Some Observations from Charleston (Open Access Edition):

Thoughts on open access (OA) from the perspectives of both the publisher and library communities at the Charleston Meeting.

The post Some Observations from Charleston (Open Access Edition): appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Canada’s draft new action plan on open government 2016 – 2018

Following are my comments on Canada’s draft new action plan on open government 2016 – 2018

Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government 2016-2018
Individual Comments by Dr. Heather Morrison
Kudos are in order to Canada’s government for global leadership, commitment, and swift moves by our new government to action, notably in the areas of commitment to open access and open data to both academic and government information, commitment to creation of a Chief Science Officer position, restoring the mandatory long form census, forthcoming free and more timely access to Statistics Canada data, and initiating electoral reform (to mention a few moves!). Following are my comments as an expert in the area of information policy, notably open access, intended to help strengthen a solid, ambitious but realistic draft plan. In the spirit of openness and transparency, note that I am a professor at the University of Ottawa’s bilingual School of Information Studies and I see career opportunities for our graduates and research opportunities for me arising from this plan and some of my suggestions.
Summary of key points
·       Reconsider centralization or the “one-stop” approach. Sometimes this is a good idea (one stop search for grants and contributions, single point of access to all geospatial data). However, centralization can also be a bottleneck and even a muzzling device. Decentralization with website and open data development in the hands of departmental experts who understand the information they are working with and how people will want to use it is probably in many instances the most effective means of providing open government information and data. I want my weather information directly from Environment Canada and my tax data directly from Canada Revenue Agency, not indirectly from a central service where staff are not likely to be experts in these areas.
·       Consider expanding information services to include reference service (professional service by intermediaries with understanding of information seeking behavior as well as government information), both through government and indirectly through libraries of all types (through advocacy for this role with key partners). This has the potential to provide better service and sometimes reduce cost. For example, in the area of Access to Information, overly broad requests may reflect lack of knowledge of the specific documents or data most likely to address a need. Direct communication with requestors may be the best means to hone requests.
·       Beware what I characterize as a blind spot of completely unrestricted re-use which could lead to intended consequences (for example effectiveprivatization of currently free public services). Impose reasonable expectations of behaviour by re-users that is in the public interest, and encourage development along these lines at the global level.  
·       Remember the vulnerable. Sometimes the best approach to open government is in-person offices. Open data and data visualization are a boon for those of who can see but a challenge for the visually disabled. Proactively address this challenge rather than waiting for complaints. Consider and consult First Nations peoples before releasing data about resources on their lands or lands that they depend on that could be exploited to their detriment.
·       Build in protection against the inevitable temptations of power and the understandable human tendency to want to look good. Access to Information – an effective means to demand information that the government does not choose to make open – will always be needed for really open government. I also recommend an arms-length approach to developing data visualization services, because it is easy to develop services that help people to see what we want them to see; our truth rather than the truth.
·       Considerable research is needed on how to go about meaningfully engaging a whole population in open dialogue and policy-making. This particular potential of open government will take an extended period of time for full development. This should be factored into assessment of progress.
·       Immediately apply principles and best practices of open dialogue and policy-making in trade treaty negotiations, beginning with the Trans Pacific Partnership.
·       Expand on corporate accountability through a review of legislation on corporations and consultations with the private sector, academics and other stakeholders to understand barriers to triple bottom line accounting (finance, people and environment) and propose solutions.
Detailed comments
Detailed comments are presented below in two sections, Overarching comments and specific comments on the draft plan.
Overarching comments
To centralize or not to centralize?
The draft plan refers in several places to centralization (single portal, one-stop etc.). I recommend re-thinking of the benefits of centralization versus decentralization. Sometimes, centralization can result in streamlining of access for the citizen; commitment 11, one-stop access to data on grants and contributions is a good example of this.  However, centralization can also be a bottleneck or even a muzzling device. Weather information is both interesting and important to the public. To have the best information on whether a potentially dangerous storm is headed in my direction, I look to the experts at Environment Canada to post what they know as soon as they possibly can. Sending information to a central service would simply create delays and likely impede good decision-making by Canadians. Governments create different departments for good reasons. The type of information provided and how it is best structured to be understood by the public will vary with the type of information. When it’s time to reconcile my taxes I want a website that is under the control of the best experts in taxation and web development for this type of information. I note below particular sections of the plan where I see centralization as beneficial or problematic.
What’s missing?
Reference and information literacy services are needed (directly through government and indirectly through libraries) and would reduce in some cases reduce the workload.
As a professor in the area of information studies, former practicing professional librarian and researcher in the areas of open access, open government, and access to information, I have had many discussions with students, experts, and government staffers who provide services such as responding to ATI requests about the challenges and opportunities. In my professional opinion, the Government of Canada could provide better service, sometimes at lower cost through a kind of service akin to the tradition of library reference services. For example, one of the reasons ATI requests can seem to be “frivolous and vexatious” appears to be that people request very large amounts of information because they do not have sufficient understanding of government operations to know what to ask for. Having a professional serving in an intermediary role who understands both information seeking behaviour and the kind of information that is held by government would likely be more efficient in many cases.
Helping people find the information they need (reference services) and providing education on how to understand the need for information, find, evaluate and effectively use it (information literacy), is a traditional role of public, school, corporate and academic libraries.
Recommendation: work with Library and Archives Canada and open government representatives at all levels (municipal, provincial, global) to advocate for an emerging role for libraries of all types in the areas of open government and incorporate professional information services within government departments.
Openness and transparency in trade treaty negotiations
Moving towards openness and transparency in government while at the same time failing to engage with citizens on trade agreements that will impact our jobs, communities, and businesses, is moving in opposite directions at the same time. Recommendation: extend open dialogue to trade treaty negotiations, beginning with the Trans Pacific Partnership.
Open government and access to government services for people with disabilities
Open data and the potential for data visualization offer tremendous potential for the advancement of Canadian society and should be embraced. However, the formats also create new challenges for people with disabilities such as print disabilities. Recommendation: address these challenges proactively through working with groups representing disabled communities and show global leadership in advocating for technological solutions to facilitate equitable open government.
Consider restrictions on access to data to avoid harm to vulnerable groups
The plan appropriately recognizes the need to consider the protection of personal privacy in the release of open data. I recommend that potential harm to vulnerable groups be another consideration in deciding whether data should be released. For example, data about valuable exploitable resources on lands our First Nations peoples own or depend on should not be released without consultation with the peoples who would be affected.
Specific comments on the draft plan
Introduction – Towards an Open and Transparent Government
Re third bullet: “a review of the Access to Information Act, and efforts to accelerate and expand initiatives to help Canadians easily access and use open data, by the President of the Treasury Board working with the ministers of Justice and Democratic Institutions”
Suggestion: split into 2 bullet points to avoid confusion because Access to Information and open data initiatives are two very different types of activities.


The Open Government Partnership
Re: the fifth grand challenge, “Increasing corporate accountability”: measures that address corporate responsibility on issues such as the environment, anti-corruption, consumer protection, and community engagement.
Comment: addressing this challenge would be a golden opportunity to begin to address the limitations of the corporate sector’s single bottom line focus on profit, financially defined. This draft plan is weak in this sector and I would like to see expansion of commitments in this area. Some suggestions:
·       Review legislation on corporations and other businesses to recognize triple bottom line accounting (financial, social, environment)
·       Develop a consultation process with citizens, civil society organizations, academics and business to uncover challenges to corporate accountability and draft solutions


IV. A. Open by Default
Re: Third paragraph, “Being “open by default” also means allowing Canadians to more easily access government services through a single online window [emphasis added]”.
Recommendation: change this sentence to “Being “open by default” also means allowing Canadians to more easily access government services through effective access mechanisms designed to facilitate accountability on service delivery [emphasis added]”.
Comments: see “to centralize or not to centralize” above.


Commitment 1: Enhance Access to Information
It is good to see a commitment to updating the Access to Information Act. Open government will never replace the need for a mechanism for citizens to effectively demand access to information. Government by definition holds power, and power inevitably will attract those who wish to pursue personal gain through corruption. Also, mistakes and poor decisions or even good decisions that did not produce the expected results cannot always be avoided. There will always be a temptation for government staff as well as elected representatives to open or close, highlight or suppress information based on whether it makes the government look good. If you don’t want to release a piece of information it’s all too easy to perceive a request for the information as “frivolous and vexatious”. An important strength of the action plan is “giving the Information Commissioner the power to order the release of government information”.
Re first bullet: “Making government data and information open by default, in formats that are modern and easy to use;”
Suggestion: add a second and third bullet to address the ongoing need for ATI and to streamline the process through the provision of reference services:
·       Providing easy-to-use, cost-free mechanisms for requesting any information that is not open by default;
·       Develop professional intermediary services to help requestors identify with precision the information required
Comment: re the second suggested bullet, see the section “reference and information services” above.


Commitment 2: Streamline Requests for Personal Information
Re: How it will be done – line 2: “a simple, central website [emphasis added] where Canadians can submit requests to any government institution”.
Suggest change to: “a simple, central website where Canadians can submit requests to any government institution to supplement requesting services that are most efficiently handled by the collecting department”.
Comment: see the section “to centralize or not to centralize?” above


Commitment 3: Expand and Improve Open Data
Re: 5th milestone: “Improve Canadians’ access to data and information proactively disclosed by departments and agencies through a single, common online search tool[emphasis added]”
Suggest change to “Improve Canadians’ access to data and information proactively disclosed by departments and agencies through departmental websites as well as a single, common online search tool”
Comment: see the section on “to centralize or not to centralize” above.


Commitment 4: Provide and Preserve Open Information
Re: Milestone 4: “Update Library and Archives Canada’s online archive of the Government of Canada’s web presence to ensure Canadians’ long-term access to federal web content”.
Recommendation – add a Milestone: consult with academic experts and Library and Archives Canada to develop a plan, recommendation and funding analysis to capture Canadian content on the web.
Comment: I applaud the addition of this milestone, but would note that we need to capture Canadian content on the web in general, not just federal web content. Currently, some of this content is voluntarily captured by Internet Archive, however I think Canadians have a duty to take this on ourselves, for profound social, legal and cultural reasons. Material that until recently was produced in print and often archived and preserved by libraries and archives is increasingly available only online and risks being lost, sometimes after only a short period of time.


