Dr Agustina Martínez-García, Head of Open Research Systems, Digital Initiatives
Cambridge University Library (CUL) is piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, which allows small presses to use a simple deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations, creating the opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their open books catalogue, should they cease to operate.
Participation in the pilot has allowed us to explore the implementation of suitable infrastructure, built on interoperable, open, and widely adopted platforms to support discovery, access, and long-term availability of open scholarly works.
Work done so far
We are pleased to share that the Cambridge repository platform participating in the Thoth network is now live at https://thoth-arch.lib.cam.ac.uk/home, and now includes a full back catalogue of two open monograph publishers. This repository is based on the open-source DSpace software.
Through the implementation phase, we have worked very closely with the Thoth technical team to support the implementation and testing of standard and automated deposit mechanisms into DSpace-based repositories. This work has allowed us to further our knowledge and expertise on scholarly and research platforms by using well adopted repository platforms (DSpace) in a new area: open access books and monographs. It has also provided us with the opportunity to test the implementation of additional infrastructure to support discovery, access, and dissemination of such open access content, and potentially experiment with other types of scholarly work.
What’s next
Now that the repository platform is live, we would like to gather insights about volume of content, required storage and staff resources (both infrastructure and user support). This will help us estimating associated costs for provision of such a service as well as preservation costs for the longer term, during the 3-year pilot.
In terms of long-term preservation, we will explore several preservation options, including preserving the content in-house as part of the Libraries’ wider Digital Preservation Programme. The types of material hosted in this platform can provide an exemplary use case of scholarly content that is “preservation ready”, uses open and standard file formats (i.e., PDF and epub) and is accompanied by rich, high quality descriptive metadata.
See this post by the Open Book Futures Team for more details about the pilot:
Dr Agustina Martínez-García, Head of Open Research Systems, Digital Initiatives
We are pleased to announce that our Diamond Open Access Journals at Cambridge platform has launched in May and can be accessed at https://diamond-oa.lib.cam.ac.uk/home. This service will be available initially as part of a one-year pilot project undertaken by the Open Research Systems (ORS) and Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) teams within Cambridge University Library (CUL).
Project overview
The main aim of the Diamond project is to support Cambridge’s research community in the context of a changing open research and scholarly publishing environment. To meet increasing demand to share research findings we are scoping, assessing, and implementing future services and systems that meet those needs, while contributing to a growing wider open research community and ecosystem. The pilot is being launched off the back of a project to understand the community-led publishing landscape at Cambridge (findings to be shared soon). Researchers in the Office of Scholarly Communication uncovered a vibrant ecosystem of DIY publishing projects at Cambridge that the library is exploring how to support through technical and resource-based approaches.
As part of the project, we are engaging with Cambridge researchers and exploring whether open and community-developed platforms meet their needs around institutional publishing and can be used as the basis for service development in this area. We are using the DSpace repository platform to support this pilot. DSpace is a widely adopted, open-source repository platform, and it is currently the solution underpinning Apollo, Cambridge’s Institutional Repository. In its newest version, it offers advanced functionality and features that can potentially make it a suitable platform for journal publishing, an area we are keen to explore with this pilot.
Where we are at
Main activities of the project are focusing on:
Exploring the implementation of suitable infrastructure, built on interoperable, open, and widely adopted platforms.
Gathering use cases of community-led open access journals at Cambridge, focusing on discipline, journal type, frequency of publication, production standards.
Gathering insights and inform future service development in this area by a) assessing the suitability of the DSpace open-source repository platform as a journal publishing platform; and b) estimating the associated costs and resourcing requirements, both in terms of service management and infrastructure (long-term access, storage, and preservation costs).
The following four Cambridge student-led journals have agreed initially to participate in the pilot, and we are also exploring opening participation to additional journals in the upcoming months.
