Tag Archives: APC

‘No free labor’ – we agree.

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[NOTE: The introductory sentence to this blog was changed on 27 June to provide clarification]

Last week members of the University of California* released a Call to Action to ‘Champion change in journal negotiations’ which references the April 2018 Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication.  This states as one of the 18 principles:

“No free labor. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on peer review and editorial contributions by our authors in support of journals, and such contributions shall be taken into account when determining the cost of our subscriptions or OA fees for our authors.”

Well, this is interesting. At Cambridge we have been trying to look at this specific issue since late last year.

The project

Our goal was to have a better understanding of the interaction between publisher and researcher. The (not very imaginatively named) Data Gathering Project is a project to support the decision making of the Journal Coordination Scheme in relation to subscription to, and use of, academic journal literature across Cambridge.

What we have initially found is that the data is remarkably difficult to put together. Cambridge University does not use bibliometrics as a means of measuring our researchers, so we do not subscribe to SciVal, but we have access to Scopus. But Scopus does not pick up Arts and Humanities publications particularly well, so it will always be a subset of the whole.

Some information that we thought would be helpful simply isn’t. We do have an institutional Altmetric account, so we were able to pull a report from Altmetric of every paper with a Cambridge author held in that database.  But Altmetric does not give a publisher view – we would have to extract this using doi prefixes or some other system. 

Cambridge uses Symplectic Elements to record publications from which, for very complicated reasons, we are unable to obtain a list of publishers with whom we publish. As part of the subscription we have access to the new analysing product, Dimensions. However, as far as we have managed to see, Dimensions does not break down by publisher (it works at the more granular level of journal), and seems to consider anything that is in the open domain (regardless of licence) to be ‘open access’. So figures generated here come with a heavy caveat.

We are also able to access the COUNTER usage statistics for our journals with the help of  the Library eresources team. However these include downloads for backfiles and for open access articles, so the numbers are slightly inflated, making a ‘cost per download’ analysis of value against subscription cost inaccurate.

We know how much we spend on subscriptions (spoiler alert: a lot). We need to take into consideration our offsetting arrangements with some publishers – something we are taking an active look at currently anyway.

Reaching out to the publishing community

So to supplement the aggregated information we have to hand, we have reached out to those publishers our researchers publish with in significant quantities to ask them for the following data on Cambridge authors: Peer Reviewing, Publishing, Citing, Editing, and Downloading.

This is exactly what the University of California is demanding. One of the reasons we need to ask publishers for peer review information is because it is basically hidden work. Aggregating systems like Publons do help a bit, although the Cambridge count of reviewers in the system is only 492 which is only a small percentage of the whole. Publons was bought out by Clarivate Analytics (which was Thompson Reuters before this and ISI before that) a year ago. We did approach Clarivate Analytics for some data about our peer reviewing, but declined to pay the eye watering quoted fee.

What have we received?

Contrary to our assumptions, many of the publishers responded saying that this information is difficult to compile because it is held on different systems and that multiple people would need to be contacted. Sometimes this is because publishers are responsible for the publication of learned society journals so information is not stored centrally.  They also fed back that much of the data is not readily available in a digestible format. 

Some publishers have responded with data on Cambridge peer reviewers and editors, usage statistics, and citation information. A big thank you to Emerald, SAGE, Wiley, the Royal Society and eLife. We are in active correspondence with Hindawi and PLOS. [STOP PRESS: SpringerNature provided their data 30 minutes after this blog went live, so thanks to them as well].

However, a number of publishers have not responded to our requests and one in particular would like to have a meeting with us before releasing any information.

Findings so far

The brief for the project was to ‘understand how our researchers interact with the literature’.  While we wrote the brief ourselves, we have come to realise it is actually very vague. We have tried to gather any data we can to start answering this question.

What the data we have so far is helping us understand is how much is being spent on APCs outside the central management of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). The OSC manages the block grants from the RCUK (now UKRI) and the Charities Open Access Fund, but does not look after payments for open access for research funded by, say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the NIH. This means that there is a not insignificant amount of extra expenditure on top of that  coordinated by the OSC. These amounts are extremely difficult to ascertain as observed in 2014.

We already collect and report on how much the Office of Scholarly Communication has spent on APCs since 2013. However some prepayment deals makes the data difficult to analyse because of the way the information is presented to us. For example, Cambridge began using the Wiley Dashboard in the middle of the year with the first claim against it on 6 July 2016, so information after that date is fuzzy.

