The Open Access Interviews: Richard Savory, Jisc Licensing Manager

For the past several decades the research community has been bedevilled with the so-called serials crisis, the phenomenon by which the cost of scholarly journals continues to rise at an unsustainable rate.

Richard Savory

Affordability

One of the most significant responses to this affordability problem was the open access (OA) movement, which in 2002 coalesced around the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Open access publishing, OA advocates have always argued, will be cheaper, and therefore sustainable.

In 2004, confronted by the growing demands of the OA movement, and faced with competition from open access publishers like BioMed Central and PLOS, traditional subscription publishers responded with hybrid OA, which allows authors to continue publishing in subscription journals but, if they wish, to choose to make a particular paper open access by paying an article-processing charge (APC). The first such initiative was Springer’s Open Choice, which at the time the company’s CEO Derk Haank characterised as a challenge to OA advocates to “put their money where their mouth is”.

Since hybrid OA APCs are more expensive than those of pure open access journals (i.e. generally around $3,000 a paper), take up remained low until research funders like the Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK agreed to start paying APCs for their funded authors.

It was quickly apparent however that, as things stood, hybrid OA could only worsen the affordability problem, since hybrid OA journals now have not one, but two income streams for the same article — one from the article-processing charge, another from the journal subscription, a phenomenon that OA advocates refer to as “double dipping”.

While publishers said that they would reduce the subscription price of hybrid journals to reflect the number of articles in them that had been paid for, what reductions have been made have been derisory. In any case, such an approach means that those who pay for hybrid OA are effectively subsidising those that choose not to embrace open access.

Transparency

Meanwhile, as subscriptions continued to rise to the point where even the wealthiest universities in the world began saying that they could no longer afford all the journals they needed, concern was also growing about the lack of transparency in journal pricing — since publishers now rarely sell single subscriptions at an advertised price, but licences to expensive databases containing hundreds or thousands of electronic journals (the so-called Big Deal) for a privately negotiated price. And in agreeing these Big Deals publishers routinely insisted on the inclusion of a non-disclosure clause in order to prevent other publishers, and the public, from knowing what they were charging for their journals.

Concern about the lack of transparency in pricing came to a head during last year’s inquiry into open access by the UK House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee (BIS), which in its report recommended “that non-disclosure clauses should not be included in publishing contracts which involve public funds.” It added, “If the use of non-disclosure clauses persists, then the Government should consider referring the matter to the Competition Commission.”

This message appears to have been taken on board by publishers. That at least is how I interpreted a recent tweet from the Research Libraries UK executive director, who reported that Elsevier is now the only publisher that still insists on non-disclosure clauses.

The issue of double dipping also arose during the BIS Committee inquiry, with many of the witnesses called to give evidence deprecating it. Perhaps for this reason Jisc, the organisation that negotiates licensing agreements with publishers on behalf of UK HEIs, has this year been busy negotiating offsetting agreements with publishers intended to mitigate or extinguish double dipping. 

Thus last month Taylor & Francis published a press release announcing that it had reached agreement with Jisc on (amongst other things) an offsetting regime, and a note on the UCL web site indicates that a similar deal has been agreed with Wiley-Blackwell.

Since the Taylor & Francis press release does not go into details of how its offsetting works, and noting that in October Jisc CEO Lorraine Estelle had told Research that she “would not reveal the offsetting formula for the two publishers” I contacted Jisc in the hope of clarifying matters. The result is the Q&A below with Jisc’s licensing manager Richard Savory.

Commercial sensitivity

What I take from the Q&A is that whether or not publishers insist on non-disclosure clauses makes little difference theoretically, since the details may in any case never be revealed (unless someone undertakes the laborious taskof submitting scores of FoI requests).

This seems evident from what Savory says below — even where there is no legal gag, he explains, those entering into an agreement with a publisher may not feel able to divulge the fine details for reasons of “commercial sensitivity” (i.e. publishers do not want their competitors to have this information). This reluctance, he adds, flows from the fact that divulging the information could “put an unnecessary obstacle in the path of a publisher’s willingness to enter into an agreement with us”.

But we should not conclude from all this that Jisc itself prefers secrecy. When Estelle told Research in October that she would not reveal the offsetting formula for the two publishers Jisc was negotiating with, explains Savory, the organisation was still consulting HEIs about the deal, and so any public comment would have been premature.