Commitment 7: Embed Transparency Requirements in the Federal Service Strategy
Re first Milestone “Development a Government and Canada Clients-First Service Strategy that aims to create a single online window [emphasis added] for all government services”.
Suggest change to: Development a Government and Canada Clients-First Service Strategy that aims to create a efficient and effective online access [emphasis added] for all government services through a departmental or centralized online window, whichever is most effective for citizens”.
Comments: see to centralize or not to centralize above.


Commitment 8: Enhance Access to Culture & Heritage Collections
Re: “The Government of Canada will expand collaboration with its provincial, territorial, and municipal partners and key stakeholders to develop a searchable National Inventory of Cultural and Heritage Artefacts to improve access across museum collections”.
Comment / question: how does this relate to Library and Archives Canada’s Building a Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy? http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/Pages/national-heritage-digitization-strategy.aspx


B. Fiscal Transparency
Re: second paragraph, “…the government will provide Canadians [emphasis added] with the tools they need to visualize spending data and compare fiscal information across departments, between locations, and over time”.
Suggested change to “…the government will develop an arms-length service to provide Canadians with the tools they need to visualize spending data and compare fiscal information across departments, between locations, and over time and encourage all members of the open government partnership to do likewise”.
Comment: it is fairly easy for an interested party to set up visualization tools to “help” people see things like financial data from a particular perspective. This can be deliberate or reflect unconscious biases. For example, to help people understand tax data, one can choose from a number of different potential comparison points. The tax freedom date approach showing how long it takes an average Canadian to work to pay taxes before they get to keep money is a good choice for people ideologically opposed to taxation and seeking tax breaks. In contrast, those of us who think public health care is the right way to go both for social and financial reasons tend to see data demonstrating the lower per-capita health spending in Canada as compared to countries with private health care as an obvious and important way of demonstrating the truth. A government that has succeeded in lowering corporate taxes by two-thirds and does not want public critique creeping into public budget discussions might be tempted to present budget data showing how little is gained by a small to medium increase in the existing corporate tax rate and avoid historical comparisons. A government determined to reserve the corporate tax rate cuts would likely emphasize historical comparisons.


Commitment 10: Increase Transparency of Budget Data and Economic and Fiscal Analysis
Re: “The Government of Canada will provide access to the datasets used in the Federal Budget each year in near real time [emphasis added]”.
Suggested change (addition) to: “The Government of Canada will provide access to the datasets used in the Federal Budget each year in near real time starting with Budget 2017 and will explore the feasibility of providing as many of these datasets as possible in advance of the release of the budget.
Comment: near real time datasets to help Canadians understand the budget would be a major leap forward, however in the long term for Canadians to have meaningful input into the budget process and parliamentarians to have full information for decision-making purposes, we have to have access to the datasets before the Budget is developed. One thought is that after Budget 2017 the datasets identified for release could be prioritized for timely open data release after that point in time.


Commitment 11: Increase Transparency of Grants and Contributions Funding
Re: “one stop access”: in this instance centralized access makes a lot of sense!


C. Innovation, Prosperity, and Sustainable Development
Re: “Making government data and information openly available to Canadians without restrictions on reuse [emphasis added]”…
Suggested change to: “Making government data and information openly available with minimal restrictions on reuse and the expectation of reuse in the spirit of the public good…”
Comments: although the spirit of “no restrictions” is one that I agree with, a major positive change, and internationally embraced by open government advocates as consensus, this is an area where in my professional opinion too open an approach invites problems as well as benefits for the social good. For example, as contributors to the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) recently discovered, their free sharing of their work in what they thought of as an open access archive enabled not only open access but also the sale of SSRN to the world’s largest commercial scholarly publisher, Elsevier, a corporation that benefits from a profit rate of about $1 billion US a year (39%) profit based primarily on toll access and that has incentive to create new locked-down services. I believe this is an early indication of a potential danger of open data that is too open. For example, in the case of government data, too open an approach to data release could result in effective privatization of public services. “Without restrictions on reuse” is so broad that it can include charging for services, paying Internet service providers to have for-pay services prioritized over free public services, making the latter less useful, and using profits to lobby against funding for free public services that profitable commercial re-users are likely to see as competition.
Open data should be open to anyone, not just Canadians. In order to have the full benefit of open access to government data we need to be able to use data from any jurisdiction and compare data across jurisdictions.


C. Innovation, Prosperity, and Sustainable Development
Re – second paragraph: “the Government of Canada will be building strategic partnerships with other governments at the provincial, territorial, and municipal level, to support the development of common standards and principles for open data”.
Comment: good idea, but add the global level; this will be necessary to create innovations that work across jurisdiction and allow cross-jurisdictional comparison.


Commitment 14: Increase Openness of Federal Science Activities (Open Science)
Comments: kudos, this is great to see!!! Note that the granting councils already have policies on open access to research outputs and digital data management strategies. With respect to open access to documents, it might be worth looking at the tri-agency policy. With respect to digital data management strategies, there are important differences between government data, collected by the government for purposes of public policy, typically collected by government staff in the course of their employment and originally owned and controlled by the government, and academic research data which frequently involves third parties such as research subjects and third party organizations (e.g. police data is important to criminologists, business data to business researchers). Here I see many more issues arising from opening of data and I recommend separate treatment of academic research and government data.


Commitment 15: Stimulate Innovation through Canada’s Open Data Exchange (ODX)
This is a great initiative, but this is where building in the concept of free reuse in the context of commitment to the public good (see C above) is important to avoid the potential privatization of free public services.


Commitment 20: Enable Open Dialogue and Open Policy Making
Re: Milestone 1 “Promote common principles for Open Dialogue and common practices across the Government of Canada to enable the use of new methods for consulting and engaging Canadians”.
Comments: I think that this is a great idea, but the potential of Web 2.0 to facilitate open dialogue and open policy making is in its infancy. Consider that we are still working towards universal basic literacy centuries after the invention of the printing press. I think that considerable research into how to use the web for open dialogue and policy making is needed, and how to engage citizens who may not have access to the web or are otherwise unlikely to use this means of participation. Perhaps this could be one of the upcoming challenge areas for the granting councils? (Disclosure: if this happens I might apply for such a grant). 


Commitment 22: Engage Canadians to Improve Key Canada Revenue Agency Services
Re: 3rd milestone: “Engage with indigenous Canadians to better understand the issues, root causes, and data gaps that may be preventing eligible individuals from accessing benefits.”
Recommendation: add a strong, specific commitment to increase the number of indigenous Canadians receiving benefits or perhaps a specific type of benefit to which they are entitled.
In conclusion, please consider these detailed comments as input intended to improve a solid plan ambitious plan by a new government that already deserves kudos for swift action in a number of important areas. Thank you for the opportunity to provide these comments, and to be actively engaged in the preceding in-person and online consultation processes.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l’information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather dot Morrison at uottawa.ca
June 23, 2016

Canada’s draft new action plan on open government 2016 – 2018

Following are my comments on Canada’s draft new action plan on open government 2016 – 2018

