Category Archives: oa.publishers

bjoern.brembs.blog » The beginning of the end for academic publishers?

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“On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption was followed by a joint statement of support by the largest and most influential research organizations in Europe. At the heart of the goals spelled out in the conclusions and the statement of support is the creation of a “publicly owned and not-for-profit” infrastructure for scholarly publications….

 

Obviously, right after the declaration came out, the corporate misinformation machine sprang into high gear. I won’t repeat the misleading, false or sometimes just comically desperate attempts at smearing an obviously well thought-through, sound and logical solution that has been decades in the making. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of reasons why the plans outlined by the Council have drawn such widespread support from all corners of the research community, while the only resistance comes from the monopolistic corporations. This declaration tackles the root of the replicability, affordability and functionality crises. It aims to treat the disease, not the symptoms and has the potential to develop into an effective vaccine against parasitic businesses striving to leech the public purse. Little wonder these businesses fear it so much.”

Abolishing an “Industry”? | In the Dark

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“A week or so ago I mentioned that the European Council had adopted a text that calls for the EU Commission and Member States to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers.

The journal Nature has responded to the news with a piece entitled EU council’s ‘no pay’ publishing model draws mixed response and the lede:

Some academics have welcomed the proposed open access plans. But publishing industry representatives warn they are unrealistic and lack detail.

It’s not really accurate to describe the response as mixed as it is completely separated: the vested interests in the academic publishing industry are against it and everyone else is for it! It’s hardly surprising to see Nature (owned by academic publishing company Springer Nature). I found this in the text of the Nature piece:

The conclusions are concerning because they support a move that would abolish an industry
Caroline Sutton, the chief executive of the STM (a membership organization of academic publishers)

Indeed, though I would argue that what the proposals would abolish is not so much an industry as a racket…”

EU council’s ‘no pay’ publishing model draws mixed response

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“The European Union’s council of ministers has called for the bloc to implement a ‘no pay’ academic-publishing model that bears no cost to readers or authors. The recommendations, part of a set of principles on scholarly publishing adopted by the council on 23 May, are not legally binding and have been welcomed by some members of the academic community. But representatives of publishers say that the suggestion is unrealistic and that the council has not outlined crucial details, including how such a model would be funded….

Organizations including the German Research Federation (DFG) have welcomed the principles. In a statement, the DFG said that it supported the “landmark recommendations”. “Under no circumstances should a situation arise in which the availability of funds determines participation in academic discourse,” it said.

Such statements show “strong political support” for open-access publishing, says Vinciane Gaillard, deputy director for research and innovation at the European University Association (EUA) in Brussels, which represents more than 850 institutions.

 

However, representatives of the publishing industry say that the implications of the council’s recommendations haven’t been fully considered….

The conclusions are concerning because they support a move that would abolish an industry, and propose building a new publishing system without clarification about how it would be paid for, says Caroline Sutton, the chief executive of the STM, a membership organization for the academic publishing industry headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands. One of the stated policy goals is cost reduction, yet “no proper economic analysis has been carried out”, she says. “It’s often presented as if this alternative is free.”

The STM is also concerned that the move would eliminate independent European publishing companies and usher in a state-defined system that could stymie academic freedom. It warns that the amount of public funds needed by member states or institutions to build repositories of academic research papers is hard to quantify….”

Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Deville, J. (2023). Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.bd1b0402

If you have heard any of the Open Book Collective team talk about our work, perhaps in a meeting, perhaps in a talk, then it’s likely that at some point, the issue of ‘BPCs’ will have come up. BPCs, or Book Processing Charges, are to books what APCs (Article Processing Charges) are to journals. BPCs are levied — usually to a university or a funder, but also in principle potentially to the author — as a fee for making an academic book available on an Open Access basis. By Open Access I mean work that can be accessed online without barriers, published using an open license — typically, but not necessarily, a Creative Commons licence.

Within the academic publishing industry, BPCs remain the most common way to fund Open Access books. They are used by publishers small and large, and by not-for-profits and commercial publishers. For small/not-for profit publishers, BPCs are usually used to cover the core production costs associated with book publishing. For large commercial publishers, BPCs can sometimes also be used to offset some of the profit — for example, from books sales or licensing contracts — that is lost when a book is made openly available to all.

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How Scientific Publishers’ Extreme Fees Put Profit Over Progress | The Nation

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“On April 17, the premier journal NeuroImage’s entire editorial team, comprising more than 40 scientists, resigned over the “unethical fees” charged by the journal’s academic publisher, Elsevier. With more than $2 billion in annual revenue, the publisher’s profit margin approaches 40 percent—rivaling that of Apple and Google. “Elsevier has become kind of like the poster child for evil publishing companies,” said neuroscientist Kristen Kennedy, one of the recently resigned senior editors.

Kennedy relies on taxpayer money to study the aging brain. At the University of Texas at Dallas, federal grants help fund the staff, equipment, and experiments in her lab. But this public money, largely from the National Institutes of Health, is being drained by exorbitant publishing fees….”

COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks | Zenodo

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Adema, Janneke, Barr, Peter, Bowie, Simon, Cole, Gareth, Deville, Joe, Fathallah, Judith, Grady, Tom, Grand, Philippa, Hall, Gary, McHardy, Julien, Kiesewetter, Rebekka, Mackay, Caroline, Moore, Samuel, Montgomery, Lucy, Ramalho, Amanda, & Tscheke, Nina. (2023, May 5). COPIM final conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”: Presentation slidedecks. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7898815

This deposit holds all slidedecks from presentations given during the two days of the final conference of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which was held on April 20 and 21, 2023, under the title of “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”.

