It’s Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the years, it has become less necessary to explain what open access is. Rather, everyone seems to have a perception of open access and an opinion about it. But those perceptions and opinions may not be based on the original tenets of the open access movement. The commercialization of open access means that it may now seem too expensive to pursue for individuals to publish open access, and too complicated for institutions to attempt without buying a product.
In some ways, the open access movement is analogous to punk music–a movement that grew out of protest and DIY sensibilities, but was quickly coopted as soon as it became financially successful. While it was never free or easy to make work open access, changes in the market recently might make it feel even more expensive and complicated. Those who want to continue to build open access repositories and promote open access need to understand where their institution fits in the larger picture, the motivations of researchers and administration, and be able to put the right solutions together to avoid serious missteps that will set back the open access movement.
Like many exciting new ideas, open access is partially a victim of its own success. Heather Morrison has kept for the past ten years a tally of the dramatic growth of open access in an on-going series. Her post for this year’s Open Access Week is the source for the statistics in this paragraph. Open access content makes up a sizeable portion of online content, and therefore is more of a market force. BASE now includes 100 million articles. Directory of Open Access Journals, even after the stricter inclusion process, has an 11% growth in article level searching with around 500,000 items. There are well over a billion items with a Creative Commons license. These numbers are staggering, and give a picture of how overwhelming the amount of content available all told is, much less open access. But it also means that almost everyone doing academic research will have benefited from open access content. Not everyone who has used open access (or Creative Commons licensed) content will know what it is, but as it permeates more of the web it becomes more and more relevant. It also becomes much harder to manage, and dealing with that complexity requires new solutions–which may bring new areas of profit.
An example of this new type of service is 1Science, which launched a year ago. This is a service that helps libraries manage their open access collections, both in terms of understanding what is available in their subscribed collections as well as their faculty output. 1Science grew out of longer term research projects around emerging bibliometrics, started by Eric Archambault, and according to their About Us page started as a way to improve findability of open access content, and grew into a suite of tools that analyzes collections for open access content availability. The market is now there for this to be a service that libraries are interested in purchasing. Similar moves happened with alternative metrics in the last few years as well (for instance, Plum Analytics).
But the big story for commercial open access in 2016 was Elsevier. Elsevier already had a large stable of open access author-pays journals, with fees of up to $5000. That is the traditional way that large commercial publishers have participated in open access. But Elsevier has made several moves in 2016 that are changing the face of open access. They acquired SSRN in May, which built on their acquisition of Mendeley in 2013, and hints at a longer term strategy for combining a content platform and social citation network that potentially could form a new type of open access product that could be marketed to libraries. Their move into different business models for open access is also illustrated in their controversial partnership with the University of Florida. This uses an API to harvest content from ScienceDirect published by UF researchers, but will not provide access to those without subscriptions except to certain accepted manuscripts, and grew out of a recognition that UF researchers published heavily in Elsevier journals and that working directly with Elsevier would allow them to get a large dataset of their researchers’ content and funder compliance status more easily. 1 There is a lot to unpack in this partnership, but the fact that it can even take place shows that open access–particularly funder compliance for open access versions–is something about which university administration outside the library in the Office of Research Services is taking note. Such a partnership serves certain institutional needs, but it does not create an open access repository, and in most ways serves the needs of the publisher in driving content to their platform (though UF did get a mention of interlibrary loan into the process rather than just a paywall). It also removes incentives for UF faculty to publish in non-Elsevier journals, since their content in those journals will become even easier to find, and there will be no need to look elsewhere for open access grant compliance. Either way, this type of move takes the control of open access out of the hands of libraries, just as so many previous deals with commercial enterprises have done.
As I said in the beginning of this piece, more and more people already know about and benefit from open access, but all those people have different motivations. I break those into three categories, and which administrative unit I think is most likely to care about that aspect of open access:
Open access is about the justice of wider access to academic content or getting back at the big publishers for exploitative practices. These people aren’t going to be that interested in a commercial open access solution, except inasmuch as it allows more access for a lower cost–for instance, a hosted institutional repository that doesn’t require institutional investment in developers. This group may include librarians and individual researchers.
Open access is about following the rules for a grant-funded project since so many of those require open access versions of articles. Such requirements lead to an increase in author-pays open access, since publishers can command a higher fee that can be part of the grant award or subsidized by an institution. Repositories to serve these requirements and to address these needs are in progress but still murky to many. This group may include the Office of Research Services or Office of Institutional Research.
“Open access” is synonymous with putting articles or article citations online to create a portfolio for reputation-building purposes. This last group is going to find something like that UF/Elsevier partnership to be a great situation, since they may not be aware of how many people cannot actually read the published articles. This last group may include administrators concerned with building the institution’s reputation.
