wish to publish.

The only systemic solution is a dedicated funding stream for publishing charges that comes from an institution or funder’s research budget; in proportion to the overall budgets that fund research open access publishing charges are small.

This is much easier said than done given the realities of institutional budgeting practices. Nonetheless there is enough money overall to support immediate, non-embargoed open access — certainly so in the biosciences.

Licensing

RP: I believe BDL published its papers under a CC BY licence. As you will know, licensing has become a contentious issue in the OA movement. Is it the CC BY licence you favour for scholarly research? If so, why? If not, why not?

MB: My preference would be for authors to choose the license that applies to their papers rather than adopt a blanket license adopted by their publishers. Publishers, and librarians, are effectively agents of authors. The intellectual determination regarding under what conditions work can be re-used should rest with those who created it.

RP: Many argue that only scholarly content that has been released under a CC BY licence can claim to be open access. You do not agree?

MB: I do not agree. My view aligns with that of Peter Suber in his Very Brief Introduction to Open Access: “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”

RP: I note that, while JMLAindicates that the copyright in the papers it publishes belongs to the authors, it does not specify a licence. Indeed the PDF files appear to have no copyright notice at all (e.g. here). That would seem to imply “all rights reserved” would it not? Or at least anyone wanting to republish or reuse them in any way would have to assume that wouldn’t they?

MB: That’s a reasonable assumption, but not true in JMLA’s case. The license is effectively CC-BY-NC, as shown here in the author copyright form. The crucial clause:  “Copyright in all articles appearing in the Journal of the Medical Library Associationis owned by their authors. Readers may copy articles without permission of the copyright owners, as long as the author and the Medical Library Association are acknowledged in the copy and the copy is used for educational, not-for-profit purposes.”

RP: I wonder if it is reasonable to expect that anyone wanting to republish, reuse, or perhaps text mine, open access papers should have to hunt down an author copyright form (or contact individual authors) in order to establish whether they can do what they want to do with a paper. I think JMLA is not the only OA journal to be vague or unforthcoming about licensing. Should not all OA journals be totally transparent about what can and cannot be done with the papers they publish? That, after all, was partly the reason for developing the Creative Commons licences.

MB: I agree with you completely. This information should be more concisely and consistently displayed on all open access articles.

Lacunae?

RP: Some commentators have suggested that as open access publishers experiment with new business models a number of them will inevitably fail. This, they say, could see parts of the scholarly record disappear — which is what Jeffrey Beall argues has already happened with some of the journals published by VictorQuest Publications. (The same concern was raised here). In the case of BDL, back copies have been archived on the BMC site, and I think they are also available in PMC. But do you think we could see a spate of open access journals fail, and that this could see lacunae in the scholarly record? Or is the danger no greater than with traditional subscription journals in your view?

MB: I am wary of Jeffrey Beall’s critiques. His useful service of identifying predatory publishers is now marred by his categorical and strident rejection of the value of all open access publishing, even the non-predatory sort. Of course he can espouse this view, but his manner of doing so generates more heat than light.

That said, there is a genuine concern that open access publications with short digital shelf lives could be lost to history (as happened with BDL, the one and only article we published on Scholarly Exchange is now lost to time. You are correct that all the BMC articles are in PMC.)

There is probably a greater risk of this happening with open access titles than with subscription-based publications, which generally have longer track records and/or are managed by profitable companies with a business interest in maintaining this record. This is not an intrinsic fault of open access as a concept though, but rather a reflection of the inherent risks of attempting to challenge and change the long-established business model for scholarly publishing.

RP: OA is a hotly contested topic. In a recent blog post you argued that both publishers and open access advocates distort the truth when making their respective cases. As you put it, “Open access advocates elide the filtering and credentialing role of publication in particular journals, which saves researchers very valuable time in deciding what to read. Subscription-based publishers obfuscate the fact that the marginal cost of posting an article is zero, in order to perpetuate a scarcity-based economy that was necessary for printed materials but is now antiquated.” You also point out that this jostling and obfuscation has now been going on for 15 years without common ground being reached by the two warring factions. How do you see this playing out? Do you, for instance, believe that open access is — as Stevan Harnad put it 18 years ago, “The Inevitable and the Optimal”? If so, how will it eventually be achieved and how much longer will it take?

MB: I agree with Harnad that OA is inevitable, as funder mandates will continue to reduce and eventually eliminate embargoes. This may take a decade, maybe two — hopefully less than either. I have no crystal ball but that writing is on the wall.

That said, I do not believe that OA to the scholarly literature is optimal. It’s just a start. Allow me to quote from that same Medium piece if I may:

“Open access advocates are right that information wants to be free, and publishers are right that information wants to be valuable. That value manifests when information becomes insight. This is value worth paying for. This is how publishers could thrive even in a completely open access world.

“In such a world scholarly papers would be considered a natural resource, like the air. Nobody can meter access to the air, but anyone can build an airplane to glide through it and build a business from there. Let’s glide along ourselves, and move from scarcity-based to insight-based economics for scholarly publishing.”

RP: Thank you for answering my questions. And good luck for the future.

UCL Vice-Provost comments on the Independent Review of the Implementation of the RCUK Open Access policy

Guest Post by Professor David Price, Vice-Provost (Research), University College London

David Price

Research Councils UK (RCUK) has today released the Report of an independent review body on the implementation of its Open Access policy.

