"The push for open access is making science less inclusive"

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Wagner, Caroline

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Aug 31, 2021, 9:58:18 AM8/31/21
to osi20...@googlegroups.com, Glenn Hampson
Here in Brazil, federal two-year research grants are capped at between $5,640 and $22,560, depending on researcher experience. Even our most generous research funding agency, São Paulo State’s FAPESP, caps its regular research grants at just under $30,000 per year.


The Ohio State University
Caroline S. Wagner, PhD
John Glenn College of Public Affairs 
Battelle Center for Science & Engineering Policy
Page Hall 210U, 1810 College Road N, Columbus, OH 43210
6142927791 Office / 614-206-8636 Mobile

Bryan Alexander

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Aug 31, 2021, 10:03:24 AM8/31/21
to Wagner, Caroline, osi20...@googlegroups.com, Glenn Hampson
Indeed.
I think a couple of OSI working groups anticipated this a few years ago, didn't we?

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Wagner, Caroline

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Aug 31, 2021, 10:08:55 AM8/31/21
to Bryan Alexander, osi20...@googlegroups.com, Glenn Hampson
This article identifies part of the problem that has been anticipated. However, it would appear we have done a very poor job of explaining the costs associated with publishing. Open Access articles do indeed help to disseminate knowledge, but the obstacle to entry remains, but it has been transformed. What have we learned from the COVID experience that we can bring to this discussion?

The Ohio State University
Caroline S. Wagner, PhD
John Glenn College of Public Affairs 
Battelle Center for Science & Engineering Policy
Page Hall 210U, 1810 College Road N, Columbus, OH 43210
6142927791 Office / 614-206-8636 Mobile


From: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Bryan Alexander <bryan.a...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2021 10:03 AM
To: Wagner, Caroline <wagne...@osu.edu>
Cc: osi20...@googlegroups.com <osi20...@googlegroups.com>; Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org>
Subject: Re: "The push for open access is making science less inclusive"
 

Roy, Michael D.

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Aug 31, 2021, 11:21:32 AM8/31/21
to osi20...@googlegroups.com, Glenn Hampson, Wagner, Caroline
It is not open access per se that is exacerbating already existing equity issues, but the particular version of open access being offered up by the Big Five that is the problem. A recent article by Jeff Pooley “Collective Funding to Reclaim Scholarly Publishing”  (https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/erpw9udj/release/3 ) does an excellent job of describing alternative versions of open access that speaks directly to the already well understood problem of letting for-profit publishers dominate open access publishing. 

Michael Roy 
Dean of the Library 
Middlebury College 
schedule a meeting at https://calendly.com/michael-d-roy 
pronouns: he, him, his

Lisa Hinchliffe

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Aug 31, 2021, 11:37:08 AM8/31/21
to Roy, Michael D., osi20...@googlegroups.com, Glenn Hampson, Wagner, Caroline
I was listening to a PLOS Twitter Space event yesterday. It was interesting to hear their discussion of their success in pitching the APC model and now admitting its equity problems and trying to move away from it. 

FWIW, I don't think the Big 5 (or many of the top 50 etc) actually want APCs at all. It costs way too much in administrative overheard to do micropayments.  They  want institutional contracts. One publisher told me that they can give institutions a 7% discount automatically for a contract  because that's what they save automatically by having an institutional  central payment  process rather than individual micropayments. 
___

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
lisali...@gmail.com





Glenn Hampson

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Aug 31, 2021, 12:07:05 PM8/31/21
to Wagner, Caroline, Bryan Alexander, osi20...@googlegroups.com

This group’s 2018 critique of Plan S (https://bit.ly/3t09hvdpretty) put the APC “playwall” concern in all caps. This wasn’t the only group expressing these concerns, of course, but we made it pretty clear that people in the know (that’s you) had concerns. Today, everyone (including Plan S signatories) has reservations about APCs. Still, the OA approaches we’re pursuing (through Plan S, TA’s, major publishers, etc.) remain heavily dependent on APCs. It’s a curious race down a dead-end alley. In the meantime, other interesting models continue to evolve (see the latest C&E brief for some cool examples: Subscribe to The Brief | Clarke & Esposito (ce-strategy.com)).

