Category Archives: oa.hybrid

Toward transparency of hybrid open access through publisher?provided metadata: An article?level study of Elsevier – Jahn – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  With the growth of open access (OA), the financial flows in scholarly journal publishing have become increasingly complex, but comprehensive data on and transparency of these flows are still lacking. The opacity is especially concerning for hybrid OA, where subscription-based journals publish individual articles as OA if an optional fee is paid. This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing. Our results show that Elsevier’s hybrid OA uptake has grown steadily but slowly from 2015 to 2019, doubling the number of hybrid OA articles published per year and increasing the share of OA articles in Elsevier’s hybrid journals from 2.6 to 3.7% of all articles. Further, we find that most hybrid OA articles were invoiced directly to authors, followed by articles invoiced through agreements with research funders, institutions, or consortia, with only a few funding bodies driving hybrid OA uptake. As such, our findings point to the role of publishing agreements and OA policies in hybrid OA publishing. Our results further demonstrate the value of publisher-provided metadata to improve the transparency in scholarly publishing.

[From the body of the text:] “The recent introduction of transformative agreements, an evolving concept describing contracts that shift library spending from subscriptions to OA (Borrego et al., 2020; Hinchliffe, 2019), might perpetuate the lack of transparency because pricing is often based on traditional subscription costs. Hence, the demand for publisher-provided data has increased. More transparency about hybrid OA uptake and funding could facilitate the assessment and adjustment of publisher contracts (Schimmer et al., 2015), enhance OA mandate compliance monitoring, and avoid double-dipping (Larivière & Sugimoto, 2018). However, previous studies have noted an absence of transparency in hybrid OA publishing and a considerable lack of publicly available and standardized data (Laakso & Björk, 2016; Lawson, 2015; Pinfield et al., 2016).”

Transformation | British Dental Journal

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“The BDJ [British Dental Journal] has become what is termed a Transformative Journal (TJ)….

A TJ commits, among other things, to continuously increase the OA share each year and to ‘flip’ to full OA for primary research once a 75% threshold has been met, and to maximise take-up of the OA option by proactively promoting the benefits of OA to authors of primary research articles….

How soon the 75% OA content is reached is difficult to estimate. It is probably some years away, but the important aspect is the commitment to aim for this transformation while also continuing to develop the value of the journal both in print and online for all users.”

University of Iowa is latest institution to expand open access through innovative ‘read and publish’ agreement – American Chemical Society

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“Researchers at the University of Iowa (UI) will soon be able to reach new audiences around the world, thanks to a transformative “read and publish” agreement with the Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Under a read and publish agreement, authors are eligible to receive financial support to publish under an open access license in any of ACS’ 12 “gold” open access journals, or in any of its over 65 premier hybrid journals. At the same time, their university maintains access to the complete suite of ACS Publications journals for researchers and students….”

ALPSP Copyright Committee responds to UKRI Open Access Policy | STM Publishing News

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“The ALPSP Copyright Committee is concerned that the announcement of the UKRI’s new open access policy will have a negative impact on progress made to date.  Limiting the opportunity for funded articles to publish in hybrid journals does not benefit learned society authors as it restricts their choice on where to publish.  Whilst many ALPSP members are investigating whether a transformative/transitional agreement may be a viable option, many learned societies have found that the complexities involved in setting up and maintaining these agreements can be extremely  difficult, particularly for smaller societies who may only publish a few journals.  This may inadvertently put these smaller publishers at a distinct disadvantage and result in their journals no longer being selected by UKRI funded authors.

Additionally, making hybrid journals fully gold open access may not be possible in the near future if there is insufficient gold open access content to include in these journals.  This could well lead to major economic difficulties for many learned and professional societies.  Finally, requiring the publication of Accepted Manuscripts with no embargo and under a CC BY licence fails to recognise the significant investment learned societies will have made in getting to that version, including in terms of peer review and related value added publishing services.  As an unintended consequence, this would dilute the Version of Record and slow the speed of transition towards open access, as publishers and societies would continue to recover their investment through subscriptions.  Ultimately, without significant additional funding being added to the ecosystem in the short term to cover this, we are very concerned about the impact of this new policy on the UK publishing industry generally and on learned societies in particular….”

Transformative Journals: an initial assessment | Plan S

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“A Transformative Journal (TJ) is a subscription/hybrid journal that is actively committed to transitioning to a fully Open Access journal. In addition, a TJ must:

gradually increase the share of Open Access content; and
offset subscription income from payments for publishing services (to avoid double payments).