For librarians who fall into the first category but are sensitive to the needs of everyone in each category, it’s important to select the right balance of solutions to meet everyone’s needs but still maintain the integrity of the open access repository. That said, this is not easy. Meeting these variety of needs is exactly why some of these new products are entering the market, and it may seem easier to go with one of them even if it’s not exactly the right long-term solution. I see this as an important continuing challenge facing librarians who believe in open access, and have to underpin future repository and outreach strategies.
Russell, Judith C.; Wise, Alicia; Dinsmore, Chelsea S.; Spears, Laura I.; Phillips, Robert V.; and Taylor, Laurie (2016) “Academic Library and Publisher Collaboration: Utilizing an Institutional Repository to Maximize the Visibility and Impact of Articles by University Authors,” Collaborative Librarianship: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 4.
Librarians should have a role in promoting open access content. The best methods and whether they are successful is a matter of heated debate. Take for an example a recent post by Micah Vandergrift on the ACRL Scholarly Communications mailing list, calling on librarians to stage a publishing walkout and only publish in open access library and information science journals. Many have already done so. Others, like myself, have published in traditional journals (only once in my case) but make a point of making their work available in institutional repositories. I personally would not publish in a journal that did not allow such use of my work, and I know many who feel the same way. 1 The point is, of course, to ensure that librarians are not be hypocritical in their own publishing and their use of repositories to provide open access–a long-standing problem pointed out by Dorothea Salo 2, among others3 We know that many of the reasons that faculty may hesitate to participate in open access publishing relate to promotion and tenure requirements, which generally are more flexible for academic librarians (though not in all cases–see Abigail Goben’s open access tenure experiment). I suspect that many of the reasons librarians aren’t participating more in open access has partly to do with more mundane reasons of forgetting to do so, or fearing that work is not good enough to make public.
But it shouldn’t be only staunch advocates of open access, open peer review, or new digital models for work and publishing who are participating. We have to find ways to advocate and educate in a gentle but vigorous manner, and reach out to new faculty and graduate students who need to start participating now if the future will be different. Enter Open Access Week, a now eight-year-old celebration of open access organized by SPARC. Just as Black Friday is the day that retailers hope to be in the black, Open Access Week has become an occasion to organize around and finally share our message with willing ears. Right?
It can be, but it requires a good deal of institutional dedication to make it happen. At my institution, Open Access Week is a big deal. I am co-chair of a new Scholarly Communications committee which is now responsible for planning the week (the committee used to just plan the week, but the scope has been extended). The committee has representation from Systems, Reference, Access Services, and the Information Commons, and so we are able to touch on all aspects of open access. Last year we had events five days out of five; this year we are having events four days out of five. Here are some of the approaches we are taking to creating successful conversations around open access.
Focus on the successes and the impact of your faculty, whether or not they are publishing in open access journals.
The annual Celebration of Faculty Scholarship takes place during Open Access Week, and brings together physical material published by all faculty at a cocktail reception. We obtain copies of articles and purchase books written by faculty, and set up laptops to display digital projects. This is a great opportunity to find out exactly what our faculty are working on, and get a sense of them as researchers that we may normally lack. It’s also a great opportunity to introduce the concept of open access and recruit participants to the institutional repository.
Highlight the particular achievements of faculty who are participating in open access.
We place stickers on materials at the Celebration that are included in the repository or are published in open access journals. This year we held a panel with faculty and graduate students who participate in open access publishing to discuss their experiences, both positive and negative.
Demonstrate the value the library adds to open access initiatives.
Recently bepress (which creates the Digital Commons repositories on which ours runs) introduced a real time map of repositories downloads that was a huge hit this year. It was a compelling visual illustration of the global impact of work in the repository. Faculty were thrilled to see their work being read across the world, and it helped to solve the problem of invisible impact. We also highlighted our impact with a new handout that lists key metrics around our repository, including hosting a new open access journal.
Talk about the hard issues in open access and the controversies surrounding it, for instance, CC-BY vs. CC-NC-ND licenses.
It’s important to not sugarcoat or spin challenging issues in open access. It’s important to include multiple perspectives and invite difficult conversations. Show scholars the evidence and let them draw their own conclusions, though make sure to step in and correct misunderstandings.
Educate about copyright and fair use, over and over again.
These issues are complicated even for people who work on them every day, and are constantly changing. Workshops, handouts, and consultation on copyright and fair use can help people feel more comfortable in the classroom and participating in open access.
Make it easy.