 

To briefly comment on your two other discussion points, Caroline:

 

  1. It would appear we have done a very poor job of explaining the costs associated with publishing.” Maybe? Kent Anderson has been a tireless explainer of this issue. But, this discussion space has been so polarized for so long that anyone who “defends” publishing costs has been vilified as being immoral, anti-science, on the take, etc.---we’ve truly heard it all. Ideally, there should be room to rationally assess what’s working in publishing, what isn’t, where we can make efficiency improvements, etc.---OSI has hopefully served a purpose in this regard. I think the acrimony has calmed down somewhat over the last five years or so, but there is still a lot of inertia with major funders and policy organizations who believe any solution that allows profit, commercial participation, or copyright is a failure. And,
  2. “What have we learned from the COVID experience that we can bring to this discussion?” Where you stand on this depends on where you sit. Some will note that rapid sharing of COVID research is how research should operate; others will note that rapid sharing of bad COVID research is how research should not operate. Personally, I think we have been reminded by COVID (because rapid sharing wasn’t invented last year) that there is a great deal of potential here. And that’s about it. Did we learn that pharma companies will invest billions in desperately needed research and then give away their data and patents? No. Researchers have and will continue to collaborate at the margins in ways that help science and at the same time serve their best interests (personal and institutional). I think we should look for ways to enhance these various engagement pathways without assuming (incorrectly) that all such pathways involve OA, APCs, TA’s, etc.

 

Best regards to you all---I hope your summer has been relaxing and rewarding.

 

Sincerely,

 

Glenn

 

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

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Danny Kingsley

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Aug 31, 2021, 5:40:21 PM8/31/21
to Glenn Hampson, Wagner, Caroline, Bryan Alexander, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Oh honestly. This is just bloody gaslighting.

I wrote a debate piece with my colleague in 2015 (yes a long time ago) called: “Open access: the whipping boy for problems in scholarly publication” https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/14/ 

The journal then asked for rebuttals, where three of the four rebuttals stated that "what was needed was an analysis of the scholarly publishing system" (conveniently ignoring the literally decades of work in this space). Our response to the rebuttals https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/20/

I also presented on this at the 2016 RLUK conference https://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley/the-value-of-embracing-unknown-unknowns

We just go around in circles.

Danny


On 1 Sep 2021, at 02:07, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:

This group’s 2018 critique of Plan S (https://bit.ly/3t09hvdpretty) put the APC “playwall” concern in all caps. This wasn’t the only group expressing these concerns, of course, but we made it pretty clear that people in the know (that’s you) had concerns. Today, everyone (including Plan S signatories) has reservations about APCs. Still, the OA approaches we’re pursuing (through Plan S, TA’s, major publishers, etc.) remain heavily dependent on APCs. It’s a curious race down a dead-end alley. In the meantime, other interesting models continue to evolve (see the latest C&E brief for some cool examples: Subscribe to The Brief | Clarke & Esposito (ce-strategy.com)).
 
To briefly comment on your two other discussion points, Caroline:
 
  1. It would appear we have done a very poor job of explaining the costs associated with publishing.” Maybe? Kent Anderson has been a tireless explainer of this issue. But, this discussion space has been so polarized for so long that anyone who “defends” publishing costs has been vilified as being immoral, anti-science, on the take, etc.---we’ve truly heard it all. Ideally, there should be room to rationally assess what’s working in publishing, what isn’t, where we can make efficiency improvements, etc.---OSI has hopefully served a purpose in this regard. I think the acrimony has calmed down somewhat over the last five years or so, but there is still a lot of inertia with major funders and policy organizations who believe any solution that allows profit, commercial participation, or copyright is a failure. And,
  1. “What have we learned from the COVID experience that we can bring to this discussion?” Where you stand on this depends on where you sit. Some will note that rapid sharing of COVID research is how research should operate; others will note that rapid sharing of badCOVID research is how research should not operate. Personally, I think we have been reminded by COVID (because rapid sharing wasn’t invented last year) that there is a great deal of potential here. And that’s about it. Did we learn that pharma companies will invest billions in desperately needed research and then give away their data and patents? No. Researchers have and will continue to collaborate at the margins in ways that help science and at the same time serve their best interests (personal and institutional). I think we should look for ways to enhance these various engagement pathways without assuming (incorrectly) that all such pathways involve OA, APCs, TA’s, etc. 