Some 16 months on from publishing the formal TJ criteria, 13 publishers – large and small, for-profit, not-for-profit, society publishers and university presses – and some 2268 journals, have enrolled in this programme.

This blog provides a summary of the uptake of the programme by publishers and an analysis of the initial data TJ publishers have provided….”

ALPSP Copyright Committee Responds to UKRI Open Access Policy

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“The ALPSP Copyright Committee is concerned that the announcement of the UKRI’s new open access policy will have a negative impact on progress made to date.  Limiting the opportunity for funded articles to publish in hybrid journals does not benefit learned society authors as it restricts their choice on where to publish.  Whilst many ALPSP members are investigating whether a transformative/transitional agreement may be a viable option, many learned societies have found that the complexities involved in setting up and maintaining these agreements can be extremely  difficult, particularly for smaller societies who may only publish a few journals.  This may inadvertently put these smaller publishers at a distinct disadvantage and result in their journals no longer being selected by UKRI funded authors.

Additionally, making hybrid journals fully gold open access may not be possible in the near future if there is insufficient gold open access content to include in these journals.  This could well lead to major economic difficulties for many learned and professional societies.  Finally, requiring the publication of Accepted Manuscripts with no embargo and under a CC BY licence fails to recognise the significant investment learned societies will have made in getting to that version, including in terms of peer review and related value added publishing services.  As an unintended consequence, this would dilute the Version of Record and slow the speed of transition towards open access, as publishers and societies would continue to recover their investment through subscriptions.  Ultimately, without significant additional funding being added to the ecosystem in the short term to cover this, we are very concerned about the impact of this new policy on the UK publishing industry generally and on learned societies in particular….”

Major UK science funder unveils strict open-access policy

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“From April 2022, scientists must make papers supported by Britain’s national research-funding agency free to read immediately on publication, the funder UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced today in a keenly awaited revision to its open-access (OA) policy. As expected, the details closely match those laid out in Plan S, the bold pledge by many funders to publish all science outside paywalls. The British agency was an early supporter of the plan.

However, it has not yet decided whether it will pay the per-paper OA publication fees charged by a particular category of journals [namely, hybrid journals] that includes Nature and other Nature-branded titles. This decision will be put out to consultation, the funder says….”

 

cOAlition S welcomes the Plan S-aligned Open Access policy from UKRI | Plan S

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“cOAlition S – an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations committed to implementing Plan S – warmly welcomes the publication of the updated UKRI Open Access (OA) policy and its explicit commitment to full and immediate Open Access.

Key aspects of the updated UKRI policy includes:

Zero embargoes. All UKRI funded research articles must be made OA at the time of publication;
Open licences. All UKRI funded research must be licensed CC BY (with some minor exceptions);
No funding of APCs in hybrid journals, outside of transformative arrangements;
Multiple routes to support compliance, including depositing the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (or Version of Record, where the publisher permits) in an institutional or subject repository at the time of final publication….”

‘Open’ relationships: reflections on the role of the journal in the contemporary scholarly publishing landscape

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“While many members of the CPH Editorial Board are supportive of the concept of open access, they are also concerned about the APC model of open access on offer. These concerns will be familiar to many of our authors and readers….

As stated succinctly by one Editorial Board member, the proposed APC model goes against the entire spirit of the journal….

For many, although strongly concerned about issues of access to the journal, the adoption of an APC-based approach risks compounding existing inequalities. Radical Community Medicine’s origins were in the need for a space to challenge public health orthodoxies, shifting the centre and breaking new ground (Scott-Samuel, 1998), a mandate continued by CPH (Bell & Green, 2015; Bunton, 1998). Critical scholars working from the epistemic margins – early career researchers, independent researchers, and social scientists within public health programmes – are most vulnerable to exclusion if funds are needed to publish. Moreover, despite Taylor & Francis’s promises of ad hoc fee waivers, it will clearly serve to reinforce centre-periphery dynamics in scholarly knowledge production, compounding the exclusion already experienced by scholars outside the global north (see Herb & Schöpfel, 2018). These systematic exclusionary practices would sit uneasily, to say the least, with our mission.

Corporate publishers have been highly successful in conflating ‘gold’ open access (a broad category describing open access delivered directly by journals versus repositories) with APC-based models (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2013). However, other versions of ‘gold’ open access exist, including what is now known as ‘diamond’ access – where the publication is free to the end user and there are no charges for the submitting author….

The difference is that these models are driven primarily by a cost-covering rather than a profit-generating approach to scholarly publishing….

Collectively, we need to decide what journals are for – and how fidelity to our communities can be protected….”

