Open Access
The Costs and Opportunities
Frank Manista and Jo Lambert, Jisc
For research funders, scholarly publication delivers crucial public benefits: funders’ open mandates in the UK are making open access (OA) a reality. The implementation of these policies requires positive engagement from all stakeholders, in the development of new standards, workflows, best practice and cost models. Through a discussion of the costs and opportunities, this chapter will outline how authors, universities, funders and publishers can support OA implementation in order to make it a success.
Keywords
Open access; OA; Finch Report; UK higher education; funding; cost; opportunity
2.1 Introduction
Open access (OA) to the outputs of publicly funded research offers social and economic benefits and supports development of new research, something that’s being encouraged through the policies of government and funders.
Policy changes following the recommendations of the ‘Finch’ Report1 in 2012 on how to increase access to published research has presented a number of challenges and opportunities to institutions, researchers, funders and publishers. The independent working group on OA, chaired by Dame Janet Finch, recommended a programme of action to enable all to read and use the outputs of publicly funded research. The report outlined several options for encouraging greater OA but recommended a policy direction in support of ‘gold’ OA publishing, where the author pays an article processing charge (APC) to publish their article in a pure OA or hybrid journal. The government, broadly supportive of the report, looked to the funding councils to implement the recommendations with support from key stakeholders.
More recently, in July 2014, the four UK higher education funding bodies introduced a new OA policy, which requires that anything to be submitted to the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) has got to be made OA. To be eligible for submission, authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts must be deposited in an institutional or subject repository at the point of acceptance for publication. The ‘Policy for Open Access in the Post-2014 Research Excellence Framework’ also indicates that:
Higher education institutions are now advised to implement processes and procedures to comply with this policy, which may include using a combination of the ‘green’ and ‘gold’ routes to open access. Institutions can achieve full compliance without incurring any additional publication costs through article processing charges. We will be working closely with Jisc to support repositories in implementing this policy, and will issue further information on this work in due course.2
The shift in policy means that OA has become an interesting, controversial and compelling requirement for grant-funded recipients to comply with. If institutions and researchers want to prove impact and relevance, they must comply with the OA requirements of their funding. However, policy compliance and management of APCs presents new requirements and demands new ways of working that can result in time consuming and costly administration challenges for universities. In a rapidly evolving landscape, communication and collaboration amongst a range of stakeholders is key to progress. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that OA is as successful as it can be and to assess what needs to be in place to support and guide those key stakeholders in the current landscape. The costs and opportunities in a transition to OA are outlined below.
2.2 The Costs of OA
The costs of managing OA are relatively high in the present transition period. This is particularly true for countries like the UK that have taken a policy decision to support the gold route to OA through payment of APCs. Various initiatives have made attempts at calculating the costs of APCs and OA administration.
2.2.1 APCs
A number of UK funders have made a policy decision to support OA, achieved through payment of an APC in a pure OA or hybrid journal. There’s a broad consensus that OA funded via APCs needs to offer a transparent and competitively priced market, but there are concerns that this isn’t currently the case. A report by Bjork and Solomon,3 published in March 2014, examined the rapidly developing APC market and identified options to support funders to ensure the APC market delivers transparency and quality services, and it offers value-for-money.
The report highlighted the rapid growth (approximately 30% a year) in gold OA and significant differences between the pure OA and hybrid OA markets in terms of cost, quality and service. Average APCs were found to be $1,418 for a ‘non-subscription’ publisher, $2,097, for an OA journal from a ‘subscription’ publisher $2,097, and for a hybrid journal $2,727. Through the report the funders aimed to stimulate discussion and debate on how all stakeholders can work together to ensure the OA market is competitive.
2.2.2 The Total Cost of Ownership
Jisc in conjunction with others such as Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) negotiate with the main academic journal publishers, to limit the ‘total cost of ownership’. This involves simultaneously negotiating with publishers on both journal subscription licenses and APC payments and to agree proposals that will offset APC payments against subscriptions. In order to model various offsetting schemes to support negotiations with publishers, Information Power, on behalf of Jisc Collections, collected data from 24 UK higher education institutions in 2014. All institutions agreed to the release of anonymised aggregated data that included financial information about both expenditure on journal subscriptions and expenditure on APC payments. A brief analysis of this data is available.4 Some institutions went further and agreed to release detailed spreadsheets outlining expenditure. Releasing this data highlighted the scale of expenditure on APCs and helped to add to the debate about hybrid OA publishing.
2.2.3 Administration and Compliance
A report ‘Counting the Costs of Open Access’5 released in November 2014 by London Higher and SPARC Europe highlighted the significant costs associated with the administration of OA in the current environment. According to the report, in 2013–2014 the sector spent nearly as much on administering the RCUK OA policy (£9.2 million) as it did on paying APCs (£11 million). The report put the cost of meeting the deposit requirements for the next REF at an estimated £4–5 million. The report also outlined the compliance burden associated with the administering ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes to OA and noted that:
• Making an article OA through payment of an APC (the ‘gold’ route) takes 2 hours or more, at a cost of £81.
• Making an article OA through self-archiving in an institutional repository (the ‘green’ route) takes just over 45 minutes, at a cost of £33.
The majority of costs were found to relate to staff time spent on policy implementation, management, advocacy and infrastructure development, although it’s clear that as processes become more embedded there are opportunities for greater efficiencies over time. It’s important to note that in spite of the costs, none of the respondents questioned the principle of increasing OA to their research outputs.
Each of these initiatives has relied on authors, funders and higher education institutions working collaboratively, sharing ideas and information to enable greater transparency and contribute to greater efficiencies. The move to OA demands significant changes to workflows and the development of new digital infrastructures, changes that take time to implement and cost money, but these changes are essential developments on the road to OA.
