Update on open access in Finland

I’ve been recently involved in a few initiatives related to open access in Finland and our university, Aalto.

First, there is an initiative to build a common Aalto Current Research Information System (ACRIS), where all Aalto researchers will input their published research. The system will directly feed into Aaltodoc, our university’s publication archive. I was graciously given a chance for offering input to working groups for both projects, and in general the planned systems sound very sensible to me. However, the self-archiving workflow isn’t as streamlined as it should be before the ACRIS system is adopted in 2015, and in the meanwhile, it is expected that significant self-archiving will start taking place in 2014 due to funder mandates.  As we recently wrote with my colleague Jani Kotakoski recently in Signum, the University of Helsinki open access mandate has not worked as well as it should had, and the technically overly complicated self-archiving process is surely partly to blame. Hopefully some of the suggestions that I made (such as metadata autofilling by doi) can be implemented before the system comes to widespread use, and Aalto will have better levels of compliance (and awareness).

I’ve also heard that our university is finalizing a draft of it’s upcoming open access policy – I’ve been trying to get involved with the process, but so far the people making the decisions have decreed that the policy preparation should be done behind closed doors. I’m a bit peeved with this, and it certainly doesn’t help with the criticism that Aalto administration is too closed to grass-roots participation. As we also wrote in Signum, Aalto stands in a very good position to learn from the experiences of others. Furthermore, the timing is very opportune since the international political situation has really started to take shape in the past year. I’m personally strongly in favor of Aalto further adopting a strict mandate for open access self-archiving of all Aalto-funded research, and believe I have the arguments to back why this would beneficial for the University. Let’s hope they will open the process for comment in the draft stage.

Second, on March 19, there was the second meeting of the Tutkimuksen Tietoaineistot (TTA) -project looking at issues of open and linked data, metadata formats, long term data preservation etc. The second meeting was a bit technical for me, but it was good to hear what is being done on this front. Finally, the founding of an Open Science Finland working group was announced under the auspices of the Open Knowledge Finland association. There will be a joint meeting with the Finnish Open Access working group (FinnOA) on April 17, which I am going to attend.

Third, Bo-Christer Björk published an article on the rise of open access in the Finnish-language Tieteessä Tapahtuu magazine (loose translatable as “Happening in Science”). The article is a recap of the results of the peer-reviewed article Björk and his colleagues published in BMC Medicine last year, which made big impact when it came out (see e.g. the Guardian story I’ve linked to before). Nice to see more articles in Finnish on the topic that seems to be very much on the table nationally at the moment.

I’ll keep following the situation and will be sure to keep the blog updated on new developments.

There are also a couple of interesting links that I’d like to add here.

Michael Eisen, one of the more radical open access advocates, gives an overview of The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing on his blog. Randal Olson draws attention to a potentially ugly side of the open science movement, and Heather Morrison decries Elsevier’s licensing policies.

A couple of interesting podcasts recently came out. First, we have a pair of publishers justifying the costs incurred in publishing scientific research on The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then, we have an interview with Ross Mounce for the Journal of Ecology podcast. I had the pleasure of meeting Ross, who is a Panton Fellow at the Open Knowledge Foundation, at the OKFest in Helsinki. He’s very active in advocating open data and open access, and I warmly recommend subscribing to his blog at http://rossmounce.co.uk.

Finally, the Nature Publishing Group announced the upcoming launch of a data journal Scientific Data. While on the face of it the initiative is laudable and in line with open science ideals, some of its specifics (e.g. the article fees and licensing terms) have already generated a lot of critical discussion on the Open Science mailing list.

It will be interesting to see how the debate develops when we move closer to the launch.

Nature’s special issue on the future of publishing

Nature Magazine special issue: The Future of Publishing. Image credit: Brendan Monroe.

Nature Magazine’s latest issue is a special on the future of publishing. There’s a ton of great content, starting with the introduction and the Editorial:

New technologies allow a much greater and faster transition to a digital future, and this week’s special issue reveals that scientists are finding a multitude of ways to publish and access their research results. As this journal has noted before, the future of research literature will ideally be an amalgam of papers, data and software that interlinks with tools for analysis, annotation, visualization and citation. The need for common standards is as great as ever.

But it is demand, not supply, that will shape how scientists and publishers grasp these opportunities. For instance, a key reason that online open-access journals are now accepted as a mainstream (if still minority) method of publishing research is because of the mandates steadily introduced since 2001 by institutions and by research funders.

The issue features a story on the rise of predatory publishing, a truly outrageous case of using journal identity theft to scam authors, on the changing roles of libraries and open data, on licensing issues (paywalled, alas), on the future of scholarly communication (see also this comment), and many more.

However, my favorite article by far is Richard Van Noorden’s meticulously researched look at the true cost of science publishing. His article covers almost all the important emerging data on the many aspects of the issue, and addresses most of the recent debates surrounding the cost of article processing fees, true publication costs, the debate on the added value of traditional publishers, and licensing issues. Richard was also a guest on the latest Nature podcast.

I’ll highlight a few of the passages that most caught my eye, but I really recommend reading the whole thing. On the current debate:

The variance in prices is leading everyone involved to question the academic publishing establishment as never before. For researchers and funders, the issue is how much of their scant resources need to be spent on publishing, and what form that publishing will take. For publishers, it is whether their current business models are sustainable — and whether highly selective, expensive journals can survive and prosper in an open-access world.

On the current wide variety in the cost of publishing:

Data from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, suggest that the science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011 and published around 1.8 million English-language articles — an average revenue per article of roughly $5,000. Analysts estimate profit margins at 20–30% for the industry, so the average cost to the publisher of producing an article is likely to be around $3,500–4,000….
Outsell estimates that the average per-article charge for open-access publishers in 2011 was $660.
…
But Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal’s internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper.

On publisher profits:

Elsevier’s reported margins are 37%, but financial analysts estimate them at 40–50% for the STM publishing division before tax. (Nature says that it will not disclose information on margins.) Profits can be made on the open-access side too: Hindawi made 50% profit on the articles it published last year, says Peters….
Commercial publishers are widely acknowledged to make larger profits than organizations run by academic institutions. A 2008 study by London-based Cambridge Economic Policy Associates estimated margins at 20% for society publishers, 25% for university publishers and 35% for commercial publishers.

On added value:

The key question is whether the extra effort adds useful value, says Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK, who last year led a revolt against Elsevier. Would scientists’ appreciation for subscription journals hold up if costs were paid for by the authors, rather than spread among subscribers? “If you see it from the perspective of the publisher, you may feel quite hurt,” says Gowers. “You may feel that a lot of work you put in is not really appreciated by scientists. The real question is whether that work is needed, and that’s much less obvious.”
…
A more-expensive, more-selective journal should, in principle, generate greater prestige and impact. Yet in the open-access world, the higher-charging journals don’t reliably command the greatest citation-based influence, argues Jevin West, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Earlier this year, West released a free tool that researchers can use to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of open-access journals (see Nature http://doi.org/kwh; 2013).

On the path forward:

More than 60% of journals already allow authors to self-archive content that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, says Stevan Harnad, a veteran open-access campaigner and cognitive scientist at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. Most of the others ask authors to wait for a time (say, a year), before they archive their papers. However, the vast majority of authors don’t self-archive their manuscripts unless prompted by university or funder mandates.

As I said, really excellent reporting, and is one of those things that goes a long way to justify for me the current cost structure of the Nature Publishing Group. Go read it all.