Cambridge Journal of Climate Research (Climate Research Society, first issue now available in the Diamond platform)
Cambridge Journal of Human Behaviour (Anthropology)
Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture (History of Art)
Scroope (Architecture)
What’s next
The next iteration of work for the pilot will focus on assessing the resources and costs involved in transitioning from pilot to service. Ensuring long-term preservation and access comes with several associated costs and it is critical to assess these when evaluating sustainable approaches to service development. Examples of cost elements that we will consider include onboarding (initial implementation) fees, hosting and maintenance fees, volume of content and storage costs, persistent identifier (DOIs and ISSN) minting and publisher databases indexing services costs, etc. We will also explore suitable long-term content preservation options, including approaches such as integrations with existing preservation services such as CLOCKSS (https://clockss.org/), or assessing in-house preservation via the services that are currently being developed as part of CUL’s Digital Preservation Programme.
Dr Mandy Wigdorowitz, Open Research Community Manager, Cambridge University Libraries
The promise and pitfalls of preregistration meeting was held at the Royal Society in March 2024. It was organised to address the utility of preregistration and initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue about its epistemic and pragmatic aims. The goal of the meeting was to explore the limitations associated with preregistration, and to conceive of a practical way to guide future research that can make the most of its implementation.
Preregistration is the practice of publicly declaring a study’s hypotheses, methods, and analyses before conducting a research study. Researchers are encouraged to be as specific as possible when writing preregistration plans, detailing every aspect of the research methodology and analyses, including, for instance, the study design, sample size, procedure for dealing with outliers, blinding and manipulation of conditions, and how multiple analyses will be controlled for. By doing so, researchers commit to a time-stamped study plan which will reduce the potential for flexibility in analysis and interpretation that may lead to biased results. Preregistration is a community-led response to the replication crisis and aims to mitigate questionable research practices (QRPs) that have come to light in recent years, some of which include HARKing (Hypothesising After Results are Known), p-hacking (the inappropriate manipulation of data analysis to enable a favoured result to be presented as statistically significant), and publication bias (the unbalanced publication of statistically significant findings or positive results over null and/or unexpected findings) (Simmons et al., 2011; Stefan & Schönbrodt, 2023).
The meeting brought together scholars and publishers from a range of disciplines and institutions to discuss whether preregistration has indeed lived up to these aims and whether and to what extent it has solved the problems it was envisioned to address.
It became clear that the problems associated with QRPs have not simply disappeared with the uptake and implementation of preregistration. From the perspective of meta-research, the success of preregistration appears to be largely disciplinary and legally dependent, with some disciplines mandating and normalising it (e.g., clinical trial registration in biomedical research), others greatly encouraging and (sometimes) requiring it (e.g., psychological science research), and others having no expectations about its use (e.g., economics research). The effectiveness of preregistration was shown to be linked to these dependencies, but also related to the quality and detail of the preregistration plan itself. Researchers are the arbiters of their research choices and if they choose to write vague or ambiguous preregistration plans, the problems that preregistration are assumed to address will inevitably persist.
Various preregistration templates exist (such as on the Open Science Framework, OSF) and some incentives for preregistration are recognised, such as the preregistration badges awarded by some journals, making it a systematic and straightforward exercise. In practice, however, it is not always the case that sufficient information is provided, and even in cases where preregistered plans are detailed, they are not always followed for various pragmatic or other (not always nefarious) reasons. As such, the research community are cautioned to not assume that preregistration equates to better or more trustworthy research. Rather, the preregistration plan needs to be critically reviewed as a standalone document in conjunction with the published study. This is important because preregistration plans that are usually deposited into repositories (e.g., OSF, National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Trials Registry) are seldom evaluated as entities of their own or against their corresponding research articles. Note that this is unlike registered reports which are a type of journal article that details a study’s protocol that does get peer reviewed before data is collected and if reviewed favourably, is given an in-principal acceptance regardless of the study outcomes.
Other discussions centred around the utility of preregistration in exploratory versus confirmatory research, whether preregistration can improve our theories, and how the process of conducting multiple but slightly varied analyses and selecting the most desired outcome (also referred to the ‘garden of forking paths’) affects the claims we make.
The overall sentiment from the meeting was that while preregistration does not solve all the issues that have arisen from QRPs, it ultimately leads to more transparency of the research process, accountability on the part of the researchers conducting the research, and it facilitates deeper engagement with one’s own research prior to any collection or analysis of data.
Since attending the meeting, I have taken away valuable insights that have made me critically reflect on my own research choices, and from a practice perspective, I have downloaded the OSF preregistration template and am documenting the plans for a research project.
