All posts by Office of Scholarly Communication

Walking the talk- reflections on working ‘openly’

Uncategorized, ,

As part of Open Access Week 2016, the Office of Scholarly Communication is publishing a series of blog posts on open access and open research. In this post Dr Lauren Cadwallader discusses her experience of researching openly.

Earlier this year I was awarded the first Altmetric.com Annual Research grant to carry out a proof-of-concept study looking at using altmetrics as a way of identifying journal articles that eventually get included into a policy document. As part of the grant condition I am required to share this work openly. “No problem!” I thought, “My job is all about being open. I know exactly what to do.”

However, it’s been several years since I last carried out an academic research project and my previous work was carried out with no idea of the concept of open research (although I’m now sharing lots of it here!). Throughout my project I kept a diary documenting my reflections on being open (and researching in general) – mainly the mistakes I made along the way and the lessons I learnt. This blog summarises those lessons.

To begin at the beginning

I carried out a PhD at Cambridge not really aware of scholarly best practice. The Office of Scholarly Communication didn’t exist. There wasn’t anyone to tell me that I should share my data. My funder didn’t have any open research related policies. So I didn’t share because I didn’t know I could, or should, or why I would want to.

I recently attended The Data Dialogue conference and was inspired to hear many of the talks about open data but also realised that although I know some of the pitfalls researchers fall into I don’t quite feel equipped to carry out a project and have perfectly open and transparent methods and data at the end. Of course, if I’d been smart enough to attend an RDM workshop before starting my project I wouldn’t feel like this!

My PhD supervisor and the fieldwork I carried out had instilled in me some practices that are useful to carrying out open research:.

Lesson #1. Never touch your raw data files

This is something I learnt from my PhD and found easy to apply here. Altmetric.com sent me the data I requested for my project and I immediately saved it as the raw file and saved another version as my working file. That made it easy when I came to share my files in the repository as I could include the raw and edited data. Big tick for being open.

Getting dirty with the data

Lesson #2. Record everything you do

Another thing I was told to do during my PhD lab work was to record everything you do. And that is all well and good in the lab or the field but what about when you are playing with your data? I found I started cleaning up the spreadsheet Altmetric.com sent and I went from having 36 columns to just 12 but I hadn’t documented my reasons for excluding large swathes of data. So I took a step back and filled out my project notebook explaining my rationale. Documenting every decision at the time felt a little bit like overkill but if I need to articulate my decisions for excluding data from my analysis in the future (e.g. during peer review) then it would be helpful to know what I based my reasoning on.

Lesson #3. Date things. Actually, date everything

I’d been typing up my notes about why some data is excluded and others not so it informs my final data selection and I’d noticed that I’d been making decisions and notes as I go along but not recording when. If I’m trying to unpick my logic at a later date it is helpful if I know when I made a decision. Which decision came first? Did I have all my ‘bright ideas’ on the same day and now the reason they don’t look so bright is was because I was sleep deprived (or hungover in the case of my student days) and not thinking straight. Recording dates is actually another trick I learnt as a student – data errors can be picked up as lab or fieldwork errors if you can work back and see what you did when – but have forgotten to apply thus far. In fact, it was only at this point that I began dating my diary entries…

Lesson #4. A tidy desk(top) is a tidy mind

Screen Shot 2016-10-24 at 13.21.11I was working on this project just one day a week over the summer so every week I was having to refresh my mind as to where I stopped the week before and what my plans were that week. I was, of course, now making copious notes about my plans and dating decisions so this was relatively easy. However, upon returning from a week’s holiday, I opened my data files folder and was greeted by 10 different spreadsheets and a few other files. It took me a few moments to work out which files I needed to work on, which made me realise I needed to do some housekeeping.

Aside from making life easier now, it will make the final write up and sharing easier if I can find things and find the correct version. So I went from messy computer to tidy computer and could get back to concentrating on my analysis rather than worrying if I was looking at the right spreadsheet.

