The Many Flavors of Open Access 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 peer review? Is there Copyright? What Uses? Who pays? How much? Obstacles Future GeoScience Society actions What? Manuscript 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 preprints or postprints 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-publishing 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 Research Works Act (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 .