And separately, Estelle agreed to clarify with me what Savory says below about the Taylor & Francis offsetting formula. “I can confirm that the average APC price mentioned by Richard Savory, in respect of the offset system agreed with Taylor & Francis, is the average price of an APC in a Taylor & Francis journal — not an industry average for APC costs. The amount an institution pays in journal subscriptions is divided by this amount to arrive at the total number of APC vouchers awarded to that institution. Institutions can then use their vouchers to fund APCs.”

The key question, of course, is whether the offsetting formula will eradicate double dipping. When I put this to Estelle she replied, “This is not an exact science, but my estimate is that this will on average reduce the cost of APCs by around 75%. The actual figure, of course depends on how many articles, by authors in each institution receiving the vouchers, are actually published in the relevant journals.”

This implies to me that, at best, the deal could still see a 25% incidence of double dipping. However, Jisc is committed to monitoring the situation closely and, says Estelle, will make the results available to the public. “All the offset systems we have agreed with publishers are new, so we will be collecting data and monitoring their impact. We will publish the results regularly. We need around 10-12 months of data following implementation of these offset system to fully understand their impact, so we aim to publish some results towards the end of 2015.”

Clearly it is vital that this information is made available to the public. It is the public, after all, that foots the bill for the scholarly communication system, and so the public should know how effectively its money is being spent.

A final point to make perhaps is that even if the offsetting agreements being negotiated by Jisc entirely reduce double dipping they will not address the fundamental problem that open access was meant to solve — making scholarly communication affordable.

After all, there is no reason to doubt that hybrid journals will continue to increase their subscriptions for the foreseeable future, and if they want access to all the articles in them (not just those their institution has paid for) universities will have to continue paying those subscriptions. The current reality would therefore seem to be that — unless something else changes — open access looks set to co-exist with subscription publishing, and the larger affordability problem will continue.

It is worth point out, therefore, that the research community in The Netherlands is seeking to negotiate deals with publishers in a way that appears intended to force subscription publishers to fully embrace open access.[1]Might this be a better approach? Could such an approach work in any case?

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[1] Whether full open access will actually prove any less costly than subscription publishing is a separate topic, of course, and best left for another day.

The interview begins

RP: As I understand it, Jisc Collections has been negotiatingoffsetting agreements with a number of publishers, including Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell. Taylor & Francis has put out a press release, so clearly that deal has been finalised. But what is the situation with Wiley-Blackwell, and which other publishers is Jisc hoping to reach agreement with over offsetting?

RS: Jisc Collections is negotiating with all journal publishers of hybrid journals on the Total Cost of Ownership. By this we mean the combined cost to UK Higher Education Institutions of journals subscriptions (the cost of consumption) and the cost of article processing charges — APCs (the cost of open access publishing).

To reduce this combined cost, Jisc Collections has negotiated with a number of publishers, including Taylor & Francis, for the introduction of offset systems. These systems recognise the additional burden of the combined costs, and offset one against the other.

We are very pleased to have reached a conclusion on an offset system to mitigate the Total Cost of Ownership with Taylor & Francis and some of the other major publishers of hybrid journals.

RP: I am wondering how these deals relate to the regular round of (Big Deal) subscription agreements that Jisc negotiates on behalf of the UK research community. I believe, for instance, that Jisc reached three-year agreementswith both Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier last year.

RS: They relate because we deal with the Total Cost of Ownership — the cost to consume and the cost of open access publication. We do not look at either of these costs in isolation.

We have agreed a three-year licence agreement with Wiley for 2015-17, and are in the middle of a 5-year agreement with Elsevier running 2012-16.

RP: I am not sure what the situation is with regard to Taylor & Francis over the Big Deal, but where do these offsetting agreements fit with the Big Deal cycle: are they in addition to the Big Deals, or some kind of addendum to them? For instance, there seems to be a component of access to subscription journals in the recent T&F deal, suggesting that this might be a Big Deal+. Is that right?

RS: We do not negotiate the Big Deals in isolation — we look at the Total Cost of Ownership (see above).

RP: Just to clarify: my understanding was that a Big Deal was agreed with Wiley-Blackwell last year. What I take to be a separate offsetting agreement was finalised with the publisher a month or so ago. So presumably the latter is some form of addendum to the former? And would I be right to conclude that the deal recently agreed with Taylor & Francis was in fact the regular Big Deal, and so perhaps the first Big Deal to include an offsetting arrangement? Or am I misunderstanding?

RS: No, our previous agreement with Wiley runs from 2012 until the end of this year, and the new agreement will run from 2015-17. Our Taylor & Francis agreements reflect the same timeframes. The new Wiley and T&F agreements both incorporate an OA offsetting component.