Open Access agreements with smaller publishers require active cross-stakeholder alignment, report says | ISSN

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Open Access agreements between consortia/libraries and smaller independent publishers are used worldwide increasingly since 2020, signalling a potential for further growth, highlights an independent report released in June 2021 by Information Power. The report was commissioned by cOAlition S and the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) as a follow up on the outcomes of the Society Publishers Accelerating Open access and Plan S (SPA-OPS) project, published in autumn 2019.

 

Navigating the barbed wire of publisher access barriers | Plan S

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“In many ways, the specific details of this situation are irrelevant. What does matter is the important points it raises:

From the baffling experiences described above, one concludes that not only is the assortment of access options confusing for readers but that major publishers are challenged to engineer and control access and authentication as they intended. Such examples validate the reasons why hybrid OA journals are problematic.

There is a significant effort associated with gatekeeping and preventing potential readers from accessing content, when research should be disseminated and read as widely as possible. This represents an increased cost in the production of publications – a cost which is ultimately borne by the subscriber or individual reader. 

There is considerable evidence that open access articles are more read than non Open access articles. Indeed, even SpringerNature, the publisher of the article example above, states that “Open approaches accelerate the progress of science…. OA is immediately accessible and highly discoverable… Previous research shows the OA advantage for researchers: OA articles are cited on average 1.6 times more than non-OA articles, downloaded 4 times more often and attract 2.5 times more attention, as measured by news and policy mentions”.

Wouldn’t it be better if the money, time and energy invested by publishers in attempting to build a complex variety of access barriers were directed towards providing a consistent approach to access? Then the money, time and energy spent by researchers and libraries in paying for and attempting to access content, via confused and confusing interfaces, could be better spent on research. If authentication and access control are so challenging, and we all, including publishers, agree that Open Access is beneficial, then we need to abandon these types of attempts at gatekeeping, and instead focus on making all research publications easily openly accessible.”

Interview with Beth Bayley, Karger Publishers – DOAJ News Service

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“A very important aspect of our strategy is to embrace, contribute to and promote Open Science, which naturally means a major emphasis on a sustainable transition to open access (OA). Besides ensuring that our policies and services support OA, we’re also working with institutions to innovate flexible Publish and Read agreements (a.k.a. transformative agreements), launching OA journals, flipping journals and adopting the Transformative Journal model for some journals….

Ideologically, OA seems like a no-brainer. In a perfect world, there would be no barriers to lifesaving and enhancing knowledge based on where, or under what circumstances, people are born. However, the challenges to making all high-quality research openly accessible—with all the essential tools to make it discoverable and useful, and everything else publishers do—are real. I think platinum OA, where there is no charge for reading or publishing, could go far to reduce inequity so I’m especially excited about our platinum OA journals, which we call Partner Publications. They help make sure organizations have a voice in the global conversation and remove barriers to readers and authors….”

Transformative Journals – Delta Think

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“This month we look at Transformative Journals (TJs). We examine what their measures of compliance mean and how the criteria for growing OA in TJs compares with the typical growth of OA in hybrid journals….

The data suggest that historically, the OA proportion of journals’ output has not grown as fast as TJ requirements require:

Over the last three years, the total number of papers published across all journals currently marked as TJs is growing at roughly half the rate needed for them to continue to enjoy TJ status.
The number of journals meeting TJ requirements of OA growth is small. Only a dozen or so (out of around 2,000) have met TJ targets for each of the last three years. However, around two thirds have met TJ targets for at least one year out of the last 3.

The data also showed that only 20 or so journals (less than 1%) had over 75% OA uptake, while two thirds (68%) had 20% OA uptake or less. Smaller journals show the fastest growth in OA. Most of the larger ones appear to be virtually static….

The data suggest that the OA growth criteria for TJ status are aggressive, but not impossible. The current crop of TJs are on average growing OA proportions at around half the pace needed to be in compliance. (The average growth in OA uptake of hybrid journals from major publishers follows broadly similar patterns.) Many journals have previously met TJ targets for one year or even two, suggesting the challenges lie in adding to existing momentum, rather than building OA uptake from scratch.

 

However, the biggest caveat is timing. Support for TJs is due to be withdrawn completely in 2024, but two thirds of current TJs have less than 20% OA uptake. So many could meet their TJ targets, but still have only around one third OA uptake in 2024. Publishers would then be faced with a tough choice: flip minority-OA journals to fully OA, risk at least one third of output as zero-embargo Green impacting subscriptions … or fall out of Plan S compliance completely and lose one third of their submissions.”