Call for Contributions: Open Consultation on Innovative Outputs in the Humanities – ALLEA

“The ALLEA Working Group E-Humanities has launched an open consultation concerning draft recommendations on recognising digital scholarly outputs in the humanities. The goal is to gather broad feedback from active humanities researchers and institutions in order to tailor the recommendations to the community’s needs.

A link to the draft recommendations and instructions for contributing are available on the Working Group E-Humanities homepage, or can be accessed directly here: https://bit.ly/ALLEAehumanities …”

Advancing a publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem based on the principles of open science

“Joint response by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and French National Research Agency (ANR). We welcome the adoption by the Council of the European Union (EU) of the conclusions on highquality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing. As key public research and innovation actors in Europe, we are committed to supporting the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem in collaboration with policymakers in Europe and beyond….”

Licence by Licence, Funder by Funder Change Can Only Take Us So Far – ALLEA Highlights A Systemic Need for Change to Scholarly Publishing – Knowledge Rights 21

“In order to make research and science work for society we need to create a publicly owned community-controlled infrastructure. As we have seen since 2002, much of the impetus for this has come from the library sector – in a sense in a bottom-up movement. The research community itself has also invested in work to change specific policies and practices where they have stronger influence, such as over the rules around funding and author licensing.  This should not, however, take attention away from the need for a parallel, top-down approach to Open Access. 

In other words, we should always remember the value of engaging with governments, given that legislative change can be a key trigger for meaningful change on the ground. After all, it goes without saying it is the copyright system – whose rules are set in legislation – which underpins scholarly publishing. As a result, in pushing for change that delivers Open Access, library trade bodies, funders and universities cannot afford to ignore this.

Therefore, in addition to Knowledge Rights 21’s work around rights retention, we are also calling for legislated secondary publishing rights, and the creation of a European copyright system friendly to research and innovation. We also strongly welcome other legislative proposals coming from our community in this area. Notably, in 2021 LIBER launched a Pan-European Model Law for the Use of Publicly Funded Scientific Publications under the title #ZeroEmbargo….”

European academies hit out at high author charges for open access publishing | Science|Business

“Open access means more and more scientific research is free to read. But now there are complaints about ‘massive’ fees that must be paid upfront by authors and claims commercial publishers are making excessive profits….

ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, claims commercial publishers are making the large profits from open access publishing under what is known as the gold model, which allows journal papers to be free to read as soon as they are published.

Instead of journal subscriptions, publishers are paid article processing charges (APCs). These fees can sometimes be thousands of euros.

The financial burden is shifting away from the readers of papers and onto the authors. This is putting a strain on academics around the world, particularly those in less well-off countries, ALLEA says in a report published last month. These fees are often rolled into partner agreements with big publishers, but researchers not covered by these agreements must usually pay APCs.

ALLEA claims that publishers make around $2 billion per year from APCs….

Robert-Jan Smits, president of Eindhoven University of Technology and former European Commission director general for research, who is a leading advocate for open access, told Science|Business that a cap should be placed on APCs to “avoid an explosion of costs,” saying, “There is enough money in the system, it is just in the wrong place.” …”

ALLEA advocates for EU-wide secondary publication rights and better negotiation of ‘big deals’ – International Science Council

“In the light of an increase in spending on scholarly publishing, and new rules on copyright law in the European Union (EU), ALLEA recently released a statement that evaluates the negative consequences of so-called ‘Big Deals’ and provides recommendations for research institutes, libraries and policy-makers to work towards change.

‘Big deals’, or ‘read and publish agreements’, are concluded between scientific publishers, on one side, and research libraries, institutions and universities, on the other, in order to provide access for readers and authors of scientific journals.

An increase in the number of articles published under a Gold Open Access model – and thus free to read – has come at the expense of the authors of scholarly publications, who often face substantial article processing charges (APCs) to publish their work as Open Access….”

ALLEA STATEMENT ON OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION UNDER “BIG DEALS” AND THE NEW COPYRIGHT RULES

“While the rising number of Gold OA publications facilitated by these deals is to be applauded, they do not deliver on the triple promise of OA. In particular, they have not led to a reduction in the exorbitant costs to the academic community incurred in the process of research publication. While the downstream costs of journal subscriptions are gradually falling, the upstream costs of publication, made up of the APCs, have risen sharply. Concomitantly, the imposition of APCs has created new, and sometimes insurmountable, barriers to publication for researchers that are not affiliated to a contracting institution. In addition, as already underlined in previous ALLEA Statements,6,7 the Gold OA model creates a disadvantage for those coming from less wealthy countries and institutions, under-funded researchers in the social sciences and humanities, and early career researchers, among others. For these academics, OA of published research comes at the expense of closure of first-tier publication fora. In addition, ALLEA is concerned that the conditions of the “Big Deals” fail to adequately reflect the rules on copyright law in the European Union (EU), and do not fairly value the creative and research endeavours of researchers and their institutions, as well as their investment and efforts over time to generate research results and publications to the benefit of the public….”