Not about double dipping

RP: Can you say how exactly how the offsetting agreement with Taylor & Francis works? Since it is designed to avoid “double dipping” I assume it only applies to hybrid journals, but the T&F press release describes it in terms of “discounted Article Publishing Charges via a voucher system”. Do I assume from this that no money will come back to HEIs, and no money discount will apply, just the opportunity for researchers at the HEI concerned to publish in hybrid (and perhaps gold?) journals at a discounted price?

RS: This is not about “double dipping” — it is about the Total Cost of Ownership for UK HEIs. Publishers such as Taylor & Francis have worked with us to introduce an offset system that we believe will significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership. An offset system, by its nature, means that the cost of one is offset against the other — so if a system is successful in reducing the costs, there is no need to move money because the cost is reduced.

RP: Can you tell me what the formula is for calculating the discount and the number of vouchers that are offered for what?

RS: It’s the institution’s expenditure divided by a given amount (roughly average APC price) = number of vouchers for discounted APCs.

RP: You will know that there have been widespread calls over the past year or so for much greater transparency over the contracts that are negotiated between research institutions and publishers — including from the House of Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, which recommended “that non-disclosure clauses should not be included in publishing contracts which involve public funds.” As I understand it, the only publisher that still insists on non-disclosure is Elsevier. Yet in October Jisc CEO Lorraine Estelle told Research that she could not reveal the offsetting formulas used in the agreements with Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell. I am not sure that your answer above is much more informative (what, for instance, is the average APC, and how is it calculated?). Do you not think that both Jisc and publishers should routinely put into the public domain the details of the agreements they reach, including exactly how any offsetting arrangement works? Or are there valid reasons for maintaining secrecy that critics do not appreciate?

RS: There is a distinction between (legal) non-disclosure and commercial sensitivity. Publisher A would usually prefer Publisher B not to have ready access to the fine detail of its agreement with Jisc Collections; indeed the prospect of this happening might put an unnecessary obstacle in the path of a publisher’s willingness to enter into an agreement with us. The information is routinely available in the community domain to the extent that we inform every Jisc Collections member of the detail of each agreement.

It should be noted at the time of speaking with Lorraine Estelle the formulas for the offset systems had not been agreed with the publishers, and our community was still being consulted about them. It would therefore have been premature to announce them in any detail to anyone at that stage.

Tangible reduction

RP: You will also know that there is some scepticism about the ability of offsetting arrangements to mitigate double dipping. How confident are you that the deals Jisc is agreeing will entirely remove the possibility of any double payment?

RS: Each of the offset arrangements we have agreed have different facets. This is because the disciplinary focus of the journals and administration workflows in each publishing house is different. However, this also provides an opportunity to monitor and evaluate the offset systems in place.

We will be collecting and analysing data on an ongoing basis to measure the impact of these systems in reducing the Total Cost of Ownership to UK universities. We are confident that the schemes in place will result in tangible reductions of what would otherwise have been the costs.
However, these schemes are new, so we have to rigorously test them and amend them if necessary.

RP: Is the “substitutions allowance” mentioned in the T&F press release essentially the voucher system by another name, or something else?

RS: This is a standard system operated by the majority of journal publishers in the case of agreements for which institutions are required to maintain ‘core subscriptions’. Archival rights are typically applied only to core subscriptions. However, institutions are able to substitute subscriptions to certain journal titles for other titles of the same value. This means that institutions can change their core subscriptions according to changes in research interests.

RP: And what are the “improved subscriptions reinstatement conditions” referred to in the T&F press release?

RS: These conditions are to make the “Big Deal” (a complete collection of journal titles) more affordable to those institutions that currently subscribe not to a complete collection, but on a title-by-title basis.

RP: The press release also says that T&F access fees are now entirely “Jisc-banded”. What does that mean?

RS: Jisc banding is the method Jisc has developed for differentiated pricing. It uses as its metric the total income (research and teaching) of each HEI. Thus, institutions that have less income pay less for the same level of access to digital resources.

Opting in

RP: I am assuming that the way Jisc works is that it negotiates deals with publishers, and then HEIs opt in or not as they wish. If that is right, what percentage of eligible HEIs do you expect to sign up to the offsetting deals that Jisc is negotiating?

RS: Yes. Jisc Collections negotiates the deals and the licence terms. HEIs may opt in if they wish to do so. We envisage that most HEIs will opt in to those agreements that provide content which matches their research and teaching requirements.

RP: What are Jisc’s objectives in negotiating offsetting arrangements: simply to avoid “double dipping” or are there other aims too?