Given the strides that have been taken toward improving the transparency, credibility and reproducibility of research, researchers at Cambridge need to consider whether preregistration plans should be included as another type of output that can be deposited on the institutional repository, Apollo. We have recently added Methods and preprints as output types which have broadened the options for sharing and which align with open research practices. Including preregistration could be a valuable and timely addition.
References
Stefan, A. M., & Schönbrodt, F. D. (2023). Big little lies: a compendium and simulation of p-hacking strategies. Royal Society Open Science, 10(2), 220346. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220346
Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22(11), 1359-1366. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632
Dr Mandy Wigdorowitz, Open Research Community Manager, Cambridge University Libraries
On Friday 17 November 2023, participants from across Cambridge and beyond gathered for a hybrid meeting on Open Research from different perspectives. Hosted by Cambridge University Libraries at Downing College, ‘Open Research for Inclusion: Spotlighting Different Voices in Open Research at Cambridge‘ drew attention to different areas of Open Research that have been at the forefront of recent discussions in Cambridge by showcasing the scope and breadth of open practices in typically under-represented disciplines and contexts. These included the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), and research from and about the Global South. A total of 84 in-person and 75 online attendees participated in the day-long event consisting of a keynote address, two talks, two panels, and a workshop.
The conference opened with a welcome address from Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith CBE FRS FMedSci, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and International Partnerships and the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics. Professor Ferguson-Smith emphasised the significance and timeliness of the conference and how it underscores the importance of the Open Research movement. She encouraged attendees to be open to new ideas, approaches, and perspectives that center around Open Research and to celebrate the richness of diversity in research.
Our keynote speaker, Dr Siddharth Soni, Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of English, then addressed the audience with a talk on Common Ground, Common Duty: Open Humanities and the Global South, providing an account of how to think against neoliberal conceptions of ‘open’ and to reimagine what openness might look like if the Global South was viewed as a common ground space for building an open and international university culture. Dr Soni’s address set the tone for a rich, multi-layered exploration of Open Research on the day, urging attendees to think of open humanities as a form of knowledge that seeks to alter the form and content of knowledge systems rather than just opening Euro-American knowledge systems to global publics.
Dr Siddharth Soni Common Ground, Common Duty: Open Humanities and the Global South
The next talk was from Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Dr Rebecca Roberts from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Fitzwilliam Museum who further explored the theme of the Global South in their practical perspective on how they managed the curation of digital archives for heritage management from their work on the projects: Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) and Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA). They reflected on the opportunities and challenges relating to the production and dissemination of information about archaeological sites and monuments in projects across Africa and South Asia as well as their experience working with and learning from local communities.
Dr Stefania Merlo and Dr Rebecca Roberts Open Data for Open Research – Reflections on the Curation of Digital Archives for Heritage Management in the Global South
An Open Research panel session was next which featured panellists with diverse backgrounds and expertise who addressed registrants’ pre-submitted and live questions. Some questions included the meaning of Open Research, its advantages and challenges, how Open Research can be engaged with by researchers (and in particular, early career researchers), and how it can be rewarded and embedded into the culture of research practices. There was engaging insights and debate amongst the panellists, led by Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, Professor Alexander Bird. He shared the platform with Philosophy of Science Professor, Professor Anna Alexandrova, Psychiatry PhD student Luisa Fassi, Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) Interim Head of Open Research Services Dr Sacha Jones, Cambridge University Press & Assessment’s Research Data Manager Dr Kiera McNeice, and Cambridge’s Head of Research Culture Liz Simmonds.
Open Research Panel
Following lunch, a second panel of scholars working across the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) took place. The panel was chaired by CUL’s Scholarly Communication Specialist, Dr Samuel Moore, and brought together experts who showcased their diverse work in this sector, from software development and museum practices to infrastructure and archiving support. The panel included Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell, CUL’s Senior Software Developer and Lead Research Software Engineer at Cambridge Digital Humanities, Isaac Newton Trust Research Associate in Conservation Dr Ayesha Fuentes from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dr Agustina Martinez-Garcia, CUL’s Head of Open Research Systems, and Dr Amelie Roper, CUL’s Head of Research. Each panellist presented on a specialist area, including Open Research code and data practices in digital humanities, collections research, teaching and learning collections care, and Open Research infrastructure. A lively discussion followed from the presentations.