Examine what you are asking people to do to participate in open access. Rearrange workflows, cut red tape, and improve interfaces. Open Access Week is a good time to introduce new ideas, but this should be happening all year long.
We can’t expect revolutions in policy and and practice to happen overnight, or without some sacrifice. Whether you choose to make your stand to only publish in open access journals or some other path, make your stand and help others who wish to do the same.
Notes
Publishers have caught on to this tendency in librarians. For instance, Taylor and Francis has 12-18 month repository embargoes for all its journals except LIS journals. Whether this is because of the good work we have done in advocacy or a conciliatory gesture remains up for debate. ↩
Salo, Dorothea. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” December 11, 2007. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088. ↩
Xia, Jingfeng, Sara Kay Wilhoite, and Rebekah Lynette Myers. “A ‘librarian-LIS Faculty’ Divide in Open Access Practice.” Journal of Documentation 67, no. 5 (September 6, 2011): 791–805. doi:10.1108/00220411111164673. ↩
In honor of Open Access Week, I want to look at some troubling recent discussions about open access, and what academic librarians who work with technology can do. As the manager of an open access institutional repository, I strongly believe that providing greater access to academic research is a good worth pursuing. But I realize that this comes at a cost, and that we have a responsibility to ensure that open access also means integrity and quality.
On “stings” and quality
By now, the article by John Bohannon in Science has been thoroughly dissected in the blogosphere 1. This was not a study per se, but rather a piece of investigative journalism looking into the practices of open access journals. Bohannon submitted variations on an article written under African pseudonyms from fake universities that “any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry…should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately.” Over the course of 10 months, he submitted these articles to 304 open access journals whose names he drew from the Directory of Open Access Journals and Jeffrey Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers. Ultimately 157 of the journals accepted the article and 98 rejected it, when any real peer review would have meant that it was rejected in all cases. It is very worth noting that in an analysis of the raw data that Bohannon supplied some publishers on Beall’s list rejected the paper immediately, which is a good reminder to take all curative efforts with an appropriate amount of skepticism 2.
There are certainly many methodological flaws in this investigation, which Mike Taylor outlines in detail in his post 3, and which he concludes was specifically aimed at discrediting open access journals in favor of journals such as Science. As Michael Eisen outlines, Science has not been immune to publishing articles that should have been rejected after peer review–though Bohannon informed Eisen that he intended to look at a variety of journals but this was not practical, and this decision was not informed by editors at Science. Eisen’s conclusion is that “peer review is a joke” and that we need to stop regarding the publication of an article in any journal as evidence that the article is worthwhile 4. Phil Davis at the Scholarly Kitchen took issue with this conclusion (among others noted above), since despite the flaws, this did turn up incontrovertible evidence that “a large number of open access publishers are willfully deceiving readers and authors that articles published in their journals passed through a peer review process…” 5. His conclusion is that open access agencies such as OASPA and DOAJ should be better at policing themselves, and that on the other side Jeffrey Beall should be cautious about suggesting a potential for guilt without evidence. I think one of the more level-headed responses to this piece comes from outside the library and scholarly publishing world in Steven Novella’s post on Neurologica, a blog focused on science and skepticism written by an academic neurologist. He is a fan of open access and wider access to information, but makes the point familiar to all librarians that the internet creates many more opportunities to distribute both good and bad information. Open access journals are one response to the opportunities of the internet, and in particular author-pays journals like “all new ‘funding models’ have the potential of creating perverse incentives.” Traditional journals fall into the same trap when they rely on impact factor to drive subscriptions, which means they may end up publishing “sexy” studies of questionable validity or failing to publish replication studies which are the backbone of the scientific method–and in fact the only real way to establish results no matter what type of peer review has been done 6.
More “perverse incentives”
So far the criticisms of open access have revolved around one type of “gold” open access, wherein the author (or a funding agency) pays article publication fees. “Green” open access, in which a version of the article is posted in a repository is not susceptible to abuse in quite the same way. Yet a new analysis of embargo policies by Shan Sutton shows that some publishers are targeting green open access through new policies. Springer used to have a 12 month embargo for mandated deposit in repositories such as PubMed, but now has extended it to all institutional repositories. Emerald changed its policy so that any mandated deposit to a repository (whether by funder or institutional mandate) was subject to a 24 month embargo7.
In both cases, paid immediate open access is available for $1,595 (Emerald) or $3,000 (Springer). It seems that the publishers are counting that a “mandate” means that funds are available for this sort of hyrbid gold open access, but that ignores the philosophy behind such mandates. While federal open access mandates do in theory have a financial incentive that the public should not have to pay twice for research, Sutton argues that open access “mandates” at institutions are actually voluntary initiatives by the faculty, and provide waivers without question 8. Additionally, while this type of open access does provide public access to the article, it does not address larger issues of reuse of the text or data in the true sense of open access.