RS: The chief objective is to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership for UK HEIs. If well-designed and implemented, we envisage that offset systems could also reduce the cost of administration for APC payments.

RP: As I understand it, the aim of what you call Total Cost of Ownership is to avoid publishers being paid twice for the same article, once by means of subscription charges and once by means of an article-processing charge. You will know that the term double dipping is widely usedto express the same thing. Can you say why you resist the term double dipping?

RS: Our focus is on the Total Cost of Ownership, because publishers adjust for double dipping at a global level by reducing the list price of their journals. This by no means addresses the situation faced by UK universities implementing OA policies with preferences for Gold open access.

Without offset systems in place, UK universities would in some cases see their expenditure with the same publishers more than double as they pay for both subscriptions and publication.

We need solutions that can be implemented quickly, and that are designed to deal specifically with the issue facing UK universities — an increase in the Total Cost of Ownership. Stephen Pinfield has introduced a perhaps more helpful term — Total Cost of Publication (but talking about the same issue); his article is an interesting read and is available here.

Managing a transition

RP: I assume these offsetting deals are a necessary part of the process of managing a transition to open access. How long do you expect that transition to take, and will it ever be complete in your view? If it is never complete, what in your view will be the implications for the future with regard to the costs of scholarly publishing, and the negotiation of Big Deals?

RS: Open Access is already bringing significant benefits to research and the wider economy and society, which is why funders of research in the UK, EU and elsewhere have put in place policies to encourage or require researchers to make their research OA.

However, the policy environment is complicated and uneven across the globe. It is difficult to say how long it will take. However, during the transition period, it is essential that library consortia such as Jisc Collections look at the Total Cost of Ownership and negotiate the best outcomes for their member libraries.

RP: How challenging are these kind of negotiations when it comes to reaching agreement with publishers, and what do you feel to be the main sensitivities for publishers when trying to reach agreement?

RS: All negotiations are challenging by their very nature. Publishers naturally wish to grow their businesses and increase revenues and libraries naturally wish to reduce the very high cost of scholarly publishing. Publishers have shown initial concern about offset systems and this is understandable given that the concept is a new one — a concept designed by Jisc Collections.

However, our negotiations are evidence-based and informed by the data we collect and analyse, so we see an increasing number of major publishers willing to introduce offset systems for their hybrid journals.

RP: The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) seems to be taking a different approachto transitioning to open access — notably through the deal they have done with Springer (a model that Elsevier seems to have rejected). What would you say were the pros and cons of these two different ways of transitioning to OA: the Jisc approach and the VSNU approach?

RS: Open Access is already bringing significant benefits to research and the wider economy and we support its implementation. Every country needs to contain the cost of scholarly publishing while providing the widest possible access — both to those in academic institutions and to society more generally.

Approaches may sometimes differ, but there is great commonality across all the countries we talk to on this issue. 

The Open Access Interviews: Dagmara Weckowska, lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex

Dagmara Weckowska

As a result of prolonged pressure from the open access (OA) movement — and following considerablecontroversy within the research community — the UK is now embarked on a journey that OA advocates hope will lead to all publicly-funded research produced in the country being made freely available on the Internet. This, they believe, will be the outcome of two funder mandates that have been introduced.

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy — which came into effect on April 1^st2013 — requires that all peer-reviewed papers and conference proceedings (and eventually monographs too it is assumed) arising from research funded by RCUK are made open access, either by researchers paying to publish in open access journals (gold OA), or continuing to publish in the traditional (subscription) manner and then depositing copies of their works in an open access repository (green OA), usually after an embargo period.

The policy of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) — which will come into effect in 2016 — will require researchers to deposit all their final peer-reviewed manuscripts in an institutional or subject repository as soon after the point of acceptance as possible, “and no later than three months after this date”.

It has taken the OA movement twelve years to get the UK to this point (the Budapest Open Access Initiative was authored in 2002), but advocates believe that these two mandates have now made open access a done deal in the country. As such, they say, they represent a huge win for the movement.

Above all, they argue, HEFCE’s insistence that only those works that have been deposited in an open repository will be eligible for assessment for REF2020 (which directly affects faculty tenure, promotion and funding) is a requirement that no researcher can afford to ignore.

But could this be too optimistic a view? Dagmara Weckowska, a lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex, believes it may be. While she does not doubt that the RCUK/HEFCE policies will increase the number of research outputs made open access, she questions whether they will be as effective as OA advocates appear to assume.

