The Many Flavors of for the Geosciences, their Future Depends on who Treats

J. Alex Speer Mineralogical Society of America American Geosciences Institute Leadership Forum September 10, 2012 1307 New York Ave, NW, Washington DC What is Open-access (OA)?

Free and unrestricted online access to scholarly journal articles * Public Access is term for making taxpayer-funded research available Topics  Flavors  What is posted?  When is it posted?  Where is it posted?  Who is the Publisher?  Is there ?  Is there Copyright?  What Uses?  Who pays?  How much?  Obstacles  Future  GeoScience Society actions

What? 

 Peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript

 Title, authors, abstract

 Peer-reviewed, edited and published paper

When?  Immediate

 Delayed  embargo period allows for a period of paid access for the publisher to sell access to recover costs Where?  author’s personal page  entire article  link  discussion forums  email lists, blogs, wikis, file-sharing networks  journal website  publisher (MSA)  aggregate (GeoScienceWorld)  institutional repository or archive  or of articles, data, graphics, audio and video files  DASH (Harvard); DSpace (MIT)  USGS’ Publications Warehouse  central repository, usually established by discipline  PubMed Central (NIH biomedical sciences)  arXiv.org (physics)  none for Earth Sciences Publisher?  self- by author  traditional publishers  society  commercial  new Open Access publishers  PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science)  eLife (Hughes, Max Planck, Wellcome)  BioMedCentral (Springer)  eEarth + 24 other earth science titles (Copernicus Publications)  “Bulk” Publishers  'light' peer-review  publish any article considered methodologically sound  high acceptance rates  PLOS One (Public Library of Science community journals)  Minerals, Geosciences (MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) Peer review? Yes  traditional  moderated - arXiv.org reviews submissions and may “recategorize” those deemed off-topic  endorsement - arXiv.org authors must be endorsed prior to publishing by an arXiv author or is automatic based on non- public criteria No  open-peer commentary - non-anonymous commentaries and authors' reply published with the paper  not needed – shift the burden of quality control to the reader Copyright? Yes  no price access barrier + fair use  “Open Access is not Napster for science” (SPARC)  Open Access only requires copyright-holder consent or the expiration of copyright, not reform, abolition, or infringement of copyright law  authors control their work  right to be acknowledged and cited  block the distribution of corrupt copies  prevent commercial re-use of the work  does not protect facts, data, or ideas

No  no price barrier + uses beyond fair use  Advocates - limiting permissible uses to "fair use" is not enough  public domain  expiration of copyright (GoogleBooks)  US government work (USGS Publications Warehouse)  copyright abolition movement  copyleft – anyone is permitted to reproduce, adapt or distribute a work  open source - free redistribution and access Who pays?  the user (reader) is off the table

 business models  Author-pays  Hybrid-Open Access journal  “Volunteer” Payments  Mandates  Publisher  The Open Access fairy

Who pays?  Author-pays  Institution  grant overhead  COPE (Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity)  16 university & research organizations  modest level of funding corresponding to a few articles a year  Funding Organization  Grant line item  direct subsidies to Open Access publisher - eLife  Out of pocket

Who pays?

 hybrid-Open Access journal  subscription-based journals in which authors pays for open-access publishing of their articles  concern about double dipping  Publisher collecting both subscriptions and author fees for the same article

Who pays?  “Volunteer” Payments  based on the amount of uploading & downloading utilization  arXiv (Cornell University Library) requests annual voluntary contributions of $2,300 to $4,000  PLOS Institutional Member – POR. Member-affiliated researchers receive a 10% discount on PLOS fees  No one has commented on the oxymoron of what is essentially “Open Access subscribers”

Who pays?  Mandates  funded and unfunded  if funding agencies require open-access publishing, they should also allow or provide the payments for any associated author fees.

 Governments  Grants & contracts  Agency-supported  US federal government legislation wild cards  (H.R. 3699) – prohibits mandated open access  Federal Research Public Access Act (H.R. 4004) – unfunded mandate

 Non-government organizations (NGO)  Wellcome Trust  Howard Hughes Medical Institute  18 foundations supported PLOS start-up

Who pays?

 Publishers – from additional revenue streams  products and services beyond journals  society dues  other program income (speaker fees?)  grants  advertising  secondary rights revenue stream (more irony?)  sponsorship of issues

Open Access Fairy How much?

Open Access Publishers  PLoS ($1,350-$2,900) – majority of revenue is from the PLoS community-journals  MDPI ($265) Hybrid-Open Access journals  Royal Society ($1,932- $2,380)  Cambridge ($2,700)  Wiley-Blackwell ($3,000)  Springer (US$ 3,000)  Nature Publishing Group ($2,250-$3,900)  Elsevier ($3,000)  Taylor & Francis’ iOpenAccess ($3,250)  MSA American Mineralogist ($250 per page, typical 10 pages or less)  e-Life (free, until established) Funder Allowances  German Research Foundation (DFG) ($952)  Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) ($6,400 for each research project ) Obstacles  technology and infrastructure are in place, so….

 What are the obstacles?  Sustainable business model  No one believes they should be the ones to pay  Not a lot of spare cash around these days  Much Open Access thinking is based on the current experiences of the biomedical field  Open Access cannot be paid for by cost savings alone  Quality  Race to the bottom as a cost saving measure?  minimal or no peer-review  dictate where to publish  number of publications rationed  Resources consumed by minimal value publications  Open Access as a vanity press

 Many variations (flavors) of Open Access  Successful future of Open Access will be those flavor(s) meeting the criteria of a sustainable business model and quality Future Our Societies’ purpose  make the results of research widely available to advance scientific discourse and accelerate the pace of discovery  Open Access is an ideal mechanism for publishing societies

 mandatory depositing of primary data will accelerate expectation of Open Access articles

 all stakeholders will resist the game of musical chairs and being the ones left to pay

 There will be a mix of open-access (author-pays) and subscription-based, or hybrid, journals  other revenue sources are few and limited in the earth sciences  Open Access journals will evolve toward the traditional subscription model, traditional journals will evolve toward open access

 bulk publishing (ranging to a vanity press) may prove to be the cash cow necessary to support Open Access publications

GeoScience Society actions  The Geosciences are too small a discipline/market to drive Open Access but need to make it known that the experiences of biomedical publications are not universally applicable

 probably enough money currently in the journal-support system, combined with cost savings, to make OA journals economically sustainable  educating and convincing the stakeholders to redirect the resources of the support system  Authors (researchers)  will universities be willing to transfer some or all of the funds going to libraries for subscriptions to a fund to pay for publication author fees, especially for publications that arise after the investigator’s grant expires?  Stress quality issues