The other issue with comparing how much a publisher has received in APCs and how much the OSC has paid (to determine the difference) is dates. We have already talked at length about date problems in this space. But here the issue is publisher provided numbers are based on calendar years. Our reporting years differ – RCUK reports from April to March and COAF from October to September, so pulling this information together is difficult.

Our current approach to understanding the complete expenditure on APCs, apart from analysing the data being provided by (some) publishers, is to establish all of the suppliers to whom the OSC has paid an APC and obtain the supplier number. This list of supplier numbers can then be run against the whole University to identify payments outside the OSC.

This project is far from straightforward. Every dataset we have will require some enhancement. We have published a short sister post on what we have learned so far about organising data for analysis. But we are hoping over the next couple of months to start getting a much clearer idea of what Cambridge is contributing into the system – in terms of papers, peer review and editorial work in addition to our subscriptions and APCs. We need more evidence based decision making for negotiation.

Footnote

* There has been some discussion in listservs about who is behind the Call to Action and the Declaration. Thanks to Jeff MacKie-Mason, University Librarian and Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, we are happy to clarify:

  • The Declaration is by the faculty senate’s library committee – University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC)
  • The Call to Action is by the University of California’s Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee, UCOLASC, and the UC Council of University Librarians, who: “seek to engage the entire UC academic community, and indeed all stakeholders in the scholarly communication enterprise, in this journey of transformation”.

Published 26 June 2018 (amended 27 June 2018)
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley & Katie Hughes
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Open Access policy, procedure & process at Cambridge

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 The Open Access policies developed and applied by the UK’s major research funders (HEFCE, RCUK and COAF) all aim to achieve one thing: freedom of knowledge for all. However, the specific mechanisms these funders have taken to achieve this goal varies considerably and requires careful implementation from higher education institutions (HEIs).
In this blog post, I’ll describe the different workflows required to meet each funder’s expectations and then look at how these policies intersect with each other to form a tangled web of policy nightmare. Some of the decisions and processes will be peculiar to the University of Cambridge, especially when it comes to decisions around funding for article processing charges (APCs), but the general approach will be true of most UK HEIs.

First up, HEFCE’s Open Access policy:

At the outset, let’s be clear: the HEFCE Open Access policy applies to all researchers working at all UK HEIs. If an HEI wants to submit a journal article for consideration in REF 2021 the article must appear in an Open Access repository (although there is a long list of exceptions). Keen observers will note that in the above flowchart HEFCE’s policy is enforced based on deposit within three months of acceptance. This requirement has caused significant consternation amongst researchers and administrators alike; however, during the first two years of the policy (i.e. until 31 March 2018) publications deposited within three months of publication will still be eligible for the REF. At Cambridge, we have been recording manuscript deposits that meet this criterion as exceptions to the policy[1].

Next up, the RCUK Open Access policy. This policy is straightforward to implement, the only complication being payment of APCs, which is contingent on sufficient block grant funding. Otherwise, the choice for authors is usually quite obvious: does the journal have a compliant embargo? No? Then pay for immediate open access.

One extra feature of the RCUK Open Access policy not captured here is the Europe PMC deposit requirement for MRC and BBSRC funded papers. Helpfully, the policy document makes no mention of this requirement; rather, this feature of the policy appears in the accompanying FAQs. I’m not expert, but this seems like the wrong way to write policies.

Finally, we have the COAF policy, possibly the single most complicated OA policy to enforce anywhere in the world. The most challenging part of the COAF policy is the Europe PMC deposit requirement. It is often difficult to know whether a journal will indeed deposit the paper in Europe PMC, and if, for whatever reason, the publisher doesn’t immediately deposit the paper, it can take months of back-and-forth with editors, journal managers and publishing assistants to complete the deposit. This is an extremely burdensome process, though the blame should be laid squarely at the publishers. How hard is it to update a PMC record? Does it really take two months to update the Creative Commons licence?

This leads us to one of the more unusual parts of the COAF policy: publications are considered journals if they are indexed in Medline. That means we will occasionally receive book chapters that need to meet the journal OA policy. Most publishers are unwilling to make such publications OA in line with COAF’s journal requirements so they are usually non-compliant.

What happens if you should be foolish enough to try to combine these policies into one process? Well, as you might expect, you get something very complicated:

This flowchart, despite its length, still doesn’t capture every possible policy outcome and is missing several nuances related to the payment of APCs, but nonetheless, it gives an idea of the enormous complexity that underlies the decision making process behind every article deposited in Apollo and in other repositories across the UK.

[1] Within the University’s CRIS, Symplectic Elements, only one date range is possible so we have chosen to monitor compliance from the acceptance date. Publications deposited within the ‘transitional’ three months from publication window receive an ‘Other’ exception within Elements that contains a short note to this effect.