GLAM panel
In a workshop session, Tim Fellows, Product Manager for Octopus, outlined how Octopus is a free and alternative publishing model that can practically foster Open Research. The platform, funded by UKRI, is designed for researchers to share ‘micro publications’ that more closely represent how research is conducted at each stage of a project. In a demonstration of the platform, Tim Fellows showed how Octopus works, it’s design, user interface, and application all with the aim of aiding reproducibility, facilitating new ways of sharing research, and removing barriers to both publishing and accessing research. An in-depth discussion followed which centered on the ways the platform can be used as well as its uptake and application across various disciplines.
Tim Fellows Octopus.ac: Alternative Publishing Model to Foster Open Research
The final talk of the day was on Open Research and the coloniality of knowledge presented by Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH and Professor of Latin American Studies. She discussed the topic with a specific focus on the questions of possession and access by outlining projects by three Latin American artists who have engaged with Humboldt’s legacy and the coloniality of knowledge. Using videos and imagery, Professor Page encouraged the audience to consider how they might identify where the principles of Open Research conflict with those of inclusion and cognitive justice, and what might be done to reconcile those ambitions across diverse cultures and communities. An engaging discussion ensued.
Professor Joanna Page Open Research and the Coloniality of Knowledge
A drinks reception brought the event to a close, allowing attendees a chance to mingle, network and continue the discussions.
Special thanks to all speakers, attendees, and volunteers for making this event such a success. Stay tuned for information about our 2024 Open Research conference.
We’re delighted to announce that the University of Cambridge has a new Self-Archiving Policy, which took effect from 1 April 2023. The policy gives researchers a route to make the accepted version of their papers open access without embargo under a licence of their choosing (subject to funder requirements). We believe that researchers should have more control over what happens to their own work and are determined to do what we can to help them to do that.
This policy has been developed after a year-long rights retention pilot in which more than 400 researchers voluntarily participated. The pilot helped us understand the implications of this approach across a wide range of disciplines so we could make an informed decision. We are also not alone in introducing a policy like this – Harvard has been doing it since 2008, cOAlition S have been a catalyst for development of similar policies, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the University of Edinburgh for sharing their approach with us.
Some of the issues that cropped up during the pilot were outlined by Samuel Moore, our Scholarly Communications Specialist, in an earlier post on the Unlocking Research blog. The patterns we saw at that stage continued throughout the year-long pilot – there was no issue for most articles, but some publishers caused confusion through misinformation or by presenting conflicting licences for the researchers to sign. We do recognise that there are costs involved in high quality publishing, and we are willing to cover reasonable costs (while noting our concerns around inequities in scholarly publishing). The fact is that some publishers are trying to charge the sector multiple times for the same content – subscription fees, OA fees, other admin fees – all while receiving free content courtesy of researchers that are usually funded by the taxpayer and charity funders.
Many researchers and funders are understandably becoming firmer in their convictions that publicly funded research should be openly and publicly available. We are fortunate that at Cambridge we are in a position to support this through our support for diamond publishing initiatives (in which the costs of publishing are absorbed for example by universities and no fees are charged to the reader or the author), through read and publish agreements negotiated on behalf of the UK higher education sector and through payment of costs associated with publishing in fully open access venues. Rights retention gives researchers a back-up plan for when other routes are not available to them, e.g. when a journal moves unexpectedly out of a read and publish agreement or a publisher does not offer any publishing route that meets their funder requirements.
This is not the end goal, we have work to do to reach an equitable approach to global scholarly publishing, and we can learn a lot especially from how South America approaches these issues. We welcome opportunities to work together with others around the world to create a more sustainable and equitable future for scholarly communications.
The UK universities sector is negotiating a read & publish deal with publisher Springer Nature. Reaching a transitional agreement is particularly important to make it easier for our authors to publish their work open access, as well as continuing to read all of Springer Nature’s content. The deal needs to be affordable for our sector, which is already under financial strain.