Dr Danny Kingsley
Scholarly Communication Consultant
Visiting Fellow, Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, ANU
Member, Board of Directors, FORCE11
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e: da...@dannykingsley.com
m: +61 (0)480 115 937
t:@dannykay68
o: 0000-0002-3636-5939

Joyce Ogburn

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Sep 2, 2021, 9:15:42 PM9/2/21
to Danny Kingsley, Glenn Hampson, Wagner, Caroline, Bryan Alexander, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Danny, thanks for reminding us of your previous work in this area. I am reminded an incident years ago when a non librarian researcher at a library conference said that we needed to start conversations about change in scholarly communication before taking action. I stood up and commented that conversations had been going on for decades and the discussions we were having were nothing new.  Many people are late to the conversations and though their perspectives are valuable, they are not as aware, engaged or knowledgeable as they may think they are.  Gees, even those of us who have been immersed in scholcom are still learning from each other. The other side of the coin is the stages that I wrote about, from awareness to transformation. Many people get stuck in awareness but don’t progress much further for lots of reason. It takes real commitment to get to ownership of issues and motivation to action that might create change. 

It’s also important to note that where APCs and the like can create inequities, so do the paywalls, technology limitations, bandwidth issues, lack of access to grants and other resources, etc. Remember the report from the first OSI conference on overload/underload?It’s a crazy quilt of access barriers and enablers out there. Access combined with overload is an entire issue unto itself. 

Cheers, everyone. I highly recommend retirement where you can dip in and out of conversations and I also appreciate the opportunity to engage when the stimulation is irresistible. 

Joyce
Professor of Practice
UNC Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 31, 2021, at 5:40 PM, Danny Kingsley <da...@dannykingsley.com> wrote:

Oh honestly. This is just bloody gaslighting.

I wrote a debate piece with my colleague in 2015 (yes a long time ago) called: “Open access: the whipping boy for problems in scholarly publication” https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/14/ 

The journal then asked for rebuttals, where three of the four rebuttals stated that "what was needed was an analysis of the scholarly publishing system" (conveniently ignoring the literally decades of work in this space). Our response to the rebuttals https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/20/

I also presented on this at the 2016 RLUK conference https://www.slideshare.net/DannyKingsley/the-value-of-embracing-unknown-unknowns

We just go around in circles.

Danny

On 1 Sep 2021, at 02:07, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:

This group’s 2018 critique of Plan S (https://bit.ly/3t09hvdpretty) put the APC “playwall” concern in all caps. This wasn’t the only group expressing these concerns, of course, but we made it pretty clear that people in the know (that’s you) had concerns. Today, everyone (including Plan S signatories) has reservations about APCs. Still, the OA approaches we’re pursuing (through Plan S, TA’s, major publishers, etc.) remain heavily dependent on APCs. It’s a curious race down a dead-end alley. In the meantime, other interesting models continue to evolve (see the latest C&E brief for some cool examples: Subscribe to The Brief | Clarke & Esposito (ce-strategy.com)).
 
To briefly comment on your two other discussion points, Caroline:
 
  1. It would appear we have done a very poor job of explaining the costs associated with publishing.” Maybe? Kent Anderson has been a tireless explainer of this issue. But, this discussion space has been so polarized for so long that anyone who “defends” publishing costs has been vilified as being immoral, anti-science, on the take, etc.---we’ve truly heard it all. Ideally, there should be room to rationally assess what’s working in publishing, what isn’t, where we can make efficiency improvements, etc.---OSI has hopefully served a purpose in this regard. I think the acrimony has calmed down somewhat over the last five years or so, but there is still a lot of inertia with major funders and policy organizations who believe any solution that allows profit, commercial participation, or copyright is a failure. And,
  2. “What have we learned from the COVID experience that we can bring to this discussion?” Where you stand on this depends on where you sit. Some will note that rapid sharing of COVID research is how research should operate; others will note that rapid sharing of badCOVID research is how research should not operate. Personally, I think we have been reminded by COVID (because rapid sharing wasn’t invented last year) that there is a great deal of potential here. And that’s about it. Did we learn that pharma companies will invest billions in desperately needed research and then give away their data and patents? No. Researchers have and will continue to collaborate at the margins in ways that help science and at the same time serve their best interests (personal and institutional). I think we should look for ways to enhance these various engagement pathways without assuming (incorrectly) that all such pathways involve OA, APCs, TA’s, etc. 
 
Best regards to you all---I hope your summer has been relaxing and rewarding.
 
Sincerely,
 
Glenn
 
 
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

Jo De

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Sep 3, 2021, 3:19:22 PM9/3/21
to Joyce Ogburn, Bryan Alexander, Danny Kingsley, Glenn Hampson, Wagner, Caroline, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Hello Everybody! Cheers for a great upcoming weekend. Thanks for all your wisdom over the years. I’ve decided to try to construct an “area” focus on aging and the elderly at a local state university. First stop, an institutional repository for all their previously published work on the topic. Joann

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