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Should the UK make a deal with Springer Nature?

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This is a guest post by Prof. Stephen J. Eglen on the concurrent negotiations between the UK academic sector and the publisher Springer Nature. Prof. Eglen is a Fellow of Magdalene College and Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. This post does not necessarily reflect the view of Cambridge University Libraries.

The UK academic sector is currently in discussion with Springer Nature around a renewed ‘read and publish’ deal for journal content. I understand that most institutions are likely to reject the current deal, but wish to continue negotiations. My position is that further discussions with Springer Nature are futile; we should stop accepting ‘transformative deals’. The likely effect of this deal would be that more of Springer Nature’s content may be openly available to read, but with the ‘paywall’ shifted to the publish side. Here I list my key objections:

  1. There is still no justification for the high APCs (9500 EUR + taxes) for Nature tier journals. Accepting a deal, regardless of the level of discounts that could be achieved, is implicitly accepting their business model. Springer Nature declined to engage with the Journal Comparison Service run by cOAlition S that aims to help understand how costs are determined.
  2. Springer Nature’s view is that ‘gold OA’ is the only viable way to open access. Other models for open access are available, and show promise, including diamond OA journals and Subscribe to Open. However, Springer Nature assert that “they haven’t found a way of making them financially sustainable”.  If we accept a gold-only view of open access,  how can we objectively assess the sustainability of alternative models?
  3. A move to a ‘gold only’ OA world would shift the barrier from reading to publishing content. Springer Nature recently announced a waiver policy for researchers from about 70 lower income countries. This still excludes many researchers worldwide e.g. from Brazil and South Africa, perpetuating neo-colonial attitudes towards the creation of scholarly content and reinforcing existing institutional inequalities within countries. Any waiver programme for APCs should be “no-questions-asked” regardless of where researchers are based. This would need to be properly costed and part of the justification of the APC (point 1).
  4. As of January 2023, several UK institutions have rights retention policies in place, with more expected to follow in the coming months. Individual researchers can also use rights retention strategy by themselves. Rights retention statements allow researchers to meet UK funder’s requirement by depositing their author-accepted manuscript without embargo. I believe Springer Nature should publicly state that they will allow any author worldwide to maintain their rights on their own author-accepted manuscripts.
  5. Over half of Springer Nature’s hybrid journals failed to meet their 2021 targets for open access articles within hybrid journals.  Those hybrid journals that fail again this year to meet their targets will be removed from cOAlition S’s transformative journal program.  Having some journals ineligible for cOAlition S funding but part of a UK read-and-publish deal would further complicate an already confusing system.  It would also question Springer Nature’s commitment to open access.

A detailed public critique of the deal is not possible because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.  Finances aside, I feel there was one element that was simply unworkable and unethical due to it requiring scholars to keep one aspect confidential if the deal were accepted.

The UK is one of only a few countries with a  heavy reliance on transformative agreements.  Sweden has already decided that transformative agreements are not sustainable and the transition period should finish at the end of 2024. Coalition S has also confirmed it will end its support of hybrid journals by the end of 2024. I would like to see the UK move away from transformative agreements. We could instead work internationally to promote more ethical and sustainable alternatives that put scholars at the heart of scholarly communication. In particular, the APC model has been tried, and introduces as many headaches as it has tried to solve. 

It is time instead to try new approaches.  There are several interesting models being developed by forward-looking organizations that the UK could endorse.  For example, MIT press recently launched shift+OPEN as a way to flip subscription based journals to diamond open access model.  Another interesting approach is Subscribe to Open where journals drop their paywall if a threshold amount of subscriptions are received.  Money saved on dealing with legacy publishers like Springer Nature is better spent investing in our own infrastructure and new approaches.

Springer negotiations: what’s our plan B? 

Policy development, Publishing, ,

The negotiations 

The UK universities sector is negotiating a read & publish deal with publisher Springer Nature. Reaching a transitional agreement is particularly important to make it easier for our authors to publish their work open access, as well as continuing to read all of Springer Nature’s content. The deal needs to be affordable for our sector, which is already under financial strain.  

The Jisc negotiating team and the University of Cambridge are committed to finding a deal that works well for us, that is our plan A. But we are aware that some previous negotiations between universities and publishers could not find enough mutual ground (for example UCLA and German universities). If a contract can’t be signed, what would that mean for our researchers? 

What would we keep access to? 

Our current deal with Springer Nature includes perpetual access to some of their catalogue. We would retain access to 69% of content we currently subscribe to, even if we have to walk away from negotiations without a deal. When clicking on these articles, you will be given automatic access if you are connected to a Cambridge network or VPN, or you would be able to gain access from elsewhere with your Raven credentials.  

Of course, we would only retain access to historic materials, not new publications. This means that the percentage of articles we have access to will slowly decline over time. The areas most impacted by the loss of access would be Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences and Clinical Medicine. But we have other plans to help people get access to the articles they require. 

How would we access other articles? 

If the University does not subscribe to an article you need to access, you would still be able to get hold of it, but the process is a little longer. The best thing to do is to install the Lean Library plugin on your device. Lean Library will look for open access content and allow you to access anything to which we retain post-cancellation access.  

If you can’t get access through Lean Library, Cambridge University Libraries will help you get the article through an inter-library loan or other routes. The exact process will depend on ongoing work, so look out for further communications about the details.  

How would we publish in Springer Nature journals?  

Open access publishing is a great way to ensure that everyone in the world can read and apply your work for free. Many funders now require open access as a condition for their funding. As an additional complication, funders including the UK research councils will not pay for open access in hybrid journals, which charge for both subscriptions and open access (what we sometimes call ‘double-dipping’), unless there are transitional read & publish deals in place, or the journal is a transformative journal.  