It is not a review of Open Access policies and their implementation in the UK. The Report is quite clear about this – it is a review of the impacts of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access for its funded research outputs. This is a review which is being undertaken at an early stage in the history of that OA policy. As such, there is much that is good and helpful about the Report’s findings and I will touch on some of these points below.

Overall, however, the Report is a missed opportunity to look at the deeper implications of the move to Open Access in the UK. There are broader issues, in many of which RCUK is a leader, which would have benefited from a more confident treatment by the panel. There is still a great deal of work to do!

The Report looks in some detail at the question of embargoes. While the short embargoes of 6 and 12 months have been taken up by the research community, there is still unhappiness. As the Report says, some of this is due to poor communication of the policy and resulting confusion in the academic community. Another aspect of it, however, is a genuine concern among some communities, for example History scholars, that short embargo periods are harmful to academic freedom to choose where to publish. RCUK needs to look at the issue of embargo periods again.

The Report also highlights a number of problems with the RCUK recommendation of a CC-BY licence for research outputs. If this is the RCUK position, then compliance with the policy would require academics to use this licence. In its review of policy implementation, the Report shows that this has not always been the case. The Report also, quite rightly, highlights the unhappiness of the Arts and Humanities community in the requirement for a CC-BY licence. From the evidence presented, it looks as though this community feels they are being made to dance to a biomedical and scientific tune, where CC-BY is more acceptable. The Report is right to highlight the need for further investigation.

The Report has further nuggets of wisdom. It highlights the administrative costs for universities of implementing the RCUK Open Access policy, building on the London Higher Report supported by SPARC Europe. It also suggests that university and publisher systems should be developed to accommodate ORCID  (for author IDs) and FundRef (for funder information), which will help monitor implementation of the policy in future years.

Table 7 presents some really interesting data on the mean costs of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

	OA journals published by non-subscription publishers	Full OA journals published by subscription publishers	Hybrid journals published by subscription publishers
5-year mean (2010-14)	£1,136	£1,164	£1,849

Why are the costs in the final column for Hybrids so much bigger than the rest? It was beyond the remit of the review to investigate this in detail, but this question does need further study. RCUK derives its money from public funds and this is a question which the taxpayer would certainly have a right to understand in more detail.

While the Report contains much that is useful and thought-provoking, there are some big gaps that it should have covered. The Report consciously limits itself to the implementation of the RCUK policy, and does not look at the wider UK Open Access scene in detail. This is a mistake because the RCUK position would be more intelligible if such a wider comparison had taken place. The Report says that the RCUK policy position is broadly complementary to other UK OA policies. Any misunderstandings on this front may be due, it says, to poor communication of the policies. Really? Are there many universities who believe this? The new HEFCE policy for REF 2020 seems to me to be quite different from the RCUK policy, and it is the REF policy that is capturing university attention at the moment. It is only the REF policy which is insisting on ‘deposit on acceptance’. And it is the RCUK policy which encourages Gold OA publications and requires the use of a CC-BY licence. The REF policy is neutral, for example, as to the colour (Gold or Green) of the OA output. To say that the RCUK and REF policies are complementary defies logic. The RCUK Review panel needs to think this one through again.

The Report highlights the shortcomings of universities in gathering data for the review. It is right to do so. There needs to be more accurate reporting next time. In that respect, I would have expected the Review panel to draw up a template for reporting, addressing the issues it identified as weaknesses in the first set of reports. The Report recommends that a template be constructed, but why (when this is such an important issue) did it not draw up this template itself? Not good practice.

Finally, the Report cautiously advocates that RCUK look at the level of funding it gives to fund OA dissemination in future years. A welcome recommendation, but rather weak. Wellcome funds all OA outputs that emanate from its funded research. Why did the RCUK review not make a similar recommendation? As things stand, once RCUK funds are exhausted, universities either have to find monies for APCs themselves or advise the authors to publish their outputs as Green outputs. This is unsatisfactory and will lead to a fragmented publication framework for RCUK research which is in no-one’s interests.

To conclude: the independent Review panel which has produced the review of the implementation of the RCUK Open Access policy has only half done its job. It has produced a detailed analysis about implementation, which is useful. But, in walking away from broader policy issues, it leaves many questions unanswered which should have been tackled. Will future reviews take these issues forward? They should.

Open Access and the Request Eprint Button: Q&A with Eloy Rodrigues

Contrary to what one might expect, not all the items in open access repositories are publicly available. Estimates of the percentage of the content in repositories that is not in fact open access tend to range from around 40% to 60%. This will include bibliographic records containing only metadata, plus full-text documents that have been placed on “dark deposit” — i.e. documents that are present in the repository but not freely available, either because they are subject to a publisher’s embargo or because the author(s) asked for the full-text to be deposited on a closed access basis. To enable researchers to nevertheless obtain copies of items that have been placed on dark deposit OA advocates developed the request eprint button. But how does the button work, and how effective is it? Below Eloy Rodrigues, Director of Documentation Services at the University of Minho, discusses the issues, and outlines the situation at UMinho.

Eloy Rodrigues

RP: How many scholarly items are currently deposited in the University of Minho’s institutional repository RepositóriUM, and what are the growth rates?

ER: Currently we have more than 32,600 items in RepositóriUM, with around 5,000 being deposited yearly since the upgrade of our policy (effective since January 2011). Since 2011 more than 20,000 items have been deposited.

