Academic and Professional Publishing – book review

My review of Academic & Professional Publishing, edited by Robert Campbell, Ed Pentz and Ian Borthwick has now been published in Learned Publishing where it is (currently) freely available . I liked it, a lot:

The fact that book publishing deadlines (especially multi-contributor works) sometimes means that the rapid pace of events can overtake some details has not prevented the authors from including concrete examples (notably in the excellent chapter on publishing and communication strategies) and it is all the better for it. Indeed, the book’s pace and scope compared to the daily torrent of information provides exactly the space for perspective and critical thought that we need.

If you’d like a second opinion, Judy Luther has also reviewed it for Scholarly Kitchen:

Reviewing this book had the feel of attending a productive meeting with a mix of interesting facts, worthwhile references, and different perspectives on important topics providing food for thought. Much like looking in a three way mirror, we recognize the familiar and realize that there are dimensions that we hadn’t seen before.

Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications

I have a new report (jointly produced with CEPA for RIN) out today: Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications.

We investigate the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. The report identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The conclusions are interesting … [read more]

Recession is the Mother of Invention (ASA Conference)

I was pleased to have been invited to talk at the Association of Subscription Agents Annual Conference this week, because otherwise I would most likely not have gone and this would have meant missing an interesting meeting.

Nearly all the talks were informative and engaging, and even if not one then usually the other. For me it was particularly interesting to get updates on the state of PDA (patron-driven acquisition), the Chinese market and new developments in data-linked and semantic publishing (though it would be nice to see an actual prototype  from Jan Velterop rather than just his ever-more-ingenious Keynote slides), while sobering to hear about the likely state of UK university finances over the near (and indeed, medium) term. (To summarise, in the notorious words of the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne: “I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left.”) Unashamedly at the engaging end of the informative–engaging spectrum (he was not being overly disingenuous when he described it as “fact free”), Mark Carden’s talk was nonetheless thought-provoking (and is available on YouTube).

The conference programme is listed on their website and I understand the speaker slides will be made available at some point. In the meantime my own slides (not terribly informative without the accompanying talk, I’m afraid) are available on Slideshare here.

The Twitterstream can be found here, for what it’s worth. I got the impression that there was rather less in the “back-channel” than at some previous conferences, with the bulk of twittering coming from just two tweeps.

Submission fees in open access journals

The summary version of a report I wrote earlier this year for Knowledge Exchange on submission fees in open access journals has just been published on the KE website.

Submission fees, in which an author pays a fee when submitting an article are already quite common in certain disciplines, notably economic and finance journals and in some areas of the experimental life sciences. The report found that that there could be benefits to publishers in certain cases (particularly for journals with high rejection rates) to switch to such a model. For high rejection rate journals one advantage would be that article processing charges could be kept much lower than they would otherwise have to be.

Overall there seems to be an interest in the model but the risks, particularly those involved in any transition, are seen by publishers to outweigh the perceived benefits. There is also a problem in that the advantages offered by submission fees are often general benefits that might improve the system but do not provide publishers and authors with direct incentives to change to open access. To support transition funders, institutions and publication funds could make it clear that submission fees would be an allowable cost. At present this is often unclear in their policies.

See also Open Access Submission Fees

Update 9/12/10: There’s a review and discussion of the report on the Scholarly Kitchen blog http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/12/09/open-access-submission-fees/

Dynamics of improving access to research papers

The contract for the “Dynamics of improving access to research papers” project was awarded to CEPA (Cambridge Economic Policy Associates) working in association with Mark Ware Consulting.

This project is part of the Transitions in scholarly communications portfolio of projects that are being managed by the Research Information Network with a very diverse range of sponsors: JISC, ALPSP, PA, STM, PRC, BL, RLUK, SCONUL, SPARC Europe, RCUK, UUK and the Wellcome Trust. The sponsors represent virtually all the stakeholders in UK scholarly communication.

The project aims to provide evidence for a better understanding of the dynamics of the transitions needed to reach a selection of plausible end-points, and the costs, benefits, opportunities and risks that this entails. Transition is understood to relate to changes in practice, business models and organisational culture within the relevant constituencies, and any new entrants, over defined timeframes. The end-points will be associated with four broad models: open access journals (Gold OA); open access repositories (Green OA); extensions to licensing; and transactional solutions. The project will be founded on a comparative description of the transitions that (i) are taking place now, and (ii) would need to take place over the next five years, in order to reach each of the selected end-points. There will also be an analysis of the drivers and mechanisms underlying these transitions, and associated costs and benefits (both cash and non-cash).

We will be drawing on the model developed by CEPA for their influential 2008 RIN-sponsored report Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK. In addition to CEPA / RIN model, we expect to develop a separate, high-level model for quantifying the wider economic benefits that might be associated with changes in the level of access resulting from the alternative scholarly communication scenarios (possibly based on the theoretical model (a modified Solow- Swan growth model) used in the JISC/Houghton reports). The work will differ from these earlier reports by the development of realistic scenarios capable in principle of being achieved over the next 5 years (as opposed to say an assumed global 90% open access), by looking at transition costs (rather than just snapshots), and by considering a range of routes to increased access (as above) which will be considered in combination rather than in isolation.

We hope this will be a significant piece of work that will contribute substantially to the debate around access, building on and extending the earlier work mentioned. The project is due to conclude in February 2011.

Open Access Submission Fees

Mark Ware Consulting has been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (www.knowledge-exchange.info), a partnership of JISC (UK), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark) and DfG (Germany), to conduct a study into the feasibility of submission fees in open access journals (i.e. as distinct from publication fees).