Weckowska reached this conclusion after doing some research earlier this year into how researchers’ attitudes to open access have changed as a result of the RCUK policy. This, she says, suggests that open access mandates will only be fully successful if researchers can be convinced of the benefits of open access. As she puts it, “Researchers who currently provide OA only when they are required to do so by their funders will need a change of heart and mind to start providing open access to all their work.”

In addition, she says: “Under the new HEFCE policy, researchers have incentives to make their best 4 papers accessible through the gold or green OA route (assuming that the REF again requires 4 papers) but they do not have incentives to make ALL their papers openly accessible.”

Further complicating matters, Weckowska points out that UK HEIs do not currently know how many research outputs their faculty produce each year, which would suggest that universities will struggle to ensure that faculty comply with the policies.

The conclusion would seem to be, therefore, that UK funders still have some work to do if they want OA to become the default for published research, both in terms of educating researchers about the benefits of open access, and ensuring that adequate compliance mechanisms are put in place.

And judging by a survey undertaken earlier this year by the publisher Taylor & Francis it would appear that there is still an urgent need to educate researchers in the specifics of what the mandates actually require of them. Only 30% of respondents to the T&F survey said they understood the RCUK policy, and many “appeared to be unsure whether the policy applies to them, since over half [55%] were unable to say whether or not their future articles would need to be published in accordance with the policy or not.”

The interview begins

RP: Earlier this year you gave a presentationon some research you have done looking at scientists’ motivations for open access publishing. This was focused specifically on the new RCUK OA policy and your conclusions were as follows:

·         That the policy changes in the UK have been effective in strengthening pro-open access subjective norms among those who had little or no experience of open access publishing.

·         That they were ineffective in promoting beliefs in the positive impact of open access publishing and creating the perceived behavioural control among those who had little or no experience of open access publishing.

·         That they have shaken up confidence in the ability to provide open access among the researchers who had been publishing in open access journals before the changes in policies.

Can you talk me through the specifics of your study, and say why you reached these conclusions?

DW: Ok, let me explain the research process and the theoretical lens that I used to look at the data and draw conclusions.

The presentation that you refer to is based on a pilot project looking at broadly defined openness in biosciences. The project involved interviews with 22 Principal Investigators (PIs) aged approximately 40 to 60, who are working in the fields of systems biology, synthetic biology and bioinformatics and hold senior research positions in 11 higher-education institutions in the UK. 

We conducted semi-structured interviews, lasting an average of two hours, at each institution between September 2013 and January 2014. This was a joint project between the Innogen Institute at University of Edinburgh and Egenisat the University of Exeter — team members at each university focused on different aspects of ‘openness’.

Part of our analysis drew on the extended theory of planned behaviour to understand motivations for open access publishing.

This theory assumes that whether we behave in a certain way or not depends on (1) our attitudes towards the particular behaviour (formed on the basis of our beliefs [so called behavioural beliefs] in the positive and negative effects of such behaviour), (2) our perceived control over performing such behaviour (formed on the basis of our beliefs [so called control beliefs] about ease or difficulty of performing the particular behaviour), (3) our subjective norms (formed on the basis of our beliefs [so-called normative beliefs] about social normative pressures,  that is, what we believe significant others want us to do) and (4) our moral norms (formed on the basis of our beliefs [so-called moral beliefs] about whether a particular behaviour is the right or wrong thing to do).

The purpose of the analysis was to identify (behavioural, control, normative and moral) beliefs expressed by scientists during the interviews and identify differences between the beliefs of early adopters of open access publishing (those who had been publishing in open access journals before the changes in RCUK policies in 2012) and late adopters.

Differences in beliefs of early and late adopters illustrate differences in motivations for open access publishing. Slides 3 and 4 of my presentation portray the answers given to the question “Why have you made your publications openly accessible?” Slides 5, 7, 8, 14 provide all the beliefs expressed by early and late adopters during the interviews.

Please note that I made conclusions about the effects of policy change although I did not speak to scientists before and after the policy change. I made an assumption that late adopters did not hold any strong beliefs about open access prior to 2012 and that the beliefs that they hold now are the result of the new policy. I think it is a reasonable assumption and it was reported by many late adopters that open access just wasn’t on their radar before 2012.

RP: So you found that scientists’ beliefs about — and attitudes towards — open access and the RCUK OA policy are dependent on whether they were already making their papers open access before the new policy was announced?

DW:Yes. Late adopters expressed strong normative beliefs (they said that they now feel they should do open access because it matters to significant others — their employers or RCUK). Such beliefs were not expressed by early adopters. Thus late adopters are likely to have formed pro-open access subjective norms. This motivating factor is absent among early adopters.