RP: Of these, how many are full text and freely available to the public (i.e. they are not metadata alone, not currently subject to publisher embargo, and not restricted to members of the university — as in requiring login)?

ER: Almost 26,000 (25,932) are freely available, which is more than 79% of the total.

RP: As I understand it, repository users can ask that a private copy of any document on dark deposit is made available to them by using the request eprint button built into the repository. In 2010 you co-authored a paper about this button, which was then more frequently called the “Fair Dealing” button. Your paper included data on “approval success rates” (i.e. the frequency with which authors sanctioned a copy of their work being made available to those requesting it). These data came from three universities: Southampton, Stirling and UMinho (your institution). The approval success rates were, respectively, 47%, 60% and 27%, with many requests simply ignored or lost. How has the situation at the University of Minho changed since then? What are the current figures?

ER: The overall response rate has remained basically the same, or even a little lower. In 2014 we had a global response rate of around 23%, with 21% sending the requested documents and 2% denying the request.

However the global response rate is highly “biased” by the effect of theses and dissertations. Theses and dissertations (T&Ds) account for around 21% of the total number of documents in RepositóriUM, and around 30% of the total number of restricted or embargoed access documents (currently around 6,700), but I estimate (based on some small “samples”) they represent far more than 50% (probably around 60% to 70%) of the requests received.

Because most authors of T&Ds don’t maintain any connection with the university after completing their thesis and dissertation, and they often change the email that was registered at the time the document was deposited in the repository (which is the email used to send the requests to authors), the T&Ds response rate is very low (probably lower than 10%), and that obviously affects the global response rate.

But we really don’t have data on this (we would need to “manually” look into the request logs we have, as we are not registering the document type from the requests) but based on some anecdotal evidence I estimate the response rate from UMinho members (professors and researchers) will be at least two times higher than the global average. So, excluding T&Ds, I “guess” the current response rate will be around 50%, or even a little bit higher (from 50% to 60%).

Eprint fatigue

RP: In 2010 you made the following comment on a blog: “Our experience is that authors get ‘tired’ of replying to copy requests, especially when requests are very frequent. The consequence is that some start not replying at all, and others ask to change to open access articles/papers/theses there were in closed/embargoed access. We had more than 20 of those requests just on the last year…” Is that still your experience, or have author’s attitudes and behaviour changed since then?

ER: In the last couple of years I haven’t had regular conversations or feedback from Minho researchers about the copy requests, in the way I did in the first few years after the introduction of the button. But I know we still receive frequent (approximately on a weekly basis) requests to change the access status of closed/embargoed documents to open access.

RP: Presumably if a paper is on closed access as a result of a publisher embargo it is not possible to change the status to open access?

ER: Presumably yes. But there this a wide variety of behaviour from UMinho authors. While some are confident and fearless, others are fearful at the time of deposit, especially with papers published in journals or conference proceedings which do not have well formalised self-archiving/OA policies. Afterwards they tend to become less timid about their publications.

We inform authors about possible access permissions or restrictions to their deposited publications, but we respect their wishes about the access status.

RP: I assume most institutional repositories now have a request eprint button. But I think not all IRs implement the button in the same way. Can you talk me through the process at RepositóriUM once a user hits the eprint button? Is it fully automated, or is there some manual intervention? What happens behind the scenes when a user requests a copy of an item in the repository?

ER: The way we implement the process in RepositóriUM (and I assume it will be similar in other DSpace based repositories, as the request-copy addon to DSpace was developed here at UMinho) is the following: When users hit the button (actually it is a closed access logo) and fill in a form with their name and email (and an optional message), an automatic email is immediately sent to the author.

That message contains a token URL, directing the author to a RepositóriUM page, where there are two buttons – Send copy / Don’t send copy. After choosing one of the options another page is displayed with a template message, which can be edited by the replier. The final step is hitting the send button.

So, in summary, the text is always provided by the author (and not automatically or by the repository staff), and the process requires just 3 clicks, plus editing the reply message if the author chooses to do so.

RP: Advocates for use of the button believe that it is a much more effective way for researchers to get access to papers on dark deposit than, say, by directly emailing the authors. I note a paperpublished in PLOS ONE in 2011 tested the email approach. A group of researchers sent out a number of email requests for papers in the area of HIV vaccine research. The success rates they reported were between 54% and 60%, which is perhaps a little higher than the rates described in your 2010 paper. What do we make of that?

ER: I can only speculate about it. The button simplifies the process, both for the requester (who only needs to make two clicks and, if they want, customise a model message to the author) and for the author (who receives an email from the repository and just needs to make three clicks, and if they want customise a reply message). But maybe, at least for some people, this may appear completely impersonal and they prefer the more personal and human direct email contact.

That said, I’m not convinced that email contact will get a higher response rate than the button, and you cannot infer that from the PLOS paper. To test that hypothesis you would need to test both approaches for the same universe of publications and authors.

RP: The PLOS ONE study reported that two thirds of the papers (where the author responded positively) were received “on the same day or the next. However, the other third of respondents took on average 11 days to reply (median 3 days, maximum 54 days).” Do you have any information on turnaround time for those who use the button at UMinho?

ER: We just have data on the mean response time. In 2014 the mean response time was near six days for accepted requests, and 3.5 days for rejected requests. Again I think this result may be slightly biased by a higher response time from T&Ds authors, but that would need to be investigated.

User friendly?

