Open access and Brexit

The UK research community’s response to the recent referendum – in which a majority of 52% voted for the UK to leave the European Union (or “Brexit”) – has been one of horror and disbelief.

This is no surprise, not least because Brexit would have a serious impact on research funding in the UK. Nature reportsthat UK universities currently get around 16% of their research funding from the EU, and that the UK currently hosts more EU-funded holders of ERC grants than any other member state. Elsewhere, Digital Science has estimatedthat the UK could lose £1 billion in science funding if the UK government does not make up the shortfall in EU-linked research funds.

And a recent Outsell report noted that EU research funds accounted for, on average, more than £900m of funding each year between 2009 and 2015, or the equivalent of one-third of the competitive funding provided by the UK’s research agencies.

But what are the implications of Brexit for open access? Given the highly volatile situation the UK now finds itself in we cannot say anything for certain. However, any squeeze on funding will surely be detrimental to current plans to migrate scholarly publishing from a subscription to an open access system.

It is, after all, generally agreed that the transition to open access will require additional funding, if only in the short term. To this we should add that the UK has been one of the main advocates for open access within the EU, and globally.

Meanwhile, the other major advocate for open access in Europe – The Netherlands – is about to give up its Presidency of the EU. During their Presidency, the Dutch managed to persuade member states to agree to a commitment to make all scientific papers freely available by 2020.

There was always scepticism as to how achievable the EU goal is, but Brexit would seem to make it much less achievable. As The Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley points out on the questions I have posed about OA and Brexit, “The EU recently set a target of 100 per cent OA by 2020. How this was to be achieved was unclear, but without the UK at the table arguments in favour of gold will be less vocal.”

So what do OA advocates think about the current situation? Below long-time proponent of open access, and Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London, Stephen Curry offers some thoughts.

As an indication of just how uncertain the situation is note that Stephen asked me to preface his answers with this statement: “Readers should please bear in mind that my answers have been composed while I am still keenly feeling the pain and confusion surrounding the outcome of the EU referendum. Ask me again tomorrow and my answers could well be different.”

Stephen Curry

The interview begins …

RP: I realise that Brexit raises more pressing issues for UK academics than any impact it might have on the transition to open access, and that much still remains uncertain about how Brexit will play out, but what in your view would be the likely implications for open access if the kind of fears expressed in, for instance, this piece in Physics Today were to be realised?

SC: You’re right that there are many more pressing issues – loss of funding, loss of a leadership role within EU research programs, loss of influence – to say nothing of the fact that the UK now feels a much more unwelcoming place to students and staff from overseas.

The scale of this seems unimaginable. And everyone is disorientated because it’s clear that there is no plan for Brexit at the moment. It is all still to be worked out.

In the meantime, there is still the hope that the process of leaving will unravel; that the country, seeing the damage being inflicted, will find some way to step back. But even that just adds to the ongoing confusion and uncertainty. With all this going on, it is hard even to think about OA.

RP: Brexiteers say that it is “unlikely that universities will be bereft of funding”. But how confident can we be that Brexit will have little or no impact on university funding, and that if the UK does suffer economically costs for open access will not be one of the first victims?

SC: Brexiters have consistently underplayed the risks and costs of leaving the EU – as has already become plain.

The UK is a net contributor to the EU overall but ‘wins’ in terms of research funding. That will disappear if our subsequent agreement (and when will that be fashioned?)  doesn't include a commitment to freedom of movement, and that doesn’t seem likely right now.

Even if we save on the EU contribution (by no means guaranteed, especially if we want access to the single market), the ongoing decline in the pound, the drop in the stockmarket and the flight of industries and jobs will likely propel the economy into recession, reducing tax receipts and the possibility that the government will be able to ‘compensate’ UK science for the loss of EU funds. To do so the government would have to demonstrate a commitment to investing in R&D that has not been evident from past settlements of flat cash or, more recently, flat value.

In those circumstances, there could well be pressure on funds for OA. But perhaps that might make RCUK/UKRI get tough on fundees to seek value for money when publishing? They’ve been reluctant to date but these are strange times. Who knows?