 

Lesson #5. Version control

One morning I had been working on my data adding in information from other sources and everything was going swimmingly when I realised that I hadn’t included all of my columns in my filters and now my data was all messed up. To avoid weeping in my office I went for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Upon returning to my desk I crossed my fingers and managed to recover an earlier version of my spreadsheet using a handy tip I’d found online. Phew! I then repeated my morning’s work. Sigh. But at least my data was once again correct. Instead of relying on handy tips discovered by frantic Googling, just use version control. Archive your files periodically and start working on a new version. Tea and biscuits cannot solve everything.

Getting it into the Open

After a couple more weeks of problem free analysis it was time to present my work as a poster at the 3:AM Altmetrics conference. I’ve made posters before so that was easy. It then dawned on me at about 3pm the day I needed to finish the poster that perhaps I should share a link to my data. Cue a brief episode of swearing before realising I sit 15ft away from our Research Data Advisor and she would help me out! After filling out the data upload form for our institutional repository to get a placeholder record and therefore DOI for my data, I set to work making my spreadsheet presentable.

Lesson #6. Making your data presentable can be hard work if you are not prepared

I only have a small data set but it took me a lot longer than I thought it would to make it sharable. Part of me was tempted just to share the very basic data I was using (the raw file from Altmetric.com plus some extra information I had added) but that is not being open to reproducibility. People need to be able to see my workings so I persevered.

I’d labelled the individual sheets and the columns within those sheets in a way that was intelligible to me but not necessarily to other people so they all needed renaming. Then I had to tidy up all the little notes I’d made in cells and put those into a Read Me file to explain some things. And then I had to actually write the Read Me file and work out the best format for it (a neutral text file or pdf is best).

I thought I was finished but as our Research Data Advisor pointed out, my spreadsheets were returning a lot of errors because of the formula I was using (it was taking issue with me asking it to divide something by 0) and that I should share one file that included the formulae and one with just the numbers.

If I’d had time, I would have gone for a cup of tea and a biscuit to avoid weeping in the office but I didn’t have time for tea or weeping. Actually producing a spreadsheet without formulae turned out to be simple once I’d Googled how to do it and then my data files were complete. All I then needed to do was send them to the Data team and upload a pdf of my poster to the repository. Job done! Time to head to the airport for the conference!

Lesson #7. Making your work open is very satisfying.

Just over three weeks have passed since the conference and I’m amazed that already my poster has been viewed on the repository 84 times and my data has been viewed 153 times! Wowzers! That truly is very satisfying and makes me feel that all the effort and emergency cups of tea were worth it. As this was a proof-of-concept study I would be very happy for someone to use my work, although I am planning to keep working on it. Seeing the usage stats of my work and knowing that I have made it open to the best of my ability is really encouraging for the future of this type of research. And of course, when I write these results up with publication in mind it will be as an open access publication.

But first, it’s time for a nice relaxed cup of tea.

Published 25 October 2016
Written by Dr Lauren Cadwallader
Creative Commons License

Who is paying for hybrid?

Uncategorized, , , ,

In our related blog ‘Hybrid Open Access  – an analysis‘ we explored the origins and issues with hybrid open access. Here we describe what funders are allowing or not in relation to payments for hybrid Open Access APCs.

Funding agencies and hybrid

Of the 179 Open Access funds listed in the Open Access Directory, 99 (55%) do not allow hybrid publishing; 78 (44%) do, or do not specify. The two remaining funds (1%) allow hybrid but either discourage it or require that the publisher have an offsetting scheme in place. This shows a strong move away from hybrid since 2014, when only 39% of funds rejected hybrid – a rejection of hybrid is now the majority position.

What’s more, these anti-hybrid funders now include some major organisations, particularly in Europe. The EU FP7 post-grant pilot, for example, is only open to authors publishing in fully Open Access journals, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) has considered hybrid ineligible for funds since December 2015.

According to a news story in Nature in January this year, the Norwegian Research Council and the German Research Foundation both pay Open Access fees for researchers but do not permit the payment of hybrid costs. The Austrian Science Fund has capped Open Access payments at a certain level; if researchers want to publish in more expensive journals (often the hybrids), they must find the extra cash themselves.

