Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness October 2015 Conference report: Jisc CNI meeting 2014: Opening up scholarly communications. 10-11 July 2014, Bristol “Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness ” October 2015 Conference report: Jisc CNI meeting 2014: Opening up scholarly communications. 10-11 July 2014, Bristol © Jisc Published under the CC BY 4.0 licence creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 3 Contents Introduction 4 Context 6 Themes: diverse discourse and the rise of social machines 9 Themes: hybrid journals and APCs: a dysfunctional market? 12 Themes: the economic future of the monograph and the 14 possibilities for OA Themes: the rise of big new data sources as 15 evidence to support research Themes: the management of research outputs: 17 supporting reproducibility, reuse and repurposing Themes: sharing and sustaining software 19 Themes: rewards, incentives and credit 20 Themes: opening up cultural heritage 23 Continuing the journey 25 Speakers and participants 28 References 30 Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness 4 Introduction Introduction Over the last decade or so, travellers moving towards an open future for scholarly communications have picked up their pace, spurred on by shifts in public perceptions of openness and by evolving scholarly views and practices. National and international initiatives from governments and funders have provided fresh incentives so that, in the summer of 2014, the time was right for a review of achievements so far and an exploration of emerging issues and points of interest. Report foreword by Clifford Lynch, executive director CNI Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness Introduction 5 At Jisc and CNI we believe that international collaboration and increasing democratisation of scholarly discourse, is of immense importance. Openness with regard to research the transitional arrangements that are supporting cannot be merely a national issue. experiments in open access and the growing need to make data, methods and software open. We examined For around 15 years, our organisations have fostered the importance of incentivising researchers to open up collaborative exchanges and activities on issues related to their work to scrutiny and collaboration. the opening up of scholarly communications because we believe this is a task we can do better together. We are This report shares the key messages from our conference, learning from each other’s successes and setbacks and reviews the current open landscape and explores emerging developing approaches that will work not just in our own themes surrounding policy, data, access and infrastructure. back yards but also for the global scholarly community. Importantly, the report also describes some innovative ideas and upcoming developments that will take scholarship Over two days in July 2014 Jisc and CNI discussed several further along the road towards being open. aspects of openness. We explored the growing diversity Rachel Bruce on the benefits of Jisc and CNI working together Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness 6 Context Context The previous Jisc and CNI Conference on opening up scholarly communication was in 2012. Since then much has changed, especially in terms of national policies to support open access to publications and research data. In the scholarly context openness is now embedded and it a major shift towards opening up research outputs. is remarkable how much scholarly information is accessible today, compared with ten or 15 years ago. Following the In both countries, funder-driven mandates are critical. In scholarly lead, openness has now gained traction in wider the UK, Research Councils UK (RCUK)3 has adopted, in society so that many governments, businesses and modified form, the Finch recommendations, favouring the nonprofit organisations are striving to be open. gold open access route over the green. In the US, the OSTP-driven process is moving ahead. At the same time, Policy initiatives independent funders such as the Wellcome Trust, the Major policy initiatives in the UK and US have helped to Andrew W Mellon Foundation and the Howard Hughes drive developments Medical Foundation continue to be influential. In the UK in 2012, the government-sponsored Finch Inquiry1 The rise in institutional OA mandates that reflect the reported on strategies to improve access to internationally expansion of funder mandates has been a further peer-reviewed research. In response, the UK has implemented important driver of change. a gold open access policy and research grants are made available to support one-off Article Processing Charges Research Excellence Framework (REF) (APCs), ensuring that papers are open to all rather than A critical development in the UK has been the funding being accessible only via subscription fees. And in the US, councils’ policy that, from 2016, any piece of work submitted the ramifications are still being felt from the White House to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the key Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Memorandum2, mechanism for assessing the research activities of British February 2013. It requires all federal agencies to ‘make Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) - must be deposited their research results free to read within 12 months after in a repository at the point of acceptance for publication. publication’, and this includes research data. At the time Each university’s REF score will have a profound effect on of the conference in summer 2014 most agencies were its share of the funding pot so institutional managers will behind schedule in meeting this requirement but most need to make sure that their researchers comply. This is a US federal agencies implemented their policies in response very effective way to push open access right to the top of to the OSTP memorandum early in 2015. Details vary from the ‘to do’ list. While there’s nothing like the REF currently agency to agency and the policies are still evolving but in the US, it is clear that the funder mandates for they apply to journal articles and conference proceedings openness will have ‘teeth’: failure to comply will result in and are likely to extend to books and electronic theses/ the withholding of grant payments or disqualification dissertations in future. As mentioned above, the US from consideration for future grants. mandate requires data to be made accessible and this is Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness Context 7 Beyond the scholarly article data and there seems to be a political will. A statement8 All these open access developments focus primarily on the from the G8 science ministers in June 2013 asserts a journal and the research article. This has been one of the commitment to making publicly funded scientific research earliest and most intensely explored areas of scholarly data open to the greatest extent and with the fewest communication but one of the most exciting current constraints possible although some legitimate, well- developments is the move to a broader view. It is important accepted legal, ethical and/or commercial restrictions will that dissertations and monographs can also be open and still sometimes be unavoidable. What these are, and how new models are being explored. Moreover, work is being best to manage them, are subjects for serious consideration. done to ensure workflows, code, software, video and other components in a research project can all be made accessible. Read on now, for a discussion of this and other key How should these evolve and interact in a digital world to themes that emerged during the conference. support ever more open and effective scholarship? This is a crucial question. It is true that some have already On the road towards openness, many been well studied and may have been the focus of policies stakeholders are now moving very fast. and programmes to encourage openness for a long time: There have been a number of developments electronic theses and dissertations are being produced in since the conference that are not covered in growing numbers and the role of open source software in the body of this report. We have highlighted supporting scholarship has received considerable some of the most promising in text boxes attention. But there is much more work needed in these like this one. areas and speakers at the conference explored approaches in more detail. Open Educational Resources (OERs), while not a primary focus of our discussions at the meeting, are also gaining traction; this is a trend worth tracking, and perhaps would form a useful future focus for joint discussions. Research data In the last few years, there has been a huge policy drive towards the sharing and management of research data. ‘We are now on the brink of an achievable aim: for all science literature to be online, for all of the data to be online and for the two to be interoperable,’ reported the Royal Society in 2012 in its influential report, Science as an Open Enterprise4. Funders such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH)5 in the US and RCUK6 and the Wellcome Trust7 in the UK have taken a lead with policies on opening up research Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness 8 Context Democratising knowledge Scholarly communication: the journey towards openness Themes: diverse discourse and the rise of social machines 9 Themes: diverse discourse and the rise of social machines Scholarly discourse is expanding. It involves more of There are also questions about how research outputs can everything - people, topics, institutions - and it is now only be made more open for analysis, exploration and reuse. rarely about one author and a single paper. Global library cooperative OCLC has been working through the implications Standard journal articles cannot do justice to the rigour of these developments for research and its report, ‘The and liveliness of some kinds of research. Some subjects Evolving Scholarly Record’9, is a useful resource. Sometimes, require multimedia to capture their multiplicity and bring data is not neatly linked and identified to a specific research them to life, whether it is data comparing quilts and maps15 project.