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Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer?

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A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

The Netherlands has a clear position on Open Access. Sander Dekker, the State Secretary  of Education has taken a strong position on Open Access, stating at the opening of the 2014 academic year in Leiden that ‘Science is not a goal in itself. Just as art is only art once it is seen, knowledge only becomes knowledge once it is shared.’

Dekker has set two Open Access targets: 40% of scientific publications should be made available through Open Access by 2016, and 100% by 2024. The preferred route is through gold Open Access – where the work is ‘born Open Access’. This means there is no cost for readers – and no subscriptions.

However Gerard Meijer, who handles the negotiations with Elsevier, says that the parties have not been able to come close to an agreement.

Why is this boycott different?

It is true that boycotts have had different levels of success. In 2001, the Public Library of Science started as a non-profit organization of scientists ‘committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature freely accessible to both scientists and to the public’. In 2001 PLoS (as it was then) published an open letter asking signatories to pledge to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers. The links to that original pledge are no longer available. Over 30,000 people signed , but did not act on their pledge. In response, PLOS became an open access publisher themselves, launching PLOS Biology in October 2003.

In 2012 a Cambridge academic Tim Gowers started the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier which now has over 15,000 signatures of researchers agreeing not to write for, review for, or edit for Elsevier. In 2014 Gowers used a series of Freedom of Information requests to find out how much Elsevier is charging different universities for licence subscriptions. Usually this information is a tightly held secret, as individual universities pay considerably different amounts for access to the same material.

The 2015 Dutch boycott is significant. Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities.  It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

This boycott has the potential to be a significant game changer in the relationship between the research community and the world’s largest academic publisher. The remainder of this blog looks at some of the facts and figures relating to expenditure on Open Access in the UK. It underlines the importance of the Dutch position.

UK Open Access policies mean MORE publisher profit

There have also been difficulties in the UK in relation to negotiations over payment for Open Access. Elsevier has consistently resisted efforts by Jisc to negotiate an offsetting deal  – where a publisher provides some sort of concession for the fact that universities in the UK are paying unprecedented amounts in Article Processing Charges on top of their subscriptions because of the RCUK open access policy.

Elsevier is the world’s largest academic publisher. According to their Annual Report the 2014 STM revenue was £2,048 million, with an operating profit of £762 million. This is a profit margin of 37%. That means if we pay an Article Processing Charge of $3000 then $1,170 of that (taxpayers’) money goes directly to the shareholders of Elsevier.

The numbers involved in this space are staggering. The Wellcome Trust stated in their report on 3 March 2015 The Reckoning: An Analysis of Wellcome Trust Open Access Spend 2013 – 14: ‘The two traditional, subscription-based publishers (Elsevier and Wiley) represent some 40% of our total APC spend’.

And the RCUK has had similar results, as described in a Times Higher Education article on 16 April 2015 Publishers share £10m in APC payments: “Publishers Elsevier and Wiley have each received about £2 million in article processing charges from 55 institutions as a result of RCUK’s open access policy”.

Hybrid open access – more expensive and often not compliant

Another factor is the considerably higher cost of  Article Processing Charges for making an individual article Open Access within an otherwise subscription journal (called ‘hybrid’ publishing) compared to the Article Processing Charges for articles in fully Open Access journals.

In The Reckoning: An Analysis of Wellcome Trust Open Access Spend 2013 – 14, the conclusion was that the average Article Processing Charge levied by hybrid journals is 64% higher than the average Article Processing Charge of a fully Open Access title. The March 2015 Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access concluded the 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’.

Elsevier has stated that in 2013 they published 330,000 subscription articles and 6,000 author paid articles. There is no breakdown of how many of those 6,000 were in fully open access journals and how many were hybrid. However in 2014 Elsevier had 1600 journals offering their hybrid option, and 100 journals that were fully open access (6%). Note that the RCUK open access policy came into force in April 2013. It would be interesting to compare these figures with  the 2014 ones, however I have been unable to find them.

