Pensoft’s statement on the European Union’s Conclusions on OA scholarly publishing

“On behalf of Pensoft Publishers, we express our support for the Conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing, recently published by the Council of the European Union. We do share all concerns articulated in the document that highlight major inequities and outstanding issues in the scholarly publishing environment.

In our opinion, it is of utmost importance to promptly address the existing issues in the publishing system, where healthy competition can thrive and contribute to a reality safe from potential mono-/oligopolies and corporate capture.

We firmly believe that only an industry that leaves room for variously-scaled pioneers and startups is capable of leading a long-awaited shift to a high-quality, transparent, open and equitable scholarly publishing landscape aligning with the principles of FAIRness….”

The Corporate Capture of Open-Access Publishing

“As the heads of progressive university presses on two sides of the North Atlantic, we support open and equitable access to knowledge. If history is any guide, however, the new policies may unintentionally contribute to greater consolidation in academic publishing — and encourage commercial publishers to value quantity over quality and platforms over people. Unless the new open-access policies are accompanied by direct investment from funders, governments, and universities in nonprofit publishers and publishing infrastructure, they could pose a threat to smaller scholarly and scientific societies and university presses, and ultimately to trust in published knowledge….

Without meaning to, many putatively open-access policies could further privatize the results of academic research….

The open-access movement has its roots in the practice of self-archiving (also called “Green” open access), wherein scholars deposit prepublication versions of their work in university repositories or community-owned preprint servers that function (to the extent possible) outside the economic strictures of formal publishing. Publishers effectively co-opted the movement by promoting instead models in which authors or their institutions pay publishers for the privilege of openness (also called “Gold” open access). As a result, open-access policies that enforce openness at any cost, under any model, have paradoxically, and against the intentions of policymakers, furthered the commodification of knowledge….

With paid open access, the academy is being asked, in effect, to subsidize the commercial sector’s use of university-research outputs with no reciprocal financial contribution….

Questions about academic freedom, widening inequality, the impact on smaller publishers, and the applicability of science-based policy for the arts, social sciences, and humanities have long been overlooked in conversations about open access….

The answers, we propose, lie somewhere in that overlooked, undervalued middle ground of nonprofit or fair-profit university-press publishing, mission-aligned with the academy. Many of those presses have been leaders in findings ways to meet the goals of providing both equitable access to knowledge and equitable participation in the creation of new knowledge. These are the publishers that universities should protect, invest in, and make deals with. Perhaps an international network of university-based publishers, libraries, and other public-knowledge providers could work together, balancing paid-for and open research content in a way that is sustainable rather than extractive, and that still values the research itself. Such a network could face down the likes of academia.edu….”

Medical advances typically begin with a study. Now, universities are struggling to afford them | CBC News

“Prices to access studies from peer-reviewed journals paid by universities — which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers — have risen more than 400 per cent over the past two decades, according to a study citing Statistics Canada data published in 2021. That’s the latest national information tracking cost increases over time, four specialists said.

Those rising costs have implications far beyond the ivory tower. Academic studies are a lifeblood of knowledge creation: from improved cancer treatments to debates about foreign policy or charting the advances of artificial intelligence, new information enters the public domain through peer-reviewed research….

The typical Canadian university library spends about 75 per cent of its acquisitions budget for new material on journal subscriptions, said Susan Haigh, executive director of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), an umbrella group representing this country’s largest university libraries….

Van Raay and his colleague, Prof. Andreas Heyland, are part of a growing trend of researchers trying to wrest control over information from the big publishing firms. 

Their project, Peer Premier, is the first-ever professional peer review service intended to be independent of any journal or publisher, according to the University of Guelph….

To use the service, an author pays $1,100 to the organization, in contrast to more than $10,000 to publish in some top journals, Heyland said.

Of that money, $300 goes to each of the article’s three independent reviewers and the remaining $200 is used for project administration. Researchers who submit get fulsome comments from the reviewers and leave with an edited, peer-reviewed manuscript that can be submitted elseware for publication, he added….”

The next chapter for protocols.io

“Today, Springer Nature announced the acquisition of protocols.io. The press release is available here, but in this blog post we would like to share what this means for protocols.io as a company and for the researchers using the platform. Before we delve into the details, it is important to confirm that our business model, open access repository, and mission and vision will not alter with this acquisition….”

Springer Nature continues open research drive with acquisition of protocols.io | Springer Nature Group | Springer Nature

“Springer Nature, the world’s leading publisher of protocols, has acquired protocols.io – a secure platform for developing and sharing reproducible methods.