On the basis of these observations one can conclude that the policy changes in the UK have been effective in strengthening pro-open access subjective norms among those who had little or no experience of open access publishing.

Late adopters did not express many (behavioural) beliefs in the positive effects of open access publishing as opposed to early adopters who believe that all sorts of good things will happen to themselves and to the world thanks to open access publishing. Thus it is unlikely that late adopters formed pro-open access attitudes while early adopters are likely to hold pro-open access attitudes based on their behavioural beliefs.

On this basis one can conclude that the policy changes were ineffective in promoting beliefs in the positive impact of open access publishing among those who had little or no experience of open access publishing.

Both early and late adopters expressed (control) beliefs about difficulties associated with open access publishing. On this basis, one can conclude that (1) late adopters are unlikely to have formed perceived behavioural control over open access publishing which could motivate them to publish open access and (2) the perceived behavioural control over open access publishing of early adopters has been shaken up (early adopters said it used to be easier to publish open access before 2012 when they had control over open access funds).

The second point of my second conclusion and the third conclusion that you cite above are based on these observations.

So these observations suggest that the policy changes were ineffective in creating the perceived behavioural control among those who had little or no experience of open access publishing, and they have shaken up confidence in the ability to provide open access among the researchers who had been publishing in open access journals before the policy changes.

All the written outputs of this pilot project are available online. We are working on an academic paper that will provide more detailed data and more in-depth analysis.

Not very optimistic

RP: To what extent do you think your findings can be generalised to other disciplines?

DW:One should not generalise these findings to other disciplines. Each discipline has its own publishing culture and the differences are stark between the sciences and the humanities. Bioscience, which was the empirical context of our study, has been one of the disciplines pioneering open access journals and open data movement.

Given the importance of copyright in arts and humanities, I would expect that researchers in these disciplines may be less motivated to provide open access to their work than researchers in, for example, biosciences. This however would need to be verified in another study. 

RP: You said: “the perceived behavioural control over open access publishing of early adopters has been shaken up (early adopters said it used to be easier to publish open access before 2012 when they had control over open access funds)”. Am I right in thinking that this is because previously RCUK allowed researchers to pay for gold OA out of their research funds, but under the new policy they are no longer allowed to use these funds to pay article-processing charges but must instead request the money from their university?

DW: Yes, that is the reason. In the past researchers were allowed to budget for OA publishing in their research grant applications to RCUK and so were in control of spending. The changed funding mechanisms for OA publishing has shaken up the perceived behavioural control of the scientists who provided OA to their work for years.

This was certainly an unintended consequence of the changed funding mechanism. However, one should not jump to the conclusion that this change is bad. It could be a good change if it is well implemented.  

In my opinion, the new funding scheme has significant advantages:

(1) under the old system scientists had to guess how many publications their research project will result in and in what journals they will publish before they started the research project. If they underestimated the OA fees they were left without funds.

(2) research publications are often written after the research grants are finished — that is when unspent grant-related money is inaccessible. In my opinion, if the universities develop fair, transparent and easy processes for allocations of OA funds, the feeling of control will likely come back.

RP: Would you say your research suggests that the RCUK policy will be successful?

DW: It depends on how you define “success”. The above research results are not very optimistic as they basically mean that late adopters will publish open access because they think they have to (e.g. when they publish the results of research funded by RCUK), not because they strongly believe that it is worth doing or the right thing to do.

Given that the late adopters also think that open access publishing is a bit of hassle, there is a possibility that they will choose open access licences only if they have to and continue to publish in a traditional way otherwise. HEFCE’s policy that sets the rules for future REFs addresses this potential problem to some extent.

No choice but to embrace OA?

RP: I think Green OA advocates view the situation more positively. They argue that as a result of the HEFCE policy OA is now a done deal in the UK, since researchers will have no choice but to embrace OA, and thus there will be 100% compliance. Are you less optimistic because you assume many researchers will choose green OA rather than gold OA, and so their papers may not be available with the RCUK’s favoured Creative Commons licence (CC BY), and only after an embargo? If so, green OA advocates would respond that this is good enough, so long as the embargoes are not overlong. They would add that embargoes can in any case be overridden by using the so-called “Request eprint Button” — where repositories provide a button to allow users to send an automatic request to the author(s) of a paper asking for a copy to be emailed to them.

DW: The point is that there is a possibility that the late adopters will choose gold (or green) open access only to show compliance to their research funders’ requirements and continue to publish in a traditional way (papers behind paywalls, no green OA) for the results of research that is funded by different means (e.g. university funds, industry). I would not consider this to be “good enough”. A green OA after a short embargo, I do consider adequate.