In 2013 Science Europe declared in a position statement that:

The Science Europe member organisations […] stress that the hybrid model, as currently defined and implemented by publishers, is not a working and viable pathway to Open Access. Any model for transition to Open Access supported by Science Europe member organisations must prevent ‘double dipping’ and increase cost transparency.

UK funders’ position on hybrid

The Wellcome Trust, while not yet abandoning hybrid entirely, voiced considerable wariness in its 2014-15 report, and has warned that stricter action will follow if there is not an improvement in publisher behaviour:

We believe declaring that Wellcome funds cannot be used to pay for hybrid OA is too blunt an instrument, unfairly penalising those publishers which provide a good service at a reasonable price, and that it would slow down the transition to a fully OA world – the position we ultimately want to get to.

However, doing nothing is no longer a valid option.  If hybrid publishers are unable to commit to the Wellcome Trust’s set of requirements and do not significantly improve the quality of the service, then classifying those hybrid journals as “non-compliant” will be an inevitable next step.

In 2015 RCUK published an independent review into the implementation of their Open Access policy which, while notably less combative on the issue of hybrid, nevertheless noted the expensiveness of the option and suggested potential future action:

The panel noted that average APCs for articles published in hybrid journals were consistently more expensive than in fully open access journals (despite the fact that hybrid journals still enjoyed a revenue stream through subscriptions). The panel recommends that RCUK continues to monitor this and if these costs show no sign of being responsive to market forces, then a future review should explore what steps RCUK could take to make this market more effective.

In the Universities UK Open Access Coordination Group’s report “Open access to research publications – Independent advice” the author, Professor Adam Tickell noted:

An alternative approach would be to consider whether funding Gold Open Access in Hybrid Journals where there are no equivalent offsets in subscription costs is a good use of public funds. During the course of working on this report, I met with the Publishers Association and Elsevier and I do not believe that the major publishers would find this slight change of course challenging.

Library funds and hybrid

In January this year the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) published Library Open Access Funds in Canada: review and recommendations. Amongst the summary of fund management recommendations was  ‘do not  fund hybrid journals‘.

SPARC maintains an Open Access Campus Funds page, which provides advice. The document “Campus-based open-access publishing funds: a practical guide to design and implementation” contains a whole section on deciding whether to support hybrid, noting “Many institutions that have functioning Open-access Funds have indicated that the toughest decision they made concerned hybrid journal eligibility”.

US library-run funds

Zuniga, H. & Hoffecker, L. (2016). Managing an Open Access Fund: Tips from the Trenches and Questions for the Future. Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, 1(1), 1-13 discusses the thinking behind a library-run Open Access fund at University of Colorado Health Sciences Library and specifies that funding will only be available for fully Open Access journals and not hybrid ones.

A recent discussion on one of the lists (which is dominated by American institutions) about library funds for open access revealed the very strong preference to support only fully Open Access journals. Of the responses from the US libraries, nine funds did not support hybrid and two did under particular circumstances. The US is not subject to the gold Open Access policies that the UK is:

  • University of Rhode Island only supports “articles published in fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals” that are listed in the DOAJ with its Open Access Fund
  • Texas A&M University Libraries’ Open Access to Knowledge Fund (OAKFund) notes “”Hybrid” Open Access publication venues and publication venues with delayed Open Access models are ineligible.”
  • The University of Pittsburgh’s Open Access Fee Author Policy states “Journals with a hybrid open-access model or delayed open-access model are not eligible.”
  • The One University Open Access (OA) AuthorFund at the University of Kansas supports only publication in “an entirely open access journal. Journals with a hybrid open-access model or delayed open-access model are not eligible”. A definition of hybrid journal is provided. – 2015 article in JLSC “Campus Open Access Funds: experiences of the KU “One University” Open access author fund”.
  • Cornell University’s Open Access Publication Fund does not mention hybrid specifically but the wording implies the fund supports only fully Open Access journals, noting “Since open access publishers do not charge subscription or other access fees, they must cover their operating expenses through other sources.”
  • Concordia University’s Open Access Author Fund states “the article must be published in a fully open access journal. Traditional subscription-based or ‘hybrid’ journals that offer an open access option for a fee are not eligible.”
  • University of Oklahoma’s Open Access (OA) Subvention Fund Policy refers to “true open access journals”, noting “Articles with a hybrid or delayed OA model are not eligible through this fund”
  • The information about University of California San Francisco’s Open Access Publishing Fund includes a section about why it does not support hybrid
  • Northwestern University’s Open Access Fund describes an acceptable open access journal as a “journal published in a fully open access format based on a published schedule of article processing fees”