RP: In 2013 RCUK anticipatedthat a full transition to open access would be completed within “around five years” [2018] and that by that time 75% of OA papers would be published as gold OA. It is also now widely accepted that – at least in the short term – a transition to open access will require additional funding (to pay the APCs generally needed for gold OA). If UK research funders and institutions faced a reduction in funding as a result of Brexit might the money needed for a transition to OA no longer be available, or significantly curtailed? If so, what sort of threat would that present for the OA movement?

SC: I think there’s a risk of that. I’m never sure what you mean by “the OA movement” – to me it’ is a heterogeneous collection of individuals and organisations with diverse emphases on the key articles of the various declarations – but it would pose a challenge to those of us in the UK who advocate the wider adoption of OA for scholarly research. I, for one, am up for that challenge. The argument for OA remains unchanged and the means to achieve it have always been the subject of debate.

RP: One possibility, I guess, is that much greater stress would be placed on green OA. But green OA does not offer any kind of transition to open access does it? And as publishers impose ever more onerous embargo conditions does green OA really offer a realistic long-term solution?

SC: That could be a direction to go in, particularly with the start of the HEFCE policy. I don’t think green OA is the long-term solution though it’s an effective interim measure. We will have to be vigilant in spotting and calling out extensions to embargo periods – particularly since I have not seen any convincing evidence that they are a cost to publishers.

RP: Presumably there are also implications for the EU. Along with The Netherlands, the UK has been the main driver of OA at a European level. As a result, in April the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science set a target of achieving full open access for all scientific publications by 2020 [A goal subsequently agreed on by the ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry of member states at the May Competitiveness Council]. With the UK set to leave the EU might we see a fall-off in interest in OA within the EU?

SC: The UK has certainly been an influential voice (even if it hasn’t been able to induce many other nations to follow it down the gold-preferring route), but it is by no means the only one as far as I can tell.

The whole Brexit process could well be a huge distraction for the rest of the EU so perhaps the 2020 deadline (rather notional in any case for some?) might slip. But perhaps not – the HEFCE policy should be effective in achieving the aspiration in the UK and that could be an example for others. I’m not as clued into EU machinations as some but I will be sorry that the UK is excluded from EU discussions on OA.

Hope springs eternal: perhaps there are clever and pragmatic ways we might still be involved. There would be no want of volunteers in my view.

RP: While there has been much discussion over what the UK might lose financially as a result of Brexit, the UK is the third largest contributor to the EU budget. If it leaves, therefore, presumably the EU will face a 12.5% fall in its budget. Again, if transitioning to open access will – at least in the short term – cost more, is it not likely that the EU will need to cut its cloth, and that in doing so it will conclude that open access is not as high a priority as it was?

SC: The UK is a net contributor so I guess there will be some contraction of the EU budget. It won’t be 12.5% because the size of the EU would also fall if the UK leaves. The EU has its own economic woes but investors looking to exit the UK could well end up in the EU, so who knows what the net effect will be?

Part of the argument for OA in science and engineering is to disseminate the raw material for developing new technologies, and that hasn’t gone away. If anything the pressures of Brexit could make it seem more needed than ever. Who knows?

RP: What if any implications for OA are there here for those in North America and the rest of the world?

SC: If the UK loses some of its momentum on OA, I wonder if the some of the noise it has created around OA might be lost.

RP: What does this all mean for scholarly publishers?

SC: This is a fantastic opportunity for them to demonstrate what they really mean when they talk about being “partners” with the research community. I hope many will seize that opportunity to make a positive contribution to the situation.

Any hint of publishers seeking to take advantage of what is going to be a painful period for the UK research community should be called out and opposed. Like I said, hope springs eternal.

RP: Thank you for taking time to answer these questions.

The OA Interviews: Michaël Bon, Founder of the Self-Journal of Science

“The OA movement has been fighting the wrong battle (all be it for a just cause), and for so long as it carries on doing so it will continue diverting and exhausting scientists and institutions in a fool’s game in which they have little power.” 

Fifteen months ago 35-year old French scientist Michaël Bon launched a new open-access publishing service called the Self-Journal of Science (SJS). 

SJS describes itself as a “non-commercial, multidisciplinary repository that provides journal-like services to entrust the evaluation, classification and communication of research to the unrestricted collective intelligence of the scientific community itself.”