Canada’s Draft New Plan on Open Government 2016-2018
Individual Comments by Dr. Heather Morrison
Kudos are in order to Canada’s government for global leadership, commitment, and swift moves by our new government to action, notably in the areas of commitment to open access and open data to both academic and government information, commitment to creation of a Chief Science Officer position, restoring the mandatory long form census, forthcoming free and more timely access to Statistics Canada data, and initiating electoral reform (to mention a few moves!). Following are my comments as an expert in the area of information policy, notably open access, intended to help strengthen a solid, ambitious but realistic draft plan. In the spirit of openness and transparency, note that I am a professor at the University of Ottawa’s bilingual School of Information Studies and I see career opportunities for our graduates and research opportunities for me arising from this plan and some of my suggestions.
Summary of key points
·       Reconsider centralization or the “one-stop” approach. Sometimes this is a good idea (one stop search for grants and contributions, single point of access to all geospatial data). However, centralization can also be a bottleneck and even a muzzling device. Decentralization with website and open data development in the hands of departmental experts who understand the information they are working with and how people will want to use it is probably in many instances the most effective means of providing open government information and data. I want my weather information directly from Environment Canada and my tax data directly from Canada Revenue Agency, not indirectly from a central service where staff are not likely to be experts in these areas.
·       Consider expanding information services to include reference service (professional service by intermediaries with understanding of information seeking behavior as well as government information), both through government and indirectly through libraries of all types (through advocacy for this role with key partners). This has the potential to provide better service and sometimes reduce cost. For example, in the area of Access to Information, overly broad requests may reflect lack of knowledge of the specific documents or data most likely to address a need. Direct communication with requestors may be the best means to hone requests.
·       Beware what I characterize as a blind spot of completely unrestricted re-use which could lead to intended consequences (for example effectiveprivatization of currently free public services). Impose reasonable expectations of behaviour by re-users that is in the public interest, and encourage development along these lines at the global level.  
·       Remember the vulnerable. Sometimes the best approach to open government is in-person offices. Open data and data visualization are a boon for those of who can see but a challenge for the visually disabled. Proactively address this challenge rather than waiting for complaints. Consider and consult First Nations peoples before releasing data about resources on their lands or lands that they depend on that could be exploited to their detriment.
·       Build in protection against the inevitable temptations of power and the understandable human tendency to want to look good. Access to Information – an effective means to demand information that the government does not choose to make open – will always be needed for really open government. I also recommend an arms-length approach to developing data visualization services, because it is easy to develop services that help people to see what we want them to see; our truth rather than the truth.
·       Considerable research is needed on how to go about meaningfully engaging a whole population in open dialogue and policy-making. This particular potential of open government will take an extended period of time for full development. This should be factored into assessment of progress.
·       Immediately apply principles and best practices of open dialogue and policy-making in trade treaty negotiations, beginning with the Trans Pacific Partnership.
·       Expand on corporate accountability through a review of legislation on corporations and consultations with the private sector, academics and other stakeholders to understand barriers to triple bottom line accounting (finance, people and environment) and propose solutions.
Detailed comments
Detailed comments are presented below in two sections, Overarching comments and specific comments on the draft plan.
Overarching comments
To centralize or not to centralize?
The draft plan refers in several places to centralization (single portal, one-stop etc.). I recommend re-thinking of the benefits of centralization versus decentralization. Sometimes, centralization can result in streamlining of access for the citizen; commitment 11, one-stop access to data on grants and contributions is a good example of this.  However, centralization can also be a bottleneck or even a muzzling device. Weather information is both interesting and important to the public. To have the best information on whether a potentially dangerous storm is headed in my direction, I look to the experts at Environment Canada to post what they know as soon as they possibly can. Sending information to a central service would simply create delays and likely impede good decision-making by Canadians. Governments create different departments for good reasons. The type of information provided and how it is best structured to be understood by the public will vary with the type of information. When it’s time to reconcile my taxes I want a website that is under the control of the best experts in taxation and web development for this type of information. I note below particular sections of the plan where I see centralization as beneficial or problematic.
What’s missing?
Reference and information literacy services are needed (directly through government and indirectly through libraries) and would reduce in some cases reduce the workload.
As a professor in the area of information studies, former practicing professional librarian and researcher in the areas of open access, open government, and access to information, I have had many discussions with students, experts, and government staffers who provide services such as responding to ATI requests about the challenges and opportunities. In my professional opinion, the Government of Canada could provide better service, sometimes at lower cost through a kind of service akin to the tradition of library reference services. For example, one of the reasons ATI requests can seem to be “frivolous and vexatious” appears to be that people request very large amounts of information because they do not have sufficient understanding of government operations to know what to ask for. Having a professional serving in an intermediary role who understands both information seeking behaviour and the kind of information that is held by government would likely be more efficient in many cases.
Helping people find the information they need (reference services) and providing education on how to understand the need for information, find, evaluate and effectively use it (information literacy), is a traditional role of public, school, corporate and academic libraries.
Recommendation: work with Library and Archives Canada and open government representatives at all levels (municipal, provincial, global) to advocate for an emerging role for libraries of all types in the areas of open government and incorporate professional information services within government departments.
Openness and transparency in trade treaty negotiations
Moving towards openness and transparency in government while at the same time failing to engage with citizens on trade agreements that will impact our jobs, communities, and businesses, is moving in opposite directions at the same time. Recommendation: extend open dialogue to trade treaty negotiations, beginning with the Trans Pacific Partnership.
Open government and access to government services for people with disabilities
Open data and the potential for data visualization offer tremendous potential for the advancement of Canadian society and should be embraced. However, the formats also create new challenges for people with disabilities such as print disabilities. Recommendation: address these challenges proactively through working with groups representing disabled communities and show global leadership in advocating for technological solutions to facilitate equitable open government.
Consider restrictions on access to data to avoid harm to vulnerable groups
The plan appropriately recognizes the need to consider the protection of personal privacy in the release of open data. I recommend that potential harm to vulnerable groups be another consideration in deciding whether data should be released. For example, data about valuable exploitable resources on lands our First Nations peoples own or depend on should not be released without consultation with the peoples who would be affected.
Specific comments on the draft plan
Introduction – Towards an Open and Transparent Government
Re third bullet: “a review of the Access to Information Act, and efforts to accelerate and expand initiatives to help Canadians easily access and use open data, by the President of the Treasury Board working with the ministers of Justice and Democratic Institutions”
Suggestion: split into 2 bullet points to avoid confusion because Access to Information and open data initiatives are two very different types of activities.


The Open Government Partnership
Re: the fifth grand challenge, “Increasing corporate accountability”: measures that address corporate responsibility on issues such as the environment, anti-corruption, consumer protection, and community engagement.
Comment: addressing this challenge would be a golden opportunity to begin to address the limitations of the corporate sector’s single bottom line focus on profit, financially defined. This draft plan is weak in this sector and I would like to see expansion of commitments in this area. Some suggestions:
·       Review legislation on corporations and other businesses to recognize triple bottom line accounting (financial, social, environment)
·       Develop a consultation process with citizens, civil society organizations, academics and business to uncover challenges to corporate accountability and draft solutions


IV. A. Open by Default
Re: Third paragraph, “Being “open by default” also means allowing Canadians to more easily access government services through a single online window [emphasis added]”.
Recommendation: change this sentence to “Being “open by default” also means allowing Canadians to more easily access government services through effective access mechanisms designed to facilitate accountability on service delivery [emphasis added]”.
Comments: see “to centralize or not to centralize” above.


Commitment 1: Enhance Access to Information
It is good to see a commitment to updating the Access to Information Act. Open government will never replace the need for a mechanism for citizens to effectively demand access to information. Government by definition holds power, and power inevitably will attract those who wish to pursue personal gain through corruption. Also, mistakes and poor decisions or even good decisions that did not produce the expected results cannot always be avoided. There will always be a temptation for government staff as well as elected representatives to open or close, highlight or suppress information based on whether it makes the government look good. If you don’t want to release a piece of information it’s all too easy to perceive a request for the information as “frivolous and vexatious”. An important strength of the action plan is “giving the Information Commissioner the power to order the release of government information”.
Re first bullet: “Making government data and information open by default, in formats that are modern and easy to use;”
Suggestion: add a second and third bullet to address the ongoing need for ATI and to streamline the process through the provision of reference services:
·       Providing easy-to-use, cost-free mechanisms for requesting any information that is not open by default;
·       Develop professional intermediary services to help requestors identify with precision the information required
Comment: re the second suggested bullet, see the section “reference and information services” above.


Commitment 2: Streamline Requests for Personal Information
Re: How it will be done – line 2: “a simple, central website [emphasis added] where Canadians can submit requests to any government institution”.
Suggest change to: “a simple, central website where Canadians can submit requests to any government institution to supplement requesting services that are most efficiently handled by the collecting department”.
Comment: see the section “to centralize or not to centralize?” above


Commitment 3: Expand and Improve Open Data
Re: 5th milestone: “Improve Canadians’ access to data and information proactively disclosed by departments and agencies through a single, common online search tool[emphasis added]”
Suggest change to “Improve Canadians’ access to data and information proactively disclosed by departments and agencies through departmental websites as well as a single, common online search tool”
Comment: see the section on “to centralize or not to centralize” above.


Commitment 4: Provide and Preserve Open Information
Re: Milestone 4: “Update Library and Archives Canada’s online archive of the Government of Canada’s web presence to ensure Canadians’ long-term access to federal web content”.
Recommendation – add a Milestone: consult with academic experts and Library and Archives Canada to develop a plan, recommendation and funding analysis to capture Canadian content on the web.
Comment: I applaud the addition of this milestone, but would note that we need to capture Canadian content on the web in general, not just federal web content. Currently, some of this content is voluntarily captured by Internet Archive, however I think Canadians have a duty to take this on ourselves, for profound social, legal and cultural reasons. Material that until recently was produced in print and often archived and preserved by libraries and archives is increasingly available only online and risks being lost, sometimes after only a short period of time.


Commitment 7: Embed Transparency Requirements in the Federal Service Strategy
Re first Milestone “Development a Government and Canada Clients-First Service Strategy that aims to create a single online window [emphasis added] for all government services”.
Suggest change to: Development a Government and Canada Clients-First Service Strategy that aims to create a efficient and effective online access [emphasis added] for all government services through a departmental or centralized online window, whichever is most effective for citizens”.
Comments: see to centralize or not to centralize above.


Commitment 8: Enhance Access to Culture & Heritage Collections
Re: “The Government of Canada will expand collaboration with its provincial, territorial, and municipal partners and key stakeholders to develop a searchable National Inventory of Cultural and Heritage Artefacts to improve access across museum collections”.
Comment / question: how does this relate to Library and Archives Canada’s Building a Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy? http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/about-us/Pages/national-heritage-digitization-strategy.aspx


B. Fiscal Transparency
Re: second paragraph, “…the government will provide Canadians [emphasis added] with the tools they need to visualize spending data and compare fiscal information across departments, between locations, and over time”.
Suggested change to “…the government will develop an arms-length service to provide Canadians with the tools they need to visualize spending data and compare fiscal information across departments, between locations, and over time and encourage all members of the open government partnership to do likewise”.
Comment: it is fairly easy for an interested party to set up visualization tools to “help” people see things like financial data from a particular perspective. This can be deliberate or reflect unconscious biases. For example, to help people understand tax data, one can choose from a number of different potential comparison points. The tax freedom date approach showing how long it takes an average Canadian to work to pay taxes before they get to keep money is a good choice for people ideologically opposed to taxation and seeking tax breaks. In contrast, those of us who think public health care is the right way to go both for social and financial reasons tend to see data demonstrating the lower per-capita health spending in Canada as compared to countries with private health care as an obvious and important way of demonstrating the truth. A government that has succeeded in lowering corporate taxes by two-thirds and does not want public critique creeping into public budget discussions might be tempted to present budget data showing how little is gained by a small to medium increase in the existing corporate tax rate and avoid historical comparisons. A government determined to reserve the corporate tax rate cuts would likely emphasize historical comparisons.


Commitment 10: Increase Transparency of Budget Data and Economic and Fiscal Analysis
Re: “The Government of Canada will provide access to the datasets used in the Federal Budget each year in near real time [emphasis added]”.
Suggested change (addition) to: “The Government of Canada will provide access to the datasets used in the Federal Budget each year in near real time starting with Budget 2017 and will explore the feasibility of providing as many of these datasets as possible in advance of the release of the budget.
Comment: near real time datasets to help Canadians understand the budget would be a major leap forward, however in the long term for Canadians to have meaningful input into the budget process and parliamentarians to have full information for decision-making purposes, we have to have access to the datasets before the Budget is developed. One thought is that after Budget 2017 the datasets identified for release could be prioritized for timely open data release after that point in time.


