He who pays the piper…
Open Access: a funders perspective
Robert Kiley
Head of e-strategy
Wellcome Library
r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk
Conference:
First Bloomsbury Conference of e-publishing
and e-publications
UCL, 28-29 June 2007
Overview
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About the Wellcome Trust
Look at the current model for scholarly publishing – and
show why this does not work in the interests of the research
community
Look at an alternative model – open access
Discuss what it might cost and who pays
Look at major players – funders, publishers, and authors –
and highlight their current attitudes to OA
Conclusions
The Wellcome Trust
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Largest charity in UK; second largest
medical charity in the world
Funds innovative biomedical research
in the UK and internationally
Currently spends around £500 million
per annum – supporting the brightest
scientists with the best ideas
Supports public debate about
biomedical research and its impact on
health and well-being
Home of the Wellcome Library and
Wellcome Collection
More information at:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
Web has transformed awareness of
research results…..
..but the traditional publishing model
Publishers
£ Profit
£
Free
Free
£
Shareholder
s & Societies
Public
funders
& HEFCE
Libraries
£
..does not always work in the interests of the research
community
Issue 1 – Access problems
Funded by the
Wellcome Trust
and MRC
Research by BMC shows that:
 90% of NHS-funded research available online full text
40% immediately available to NHS staff
30% immediately available to public
See: http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/inquiry/refersubmission.pdf
Issue 2 – Research potential not fully
realised
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Internet provides new opportunities for text and data to
be fully integrated
The web – and web 2.0 developments – provides the
ability for researchers to data-mine and mash-up data to
generate new knowledge
The “read-only” access rights favoured by many
publishers, limits these developments
Integrating text and data
Integrating text and data
Developing new resources from
mining the literature: textpresso
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Ability to computationally mine the text and data to enable new
facts to be discovered
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The abstract is just not good enough. TextPresso developers found that
"full text access increases recall of biological data types from 45% to
95%. Some specific types of data (e.g., antibody data, mapping data,
transgene data) are very unlikely to appear in abstracts ( 10% recall) but
can be found in full text (70% recall)
Developing new resources from
mining the literature: Malaria Atlas Map
Data mined from the research literature
“Mashed-up” with
Google earth
Solution – open access
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Open access: a definition (Bethesda definition)
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The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free,
irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license
to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and
to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for
any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of
authorship
Under an open access model, publishers move from “content
ownership” model to a “service” model
OA at the Wellcome Trust: policy
All research papers – funded in
whole or in part by the Wellcome
Trust – must be made freely
accessible from the PubMed
Central and UKPMC repositories
as soon as possible, and in any
event within six months of the
journal publisher’s official date of
final publication
How do Wellcome Trust grantees
comply?
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Compliance can be achieved by following one of two routes:
Route 1 – open access publishing [preferred route]
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Route 2 – author self-archiving
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Publish in OA/hybrid journal
Typically incurs cost - met by Trust
Publish anywhere - but self-archive a version of the author manuscript
(must include all changes that arise from the peer-review process) and
make that available from PMC/UKPMC within 6 months
No fee
If a publisher offers neither route:
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Author can make revision to the journals copyright statement –
boilerplate language provided – and see if the publisher will accept this
Look for an alternative publisher
Publishers response to the
Wellcome grant conditions
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Significant number of commercial and not-for-profit publishers
now offer an OA-publishing option that is compliant with the
Trust’s requirements (e.g. PLoS, BMC, Springer, Elsevier,
OUP, CUP, BMJPG, Sage etc)
Other publishers allow the author to self archive a version of
the final article and make that available within 6 months (e.g.
Nature, AAAS, AMA, Am. Physiological Assoc)
However, some publishers have policies that do not allow
Wellcome-funded authors to publish in these titles
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High profile publishers that do not offer a WT-compliant policy include
the American Association of Immunologists, and the American
Association for Cancer Research
Open access publishing – who pays?