The Jisc negotiating team and the University of Cambridge are committed to finding a deal that works well for us, that is our plan A. But we are aware that some previous negotiations between universities and publishers could not find enough mutual ground (for example UCLA and German universities). If a contract can’t be signed, what would that mean for our researchers?
What would we keep access to?
Our current deal with Springer Nature includes perpetual access to some of their catalogue. We would retain access to 69% of content we currently subscribe to, even if we have to walk away from negotiations without a deal. When clicking on these articles, you will be given automatic access if you are connected to a Cambridge network or VPN, or you would be able to gain access from elsewhere with your Raven credentials.
Of course, we would only retain access to historic materials, not new publications. This means that the percentage of articles we have access to will slowly decline over time. The areas most impacted by the loss of access would be Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences and Clinical Medicine. But we have other plans to help people get access to the articles they require.
How would we access other articles?
If the University does not subscribe to an article you need to access, you would still be able to get hold of it, but the process is a little longer. The best thing to do is to install the Lean Library plugin on your device. Lean Library will look for open access content and allow you to access anything to which we retain post-cancellation access.
If you can’t get access through Lean Library, Cambridge University Libraries will help you get the article through an inter-library loan or other routes. The exact process will depend on ongoing work, so look out for further communications about the details.
How would we publish in Springer Nature journals?
Open access publishing is a great way to ensure that everyone in the world can read and apply your work for free. Many funders now require open access as a condition for their funding. As an additional complication, funders including the UK research councils will not pay for open access in hybrid journals, which charge for both subscriptions and open access (what we sometimes call ‘double-dipping’), unless there are transitional read & publish deals in place, or the journal is a transformative journal.
A read & publish deal would mean that the cost of open access publishing is covered by the libraries upstream, and researchers can publish at no additional cost. However, if a deal cannot be reached, many Springer Nature journals would remain hybrid journals. This means that many researchers would be required to publish open access, but have no access to central funds for this.
The solution is the Rights Retention strategy. By signing a pilot agreement with the University and including a rights retention statement in their manuscript, authors will retain their rights to make the manuscript openly available immediately on our repository, Apollo. This way, they will fulfil their funder requirement without having to pay a penny.
It should also be noted that some journals, such as Nature, have put into place specific provisions for researchers whose funders mandate open access.
How will we find out more?
The current contract runs until the end of December 2022 and we are assured of a grace period stretching to February 2023, during which access will continue if negotiations are ongoing.
We will continue to update our website as more information becomes available. An announcement will be made by email across the University once the outcome of the negotiations is known. Please email info@osc.cam.ac.uk or speak to your librarian if you have any questions.
The University’s one-year rights retention pilot has been running for six months now, during which time many papers containing the rights retention declaration have been submitted by Cambridge authors. As expected, the Office of Scholarly Communication is receiving more queries about rights retention from Cambridge academics, many of which relate to how publishers are responding to submissions containing the rights retention declaration. This post covers some of these queries to offer a picture of how rights retention is being received.
It is worth reminding ourselves what the rights retention pilot entails. All researchers at Cambridge can sign up to participate in the pilot here. In doing so, the researcher enters into a non-exclusive agreement with the university to make all their papers immediately open access under a Creative Commons attribution (CC BY) licence. When a researcher submits an article to a publisher, they include the following statement in the acknowledgements or funding section of the article file:
‘For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission’
Upon editorial acceptance, the researcher uploads a copy of the accepted manuscript to Symplectic Elements. The Open Access team will deposit the manuscript into Apollo and will release it publicly at the appropriate time.
Publisher responses
One of the primary fears researchers have regarding rights retention is that a publisher may editorially reject their article at the point of submission. While we are still dealing in small numbers of submissions and queries associated with the pilot, we have heard from at least two researchers that have been rejected from the journal at the point of submission due to rights retention language in their manuscript. In these cases, journals from the Seismological Society of America and the American Society of Hematology informed the respective authors that rights retention is not permitted because copyright transfer and an embargo period is required for publication in their journals. As a consequence, the authors in each case decided to submit to an alternative journal so that they could comply with their funder requirements. We are also aware of authors who received different answers from the American Society of Hematology, including to pay a fee or to accept rights retention. We hope rights retention will be approved in due course by the publisher as an acceptable route for all authors.