While the higher cost for hybrid Article Processing Charges is in itself is an issue, there is a further problem. Articles in hybrid journals for which an Article Processing Charge has been paid are not always made available at all, or are available but not under the correct licence as required by the fund paying the fee. Here at Cambridge, the five most problematic publishers with whom we have paid more than 10 Article Processing Charges have a non compliance rate from 11-25%. With this group of publishers we are having to chase up between three and 31 articles per publisher. This takes considerable time and significantly adds to the cost of compliance with the RCUK and COAF policies.

According to the March 2015 Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access, ‘Elsevier stated that around 40% of the articles from RCUK funding that they had published gold were not under the CC-BY licence and are therefore not compliant with the policy’ (p19).

We support our Dutch colleagues

In summary, the work happening in The Netherlands to break the stranglehold Elsevier have on the research community is important. We need to stand by and support our Dutch colleagues.

NOTE: This blog was subsequently reblogged on the London School of Economics Impact Blog and later listed as one of the Top Ten Posts for 2015: Open Access. It was also listed as one of the blogs that had an average minute per page measurement of over 6 minutes and 30 seconds.

Published 3 July 2015, added to on 22 January 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Libraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan Dempsey

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There is no argument even from traditionalists that the library role is changing. But there is a great deal of confusion and sometimes fear about what that means, and what the future might look like.

On 3 June, Lorcan Demsey*  came to speak to staff at Cambridge University Library about how the role and purpose of libraries are changing. The slides from his talk are available on Slideshare.

The one sentence headline from the talk was that research libraries are moving from licensing published content to managing workflow and research outputs – which means the print collection needs to be managed down to free up resources for the new roles. The subhead is – if we don’t do this, the publishers are waiting in the wings to take over.

Modern libraries in research environments

The Library role is distilling from owned materials to facilitating access to many things. Changing focus to ‘discovery’ in the collection means there must be a loss of some of the items.

Lorcan noted that his sense is that there is still a low uptake of this concept. As someone who has been working in scholarly communications for over a decade. I agree.

The collection as a means to an end rather than an end it itself – in some ways this is obvious but in others it is a huge psychological shift. 

  • In a print world, researchers and learners organised their workflow around the library. The library had a limited interaction with the full process.
  • In a digital world the Library needs to organise itself around the workflows of research and learners. Workflows generate and consume information resources.

In libraries there is a separation of the discovery and the collection – library users are on the global level. The library will make some available and own some of those.

Change of focus

The research endeavour has moved from a focus on outcomes to begin to think about a range of activities around the process and the aftermath.

The traditional role of a library – outside of special collections and manuscripts – deals with outcomes like the books and journals. In this model students and researchers interact with the books and journals and then turn it into classically published works that come back into the library.

But we live now in an online world and the Library is interacting with the content in many different ways. There is interest in the process of research –methods, evidence and research data. There is also interest in the discussion around research through pre-prints, working papers and a variety of prepublication activity. This involves revision, derivative works and reuse. Copyright is important in these cases to let people know how things will be used.

This means that ‘collections’ from a library perspective now include the process, methods, discussions and outputs as well as books and journals.

From curation to creation

Mediated access to licensed material is becoming more streamlined, and other items becoming more available. Libraries are supporting creation, not just consumption.

Libraries need to be seen as a source for collaboration. There needs to be a partnership between the Library and the Faculty. The library is a partner in terms of the creation activity. The mediating role will continue.

Managing this transition is often done opportunistically – when people retire they are replaced with new skill sets.

The repository was seen by the Libraries initially as something in relation to artefacts but now it is seen as part of the workflow of the research lifecycle. There is less attention on what is coming in and more focus on sharing material back out.

Show me the money

There is a question around how much of this activity will be supported by the institution? And how is the resource shifting occurring in the libraries?

Lorcan said that while libraries talk about a growing interest in special collections and archives, there is no evidence from a budget perspective that this is being supported.

Publishers are trying to muscle in

Managing online identities

There is considerable interest amongst researchers in having a carefully tended online presence. This is time consuming, and would appear to be important to the researchers. This process is becoming intimately tied to publication – it is where people are announcing their publication.