Commitment 11: Increase Transparency of Grants and Contributions Funding
Re: “one stop access”: in this instance centralized access makes a lot of sense!


C. Innovation, Prosperity, and Sustainable Development
Re: “Making government data and information openly available to Canadians without restrictions on reuse [emphasis added]”…
Suggested change to: “Making government data and information openly available with minimal restrictions on reuse and the expectation of reuse in the spirit of the public good…”
Comments: although the spirit of “no restrictions” is one that I agree with, a major positive change, and internationally embraced by open government advocates as consensus, this is an area where in my professional opinion too open an approach invites problems as well as benefits for the social good. For example, as contributors to the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) recently discovered, their free sharing of their work in what they thought of as an open access archive enabled not only open access but also the sale of SSRN to the world’s largest commercial scholarly publisher, Elsevier, a corporation that benefits from a profit rate of about $1 billion US a year (39%) profit based primarily on toll access and that has incentive to create new locked-down services. I believe this is an early indication of a potential danger of open data that is too open. For example, in the case of government data, too open an approach to data release could result in effective privatization of public services. “Without restrictions on reuse” is so broad that it can include charging for services, paying Internet service providers to have for-pay services prioritized over free public services, making the latter less useful, and using profits to lobby against funding for free public services that profitable commercial re-users are likely to see as competition.
Open data should be open to anyone, not just Canadians. In order to have the full benefit of open access to government data we need to be able to use data from any jurisdiction and compare data across jurisdictions.


C. Innovation, Prosperity, and Sustainable Development
Re – second paragraph: “the Government of Canada will be building strategic partnerships with other governments at the provincial, territorial, and municipal level, to support the development of common standards and principles for open data”.
Comment: good idea, but add the global level; this will be necessary to create innovations that work across jurisdiction and allow cross-jurisdictional comparison.


Commitment 14: Increase Openness of Federal Science Activities (Open Science)
Comments: kudos, this is great to see!!! Note that the granting councils already have policies on open access to research outputs and digital data management strategies. With respect to open access to documents, it might be worth looking at the tri-agency policy. With respect to digital data management strategies, there are important differences between government data, collected by the government for purposes of public policy, typically collected by government staff in the course of their employment and originally owned and controlled by the government, and academic research data which frequently involves third parties such as research subjects and third party organizations (e.g. police data is important to criminologists, business data to business researchers). Here I see many more issues arising from opening of data and I recommend separate treatment of academic research and government data.


Commitment 15: Stimulate Innovation through Canada’s Open Data Exchange (ODX)
This is a great initiative, but this is where building in the concept of free reuse in the context of commitment to the public good (see C above) is important to avoid the potential privatization of free public services.


Commitment 20: Enable Open Dialogue and Open Policy Making
Re: Milestone 1 “Promote common principles for Open Dialogue and common practices across the Government of Canada to enable the use of new methods for consulting and engaging Canadians”.
Comments: I think that this is a great idea, but the potential of Web 2.0 to facilitate open dialogue and open policy making is in its infancy. Consider that we are still working towards universal basic literacy centuries after the invention of the printing press. I think that considerable research into how to use the web for open dialogue and policy making is needed, and how to engage citizens who may not have access to the web or are otherwise unlikely to use this means of participation. Perhaps this could be one of the upcoming challenge areas for the granting councils? (Disclosure: if this happens I might apply for such a grant). 


Commitment 22: Engage Canadians to Improve Key Canada Revenue Agency Services
Re: 3rd milestone: “Engage with indigenous Canadians to better understand the issues, root causes, and data gaps that may be preventing eligible individuals from accessing benefits.”
Recommendation: add a strong, specific commitment to increase the number of indigenous Canadians receiving benefits or perhaps a specific type of benefit to which they are entitled.
In conclusion, please consider these detailed comments as input intended to improve a solid plan ambitious plan by a new government that already deserves kudos for swift action in a number of important areas. Thank you for the opportunity to provide these comments, and to be actively engaged in the preceding in-person and online consultation processes.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l’information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather dot Morrison at uottawa.ca
June 23, 2016

Bravo to India’s DBT/DST on proposing a new world standard for OA policy


Government of India Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science and Technology (DBT / DST) Proposed Open Access Policy
Comments submitted by Heather Morrison to the Open Access Policy Committee and cross-posted to Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ and The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/
Congratulations to the Open Access Policy Committee for a proposed policy that can be considered a new model for the world in almost every respect!
My two suggestions to perfect this policy are as follows:
1.                  After this sentence on page 1: “Grantees can make their papers open-access by publishing in an open-access journal or, if they choose to publish in a subscription journal, by posting the final accepted manuscript to an online repository”, this sentence were added: “Grantees who publish in an open-access journal should post the final published manuscript to an online repository based in India”.
Rationale: journals and publishers are free to come and go and change business models as they please. A journal that is open access today could cease to exist, or be sold to a publisher that uses a toll access business model in the future. The only way to ensure ongoing open access to publicly funded research is through the use of repositories under the direct or indirect control of the funding agency.
2.                  p. 2: “Suggest that the period of embargo be no greater than one year” – change “Suggest” to “Insist”, and add this phrase: “Future revisions of this policy will look to decreasing and eventually eliminating accommodation for publisher embargoes”.
Rationale
“Suggest” to “Insist”: the experience of one early open access policy leader, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, illustrated very well that certain publishers will take every advantage of any policy loophole available. The 2004 policy merely requiring open access had a dismal compliance rate; this changed dramatically with the strong 2008 policy. If researchers have options, publishers will refuse open access or demand longer embargoes. If policies are strong, publishers adjust as can be easily observed through the Sherpa RoMEO Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-Archiving service, which illustrates the shifting landscape of scholarly publishing overall towards compliance with open access policy as well as concessions for specific policies.
“Decreasing and eventually eliminating…publisher embargoes”: the purpose of permitting publisher embargoes is to give the industry time to adjust. Publishers have now had more than a decade to adjust to open access policies around the world, including many by the world’s largest research funders. There are now close to 10,000 fully open access peer-reviewed scholarly journals, employing a variety of business models, including commercial operations that are quite successful financially. There is no reason for publishers to continue to need the “training wheels” support of embargo periods indefinitely.
There is no reason to delay the advance of research by one year at every step. We need clean energy solutions and answers to tough questions like climate change today. Since scientific advance is incremental in nature, a one-year embargo at every step towards an advance can mean an actual delay of many years in achieving a breakthrough.
Particular strengths of this policy that I would like to highlight:
p. 1:  “DBT/DST will not underwrite article processing charges levied by some journals”.
Bravo! The purpose of public funding of research is and should be to facilitate the conduct of research, not to subsidize secondary support services such as scholarly publishing.  The priority for DBT/DST funding should be ensuring that India’s research facilities are state of the art and providing salaries for Indian researchers and support for Indian students.
Also, there are areas (with this policy being a good example) where government policy is the best approach, and other areas that are best left to the market. It is appropriate for governments to direct researchers benefiting from public funding to make their work openly accessible. However, there are reasons to leave business models to the market. One reason is that commercial companies employing the article processing fee method are likely to be subject to the same market forces that caused distortion in the subscriptions market, and targeted government funding in this area could easily exacerbate the problem. Another is that currently many publishers using the open access article processing fee approach provide waivers for authors from developing countries; this may even be the default. This information is from my research in progress (my apologies that my data is not yet ready to share; it will be posted as open data as soon as it is ready). If governments provide funding for authors from developing countries for article processing fees, this concession may well disappear and have a severe impact on authors without the benefit of such funds.
p. 1: “The DBT/DST affirms the principle that the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, shouldbeconsideredinmakingfuturefundingdecisions.DBT/DSTdoesnot recommend the use of journal impact factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions”
Bravo! This is the approach recommended by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment http://am.ascb.org/dora/, and an approach that I heartily support. Among other things, heavy reliance on the impact factor as surrogate for quality of academic work has been a factor in market distortion in scholarly publishing. Also, reliance on impact factor has been an incentive for scholars to focus on topics of interest to high impact factor journals generally based in developed countries. For scholars in the developing world, this is an incentive to redirect focus from problems and issues of local concern to topics of interest to the developed world. This has also been a disincentive to development of local scholarly publishing systems. The ease of publishing on the internet means that it is timely for scholars in India and elsewhere to consider growing local scholarly publishing initiatives, providing opportunities for local leadership, outlets for research on topics of particular interest to India, and taking advantage of local currency and economic conditions to get the best deal on publishing services.
Other strengths shared with previous open access policies:
·       The policy is required, not just requested
·       Strong incentives for compliance (compliance considered in future funding and promotion requests)
·       Immediate deposit of final manuscript post peer review is required, even when access must be delayed due to publisher embargoes
In summary, India’s DBT/DST proposed open access policy is sound, innovative, and in my expert opinion, sets a new standard for the world. The two recommendations for improvement is to ensure that all articles are deposited in a local open access repository, including articles published in open access journals (which may in future cease to exist, change ownership or business model), and to insist on rather than suggest an embargo of no more than one year with language indicating eventual elimination of embargoes. Particular strengths highlighted are the refusal to provide funds for article processing fees and the direction to consider the quality of the work, not the impact factor of the journal in which it is published.
Respectfully,
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l’information / School of Information Studies
Master of Information Studies (M.I.S.) program accredited by the American Library Association
Maîtrise en sciences de l’information (M.S.I.) accréditée par l’American Library Association
University of Ottawa
Heather.Morrison@uottawa.ca
July 5, 2014

Open access legislation in the US and Canada looks to prioritize post-publication archiving, not publishers’ profits

My open access policy post has just been published in the London School of Economics Impact Blog.

The text follows. Note that this was written before the Canadian tri-agency draft open access policy was released on October 15, but correctly predicts expansion of the CIHR policy basics across the funding agencies. My comments on the tri-agency policy are posted here.  The ACOA / APLAC response draft is posted here.