RP: On March 2^nd I tried to access a paper in RepositóriUM called “Academic job satisfaction and motivation: findings from a nationwide study in Portuguese higher education”. On trying to open the paper I was told that it was on restricted access and invited to request a copy of it, which I did. As the image below shows, I was informed that my request had been successful. However, I never heard anything further, and was left in the dark as to what had happened to my request. It is not a very user-friendly system is it? Might not most readers be inclined to give up after even a couple of such failed attempts to get a paper?

ER: Yes, I recognise that. It is not very user friendly, and people may be inclined to give up after a couple of “non-answers”. We’ve focused the development of the addon on making it very easy and simple to use by external readers and especially by UMinho authors.

At the time of development we really didn’t consider the issues around monitoring, reporting, collecting statistics on the use of the button, or providing feedback to requesters. And after the initial development we have really just made some minor improvements/adjustments (like spam control through a captcha feature) and upgraded it to the newest DSpace releases.

RP: My experience with the ORBirepository at the University of Liège was somewhat different. I tried the button there twice. On both occasions I received the full text (or a link to it) within 24 hours. Paul Thirion, Head librarian at the University of Liège, reports that the approval success rates for requests made using the button built into the ORBi repository are higher than average, ranging from 67% in 2009 to 81% in 2014. Do you have any sense of why Liège is more successful at getting researchers to approve eprint requests than other universities?

ER: I really don’t know. I imagine that, apart from some subjective aspects (like cultural and organisational differences and/or a different relationship to and perception of open access and the institutional repository between researchers at Liège and Minho etc.), there are some objective factors to explain it: probably the T&Ds effect is not present at ORBi, and I can speculate that there is a difference in the percentage of closed/embargoed access documents in ORBi (which I think is higher than in RepositóriUM), and maybe there is also a lower percentage of documents for which the access status is changed to open after deposition. [RP: Paul Thirion reports that around 62% of the documents in ORBi are full-text].

To what end?

RP: The paper you co-authored in 2010 goes on to say, “Given a significant number of button requests which are ignored or lost, one might be tempted to assume that it has not worked. However, this is not true. The principal impact of the Button has been to enable the adoption of institutional IDOA mandates.” This left me wondering as to the point of the button. I had assumed the sole purpose was to ensure that those who want access to papers under publisher embargo can nevertheless obtain a copy of them. For instance, in commenting on the open access policy being introduced by the Higher Education Funding Council for England Stevan Harnad described the purpose of the button as being to “tide over the usage needs of UK and worldwide researchers for the deposited research during the allowable embargo.” Your paper, however, suggests that the objective is rather to encourage funders and institutions to introduce OA mandates. What are your views today on the purpose of the button?

ER: I think the introduction of the button had both the immediate and practical objective of providing access to papers which were deposited with temporary (embargo period) or definitive access restriction, and the more strategic objective of helping in the introduction of mandates (by creating a mechanism that allows mandating universal deposit, regardless of eventual access restrictions, while offering a “second class” access procedure).

In my opinion both purposes remain important today.

RP: How would you describe the success of the button today, and what do you predict for its future success?

ER: I don’t know what the global response rate to the button requests is.  But even if it is closer to the UMinho 50% estimate, than the Liege 80% result, it means that tens or hundreds of thousands of papers were made available to many readers that otherwise would not have access to them.

So, I think the button is relatively successful, both in actually providing access to closed/embargoed access publications and in helping institutions and funders to define self-archiving mandates, without pushing themselves into spending yet more money by paying APCs, on top of their subscription costs.

For the immediate future, I predict the button will remain useful and hopefully more successful, as the number of mandatory polices, as well as embargoes, grows.

RP: One thing I find striking is that advocates for the button seem to have done very little research into its efficacy. Why do you think that is?

ER: I can only reply for myself and for UMinho’s RepositóriUM. I think the first reason is that our main focus is on managing and running the repository as a critical service of the university, with limited capacity to do research and development. So we use that limited capacity for very practical and applied developments and not on “non-applied research”.

The second reason is that, despite being important and useful, the button is not on our top three priorities for work on the repository. We’ve devoted much of our efforts on improving the repository interoperability and integration with other services/systems, on facilitating and simplifying the deposit/self-archiving of publications into the repository, on collecting and providing usage statistics to authors of publications in the repository, on guaranteeing/improving repository visibility in the global search engines (especially Google), etc. All those issues have higher strategic relevance for us given the current state of policy implementation and repository development at UMinho.

RP: Do you think there is a danger that if the button were to prove too successful publishers might seek to curtail or prevent its use in some way?

ER: I don’t think so. It is at least very questionable that publishers would have any solid legal ground to act against the button use, and, on the other hand, it would give them very bad publicity. So, from a cost-benefit point of view, I think the button is not a high priority for publishers either.

RP: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

__­­___

I am currently working on a longer document about dark deposit and the request eprint button. As such, I would welcome people’s thoughts about and experiences of these two things. I can be contacted here.

The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press

As the open access train rolls towards the future more and more traditional scholarly publishers are jumping on board. When and how they do so is not an easy decision—as Wiley’s Alice Meadows pointed out recently on the Scholarly Kitchen. Nevertheless, OA is now inevitable, so the plunge has to be taken sooner or later.

The University of California Press made its move in January, launchingtwo new open access programmes—Collabra and Luminos.