RP: I see. Your point is that researchers may not opt for open access at all, despite the RCUK and HEFCE policies?

DW: Yes. We did our research before the HEFCE policy was announced so the motivations of late adopters may have been strengthened by now. However, if the need to comply (with RCUK and HECFE) continued to be the only strong motivation for late adopters, one would worry whether all their research outputs will be made OA.

RP: I suspect open access advocates would respond by saying that since only those papers made available in an open repository will be considered for REF evaluation purposes, researchers will feel bound to make all their work freely available.

DW: I think people who believe, as you say, that “researchers will have no choice but to embrace OA” because of the HEFCE policy forget that academics need to submit only a few papers for REF (4 for the last REF). Good researchers publish much more than 4 papers in any REF period (~5 years) and they could strategically choose to make 4-6-? papers open access (green or gold) and keep the other papers behind a paywall.

The RCUK policy requires OA for papers resulting from research funded by RCUK. HEFCE policy requires OA for all papers submitted to REF — e.g. 4 papers per independent full-time scientist in the last REF period.

As I see it, there will be papers written from research that was not funded by RCUK (or other funders who require OA) and is not planned to be submitted to REF. Will late adopters make these papers (gold or green) OA? I would say it is unlikely, until they develop beliefs in the personal or societal benefits of open access publishing.

So I believe it is feasible that there will be near 100% compliance with the HEFCE policy — nearly all the papers submitted to REF will be accessible from repositories after an embargo period or from publishers under a CC BY licence. However, in my opinion, this does not mean that nearly all papers published by UK scientists will be open access.

Universities are bureaucracies

RP: In other words, because not all research papers published in the UK need to be submitted for the REF, and because not all the research published in the UK is funded by RCUK (or the Wellcome Trust etc.), your suspicion is that many papers could still end up stuck behind a paywall?

DW: Exactly. Under the new HEFCE policy, researchers have incentives to make their best 4 papers accessible through the gold or green OA route (assuming that the REF again requires 4 papers) but they do not have incentives to make ALL their papers openly accessible.

To submit their very best papers to the REF, scientists would need to provide OA to their first 4 papers published in a given REF period  and then every paper that they feel is stronger than the ones that they already made OA.

RP: But does that not suggest that all their papers will therefore end up OA? And should we not assume that they will in any case want to make them all OA “just in case”?

DW: Scientists have their ways of judging the quality of a paper (e.g. on the basis of a journal’s impact factor [unfortunately] or the quality of a journal’s editorial board) and having gone through the last REF exercise researchers are aware of departmental strategies and criteria for a ‘REF-able’ paper.

So I believe that many researchers may develop strategies for identifying REF-able papers and making them open access and leaving other papers behind a paywall, particularly if the process of depositing papers in repositories is time-consuming (e.g. due to complicated repository systems or copyright issues).

However, if universities set up easy processes for depositing papers, or units dedicated to making all the institution’s papers accessible at least through the green route then it is more likely that 100% of UK scientific outputs will be openly accessible.

RP: The management and monitoring of OA policies, and ensuring compliance, is clearly going to be a big challenge. You may know that a recent Jisc report stated the following: “One of the most significant issues which arose during the TCoO [Total Cost of Ownership] data capture exercise was the fact that not one of the 24 universities involved in the project were able to tell the project the total number of APCs paid by their institution. In the vast majority of cases, the Library handled the RCUK and Wellcome funds and captured data on APCs paid from those funds. But none were able to establish how many APCs were paid from departmental/ faculty research project funds. A number of librarians asked the University Finance department for this information, but none were able to provide a figure. The speed that the data was collected at meant that institutions had very little time to compile data which they were not already collecting, which also meant that in some cases the data could not be fully checked for accuracy. In addition it was interesting to note that, despite a specific request, only one of the libraries was able to provide IPL [Information Power Limited] with the total number of articles published by their institution in a given academic year.” I wonder how likely you think it is that the units you feel are necessary will be created, and if they are how successful you think they might be — not just in terms of managing and distributing gold OA funds, but in ensuring compliance.

DW: Universities are bureaucracies and so take time to adapt to changes in the environment. The capability to manage open access publishing will not be developed overnight.

The problem increases when a university library does not have the spare capacity to take on the extra tasks and when the library staff lack the necessary skills and knowledge, e.g. legal knowledge of different copyright licence agreements.

