Transcript No Slide Title

Open Access;
where next?
David Hoole
Nature Publishing Group
10 January 2007
Background
 Many open access journals have launched over the past eight years
but they have not gained significant market share, although a few
have gained significant impact (eg PLoS Biology at 14.672).
 NPG’s Molecular Systems Biology has published 28 author-paid
articles in 2007, 35 articles in 2006, and 14 in 2005 (March to Dec).
It has a first impact factor of 7.941
 Most major publishers have introduced hybrid models, allowing
authors to choose open access publication within existing
subscription journals – reported uptake has been low (eg OUP,
Blackwells, Springer).
 NPG has actively encouraged self-archiving by authors of the
accepted manuscript in institutional repositories after six months,
since 2005.
Recent developments at NPG
 NPG’s self-archiving policy has survived intact for the
past three years.
 Several society-owned journals have introduced hybrid
business models – BJP, BJC and EMBO
 Genome papers have always been made ‘open access’
– we have recently formalised this by publishing them
with a Creative Commons licence, allowing noncommercial reuse:
Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share
Alike (by-nc-sa) 3.0 Unported
Elsevier policies with NIH, Wellcome
and HHMI
 Different approach from NPG
 Individually negotiated policy agreements with
funders
Develoments in the US
 In October the US Senate passed a bill
mandating that research funded via the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) [1] must be deposited
in the NIH's free-to-access online repository,
PubMed Central [2], within one year of
publication in a peer-reviewed journal (the OA
Provision is part of the much broader Labor,
Health and Human Services (LHHS)
appropriations bill)
 "The Director of the National Institutes of Health
shall require that all investigators funded by the
NIH submit or have submitted for them to the
National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central
an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed
manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to
be made publicly available no later than 12
months after the official date of publication:
Provided, That the NIH shall implement the
public access policy in a manner consistent with
copyright law."
 In November, George Bush vetoed the bill.
 Bush vetoed the bill for its high level of
spending, not for its OA provision.
 A compromise bill (with less spending) was
signed by George W Bush on the 26 December
2007.
What does the policy mean?
The NIH doesn't have a mandate in place yet. It has only been instructed to adopt one. The NIH has discretion to fill in
the other details according to its own judgment. Here are some of the policy details still to be decided:
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How will the NIH deal with conflicts between its OA mandate and the policies of publishers where NIH grantees
may submit work? Some funders choose to create loopholes, deferring to publisher policies and in effect letting
publishers opt out. Some funders, led by the Wellcome Trust, never open this loophole and simply require
grantees to comply with the funding contract, which researchers sign long before they sign a publisher's copyright
transfer agreement; if a given publisher will not permit OA archiving on the funder's terms, then grantees must find
another publisher.
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What sanctions, if any, will the agency use for non-compliance?
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Will the policy apply retroactively to previous NIH grants? If so, how soon will it do so? The Wellcome Trust
adopted its OA mandate prospectively in October 2005 and made it apply retroactively to all outstanding grants
one year later.
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The US has already adopted a government-purpose license allowing federal agencies to disseminate the results of
the research they fund. In 2005, the NIH knew about the license but decided to rely on publisher consent instead.
Will it rely on the license this time?