A read & publish deal would mean that the cost of open access publishing is covered by the libraries upstream, and researchers can publish at no additional cost. However, if a deal cannot be reached, many Springer Nature journals would remain hybrid journals. This means that many researchers would be required to publish open access, but have no access to central funds for this.  

The solution is the Rights Retention strategy. By signing a pilot agreement with the University and including a rights retention statement in their manuscript, authors will retain their rights to make the manuscript openly available immediately on our repository, Apollo. This way, they will fulfil their funder requirement without having to pay a penny.  

It should also be noted that some journals, such as Nature, have put into place specific provisions for researchers whose funders mandate open access.  

How will we find out more? 

The current contract runs until the end of December 2022 and we are assured of a grace period stretching to February 2023, during which access will continue if negotiations are ongoing.  

We will continue to update our website as more information becomes available. An announcement will be made by email across the University once the outcome of the negotiations is known. Please email info@osc.cam.ac.uk or speak to your librarian if you have any questions.  

Is a Rights Retention Clause needed for OA books?

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Dr. Rupert Gatti is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and co-founder of the non-profit Open Book Publishers.

In recent discussion about funder-imposed Rights Retention Strategies (RRS) I realised that there is an important consideration for funders of Open Access (OA) books and book chapters that differs significantly to the standard arguments for RRS with journal articles, and that I haven’t seen articulated elsewhere.

The standard motivation for applying RRS to article submissions is that it ensures that the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) can be shared and reused under a CC BY licence even if there are greater restrictions over reuse of the final published article. Consequently it allows the author to comply with a funder’s OA mandate without having to pay the publisher’s Article Processing Charge (APC) or requiring the publisher to apply a CC BY licence to the published version. 

(As an aside, such a licence applied to a submitted book manuscript would present no difficulties for Open Book Publishers (OBP) as we require, no –  we impose!, Rights Retention for authors in any case. OBP’s standard contract is that the author maintains all copyright control of their work and provides OBP only with a non-exclusive licence to publish their work in various printed and digital formats. So a RRS would provide no issues for us, or for any of the many other OA book publishers who adopt similar policies.)

In situations where a book is published under a more restrictive CC licence, rather than CC BY, I believe there is a separate case for funders to require that an author Rights Retention Clause be inserted into the final publishing contract the author signs with the publisher.

Many funders are, or have signalled that they will be, allowing more restrictive licences than CC BY for books and book chapters. I believe there ARE very good academic reasons why NC and/or ND licences are the appropriate ones to use in some situations, which typically revolve around the scholarly integrity of the work (for example when the material published is culturally sensitive). Humanities and Social Science scholars have been raising these concerns for several years now, and I agree with many of them. For me, the critical consideration is when the reasons used to justify restrictions on re-use are SCHOLARLY – and based around the scholarly integrity of the work – rather than commercial or based around the perceived needs or demands of the publisher. 

By design, when a title is published under one of these more restrictive licences (say NC-ND) anybody wanting to reuse components of the book will need to seek permission from the copyright holder, in much the same way as for an ‘all rights reserved’ work. Typically, for books, the publishers require the authors to assign the copyright, or controls over the copyright permissions, to them – which means that for the full extent of the copyright term (typically author’s lifetime + 90 years) it is the PUBLISHER that has control over and decides on any allowed reuse of the work, rather than the author. 

This, of course, breaks the scholarly argument for imposing the restrictive licence in the first place. If the material is culturally sensitive then it is the AUTHOR who needs to be making any reuse decisions – based on the author’s understanding of the sensitivities, and possibly in consultation with a community of people. The publisher often has none of that knowledge or understanding, and may allow reuses in inappropriate situations (especially if financial remuneration is involved) or not allow appropriate reuses (especially if sufficient financial remuneration is not involved). 

An example may be helpful. Let us suppose that a scholarly work on a culturally sensitive topic is published using a CC BY-NC-ND licence. It may matter enormously how and by whom any translation of the work is created, how the work is commercialised, the specific pronunciation used in any audio edition, or the nature of the images used to illustrate a subsequent edition. With control in the hands of the publisher, culturally insensitive derivative works may be approved, and new works that have been carefully created with the approval of the community may be denied.  

If a funding body is allowing the use of more restrictive licences on scholarly rather than solely commercial grounds – then it is surely also important to ensure that control over reuse of the content is maintained by the scholar/author rather than allowing the publisher to usurp those rights.  

To achieve that, the copyright assignment and reuse controls have to be assigned to the author within the publication contract signed by the author, and thus some form of Rights Retention Clause needs to be included. Without an explicit presubmission funder mandate, authors alone are unlikely to have sufficient bargaining power to ensure the inclusion of such a clause in the publishing contract they sign.

Of course this doesn’t fully resolve the situation when the author dies. By default it will be the author’s estate which heredits those rights and controls for the last 90 years of the copyright term, and they may be no more informed than the publisher about cultural sensitivities. So a further question arises: can/should a rights assignment for the period after the author’s death also be included or considered a requirement of the publishing contract in these circumstances? At the very least, this would seem to be something to encourage authors to consider and include in the publishing contract as well.

Finally, it may be worth noting that the standard RRS on the submitted manuscript alone is not sufficient in the situations described above, as without the proposed clause in the final contract the publisher will still have permission to approve inappropriate reuse of the final published work without need to consult the author.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Lucy Barnes, Stephen Eglen, Graham Stone, Alessandra Tosi and Niamh Tumelty for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

This blog has been cross-posted on the Open Book Publisher Blog: http://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/is-a-rights-retention-clause-needed-for-oa-books