What should a librarian do?
The issues above are complex, but there are a few trends that we can draw on to understand our responsibilities to open access. First, there is the issue of quality, both in terms of researcher experience in working with a journal, and that of being able to trust the validity of an individual article. Second, we have to be aware of the terms under which institutional policies may place authors. As with many such problems, the technological issues are relatively trivial. To actually address them meaningfully will not happen with technology alone, but with education, outreach, and network building.
The major thing we can take away from Bohannon’s work is that we have to help faculty authors to make good choices about where they submit articles. Anyone who works with faculty has stories of extremely questionable practices by journals of all types, both open access and traditional. Speaking up about those practices on an individual basis can result in lawsuits, as we saw earlier this year. Are there technical solutions that can help weed out predatory publishers and bad journals and articles? The Library Loon points out that many factors, some related to technology, have meant that both positive and negative indicators of journal quality have become less useful in recent years. The Loon suggests that “[c]reating a reporting mechanism where authors can rate and answer relatively simple questions about their experiences with various journals seems worthwhile.” 9
The comments to this post have some more suggestions, including open peer review and a forum backed by a strong editor that could be a Yelp-type site for academic publisher reputation. I wrote about open peer review earlier this year in the context of PeerJ, and participants in that system did indeed find the experience of publishing in a journal with quick turnarounds and open reviews pleasant. (Bohannon did not submit a fake article to PeerJ). This solution requires that journals have a more robust technical infrastructure as well as a new philosophy to peer review. More importantly, this is not a solution librarians can implement for our patrons–it is something that has to come from the journals.
The idea that seems to be catching on more is the “Yelp” for scholarly publishers. This seems like a good potential solution, albeit one that would require a great deal of coordinated effort to be truly useful. The technical parts of this type of solution would be relatively easy to carry out. But how to ensure that it is useful for its users? The Yelp analog may be particularly helpful here. When it launched in 2004, it asked users who were searching for some basic information about their question, and to provide the email addresses of additional people whom they would have traditionally asked for this information. Yelp then emailed those people as well as others with similar searches to get reviews of local businesses to build up its base of information. 10 Yelp took a risk in pursuing content in that way, since it could have been off-putting to potential users. But local business information was valuable enough to early users that they were willing to participate, and this seems like a perfect model to build up a base of information on journal publisher practices.
This helps address the problem of predatory publishers and shifting embargoes, but it doesn’t help as much with the issue of quality assurance for the article content. Librarians teach students how to find articles that claim to be peer reviewed, but long before Bohannon we knew that peer review quality varies greatly, and even when done well tells us nothing about the validity of the research findings. Education about the scholarly communication cycle, the scientific method, and critical thinking skills are the most essential tools to ensure that students are using appropriate articles, open access or not. However, those skills are difficult to bring to bear for even the most highly experienced researchers trying to keep up with a large volume of published research. There are a few technical solutions that may be of help here. Article level metrics, particularly alternative metrics, can aid in seeing how articles are being used. (For more on altmetrics, see this post from earlier this year).
One of the easiest options for article level metrics is the Altmetric.com bookmarklet. This provides article level metrics for many articles with a DOI, or articles from PubMed and arXiv. Altmetric.com offers an API with a free tier to develop your own app. An open source option for article level metrics is PLOS’s Article-Level Metrics, a Ruby on Rails application. These solutions do not guarantee article quality, of course, but hopefully help weed out more marginal articles.
No one needs to be afraid of open access
For those working with institutional repositories or other open access issues, it sometimes seems very natural for Open Access Week to fall so near Halloween. But it does not have to be frightening. Taking responsibility for thoughtful use of technical solutions and on-going outreach and education is essential, but can lead to important changes in attitudes to open access and changes in scholarly communication.
Eisen, Michael. “I Confess, I Wrote the Arsenic DNA Paper to Expose Flaws in Peer-review at Subscription Based Journals.” It Is NOT Junk, October 3, 2013. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439. ↩
Sutton, Shan C. “Open Access, Publisher Embargoes, and the Voluntary Nature of Scholarship: An Analysis.” College & Research Libraries News 74, no. 9 (October 1, 2013): 468–472. ↩
Most famously, he was arrested in 2011 for the mass download of journal articles from JSTOR. He returned the documents to JSTOR and apologized. The Massachusetts state court dismissed the charges, and JSTOR decided not to pursue civil litigation. But MIT stayed silent, and the federal court charged Swartz with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, Swartz could be sentenced to up to 35 years in prison at the age of 26. He committed suicide after facing charges for two years, on January 11, 2013.
