Category Archives: Open Research at Cambridge Conference

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.

Open Research in Cambridge: 2022 in review

Open Research at Cambridge Conference, , ,

2022 has been another fantastic year for Open Research in Cambridge and I’m so proud of what we have achieved together as a community of researchers, library staff, technicians, administrators, publishers and more. I’d like to highlight some of the key themes in our work this year and thank all who have contributed to this work in any way throughout the year (though I have limited myself to naming chairs of workstrands below). The following video by our Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), Prof Anne Ferguson-Smith, gives an indication of the importance that the university places on this work.

Understanding disciplinary differences

I know that I’m not alone in hearing that researchers in Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences disciplines often feel a disconnect between the language and priorities of “Open Science” and their experiences of how research is conducted – this is one of the reasons we choose to frame it as “Open Research” here in Cambridge. I see a strong desire from many to engage with open research practices, paired with frustration with the challenges of translating the terminology of open science to other areas. In order to better understand these issues, we established two working groups (Open Research in the Humanities and Open Qualitative Research), each of which was tasked with forgetting what they think they should do due to how open science is generally described, and instead describe what they see as the opportunities for open research within their disciplines.

The Open Research in the Humanities group was chaired by Prof Emma Gilby and supported by Dr Matthias Ammon. Their excellent report is already available on Apollo and through a series of blog posts here on Unlocking Research. The Open Qualitative Research group was chaired by Dr Meg Westbury and their report is due to come to the university’s Open Research Steering Committee in January. We will be sharing this more widely in early 2023 – it’s well worth watching out for! Both reports will inform how we talk about Open Research at Cambridge and will shape the transformative programme that we are in the process of developing.

Research data management

Our small but dedicated Research Data team, led by Dr Sacha Jones, has had another impressive year. Our Data Champions Network goes from strength to strength, and has expanded into departments that have not been represented in previous years. Other key projects have included a review of our research data services with recommendations for future development, a project on electronic research notebooks, and lots of work to support open research system developments, all while continuing to support researchers with data deposits and writing data management plans. This team is expanding next year which will enable even more work to meet the needs of different disciplines.

The future of scholarly publishing

We hosted a series of three strategic workshops on the future of scholarly communication earlier this year, developed in collaboration between Cambridge University Libraries and Cambridge University Press. Led by independent facilitator Mark Allin, participants across disciplines and career stages came together to discuss the problems of scholarly communication, potential long-term solutions to these problems and a strategy to help Cambridge get us there. The proposals emerging from the meeting are currently being developed and include newly developed infrastructures for diamond open access publishing projects and a series of high-level strategic meetings aimed at strategic improvements to equity in academic publishing. There are already diamond publishing initiatives within Cambridge, and projects will start in early 2023 to understand existing initiatives in greater detail and to provide the infrastructure to establish additional diamond journals. 

The library’s annual Open Research Conference took a similar visionary approach in its focus on the future of open access. Titled Open Access: Where Next?, the conference featured expert speakers on how we can think beyond open access toward more innovative, sustainable and equitable open futures. We heard from researchers excluded by certain approaches to open access, how other researchers are addressing issues through their own scholar-led approaches, alongside how openness fits into changing research cultures and can facilitate experimental publishing projects. A full round up with videos of each session is available on the Unlocking Research blog.  My thanks to Dr Bea Gini for her leadership in planning this conference.

Open Access now

While we are actively working towards a new future for scholarly publishing, we also need to ensure that our researchers have ways to make their work open access right now. We do this in a number of ways, engaging with the academic community and contributing expert open access advice on publishing agreements that are negotiating across the sector and administering the block grants that are provided by funders and the university to cover the costs of publishing in fully open access venues. All of this requires close reading and interpretation of funder requirements to ensure that we are able to support our researchers in what they are required to as well as what they would like to do. I’d like to specifically thank Alexia Sutton, who leads our Open Access team, and Dr Samuel Moore, our Scholarly Communication Specialist, for their leadership in this area.

We are particularly pleased with the engagement from across the university with the ongoing Rights Retention Pilot, which provides a route to open access for articles that cannot be made immediately available through existing publishing deals, are not eligible for the block grants mentioned above or where the publisher simply does not provide any route to immediate open access. We are now consulting on the development of a Self-Archiving Policy which is buit on what we have learned throught he pilot and will sit within our Open Access Publications Policy Framework. Members of the university can find out more by reading this document (accessible to Raven users only). It has been an honour to lead a dedicated group of library and research staff on this project.

Open research systems

Everything we do requires that we have the right technical infrastructure in place. The Open Research Systems team is led by Dr Agustina Martinez-Garcia and based within Cambridge University Libraries’ Digital Initiatives directorate. This year has seen projects to upgrade links between Symplectic Elements and Apollo, technical changes to support the rights retention pilot, a review of the open research systems landscape, contributing to thinking around future publishing platforms, electronic research notebooks and data infrastructure, and planning ahead for the upgrade to DSpace 7, improvements in the thesis service, and building connections between DSpace repositories and Octopus. This is not a comprehensive list and we plan to showcase more of their work on the blog in 2023.

