What is the OA2020 Initiative really all about?
Colleen Campbell
Colleagues, as Richard and Glenn have asked me to share more information about the goals of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, I am pleased to offer the following.
Why is an approach that focuses on revenue flows and economic forces necessary within the OA movement?
While the MPDL White Paper provided the economic grounding for the Open Access 2020 Initiative, illustrating that a transition of the current corpus of subscription journals to open access was feasible without further monetary investment, the motivation for the OA2020 Initiative is, perhaps, best illustrated by the findings of Bo-Christer Björk. In his 2017 article “Scholarly journal publishing in transition – from restricted to open access,” Björk applied Porter’s Five Forces framework, a widely-used business strategy development model, to analyse the level of competition in today’s scholarly journal publishing business, noting that the lack of competitiveness among the major subscription publishers neutralizes the other forces at play, preventing a large-scale shift to open access. If we are to achieve open access on a large-scale, efforts dedicated to building an open access landscape around the dominant subscription system must be complemented by efforts that tackle the subscription system head-on.
What are the goals of OA2020?
The stated intent that is at the foundation of the OA2020 Initiative can be found in the Expression of Interest (signed by 107 academic and research organizations to date) which states:
- We aim to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing in accordance with community-specific publication preferences. At the same time, we continue to support new and improved forms of OA publishing.
- We will pursue this transformation process by converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support sustainable OA business models. Accordingly, we intend to re-organize the underlying cash flows, to establish transparency with regard to costs and potential savings, and to adopt mechanisms to avoid undue publication barriers.
- We invite all parties involved in scholarly publishing, in particular universities, research institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large.
Using the research funds currently invested in the scholarly publishing system as leverage, OA2020 seeks to accelerate the transition to open access by liberating those funds—now locked up in big deal subscriptions and surreptitiously siphoned in publishing fees, so that they may flow to support the open publishing and dissemination systems desired by the academic community, be that scholar-owned publishing infrastructure, commercial OA publishing based on any variety of sustainable and transparent business model, or regional, disciplinary and funder platforms, etc.
How does OA2020 propose to achieve those goals?
OA2020 is not prescriptive in its approach and embraces any number of strategies aimed at systematically removing our financial investment in the paywall system controlled by the large commercial publishers and shifting those funds to support open access publishing models. Whether through big deal subscription cancellations, committing a portion of institutional funds toward a scholarly commons, publisher negotiations, or other methods, the common denominator is the OA2020 call to divest of the subscription system and invest in open access.
How can publisher negotiations accelerate the transition to open access?
Negotiating offset, or transitional agreements is just one approach that that aligns with the overarching strategy of OA2020, and such agreements are seen by all who are negotiating them as an essential component of a comprehensive open access roadmap, as so well illustrated by the Dutch “Five Pillars of Open Access.” These iterative, pilot agreements seek not only to grant researchers the means to freely investigate the latest research with new technologies and make their own results immediately available, but also to rein in the funds already flowing through academic and research institutions to the large commercial publishers, unmonitored and unchecked. The subscription system in its current state allows the large commercial publishers to cash in on a double, indeed, duplicate revenue stream of ever-increasing and opaque subscription fees paid by libraries and runaway publishing fees paid by researchers (article processing charges, page charges, color charges, etc.)—hardly a rational use of research funds. Transitional agreements, as a first step, stem the flow of these two revenue streams, bringing them together in a controlled confluence, so that the funds can finally be monitored and a stop put to the duplicate spending. Additionally, transitional agreements are characterized by a shift of funding from the “read access” side to the “publishing” side, which enables a formal withdrawal of financial support of the paywall system and allows publishing fees to be isolated, scrutinized, differentiated and controlled. Indeed, transitional agreements and their underlying workflows intended to cultivate transparency which, in turn, increases the level of competition among the large commercial publishers who hold the bulk of scholarly publishing in an oligopoly. True to the basic economic principle of competition, as more control and transparency is demanded by academic institutions through transitional agreements, publishing prices can be expected to go down, creating the conditions necessary for innovation, new market entries—whether commercial or of the academy—and, ultimately, a lively and diverse scholarly communications ecosystem in which funds are free to flow to the services wanted and needed by scholars and their institutions.
But in practical terms, transitional agreements shift funds from the paywall to article processing charges; will that not perpetuate the dominating power of the large commercial publishers and put under-funded researchers at a disadvantage?
No, by finally delivering on the first order of the open access movement, unencumbered access to the latest research, the OA2020 Initiative is a concrete step forward in eliminating inequalities. Bringing down paywalls can only boost scientific research, and those who stand to benefit most are researchers in under-funded contexts who are currently locked out of access to paywalled content. Furthermore, with funds released from the lockbox of the subscription system, institutions are empowered with the opportunity to reinvest those funds in the publishing programs and platforms that will best enhance the production, dissemination, discovery and integration of local research. There is no doubt that scholarly communications must continue to evolve, but if we continue to invest in the atavistic paywall system, we will only hinder that progress.
For further information on the Open Access 2020 Initiative, I invite the community to explore our website https://oa2020.org or to contact me directly off-list.