Information wants to be free; Information wants to be expensive
Now, he was a controversial figure. He advocated Open Access (OA) but to the extent of encouraging scholars, librarians, students who have access to copyrighted academic materials to trade passwords and circulate them freely on the grounds that this is an act of civil disobedience against unjust copyright laws in his manifesto. He was an advocate of the open Internet, the transparent government, and open access to scholarly output. But he also physically hacked into the MIT network wiring closet and attached his laptop to download over 4 million articles from JSTOR. Most people including librarians are not going to advocate trading their institutions’ subscription database passwords or breaking into a staff-only computer networking area of an institution. The actual method of OA that Swartz recommended was highly controversial even among the strongest OA advocates.
But in his Guerrilla OA manifesto, Swartz raised one very valid point about the nature of information in the era of the World Wide Web. That is, information is power. (a) As power, information can be spread to and be made useful to as many of us as possible. Or, (b) it can be locked up and the access to it can be restricted to only those who can pay for it or have access privileges some other way. One thing is clear. Those who do not have access to information will be at a significant disadvantage compared to those who do.
And I would like to ask what today’s academic and/or research libraries are doing to realize Scenario (a) rather than Scenario (b). Are academic/research libraries doing enough to make information available to as many as possible?
Among the many articles I read about Aaron Swartz’s sudden death, the one that made me think most was “Aaron Swartz’s suicide shows the risk of a too-comfortable Internet.” The author of this article worries that we may now have a too-comfortable Internet. The Internet is slowly turning into just another platform for those who can afford purchasing information. The Internet as the place where you could freely find, use, modify, create, and share information is disappearing. Instead pay walls and closed doors are being established. Useful information on the Internet is being fast monetized, and the access is no longer free and open. Even the government documents become no longer freely accessible to the public when they are put up on the Internet (likely to be due to digitization and online storage costs) as shown in the case of PACER and Aaron Swartz. We are more and more getting used to giving up our privacy or to paying for information. This may be inevitable in a capitalist society, but should the same apply to libraries as well?
The thought about the too-comfortable Internet made me wonder whether perhaps academic research libraries were also becoming too comfortable with the status quo of licensing electronic journals and databases for patrons. In the times when the library collection was physical, people who walk into the library were rarely turned away. The resources in the library are collected and preserved because we believe that people have the right to learn and investigate things and to form one’s own opinions and that the knowledge of the past should be made available for that purpose. Regardless of one’s age, gender, social and financial status, libraries have been welcoming and encouraging people who were in the quest for knowledge and information. With the increasing number of electronic resources in the library, however, this has been changing.
Many academic libraries offer computers, which are necessary to access electronic resources of the library itself. But how many of academic libraries keep all the computers open for user without the user log-in? Often those library computers are locked up and require the username and password, which only those affiliated with the institution possess. The same often goes for many electronic resources. How many academic libraries allow the on-site access to electronic resources by walk-in users? How many academic libraries insist on the walk-in users’ access to those resources that they pay for in the license? Many academic libraries also participate in the Federal Depository Library program, which requires those libraries to provide free access to the government documents that they receive to the public. But how easy is it for the public to enter and access the free government information at those libraries?
I asked in Twitter about the guest access in academic libraries to computers and e-resources. Approximately 25 academic librarians generously answered my question. (Thank you!) According to the responses in Twitter, almost all except a few libraries ( mentioned in Twitter responses) offer guest access to computers and e-resources on-site. It is to be noted, however, that a few offer the guest -access to neither. Also some libraries limit the guests’ computer-use to 30 minutes – 4 hours, thereby restricting the access to the library’s electronic resources as well. Only a few libraries offer free wi-fi for guests. And at some libraries, the guest wi-fi users are unable to access the library’s e-resources even on-site because the IP range of the guest wi-fi is different from that of the campus wi-fi.
I am not sure how many academic libraries consciously negotiate the walk-in users’ on-site access with e-resources vendors or whether this is done somewhat semi-automatically because many libraries ask the library building IP range to be registered with vendors so that the authentication can be turned off inside the building. I surmise that publishers and database vendors will not automatically permit the walk-in users’ on-site access in their licenses unless libraries ask for it. Some vendors also explicitly prohibit libraries from using their materials to fill the Interlibrary loan requests from other libraries. The electronic resource vendors and publishers’ pricing has become more and more closely tied to the number of patrons who can access their products. Academic libraries has been dealing with the escalating costs for electronic resources by filtering out library patrons and limiting the access to those in a specific disciplines. For example, academic medical and health sciences libraries often subscribe to databases and resources that have the most up-to-date information about biomedical research, diseases, medications, and treatments. These are almost always inaccessible to the general public and often even to those affiliated with the institution. The use of these prohibitively expensive resources is limited to a very small portion of people who are affiliated with the institution in specific disciplines such as medicine and health sciences. Academic research libraries have been partially responsible for the proliferation of these access limitations by welcoming and often preferring these limitations as a cost-saving measure. (By contrast, if those resources were in the print format, no librarian would think that it is OK to permanently limit its use to those in medical or health science disciplines only.)
