Open Access Initiative:
Paradigm shift in publishing
Dr.H.S.Siddamallaiah
Principal Librarian and Information Officer
NIMHANS, Bangalore - 560020
Why OA

Cannot afford to subscribe all needed journals
 Depreciating ability of libraries
 Libraries are finding alternatives to keep pace with
these increase in price
– by relying on “big deals” and consortia discounts

Subscription price persistently escalating at an
annual rate of approximately 8% to 10%
 Cost of journals is rising faster than inflation
 Monopoly of some of the publishers and
escalating the cost every years
Why OA

Investigators expect free access to publications
necessary for research and education
 IT enables us for cost-effective alternatives
available (compare to the traditional publishing
model)
– In publishing and providing access to intellectual assets
at cheaper cost
Evolution of OA

The voice of change was initiated by librarians alone,
 Later spread to the scientific community,
 Governmental groups understood scientific materials in the
interest of public good,
 Funding agencies understood the importance of free flow
 General public (users) moved with satisfied/ relief
 Ultimately publishers also joined the move,
Publishers, librarians, scientists, funding agencies,
and consumers joined the OA

Three types of OA
– open access publishing
– open archiving
– institutional repositories

Google (“open access publishing”)
What is open access?

Publications
– freely available online
– no charges imposed for access
 Budapest, Berlin, and Bethesda (BBB) statement


OA allows users to read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to the full text of works
Permitting use for any lawful purpose

OA is not applicable to
– content where authors expect financial
compensation

Authors role within current copyright law
– Allowing authors to either retain the right to
post their papers on institutional servers or
“open archiving” or
– Transfer rights to publishers who allow free
access to their work
Different type of OA

Do not charge subscription or access fees (known as
the “gold” road),

Allow self-archiving and/or commitment to
deposit a digital copy of a publication to a publicly
accessible Website (known as the “green” road)
 Maintain peer review to preserve their academic
reputations,
 Recover costs by charging an author publication
fee
Problems During Traditional print
publishing

Dual pricing levels force libraries to routinely
– Libraries pay more than ten times the price charged individuals for
the same subscription




(STM) publishing is a $7 billion industry
Journals were the fastest-growing media sub-sector of the
prior 15 years
Commercial publisher profits have averaged in the 20% to
40% range
Reed Elsevier, one of the leading commercial STM
publishers, had an operating margin of approximately 26%
in 1997 [12], and a 2002 Morgan Stanley report on STM
publishing listed a profit margin of 37% for Elsevier's core
titles

Publisher mergers led to higher prices
– as competition decreases


Anticompetitive activity was a concern for librarians
In addition, publishers of major STM journals routinely
charge authors significantly
– figure reproduction, and reprint fees at the time of publication

Authors have also traditionally been required to surrender
–
copyright to the publisher,
– thus limiting subsequent use of their own publications such as
posting their own papers on a personal Website
Scientific authors

Needs a wide dissemination/notice for their work
– not financial reward,

High prices were not solely the result of increased
costs,
– but might have been motivated by profit-seeking
publishers

Librarians are sandwitched – Strong demands from administrators to better control
library budgets,
– Pressure from scientists and clinicians who were losing
access to critically important journal literature
History of open access
Internet made it possible to share scholarly
communication, entirely new ways
Cooperation among authors/
scientific community

Scientists to share ideas prior to publication
– Physicist Paul Ginsparg found arXiv, in 1991,

self-archiving—depositing papers in a publicly
accessible, Internet-based archive
– ( Steven Harnad “subversive proposal,”)
to maximize exposure to their work and eliminate subscription
price barriers - hampering research sharing worldwide

Harnad - advocating author self-archiving
(posting of pre- and post-prints on
individual Websites), along with the
creation of tools for creating interoperability
and metadata standards to enable multiple,
disparate archives to function as one
searchable, freely accessible virtual archive

Due to opposition from learned societies
and commercial publishers,
Pub-Med Central,


currently houses full text for more than 160 journals.
PubMed Central - strengthened by the NIH public
access policy
– important to the OA movement,

Michael Eisen and Patrick Brown found
– Public Library of Science (PloS) - 2000
movement to persuade scientists to boycott
editing or publishing in journals that did not
make their content freely available

(Over 34,000 scientists worldwide signed a pledge)

BioMed Central (BMC),
– Vitek Tracz, (former chair of the Current Science Group)
after selling a number of publishing businesses
to Elsevier, found BMC,

based on the “author-pays” model.
Bio-med Central

Free online and supported by author fees
 Payment per article or institutional
memberships
 affiliated with organizations
– have privilege of reduced charges
– having over 460 institutional members
– publishing more than 110 OA journals
Significant milestones

In 2003
– Many Universities did not renew Elsevier
journals for the “big deal” involving bundles of
titles


canceled low-use titles
In 2004
– Editorial board of commercially published
journal - left Elsevier

United Kingdom's House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee
– recommended self-archiving, a proposal eventually
rejected by the UK government

in 2005, the eight UK Research Councils issued a
proposal mandating
– grant recipients post papers to either a free
institutional or
– subject-based repository, as soon as possible after
publication.