ALLEA Statement on Open Access Publication under “Big Deals” and the New Copyright Rules – Kluwer Copyright Blog

“ALLEA, therefore, welcomes recent studies showing that OA publication in scientific journals is on the rise.[2]  An important driver of this development are the so-called “Big Deals”; “read and publish agreements” that have been negotiated in recent years between (consortia of) research libraries, institutions, and universities on the one hand, and scientific publishers on the other. These agreements, also known as “transformative agreements”, have replaced the subscription deals that were previously agreed between research libraries and publishers, and which provided for large bundles of subscriptions to proprietary journals to be made available electronically to libraries and their affiliated researchers.[3]

The new generation of deals is “transformative” in that they additionally allow for OA publication under the “Gold” standard of (usually a finite number of) research articles by institution-affiliated researchers in return for payment of substantial “article processing charges” (APCs)3 that allow publishers to recoup their investment in OA publication.

As a recent study demonstrates, commercial publishers currently derive more than two billion USD annually from APCs.2 Despite gradually decreasing subscription revenues, the commercial publishers have managed to embrace the Gold OA model without compromising their total revenues and enormous profit margins. Evidently, Gold OA publishing has become a new, highly profitable business model in and of itself,2 in addition to the subscription model which has remained partially intact. Incorporating Gold OA publication into all-encompassing read and publish agreements has thus allowed the major commercial publishers to effectively consolidate and enhance their already dominant position in the field of scholarly publishing,[4] solidifying their role as the gatekeepers of publicly funded research.[5]

While the rising number of Gold OA publications facilitated by these deals is to be applauded, they do not deliver on the triple promise of OA. In particular, they have not led to a reduction in the exorbitant costs to the academic community incurred in the process of research publication. While the downstream costs of journal subscriptions are gradually falling, the upstream costs of publication, made up of the APCs, have risen sharply.

Concomitantly, the imposition of APCs has created new, and sometimes insurmountable, barriers to publication for researchers that are not affiliated to a contracting institution.[6] In addition, as already underlined in previous ALLEA Statements,6,[7] the Gold OA model creates a disadvantage for those coming from less wealthy countries and institutions, under-funded researchers in the social sciences and humanities, and early career researchers, among others. For these academics, OA of published research comes at the expense of closure of first-tier publication fora.

In addition, ALLEA is concerned that the conditions of the “Big Deals” that drive these developments do not adequately reflect the rules on copyright law in the European Union (EU) and fail to fairly value the creative and research endeavours of researchers and their institutions, as well as their investment and efforts over time to generate research results and publications to the benefit of the public….”

ALLEA’s Response to Council Conclusions on Research Assessment and Open Science – ALLEA

“ALLEA welcomes the adoption of the Conclusions on Research Assessment and Implementation of Open Science by the Council of the European Union on 10 June.

The Conclusions are in agreement with points that ALLEA has made over the years, in particular on the necessity of appropriately implementing and rewarding open science practices and the development of research assessment criteria that follow principles of excellence, research integrity and trustworthy science.

At the same time, ALLEA continues to stress that it matters how we open knowledge, as the push for Open Access publishing has also paved the way for various unethical publishing practices. The inappropriate use of journal- and publication-based metrics in funding, hiring and promotion decisions has been one of the obstacles in the transition to a more open science, and furthermore fails to recognize and reward the diverse set of competencies, activities, and outputs needed for our research ecosystem to flourish….”

ALLEA Statement on Equity in Open Access – ALLEA

“The statement “Equity in Open Access” addresses how “gold” open access publishing routes and large read-and-write deals contribute to establishing inequitable structures within academic research. The statement builds on the 2021 theme of the International Open Access Week, ‘It matters how we open knowledge: building structural equity’, which was in turn inspired by one of the four core values of Open Science, as defined in the recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.

Although collective deals can be beneficial to individual researchers that are affiliated with organisations covered by such agreements, ALLEA highlights several important inequities resulting from these developments:

“[These deals] effectively incentivise such researchers to publish in the journals covered by the deal, which are often expensive journals that trade on their high ‘impact factor’ – a metric noted as problematic by Open Science initiatives.”
“This tacit incentivisation risks further increasing the market dominance of the big commercial publishers and clearly disadvantages smaller specialist and learned society publishers.”
“It takes no account of the fact that, at least in the humanities, there are still a significant number of researchers not affiliated with institutions covered by the deals, nor in some cases with any institution.”
“It privileges established over early career researchers. It ignores the needs of researchers based in the Global South, in smaller institutions, or in industry. It favours well-funded areas of research over equally important, but less well-resourced areas.” …”

Science community steps up to reform open access

“The International Science Council (ISC) and ALLEA (All European Academies) last month drew the attention of the scientific community to the inadequacies of open access to research papers as currently implemented by publishers (see go.nature.com/3otps2d and go.nature.com/3cfp6bq). Open access to the record of science is essential for an equitable and inclusive global scientific enterprise and to the scientific self-correction that is crucial for rigour and public trust. The ISC statement sets out eight fundamental principles of publishing that need to be upheld in serving the needs of science, including mandating access to all evidential data and removing restrictive copyright.”

Workshop Report: “Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road”

“This report on ethical aspects of open access summarises the outcomes of a workshop which was attempting to do exactly that. Throughout the various presentations, given by a variety of stakeholders, solutions from different angles are provided. We are deeply grateful to our hosts, the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, for welcoming us in Brussels, to all of our speakers, who have made invaluable contributions to the topic, to the audience for their lively and interesting participation, and to the members of the ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics on whose initiative this workshop came to be….”