Cheers,
Colleen
Colleen Campbell
OA2020 Partner Development
Max Planck Digital Library
+49 160 9725 1536
@ColleenCampbe11
Glenn Hampson
Thank you Colleen,
Can I bug you with a couple of follow-up questions? No rush---thank you for taking a swing at these:
- If I’m hearing you correctly, OA2020 is about converting subscription resources to OA resources, correct? Different approaches are embraced, but the main “pathway” here is resource conversion. What I think we were trying to grasp earlier in this conversation is whether OA 2020 embraces all approaches to improving OA. It seems your answer to this is yes, but only if these approaches involve resource conversion.
- There are at least some who will disagree with Bjork’s five forces analysis of the publishing industry, which basically says that commercial publishers are on easy street and facing no competitive pressure whatsoever. I’m not an industry analyst and don’t play one on TV. However, just from my own reading and conversations with people in this group, it seems this analysis is incomplete at best. The bargaining power of suppliers is high (as I see it, suppliers in this equation are funders who “supply” the capital for publishing work---e.g., Wellcome and NIH---not paper and ink providers), and the other four forces in Porter’s matrix are all growing or are at least much more visible now than in years past: the bargaining power of customers (universities and researchers), the threat of new entrants (new publishing models and preferences and the rapid growth of new entrants), the threat of substitute services (rapid APC-based publishing options), and rivalry among existing competitors (who are all positioning for the open data revolution, the next big stage in publishing, and who---like PLOS---are struggling to retain their market share). So, I think one can reasonably posit that there is in fact growing pressure on commercial publishers at the moment. If this is indeed the case, does this change your thinking at all? That is, might these publishers be both incentivized to work for change that customers want (once they have a clear understanding of these desires) and also in a strong position to help lead this change? [It would be great to get some input here from some actual industry analysts.]
- Would OA2020 embrace a future where any amount of subscription products are allowable? For instance, suppose there’s a future where preprint servers take off and researchers get most of the access they need for free, but subscription and membership-supported publications still exist to add value to the information landscape---identifying the most important work, adding editing/design/discovery value to this work, etc. Would this be okay? Or what if paywalls stayed up but embargo periods came down? Or what if an iTunes model emerged that significantly lowered paywalls? Are any of these outcomes acceptable to OA2020?
Thanks for thinking about this---all good stuff.
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
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David Wojick
Last week's issue of my (subscription!) newsletter looks at OA2020. I have made it OA here:
https://davidwojick.blogspot.com/2018/04/fund-flipping-threatens-publishers.html
Comments welcome.
A fascinating effort.
David
David Wojick, Ph.D.
http://insidepublicaccess.com/
Thank you Colleen,
Can I bug you with a couple of follow-up questions? No rush---thank you for taking a swing at these:
- If I’m hearing you correctly, OA2020 is about converting subscription resources to OA resources, correct? Different approaches are embraced, but the main “pathway†here is resource conversion. What I think we were trying to grasp earlier in this conversation is whether OA 2020 embraces all approaches to improving OA. It seems your answer to this is yes, but only if these approaches involve resource conversion.
- There are at least some who will disagree with Bjork’s five forces analysis of the publishing industry, which basically says that commercial publishers are on easy street and facing no competitive pressure whatsoever. I’m not an industry analyst and don’t play one on TV. However, just from my own reading and conversations with people in this group, it seems this analysis is incomplete at best. The bargaining power of suppliers is high (as I see it, suppliers in this equation are funders who “supply†the capital for publishing work---e.g., Wellcome and NIH---not paper and ink providers), and the other four forces in Porter’s matrix are all growing or are at least much more visible now than in years past: the bargaining power of customers (universities and researchers), the threat of new entrants (new publishing models and preferences and the rapid growth of new entrants), the threat of substitute services (rapid APC-based publishing options), and rivalry among existing competitors (who are all positioning for the open data revolution, the next big stage in publishing, and who---like PLOS---are struggling to retain their market share). So, I think one can reasonably posit that there is in fact growing pressure on commercial publishers at the moment. If this is indeed the case, does this change your thinking at all? That is, might these publishers be both incentivized to work for change that customers want (once they have a clear understanding of these desires) and also in a strong position to help lead this change? [It would be great to get some input here from some actual industry analysts.]
- Would OA2020 embrace a future where any amount of subscription products are allowable? For instance, suppose there’s a future where preprint servers take off and researchers get most of the access they need for free, but subscription and membership-supported publications still exist to add value to the information landscape---identifying the most important work, adding editing/design/discovery value to this work, etc. Would this be okay? Or what if paywalls stayed up but embargo periods came down? Or what if an iTunes model emerged that significantly lowered paywalls? Are any of these outcomes acceptable to OA2020?
Thanks for thinking about this---all good stuff.
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: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Colleen Campbell
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2018 8:51 AM
To: 'The Open Scholarship Initiative' <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: What is the OA2020 Initiative really all about?
Colleagues, as Richard and Glenn have asked me to share more information about the goals of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, I am pleased to offer the following.
Why is an approach that focuses on revenue flows and economic forces necessary within the OA movement?