2.3 The Opportunities for OA
2.3.1 Collaboration
OA remains a rapidly evolving area but this presents opportunities. By working together across disciplines as an OA community, stakeholders have the opportunity to address issues associated with OA management and to influence change. Collaborative arrangements involving organisations such as Jisc, RLUK, the SCONUL and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) are common. The Jisc OA good practice pathfinder6 projects are investigating what works best in implementing OA and developing shareable models of good practice. These institutions indicate what can be achieved with varying levels of research base, finance and human resource.
2.3.2 Metadata and Standards
Information about OA publications is currently held in a variety of systems and there’s a real need to enable greater interoperability by improving metadata and standards. A significant amount of work is ongoing. This includes RIOXX7 which is a metadata profile allowing institutional repositories to share information about OA research papers and their compliance with funder policies, and should be CASRAI-UK not CASRIA-UK8 which aims to identify opportunities to align common terms and vocabularies to support OA reporting.
2.3.3 Licensing
One of the most relevant means of ensuring that research and information is accessible to everyone is to employ the proper licence. Licensing issues, to date, seem to account for one of the greatest barriers to complying with OA policies. Part of the problem is a general confusion over which licences are to be used, and some publishers’ websites are not particularly clear in explaining what authors need to do in order to comply with a policy. Whereas RCUK emphasises that the CC BY licence must be used in order to comply with their policy, HEFCE takes a slightly more relaxed approach: ‘We [HEFCE9] have not pushed for strict rules on licensing, but we recognise the benefits of more permissive licensing in providing more efficient and automated access to research, and we want to reward institutions that enable these benefits’. Thus, the main thrust of the policy is not to strong arm institutions and researchers, but to underscore that there is a public value in making an article OA and there is also the potential for reward if processes are put in place that enable OA to happen. Therefore, the success of OA is placed squarely on the shoulders of institutions and researchers to become more informed about what needs to be done, and if they do so, they stand to benefit both directly and indirectly.
2.3.4 Workflows
Another means of ensuring that OA happens in the best possible way is to ensure development of workflows to support the publication process. Many universities have developed efficient strategies, including creating working groups which then disseminate information about requirements at an institutional, faculty and school level. This can often result in a huge increase from academics enquiring whether their work can be made OA via the institution’s publication funds. This increase illustrates an even greater need to make sure the processes are as streamlined as possible and that there is the necessary support within institutions to make it all sustainable.
One of the best ways of ensuring efficient workflows is to get the Finance Department on board as early as possible and to communicate regularly when it comes to managing funds and paying for APCs. Joining up work with Finance would mean that the delays that occur when trying to get a publication paid for would be significantly reduced.
2.4 Research Impact
Kevin Dolby from the Wellcome Trust presented a report at the 6th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing on September 17–19, 2014. His talk was about ‘OA Publishing Community Standards – Article Level Metrics: A Funder’s perspective’. One of the key points that he made was that availability of the published articles was vital to increasing the ability to measure the impact of the research. Another measure is citation, and one of the strongest examples he gave was that the article ‘PHENIX: A Comprehensive Python-Based System for Macro-Molecular Structure Solution’ was published in Acta Crystallographica, an OA, as well as hybrid OA journal, and was cited 2904 times, proving that making a publication OA can have a significant result in more citations, which in turn affects the academic’s potential for more research and promotion. Although OA does not necessarily guarantee increased citation rate, the fact that there is evidence to suggest that it can increase them and that it can contribute to the improvement of peer review, it would seem that the arguments for OA are quite strong.
All that said, even those promising statistics show us that much still needs to be done, and that is not simply trying to get academics on board with either the carrot or the stick. Their concerns are many, and they are not simply about control over their research and where they publish, although those concerns are still significant. In the name of academic freedom, no research libraries or funding councils want to be perceived to be telling researchers what to do or where to publish; that said, many academics do point out that the push for OA has created some bureaucratic loopholes that would seem only to benefit publishers, and these lacunae need to be addressed and corrected.
Although with all publications in all fields, there is always a green option, the ability to self-archive the article in the institutional repository upon acceptance, there remains a great deal of confusion regarding what ‘date of acceptance’ actually means and which version can be placed in the repository that does not violate licensing or copyright.
Therefore, aside from the actual costs of paying for the APCs in order to get an article accessible to everyone, there is that additional cost of time: if there is an embargo period whereby the article cannot be made OA, then the arguments for OA increasing citations and impact are potentially severely curtailed.
OA clearly presents opportunities to raise the visibility and profile of the institution, to promote research outputs more widely and effectively, and to provide a better return on investment for funders. Academic research needs to remain vital and cutting edge if it is going to benefit humanity on a global scale. Although it is true that if a general member of the public wants to have access to an article, a very easy way is to write to the author and ask for a copy, that doesn’t take into account that research which the public has paid for remains behind paywalls. Even many academics have had the experience of being published in a journal which their own university library does not subscribe to which ostensibly means that they, themselves, do not have access to their own article.
Although there are actual financial costs for OA, over and above the costs that cover staff and time, questions surrounding cost over price are important to ask when attempting to determine what the overall benefit of OA will be. Much has been done since the movement began in the 1990s, and the opportunities to institutions, researchers and funders are manifold if a truly collaborative atmosphere can result. Carrots and sticks remain the tools most often used to encourage engagement, but the true goal is a sea change, helping all key stakeholders understand the benefits that can come about – financial, research, engagement, collaboration, career promotion, policy strategies and access, as well as the potential for reinvestment back into innovation and technology.