Lorcan mentioned a study in Nature which was a survey of 3,000 scientists and engineers. They found 6% used Google Scholar, but more than half were using ResearchGate more regularly than LinkedIn. Not surprisingly this behaviour can be broken down by discipline. The social sciences tend to use Google Scholar, and academic.edu has low use by engineering and sciences. There are many solutions to the workflow to help researchers. Many of these will go away, but some are quite heavily used.

Thinking historically, a catalogue covers the material a library owns. The library has a discovery layer and a license. However this activity will have to shift to support creation. We have repositories, Google Scholar, ResearchGate etc. The incentive to use the repository is very low compared with these services.

A gap in the market?

Workflow is the new content – managing identity is where a lot of the focus is. Publishers are trying to position themselves as the service provider in this space.

Many libraries do not see their role as managing evolving scholarly records – the research and learning material. The curation of identity for researcher profiles is a big interest. This is often currently managed by research offices.

However this is a space into which publishers are moving. Several big publishers are now trying to be part of the full cycle for researchers.

For example Elsevier has two products – Pure is a content management system for research reporting and Mendeley is an academic social network. It is no coincidence that the word ‘solution’ is in the url thread. Similarly, Macmillian (publishers of Nature) recently bought Digital Science the company that created the equivalent products Symplectic and figshare. Digital Science was not included in the Macmillan Springer merger, possibly because they still need substantial investment. Lorcan noted that people see them as ‘plucky start-ups’ but they are owned by big publishers. There has been a big take-up of these services.

Lorcan showed a quote from Annette Thomas, CEO of Macmillian Publishers about ‘A publisher’s new job description’.

Her view is that publishers are here to make the scientific research process more effective by helping them keep up to date, find colleagues, plan experiments, and then share their results. After they have published, the process continues with gaining a reputation, obtaining funds, finding collaborators, and even finding a new job. What can we as publishers do to address some of the scientists’ pain points? 

As Lorcan observed – you can take out the word ‘publisher’ and replace with the word ‘library’.

Managing down collections

Libraries are increasingly wanting to organise their space around the student experience not around collections. Lorcan used a grid to illustrate the changing focus. The two distinctions were:

  • Whether items are in many collections or are rare or unique.
  • Whether items require stewardship. Items that are high stewardship items are looked after and resources are spent on them. Items that are low stewardship don’t get looked after in Libraries.

At one extreme is licensed materials which are high stewardship/many collections. The opposite corner is research materials which are only available in a few collections and are low stewardship.

Lorcan said he thinks in the future there will be a focus on distinctive collections. There needs to be a lot more money to do this. So licensed purchased material will be more streamlined. Management attention 15 years ago was on highly managed, licensed items, but now the focus has shifted to items of low stewardship.

Inside out library

Market materials: licensed/purchased stuff. Library as broker and telling users that these things are available in a special way.

Distinctive collections: Library is provider and want to maximise discoverability. Want other people to know about faculty expertise, and research data. Putting into own discovery layer doesn’t help there. Think about metadata and which aggregators are important. Been slow to realise that discoverability is vital.

These have very different dynamics. We want to share material held within the library with the rest of the world. The licensed stuff is external and libraries bring it in to share internally. This is inside out.

Traditionally libraries deal with published, purchased material (including special collections). However there is a shift away from acquisitions to demand. This means that libraries need to redirect their resources towards research support. One way of doing this is to manage down the print collection.

There was an explosion of publishing after the Second World War. In the same way that baby boomers are all retiring at the same time, we are now faced with the challenge of managing these collections down.

Challenges for identity

The managing down of print collections coincides with the push to repurpose space in libraries. There are many discussions with architects – managing down print means there must be refurbishment.

One of the issues emerging for libraries is: Without the books, does the campus see this as the Library? Is the space needed for the Library – could they be replaced by learning commons or the student union?

We can see the identity discussion about libraries emerging now. If we are managing down collections, what is the space for? What are the new services we offer? Lorcan mentioned media stories where librarians are being attacked by historians who see this as managerial, technocratic activity.

Lorcan described some of the shared collection activities happening in the USA.

Conclusion

We used to think of the Library as a collection. Now we need to think of the Library in terms of the user and their workflows.