That said, there were a couple that are considering support for hybrid:

  • Wayne State University’s Scholars Cooperative Open Access Fund states “Hybrid open access arrangements (“paid open access” or “open choice”) may be considered on a case-by-case basis”.
  • Wake Forest University Open Access Fund does support hybrid, but the cost for all open access is split three ways between the Library the Research Office and the author.
UK library-run funds

In November last year the UCL, Newcastle and Nottingham Universities published the results of a survey with Jisc: “Institutional policies on the use of Open Access Funds“. The report noted that of the respondents 18 institutions in the UK had a central institutional fund (not provided by RCUK/COAF). The report noted there were different approaches to using these central funds. At the time four institutions paid for papers in fully Open Access journals only; four paid for papers in both fully Open Access and hybrid journals, without encouraging authors in favour of Green or Gold; and five institutions encourage authors to choose Green where possible.

In response to a list query in October 2016 (which is not a comprehensive survey by any means), there was a mixture of arrangements in the UK library-run funds. Four funds did not support hybrid, four did, and there were three that supported them in particular circumstances.

Some UK funds are primarily non-hybrid with a small number of exceptions.

  • University College London has a fund which provides limited funds “for other UCL corresponding authors who are full (not honorary or visiting) members of staff or students where the funder does not cover open access charges”. This fund generally only pays for papers in fully OA journals. When it comes to hybrids the policy is very much to recommend Green, but the fund does occasionally pay for papers in hybrid journals “where the author makes a case for it”.
  • The University of Bath has a Bath open access fund  for journals that operate “a ‘Gold’ or paid Open Access model only AND the journal is a Q1 title as measured by Journal Citation Reports or SciMago Journal Indicators”. Note that this fund will support hybrid by exception, with Associate Dean agreement.
  • Lancaster University has a small fund available with strict criteria for when it can be used.  The research paper must both be likely to be rated as 4* in the next REF and be the most appropriate place to publish and does not offer a compliant green route or is an open access only journal. Applications need approval from the Heads of Department and Associate Dean for Research.

Other funds do not distinguish between hybrid and fully OA journals:

  • King’s College London are in the second pilot year of an Open Scholarship Fund which currently does not distinguish between hybrid and full open access journals – but this may be considered if the funds are exhausted.
  • Northumbria University Newcastle has an institutional Open Access fund to cover APCs in both fully gold and hybrid journals.
  • Liverpool University has an institutional open access fund here that has very minimal criteria (CC BY, no retrospective OA, no page or colour charges) that pays both hybrid and fully OA APCs. The fund is reviewed every six months.
  • Queen Mary University will be starting to offer a small institutional fund this year to cover non funded research which will support hybrid

There are some UK institutions where no central fund exists but Departments or Faculties have established their own funds with their own rules.

Conclusions

The increase in funds that do not allow payment for hybrid since 2014 indicates that increasingly the gloss has come off hybrid. Originally considered to be a transition method towards fully Open Access journals, the lack of movement towards this outcome has meant a tightening by funders on what can be spent on hybrid. It will be interesting to revisit this in another two years’ time.

Published 24 October 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley and Dr Philip Boyes 
Creative Commons License

Hybrid open access – an analysis

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Welcome to Open Access Week 2016. The Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge is celebrating with a series of blog posts, announcements and events. In today’s blog posts we revisit the issue of paying for hybrid open access. We have also published a related post “Who is paying for hybrid?” listing funder policies on hybrid.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of funder open access mandates, the terms of which can differ markedly, adding to the confusion of an already complex area. The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) lists 80 funders with open access requirements, and the list continues to grow.