What is noteworthy about SJS is that it is not another open access journal, but a new-style publishing platform, and one that could be viewed as a direct challenge to the top-down power structure of academia, and to the oligarchic editorial boards of legacy journals.

It is also worth noting that Bon was not aware of the open access movement when he conceived SJS. His aim was to fix what he sees as serious problems in the current scholarly communication system – problems of quality, of transparency, and of effectiveness. 

When he did find out about the open access movement Bon concluded that OA advocates have been trying to do things back to front, and as a result have played into the hands of publishers.

That is, in seeking to fix the access issue prior to fixing the structural flaws in the current publishing system the open access movement is overseeing the relocation of a broken model into a new environment. 

By contrast, says Bon, SJS is focused on exploiting the new environment to reinvent scholarly communication. In the process, he says, the access issue is solved collaterally – since openness is a given in SJS’ modus operandi.

If you want to find out more about how SJS works, about Bon’s philosophy and objectives, and where he thinks the OA movement has gone wrong, you can read a Q&A with him. This is available in a pdf file here. [Usual health warning: it is 28 pages long].

The Open Access Interviews: Sir Timothy Gowers, Mathematician

As the use of green open access policies looks increasingly like a failed strategy, and as universities, research funders, and governments in Europe seek to engineer a mass “flipping” of subscription journals to gold OA, has the open access movement reached a watershed moment? 

If so, how will it develop from here, is it headed in the right direction, and who should be leading the way? 

One remarkable thing about the OA movement is that it has primarily been driven by people other than researchers.

The President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, José van Dijck drew attention to this recently when she pointed out that the debate about open access has been mostly about what university administrators, librarians, government, funding organizations and publishers think, not what researchers think, or need. 

Yet it is researchers who create, quality check, and consume the papers that make up scholarly journals. They are the originators of, and primary audience for, the literature, so should they not have a large say in how scholarly communication develops?

As the financial consequences of gold OA become apparent, and as researchers are confronted with ever more onerous bureaucratic rules (policies) requiring them to make their work OA, however, this is likely to change. Certainly we can see researchers beginning to take more of an interest in the topic, and the signs are that they are not at all happy with the mess and confusion created by the OA movement.

Might we, therefore, see researchers become the foot soldiers of the next battle in the revolution the OA movement began? And might they want to do things somewhat differently?

If so, given his credentials who could claim to be better qualified to lead the troops over the top than Sir Timothy Gowers? 

Read the Q&A in the linked pdf and see if you agree. The interview is prefaced with an introduction.

To download the text click here.

Michał Starczewski interviews Richard Poynder for the Otwarta Nauka site

I was asked recently by open science advocate and historian Michał Starczewski if I would do a Q&A on open access for the Otwarta Nauka site based at the University of Warsaw. 

Below are the first two questions and answers. The full interview can be accessed here. 

It is also available in Polish here.

Michał Starczewski: Do you think that openness is already a new standard in the world of scholarly communication, or is it still an ongoing experiment?

Richard Poynder: Well, openness is certainly fast becoming a new standard in scholarly communication. What we don’t yet know, however, is exactly what openness means (or should mean) in this context, and exactly what processes and outputs it should apply to (and to what degree). We also don’t know who should best fund it, provide it, and manage it.

The OA movement is more than 20 years old. What surprised you most during this period?

What has surprised me most is the OA movement’s lack of organisation, or clear strategy on how to make OA a reality. As a consequence, we are now some 15 years away from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (where the term open access was adopted), and much still has to be achieved, not least clarifying the issues listed in my last answer. Apart from anything else, we still have no conclusive definition of open access. Given this, it is no surprise that there is a great deal of confusion about open access.

I think there are two main reasons for the failure of the OA movement to take a more structured approach. First, the research community is not actually very good at organising itself, particularly on a global scale. And it doesn’t help that researchers are increasingly incentivised to compete more than co-operate with one another.

Second, OA advocates have tended to approach open access more as if it were a religion than a pragmatic response to the possibilities the network provides to improve both the research process and scholarly communication (which should surely be the ultimate goal of open access).

These two factors have generated unhealthy schisms and disputes within the movement, with advocates spending too much time arguing over doctrine. 