We must move to more facilitated access to items, also move to the management and disclosure of curated materials. The print and digital scholarly record needs curation and co-ordination at a conscious national level.

The job is about restructuring the means but we need to make decisions about moving resources or bets on the future. Libraries must shift from an organisation where the end was known to one where we must take some risk.

Published 6 June 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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* Lorcan coordinates strategic planning and oversees Research, Membership and Community Relations at OCLC. He has worked for library and educational organizations in Ireland, the UK and the US. His influence on national policy and library directions is widely recognized. He is on Twitter – @LorcanID

 

A review of the RCUK review of implementation of its OA policy

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The RCUK released its ‘Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access’ today and it makes interesting reading. First I should state that I think this is a good report, it seems well researched and balanced in tone and it is well written and laid out. Jisc also welcomes the report.

Overall findings

It seems that a ‘common factor’ amongst all of the people and groups interviewed was ‘a general acceptance and welcome given to the concept of open access’. However, the administrative effort to implement the policy and distribute the funds is significant. This is not helped by a level of confusion about different funding policies, particularly relating to embargo length, licence usage and expectations of data collection for compliance monitoring.

Not only is this an administrative problem but it is ‘leading to researchers ultimately not engaging with open access at all as it was perceived as being ‘too difficult’.’ (p16) Certainly there have been instances of this view expressed by researchers at Cambridge University.

This blog will concentrate on a few aspects of the review I thought interesting – support or otherwise of hybrid, reporting issues, non-compliance amongst publishers, lack of awareness amongst researchers and licenses. It finishes with an observation that the review validates some of the decisions Cambridge has made in relation to implementing the RCUK policy.

I should note the review includes some interesting information about learned societies, embargo periods and monographs but these are big issues that need teasing out on their own.

Supporting hybrid

As the Wellcome Trust found in their recent analysis of open access spend in 2013/2014 the RCUK reported that the amount charged for APCs for hybrid open access continue to be ‘consistently more expensive’ than fully OA journals, ‘despite the fact that hybrid journals still enjoyed a revenue stream through subscriptions’.

The review recommended that this should be monitored 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’ (p25).

The reported amounts being spent on APCs are also interesting. The average APC paid during the first year, at £1,600 inc VAT was £472 less than the average APC assumed by the Finch Group, which was used as a proxy when calculating the size of the RCUK block grant (£1,727 + VAT = £2,072) (p11). While this in itself is not surprising as the amount quoted in the Finch report was seen to be high by open access advocates at the time, it is interesting to note that the average APC paid by Cambridge in 2014 was higher than the average quoted in the review at £1891.63.

Despite this large amount of money being spent on APCs, publishers offering hybrid – not the fully open access publishers, it should be noted – ’questioned’ level of the block grant currently offered by RCUK. These publishers expressed the view that the block grant ‘was too low to properly fund the transition to gold. Publishers felt that the transition to full gold open access publishing would be successful only if it was fully funded’ (pp15-16). It does beg the question as to what ‘fully funded’ means in this context.

Researcher awareness

Researchers appear to remain unaware of the tsunami that is occurring in scholarly communication. By centralising the payment of APCs we once again have a situation where researchers are divorced from the economic realities of publishing, in the same way libraries have traditionally been the foil between the economics of subscriptions and the access to the materials.

This concern is supported by the review’s observation that: ‘There is little evidence to suggest that the introduction 
of the RCUK policy had much of an impact on author behaviour, with publishers reporting that authors did not seem to be changing their choices on where to publish.
’ (p15)

If anything it has had a negative effect where ‘RCUK’s preference for gold has therefore been, at times, seen as a barrier to implementation and ‘buy-in’ from various communities across the disciplines’(p26). Anecdotally we are seeing this happening at Cambridge.

The review did note that ‘further transparency on what is being paid in APCs by institutions to publishers will be crucial in helping to change behaviours and ease the transition towards open access’.

Reporting issues

The review noted at several stages that there have been difficulties with collecting data and that they ‘have been more reliant on opinion than perhaps
 we might have liked to at the outset of the review’ (p4). They acknowledge the process would have been assisted greatly if there had been some standardisation in what the RCUK was asking for as the ‘template was, understandably, interpreted in a variety 
of ways’ (p9) I should note that Jisc is attempting to standardise the reporting.