Alison Mudditt

Collabra is a mega journal that will initially focus on three broad disciplinary areas (life and biomedical sciences, ecology and environmental science, and social and behavioural sciences), and then expand into other disciplines at a later date. Collabra is expected to publish its first articles in the next month or so.

Luminos is an open access monograph publisher that will publish its first book this autumn.

What is the context in which UC Press’ move needs to be seen?

The key challenge open access poses for publishers is how to develop a workable business model. After all, since OA requires that research publications are made freely available, the traditional subscription model no longer works. Understandably, therefore, publishers have concluded that the costs of producing OA journals and books will have to be recovered at the author’s side of the process (via author-side fees) rather than at the reader’s side (via subscriptions). 

The question therefore is: how can this be done in a way that it is both workable and sustainable? Today there are two primary ways of attempting to do this—the article-processing charge (APC) and the membership scheme.

In the former case, the onus for finding the funds needed to pay to publish falls on authors. This means that if they cannot persuade their institution or funder (assuming they have one) to pay the bill, they may have to pay it themselves. (Most OA publishers advertise fee waivers, but it is not entirely clear how many researchers benefit from these, especially those offered by commercial publishers).

In the latter case, the author’s institution takes on the responsibility—by bulk-buying APCs (publication rights if you like) for all its researchers. Normally, this means the institutional library will pay subscription-like annual fees to a number of open access publishers. For authors this has the benefit of making OA publication services free at the point of use, although there are variations on this model—e.g. hereand here. 

And as large subscription publishers like Springer ramp up their open access activities we are seeing new-style big deals emerge whereby libraries pay a single annual fee that covers both access to the publisher’s paywalled content andpublishing rights for researchers who want to publish in their open access journals.

These new models have their critics, and OA advocates frequently point out that the majority of OA journals today do not charge a publication fee. The implication is that there are other, better, ways of funding open access. Nevertheless, as large commercial subscription publishers increasingly move into the open access space (offering OA journals and, increasingly, OA books), the tide is currently moving strongly in the direction of author-side pay-to-publish models. 

Today, therefore, unless their institution has a membership scheme with the OA journal  in which they want to publish, authors looking to embrace OA still face the challenge of finding some way of paying the publication fee. This can be very difficult, particularly for researchers who have little or no funding (as UCLA behavioural and evolutionary ecologist Peter Nonacsdescribes here).

Those who work in subjects where the monograph is the primary vehicle for communicating research find themselves in a particularly hard place. Consider, for instance, that where a commercial publisher like Springer charges $3,000to make an article open access (and non-profit OA publisher PLOS charges between $1,350 and $2,900) the cost of publishing an OA book can be as much as $17,500 + taxes (which is what Palgrave Macmillan charges). Clearly, this poses a huge challenge.

In the hope of addressing this issue Knowledge Unlatched—a not-for-profit organisation coordinating a global consortium of libraries to share the costs of making books open access—has pioneered a library consortium approach. 

The model used here is not unlike the membership schemes used by OA journal publishers, but what libraries pay depends not on the number of texts their researchers publish, but on how many other libraries join the consortium. Basically, publication costs are shared between institutions on a per title basis. Knowledge Unlatched estimates these costs at around $13 to $60 per library, per book. Clearly, time will tell how successful this approach proves.

Variations on a theme

So what is UC Press bringing to the party? Essentially, while embracing the two primary author-side payment models, the Press has introduced some interesting innovations. Let’s describe its approach therefore as variations on a theme.

The first point to make is that as a non-profit publisher subsidised by its host university, and with its own foundation, UC Press has been able to set Collabra’s APC at $875. This is not only significantly lower than what commercial publishers charge, but considerably lower than PLOS ONE, the pioneering mega journal launched by non-profit publisher Public Library of Science in 2006. PLOS ONE charges $1,350 per paper.

Moreover, only $625 of this fee will go to Collabra, with $250 being pooled in what the publisher calls a “Research Community Fund”. This fund is then used to pay editors and reviewers a fee for their services. Explaining how it works to Scholastica, UC Press’ director of digital development Neil Christensen said, “[O]n a quarterly basis we look at activities: Reviewer A had X many decisions, Editor A had X many decisions, and for each decision there is a point value. You take the total sum of the money in the pool and then divide it by the total sum of the points that have been generated for that period, and then allocate the money based on how many points or value each individual has contributed.”

It is this novel feature that has attracted most attention for Collabra (see here and here for instance). But in fact the more interesting aspect of Collabra’s model is that editors and reviewers are invited not to take the money they have earned, but to give it away—either by donating it to the Collabra Waiver Fund, or to their own institutional open access fund. By doing so, they can help researchers who do not have the money needed to publish make their work open access too.

What this does is draw out attention to the fact that scholarly publishing is essentially a communal and collaborative activity, and one that works best when scientists and scholars are able to share their findings in as frictionless a way as possible. While the Internet has made it technically much easier to share research, current models of open access have made it financially harder (since authors now need money to pay to publish). As noted, this is especially difficult for those in subjects with little in the way of funding. With Collabra, UC Press is proposing that a possible way of mitigating this new obstacle is to invite researchers to share the costs of open access publishing amongst themselves in an equitable way.

And with this same aim in mind, Collabra plans to “pair” different research fields. As Mudditt explains below, “One of Collabra’s core innovations is to test the thesis that we can use income from fields with higher research funding to support those with little or no funding. As such, this requires us to publish both in fields that have substantial funding (such as the life sciences) and those that have far less (in this case, social and behavioural sciences).”

