Thanks for your continued contributions to our understanding of this important issue Richard. I’m intrigued by this statement from your interview with Mahmoud Khalifa: “in the global South (or at least in the Middle East) [researchers] may actually find it relatively easy to access research information, but far from easy to disseminate their own research to a global audience.” Can you (and/or others on this list) elaborate on this? Mr. Khalifa’s basic argument seems to be that thanks to government subsidies and the efforts of organizations like Research4Life, accessing the subscription market is less worrisome than trying to publish in a flipped world where the cost of publishing is shouldered by researchers (since this cost is very high relative to academic salaries in his country).
I think the “usual” argument we make in open is that lower-to-middle income countries (LMICs)---and indeed, the majority of institutions everywhere that don’t have limitless library budgets---are in an access deficit and that we need to improve this access. Mr. Khalifa is saying that for his region at least, access to published material is fine. It’s access to publishing that would suffer in a world where subscriptions are replaced by APCs.
Do we have actual numbers that support any of these arguments---studies (or white papers, or business briefs, etc.) showing APCs as a percentage of income, or showing how much research access is lacking and where? I know we have anecdotal information galore, but are these questions that need to be studied further?
Best,
Glenn
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org
From: scholcom...@lists.ala.org <scholcom...@lists.ala.org> On Behalf Of "Richard Poynder" (via scholcomm Mailing List)
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 3:54 AM
To: scho...@lists.ala.org
Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
To try and get a sense of how open access looks from different parts of the world, particularly as the strategy of engineering a global “flip” of subscription journals to a pay-to-publish gold OA model gains more traction, I am interested in talking to open access advocates in different parts of the world, ideally by means of matched interviews.
Earlier this month, for instance, I published a Q&A with Jeff MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer. (https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from.html).
Yesterday, I published a matched Q&A covering the same themes with Mahmoud Khalifa, a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office, and DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. This interview can be read here: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from_24.html
I have also been asking those I interview to comment on the answers given by their matched interviewee. Mahmoud Khalifa’s response to the MacKie-Mason Q&A is incorporated in this post: https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-mahmoud.html
I am open to suggestions for further matched interviews.
Richard Poynder
Dear OSI friends,
It is indeed more difficult to publish in venues with a global reach than it is to access publications. Publishing in elite venues is highly competitive, and studies show bias towards English speaking countries, elite institutions, and certain fields in which it is easier to publish. The more that venues transfer costs of publication to authors the more difficult it will become for researchers from developing countries to join the global conversation.
There is literature on this topic – happy to share with anyone who wants more – email me off the list.
Thanks,
Caroline Wagner
Caroline S. Wagner
Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs
John Glenn College of Public Affairs
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43221
Editor, Science & Public Policy Journal
Submit now: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/spp
Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/osusiaprof
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> why would universities and governments and funding agencies want to
> support scholarly communication for their researchers when the payment
> is to read, but not when the payment is to publish(?)
I think one reason to suspect that this would be a problem is that right now, universities pay to read not because they have strong feelings in favor of the subscription model itself, but simply because payment is required – no payment, no reading. The same isn’t true of publication. There are lots of no-payment-required publishing options out there, and as long as that’s the case (and the no-payment-required options confer a reasonable amount of prestige on the author), universities will almost certainly resist allocating money to support optional pay-to-publish arrangements. To change that, a flip from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish would have to be effectively universal, making it so that you really can’t publish without paying. I can’t imagine how a truly universal flip could happen. The only way it could be possible would be if all the governments of the world made it actually illegal to publish scholarship on a pay-to-read basis. Barring that kind of legal restriction, there will always be a market incentive for a publisher to say to authors “Come publish in our pay-to-read journal – it will cost you nothing, and you’ll get high-quality publishing services.”
---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
From:
<osi20...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jeffrey MacKie-Mason <jmm...@berkeley.edu>
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 3:40 PM
To: Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Cc: Richard Poynder <richard...@btinternet.com>, The Open Scholarship Initiative <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
Yes, of course, if we start making Prof. X pay, and don't redirect funds to Prof. X, it will be harder for her to publish. But the funds currently used to pay for subscriptions (however much or little they are) will be freed up, and it seems odd to assume that those supporting scholarly communications for their researchers would just walk away from them at this point!
---
Jeff MacKie-Mason
University Librarian
Chief Digital Scholarship Officer
Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics
UC Berkeley
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Hi Jeff,
Is there a survey or some such that backs up this assumption? Say, for instance, that only 10% of publications get flipped. How do we know that money will be rechanneled for these? Given the nature of bureaucracies, it seems equally plausible that institutions will find it’s too much of a hassle to create two tracks of paying for journals---subscriptions plus APCs. The path of least resistance might be to discourage this kind of bifurcation unless someone (OSI? UNESCO? Researchers?) can demonstrate that the tangible benefits far outweigh the potential hassles. I’m not arguing against trying this, mind you---just asking what kind of survey or other data your models (or other models) are built on.