Too-comfortable libraries do not ask themselves if they are serving the public good of providing access to information and knowledge for those who are in need but cannot afford it. Too-comfortable libraries see their role as a mediator and broker in the transaction between the information seller and the information buyer. They may act as an efficient and successful mediator and broker. But I don’t believe that that is why libraries exist. Ultimately, libraries exist to foster the sharing and dissemination of knowledge more than anything, not to efficiently mediate information leasing. And this is the dangerous idea: You cannot put a price tag on knowledge; it belongs to the human race. Libraries used to be the institution that validates and confirms this idea. But will they continue to be so in the future? Will an academic library be able to remain as a sanctuary for all ideas and a place for sharing knowledge for people’s intellectual pursuits regardless of their institutional membership? Or will it be reduced to a branch of an institution that sells knowledge to its tuition-paying customers only? While public libraries are more strongly aligned with this mission of making information and knowledge freely and openly available to the public than academic libraries, they cannot be expected to cover the research needs of patrons as fully as academic libraries.
I am not denying that libraries are also making efforts in continuing the preservation and access to the information and resources through initiatives such as Hathi Trust and DPLA (Digital Public Library of America). My concern is rather whether academic research libraries are becoming perhaps too well-adapted to the times of the Internet and online resources and too comfortable serving the needs of the most tangible patron base only in the most cost-efficient way, assuming that the library’s mission of storing and disseminating knowledge can now be safely and neutrally relegated to the Internet and the market. But it is a fantasy to believe that the Internet will be a sanctuary for all ideas (The Internet is being censored as shown in the case of Tarek Mehanna.), and the market will surely not have the ideal of the free and open access to knowledge for the public.
If libraries do not fight for and advocate those who are in need of information and knowledge but cannot afford it, no other institution will do so. Of course, it costs to create, format, review, and package content. Authors as well as those who work in this business of content formatting, reviewing, packaging, and producing should be compensated for their work. But not to the extent that the content is completely inaccessible to those who cannot afford to purchase but nevertheless want access to it for learning, inquiry, and research. This is probably the reason why we are all moved by Swartz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in spite of the illegal implications of the action that he actually recommended in the manifesto.
Knowledge and information is not like any other product for purchase. Sharing increases its value, thereby enabling innovation, further research, and new knowledge. Limiting knowledge and information to only those with access privilege and/or sufficient purchasing power creates a fundamental inequality. The mission of a research institution should never be limited to self-serving its members only, in my opinion. And if the institution forgets this, it should be the library that first raises a red flag. The mission of an academic research institution is to promote the freedom of inquiry and research and to provide an environment that supports that mission inside and outside of its walls, and that is why a library is said to be the center of an academic research institution.
I don’t have any good answers to the inevitable question of “So what can an academic research library do?” Perhaps, we can start with broadening the guest access to the library computers, wi-fi, and electronic resources on-site. Academic research libraries should also start asking themselves this question: What will libraries have to offer for those who seek knowledge for learning and inquiry but cannot afford it? If the answer is nothing, we will have lost libraries.
In his talk about the Internet Archive’s Open Library project at the Code4Lib Conference in 2008 (at 11:20), Swartz describes how librarians had argued about which subject headings to use for the books in the Open Library website. And he says, “We will use all of them. It’s online. We don’t have to have this kind of argument.” The use of online information and resources does not incur additional costs for use once produced. Many resources, particularly those scholarly research outputs, already have established buyers such as research libraries. Do we have to deny access to information and knowledge to those who cannot afford but are seeking for it, just so that we can have a market where information and knowledge resources are sold and bought and authors are compensated along with those who work with the created content as a result? No, this is a false question. We can have both. But libraries and librarians will have to make it so.
Videos to Watch
“Code4Lib 2008: Building the Open Library – YouTube.”
“Aaron Swartz on Picking Winners” American Library Association Midwinter meeting, January 12, 2008.
“Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors.”
REFERENCES
“Aaron Swartz.” 2013. Accessed February 10. http://www.aaronsw.com/.