Will the policy allow grantees to use grant funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals? The NIH is
already willing to pay these fees, but it may or may not integrate this policy with the new OA mandate.
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Will the policy require OA for raw or refined data generated by NIH-funded research? The NIH already has a datasharing policy, but it's not a mandate.
UK developments
 Most funders have supported open access in
principle, and now mandate or strongly
encourage ‘self-archiving’ within 6 or 12 months.
Most publishers allow this.
 The debate here has focused on what rights a
funder acquires when paying a publication fee.
 The Wellcome Trust has worked with the
UKPMC Publisher Advisory panel to reach
agreement on the key issue of derivatives.
Statement of principle from the UKPMC Publishers
Panel in relation to re-use of documents for which an
open access fee has been paid
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Context
The UKPMC Publishers Panel is made up of representatives of the funders of UK PubMed Central and the following
trade associations: The Publishers Association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical
Publishers and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. As such, the UKPMC Publishers
Panel has no authority to bind individual rightsholders in relation to the terms governing re-use of content for which
an open access fee has been paid. The UKPMC Publishers Panel has, however, agreed the following statement
of principle in relation to the re-use of documents for which an open access or sponsorship fee has been paid.
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Statement of principle
1.
It is in the interests of fostering and promoting research that such documents may be freely copied and used for
text and data mining purposes, provided that such uses are fully attributed, undertaken on a non-commercial
basis, and do not interfere with any moral rights of the author(s) of the documents. “Commercial” is taken here to
include (but not be limited to) the use of documents by for-profit organisations for promotional purposes, whether
for a fee or otherwise.
2.
These documents are protected by copyright and/or other applicable law. Where content in the document is
identified as belonging to a third party, consent should be obtained from the third party for the right to re-use this
content
3.
In addition to making the document openly and freely accessible to all users worldwide at the time of publication,
other re-use of the content, including but not limited to further redistribution, adaptation and translation, is
encouraged under licence from individual rightsholders.
4.
The UKPMC Funders recognise the value that publishers add to the research process and acknowledge that the
costs associated with publishing are legitimate research
Developments in Europe
 In February 2007 the European Commission, published a document
(COM(2007)0056) "Communication on Scientific Information in the
Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation"; The
Commission sent Communication COM(2007)0056 to the European
Council and to the European Parliament.
 The European Council debated the subject and in November 2007 it
published "Council Conclusions on Scientific Information in the
Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation".
 The European Parliament's Research Committee listened to a
presentation by the Commission on "Communication on Scientific
Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and
Preservation". This was the final item on the agenda of their meeting
on 13 September 2007. The Committee decided to take no action,
and COM(2007)0056 has been wiped from the Parliament's
database.
PEER Project: Publishing and the
Ecology of European Research
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The publishing and research communities agree that access to the results of European funded research is
important to maximise its use and impact. However, they hold different views on whether mandated deposit in
open access repositories is necessary and the embargo periods that would be appropriate. No consensus has
been reached on a way forward.
The key problem is that there is no clear evidence of what the impact of archiving research outputs in open access
repositories will be if implemented on a broad and systematic scale. The PEER project is a collaboration involving
the publishing, library and research communities to gather this evidence.
The aim is to develop an “observatory” to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time. Participating
publishers will collectively contribute 300 journals to the project and allow deposit of stage-two research outputs in
European repositories using various embargo periods. Supporting research studies will address issues such as:
• How large-scale archiving will affect journal viability
• Whether it increases access
• How it will affect the broader ecology of European research
• Factors influencing the readiness to deposit in institutional and disciplinary repositories and the associated costs
• Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving.

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The project partners are the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM),
European Science Foundation (ESF), Goettingen State and University Library, Max Planck Society and Institut
National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). Through Goettingen they plan to involve the
expertise of the DRIVER project on European repositories. PEER will lead to a greater understanding of journal
and repository use in the digital age, and will do much to foster trust and mutual understanding between the
stakeholders in academic research and scholarly publishing.
These partners have submitted a funding proposal to the European Commission eContentplus programme. If the
bid is successful, the project would start in June 2008 and continue for 3 years.
Developments in the physical sciences
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arXiv repository since 1994
‘Minimal’ effect on subscriptions
CERN
SCOAP3 – cancelling subscriptions to pay author charges focusing on top six journals: Physical Review (A through E); Journal
of High Energy Physics (JHEP); Physics Letters (A and B); Nuclear
Physics (A and B); Physical Review Letters and the European
Physical Journal (A and C)
 In December, PhysMath Central announced membership
agreements with the CERN and DESY high-energy physics
laboratories. The organizations will centrally cover article-processing
charges for all research published by their investigators in PMC
Physics A.
 "The SCOAP3 consortium will be open to all high-quality peerreviewed journals, including emerging publishing outlets as well as
established titles".
Related issues
 Research institutions developing copyright and
access policies - sometimes retaining author
copyright
 Institutional repositories being developed by
universities – what relation with PMC? Version
control? Policing deposit?
 Academic freedom; is the NIH policy a threat to
academic freedom, or are publishers the
problem?
Back to the economics
 Business models: Publication fee vs subscription fees vs
hybrid models
 All publishers with hybrid models have committed to
pricing the subscription content independently of the
‘author paid content’. In principle, this means reducing
prices if author-paid content replaces subscription
content.
 Full OA only makes sense on journals with low
circulations, where the number of authors may be more
equivalent to the number of subscribers - especially if the
subscription price is low compared to the publication fee
 Generally NPG journals have large circulations
NPG policy
 Experiment with publication-fee OA on MSB.
 Respond to society requests to introduce hybrid
models on society-owned AJs.
 Practice “publisher archiving” with the PEER
project.
 Be ready to offer publisher archiving to NIH
authors when self-archiving by grantees is
mandated.
 Monitor author submissions and feedback
carefully.
What’s next in 2008?
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NIH policy will be confirmed
More repositories, more self-archiving, more OA
Funders demanding ‘results’
Marginal impact on subscriptions (possibly bigger effect
on low impact titles) – increased price sensitivity?
BMC to make a profit?
PLOS to get more funding?
National and international developments in e-science
infrastructure
More wrangling