Published 18 September 2017
Written by Dr Arthur Smith
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Cambridge RCUK Block Grant spend for 2016-2017

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Much to our relief, last Friday we sent off our most recent report on our expenditure of the RCUK Block Grant fund. The report is available in our repository. Cambridge makes all of its information about spend on Open Access publicly available. This blog continues on from that describing our spend from 2009 – 2016, and from the blog on our open access spend in 2014.

Compliance

We are pleased to be able to report that we reached 80% compliance in this reporting period, up from 76% last year. The RCUK is expecting 75% compliance by the end of the transition period on 31 March 2018, so we are well over target.

According to our internal helpdesk system ZenDesk, our compliance is shared between 52% gold (publication in an Open Access journal or payment for hybrid Open Access), and 28% green (placement of the work into our institutional repository, Apollo). We do not have the breakdown of how many of the gold APC payments were for hybrid. In the past it we have had an overall 86.8% spend on hybrid.

Not only do we have an increase from 76% to 80% in our compliance rates overall, this is even more impressive when we consider that this is in the face of a 15% increase in the number of research outputs acknowledging RCUK funding. Web of Science indicated in a search for articles, reviews and proceedings papers that Cambridge published 2400 papers funded by RCUK in 2016. In 2015 Web of Science the same search counted 2080 RCUK funded research outputs.

Headline numbers

  • In total Cambridge spent £1.68 million of RCUK funds on APCs (this is up from £1.28 last year)
  • 1920 articles identified as being RCUK funded were submitted to the Open Access Service, of which 1248 required payment for RCUK*
  • The average article processing charge was £1850 – this is significantly less than the £2008 average last year, reflecting the value of the memberships we have (see below)

*Note these numbers will differ slightly from the report due to the difference in dates between the calendar and financial years (see below).

Non APC spend

In total Cambridge spent £1.94 million of RCUK funds in this reporting period, of which £1.68 million was on APCs.  Approximately 13% was spent on other costs,  primarily distributed between staffing, infrastructure and memberships.  The greatest proportion is staffing, with £95,000 spent on this cost. Memberships were the next largest category, mostly arrangements to reduce the cost of APCs, including:

  • £42,000 on the open access component of the Springer Compact
  • £22,000 on memberships to obtain discounts – there is a list of these on the OSC website
  • £18,000 on the University’s SCOAP3 subscription

The RCUK fund has also supported the infrastructure for Open Access at Cambridge, with £62,000 covering the cost of several upgrades of DSpace and general support for the repository. This has allowed us to implement new services such as the minting of DOIs and our hugely successful Request a Copy service which allows people to contact authors of embargoed material in the repository and ask them to send through the author’s accepted manuscript. This category also covers our license for our helpdesk system, ZenDesk, which helps the Open Access team manage the on-average  responses to 60 queries a day. We are also able to run most of our reporting out of ZenDesk.

There are some other smaller items in the non APC category, including £1500 on bank charges that for various reasons we have not been able to allocate to specific articles.

Are these deals good value?

Some are. The Springer Compact is shown as a single charge in the report with the articles listed individually. The RCUK Block Grant contributed £46,020 to the Springer Compact and 128 Cambridge papers were published by Springer that acknowledged RCUK funding. This gives us an average APC cost per paper to the RCUK fund* of £359.53 including VAT. This represents excellent value, given that the average APC for Springer is $3,000 (about £2,300).

*Note that in some instances the papers acknowledging RCUK may also have acknowledged COAF in which case the overall cost for the APC for those papers will be higher.

Cambridge has now completed a year having a prepayment arrangement with Wiley. Over this time we contributed £108,000 to the account and published 68 papers acknowledging RCUK. This works out that on average the Wiley APC cost was £1,588 per paper. Like Springer, the average APC is approximately £2,300 so this amount appears to be good value.

However the RCUK has contributed a higher proportion to the Wiley account than COAF because at the time the account was established we had run low on COAF funds. Because the University does not provide any of its own funds for Open Access, there was no option other than to use RCUK funds. We will need to do some calculations to ensure that the correct proportion of COAF and RCUK funds are supporting this account. It is a reflection of the challenges we are facing on a rolling basis when the dates are fluid (see below).

It appears we need to look very closely at our membership with Oxford University Press. We spent £44,000 of RCUK funds on this, and published 22 articles acknowledging RCUK funding. This works out to be an APC of £2000 per article, which is not dissimilar to an average OUP APC, and therefore does not represent any value at all. This is possibly because our allocation of the expense of the membership between COAF and RCUK might not reflect what has been published with OUP. We need to investigate further.