Providing further context on open access policy, Heather Morrison presents cases from the U.S. and Canada, where each are also grappling with how to provide wider access to publicly funded research. If passed, the U.S.’s FASTR Act would require ‘green’ archiving and a focus on interoperability of local repositories. Across North America, faculty-led institutional policy has also been instrumental in administering access whilst preserving university autonomy.

What do UK academics and policy-makers need to know about open access policy across the pond? This is a call for UK academics to join us in calling for public policies that prioritize the needs of scholars and the public interest, not the profits of a handful of publishers. U.S. leaders have developed approaches to policy that are good models for any country! The U.S. Free Access to Research Act (FASTR), if passed, would require the archiving of peer-reviewed results of research funded by federal agencies for public access with a maximum six month embargo. A White House directive in response to a public call for open access is calling for much the same approach, with implementation details anticipated at any moment.

Scientific Data on Demand – NERSC’s High Performance Storage System

Image credit: Berkeley Lab (CC-BY-NC-SA)

A six month embargo is more than generous considering that scholarly publishers have had over a decade to transition to open access. There are more than ten thousand fully open access peer reviewed journals successfully employing a variety of business models listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. By insisting on deposit in repositories for public access with long-term preservation addressed, FASTR ensures ongoing access to these works for the U.S. public. FASTR addresses the technical requirements for re-use much more directly than the RCUK’s indirect and insufficient preference for a particular license. Research funders in the U.S. and Canada fund research rather than targeting funding to open access article processing fees. The faculty permissions approach, developed by academics for academics, pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT is the optimal model for institutional open access policy from the scholar’s point of view. Perhaps a topic for another day: throughout the U.S. and Canada, university libraries provide hosting and support services for faculty-led publishing.


The Free Access to Research Act (FASTR) in the U.S., if passed, would require free public access to federally funded research for departments with research budgets of $100 million or more. Unlike the UK, FASTR does not ask authors to publish in open access journals, nor does it provide funding for open access article processing fees. FASTR’s call for examination of open licensing is very similar to the recent advice from the UK’s Business, Innovation and Skills Committee for further research on this point.

FASTR is a superior policy to the UK’s RCUK policy from a number of perspectives. First, demanding deposit in repositories designed for long-term preservation for free public access assures that U.S. citizens will have access to these works in perpetuity. The UK’s push for gold open access policy leaves works funded by the UK at the mercy of publishers and journals that could fold, be owned or controlled by organizations outside the political influence of the UK, or that could change their business model in future.

The US focus on interoperability and local repositories meeting technical requirements directly addresses requirements for data and text-mining. This is likely to be far more effective than the UK’s attempt to achieve this indirectly through CC-BY (attribution only) licensing. CC-BY is not necessary for data and text mining of freely available works as these are essentially automated forms of reading materials. CC-BY is not sufficient for data and text mining because a CC-BY license can be placed on works that are not technically suited for these tasks, such as a locked-down PDF.
Both the UK and the FASTR approaches are designed to accommodate publishers in the transition process. The FASTR maximum six-month embargo on green open access archiving is appropriate given that scholarly publishing has now had more than a decade of experience with open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals which use a variety of business models. This is a strong indicator of the ability of scholarly publishers to transition to open access, given good public policy which prioritizes scholarship and the public interest while giving scholarly publishers a lengthy period of time to adjust. The goal for open access policy should be to gradually decrease embargo periods to zero, reflecting that the public interest is and should be the priority of government, not protecting outmoded business models.

Other North American funding agencies are largely following this U.S. model. For example, Canada’s first federal funding agency to adopt an open access policy, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), adopted a policy fairly similar to the public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Canada’s tricouncil funding agencies are currently undergoing discussions with a view to standardizing open access policies across the agencies, with CIHR’s policy most likely to serve as the model.  It should be acknowledged that the UK’s early lead in green open access policy and repository development was a major influence in the direction of U.S. and Canadian policy.

While U.S. and Canadian research funders allow for researchers to apply for open access article processing fees in research grant applications, it is unlikely that either the U.S. or Canada would follow the lead of providing targeted funding for this purpose, particularly in the current lean economic environment. Even in better economic times, in North America there is far more university autonomy and less central direction than is the case in the UK.

A great model for institutional policy from the scholar’s point of view is the faculty-led open access permissions policy pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT. Shieber and Suber have developed a webpage dedicated to what they call “good practices” for this kind of policy.  The basic idea is that faculty give their university permission to post their peer-reviewed articles for open access in their local repository, with a waiver option available to authors on request. This approach gives a university all the permissions needed to make the work of its faculty open access, while at the same time asserting the rights of faculty to their own work.
ccbync
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Canada’s tricouncil draft open access policy: my comments

Canada’s tricouncil funding agencies (NSERC, CIHR and SSHRC) have posted a consultation on their draft open access policy. Comments are due by December 13, 2013. Following are my comments.

Kudos to the tricouncil for an overall sensible draft open access policy that in many respects can serve as a model for other funding agencies.

Overall

One of the strengths of the policy is that open access publishing is an option, not a requirement, with use of grant funds allowed for this purpose. The reason this is a strength is that this permits market forces to operate. This is important to address a long-term market dysfunction in which a few large commercial scholarly publishers enjoy hefty profit margins in the range of 30-40% in an inelastic market that does not respond to market signals such as deep cuts to universities and research budgets, while on the other hand a significant portion of scholarly journal and monograph publishing requires subsidy. Today’s technology makes it possible to conduct high quality scholarly publishing (peer review coordination and editing) at a fraction of the costs of some of the large commercial publishers, suggesting that it is very much worthwhile pursuing a competitive market so that funding can be re-directed from paying for publication to more money for research per se, as well as new needs such as research data retention, management and preservation. See the Appendix to this letter for more detail.

3.1 Option #1: Grant recipients submit their manuscript to a journal that offers immediate open access to published articles, or offers open access to published articles within 12 months.

Suggested change – add: and deposit a copy of the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a Canadian open access archive on acceptance for publication, with open access delayed if necessary. 

Rationale: option #1 is not sufficient to ensure ongoing open access. The policy applies to grantees, not to journals. If a grantee meets the requirements by publishing in a journal that fits the criteria for this option, there is nothing to stop the journal from subsequently changing journal policy, for example changing its business model to toll access or extending the embargo period. This is true even for journals that use Creative Commons licenses; these extend and clarify permissions downstream but pose no obligations on the original copyright holder.

Option #2: Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a digital archive where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to determine which publishers allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

Suggested change to:

Option #2: Grant recipients archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscript in a Canadian-based digital archive on acceptance for publication where it will be freely accessible within 12 months (e.g., institutional repository or discipline-based repository). It is the responsibility of the grant recipient to ensure that they retain rights to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies.

Rationale:

Ensuring ongoing open access to Canadian works is best served through archives based in Canada. Archives based elsewhere are subject to funding contingencies that are not under the control of Canada and access to archives outside of the country could be impacted by forces not under the control of Canada or Canadians. For example, if a grantee fulfills the requirement of this policy by depositing a copy of a work into an archive in a foreign country, it is within the realm of the possible that the foreign archive could be under the control of a country with which Canada is at war or in a trade dispute.

To facilitate compliance, authors should be required to deposit a copy of their post-peer-reviewed manuscript on acceptance for publication, with delay in open access if necessary. This greatly simplifies the process of accountability.

The original statement places more emphasis on publisher rights than is warranted. Research funding agencies have the right to set policies with which grantees must comply, and copyright begins with the author. Authors should insist on rights retention rather than passively complying with publisher policy.

Requiring deposit in a local open access archive is not an onerous burden, and is much less of a burden today than it was a few years ago. The majority of Canada’s universities already have institutional repositories in place, and all Canadian research institutions will need to develop repository services in the near future, whether for this policy or for other purposes. For example, every institution with graduate students either has, or will soon need, a repository for electronic deposit of theses. Every institution with researchers will soon need one or more repositories for storing research data. A few years ago development of an institutional repository required local expertise and considerable investment, but today hosted solutions are available and affordable, and smaller institutions can share repositories and save quite a bit on the costs.

Embargo period (option # 1 and option # 2): suggest 6 months, not 12

The embargo period of 12 months is, in my opinion, far too generous. Scholarly publishers have had more than a decade to adjust to open access. The purpose of scholarly research is to advance our knowledge and serve the public interest; any financial benefits to scholarly publishers is incidental and should be given an accordingly lower priority. The embargo period should be shortened to 6 months, with an indication of review with a view to eventually eliminating the embargo period.

Another suggestion

One suggestion to facilitate both acceptance and compliance would be for the tricouncil to accept URLs to works in institutional repositories in CVs for grant application purposes. This would mean that the small steps needed to make works open access would also free up time for researchers.

Thank you for a good model for open access policy and for the opportunity to participate in this consultation.

Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
University of Ottawa School of Information Studies

Appendix: how researchers can save money when open access publishing is a choice

Researchers can save money by selecting more cost effective options such as publishing in one of the majority of open access journals that do not charge article processing fees. Of the close to 10,000 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, 6,555 or approximately two-thirds have “no article processing charge” (DOAJ, 2013). Researchers considering open access journals that do charge article processing fees have an incentive to prioritize journals equivalent in scholarly value but lower in cost where possible, as seeking lower costs means more research funds can go to other priorities such as support for student training and purchase of necessary equipment. Today’s technology has made it possible to complete the important scholarly work of coordinating peer review and editing at a very high level of quality at a fraction of the cost associated with some of the large commercial scholarly publishers. According to my analysis (Morrison, 2013), the average global expenditure by university libraries for each peer-reviewed scholarly article is approximately $4,500. To illustrate the potential for savings, note (merely as one of many examples) that the profitable Hindawi manages the process charging article processing fees as little as a tenth of this amount.

References

DOAJ (2013). Browse by publication charges. Retrieved October 16, 2013 from http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=byPublicationFee&uiLanguage=en

MORRISON, Heather. Economics of scholarly communication in transition. First Monday, [S.l.], may. 2013. ISSN 13960466. Available at: <http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4370/3685>. Date accessed: 16 Oct. 2013. doi:10.5210/fm.v18i6.4370.