We have also seen OA advocates become addicted to cheerleading and the shouting of slogans, which has deflected them from devoting sufficient time to developing practical strategies and tools to achieve open access. The assumption was that all that was required was to “convert” colleagues. When the movement failed to do that it began lobbying funders and institutions demanding that researchers be compelled to embrace OA, essentially they sought to offload the responsibility onto others.

It also has to be said that the strategies proposed and/or supported by OA advocates have often been cockeyed — not least the concept of the article-processing charge (APC). That anyone ever thought pay-to-publish was a sensible way of disseminating research is most odd. Not only is it impractical, but it has played into the hands of profit-hungry legacy publishers, and indeed any fly-by-night cowboy able to create a web site. 

I have also been surprised at how disconnected OA advocates are from the views of the wider research community — a tendency exacerbated by their habit of gathering together in their echo chamber of choice (conference hall, social media etc.) where their beliefs, prejudices and misconceptions are reinforced rather than subjected to a reality check. 

The recent Berlin 12 meeting suggests that this ghettoisation is increasing. As the meeting was entirely focused on “flipping” subscription journals to OA models it was “by invitation only” and the organisers chose not to invite any prominent green OA advocates, presumably to avoid any dissenting voices questioning the premise of the plan (although we cannot state this as a fact since the delegate list was secret).

All of which is to say that I have been surprised at how open access has been treated as a “cause” rather than a solution. And despite what OA advocates like to claim, the movement is not by nature democratic, but evangelical.

The French Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. OA advocates have sought to persuade colleagues by appealing to their hearts rather than their reason. 

While this approach may make sense in the context of deciding whether to believe in God (aka Pascal’s Wager), it is not very helpful when trying to persuade people of the need to change the way that research is disseminated. 

And it is my belief that this approach has not only slowed progress but is allowing legacy publishers to co-opt the movement for their own ends ...

The full interview (11 questions and answers) can be read on the Otwarta Nauka site here.

It is also available in Polish here.

Why I won’t be doing that video interview about open access

Recently I was contacted by Library Journal (LJ) in connection with a series of video interviews it is conducting with open access “VIP’s and leaders”. The first interview – with the Director of Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication Peter Suber – has already been published. Would I have some time to do an interview myself, I was asked? The project is for a new section of LJ’s web site sponsored by the open access publisher Dove Press.

I liked the idea of doing a video interview but I was instinctively shy of being associated with a project that has a large Dove Press banner on the top right hand corner proclaiming it to be the “exclusive sponsor” of the site, along with a list of featured articles with “Sponsored by Dove Medical Press” in prominent red ink strapped across the top of each one. I felt that taking part would amount to endorsing Dove Press, which for reasons I will explain below I did not want to do.

I emailed LJ back to say I was not comfortable with doing an interview for a site sponsored by Dove Press, and asked whether it would consider posting any such video elsewhere on the LJ site. Strangely, I received no reply to this. As I was now intrigued as to how this site had come about, who had suggested the idea, and what its purpose was I also emailed LJ’s Managing Editor. To this too I received no reply.

So what are my reservations about being associated with Dove Press? There are a number of issues here, including a discomfort with the publisher’s marketing and PR activities, a concern with its editorial processes, some puzzlement over its lack of transparency, and a suspicion that its commitment to open access is not as deep as I would like.

Let’s be clear, while somehave accused Dove Press of being a “predatory” publisher, I am making no such claim here. Nor could I, since I don’t have sufficient information to make a judgement either way. I am just stating the reasons why I personally do not want to be associated with the company.

Marketing and editorial

What is indisputable is that Dove Press has a somewhat controversial history. When it started out in 2008, for instance, it was criticised for spamming researchers. Its fiercest critic at that time was Gunther Eysenbach, who in 2008 wrote a blog post about Dove Press (plus fellow NZ-based publisher Libertas Academica) entitled “Spammer of the Month”.

Around that time, I interviewedDove Press’s Publisher Tim Hill. As part of that interview I asked him about the company’s unsolicited emailing campaigns. He replied that these were all perfectly legal and that Dove Press had in any case ceased emailing researchers.

