Study projects future of article OA

[David Wojick]

https://blog.ourresearch.org/future-of-oa/

Includes interesting quantitative analyses. I have not looked at the study but the home page graphics project major growth for gold OA. This is in contrast to David Crotty's recent TSK saying gold was doomed. See https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/10/09/roadblocks-to-better-open-access-models/. Bit of a disagreement. I tend to disagree with Crotty, especially since he goes on to say there is no clearly viable alternative to gold

The Ourresearch.org home page graphics also say OA articles are getting a lot more views than their numbers. This supports the idea that OA speeds up diffusion, hence science, via a higher contact rate.

David

[Glenn Hampson]

Thanks for sharing this David and congratulations to Heather and Jason on another great contribution to this field. Numbers aside (and the authors explain the possible shortcomings here with counting only DOI'd publications*), I think (personally) that the most important takeaway may be this: "One interesting realization from the modeling we've done is that when the proportion of papers that are OA increases, or when the OA lag decreases, the total number of views increase -- the scholarly literature becomes more heavily viewed and thus more valuable to society. This is intuitive, but could be explored quantitatively in future work."

Best,

Glenn



*WRT the data, DOI's are a fairly recent invention so counting these (in Crossref, Unpaywell, etc.) tends to produce an inflated estimate of open and open growth rates. However, even looking at a broader set of journals, Eric Archambault's research came to the same conclusion that open (of some sort, if we consider hybrid and bronze to be acceptable open outcomes, which many open advocates do not**) is already nearing 50% of the total output and is increasing at about 4% annually due to "backfilling" as articles come off of embargo.

** And this is an important point, because if open is going to be limited by statute (read: Plan S) to non-hybrid work that is sitting on approved repositories (and not publisher sites) then open has a long way to go. Here again, we need to make sure we're speaking the same language when we say "open." This report is good news from OSI's point of view, but it can't really be cheered by everyone because it doesn't paint a super robust future for gold and green relative to hybrid and bronze, and that's assuming that trend lines continue---i.e., that publishers aren't going to pick up their game and really start pushing their open repositories more aggressively (which is sure to happen as researchers get more interested in this and as open starts flexing its potential).

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[David Wojick]

I would say it is a very rosy picture for gold, especially compared to Crotty's.

David

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[Glenn Hampson]

Actually David, I think the other David (Crotty) may be referring to the death of APC's as a funding model, not to gold OA. We often use these two words (gold and APC) interchangeably but we shouldn't. Most gold open measured by the number of articles produced is APC funded, but most gold journals are not APC-funded. So the hope (however realistic) of Plan S is to encourage the growth of non-APC funded gold journals---journals that are supported by means other than author subsidies (so shifting these costs to foundations, universities, governments, etc.; some of this is called "diamond" OA). Crotty's point is that APC gold is an evolutionary dead-end---which is what we were also advising in our Plan S policy report---not that gold open is dead. Heather and Jason's projection, of course, is rather bullish on the future of gold---tbd whether that plays out in the form of APC-funded gold or non-APC gold.

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[Lisa Hinchliffe]

FYI .... Heather, Jason, *and Richard*

I've very much appreciated that Heather and Jason have both engaged with me extensively over Twitter the past 24 hours and helped me better understand the parameters of the datasets they are working with. For example, for reading, you are only getting the data on people who have the unpaywall browser extension installed. Are those folks representative? What's the impact given the dataset excludes all reading via ReadCube, Mendeley, Zotero, ResearchGate, ShiHub, etc.? Is it that closed is less read or that the tracking is not capturing the mechanism for reading closed? 

Don't get me wrong, this is a tremendous analysis and worthy of consideration but I think we also need to ask if we have warrant to generalize from the data they have to the universe of all readers/reading and if so how confidently? 

Lisa

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[Glenn Hampson]

Yep---agreed. And sorry about omitting Richard---Heather and Jason are in OSI but not Richard (yet anyway), hence my rudeness 😊

[David Wojick]

First I heard of APCs going away. What fraction has gone?

I am puzzled because APC gold looked like the most viable way forward. What is replacing it?

David

[Lisa Hinchliffe]

I believe the claim is that they need to go away not that they are currently going away. It's an argument for intervention not an observation of change. 

FWIW, at the moment, I think they are still growing, especially if you count Publish+Read/Read+Publish agreements as being in that category. Which is what, along with Plan S work that was first about capping and now about breaking costs into their component parts, has brought on renewed scrutiny from social justice perspectives and business models. 