Predicting increasing costs and reduction in open access: comments on the Research Councils UK revised OA Policy and Guidance

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) has just issued a revised OA Policy and Guidance http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/RCUKOpenAccessPolicyandRevisedguidance.pdf

This is a stellar example of well-intentioned but poorly crafted government policy. I predict that this policy will increase the costs of scholarly publishing by creating an incentive for publishers to develop open access article processing fees with no incentive to keep prices reasonable and actually decrease access, by providing an incentive for journals to increase embargo periods (to force authors to choose the OA via APF).

Relevant sections of the policy:

Expectations of researchers:

Researchers, as the generators of all of the research papers and responsible for much of their peer review, are expected to publish any peer-reviewed research papers… in journals that are compliant with the RCUK policy on Open Access. 
Compliance of journals:
RCUK recognises a journal as being compliant with this policy if: 
The journal provides, via its own website, immediate and unrestricted access to the final published version of the paper, which should be made available using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Proces sing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. 
Or,
The journal consents to deposit of the final Accepted Manuscript in any repository, without restriction on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. No APC will be payable to the publisher. In this latter case, RCUK will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and the final Accepted Manuscript becoming Open Access. In the case of papers in the arts, humanities and social sciences (which will mainly be funded by the AHRC and the ES
RC), the maximum embargo period will be twelve months. In some circumstances, where funding for APCs is unavailable during the transition period, longer embargo periods may be allowable (see section 3.5).

Comment: this policy provides journals an incentive to offer an open access option via article processing fees which authors are forced to choose if the journal’s embargo period is longer than what is acceptable to RCUK. The UK only produces about 6% of the world’s scholarly literature, so OA to this literature will not enable UK libraries to cancel subscriptions. To maximize revenue, a journal can provide an OA via APF option at the price of their choosing and extend the embargo period to avoid having authors choose the self-archiving option. The majority of scholarship is not nationally based, so increased embargo periods are unlikely to be restricted to the UK. This means that the UK is likely to enjoy less access to non-UK scholarship in the coming years than would be the case if this policy had not been adopted.

Thus in spite of the best of intentions this is a poor policy and let’s hope funders elsewhere do not look to this as a model. Fortunately in this case the US is getting it right.

Another problem with the policy is the assumption that licensing (CC-BY) can achieve the re-usability that is desired. As I’ve discussed in detail elsewhere http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/10/critique-of-cc-by-series.html, this just won’t work. The result will be a corpus of CC-BY licensed locked-down PDFs or even more open documents with locked-down image-based charts and graphs that are useless for text and data-mining and re-use.

UK Business, Innovation & Skills Committee’s inquiry into Government’s Open Access Policy: my submission


Dr. Heather Morrison
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
hgmorris at sfu dot ca
Business, Innovation & Skills Committee
February 5, 2013
Re:            Business, Innovation & Skills Committee’s inquiry into Government’s Open Access Policy
1.     This is an individual submission from a scholar specializing in open access and scholarly communication and a long-time open access advocate. This is a substantially different submission from the one that I recently submitted to the House of Lord’s Science and Technology Committee.
Executive Summary
2.     Changing the Government’s Open Access Policy from one intended to support ‘gold’ open access publishing to a straightforward ‘green’ open access policy requiring researchers to deposit works for open access in a UK-based repository is recommended. This is absolutely necessary to ensure that the works of UK researchers remain open access and available to UK researchers and the UK public. The Open Access Policy applies only to UK researchers, not publishers. A researcher can publish in a fully open access journal that uses CC-BY, which is then sold to another publisher and converted to toll access. The steady growth of open access journals, and more recently monographs, over the past few years illustrates that ‘green’ open access policy is sufficient to drive growth in open access publishing. Conversely, the policy as written is highly likely to harm ‘gold’ open access publishing, by inflating prices which is likely to decrease support for this approach outside the UK.
3.     The use of CC licenses for scholarly works should be considered experimental for the time being. None of the CC licenses map to any definition of open access. Any of the CC licenses can be used with toll access works. Some of the arguments used for CC-BY do not bear careful scrutiny. For example, it is a common belief that CC-BY is needed to facilitate data and text mining. CC-BY is not necessary, sufficient, or even desirable for data and text mining. Internet search engines routinely conduct data and text mining on a massive scale without any need for CC-BY. CC-BY can be used with works that are not at all suitable for data or text mining, such as locked-down PDFs. The Attribution element of CC-BY is problematic when a number of data / text mining sources are combined; data experts recommend CC-0 or public domain, not CC-BY.
4.     There are aspects of the CC-BY license that are problematic for scholarship. CC-BY will often be incompatible with research ethics and rights of third parties whose work is included in scholarly works. Permitting the creation of derivatives may open up possibilities for new ways of speeding the advance of knowledge, but it also opens up the possibility of introducing errors and damaging the reputations of scholars by facilitating the creation of poor quality derivatives. These are just a couple of examples. Much more thought and research would be desirable before a default license for open access scholarly works is accepted.
5.     The vast majority of open access journals do not use Creative Commons licenses at all, and those that do, do not always choose CC-BY. Only 11% of the fully open access journals listed in the DOAJ use the CC-BY license. There is evidence that, given a choice, scholars prefer to use more restrictive licenses. Recent evidence from Nature’s Scientific Reports found that only 5% of scholars given a choice between 3 CC licenses chose CC-BY.
6.     There are problems with affordability in scholarly communication in addition to access barriers. It is important to create a future for scholarly communication that is both open access and affordable. At the average cost of $188 per journal found by Edgar & Willinsky in a major survey of journals using OJS, the full cost of global open access publishing could be supported by the budgets of academic libraries, at a small fraction of current spend, which could free funds to support emerging needs such as preservation of electronic information and support for research data services. At the rate of the $5,000 per article charged by Elsevier’s Cell Press for “sponsored access”, the costs of the global scholarly communication system would increase by 16%.
About me
7.     Recently, I completed a doctorate at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication. My dissertation, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530, reports on research that is highly relevant to this inquiry, particularly chapter 5, on the economics of transition to open access, and chapter 3, which includes a substantial section mapping Creative Commons licenses and open access. I have developed and taught courses on scholarly communication and open access at the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and have published extensively on the topics of scholarly communication and open access, including the monograph Scholarly Communication for Librarians: Chandos, 2009. I have also taught Information rights for the information age at the SFU School of Communication.
8.    I am also a librarian with more than a decade’s experience, primarily negotiating
purchase of electronic resources at a provincial and sometimes a national level, through my position as Coordinator at BC Electronic Library Network.
Detailed comments
9.     Open access policy should always require that researchers deposit work into open access repositories – the ‘green’ approach, and never require that researchers publish in open access venues such as journals – the ‘gold’ approach.
10.  Open access policy should stipulate that researchers deposit works into UK based open access repositories, such as institutional repositories. The reason for this stipulation is to ensure that UK funded research remains open access and remains available to the UK research community and public. To illustrate why this is necessary, consider the scenario where a researcher publishes in an open access journal but does not deposit in a UK based open access archive. The open access journal may cease to exist or be sold to a publisher that decides to change the model from open to toll access. Note that policies covering UK funded researchers, by definition, cover the actions of the researcher, not the publisher.
11.  It is not necessary for open access policy to require publication in ‘gold’ open access journals, because ‘green’ open access policies are more than sufficient to provide incentive for publishers to adapt and offer ‘gold’ open access journals. Over the past few years, thanks in large part to the leading-edge ‘green’ open access policies of the UK Research Councils and similar funding bodies elsewhere, an open access publishing system has emerged and is growing on a steady basis. There are more than 8,000 fully open access, scholarly peer-reviewed journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The net growth of the DOAJ is a fairly consistent 3-4 titles per day.
12.  It is premature to make any recommendations about which license is optimal for scholarship. For this reason it is not advisable to insist that researchers publish using the CC-BY license.
13.  One of the reasons it is not advisable to recommend the CC-BY license is because many of the arguments in favour of this license are not well thought out. For example, on a superficial level CC-BY appears to reflect the strong open access of the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition. However, this superficial resemblance is not reflected in the legal code. For example, CC-BY does not necessarily mean “free of charge” which is central to any definition of open access.
14.  There is a common misperception that CC-BY is needed to facilitate text and data mining. CC-BY is not necessary, sufficient, or even desirable for text and data mining.
15.  CC-BY is not necessary for text and data mining. Internet search engines such as Google conduct text and data mining on a massive scale, on a continuous basis. This text and data mining is routinely conducted on works with any of the Creative Commons licenses, or no license specified, and even web pages that are All Rights Restricted. On the Internet, the way to note that a web page is not available for text and data mining is to use the norobots.txt in the web page’s metadata. Otherwise, the default is that text and mining is the norm.
16.  CC-BY is not sufficient to permit text and data mining. The Creative Commons licenses are a means by which creators or rights holders can waive certain rights that they have under copyright. However, the CC licenses do not place any obligations on the licensor. A CC-BY license can be used on a work that consists of locked-down image files that are not at all useful for text or data mining. A CC-BY license can also be used on a website that uses the nonrobots.txt metadata that tells the web that the page is not available for crawling.
17.  CC-BY is not desirable for text and data mining, because the attribution element is problematic when large numbers of datasets are combined. Data experts are recommending CC-0 or similar types of licenses for data for this reason.
18.  CC-BY licenses can be problematic for scholarship.
19.  CC-BY as a default for scholarly works is highly problematic, because CC-BY places no obligations on the licensor. An open access publisher using the CC-BY license can sell all of their journals to another entity. There is nothing in the CC-BY license that obligates the purchaser to continue with the open access model; they are free to convert all of the journals to toll access. This is one of the reasons I always recommend that open access policy be for ‘green’ open access archiving.
20.  CC-BY licenses will tend to conflict with research ethics and rights of third parties whose works are included in scholarly works covered by policy. A CC-BY license grants blanket permission to use works, including commercial works and making of derivatives, to anyone, anywhere. This means that a picture of a research subject could be harvested and included in an image bank to sell for a wide variety of uses, including advertising. Informed consent in this situation would require explaining to research subject that if their photo is published under a CC-BY license the consequences could include such scenarios as having their picture (possibly modified) posted as part of an ad on a bus.
21.  CC-BY licenses, by allowing for derivatives on a blanket basis without requiring permission, can add inaccuracy into the scholarly record and/or damage the reputation of scholars, universities, and the UK education system, if poor quality derivatives are made.
22.  CC-BY licenses, by granting commercial rights on a blanket basis, permit commercial entities to use the works of a publisher to compete with the publisher for revenue. For example, a commercial company could set themselves up to automatically capture new content created by a journal in order to attract advertising revenue that might otherwise have gone to the journal. This is a threat to journals, particularly smaller society journals.
23.  The full impact of the Creative Commons licenses at this point in time is not fully known. Allowing for the creation of derivatives could open up the potential to increase the speed of knowledge creation and/or the development of useful new tools and services, or it could slow down progress by facilitating the creation and dissemination of poor quality derivatives. For this reason, the use of particular licenses for scholarship at this point in time should be considered experimental. Use of the CC licenses should be encouraged, but a particular license should not be selected as a default, and researchers should not be required to use a particular license.
24.  Most open access journals do not use Creative Commons licenses at all; those that do use CC licenses do not necessarily use CC-BY. Only about 11% of the fully open access journals listed in the DOAJ use CC-BY (see Suber, P. June 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, The Rise of Libre Open Access http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-12.htm
25.  There is some evidence suggesting that CC-BY is not the choice of scholars themselves. Nature’s Scientific Reports is a gold open access journal that provides authors a choice of CC license, affording an unusual opportunity to observe the CC license choice of scholars when all other variables are equal, e.g. there is no difference in cost based on the license choice. As reported by Nature’s Grace Baynes to the GOAL Open Access list on February 5, 2013, only 5% of authors chose the CC-BY license (from http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/2013-February/001557.html).
Details:
1 July 2012 to 7 November 2012
Introduced CC-BY;
Three license choices available
412 papers accepted
* 37% were CC BY-NC-SA 
* 58% were CC BY-NC-ND 
* 5% were CC BY
26.  The affordability of an open access scholarly publishing system hinges on the average cost per article. The majority of open access journals do not charge article processing fees, so it is important not to confuse average cost per article with the APF approach. In addition to the access problem, scholarly communication has had an affordability problem over the past few decades. It is important to address the affordability problem in the transition to open access.
27.  By my calculations, if all of the world’s scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles were published at the $188 US average per article found by Edgar & Willinsky in their 2009 survey of more than 900 journals using Open Journal Systems, the full cost could come from academic library budgets with cost savings of 96% of academic library budgets (for details, see chapter 5 of my dissertation). It is important to seek these savings as academic libraries have many new needs to fill, such as preservation of electronic information and supporting research data services. On the other hand, if the average cost were the $5,000 per article charged by Elsevier’s Cell Press for “sponsored access”, this would increase the cost of the system overall by about 16% - and still not achieve open access, as sponsored access is not really open access, just free-to-read from the publisher’s website.
28.  The RCUK’s generous block grants for article processing fees are likely to distort the market by inflating costs for article processing fees. If this approach were to success in achieving open access, it would be at the cost of increasing the problem of lack of affordability of the system. However, I predict that this approach will fail, as the impact of inflating the costs of article processing fees is very likely to decrease support for open access publishing outside the UK, thus dooming the sector the grants are intended to support.
29.  I predict that an unintended consequence of the RCUK block grants for article processing fees will be a decrease in support for this approach outside the UK as this is likely to inflate costs. This will decrease the competitiveness of the UK research system, as it will be stuck with costs that researchers elsewhere do not have to pay.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to participate, and for the UK’s leadership in the area of open access policy.
Heather Morrison, PhD
hgmorris at sfu dot ca