A second group of publishers have asked for the rights retention language to be removed either because they deemed it not necessary to comply with or because another compliant route was available to the authors. For example, a journal published by Springer Nature asked for the rights retention language to be removed because it was not required for compliance purposes (because the article was submitted prior to the relevant policy coming into effect). Journals published by Elsevier, the American Chemical Society and Optica all asked for the rights retention language to be removed because of pre-existing publishing agreements that allow Cambridge researchers to publish open access free of charge. In these instances, authors were willing to remove the language from the final published version and so it was not clear what would have happened if they had not done so. We have received advice that removing this wording does not negate the fact that the publisher has been informed of the prior licence and so rights retention is still permissible here. We are recommending that researchers include the rights retention declaration where possible even when publishers ask for it to be removed.
Despite the queries reported here, we have also seen a notable uptick in the number of submissions in the repository containing rights retention language, including within journals published by Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Springer Nature, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Company of Biologists and JMIR Publications (to name a few). One journal published by the American Psychological Association was willing to accept immediate CC BY for UKRI-funded authors, although this was still subject to a copyright transfer agreement. In the case of Springer Nature, acceptance of the rights retention language also entailed payment of colour charges – something the authors had not anticipated and which we detailed further in this Twitter thread. We urge publishers to be as clear as possible about whether they accept rights retention and upon what conditions.
I am sharing this data because it offers a snapshot of some of the responses we have seen from publishers so far. While we encourage our researchers to report any publisher pushback, we cannot be sure of all publisher responses, simply because researchers are under no obligation to report them. It is interesting, though, that some publishers are asking researchers to remove the rights retention declaration when there is a publishing agreement in place. We can hypothesise that this is because publishers want to prevent as many articles as possible from using this language because it would set a precedent for other researchers without access to such agreements to use rights retention too. Given this, the Office of Scholarly Communication is continuing to advise that the declaration is included in all manuscripts where possible, although this will be down to how persistent an author wants to be in requesting the language be retained.
Open Access is a powerful tool that enables researchers to share their research and maximise the impact of their work. However, the reality is that gold open access is a business model that is based on paying to publish, and it’s a business model that is primarily supported by research funders. What that means in practice is that gold open access often comes with a price tag that effectively excludes unfunded researchers.
The University of Cambridge has established a new institutional open access fund to provide financial support for unfunded researchers across the collegiate University. Researchers who do not have access to grant funds with which to pay the open access fees will be able to use the fund to pay the open access fees for their research or review papers in fully open access journals.
Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research explains that:
“This is significant step in ensuring that all University of Cambridge researchers can opt for gold open access publishing. We are proud to establish this fund that will be especially beneficial to early career researchers as well as other researchers in the collegiate University who are not eligible for the open access funds that are provided by grant funders. Significant inequalities remain in the global scholarly publishing system, however, so we continue our commitment to support different open access solutions that are available to any researchers, both within and outside the University”.
The new fund is one of the many ways that the University helps researchers make their research open access and complements our many Read & Publish deals, the Rights Retention Pilot and the facilitation of green self-archiving in the University’s institutional repository, Apollo.
Who can use the new institutional open access fund?
Researchers who have a strong connection (typically research staff and students) with the University of Cambridge (including the Colleges) who have no way of paying for open access fees in fully open access journals.
What will the new institutional open access fund cover?
The fund can be used to pay open access fees for full research articles or non-narrative review papers in fully open access journals, provided there is no other way of paying the fee (for example, where there is no Read & Publish deal available to any of the authors, or where none of the author team has access to any funding).
How will the new institutional open access fund work?
The Open Access team can provide in principle funding decisions but cannot guarantee payment until a paper has been accepted for publication. Researchers are encouraged to seek an in-principle decision before incurring any fees by emailing the Open Access Team.
Where can I find more information about the new institutional open access fund?
There is more information on the Open Access website about the institutional fund, and the Open Access Team is available to answer any queries.
What about the bigger issue?
We are very conscious about the wider challenges with author-pays models of open access, for example for unaffiliated researchers and those in institutions without access to funding of this sort, and especially of the global equity issues that arise. We held several strategic workshops looking at these issues earlier this year and will continue to work towards finding a more equitable future for open access scholarly publishing.