Caveat – the date problem

We manage Open Access funds that operate on different patterns. The COAF funds match the academic year, with the new grants starting on 1 October each year.  The RCUK works on a financial year, starting on 1 April each year. Many of our memberships and offset deals work on the calendar year.

To add to the confusion, the RCUK is behind in its payments, so for this current year which started on 1 April 2017, we will not receive our first part-payment until 1 June. That amount will not cover the commitments we had already made by the end of 2016, let alone those made between 1 April when this year started and the 1 June when the money is forthcoming. This means we will remain in the red. Cambridge is carrying half a million pounds in commitments at any given time. The situation makes it very difficult to balance the books.

Our recent RCUK report covers the period of 1 April 2016 – 31 March 2017 and refers only to invoices paid in this period. In the report the dates go beyond the 31 March 2017 because the reconciliation in the system sometimes takes longer, so items are logged as later dates even though the payment was made within the period. The publication dates for the articles these invoices relate to are wildly different, and many of these have not yet been published due to the delay between acceptance and publication which ranges from days to years.

This means working out averages is an inexact science. It is only possible to filter Web of Science by year, so we are only able to establish the number of papers published in a given calendar year. This set of papers is not the same set for which we have paid, but we can compare year on year and identify some trends that make sense.

Published 22 May 2017
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

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Who is paying for hybrid?

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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 
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Hybrid open access – an analysis

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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 
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Cambridge University spend on Open Access 2009-2016

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Today is the deadline for those universities in receipt of an RCUK grant to submit their reports on the spend. We have just submitted the Cambridge University 2015-2016 report to the RCUK and have also made it available as a dataset in our repository.

Compliance

Cambridge had an estimated overall compliance rate of 76% with 46% of all RCUK funded papers  available through the gold route and 30% of all RCUK funded papers available through the green route.

The RCUK Open Access Policy indicates that at the end of the fifth transition year of the policy (March 2018) they expect 75% of Open Access papers from the research they fund will be delivered through immediate, unrestricted, on‐line access with maximum opportunities for re‐use (‘gold’). Because Cambridge takes the position that if there is a green option that is compliant we do not pay for gold, our gold compliance number is below this, although our overall compliance level is higher, at 76%.

Compliance caveats

The total number of publications arising from research council funding was estimated by searching Web of Science for papers published by the University of Cambridge in 2015, and then filtered by funding acknowledgements made to the research councils. The number of papers (articles, reviews and proceedings papers) returned in 2015 was 2080. This is almost certainly an underestimate of the total number of publications produced by the University of Cambridge with research council funding. The analysis was performed on 15/09/2016.

Expenditure

The APC spend we have reported is only counting papers submitted to the University of Cambridge Open Access Team between 1 August 2015 and 31 July 2016. The ‘OA grant spent’ numbers provided are the actual spend out of the finance system. The delay between submission of an article, the commitment of the funds and the subsequent publication and payment of the invoice means that we have paid for invoices during the reporting period that were submitted outside the reporting period. This meant reconciliation of the amounts was impossible. This funding discrepancy was given in ‘Non-staff costs’, and represents unallocated APC payments not described in the report (i.e. they were received before or after the reporting period but incurred on the current 2015-16 OA grant).

The breakdown of costs indicates we have spent 4.6% of the year’s allocation on staff costs and 5.1% on systems support. We noted in the report that the staff time paid for out of this allocation also supports the processing of Wellcome Trust APCs for which no support is provided by Wellcome Trust.

Headline numbers

  • In total Cambridge spent £1,288,090 of RCUK funds on APCs
  • 1786 articles identified as being RCUK funded were submitted to the Open Access Service, of which 890 required payment for RCUK*
  • 785 articles have been invoiced and paid
  • The average article cost was ~£2008

Caveats

The average article cost can be established by adding the RCUK fund expenditure to the COAF fund expenditure on co-funded articles (£288,162.28)  which gives a complete expenditure for these 785 articles of £1,576,252.42. The actual average cost is £2007.96.

* The Open Access Service also received many COAF only funded and unfunded papers during this period. The number of articles paid for does not include those made gold OA due to the Springer Compact as this would throw out the average APC value.

Observations

In our report on expenditure for 2014 the average article APC was £1891. This means there has been a 6% increase in Cambridge University’s average spend on an APC since then. It should be noted that of the journals for which we most frequently process APCs, Nature Communication is the second most popular. This journal has an APC of £3,780 including VAT.