Open access publication makes access to research free for the end reader, but in many fields it is not free for the author of the article. When I told a friend in a scientific field I was working on this article, he replied “Open access is something you can only do if you have a grant.” PeerJ, a scholarly publishing venture that started up over the summer, aims to change this and make open access publication much easier for everyone involved.
While the first publication isn’t expected until December, in this post I want to examine in greater detail the variation on the “gold” open-access business model that PeerJ states will make it financially viable 1, and the open peer review that will drive it. Both of these models are still very new in the world of scholarly publishing, and require new mindsets for everyone involved. Because PeerJ comes out of funding and leadership from Silicon Valley, it can more easily break from traditional scholarly publishing and experiment with innovative practices. 2
PeerJ Basics
PeerJ is a platform that will host a scholarly journal called PeerJ and a pre-print server (similar to arXiv) that will publish biological and medical scientific research. Its founders are Peter Binfield (formerly of PLoS ONE) and Jason Hoyt (formerly of Mendeley), both of whom are familiar with disruptive models in academic publishing. While the “J” in the title stands for Journal, Jason Hoyt explains on the PeerJ blog that while the journal as such is no longer a necessary model for publication, we still hold on to it. “The journal is dead, but it’s nice to hold on to it for a little while.” 3. The project launched in June of this year, and while no major updates have been posted yet on the PeerJ website, they seem to be moving towards their goal of publishing in late 2012.
To submit a paper for consideration in PeerJ, authors must buy a “lifetime membership” starting at $99. (You can submit a paper without paying, but it costs more in the end to publish it). This would allow the author to publish one paper in the journal a year. The lifetime membership is only valid as long as you meet certain participation requirements, which at minimum is reviewing at least one article a year. Reviewing in this case can mean as little as posting a comment to a published article. Without that, the author might have to pay the $99 fee again (though as yet it is of course unclear how strictly PeerJ will enforce this rule). The idea behind this is to “incentivize” community participation, a practice that has met with limited success in other arenas. Each author on a paper, up to 12 authors, must pay the fee before the article can be published. The Scholarly Kitchen blog did some math and determined that for most lab setups, publication fees would come to about $1,124 4, which is equivalent to other similar open access journals. Of course, some of those researchers wouldn’t have to pay the fee again; for others, it might have to be paid again if they are unable to review other articles.
Peer Review: Should it be open?
PeerJ, as the name and the lifetime membership model imply, will certainly be peer-reviewed. But, keeping with its innovative practices, it will use open peer review, a relatively new model. Peter Binfield explained in this interview PeerJ’s thinking behind open peer review.
…we believe in open peer review. That means, first, reviewer names are revealed to authors, and second, that the history of the peer review process is made public upon publication. However, we are also aware that this is a new concept. Therefore, we are initially going to encourage, but not require, open peer review. Specifically, we will be adopting a policy similar to The EMBO Journal: reviewers will be permitted to reveal their identities to authors, and authors will be given the choice of placing the peer review and revision history online when they are published. In the case of EMBO, the uptake by authors for this latter aspect has been greater than 90%, so we expect it to be well received. 5
In single blind peer review, the reviewers would know the name of the author(s) of the article, but the author would not know who reviewed the article. The reviewers could write whatever sorts of comments they wanted to without the author being able to communicate with them. For obvious reasons, this lends itself to abuse where reviewers might not accept articles by people they did not know or like or tend to accept articles from people they did like 6 Even people who are trying to be fair can accidentally fall prey to bias when they know the names of the submitters.
Double blind peer review in theory takes away the ability for reviewers to abuse the system. A link that has been passed around library conference planning circles in the past few weeks is the JSConf EU 2012 which managed to improve its ratio of female presenters by going to a double-blind system. Double blind is the gold standard for peer review for many scholarly journals. Of course, it is not a perfect system either. It can be hard to obscure the identity of a researcher in a small field in which everyone is working on unique topics. It also is a much lengthier process with more steps involved in the review process. To this end, it is less than ideal for breaking medical or technology research that needs to be made public as soon as possible.
In open peer review, the reviewers and the authors are known to each other. By allowing for direct communication between reviewer and researcher, this speeds up the process of revisions and allows for greater clarity and speed 7. Open peer review doesn’t affect the quality of the reviews or the articles negatively, it does make it more difficult to find qualified reviewers to participate, and it might make a less well-known researcher more likely to accept the work of a senior colleague or well-known lab. 8.