As part of our series on the ongoing negotiations between Elsevier and the UK university sector, this post by Michael Williams, Head of Collection Development & Management at Cambridge University Libraries, explores the University’s plans for continued research access in the event that an agreement cannot be reached.
As negotiations continue between Elsevier and the UK university sector, institutions need to position themselves to ensure that we have a realistic alternative access solution if the decision is to not sign an agreement. But what would happen in the event of a non-renewal scenario? This post explores how we at Cambridge University Libraries are preparing for Plan B and the alternative access solutions we will be providing.
As Jessica Gardner discussed on this blog, our collective ambition is to negotiate a Read-and-Publish deal with Elsevier that meets the sector’s requirements on costs and open access. However, a decision on the deal is looming in the coming months so we need to ensure we have an effective alternative option for accessing journal content if Elsevier does not meet our requirements. Importantly, however, this Plan B does not just apply to Elsevier but would come into play in the event of opting out of deals with other big commercial publishers in future negotiations.
At Cambridge we are doing our best to engage our research communities with the Elsevier negotiation so that any decisions around the deal and potential implementation of Plan B will only take place following communication and engagement with research-active members of the University. If we need to implement a Plan B, it should not come as a surprise; it will be planned and communicated in advance.
Elements of Plan B
An effective Plan B will enable users to obtain articles with a minimum of intervention and as seamlessly as possible. To achieve this, we are developing an integrated workflow that includes the use of browser extensions for discovery and document delivery services such as Inter-Library Loan (ILL). Additionally, we will subscribe to core titles (rather than a ‘Big Deal’ bundle) to provide continual access to content that we know will be in high demand, and make sure to actively share with our academic communities the post-cancellation access information detailing the journal coverage that will continue beyond the end of the existing deal.
Existing ILL services at Cambridge are being developed and expanded. We are implementing RapidILL, a document delivery service that enables quick turnaround times for the supply of journal articles and book chapters, which integrates with iDiscover and other discovery tools. In addition, we are co-ordinating with other UK universities for the supply of content through new and existing peer networks. The negotiations therefore offer the opportunity to bring our document delivery services up to date for this and any future negotiations. For requests that cannot be supplied by Inter-Library Loan, the library is establishing a funding plan to purchase articles on a case-by-case basis.
Another element of Plan B is the promotion of preprint servers and other openly accessible outputs for obtaining research that may not be the version of record but is still of use to researchers. Many articles will already be available as gold open access via publisher websites, but we also encourage our University members to utilise the vast array of papers uploaded to institutional and subject repositories and other indexes available on the web. These include legal author-sharing networks and Google Scholar. Through these networks, along with plugins such as Lean Library, users may also request access to papers directly from the authors themselves. These networks may be used to share materials under copyright. We should acknowledge that pirate sites are heavily used by some researchers; we will not be promoting these pathways to access through library channels and do not recommend their use.
Communications
Communications with the Cambridge community about how these alternative forms of access will change their workflows are important to the Plan’s success. Users need to understand that changes will be made but that alternatives do exist for accessing content. If we implement Plan B, we need to minimize the impact of non-renewal and provide solutions that deliver content seamlessly. To prepare for this we will be communicating with our users across our research community to inform, receive feedback and to test the services we deliver. We also need to ensure that library colleagues are aware of the changes and are consequently able to advise on how these changes will affect researchers. Plan B is therefore as much about communication as it is about technical changes.
Our website is a central point for information, containing FAQs and ways for researchers to provide feedback on our plans. Many of the services we are implementing would only be publicly available in the event of a non-renewal scenario. This is a good moment to pause and remind ourselves that the sector’s preferred route is to negotiate sustainable transitional agreements that meet our needs to Read and Publish – at an affordable price and meeting the expectations of funder policies. We must not lose sight of this in our Plan B planning.