The same community-focussed approach is also inherent to the Luminos model. While its publication fee ($15,000) is comparable to that charged by other publishers, UC Press will subsidise the fee through a library membership scheme (research libraries are being asked to pay an annual fee of $1,000 in order to “directly support researchers in getting vital work into the world” and to “help ensure access to this work is open and free to everyone”). The publishing costs will also be directly subsidised by UC Press. As a result, it is expected that the cost to the author will be halved to around $7,500. UC Press assumes that in most cases the author’s institution will pay the subsidised fee, but it has also created a Luminos fee waiver fund for those unable to obtain institutional support.

And in a similar collaborative spirit, UC Press is working with the California Digital Library (courtesy of a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) to develop a web-based open-source content management system to support the publication of open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences. When complete, the system will be made available to the wider community of academic publishers, especially university presses and library publishers.

So far as licensing goes, UC Press has decided to directly emulate what other OA publishers are doing. All the papers published by Collabra, for instance, will be licensed under a CC-BY licence—as they are with PLOS eLife, PeerJ, and F1000Research. And authors publishing with Luminos will be able to choose from a range of Creative Commons licences, as they can with Knowledge Unlatched. When asked on the Scholarly Kitchen blog about the latter decision, Mudditt explained that research undertaken by UC Press (and by Knowledge Unlatched) had “unearthed significant concerns from authors about losing control of their material.”

In summary, while UC Press’ OA programmes could be described as variations on a theme, they come with some interesting innovations. These innovations remind us that scholarly communication works best when it experiences as little friction (both technical and financial) as possible. They also remind us that communicating research is essentially a communal and collaborative process. And since for some authors open access introduces financial obstacles that did not previously exist, it follows that the research community needs to come up with new non-discriminatory ways of sharing the costs of scholarly communication.

It is also possible that today’s author-side pay-to-publish OA models may not prove workable in the long term. The OA membership schemes being introduced by large journal publishers, for instance, seem destined to recreate the dysfunctional market conditions that subscription publishers are accused of creating with the big deal. As such, it is not currently clear that open access will solve the affordability problem that caused many to join the OA movement in the first place.

But the good news is that if publishers like UC Press continue to experiment, and to innovate, both the accessibility and the affordability problems may eventually be solved.

To find out more about UC Press’ open access plans please read Mudditt’s answers to my questions below.

The interview begins …

RP: UC Press is launching two new open access initiatives: Luminos, which will publish scholarly open access monographs, and Collabra, a new OA mega journal. Are these initiatives part of UC press, or a separate financial entity? Your Collabra FAQ seems to imply the latter, and refers to UC Open Press?

AM:Both initiatives are a core part of UC Press in all ways: financially, strategically, and as a core way of fulfilling our mission to add visibility and impact to transformational scholarship. UC Open Press is not a separate entity or even an imprint—it is simply an umbrella under which we can gather these and any future OA programs.

RP: Is this UC Press’ first toe in the OA waters?

AM:Although UC Press has experimented with a handful of OA books in the past, these programs are our first serious foray into OA. We feel the timing is right for both projects and for UC Press to make a meaningful contribution to open access.

We have been exploring the launch of a mega journal for a couple of years. With Collabra, we knew we needed to build on what has already been achieved in open access publishing—and then go further. The model we have developed addresses, head-on, systemic problems that have not yet been solved around the recognition of peer review and funding APCs for disciplines without large grants.

We were spurred to develop Luminos both by the challenges we see in the current monograph model and the growing need for an approach that better disseminates scholarship and supports increasingly digital research from the social sciences and humanities.

We believe Luminos can expand global reach and better utilize digital technologies to enhance and support the monograph. These disciplines are, of course, some way behind the sciences in both their understanding and acceptance of digital and OA models, but we believe they are at a critical inflection point and ready for an evolution and extension of the current model.

RP: What does mega journal mean in the context of Collabra: cross disciplinary, volume publishing, PLOS ONE-style ‘lite’ peer review? None of these things? All these things plus more?

AM:All these things plus more, although we do not like the phrase peer-review “lite” for this type of peer review. There is nothing “lite” about being selective for accuracy, methodological and ethical soundness, and credibility. It’s simply less subjective.

RP: Why have you opted for the mega journal model? Is it just that you feel this to be the most cost effective way of publishing scholarly journals on the Internet today, or were there other considerations? If so, what were these?

AM:The mega journal approach offers us simplicity and flexibility—important considerations for a university press with relatively limited resources.  Collabra is about sharing value and we knew it would be simpler and more effective to build and share that value across a single infrastructure.

That said, we are also looking to foster development of smaller community journals under Collabra. One of our goals is that, for example, an ecologist author, editor, or reviewer will feel part of "Collabra Ecology."

We have shied away from characterizing any facet of our open access program as pilot or experimental; UC Press knows that open access is a critical part of our publishing strategy moving forward. That said we also know that Collabra will continue to evolve and believe the mega journal approach will afford us maximum flexibility and agility as the journal expands and develops.

RP: In a piece published in Inside Higher Education Neil Christensen, director of digital development at UC Press, stressed that it is non-profit, and said that too many university presses have tried to scale down and imitate the strategy of successful commercial publishers. “Maybe what we’ve discovered is that’s not the way to do it? With Collabra, let’s try to work out a model that works for us. It may not work for other publishers, but, hey, that’s not our headache.” Can you expand on this a little?