Slidedecks & video recordings are also available via the conference website, at https://scalingsmall.pubpub.org/

 

 

Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Deville, J., Fathallah, J., & Onalee Snyder, L. (2023). Building Effective Outreach Strategies for Open Access Book Initiatives: Lessons Learned from the Open Book Collective . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.c0d717bc

As Open Access (OA) book publishers, and especially Diamond Open Access publishers, increasingly turn towards membership programs to support their work, effective outreach has become ever more important. For such publishers and for us at the Open Book Collective (OBC) sustainability depends on successfully convincing supporters that our work, and in our case that of the publishers and infrastructure providers that are our members, is relevant to the libraries and other organizations that we are asking for ongoing financial support. In many cases, this also means speaking not just about individual publications, publishers, or publishing service providers, but issues connected to OA publishing more widely. For that reason, a key feature of our outreach has been stimulating conversation and engagement around the OBC, the platform, and the future of OA books. 

In this blog post, we provide an account of how we have responded to the challenge of developing an effective outreach strategy, with the aim of sharing and archiving our experiences so that others may benefit from what we have learned, especially initiatives looking to engage with libraries and other institutional stakeholders. We document the development of the OBC’s outreach strategy and highlight the importance of effective outreach efforts in promoting wider access to scholarship.

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Virtual Training – The Very Latest in Open Access in China and Around The Globe

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“The focus will be on the latest in open science, open research, open data, OSTP and Europe’s cOAlition S, and look ahead to future initiatives and prospects of open access (OA) across China. 

Who should attend?

This training, delivered by three scholarly experts, is aimed at scholarly publishers who are based in China. It will also be relevant to those who do business with Chinese publishers….”

Book Publishers Are Trying to Destroy Public E-Book Access in Order to Increase Profits ? Current Affairs

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“The publishers argued that the Internet Archive practices a form of “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.” Judge Koeltl agreed, saying that although IA does not actually increase the number of books in circulation, “the Publishers hold exclusive publishing rights” and the IA “infringed the plaintiffs’ copyrights in 127 books (the “Works in Suit”) by scanning print copies … and lending the digital copies to users of the defendant’s website without the plaintiffs’ permission.” He says that they can only legally digitize books that are considered to be in the public domain,1 which would force them to remove more than 3.6  million copyrighted works currently on the site.  

Koeltl dismissed the Archive’s argument that their practices constitute “fair use,” which allows copying for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. To determine if a piece of content falls under fair use, judges consider nonprofit or educational purposes, transformation, and market effect. In his opinion, Koeltl gave lengthy explanations for why he believes IA is not fair use. Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt and one of the most prolific writers on fair use in the Internet age, gives Koeltl’s tortured logic the verbal flogging it deserves, arguing that the Archive’s lending is transformative, not for profit, and no more impactful to the market than the average library. But even setting aside the legal question of copyright infringement, we should still consider the destruction of the IA to be a bad thing for society. At bottom, this is a case of a cabal of powerful commercial interests using the legal system to bully a public organization that offers a superior service, completely for free, without stealing anything….”

EU research ministers make fresh call for a full transition to free open access publishing | Science|Business

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“EU ministers made a fresh call for open access to become the default mode for scientific publishing in a new set of Council conclusions today, prompting opposing reactions from the science community and journal publishers.

The Council conclusions call for a crack down on the unsustainable author fees that are currently propping up open science publishing, and undermining the ambition of making research results free to access. “We need to make sure that researchers can make their findings available and re-usable and that high-quality scientific articles are openly accessible to anyone that needs to read them,” said Mats Persson, Swedish minister for research, who currently holds the rotating council presidency chair.

The push for open access isn’t new and the EU has made a lot of headway with various initiatives and political statements. A big breakthrough came in 2018 in Plan S, under which a group of major research funding and performing organisations signed up to paywall-free science….”

Open access publishing: options for reduced or waived publication charges

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“Open access publishing: options for reduced or waived publication charges

Lower income country authors wishing to publish Open Access articles can follow the links below for a range of publisher websites and find details of article processing/publishing charge (APC) fee waiver and discount policies or other subsidized publishing options.”

Fradenburg Joy & & van Gerven Oei (2023) What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books | The Journal of Electronic Publishing

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Fradenburg Joy, E. A. & van Gerven Oei, V. W., (2023) “What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627

 

Opening Access | Association of University Presses 2023 Annual Report

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“The Association views Open Access (OA) to scholarship as an ideal fully in line with our mission, and a practice that must align with our values. The majority of member presses continue to explore OA publishing projects, and the Association works to support active learning and productive advocacy around OA modes of publishing.  The Open Access Committee is charged with developing resources, recommendations, and knowledge for our global community. To this end, the committee has published a draft resource list, curated to help university presses navigate the many different models, developing infrastructures, and growing expectations in OA publishing. The Committee has also continued inviting representatives from OA initiatives, such as OASPA, the Books Analytic Dashboard, and OpenStax, to present on their work to the committee. In 2022, on the heels of a new US Office of Science and Technology Policy memo outlining expansive OA expectations for federally funded research, the Committee coordinated a community hangout to share information, ideas, and concerns….”