Research enquiries, briefings and training

I want to end with huge thanks to the library staff based both in the Office of Scholarly Communication and in the Faculty & Department Libraries who do so much throughout the year, answering frontline research support queries, signposting as required, providing tailored briefings and training on highly complex and constantly changing topics. We especially value the disciplinary insights we get through working closely with the Research Support Librarians that are based within the Schools.

Join our team!

Open Research is an incredibly rewarding area to work in and the scale of what we’re trying to achieve is really ambitious. I’m delighted that the importance of what we are doing is recognised by both Cambridge University Libraries and the wider university and as a result we are expanding our team!

We are currently recruiting for an Open Research Community Manager to establish and develop a Cambridge Open Research Community, bringing researchers across the university community together through regular online and in person events to enable exchange of expertise in open and rigorous research practices. In January, we plan to advertise for two Research Data Coordinators and an Open Research Administrator, with a Research Services Manager post following later in the year. All of these roles will be listed on the university’s jobs site as well as on LinkedIn, mailing lists etc. If you’re interested in our work and would like to find out more about these opportunities please get in touch at info@osc.cam.ac.uk!


Open access: where next? – event round-up

Open Research at Cambridge Conference, ,

Dr. Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist, Cambridge University Libraries

On Friday 18th November, participants from across Cambridge and beyond gathered for a hybrid meeting on the future of open access publishing. Hosted by Homerton College, ‘Open Access: Where Next?’ explored issues relating to article-processing charges, research assessment and innovation in scientific publishing. 65 in-person attendees and 78 online attendees participated in the day-long event consisting of four panels and a keynote from Professor Gina Neff of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Prof. Neff kicked off the event with a timely and insightful talk titled ‘Further than the academy: the stakes for open research’. Covering themes such as misinformation, preservation and widening participation in knowledge, Prof. Neff explored the importance of democratic and responsible approaches to our digital present and future, looking especially to libraries as key to supporting these issues.

The first panel of the day, ‘Further than privileged universities’, was introduced by Dr. Matthias Ammon and featured Dr. Juliet Vickery, Chief Executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, Dr. Tabitha Mwangi, Cambridge-Africa Programme Manager, and Dr. Stuart Pracy, Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Exeter. Each panellist spoke on the challenges of open access that arise from either being outside privileged university spaces or without secure employment within them. Despite representing quite different communities, there were a number of commonalities between the experiences of each speaker, most notably the fact that moving from paying to access scholarly material to paying to publish it added a new exclusionary dimension to their ability to communicate research.

In the second panel, we heard from three speakers who are working against the move toward paying to publish. ‘Further than APCs and BPCs’ featured speakers working on publishing projects that do not require authors to pay processing charges to publish their work – so-called Diamond open access. Cambridge librarians Dr Meg Westbury (Academic Services Librarian, Human and Social Sciences) and Dr Yvonne Nobis (Head of Physical Sciences libraries) described their respective publishing projects, The Journal of Information Literacy and Discrete Analysis. The audience learned about both the challenges around running a journal on a shoestring, but also the advantages of a DIY approach to publishing without recourse to expensive publishing networks. In addition, Dr. Joe Deville of Lancaster University explained the work of the soon-to-launch Open Book Collective to collaboratively fund the publication of open access books in the humanities and social sciences.

After lunch, Niamh Tumelty chaired a roundtable with Cambridge researchers on research assessment and its relationship with publishing. Prof. Steve Russell, Head of Department of Genetics, described his work as Chair of DORA (the Declaration on Research Assessment) alongside the work needed for the university to fulfil its commitment to ensuring researchers are no longer judged by the venues in which they publish. Following this, Liz Simmonds – the University’s Head of Research Culture – described the pros and cons of alternative approaches to assessment such as narrative CVs. Finally, Prof. Emma Gilby of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics explained the view from the humanities, particularly how declarations such as DORA are designed and implemented with the sciences in mind.

The final panel of the day was on innovations in scholarly publishing. Chaired by Dr. Samuel Moore, three panellists described their publishing approaches to moving beyond the traditional journal article. Dr. Mónica Moniz of Cambridge University Press & Assessment presented Research Directions – the press’ approach to publishing the research lifecycle across a variety of disciplinary questions. Following this, F1000’s Head of Data and Software Publishing, Dr. Beck Grant, described the publisher’s approach to automated data publishing in partnership with the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Finally, Dr. Damian Pattinson discussed eLife’s new approach to removing accept/reject decisions from its publishing process – and an invigorating discussion ensued!

At the end of the day, Niamh Tumelty summarised the event and reminded participants to fill out the postcards they were given at the start of the day to document what actions they will take in response to the issues covered in the conference. We will be posting these postcards to participants in January as a reminder of what you planned to do (with vouchers to three lucky recipients). Special thanks to all participants, attendees and organisers, but especially to Bea Gini for all her help with this, her last, event as part of the Office of Scholarly Communication. Thanks also to Clare Trowell for designing our postcards.