Final note
If we are to be in a strong negotiating position, we must have a well-planned, credible alternative to proposals put forward by Elsevier or any big publisher. At Cambridge, we have worked hard for this and are prepared for any eventuality. In the event of moving to a Plan B, we aim to minimize the impact of non-renewal and provide solutions that deliver content seamlessly, but it is important to recognise that no Plan B will meet all user needs and be cost- and disruption-free from the user perspective. Access may be clunky and it will not be available ‘anywhere, anytime’ like current journal subscriptions. Depending on the length of time Plan B is needed, the situation may worsen as time passes (as the first thing we would lose is access to the most recently published content) but I am confident that research undertaken at the University of Cambridge will be well served whatever the outcome of the negotiation. Please do get in touch with the Office of Scholarly Communication if you have any questions at all.
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This post by Dr Jessica Gardner, Cambridge University Librarian, introduces the context for the ongoing negotiation between Cambridge University and the publisher Elsevier. It is the first in a series of posts on the negotiation from members of the Cambridge community. If you would like to contribute your own post, please get in touch via the link in the post below.
As Cambridge University’s Librarian, I am mindful of the need for our academics to be able to access the journals they require and publish in the journals they feel most befit their research. The library is here to support Cambridge’s academic mission to develop and share new knowledge, which requires comprehensive access to the scientific record. Through the coming months, as we continue our negotiations with Elsevier, we want to listen to the academic community to better understand how these negotiations may impact their work.
But the university and its library also have a strong mission around open research and a commitment to sharing knowledge as openly and freely as possible. Regardless of where you are around the world, we want you to be able to access and build upon the world-leading research produced at Cambridge. As we have seen over the last 18 months of the pandemic, open research has the potential to truly revolutionise how research is conducted and shared, allowing us to address challenges affecting local, national and international communities. The library will continue to lead this open agenda while serving our academic communities with the resources and expertise they need within different disciplinary settings.
Across the UK, our total spend with Elsevier is likely to reach £50 million in 2021. For Cambridge, our share of this figure includes what we pay for journal subscriptions and article-processing charges for open access. With our current agreement due to expire at the end of this year, we have a fiscal responsibility to review this deal and to ensure that we are paying the correct amount to access and publish with Elsevier journals. Working in a consortium organised by Jisc, we are seeking to renegotiate this figure (through a ‘transitional agreement’) while ensuring a meaningful reduction in the price paid. You can read more about the negotiations and our objectives here.
In order to ensure that all voices are heard relating to these negotiations, we are engaging with staff and students through a number of channels. We are seeking input from the Cambridge community, and hope you can tell us what you feel our future relationship with Elsevier should be. There will be a University-wide consultation in Michaelmas Term 2021. In the meantime, we welcome feedback and expressions of interest from anyone wishing to participate in future events and engagement plans. In addition, we will be hosting town hall events in September to keep the community informed and seek further input (stay tuned for details). This blog will also be used to highlight the views from across Cambridge. Please do get in touch with Samuel Moore, Scholarly Communication Specialist at the library, if you would like to write a blog post on any topic relating to the negotiation or the future of scholarly communication at Cambridge.
Though Cambridge is aiming for a deal, it is important to understand that, as in any negotiation, there is a possibility that one cannot be struck. We are committed to dialogue but also aware that we cannot continue to simply meet rising prices year on year or to accept deals that do not further our open access goals. The university sector is facing multiple financial pressures, including those arising from the pandemic, and we expect publishers to take the financial situation and the sector’s needs into account. Given Elsevier is the largest publisher in the world, the stakes are undoubtedly high, but we are confident that our sector will work to get the best deal possible. Nevertheless, as a sector we may have to hold the line, push back and challenge, keeping in mind that many other universities around the world have walked away too. In such a scenario, we know that effective strategies for journal access will be critical to the academic community in Cambridge.
Looking further ahead, it is beholden upon us to look beyond the negotiation with just one publisher. The last twenty years have seen a decided shift towards open access and open research and it is clearly the direction of travel. In some academic subjects, this has been vital to the world-wide pandemic response through rapid sharing of results, such as via preprints and data sharing. Libraries have been committed to the OA agenda and are leading the way through a variety of models, including through the kinds of agreements we are seeking with Elsevier to transition us to a fully open access world. We are now at a point of transformative change that will lead us to a time when it is a normal practice to make things openly accessible, and we look forward to working within the disciplinary needs of the Cambridge community to make this open future a reality.