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Open access publishing still incurs costs
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Management of peer review process
Copy & language edits
But rather than charging readers – and creating artificial access
barriers – the OA model looks to shift these costs
“Author pays” model (more accurately “funder pays”) is gaining
in popularity
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All UKPMC funders recognise that OA fees are a legitimate research
expense
RCUK have indicated that publication fees for open access journals would
be a legitimate use of indirect research expenses
See: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/funderpolicies/ for further
information
What will it cost?
Costs and business models in scientific research publishing
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/
publications
Total cost of paying for OA?
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Trust estimates that providing OA to all the research
papers it helps fund will cost between 1%-2% of its annual
research budget
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Approx 4000 original research papers published every year. If
every single one of those papers was published as an open access
article, with an average cost of £1650 per article, the total cost to
the Trust would be £6.64 million; just over 1% of our annual
research budget.
Trust is rarely the sole funder of a research team, and more than
80% of papers that acknowledge our support also acknowledge the
support of one or more other funders. In time these costs will be
spread throughout the research budget and fall below the figure
estimated here.
Will OA lead to lower costs?
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Although the OA “funder pays” model incurs costs around
administration and collection of these payments ….
…in the longer term, the move to OA should lead to lower
costs
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Dispense with print – offer print on demand at cost (e.g. PLoS)
Eliminate subscription management
Eliminate DRM systems
Reduce legal overheads (drafting, monitoring, & enforcing licences)
Reduce marketing fees
Is OA sustainable? NAR and OUP - a
case study
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Nucleic Acids Research moved from a subscription, to hybrid
and then to full OA journal
In 2005 92% of authors paid the OA fee (8% waived)
Income per article has fallen:
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..but OA costs increased to offset this fall:
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2003 $4224 income per article
2004 $4647 income per article
2005 $3622 income per article
2005 - Member £300; Non-member £900
2006 - Member £500; Non-member £1000
2007 - Member £625; Non-member £1250
Additional titles are joining the Oxford Open programme
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2005 – 21 titles
2006 – 49 titles
2007 – 60 titles
OA and the future: funders
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Increasing number of funders recognise that full OA ensures
that that the fruits of their investment can be accessed and
built upon
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No rowing back - OA is here to stay
Increasing numbers of funders are making funds available to
cover OA costs…
…but will only pay these costs when:
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a publisher agrees to undertake a number of services (e.g. deposit in
PMC, in XML format) on behalf of the author
Allows these articles to be fully re-used for research purposes
OA and the future: publishers
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Increasing number of publishers are offering a form of “OA” –
but the OA “flavour” may not always be sufficient to meet
funders’ demands
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ACS Author Choice Programme:
“The ACS version of the article must not be changed, modified or
enhanced ….prohibited examples include adding of Internet links..
http://pubs.acs.org/pressrelease/author_choice/authorchoice_form.pdf
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Publishers increasingly demanding full recognition for their
services
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Recent ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM paper agues that publishers should
be able to derive the revenue benefit from the publication ….. and its
further distribution and access in recognition of the value of the services
they provide
Wiley/Batts spat is clear evidence that the commercial publishers
are increasingly concerned about re-use of content.
http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/04/victory_a_happy_resolution.php
OA and the future: authors
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Awareness of the issues around OA still relatively low
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More concerned with the impact factor of a particular journal –
rather than its OA policy
OUP study showed that 78% of authors agreed or strongly
agreed that “unrestricted re-use of their article after publication
is important”
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In 2005-06 only 32% of the funding the Trust made available for OA
publishing was claimed
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_report.pdf
Expectation that authors will comply with funder mandates
Funders need to develop author-friendly services so the
benefits of OA become manifest
Conclusion
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Providing unrestricted access to research outputs is good for
science and society
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Funding is available for authors to meet OA costs
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This should allow publishers to begin moving to an OA model
Dissemination costs are research cost
Still in a period of transition
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Allows research to be freely accessed and built upon
Helps funders evaluate impact of their funding portfolio
In time, overall publication costs should fall
Publishers and funders trying to define their positions and (hopefully) reach
a common understanding
Authors slowly beginning to recognise benefits of OA
OA will prevail
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Scholarly publishers will evolve and develop business models based on
providing services, rather than perpetuate the model which is based on
access barriers and artificial scarcity