In the late 1990s universities were expected to start collecting and reporting data about patenting, licencing and other forms of knowledge exchange with the business and community. At that time the UK government created a HEROBAC (now HEIF) fund to help universities develop the capacity to manage knowledge exchange activities, which led to the creation of many university technology transfer offices. New training organisations were also set up to train technology transfer managers and to share good practice across universities.

I think it should be assessed whether there is a need for a fund that would help universities to develop the capacity to manage open access publishing. Also the new training needs for librarians should be assessed and addressed.

No one knows

RP: You said: “I believe it is feasible that there will be near 100% compliance with the HEFCE policy — nearly all the papers submitted to REF will be accessible from repositories after an embargo period or from publishers under a CC BY licence. However, in my opinion, this does not mean that nearly all papers published by UK scientists will be open access.” I wonder if you have a sense of what percentage of the papers produced in the UK might therefore not be made OA. If you don’t have data on this, what is your gut feeling? Are we talking about a sizeable percentage of papers that could still end up behind a paywall, or a sufficiently small number that it will make little difference?

DW: I can’t answer that question. To make a guesstimate I would need to know what percentage of research is done in the UK with funding that has no OA requirements and how many papers are produced on the basis of such research. No one knows that.

If you are interested in looking into it you could check the percentage of research income received from different sources. Data on this can be purchased from HESA. However, looking at funders’ OA policies and the percentage of income received by universities from those funders, you would still not get a full picture because these statistics do not cover research activities done without external funding.

UK universities allow academics to spend a % of their time on research and publishing, for example, 40% — so two full days per week for research. Some academics do not have external funding for their research activities. I expect that the percentage of academics who do research without external funds will differ by discipline and type of university. Again, I don’t think anyone has an overview of how many papers are published on the basis of research that is not funded externally.

HEFCE’s policy on OA is currently the only way to encourage open access to papers produced on the basis of research that is not externally funded. But as I explained earlier, it would be possible to comply with HEFCE’s policy by making only a few papers OA in a given REF period.

RP: In a nutshell, then, your research suggests that if scientists do not have a personal belief in the value of OA then not even the combination of the RCUK and HEFCE (plus Wellcome etc.) policies is sufficient to ensure that all the papers published by UK researchers are made OA. For that to happen it will be necessary to engineer a change of hearts and minds within the research community?

DW: That is absolutely right. Researchers who currently provide OA only when they are required to do so by their funders will need a change of heart and mind to start providing open access to all their work. The future will show if the RCUK and HEFCE polices are enough to trigger such a change.

RP: What is your personal view about open access and the current UK OA policies?

DW: I personally believe that open access academic publishing can potentially help disseminate scientific knowledge around the globe and to a number of societal groups. For instance, journalists like yourself and civil servants will benefit from open access publishing, in my opinion.

However, I am not yet convinced that we will see local economic benefits (you may want to look at my presentationabout Open Access and Innovation where I examine a set of assumptions underpinning the claim that open access will lead to more innovation and suggest that many of these assumptions are not yet supported by evidence).

I am also worried about the cost of open access publishing in the UK during the transition period, and the criteria that will be used by RCUK and universities to distribute open access funds (e.g. whose publications will be restricted because of limited funds).

Because of these worries I am yet to be convinced that the gold open access required by RCUK is a significantly better model than green open access model adopted in the US and promoted by HEFCE’s new policy.

RP: Do you think that researchers are more likely to opt for green or for gold OA in the UK?

DW: Our study did not examine in detail the differences in motivations for green and gold open access, so I cannot say whether researchers are more likely to opt for green OA on the basis of our findings.

RP: What do you see as the likely end game so far as OA is concerned, both in the UK and globally?

DW: I believe that a large proportion of scientific literature will be openly accessible in the foreseeable future, if the hearts and minds of scientists can be changed.

Open access policies have been introduced by public funders in many developed countries, including the US, the European Union, Australia, and in an increasing number of developing countries.

Right now it is important to monitor whether the policies are effective in stimulating a change in publishing behaviour and design other interventions if necessary. The publishing industry will be keen to maintain their business model while public funders will strive to maximize the benefits from research that they fund. Perhaps, some form of green open access will be the final compromise.

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Dagmara Weckowska is a lecturer in Business and Innovation at the University of Sussex. She holds a PhD in Technology and Innovation Management from SPRU-Science Policy Research Unit at the Universityof Sussex. In the last 7 years she has researched the individual, organisational, legislative and regulatory aspects that affect the emergence of science-based innovation. More recently, while working as a research fellow at Innogen — the Institute for Innovation Generation in the Life Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Dagmara started researching the relationship between open science and open innovation, including the issues of open access.