UK House of Lords short enquiry into open access: my response

Update January 17 – note that I am working on a revised submission to conform to the Select Committee’s guidelines and to correct some potential misinterpretations.

Important addition January 17 – it has come to my attention that my section addressing maximum embargoes could be misinterpreted as suggesting a recommended embargo. To be clear, my words are meant to address the absolute maximum for disciplines in the humanities and social sciences where UK based traditional journals do not yet have experience with the common practice of providing free access to back issues. My revised recommendation reads:

On maximum embargoes: an industry norm of free back issues to scholarly society journals about a year after publication appears to be emerging. For this reason, I recommend that a year’s embargo be considered as the absolute maximum across the disciplines. The current 6-month embargo in STM should be retained, and all advice to publishers should clearly indicate that the practice of allowing embargoes is to facilitate a transition to full open access, and that the eventual goal is to gradually reduce and then eliminate embargoes. Embargoes are a concession to existing publishers; the public has a right to access the results of publicly funded research with no delay. (added Jan. 17, 2013).

There will be other changes in my final revision, however this is a particularly important one to note.

The UK House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology has launched a http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/science-and-technology-committee/inquiries/parliament-2010/open-access/short enquiry into open access. Following is my response.

Heather Morrison, M.L.I.S., PhD
Coordinator, BC Electronic Library Network
Adjunct Faculty, University of British Columbia (scholarly communication & open access)
House of Lords
Select Committee on Science and Technology
hlscience at parliament dot uk
January 16, 2013
House of Lords Select Committee on Open Access: Call for Evidence
This is an individual submission, from an open access advocate and scholar focused on the area of scholarly communication and open access. In November 2012, I defended my dissertation, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age <https://theses.lib.sfu.ca/thesis/etd7530> which addresses some critical issues of relevance to open access policy development.
Highlights
The long-term leadership of the UK and the House of Lords in open access is acknowledged and applauded. It is recommended that researchers always be required to deposit work in UK based repositories, even when publishing work in open access venues, to ensure that UK funded research never becomes unavailable or unaffordable to people in the UK.
My research delves into mapping open access with the Creative Commons licenses, finding that, despite superficial similarities, the CC licenses are useful tools but no CC license is synonymous with open access and each license element has both useful and negative implications for scholarship. For example, allowing derivatives and commercial uses to anyone downstream will not always be compatible with research ethics requirements. A participant in a weight loss study giving permission to use a photo for a scholarly journal cannot be assumed to have granted permission for anyone to use this photo in a commercial advertisement. I recommend replacing the requirement that funded articles use the CC-BY license with a statement that when RCUK funds for open access publishing are used, there should be no restrictions placed on educational or research uses of the works.
As an open access advocate, I recommend againstblock funding for open access article processing fees, as this will interfere with the market, raising prices that will result in loss of support for this approach outside the UK, disadvantaging the very publishers who think that this approach will benefit them. Instead, I recommend that the UK follow the policies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Canada’s Canadian Institutes of Health Research in allowing researchers to use their research grants to pay open access article processing fees.
I suggest providing some funding to provide infrastructure and support and/or subsidies to assist scholarly society publishers, a common practice at university libraries throughout North America, and I further recommend that the UK set aside some seed funding to fund the future, that is, the next generation of scholarly communication, overlay journals built on institutional repositories, an area where the UK is well positioned to play a leadership role.
Finally, I present some data of relevance to the question of maximum permissible embargoes before works can be made open access. It can be argued that a new norm of scholarly journals providing free back issues on a voluntary basis, typically within a year of publication, has emerged in the past ten years. This is such a widespread and growing practice that the lack of evidence of harm to these journals is in itself evidence that a one-year’s embargo causes no harm to journals relying on subscriptions, even when all articles in the journal are made freely available. Therefore I suggest that it would be quite appropriate to set a maximum embargo of no more than one year regardless of discipline. Thank you very much for the opportunity to participate in this consultation.
Details
1.         Open access to scholarly knowledge, as noted in the 2002 Budapest Open Access
Initiative, is an unprecedented public good, an opportunity to make scholarly works as useful as they can be, and an opportunity for all, including those from the developing world and poorer regions in the developed world, to benefit from and participate in a global scholarly conversation. Congratulations and thanks to the UK for long-standing leadership in the area of open access. The intent of the RCUK Open Access Policy is a welcome push towards even greater support for open access. My submission is intended to address a few areas where minor changes could substantially improve this strong leadership in the push for the next phase of open access.
2.         I have explored the question of the mapping of Creative Commons licenses with open access and have come to the conclusion that despite superficial similarities there are important differences. Therefore, I recommend against equating open access with Creative Commons licenses, and particularly with the CC-BY license. My work on this topic will not fit within the 6-page limit, but the following points feature a few highlights.
3.         The RCUK policy states:  The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if 1. The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction”.
Comment: It is not sufficient to insist that a journal allows deposit in other repositories. Researchers should be required to deposit in other (UK-based) repositories for open access. The reason is that the RCUK policy applies to researchers, not to publishers or journals. The Creative Commons licenses are means by which license holders can relinquish certain rights that they have under copyright, which do not place any obligation on the licensor. If a researcher publishers in an open access journal but fails to deposit in an open access repository, then if the journal or publisher ceases to make the work open access, access to the work could be lost to the UK research community.  For example, an open access publishing company could be sold to another company which could issue the same works under toll access only, with all rights reserved, and no obligation to sell products at prices UK universities can afford.
4.         As an open access advocate, I argue that the CC-BY is not optimal as a default for open access, but on the contrary a weak and problematic license that raises the possibility of wholesale loss of open access downstream. See point 3 above regarding the example of an open access publishing company selling to another company that decides to go with a toll access model.
In addition, there are valid scholarly reasons why CC-BY cannot be used with every research article. CC-BY is not always compatible with research ethics. An example is a person whose picture is taken and published as part of a study on weight loss. The researcher’s right to publish this picture (with permission) does not give the researcher a right to grant anyone, anywhere blanket permission to re-publish the picture for commercial purposes (such as using it in a weight loss ad), as use of the CC-BY license does.
It is not uncommon for scholars to use works created by third parties in their works, in which case copyright belongs to the third party and scholars cannot grant permission to others to use these works.
Scholars may have valid reasons for preferring that NoDerivatives be specified. The quality of work reflects on a scholar in a way that can make or break a career, and a poor quality derivative could reflect poorly on the scholar. Third parties whose work is included in scholarly articles may have similar concerns about quality with derivatives.
The CC-BY provision in the RCUK policy places both scholars and journals in an awkward position, with a choice of violating the rights of others, or refraining from using works that truly are useful and could be included, just not under the CC-BY license.
For all these reasons, I recommend replacing the requirement that funded articles use the CC-BY license with a statement that with a statement that when RCUK funds for open access publishing are used, there should be no restrictions placed on educational or research uses of the works (RCUK policy point one). This should be sufficient to prevent such potential abuses by publishers as retaining rights to charge for coursepacks or for use by commercial companies, while avoiding the potential abuses of the works per se opened up by CC-BY.
5.          As an open access advocate, I argue againstblock grants for open access article processing charges to universities. This is an interference with the market that I consider to be against the interests of open access, and even the open access publishers that one might think would benefit from this policy, although I doubt that they would agree.
One reason is because the way these grants have been set up encourages high prices for article processing fees. It is highly unlikely that other countries will follow the UK’s lead on this. The UK is aiming to protect a positive balance in trade, while for virtually every other country, the incentive is in the opposite direction, i.e. for most countries scholarly publishing involves a negative balance in trade, and propping up the existing system is counter-productive.
If prices for open access article processing fees are inflated due to the RCUK’s generosity, this is a disincentive for voluntary initiatives to support article processing fees. Ross Mounce recently released some research illustrating a 5% increase in BioMedCentral’s open access article processing fees over the past year. This is above inflation, and for library subscriptions, an increase of this amount would be sufficient to trigger a “review before renewal” decision, and possibly cancellation. In other words, RCUK’s generosity in its support of open access via article processing fee publishers may actually cause a drop in support for this publishing model from outside the UK. What I recommend is the approach of the NIH and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, that is, allowing researchers to use grant funds to pay open access article processing fees, but not providing targeted funds. This is an approach that provides support in a manner that allows the market to do its work. 
6.         To support scholarly societies in making a move to open access, I recommend subsidizing scholarly and university press publishing either directly through block publishing grants or indirectly through providing infrastructure support for their publishing. Direct subsidy is much more cost-effective than indirect subsidy through APFs. One example of such a program in Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Aid to Scholarly Journals, and the Synergies project that has provided support for Canada’s social sciences and humanities journals to move online and facilitated the move to open access for a number of these journals. In North America, it is common for university libraries to provide hosting and support services for journals local faculty are involved with, an option that facilitates high quality open access publishing at a modest cost. 
7.         Fund the future. To prepare the UK for leadership in scholarly communication in the future I recommend providing some seed funding for the most transformative possibility for scholarly communication reported by Houghton and Oppenheimer in 2009 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/01/houghton.aspx, that is, building an overlay journal system on top of institutional repositories. Britain’s strength in institutional repositories makes the UK a natural leader in this area. UK-based mathematician Timothy Gowers recently posted about a new system that will make it easy to create overlay journals with arXiv, suggesting that this approach may be feasible much sooner than most of us had thought: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
8.         On maximum embargoes: an industry norm of free back issues to scholarly society journals about a year after publication appears to be emerging. For this reason, I recommend that a year’s embargo be considered as the absolute maximum across the disciplines. The current 6-month embargo in STM should be retained, and all advice to publishers should clearly indicate that the practice of allowing embargoes is to facilitate a transition to full open access, and that the eventual goal is to gradually reduce and then eliminate embargoes. Embargoes are a concession to existing publishers; the public has a right to access the results of publicly funded research with no delay. (added Jan. 17, 2013).