There is no reason to doubt this. I haven’t noticed any complaints recently. On the other hand, it might be that spam messages from open access publishers are now so commonplace, and so apparently unstoppable, that researchers no longer even comment on such activities.

By then, in any case, Dove Press’s marketing strategy seems to have changed, with the company becoming a frequent sponsor of events – e.g. here, here and here. Sponsorship is, of course, widely practised by scholarly publishers these days, and some may say it is unremarkable. But not everyoneis comfortable with it, especially when it involves large powerful companies like Elsevier. Either way, Dove Press’s exclusive sponsorship of part of LJ’s web site seems to me to be a top-heavy approach to sponsorship.

There have also been complaints from other publishers about Dove Press launching “copycat” journals that confuse authors over their provenance. In 2010, for instance, a New York publisher told me that it had had to exert a great deal of pressure on Dove Press to get it to change the name of a couple of journals it had launched with identical or near identical titles to existing journals Maybe this is no more than the cut and thrust of business competition, but many might feel it not to be in the spirit of open access.

In addition, Dove Press has faced criticism over its editorial processes. In February 2010, for instance, a 45-year-old biology professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama in Huntsville called Amy Bishop shot dead three of her colleagues and wounded three others after being denied tenure. In reporting on the killing, journalists quickly discovered that one of Bishop’s research papers had been published by Dove Press, and that she had named her own minor children as co-authors of the paper.

When I emailed Hill to ask him about this he replied, “We do ask that all co-authors be cited in any paper sent to us. Dr Amy Bishop was the corresponding author of this paper. Her paper (‘Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival’) was peer-reviewed by 3 experts and revised by Dr Bishop prior to an editorial decision to accept the revised paper for publication.” He added: “It appears, on the basis of media reports, that she [Bishop] was in breach of our authorship criteria.”

This explanation by no means satisfied everyone, and since Dove Press was at that time a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) the criticism was directed at OASPA too, with demands that it investigate the activities of Dove Press (e.g. hereand here).

Concern about Dove Press’s editorial processes was further heightened in October 2013, when Science journalist John Bohannon conducted his now infamous “sting” in which he sent out a fatally flawed paper to 304 open access publishers. One of those to accept the flawed paper was Dove Press.

Commenting on the incident on the OASPA web site, Eysenbach said, “[H]ow much longer will this publisher be allowed to tarnish the reputation of open access and OASPA? How about three strikes and you are out?”

This time OASPA did investigate Dove Press. Its conclusion: “there was a lack of sufficient rigour in editorial processes” at the journal concerned (Drug Design, Development and Therapy). As a result, OASPA terminated Dove Press’s membership in November 2013

Dove Press has also featured a number of times on the Retraction Watch site. In 2014, for instance, the site reported on the retraction of a Dove Press paper following heated media criticism of claims that green coffee bean extract could help people lose weight. This led to the authors of the Dove Press paper issuing a retraction note that said the “sponsors of the study cannot assure the validity of the data”. The US Federal Trade Commission also investigated the matter, and this led to a settlement in which a Texas-based company was required to “pay $3.5 million, and to have scientific substantiation for any future weight-loss claims it makes.” (See also here).

And in 2014 a researcher complainedthat Dove Press’s peer reviewer form did not offer reviewers an option to reject papers.

It is therefore unsurprising that Dove Press at one time featured on Jeffrey Beall’s list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”. In April 2010 Beal also included Dove Press and Libertas Academica (the latter, claimed Beall, was a Dove Press brand rather than a separate company) in a comparative review he published in The Charleston Adviser entitled “Predatory” Open-Access Scholarly Publishers.

And it is unsurprising that Dove Press’s membership of OASPA has been an on/off affair. The publisher joined OASPA in late 2009, but withdrew on 7^thApril 2010. It applied again in May 2012, and was accepted on 12^th July 2012. As noted, following the Sciencesting it had its membership terminated by OASPA (on 5^th November 2013). But it applied again in June 2015 and was accepted back into the organisation on 23^rd September 2015. Dove Press is currently still a member of OASPA.