Scientific advancement depends on data credibility and work that can be verified, built upon and reproduced. Sharing  all elements of research, including data, methods and materials, and even negative results, makes research more  efficient, enables reproducibility and therefore builds trust in science. Studies show that lack of awareness of existing work or negative results leads to unnecessary duplication and could waste up to €26 billion in Europe alone. 

By laying out detailed step-by-step instructions for research methods, aiming to standardise the process, ensure accuracy of results and enabling research to be reproduced, protocols have a vital role to play in addressing this. With protocols.io joining Springer Nature’s leading protocol offering, researchers will now have the option to make their protocols openly available on the protocols.io platform (fully OA)  as well as publishing them in peer-reviewed publications (searchable via the Springer Nature Experiments)….”

Mastodon over Mammon: towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge | Royal Society Open Science

Abstract:  Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record—encompassing text, data and code—to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

 

Focus: Climate Change and Environmental Health: The Economics of Scientific Publishing – PMC

Abstract:  The peculiar nature of scientific publishing has allowed for a high degree of market concentration and a non-collusive oligopoly. The non-substitutable characteristic of scientific journals has facilitated an environment of market concentration. Acquisition of journals on a capabilities-based approach has seen market concentration increase in favor of a small group of dominant publishers. The digital era of scientific publishing has accelerated concentration. Competition laws have failed to prevent anti-competitive practices. The need for government intervention is debated. The definition of scientific publishing as a public good is evaluated to determine the need for intervention. Policy implications are suggested to increase competitiveness in the short-run and present prestige-maintaining alternatives in the long run. A fundamental change in scientific publishing is required to enable socially efficient and equitable access for wider society’s benefit.

 

The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It | LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries

Abstract:  The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy. In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation, characterized by datafication and commodification similar to practices on social media platforms. Scholarly publications are treated as user-generated contents for data tracking and surveillance, resulting in profitable data products and services for research assessment, benchmarking and reporting. Meanwhile, the bibliodiversity and equal open access are denied by the dominant gold open access model and the privacy of researchers is being compromised by spyware embedded in research infrastructure. This article proposes four actions to fight the platformisation of scholarly information after a brief overview of the market of academic journals and research assessments and their implications for bibliodiversity, information access, and privacy: (1) Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs; (2) Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing; (3) Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform; and (4) Advocate for research assessment reforms.

 

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

“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.”

Open Access & Open Science: failure is not an option for any party | LERU

“LERU welcomes the presently developed draft Council Conclusions on “high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing”, to be adopted at the Competitiveness Council meeting of 23 May 2023[1]. They take Open Access to the next stage of implementation across Europe and thus represent a key move in embedding Open Science into the European research landscape. Many LERU papers, on Open Access, Open Data and Open Science have advocated the same causes.

For LERU, it is important that the upcoming Council Conclusions recognize that the increasing costs for scholarly publishing associated with certain business models may cause inequalities in communities and actually prove to be unsustainable for research funders and universities. Many people are now aware of the increase in publishing prices and the spread of transformative agreements, a result of which is a consolidation of the oligopoly in the publishing system.

The essential problem occurs when there are no reductions in price but increases, and where the resulting coverage is low. The threat is what will happen if everything is flipped to Open Access with high APC charges, both individual and under an agreement….”

Future of Scholarly Communications Committee Promotes Equitable, Sustainable Academic Publications at Faculty Senate Meeting | The Cornell Daily Sun

“The Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications presented at the Wednesday, March 8 Faculty Senate meeting in Schwartz Auditorium at Rockefeller Hall to discuss the effects of large corporations on academic publications.

To kick off the meeting, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks, who serves as the co-chair of the committee, emphasized the significance of Cornell libraries….

Following Westbrooks’s presentation, Prof. K. Max Zhang, engineering, who serves on the University Faculty Library Board, introduced the Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications. According to Zhang, the committee is made up of roughly 15 members, representing both Cornell’s library system and academic side.

The committee details seven charges towards more accessible scholarly journals. Zhang summarizes these charges into four categories — assessing the current publishing model, evaluating new publishing models, identifying the University’s role in new models and reporting to the faculty about the problems of for-profit publishing….