            
           The following is intended to illustrate why the permitted embargo should be no more than 1 year at absolute maximum for journals in the social sciences and humanities that do not yet have experience with free access practices. (Added Jan. 17, 2013). This practice of making back issues free is widely practiced by traditional publishers. There is no evidence that providing this access has caused any harm to the publishers. The large and growing number of journals following this practice supports my assertion that this is becoming the standard.

On March 16, 2004, traditional not-for-profit publishers in Washington, D.C. made a commitment to the Washington D.C. Principles For Free Access to Science – A Statement from Not-for-Profit Publishers <http://www.dcprinciples.org/>, through which “representatives from the nation’s leading not-for-profit medical/scientific societies and publishers announced their commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings”.
The publishing principles and practices supported by this group include:
“3.  As not-for-profit publishers, we have introduced and will continue to support the following forms of free access:…
The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone worldwide either immediately or within months of publication, depending on each publisher’s business and publishing requirements”
In other words, this very traditional group of scholarly society publishers committed, back in 2004, to making their journals freely available either immediately or within months of publication. There are a number of indications that this is now a common practice. There are now more than 8,000 fully open access scholarly journals, and many more that provide free access to back issues on a purely voluntary basis, frequently with a 12-month delay.
The extent of this practice may be best viewed in the Electronic Journals Library (EZB). The EZB is a collaborative project of 589 libraries, based in Germany that collects both subscription and free “scientific and academic full text journals”. EZB currently includes 38,066 journals – close to 30,000 more titles than are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is limited to fully OA journals. Among the 30,000 journals are a very large number of journals that voluntarily provide free access to back issues, with no policy requirement. Details about the EZB can be found here:
A quick scan of the journals participating in the US-based Highwire Free hosting service illustrates that a 12-month embargo is very common for the society journals participating in this service:
The number of journals voluntarily contributing to PubMedCentral has been growing steadily, from 410 in March 2008 to 1,464 at the end of 2012. Of these, over 1,000 voluntarily provide all content for immediate free access. Data is from The Dramatic Growth of Open Access:
A key point is that this data illustrates that a great many traditional scholarly journals have made the decision to provide free back to their journals with a minimal embargo period, with one year being common, and no embargo at all being not at all unusual. Many such journals made this step with some concern about the potential impact on their subscriptions and revenue. If there had been dire consequences for such journals, there would be plenty of data today to demonstrate that providing free access after a brief embargo harms subscriptions. No such data has ever been brought forward to my knowledge. Providing free access to back issues appears to be rapidly becoming the norm for scholarly journals, and so I recommend a maximum embargo for OA policy of 12 months.
Thanks once more for the opportunity to participate.
Heather Morrison, PhD
Freedom for scholarship in the internet age
Following are details about the short enquiry from the House of Lords’ website
This short inquiry will focus on the implementation of the Government Open Access policy.

The Committee will consider a range of concerns including:

  • embargo periods;
  • arrangements for article processing charge (APC) funds;
  • international issues; and
  • risks for learned societies.

The Committee expect to produce an output in mid-February, to inform the development of Research Council UK’s policies.
The Committee has issued a targeted call for evidence to key stakeholders for this short inquiry, any party interested in submitting written evidence should contact the Clerk to the Committee on hlscience at parliament dot uk. The deadline for submissions is Friday 18 January 2013.

 

Will open access article processing fee publishers do the right thing and join OA advocates in calling for friendly amendment to the RCUK policy?

This summer the Research Councils U.K. adopted a stronger open access policy, as explained by Peter Suber in the September 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. While the strong support for open access, including funding for open access publishing, is welcome news, this policy includes some ill-thought-out provisions and open access advocates are calling for revisions before the policy is implemented; see Peter’s article for some objections and recommendations.

In brief, the reason this is a bad policy is because it requires researchers to select a gold open access option when one is available, and provides block funding to UK universities to pay article processing fees. This gives publishers a strong incentive to backtrack on green self-archiving policies, adding to the delay or embargo period or removing this option altogether. By making this requirement and providing funding, this is in effect a “blank cheque” policy which is certain to raises the costs of scholarly publishing.

This is why: if you had a business and customers had to buy what you sold regardless of the cost, how might this impact your pricing policy? What if you’re a corporation and legally bound to provide shareholders with the best profit returns that you can? This, from my perspective, is an example of a government just throwing money at a problem without thinking it through – very out of character for the current UK government. If they have cash to spare, for heaven’s sakes why do they not use it to subsidize students rather than publishers?

Others have made similar points. The main reason for this post is to ask open access publishers involved in lobbying for this whether they are shooting themselves in the foot, and whether it might be in their own best interests in the long run to join open access advocates in calling for improvements to the RCUK policy before implementation.

Why? The primary reason is that this would be better for open access.

In case any OA publishers are finding it difficult to put the unprecedented public good that is open access at the top of their priority list, they should not that in the medium to long term, changes to this policy are in their own best interests, too.

The vast majority of funding for scholarly journals at present – percentages range from 68 – 90% (see my draft dissertation for details) comes from academic library budgets. The UK is a major sponsor of research, but even so only 6% of the world’s scholarly research comes from the UK. If the UK goes ahead with this obviously unsustainable approach to supporting OA publishing, OA publishers should be aware that this is highly likely to result in a drop in support from academic libraries around the world. For example, price inflation to fit this exceptional UK market will likely result in a drop in support for article processing fees by libraries around the world – a relatively new trend that has the potential to grow, but is likely to be nipped in the bud if this policy is not fixed. Also, if funding is diverted from research budgets to open access article processing fees, OA publishers should expect well-deserved backlash from scholars and universities. I’ll be on their side; my draft thesis is called Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age, not Give Money to OA Publishers. Cash from the RCUK for article processing fees might seem like a really good thing right now, but a portion of 6% of the revenue from the world’s scholarly publishing is not a good reason to jeopardize transitioning the 68-90% from subscriptions to OA publishing.

To conclude: I recommend that open access publishers working with the article processing fee approach join the rest of the open access movement in calling for the RCUK to fix the flaws in their open access policy before implementation, to remove the blank cheque that forces scholars and universities to pay for OA. Perhaps, as a long-time open access advocacy leader, not-for-profit publisher and open access advocacy organization, Public Library of Science should take the lead in calling for this change. An open letter to this effect posted prominently on the PLoS website would be a welcome development.