While the MPDL White Paper provided the economic grounding for the Open Access 2020 Initiative, illustrating that a transition of the current corpus of subscription journals to open access was feasible without further monetary investment, the motivation for the OA2020 Initiative is, perhaps, best illustrated by the findings of Bo-Christer Björk. In his 2017 article “Scholarly journal publishing in transition – from restricted to open access,  Björk applied Porter’s Five Forces framework, a widely-used business strategy development model, to analyse the level of competition in today’s scholarly journal publishing business, noting that the lack of competitiveness among the major subscription publishers neutralizes the other forces at play, preventing a large-scale shift to open access. If we are to achieve open access on a large-scale, efforts dedicated to building an open access landscape around the dominant subscription system must be complemented by efforts that tackle the subscription system head-on.
What are the goals of OA2020?
The stated intent that is at the foundation of the OA2020 Initiative can be found in the Expression of Interest (signed by 107 academic and research organizations to date) which states:
- We aim to transform a majority of today’s scholarly journals from subscription to OA publishing in accordance with community-specific publication preferences. At the same time, we continue to support new and improved forms of OA publishing.
- We will pursue this transformation process by converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support sustainable OA business models. Accordingly, we intend to re-organize the underlying cash flows, to establish transparency with regard to costs and potential savings, and to adopt mechanisms to avoid undue publication barriers.
- We invite all parties involved in scholarly publishing, in particular universities, research institutions, funders, libraries, and publishers to collaborate on a swift and efficient transition for the benefit of scholarship and society at large.
Using the research funds currently invested in the scholarly publishing system as leverage, OA2020 seeks to accelerate the transition to open access by liberating those funds—now locked up in big deal subscriptions and surreeptitiously siphoned in publishing fees, so that they may flow to support the open publishing and dissemination systems desired by the academic community, be that scholar-owned publishing infrastructure, commercial OA publishing based on any variety of sustainable and transparent business model, or regional, disciplinary and funder platforms, etc.
How does OA2020 propose to achieve those goals?
OA2020 is not prescriptive in its approach and embraces any number of strategies aimed at systematically removing our financial investment in the paywall system controlled by the large commercial publishers and shifting those funds to support open access publishing models. Whether through big deal subscription cancellations, committing a portion of institutional funds toward a scholarly commons, publisher negotiations, or other methods, the common denominator is the OA2020 call to divest of the subscription system and invest in open access.
How can publisher negotiations accelerate the transition to open access?
Negotiating offset, or transitional agreements is just one approach that that aligns with the overarching strategy of OA2020, and such agreements are seen by all who are negotiating them as an essential component of a comprehensive open access roadmap, as so well illustrated by the Dutch “ Five Pillars of Open Access.†These iterative, pilot agreements seek not only to grant researchers the means to freely investigate the latest research with new technologies and make their own results immediately available, but also to rein in the funds already flowing through academic and research institutions to the large commercial publishers, unmonitored and unchecked. The subscription system in its current state allows the large commercial publishers to cash in on a double, indeed, duplicate revenue stream of ever-increasing and opaque subscription fees paid by libraries and runaway publishing fees paid by researchers (article processing charges, page charges, color charges, etc.)—hardly a rational use of research funds. Transitional agreements, as a first step, stem the flow of these two revenue streams, bringing them together in a controlled confluence, so that the funds can finally be monitored and a stop put to the duplicate spending. Additionally, transitional agreements are characterized by a shift of funding from the “read access†side to the “publishing†side, which enables a formal withdrawal of financial support of the paywall system and allows publishing fees to be isolated, scrutinized, differentiated and controlled. Indeed, transitional agreements and their underlying workflows intended to cultivate transparency which, in turn, increases the level of competition among the large commercial publishers who hold the bulk of scholarly publishing in an oligopoly. True to the basic economic principle of competition, as more control and transparency is demanded by academic institutions through transitional agreements, publishing prices can be expected to go down, creating the conditions necessary for innovation, new market entries—whether commerciial or of the academy—and, ultimately, a lively and diverse sscholarly communications ecosystem in which funds are free to flow to the services wanted and needed by scholars and their institutions.
Richard Poynder
There are a number of things that puzzle me about this statement, but I will point to just one of them.
A link to it has been posted on my blog and flagged as feedback on a recent interview I did with UC Berkeley’s University Librarian Jeff MacKie-Mason: https://bit.ly/2qFBcko
That interview was heavily focused on the implications of a global flip for researchers based in the global South: Yet apart from a somewhat obscure reference to “under-funded researchers” I cannot see how the statement addresses in any meaningful way the problems that a global flip can be expected to create for those in the developing world, problems that were discussed in some detail in the interview. Essentially it seems to be no more than a restatement of what OA2020 has been saying for a number of years.
Richard Poynder
From: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Colleen Campbell
Sent: 17 April 2018 16:51
To: 'The Open Scholarship Initiative' <osi20...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: What is the OA2020 Initiative really all about?
Colleagues, as Richard and Glenn have asked me to share more information about the goals of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, I am pleased to offer the following.
--