“I want to be clear that I do not believe that publishers are inherently evil, or bad,” Westbrooks said. “What I really want to bring home is the fact that this is not good for science, it’s not good for scholarship and it’s not good for innovation to have a small set of multinational companies, that we call an oligopoly, control all the academic publishing in the world.” …”

Reclaiming the Digital Commons: A Public Data Trust for Training Data

Abstract:  Democratization of AI means not only that people can freely use AI, but also that people can collectively decide how AI is to be used. In particular, collective decision-making power is required to redress the negative externalities from the development of increasingly advanced AI systems, including degradation of the digital commons and unemployment from automation. The rapid pace of AI development and deployment currently leaves little room for this power. Monopolized in the hands of private corporations, the development of the most capable foundation models has proceeded largely without public input. There is currently no implemented mechanism for ensuring that the economic value generated by such models is redistributed to account for their negative externalities. The citizens that have generated the data necessary to train models do not have input on how their data are to be used. In this work, we propose that a public data trust assert control over training data for foundation models. In particular, this trust should scrape the internet as a digital commons, to license to commercial model developers for a percentage cut of revenues from deployment. First, we argue in detail for the existence of such a trust. We also discuss feasibility and potential risks. Second, we detail a number of ways for a data trust to incentivize model developers to use training data only from the trust. We propose a mix of verification mechanisms, potential regulatory action, and positive incentives. We conclude by highlighting other potential benefits of our proposed data trust and connecting our work to ongoing efforts in data and compute governance.

 

FUNDING THE BUSINESS OF OPEN ACCESS: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGES, RESEARCH FUNDING AND THE REVENUES OF THE OLIGOPOLY OF PUBLISHERS

Abstract:  Since the early 2010s, more than half of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published by the so-called oligopoly of academic publishers – Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. These publishers are now increasingly charging fees for open access journals, especially given the rise of funder OA mandates. It is worthwhile to examine the amount of revenue generated through OA fees since many of the journals with the most expensive article processing charges are owned by the oligopoly. This study aims to  stimate the amount of article processing charges for gold and hybrid open access articles in journals published by the oligopoly of academic publishers, which acknowledge funding from the Canadian Tri-Agencies between 2015 and 2018. The Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications mandates that all funded research for Canadian Institute of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grantees be made available as OA. To comply, grantees will often use grant funds to pay OA fees, or APCs. During the four-year period analyzed, a total of 6,892 gold and 4,097 hybrid articles that acknowledge Tri-Agency funding were identified, for which the total list prices amount to $USD 25.3 million ($13.1 for gold and $12.2 for hybrid). 

DEAL ist ein Problem – Gespräch mit Thomas Stäcker über die Folgen der Digitalisierung für Bibliotheken (3) – Aus der Forschungs­bibliothek Krekelborn

From Google’s English:  

“Isn’t it obvious that the DEAL project wants to promote open access, but that this good intention is bought at a high price and the oligopoly structures in the science market are being consolidated?

I agree with you there. However, many colleagues in the library world see things differently and see DEAL as a success. After a few years of observation, however, I have to confirm the diagnosis that expectations in DEAL as a game changer in terms of the publication system are being disappointed. We don’t save any money. Promises of reallocating funds are unrealistic. I consider the still existing restriction to a few players to be fatal, since existing oligopolies are being further entrenched. The really good thing about DEAL is that you negotiate on a national level in a consortium. It is also very important that the German Rectors’ Conference organizes this process, because science itself and not just the libraries are involved.So I think a lot of DEAL as a structure, but I don’t think that DEAL is still addressing the right issues at the moment. Why can’t DEAL as a consortium also serve, for example, to establish Diamond Open Access structures? You could get the funding for this, for example from the DFG….”

Will Humanities and Social Sciences Publishing Consolidate? – The Scholarly Kitchen

“Today, I want to introduce a scenario that I believe should be modeled out by strategists, both in the publishing and library communities. In introducing this scenario, I want to underscore that I do not believe it to be inevitable, nor do I wish to advocate for it. But part of my job is to wonder about the future and to identify some scenarios that can inform planning in our sector. One of the scenarios that I have been considering more and more is a major consolidation among humanities and social sciences (HSS) publishers. 

In this piece, I focus primarily on consolidation among the US, UK, and EU commercial primary publishers. In this segment, consolidation is pursued largely through market-driven acquisitions and strategic partnerships. The same market factors that I discuss below will equally impact not-for-profit HSS publishers, but they may not wish, or may find it difficult, to consolidate in the same fashion. In some ways, though, this analysis may be of greatest importance for those that will find it most difficult to lead….

Finally, given the largely reactive concerns in academia and academic libraries to consolidation in STEM scholarly communication and infrastructure segments, is there any form of strategic investment or advocacy that can, from advocates’ perspective, constructively shape the HSS market before the consolidation scenario develops any further?”