Given the experience of JSConf and a great deal of anecdotal evidence from women in technical fields, it seems likely that open peer review is open to the same potential abuse of single peer review. While open peer review might make the rejected author able to challenge unfair rejections, this would require that the rejected author feels empowered enough in that community to speak up. Junior scholars who know they have been rejected by senior colleagues may not want to cause a scene that could affect future employment or publication opportunities. On the other hand, if they can get useful feedback directly from respected senior colleagues, that could make all the difference in crafting a stronger article and going forward with a research agenda. Therein lies the dilemma of open peer review.
Who pays for open access?
A related problem for junior scholars exists in open access funding models, at least in STEM publishing. As open access stands now, there are a few different models that are still being fleshed out. Green open access is free to the author and free to the reader; it is usually funded by grants, institutions, or scholarly societies. Gold open access is free to the end reader but has a publication fee charged to the author(s).
This situation is very confusing for researchers, since when they are confronted with a gold open access journal they will have to be sure the journal is legitimate (Jeffrey Beall has a list of Predatory Open Access journals to aid in this) as well as secure funding for publication. While there are many schemes in place for paying publication fees, there are no well-defined practices in place that illustrate long-term viability. Often this is accomplished by grants for the research, but not always. The UK government recently approved a report that suggests that issuing “block grants” to institutions to pay these fees would ultimately cost less due to reduced library subscription fees. As one article suggests, the practice of “block grants” or other funding strategies are likely to not be advantageous to junior scholars or those in more marginal fields9. A large research grant for millions of dollars with the relatively small line item for publication fees for a well-known PI is one thing–what about the junior humanities scholar who has to scramble for a few thousand dollar research stipend? If an institution only gets so much money for publication fees, who gets the money?
By offering a $99 lifetime membership for the lowest level of publication, PeerJ offers hope to the junior scholar or graduate student to pursue projects on their own or with a few partners without worrying about how to pay for open access publication. Institutions could more readily afford to pay even $250 a year for highly productive researchers who were not doing peer review than the $1000+ publication fee for several articles a year. As above, some are skeptical that PeerJ can afford to publish at those rates, but if it is possible, that would help make open access more fair and equitable for everyone.
Conclusion
Open access with low-cost paid up front could be very advantageous to researchers and institutional bottom lines, but only if the quality of articles, peer reviews, and science is very good. It could provide a social model for publication that will take advantage of the web and the network effect for high quality reviewing and dissemination of information, but only if enough people participate. The network effect that made Wikipedia (for example) so successful relies on a high level of participation and engagement very early on to be successful [Davis]. A community has to build around the idea of PeerJ.
In almost the opposite method, but looking to achieve the same effect, this last week the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) announced that after years of negotiations they are set to convert publishing in that field to open access starting in 2014. 10 This means that researchers (and their labs) would not have to do anything special to publish open access and would do so by default in the twelve journals in which most particle physics articles are published. The fees for publication will be paid upfront by libraries and funding agencies.
So is it better to start a whole new platform, or to work within the existing system to create open access? If open (and through a commenting s system, ongoing) peer review makes for a lively and engaging network and low-cost open access makes publication cheaper, then PeerJ could accomplish something extraordinary in scholarly publishing. But until then, it is encouraging that organizations are working from both sides.
Davis, Phil. “PeerJ: Silicon Valley Culture Enters Academic Publishing.” The Scholarly Kitchen, June 14, 2012. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/14/peerj-silicon-valley-culture-enters-academic-publishing/. ↩
Hoyt, Jason. “What Does the ‘J’ in ‘PeerJ’ Stand For?” PeerJ Blog, August 22, 2012. http://blog.peerj.com/post/29956055704/what-does-the-j-in-peerj-stand-for. ↩
Wennerås, Christine, and Agnes Wold. “Nepotism and sexism in peer-review.” Nature 387, no. 6631 (May 22, 1997): 341–3. ↩
For an ingenious way of demonstrating this, see Leek, Jeffrey T., Margaret A. Taub, and Fernando J. Pineda. “Cooperation Between Referees and Authors Increases Peer Review Accuracy.” PLoS ONE 6, no. 11 (November 9, 2011): e26895. ↩
Mainguy, Gaell, Mohammad R Motamedi, and Daniel Mietchen. “Peer Review—The Newcomers’ Perspective.” PLoS Biology 3, no. 9 (September 2005). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1201308/. ↩
Crotty, David. “Are University Block Grants the Right Way to Fund Open Access Mandates?” The Scholarly Kitchen, September 13, 2012. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/13/are-university-block-grants-the-right-way-to-fund-open-access-mandates/.↩
Van Noorden, Richard. “Open-access Deal for Particle Physics.” Nature 489, no. 7417 (September 24, 2012): 486–486. ↩