AM:Absolutely. Business models that work well for big commercial publishers work for them because they don’t work well for other publishers. That a handful of publishers have amassed thousands of journals sharply illustrates this dynamic.

It’s no secret that UC Press and other non-profit and mission-driven publishers have lost journal relationships to larger commercial publishers and we knew we needed to find a new way forward.

Collabra’s model speaks to publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers who are seeking more cost transparency and greater recognition of the critical role that the academic and scientific community plays in journal publishing. In our model, the people who do the fundamental work of peer-review are recognized for this and are able to decide where to place that value.

Our extensive research—and the very positive response to Collabra since its launch—suggests that these goals resonate deeply with many.  Whether or not this model works for all publishers, we hope it will inspire further discussion and redevelopment of the publishing value chain.

Business models

RP: On the Scholarly Kitchen Rick Anderson said of Collabra that it has “a business model that relies partly on library memberships and that provides payment to peer reviewers and editors, payment which they may opt to accept or to pass along, either to their local institutions’ OA subvention funds or back to Collabra to support its own APC waiver fund.” Can you say more about the business models and pricing, both for Collabra and Luminos? I assume the membership scheme refers only to Luminos?

AM:Yes, Collabra is funded exclusively by APCs and by the waiver fund. We have sought to keep the APC as low as possible and have been completely transparent about what this covers (see here). A key innovation is that editors and reviewers are paid, albeit a relatively small amount, for their work on the journal.

Here’s how it works:

Editors and reviewers receive points for all submissions with which they are involved—regardless of whether a given article is accepted or rejected.

-  Senior Editors receive 1 point per submission they oversee.

-  Handling Editors receive 3 points per submission they accept/reject.

-   Reviewers receive 3 points per submission on which they recommend a decision.

A $250 share from each accepted article APC of $875 is pooled in the Research Community Fund. Points are totalled and converted into a share of this fund every payment period. Since the fund is supported by APCs, people’s share of it will vary depending on article acceptance levels during each payment period.

Editors and reviewers decide what to do with their shares. They can receive them electronically as cash. Or they can elect to pay forward to the Collabra Waiver Fund or pay forward to an institutional Open Access fund which will then funnel back into the research community to support more OA funding. There’s a virtuous cycle we believe this model can engender.

The funding streams for Luminos are a little more multi-faceted as these disciplines do not have grant funding, but we have taken a similar community-based approach. Again, we have sought to keep publication costs as low as possible. Our baseline cost is $15,000 (this rises with longer titles and/or those with greater complexity, such as heavy illustration or multimedia elements).

We estimate that we will be able to cover a significant portion of these fees (between $7-8,000 per title) through revenue from the library membership scheme (see here), the sale of print copies, and an ongoing subsidy from UC Press. The remaining amount—starting at $7,500—will be recovered through a charge to the author (which we assume will typically be funded by their institution, although there are other sources).

RP: In an interview on the Scholastica blog Christensen says, “We’re saying, ‘let’s try and do what’s already being done in terms of APCs only do it at a lower price and recognize that the academy has a role there in generating value.’ Let’s pay part of that APC back to the academy and let them decide what to do with it.” Are you convinced that APCs are the inevitable long-term financial model for open access publishing, and so the issue is only one of getting the pricing formula right, or are you open to the possibility that the APC may disappear in the near future, to be replaced by something else?

AM:I don’t think that any of us should be utterly convinced of any financial model for OA and indeed, I think it is highly likely—not to mention desirable—we will end up with a much more mixed economy of funding sources for OA. There is increasing concern that APCs (particularly the high ones charged by some publishers) are eating into funding for the research itself, and then there are of course the fields that don’t have research grants to fund APCs.

We are still in the very early days of OA and as it grows and matures, I imagine that APCs funded by research grants will be supplemented by other sources of funding including a variety of institutional funding models and philanthropic support. I don’t think it’s productive to look for any single model to answer all problems, and too many discussions reach for premature conclusions.

Right now, Collabra utilizes a low APC that underpins its OA publishing mission. Should a better way emerge that allows Collabra to pursue our non-profit mission to advance knowledge, share value, and drive change, then we will explore it.

RP: Can you say something about UC Press’ finances? The Press receives a subsidy from the University of California, and it has a Foundation that accepts donations, but can you share with me the headline figures for the last financial year, and say to what extent these numbers were dependent on the University and the Foundation, rather than earned revenue? What would be the implications if the University did not provide a subsidy, and there was no Foundation?

AM:UC Press is in a strong and stable financial position and in the current year will cover over 90% of its expenses through earned revenue. However, like many university presses, we receive a subsidy from our home university, currently about $2.5M (a significant portion of which is designated specifically to support the work of UC faculty).

Alongside university subsidy, we are also fortunate to have additional support from the UC Press Foundation via existing endowments of $15M and active fundraising in support of new initiatives such as Collabra and Luminos.

External sources of support are critical for university presses all of whom at some level share a mission to publish work of scholarly, intellectual, or creative merit, often for a small audience of specialists. UC Press runs an effective and efficient non-profit publishing business, but without University funding and outside philanthropic support we would make a significant loss each year.