The publisher is also no longer on Beall’s list, and it is currently a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Transparency

Personally, I also feel there is insufficient transparency at Dove Press. When I interviewed Tim Hill in 2008 I asked him who owned the company. In response he would say only that it was “created by a group of former publishing executives, mostly from ADIS International” (now part of Springer), and that the company was owned by “six private individuals.”

And I believe that OASPA asked for too little information about the ownership of Dove Press when the publisher first joined.

Here the discussion becomes a little entangled with Libertas Academica. Since commentators like Beall and Eysenbach were claimingthat Libertas Academica and Dove Press are the same company I also asked Tim Hill what if any connection there was between the two companies. Hill replied, “There is no connection other than a familial one. My son, Thomas, owns and operates Libertas Academica.”

A year later I interviewedson Tom Hill, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as being the Publisher and CEO of Libertas Academica. When I asked him who owned the company he declined to say, on the grounds that it is a “privately held company”. And while he was willing to say that he personally had an ownership stake in the company he declined to say what that was. When I asked him if his father had an ownership stake in Libertas Academica, or any involvement in the company, his reply was a simple “No”.

When the Amy Bishop killing took place I did some research on New Zealand Companies House. This suggested to me that Tim Hill didhave a stake in Libertas Academica. In fact, the records indicate that it was Tim Hill who in 2004 registeredthe company, and who was at that time the sole shareholder and director. When I spoke to Tom Hill in 2009, his father Tim still appeared to be registeredas a shareholder, as were Tom Hill, Ann Shirley Hill, and a couple of trusts.

In 2010 I emailed both Hills and asked them to clarify the situation. Tim replied that I had no legitimate business to ask the question, but added, “In light of your continued pursuit of this private matter I have checked with my lawyers and note that my initial directorship of Libertas had not been cancelled as they were instructed to do in 2005. This has now been done and Tom is the only director of Libertas Academica … [and] … I confess, yes, I personally own 1% of Libertas Academica.”

He went on to say, “Our Family trust owns several assets including equity in publishing companies, real estate etc.”  He added that he had nothing to hide and always tried to be open, but “I draw the line at my personal financial and tax arrangements”.

And he ended his email: “Henceforth I will not be providing you with any comment or information on any subject.”

The response from son Tom Hill was similar. Initially he did not reply to my email, so I sent him a reminder – to which he replied, “I have no comment to make on your earlier email. Please cease immediately and permanently sending any further emails to me on this or any other matter.”

Personally, I felt these to be excessive responses to my question. I certainly wasn’t seeking any tax information, and since I had only asked the question twice (with a two-year gap between) I fail to see how it could be classified as “continued pursuit”. Moreover, as the ownership details of New Zealand and UK companies are held in a freely available public database I don’t see how this kind of information can be classified as private.

Be that as it may, New Zealand Companies House records that Tim Hill did resign his directorship in Libertas Academica, on 22^nd February 2010. However, he still appears to have had a shareholding in the company in June 2011, before being finally removed from the register in June 2014. It may be that I am misreading the Companies House data. If so, I apologise to both Hills in advance. My problem is that they have boycotted me, so it difficult to check facts with them.

Does it matter?

But does Tim Hill’s involvement with Libertas Academica have any relevance to this discussion? Some might feel it does, not least because during the period he was a director/shareholder of Libertas Academica this publisher too experienced a number of controversial incidents. In 2008, for instance, there were complaintsabout a paper published in a Libertas Academica journal called Theoretical Biology Insights. The concern was that the paper appeared to suggest that the complete state of all human brains might somehow be encoded in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Responding to the criticism, Tom Hill explainedthat the paper had been inappropriately published as a result of “a database error caused by a server upgrade.” The paper subsequently disappeared, but what exactly happened is not clear today as at some point the journal itself disappeared – although there is an echo of it in the Internet Archive, and a blank Editorial Board page here. Again, since I have been boycotted by Tom Hill I cannot seek clarification from him.

However, aware that Libertas Academica is a member of the archival service CLOCKSS I contacted them. A spokesperson informed me that since a “trigger event” never took place the journal was not archived at CLOCKSS. “In the case of Theoretical Biology Insights, my guess is that we were not aware of its existence,” he said. “If we had been aware of it, I think we would have asked Libertas about triggering it. In principle a CLOCKSS-participating publisher should archive all of its journals in CLOCKSS; in this case, that didn’t quite happen, but our preference would have been that Libertas archived it with us and then we had triggered it.”