Within the UK, policies fall into three broad categories: those that mandate green Open Access without paying a fee, such as the HEFCE policy; those that prefer gold but make no additional funds available, such as the NIHR policy, and those that have a preference for gold and offer block grants to institutions to help cover the associated costs, such as the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Charities Open Access Fund (COAF) policies.

Accompanying this expansion of mandates, unsurprisingly, has been an increase in the amount being spent to support Open Access. The Open Access Directory lists 179 funds for OA journal articles worldwide, compared with 81 in early 2014.

All this brings into sharper relief the question of how open access funds support hybrid publishing. But first a quick history lesson.

Hybrid origins

Hybrid journals provide open access to specific articles where an Article Processing Charge has been paid in an otherwise subscription journal. A few learned societies offered hybrid options in the early 2000s. Hybrid open access options were first offered by large publishers in 2004 with Springer’s Open Choice product charging USD3000 per article. This price has not changed in the past 12 years. In the UK the Springer Compact now pays for hybrid under a different model.

Wiley Online Open’s trial began the same year, charging USD2500. Today the price ranges from USD1,500 – 5,200. Oxford Open launched in 2005, and in 2006 Elsevier Open Access and Sage Choice began. In 2007, Taylor & Francis Open Select, Cambridge Open and Nature Publishing Group’s open access offering began.

The uptake of hybrid began slowly. It is very difficult to obtain statistics on what percentage of journals have hybrid Open Access content but in his 2012 analysis The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles – a failed experiment?, (open access version here ) Bo-Christer Bjork found the number of hybrid journals had doubled in the previous couple of years to over 4,300, and the number of such articles was around 12,000 in 2011. This represented a small proportion of eligible authors (1-2 %).

That analysis was published the same year as the Finch Report which recommended a gold path to Open Access. The resulting RCUK Open Access Policy and RCUK Block Grants to fund Open Access APCs has dramatically increased the  expenditure on hybrid in the UK since 2013. According to a report published in 2015, “the UK’s profile of OA take-up is significantly different from the global averages: its use of OA in hybrid journals and of delayed OA journals is more than twice the world average in both cases, while its take-up of fully OA journals with no APC (Gold-no APC) is less than half the world average and falling.”

At Cambridge University we have spent literally millions of pounds on hybrid Open Access – which constitutes approximately 85% of our total APC spend. This is a higher percentage than estimates across the country, which are a 76% spend on hybrid Open Access.

Double dipping

Hybrid represents a second income stream to publishers and has raised questions about ‘double dipping’. Some publishers manage this by reducing the cost of subscriptions in proportion to the percentage of hybrid in a given journal, such as Nature Publishing Group. However ‘big deals’ for subscriptions can render this relatively ineffective, and the reduction is spread across all subscribers, regardless of who has paid the article processing charge. This means research intensive institutions (such as Cambridge) are contributing heavily to the system but not receiving a relative reduction.

To address this issue at a local level, several publishers have created offsetting arrangements, where discounts or refunds are provided in proportion to the contribution the institution has made in APC payments above subscriptions. However, each of these schemes operates differently and they can be complicated to administer, or have other preconditions such making large prepayments to publishers.

The biggest problem from an implementation perspective, however, is that they are by no means universal. By far the biggest publisher, Elsevier, for example, offers no form of offsetting at all, although they nevertheless assert that they do not double dip. The result is that in very many cases, institutions and authors continue to have to pay twice for material in hybrid journals, swelling publisher coffers at the expense of research funding.

Very expensive

One of the problems with hybrid is that even ignoring the added cost of subscriptions to the non Open Access material in those journals, hybrid Open Access charges are more expensive than those for fully Open Access journals.

In March last year both the Wellcome Trust and the RCUK undertook a review of their Open Access policies. The Reckoning: An Analysis of Wellcome Trust Open Access Spend 2013 – 14  noted: “The average APC levied by hybrid journals is 64% higher than the average APC charged by a fully OA title”.  In Wellcome’s data, the average APC for a hybrid article in 2014-15 was £2104, compared with only £1396 for fully OA journals. Worryingly, the data showed that fully OA APC costs had risen more than their hybrid counterparts since the previous year.