That said, since I arrived at UC Press the organization has been able to build an investment fund from its annual surpluses generated through a combination of strong financial management and new efficiency and cost reduction measures.  We did so recognizing the need to innovate and have used the funds to kick-start new programs, including the initial launch of our OA initiatives.

Our expectation is that in the long-term these programs will operate on a cost-recovery basis. However, we also recognize that investment can accelerate progress for both Collabra and Luminos, and, therefore, the UC Press Foundation is working to help secure additional capital for these publishing programs.

RP: You recently announced that, along with the California Digital Library, you have received a $750K Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a “web-based, open source content and workflow management system to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences”.  Could you not use an existing open source system like Open Monograph Press? What is lacking in OMP that UC Press plans to develop?

AM:The big difference between what we are trying to do and what OMP currently does is that while OMP can manage tasks, metadata, and finished documents required in the production process, it doesn't contain any functionality for authoring or revision in a web-based visual editor, nor does it include any functionality to do automated transformations to EPUB or print-ready files.

In OMP, all production still needs to be handled in desktop tools like Word and InDesign. We don’t just want to manage monographs as documents in the system—we want to migrate more of the authoring, revision, and output process to the web.

This is really the big leap—we want to move more of the authoring, revision, and production process to the web, where it can be better automated and more collaborative.

RP: Presumably you will not need to develop your new system before publishing monographs with Luminos?

AM:No. The technology we need to publish is already in place via our partnership with Ubiquity Press. The Mellon grant is to support development of a CMS that will help us to make title development from authoring through review, editing, and production more efficient, but it will not be a hosting platform. Until this has been developed, Luminos titles will be produced through our current systems.

Authors and waivers

RP: The Inside Higher Education piece says of Collabra, “In its first phase, the journal will pair research from faculty in life and biomedical sciences and ecological and environmental sciences—disciplines where research grants are easier to come by—with research from faculty in social and behavioral sciences. The second phase includes a similar pairing: computer science and medical and health sciences with the humanities.” What does “pairing” mean here?  And why are you doing it?

AM: One of Collabra’s core innovations is to test the thesis that we can use income from fields with higher research funding to support those with little or no funding. As such, this requires us to publish both in fields that have substantial funding (such as the life sciences) and those that have far less (in this case, social and behavioural sciences).

This is what we mean by pairing. We’re doing it because we believe it’s better for value to be shared amongst researchers than amongst shareholders, and we want to demonstrate that it is possible to do so.

RP: Can you say something about the profile of the authors you expect to attract, both for Collabra and Luminos? In particular, will you be encouraging authors from the Global South to publish with you? Do you expect them to be attracted to your offerings? If so, why?

AM:We hope to attract a wide range of authors from at various career levels and from different institutions and geographies to both programs. We will ensure we have wide editorial representation and we hope the ground-up, low publication charges and community spirit of both programs will resonate with all authors.

And of course, each program has a waiver fund which will help to support authors without the ability to fund publication through other means.

RP: Can you say how the APC waiver program works, and how researchers will be asked to demonstrate need and eligibility?

AM:Authors from HINARI category A countries qualify for waivers, and so can authors from other countries who show evidence of no institutional funding. We’re just in the process of finalizing these policies for both programs, and will have these available by late March.

It’s worth noting that although we use the term “waivers” (a term that people are accustomed to), technically we aren’t waiving publication charges but rather sponsoring waived APCs with funds from the Collabra Waiver Fund. Our publication charges are so low that there is no margin built in to afford waiving fees.

RP: Neil Christensen has said, “If—a year from now—the waiver fund runs dry because the editorial team has decided not to put money into it or we can’t find funders, then it runs dry. We don’t have any plans for the press to use its own money to seed it again. The idea is that it should be able to carry itself.” Does this imply that we might we see the waiver programme phased out at some point?

AM: It’s theoretically possible, but we don’t believe it’ll happen. We’re confident Collabra will attract funding and that some Collabra value will be paid forward to help sponsor future authors.

There is significant value in journal publishing, but much of it is not shared with the right people. We’re re-routing value to more deserving people, and we believe that a growing number of people will support this when given the opportunity.

RP: You have stressed that UC Press is a non-profit publisher. As I understand it, both you and Neil Christensen have spent most of your careers with commercial publishers (including time with Sage, Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, Nature and Wiley). Should this strong commercial background be viewed as a strength or a weakness when it comes to managing a non-profit university publisher like UC Press, and why?

AM: I don’t think that there is any inconsistency here. Those of us who have joined UC Press from the commercial world have done so because we believe passionately that university presses play a critical role in scholarly communication.

That said, I think that we bring some of the discipline and focus of the commercial world, both of which are essential if university presses are to be sustainable in a dramatically changing marketplace.

And to continue to serve our mission effectively, we have to be able to invest. We do not have the constraints of answering to shareholders, so we can run an efficient and effective business in which decisions are rooted in long-term vision, not short-term shareholder concerns.

RP: When can we expect the first articles and monographs to be published by UC Open Press?

AM: We currently anticipate that Collabra will open for submissions around the end of March. Of course, when the first Collabra article will publish will depend on how quickly articles go through the review process. We estimate that the quickest will take somewhere between 2-4 weeks, so that would give us published articles sometime in April/May. We are happy to report that we have already received enquiries from people wanting and waiting to submit!

With regard to monographs, we have already signed nearly 10 books for the Luminos program, and we expect to publish our first titles in early fall 2015 with approximately 8-10 titles published by the end of the year.

RP: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.