In any case, the spokesperson added, “No DOIs for the journal are registered in CrossRef. DOIs are a reference point for journals to meet a certain level of credibility, which this journal did not have.”

Subsequently, in January 2010, I was contacted anonymously by someone complaining that one of Libertas Academica’s journals – Autism Insights – was being used as a vehicle to propagate the ideas of the discredited medical researcher Andrew Wakefield. To this end, the anonymous informant said, its editorial board was dominated by members of Wakefield’s Thoughtful House Center for Children, and included Wakefield himself. As the informant contacted me just prior to Tom Hill boycotting me I emailed Hill for a response. He replied that the journal’s EiC did not wish to respond to the allegation, and neither did he.

While Autism Insights is no longer published the back issuesare available on CLOCKSS. However, the list of editorial board members appears to have disappeared. “I am afraid,” the CLOCKSS spokesperson told me, that “the publisher did not provide us an Editorial Board for archiving.”

Ownership and management of Dove Press

But let’s return to Dove Press. As noted, in 2008 Tim Hill declined to say who owns the company. In terms of senior management, the publisher’s website currently states: “Philip Smith and Kevin Toale are the Executive Directors based in the UK, and Tim Hill is the Publisher based in New Zealand.”

What about its locations? Dove Press’s New Zealand registered address is that of a chartered accountancy in Auckland (the same address as for Libertas Academica). Dove Press’s UK registered address is 97 Judd Street in London, and its web site indicates that the address for the editorial office is a PO Box in Corinthian Drive Albany, Auckland. The head office is at Beechfield House in Macclesfield, Cheshire.

It is not easy to make contact with the UK executives as their email addresses do not seem to be available. The couple of times I tried to call the head office I got an answer machine. There is a contact form on the web site, but I assume this is fed to Tim Hill, who has said he will not respond to any further messages from me. Dove Press’s membership details on the OASPA site dooffer an email address (publisher@dovepress.com). Again, however, this presumably goes to Tim Hill.

Elsewhere, Dove Press’s About Pagelists a “Medical Director” called Scott Fraser, who is a Consultant in the North East of the UK. Again his email address is not provided, but in 2010 I did manage to locate his institutional email address and emailed him there. My message went unanswered.  

Tim Hill’s unwillingness to give me information about the ownership of Dove Press seems odd in light of the fact that it is freely available in public databases. New Zealand Companies House, for instance, reveals that Dove Medical Press (NZ) is majority owned (99%) by UK-based Dove Medical Press Limited (with 1% held in the name of Ann Shirley Hill).

UK Companies House lists 5 current officers of Dove Press and 8 shareholders. The shareholders include The T & A Hill Family Trust, Kevin Toale, and Philip Smith. Another shareholder is Graeme Peterson. Peterson is also recorded as being the Managing Director and Company Secretary of Dove Press.

On his LinkedIn page Peterson describes himself as an experienced healthcare professional and CEO and MD of The Prime Medical Group, a company, he says, that partners with pharmaceutical clients “to create and deliver medical education and communication programmes with global, regional or national implementation.” I take this to mean that it is a medical education and communications company (MECC).

Prime Medical Group has a number of associated businesses, including Prime Medica, Core Medica, Only Oncology, and Prime HealthCare Ltd, all based in Knutsford, Cheshire, and all of which seem to be in the MECC business. Peterson’s various directorships can be viewed here.

I could find no mention of Dove Press on Peterson’s LinkedIn page. I was also unable to find any mention of him on the Dove Press web site. To try and establish why, I sent a LinkedIn contact request to Peterson, a request he accepted. I followed up with a question about Dove Press but had received no reply by the time I posted this.  By doing a number of web searches I eventually discovered an email address for Kevin Toale. My message to that address remained unanswered at the time I published this.

Other Dove Press shareholders listed in the company’s Annual Return include JSI Communications, a company owned by one of the Dove Press directors, John Stolz. On his LinkedIn pageStolz describes himself as a former medical writer for ADIS International. JSI, he explains, plans and implements medical writing projects on behalf of pharmaceutical company clients. In 2005 Stolz was describing himself as Commissioning Editor for Dove Press.