An open access business model based on submission charges could have real advantages over OA based (solely) on publication charges. For example, at present and under gold OA, authors have an incentive to submit their paper to an unrealistically prestigious journal or conference, since there is no cost to them, their paper might be accepted, and even if it is not, they will receive good feedback from senior reviewers. They can then re-submit the paper to less and less prestigious journals or conferences until it is accepted. There is little cost to them but great cost to the wider scholarly communications community. An approach based on submission charges may also introduce a greater level of competition into the scholarly communication domain by more closely relating payments to services provided. It might also provide a better OA model for high-rejection-rate journals where otherwise the publication charge has to cover the costs of peer review of all the rejected papers.

There may be, however, risks in a model based on submission charges, for example funders may find it difficult to develop an acceptable mechanism to limit the payments they are called on to make. For their part, publishers may be reluctant to deter potential authors by introducing a fee not required by their competitors.

There has been some discussion of this model in the past, for instance in the Wellcome Trust 2004 report Costs and business models in scientific research publishing, while in October last year Gavin Baker raised the topic on his blog post Submission fees: a means of defraying costs for OA journals?, and more recently there was some discussion on the liblicense listserv.

The study will involve reviewing the literature and looking at the past experience of journals using submission charges, and then exploring possible models and testing these through consultation with major stakeholders including research funders, publishers, libraries and infrastructure providers, universities and researchers (as editors, peer reviewers, readers and authors).

At this stage we would be very pleased to hear from anyone with an interest in this topic.

High-tech SMEs’ access to information

The Publishing Research Consortium has published a new report by Mark Ware Consulting today:

Access by UK small and medium-sized enterprises to professional and academic information

From the press release (pdf):

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with 250 employees or fewer, make up 99.9% of UK businesses, and represent 59% of private sector employment and 52% of turnover. The latest study from the Publishing Research Consortium shows that staff in high-tech SMEs in the UK value research articles even more highly, and read more of them, than do those in larger businesses.

… Of those who considered information to be an important success factor for their organisation, 71% found access to research articles ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ (compared with 82% in larger businesses and 94% in higher education), while 29% felt it was ‘fairly difficult’ or ‘very difficult’; 60% felt it was easier than five years ago.

Despite this, more than half had experienced some recent difficulty in obtaining one or more articles; although they use a wide range of access channels, they find pay-per-view (PPV) costly and difficult, and ‘walk-in’ access at a local university inconvenient.

The report goes on to consider some suggestions for improving access for SMEs.

I will be presenting the results of the study at an extra session at the ALPSP Annual Conference at 5.30 on Thursday 10 September (slides).

Scholarly Communications Toolkit – new blog

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I am working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on the development of a web-based toolkit for scholarly communications in the UK.

We have now launched a blog for the project which can be found here: http://rinsc.wordpress.com/

We plan to use the blog to post our research findings as they develop, gather data and documents and to solicit feedback as the project progresses towards implementing the toolkit.

Technorati Tags: Institutional repositories, Libraries, Online publishing, Open Access, Web2.0

Overview of trends in STM journals market

Probably old news for most, but the Library Journal annual survey by Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born is as good this year as ever: Reality Bites: Periodicals Price Survey 2009 (Library Journal, 15 April 2009).

The authors are very pessimistic on the impact of the global recession and the prospect for library cuts. They report ARL saying that most of its 123 libraries will lose funding in 2010. Cuts are estimated at 5-15% for FY10, with the same or higher in FY11, and possibly cuts in FY12 and beyond.

The article also covers open access, reporting that over half of NIH-funded articles are now getting deposited in PubMedCentral, with 400,000 users accessing 700,000 articles each day; Orsdel & Born don’t think the “Fair Copyright” Act will get passed but also say it’s unlikely Obama would sign it into law even if it were passed.

Consortia deals and bundles continue to be the dominant business model – libraries now acquire more than half of their content in bundles of 50 titles or more.

Finally, the authors describe as a “startling twist” Outsell’s Nov 2008 analysis that suggested that simply having the content wouldn’t be enough, and that the future of subscriptions would be in providing workflow tools and services to help users manage the existing ocean of information. Since Outsell (and others) have been predicting the importance of workflow solutions since at least 2002 it’s hard to see what’s startling about it, but it’s certainly an important trend. It’s also another trend (like consortia big deals) that favours large publishers (who can afford to invest in workflow technology and have a breadth of content to underpin it), potentially at the expense of smaller, society publishers. Some 25% of Thomson revenues now come from software-based products, according to this article by David Worlock of Outsell from 2007, which sees workflow integration as a potential disruptive technology.

Technorati Tags: Libraries, Open Access

RIN Scholarly Communication Toolkit

We’ve been awarded a contract to develop a web-based toolkit to support key stakeholders (especially research funders, higher education institutions, libraries and publishers) to apply the common principles set out in an earlier RIN document, the Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy.

I’m working with Robin Beecroft of Searchlighter on this project, which will run from March to November 2009.

The toolkit will provide guidance to relevant stakeholders in relation to each principle constituting the statement of principles, and their roles in applying them. It will encourage reflection on how the agendas of different stakeholders might be aligned behind common goals and conflicts of interests resolved.

In practice, I think this means we will need to create some community around the project if it is to live and grow beyond the initial design. So we’re looking for ideas on how to create online communities around projects. 

We’re currently in a research and consultation phase, surveying and interviewing people from across the scholarly communications spectrum. 

I’ll shortly create a separate blog for the project – watch this space for an announcement.