Similarly in the Research Councils UK 2014 Independent Review of Implementation the observation was that article processing charges for hybrid Open Access were “significantly more expensive” than fully OA journals, “despite the fact that hybrid journals still enjoyed a revenue stream through subscriptions”.

A Max Planck Digital Library Open Access Policy White Paper published on 28 April 2015 noted that The Wellcome Trust had a significantly higher average APC cost than German, Austrian and SCOAP3 figures. This was because the Wellcome Trust pays for hybrid APCs, “which are not only much higher than most pure open access costs but are also widely considered not to reflect a true market value. In Germany and many other countries, hybrid APCs are excluded from the central funding schemes.”

A study undertaken last year considered APCs in the five-year period between 2010 and 2014 found the mean for fully-OA journals published by non-subscription publishers was£1,136 compared with £1,849 for hybrid journals. The same study also found that traditional subscription publishers are capturing most of the APC market. The top-10 publishers in terms of numbers of APCs received from participant institutions (who received 76% of the total APCs paid from the sample) “only included two fully-OA publishers (PLOS and BMC). The others were established publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and so on) who are mostly gaining APC income from hybrid journals.”

The 2014 report Developing an effective market for open access article processing charges was written for a consortium of research funders comprising Jisc, Research Libraries UK, Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund, the Luxembourg National Research Fund and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. The authors noted of the hybrid journal market that it is “highly dysfunctional, with very low uptake for most hybrid journals and a relatively uniform price in most cases without regard to factors such as discipline or impact“.

Value for money?

A second issue which has become apparent as open access mandates have expanded is the extent to which publishers – mostly of hybrid journals – do not deliver the Open Access option that has been paid for. In many cases, the ‘immediate’ Open Access for which an author or institution has paid an APC may take months or even years to be made Open Access; some articles are never made Open Access at all. Even when articles are made available, there is no guarantee that it will have the appropriate licence. It is by no means uncommon for articles to carry more restrictive licences than those requested, or for the appropriate licence to appear on a journal website while the PDF of the article itself bears only a publisher copyright notice and a prominent ‘All rights reserved’.

In March 2016 the Wellcome Trust published a report into compliance among its paid-for articles in 2014-15, concluding:

The good news is that we have seen an improvement in correct and programmatically identifiable licences (from 61% of papers in ’13-‘14, to 70% in ’14-‘15) and a similar increase in overall compliance from 61% to 70%.  The bad news, however, is that in 30% of cases we are not getting what we are paying for.

The source of this non-compliance was overwhelmingly hybrid journals, and the largest publishers were the worst offenders: in the Wellcome data, 31% of Elsevier hybrid articles (and 26% of their ‘fully OA’ articles!) were non-compliant, as were 54% of Wiley’s.

One might conclude, then, that hybrid Open Access represents a bad deal for funders and institutions, with poor service and double-dipping.

Other hybrid issues

To further complicate matters, some have argued that the open access/hybrid dichotomy is too stark. Some journals, particularly coming from learned societies, (e.g. Plant Physiology, from the American Society of Plant Biologists) make all articles open access after a certain period, but charge an optional APC to make them available sooner. This would generally be considered hybrid publishing, but could be seen as a rather different category from the majority of corporate hybrid journals, in which articles never become Open Access unless an APC is paid. There is a possibility that strict funder mandates against hybrid could close off such journals to researchers, exacerbating the anxieties regarding open access felt by many learned societies.

Where does this leave authors and institutions? It’s clear that the situation remains very much in flux. The problems that have existed with hybrid since the beginnings of Open Access are far from resolved, despite the expansion of journal offsetting schemes. Meanwhile, prices continue to rise and while many funders have taken the step of allowing their funds to be used only for fully Open Access journals, it is still a minority of the largest and most powerful funding bodies.

The result is confusion for researchers and an increased administrative burden for institutions, who have to manage and advise on a proliferation of divergent funder and publisher policies, as well as conducting regular and extremely resource-intensive compliance-checking of hybrid publications to ensure publishers have delivered what has been paid for. As numbers of Open Access publications increase, it is questionable how sustainable this will be.

Published 24 October 2016
Written by Dr Philip Boyes and Dr Danny Kingsley 
Creative Commons License