Also listed as a Dove Press shareholder is William Dolben, whom I take to be the founder and CEO of Content Ed Net, a company that describes itself as the second largest seller of reprints to the global pharmaceutical industry. On his LinkedIn page, Dolben says he is a former ADIS and Wolters Kluwer Exec VP.

As noted, Tim Hill expressed the belief that I have no legitimate reason to ask him about the ownership of Libertas Academica, and he refused to say who owns Dove Press, presumably because – like his son – he viewed it to be private information.

However, in many countries (including the UK and New Zealand) the law requires that this information is supplied to a relevant government agency, which in turn has to make it available for public inspection. In the UK, this information is required under the Companies Act 2006. As Companies House explains, making this information public does not conflict with the Data Protection Act because “personal data is exempt if the data controller is duty bound to make it available to the public.”

Indeed, company information has itself become open access in many countries. This means there is now no charge to view it online, and it can be linked to directly – e.g. hereand here. Perhaps in recognition of this in 2015 Dove Press included a link to Companies House on its About page. (The link was not there up until 2014).

Beyond that, it seems to me that since the bulk of their revenue comes from the public purse there is an onus on scholarly publishers (even if private companies) to be transparent about both their ownership and their finances. There is also a view that in committing to open access, a publisher should be presumed to have committed to greater openness in all aspects of its business. As publishing consultant Joe Esposito has put it, “Let’s be open about open access.”

But what is most puzzling to me is why simply asking for ownership information led to a journalist (me) being boycotted by a publisher, with the publisher saying that he will not provide that journalist with any further comment or information about anything!

What level of commitment to open access?

All of which leads me to a final question: how committed is Dove Press to open access? Certainly its attitude to licensing suggests it is not as committed as OA advocates might like. For instance, where OA advocates believe that the norm for open access should be use of the CC BY licence (and indeed OASPA “strongly encourages” its use), Dove Press insists on using the CC BY NC licence. While the copyright appears in the name of the authors of papers, the licensing information says, “Permissions beyond the scope of the License are administered by Dove Medical Press Limited.” In other words, Dove Press is able to earn money on top of the fee it charges authors to publish their papers, none of which I assume finds its way back to the authors.

Doubtless for this reason, on its permissions page Dove Press expressly prohibits a number of uses of the content it publishes, unless further payment is made. And presumably in order to ensure this, its articles all include a link to the Copyright Clearance Center’s permission form.

After playing around with the CCC permission form it seemed to me that if a business wanted to print out and photocopy on high quality paper a 9-page Dove Press article in order to, say, mail it to 200 doctors, the cost would be $13,803.50 (or $ 69,003.50 for 1,000 doctors). This is income, remember, that Dove Press can earn on top of the $2,310per paper that it charges authors in order to make their work open access.

It is also worth pointing out that although Dove Press implies – both on its own website and on the LJ web site – that it is celebrating 10 years of commitment to open access this is not strictly accurate. When I spoke to Tim Hill eight years ago he told me that the company was conceived as a subscription business, not an open access publisher, and it was at that time still selling subscriptions, and charging users pay-per-view fees of $59 per paper.

Finally, with many now calling for open peer review, some might feel Dove Press’s single blind peer review process to be a little out of keeping with the spirit of the times. Dove Press reviewers (who can vary from 2to 4) are not named, and the reviews remain secret.

Let me stress once again that I make no claim about the probity or otherwise of Dove Press. I am working on the assumption that it is an honest and well-meaning organisation, and its directors and shareholders upstanding members of the community. But the way I see it is that a company that has over the years been involved in a number of controversial incidents, that appears to have a less than full commitment to open access, and which has boycotted a journalist simply for posing ownership questions, is now asking that journalist (by proxy, via LJ) to endorse it – which is what I feel I would be doing were I to accept LJ’s invitation to feature on a Dove Press-sponsored web site. I hope readers can understand why I do not wish to do that.  

What does also surprise me is that LJ did not ask me to explain why I feel uncomfortable about accepting its invitation, and the managing editor did not respond to my enquiry about its Dove Press-sponsored Open Access in Action website.