Datasets on Cambridge APC spend 2009-2016

Cambridge released the information about its 2014 APC spend for RCUK and COAF in March last year and intended to do a similar report for the spend in 2015, however a recent FOI request has prompted us to simply upload all of our data on APC spend into our repository for complete transparency. The list of datasets now available is below.

1. Report presented to Research Councils UK for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

2. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2015-2016

3. Report presented to the Charity Open Access Fund for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014-2015

4. Report presented to Jisc for article processing charges managed by the University of Cambridge, 2014

5. Open access publication data for the management of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust open access policies at the University of Cambridge, 2014-2016

Note: In October 2014 we started using a new system for recording submissions. This has allowed us to obtain more detailed information and allow multiple users to interact with the system. Until December 2015 our financial information was recorded in the spreadsheet below. There is overlap between reports 5. and 6. for the period 24 October and 31 December 2015.  As of January 2016, all data is being collected in the one place.

6. Open access publication data for the management of Research Councils UK, Charities Open Access Fund and Wellcome Trust article processing charges at the Office of Scholarly Communication, 2013-2015

Note: In 2013 the Open Access Service began and took responsibility for the new RCUK fund, and was transferred responsibility for the new Charities Open Access Fund (COAF). At this time the team were recording when an article was fully Wellcome Trust funded, even though the Wellcome Trust funding is a component of COAF.

7. Open access publication data for the management of Wellcome Trust article processing charges from the School of Biological Sciences, 2009-2014

Note: Management of the funds to support open access publishing has changed over the past seven years. Before the RCUK open access policy came into force in 2013, the Wellcome Trust funds were managed by the School of Biological Sciences.

Published 14 September 2016
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley & Dr Arthur Smith
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Cambridge expenditure on APCs in 2014

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Cambridge (along with many other institutions) were recently approached by Jisc to report on our article processing charges (APC) payments for 2014  as part of Jisc’s APC data collection project to address the Total Cost of Ownership of scholarly communication. Stuart Lawson, who is compiling these datasets has made the files available on Figshare.

A couple of caveats – This dataset only contains APCs which were paid centrally; there will be many other APCs paid by the University of Cambridge and its staff which are not included in this dataset.

Also we ended up listing the publications that were submitted to our system in 2014 because that was our starting point, rather than considering the payments from 2014 and working back. This might be an issue for the analysis – it will depend on which way people have interpreted ‘2014’. I should note that 74 (12.13%) of the invoices listed in this data were actually paid in January 2015.

Headline numbers

  • 610 funded articles were submitted in 2014 to our system for publication
  • 495 have been invoiced and paid as at March 2015
  • The amount spent on APCs (including VAT) for these invoices was £936,224.86
  • This gives an average cost per APC paid (including VAT if charged) of £1891.36
  • The range of APCs is from £94.61 for an article published by Magnolia Press, to £3,869.72 for an article published by Wiley

What does this mean?

It means we are spending a lot of (RCUK) money on APCs.  We also have supported payment of page and colour charges and have paid for researchers to join memberships that offer a discount for APCs out of the RCUK fund – neither of those categories of expenditure was captured in this data set.

The University is participating in the various Jisc Collections series of offsetting programs with publishers and we are discussing other ways of managing this expenditure. However, we really need to consider whether this is the way of the future.

Issues with reporting

Pulling the information together for this list revealed a few issues. First, while we agree with the collection of data to allow aggregation across the sector, for us to pull the required information together was challenging because we do not collect the information in this way.

However there are some indications this type of detail will be requested on a standard basis for reporting. Certainly Jisc suggesting this as a way forward. In their ‘APC data collection’ blog  they state:

HEIs will be able to benchmark their APC data. Using a standard template will help to produce comparable data between institutions which can be more easily aggregated. The data fields to be completed have been chosen from careful analysis of HEI needs. This means that the spreadsheet can be used for both internal reporting and also external reporting including to the Wellcome Trust for compliance monitoring of the Charity Open Access Fund, and potentially RCUK.

 So we therefore need to consider this information when designing new systems.

Issues with invoices

We have a considerable block of Purchase Orders that have not been invoiced. While there will always be a delay because of the length of time between acceptance and publication in some instances, some of these are very old.

The issue of items not being invoiced can partially be explained by the cancellation of Purchase Orders. In some cases the team has contacted the author and found that the email is bouncing because the author has moved to a different institution. In other cases the author decided not to go ahead with open access publication, so we have raised a Purchase Order against something that no longer exists.

Long standing Purchase Orders (over 14 months) are potentially a problem because it is money being held as committed funds. We are now adding the process of checking older  un-invoiced Purchase Orders to the ever-growing list of things to do in the workflow for ensuring compliance.

Published 26 March 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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