When Cambridge was asked to report on compliance levels for the RCUK we were hampered by our inability to articulate the complete number of articles being published that have been funded  by RCUK. The review recognises that this was a widespread problem, particularly in ‘larger, distributed institutions (such as the research intensive universities)’. (p9). Many institutions provided estimates for the compliance reporting.

The review also looked at the (substantial) costs associated with collecting this data and noted that publishers could help given that the sources of data held by publishers ‘would be administratively simpler to collect’ (p10).

Not only could publishers reduce the costs of compliance by providing data, but, the review noted that  ‘complexities in working with publishers [was] one of the areas that had generated considerable administrative effort’ (p21). The problems include initial negotiations and ensuring that licences and invoicing were correct. The cost for this is borne by authors, library and administrative staff and the finance team.

Non compliant publishers

This then moves the focus to the compliance of publisher – which can be taken in a couple of ways. First, the review panel looked at how 
the publishers had helped institutions and researchers to comply with the policy by ensuring that their journals were ‘compliant’ (p11).

It seems that a considerable amount of funded research where an APC has been paid is not compliant with the RCUK policy because the license is not a CC-BY license. For example Elsevier stated that around 40% of the articles from RCUK funding that they had published gold were not under the CC-BY licence and are therefore not compliant with the policy. The American Society of Plant Biologists noted that its journal was not compliant as it did not offer the CC-BY licence and that was unlikely to change in the near future (p19).

Other publishers offer more than one type of license which makes it confusing for the authors, indeed  there was clear evidence that some publishers were offering a choice of licences, even when they knew that the author was RCUK-funded..

The question of publishers not making articles available even after an APC was paid was not singled out in the report but is implied in a  few of the statements in the review, particularly in the institutions having to double check if work is available post publication. This is an area which needs further analysis.

Licensing

The issue of the CC-BY licenses was a recurrent theme in the review. Many arts, humanities and social science disciplines hold ‘principled and practical objections to the use of CC-BY licences’ (p18). This is partly because work under a CC-BY license ‘could be both used commercially in ways of which the author does not approve and also might not be properly acknowledged as their work’ (pp19-20).

This does demonstrate a lack of full understanding of what a CC-By license allows, but  this is not surprising as  ‘Many publishers … reported a significant number of researchers were signing licence agreements without understanding what they were signing’ (p19).

Also highlighted in evidence was an issue with third
party copyright in that some rights owners (for example, image libraries) are reluctant to license material for digital reproduction, let alone for reproduction in an article that
is published under a CC-BY licence.

Support for the University of Cambridge approach

It was heartening to read of a couple of areas that support the position that Cambridge University has taken towards the implementation of the RCUK and HEFCE policies.

The review mentioned visits to institutions and noted how long it takes 
for researchers to learn about open access including the requirements, expectations and processes they need to follow. ‘One senior researcher commented that it had taken a full half a day to learn about open access.’ At Cambridge University we have taken a very soft touch approach to the researcher who simply has to fill in a few fields and upload a file through a simple interface and the Open Access team takes care of the rest.

Cambridge University has also taken a ‘first in best dressed’ approach to expenditure of the block grant. This seems to have been a good decision as the review has noted that there were concerns raised within both written and oral evidence that where institutions had distributed the block grant by department or faculty, as it had a detrimental impact on some disciplines.

About the review

The review covered the period from April 2013 to July 2014. When the RCUK policy was announced they did say that there would be a review within a year, however there was a need for a full year of implementation before they collected the data so hence the delay.

Chaired by an independent researcher, Professor Sir Robert Burgess, the review panel consisted of ‘knowledgeable members of the various communities and sectors with an interest in the policy and open access’. The evidence collected was through over 80 submissions,  some verbal evidence and a small number of visits to institutions to talk informally with researchers, librarians and institutional administrative staff about their experiences of implementing the policy.

The report mentions on no fewer than three occasions that it is a review of the policy implementation not a debate on the merits of open access.

The next planned review will be in 2016.

Published 26 March 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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