Major journals implement OA
• publishers including Springer-Verlag,
Blackwell, and Nature Publishing Group

implemented a variety of OA features and options
– Library, governmental, nonprofit groups and
professionals organization -endorse OA.
– Society publishers took a “middle ground” OA
position by pledging to provide free full-text
online access to their journals either
immediately or within months

France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands
– embrace OA and self-archiving initiatives

The Wellcome Trust, a major UK research funder,
sets OA requirements:
– All grantees awarded funds after October 1, 2005,

must make their published results freely available in PubMed
Central no later than six months after publication

February 2005,


NIH policy to broaden access to the biomedical
literature
2004 Congressional directive to implement
Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), found 1998,
– a library-backed advocacy group that publishes
alternative, lower-priced journals in selected
subject areas

1999 , E-Biomed, the brainchild of Nobel
laureate and then-director of the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH), Harold
Varmus.

Most stakeholders acknowledged
– change in the publishing landscape is
inevitable,
– transformation and remedies are the “green”
road (self-archiving articles published in nonOA journals) and
– “gold” road (publishing in OA journals)
Both movements intensify and multiplicity of
models and initiatives coexisting
End to end process of the scholarly knowledge life cycle
Research
databank
Science
portal
database
Research
Environment
searching harvesting
validation
Academic
output
Laboratory
data
Peer
Reviewed
journal
Content creating activities
– Learning activities
– Knowledge Management activities
– Product Management, Maintenance and Support
activities
– Print, Multimedia, Web, Wireless and PDA Publishing
activities in many fields (e.g., educational publishing,
reference publishing, legal publishing)

content from publishing is more
Content forms

Databases

e-Learning


Enterprise Integration platforms
Web Content management

Enterprise Application Servers

Enterprise Document Knowledge Management

Digital Asset Management
Content and Contextual value
Educational Publisher - flexible Content

Reference & Journal Publisher
– Digital Asset Management System

Manufacturer
– product documentation
–
–
–

regulatory documentation
multilingual production
field-service data, workflow and governance
Health Sciences Publisher
– Integrated authoring and production tools
Tools & Technologies








Authoring
Database
Assembly & Rendering
Web Delivery
Integration
UDDI = Universal Description, Discovery & Integration (a
large XML document)
SOAP = Simple Object Access Protocol
XML Language-- XML message or document is received
and processed in the right order .
Traditional (Old) Workflow

Manuscript submitted on paper (sometimes
with disk) to Editorial office  Paper
accepted for publication  Proofs sent to
authors, proofreaders, etc  author queries
answered  Final pages approved
Traditional Workflow (cont’d)
Not involving scientific community
 Paper keyed and coded
 Article laid out (paginated) in proprietary
typesetting system
 Typesetting files converted to SGML
 Electronic product produced
XML front ends  rethinking content & markup
Activity analysis
Changes lost in
media-neutral format
(version management issues)
Changes made on paper
Manuscript
Galleys
Pages
Paper submissions
Electronic Product
(repurposed from print)
Changes made to proprietary
typesetting
files
XML front ends  rethinking content & markup
Publishers to use 1, 2, 3 rights
Pages
Manuscript
Galleys
Galleys
Final, corrected
articles in DB
Publishers can add value and “squeeze” profits by making
this part more efficient – enter CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Electronic Product
X, Y and Z
And by diversifying
the product suite it
offers to the market
Content Management for
Efficiency

Digital workflow and benefits:
– Seamless movement of files in media neutral
format
– Enforcement of interoperability standards
– Editorial System; Author Gateway
– suite of web-based author services
Web-based author services

Communication cost and speed is taken care in
author support service:
– Better management of peer review process
– Provide tools for authors to track

status of their manuscript throughout publication process
– Decrease transfer time from:



Author to Editor
Editor to Referee
Editor to Production
Author Gateway

“One-stop shop” for authors’ interactions
– Dissemination of information (author
guidelines, paper tracking, marketing materials,
etc.)
– feedback from marketplace
E-publishing process for speed and less
handling cost

Electronic submission  Editorial office
Production (can have production tracking system)
 e-publication  Linking to database –
getting into aggregators
E- environment

One common global workflow, with many
different local production links
 All use same tools, tracking systems, etc.
 Links to all submission systems, peerreview systems and copy-editing system
End-to-end process
Products
Journals
Books and other
Editorial process
Production
processes
Digital data
Electronic
Warehouse
Re-using
Book and journals workflow  differences in
content, authoring environments
 There are 
– Common DTDs, to be enforced centrally
– Content Management standards to be enforced globally
– Authoring/editing tools with standardization and
enforcement
– Keeping in mind the different author environment

Recognizing *when* workflows must be flexible,
and when they cannot
Conclusion

IT enables global access hence the bargain
in cost and access to maximum literature
 The success depends on the cooperation to
changed mindset and IT-set
 However this open access itself is treading
towards virtual high cost business plan