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[David Wojick]

As I suspected Lisa, wishful thinking at this point. I do not understand the "evolutionary dead end" metaphor and it is neither explained nor argued for, just asserted. Seems like a claim worth discussing. As I said, at this point APC gold seems more like the way forward. It pays the bills and we are talking about something like $10 billion a year.

David

[JJE Esposito]

The term "Gold OA" is no longer useful now that there are many ways for publishing services to be paid for outside of end-user subscriptions. The devil is in the details.

Joe Esposito

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[Anthony Watkinson]

APCs do not work for the Global South or for disciplines who do not work on the basis of grants – humanities. This has been clear for some time.

Hence the various schemes for books like Knowledge Unlatched which relies on libraries paying. I did some googling to look to see how terminology is being used/developed and came across this: https://openscience.com/what-is-gold-open-access/. I bet you all know this. It seemed interesting.

Anthony

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[David Wojick]

From an business perspective the fact that the business model does not work for a relatively small subset of customers is not enough to cause massive change. This is essentially an equity argument, not an economic one. Plus there are waiver programs. Then too the alternatives to APC have their own disadvantages, as Crotty discusses.

Re the South, the extraordinary growth of predatory journals may play in here. They are very low APC journals after all. We may already have a two tiered system of APC journals.

David

[Glenn Hampson]

Alas, it’s a nuanced discussion David…I refer you to our group’s Plan S policy paper (Section 4: Should we really go for the gold?) for the details: https://journals.gmu.edu/index.php/osi/article/view/2450/1525

 

In short, this solution will work for some regions, fields and researchers (and is working), not others, and certainly not all. And therein lies the rub. When we’re talking about creating solutions that work for everyone everywhere we need to be flexible and inclusive and really do our best to understand the global state of affairs. Subsidy programs are underfunded and inadequate by themselves to remedy current inequities; APC charges of even a few hundred dollars are too high for many authors; there is no downward pressure on APC prices because academic authors shop on the basis of quality, not price; and so on. So, be wary the simple explanations and simple solutions: they’re probably wrong.

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[David Wojick]

Glenn, my point is that from a business perspective your nuances may be unrealistic. As an industry analyst I have to be careful to distinguish what is from what people think ought to be, but is not.

David

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[Glenn Hampson]

Understood (I think). The point here, however, isn’t that the marketplace likes APCs. It’s that this approach is being mandated at scale (not by name, but by default since most OA articles are APC-funded, and most of this funding comes from authors). And that’s why there’s concern. If we’re going to tell the market which solutions to adopt (or else), then we need to be absolutely certain we’re right and also be willing to accept suboptimal outcomes. Or we need to be less specific---for instance, take a cap and trade approach to open wherein we “just” require that x% of country/institution y output needs to be open (on the spectrum, not necessarily CC-BY) by z date. That approach is workable and allows for broad adaptation, endorsement, innovation, competition, speed, and flexibility.

[Margaret Winker Cook]

Let’s not forget that most (71% as of last year) journals indexed in DOAJ do not charge APCs. https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2018/02/06/doaj-apc-information-as-of-jan-31-2018/9/

Particularly in the South, APCs are not the solution—journals are funded by institutions, governments, or organizations.

Margaret 

Margaret Winker, MD

Trustee, WAME

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wame.org

wame.blog

@WAMedEditors

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[Rick Anderson]

But let’s also remember that DOAJ doesn’t count all of the journals that charge APCs for OA publication:

 

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/08/26/do-most-oa-journals-not-charge-an-apc-sort-of-it-depends/

 

As David Crotty points out in this piece, a more accurate representation of things would be to say:

• The majority of fully gold OA journals listed by the DOAJ do not charge authors an APC.
• The majority of journals offering OA publication to authors charge APCs.
• The majority of OA papers are published via paying an APC.

 

 

 

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[Lisa Hinchliffe]

"It pays the bills." 

Does it? Or, at least does it always? For hybrid, clearly yes. But, for pure OA journals, is this proving true? I'm hearing an undercurrent that maybe that isn't the case ....  I do of course know the studies that conclude "there is enough money in the system"  ... but I also heard three presentations by various PLOS folks in the Sept/Oct alone indicating the micropayment model isn't sustainable (for PLOS?)... 

[Margaret Winker Cook]

All true, but when discussing gold OA options without APCs, it’s worthwhile considering the South’s solutions. 

Margaret

[Glenn Hampson]

Are you referring here to SciELO?

Sent from my iPhone

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[Margaret Winker Cook]

Among many others—journals all over the South.

Margaret