Many thanks,
Glenn
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org
From: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason <jmm...@berkeley.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 2:40 PM
To: Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
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Rick,
I think you’ve just made the competition argument for why OA has the potential to place competitive pressure on APCs. I don’t think anyone’s goal in flipping to OA is to live in a purely pay-to-publish world – the goal is rather to foster an OA world, which presumably will be comprised of a variety of business models (and price points) competing for authors and for institutional dollars, just as there are now.
Ivy
Hi, Ivy –
I agree that no one (to my knowledge, anyway) is trying to create a purely pay-to-publish world. But my response was to the specific question that Jackie raised – given that universities are now willing to pay to read, why would we think that they’d be less willing to pay to publish? My point about a purely pay-to-publish world was just that this is the only scenario in which I think universities would be just as willing to pay “when the payment is to publish” as they currently are to do so “when the payment is to read.”
Rick
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Very sorry about screwing up your first name, Jeff! The fact that my brain goes to “Jackie Mason” just shows I’m getting old...
> I can't see any decent research university (which is where most of the volume
> of publications come from) declining to redirect funding from subscriptions to
> publication charges simply because *some* journals are available without
> publication charges.
I apologize if I’m misunderstanding your point here, but isn’t that what’s happening right now? The current situation is that a growing number of journals impose publication charges, most journals impose access charges, and a growing number impose some combination of the two. Don’t we see lots of decent research universities right now declining to redirect funding from subscriptions to publication charges? (Mine would be one example.)
> Note, when we say "universities redirect" in the first instance this means
> university libraries, since the subscription budgets are in our hands.
Right, except that those budgets only come to our hands at the pleasure of our institutions. It’s really not our money – it’s the university’s money, and the university entrusts to us a certain amount of it every year with which to do the university’s business. So this needs to be about more than what my library thinks would be a better world—before I put the university’s money where the library’s mouth is, I need to make sure we’re aligned. It sounds like you guys in the UCal system really are pretty well aligned in that way: of the ten US institutions that have signed on to the OA2020 Expression of Interest, six are institutions from the UCal system, and from everything I’ve heard the decision to move in that direction was indeed made with strong institutional support. But the vast majority of US libraries are at institutions that haven’t signed on to that document, so the small red flag that I always raise with my colleagues when they talk about redirecting library funds away from subscriptions and towards direct supply-side support of publication, is that the more money you shift in that direction, the more important it is to make sure your institution really supports that shift. Saying “Well my gosh, why wouldn’t they support it?” seems to me more or less beside the point. The question that determines budget allocations isn’t what we in libraries think our institutions ought to want, but what they actually do want.
---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
From:
Jeffrey MacKie-Mason <jmm...@berkeley.edu>
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 at 7:23 PM
To: Rick Anderson <rick.a...@utah.edu>
Cc: Ivy Anderson <Ivy.An...@ucop.edu>, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>, Richard Poynder <richard...@btinternet.com>, The Open Scholarship Initiative <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
Rick, universities want their scholars to publish in good, high reputation journals. I can't see any decent research university (which is where most of the volume of publications come from) declining to redirect funding from subscriptions to publication charges simply because *some* journals are available without publication charges. They might provide *some* incentive for authors to consider the cost of publishing in different places, and since for pretty much any article there will always be at least 2, 3, 4 high quality journals that would be appropriate, that's a good thing (only by giving authors some reason to care about which publisher they give copyright to will we ever break the monopoly power of the big for-profit publishers -- since owning copyrights *is* the sole source of their power).
Note, when we say "universities redirect" in the first instance this means university libraries, since the subscription budgets are in our hands. I have often publicly committed to redirecting funds from subscriptions to publication charges as journals flip (and, indeed, my institution, UC Berkeley, was the second in the US to sign the OA2020 Expression of Interest in which we make a commitment to redirect subscription monies toward OA).
A latent assumption behind the fear that authors will get screwed by their institutions is that the institutions want to screw their researchers. We call that killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Put another way, what university is going to want to lower *its* prestige by reducing the ability of its researchers to publish as many articles as they can, in the most prestigious journals they can?
Jeff
---
Jeff MacKie-Mason
University Librarian
Chief Digital Scholarship Officer
Professor, School of Information and Professor of Economics
UC Berkeley
Error! Filename not specified.
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Hi Jeff,
I hope this isn’t piling on but a couple of your statements jumped out at me and I think they’re important to unpack as we discuss how to engage with this:
Best,
Glenn
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org
From: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason <jmm...@berkeley.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2018 6:23 PM
To: Rick Anderson <rick.a...@utah.edu>
Cc: Ivy Anderson <Ivy.An...@ucop.edu>; Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>; Richard Poynder <richard...@btinternet.com>; The Open Scholarship Initiative <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [SCHOLCOMM] North, South, and Open Access: The view from Egypt with Mahmoud Khalifa
[fwiw, my first name is Jeff. Because of my hyphenated last name folks often collapse it into Jackie Mason...which is kinda funny.]
On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 5:09 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:
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