Following the hearing on Open Access on Tuesday 16^th April, I have a number of further points to make.

1. I confirm that our modeling showed that, in an all-Open Access world where all research reports are openly available, Gold Open Access would be cheaper – so long as article-processing charges are kept at a reasonable level. This, of course, would require suitable market pressure on these charges (see below).
2. Our modeling also showed that by far the cheapest way for any actor (university or nation) to get to that point is through Green Open Access. This has much lower costs than Gold OA (especially in the UK where the costs of the repository infrastructure are largely already sunk) and simply requires institutions to continue paying subscriptions for the journals they require while using their repositories to provide access to all their outputs. In this scenario, the issue of the UK producing only 6% of the world’s research but needing access to 100% of that corpus becomes less important. Annex A shows some further data.
   ‘Hybrid’ Gold Open Access
3. RCUK’s policy has a stated preference for Gold Open Access, and permits paying for so-called ‘hybrid’ Gold OA, where authors can opt to pay an article-processing fee to make individual articles Open Access in an otherwise toll-access (subscription-based) journal. In these cases, unless the publisher has a sophisticated mechanism in place to reduce subscription costs in line with the additional, new, revenue from this ‘hybrid’ Gold stream, the UK taxpayer ends up paying the publisher twice – once for the subscription and again to make individual articles freely available (this is known as publisher ‘double dipping’ into the taxpayer’s pot).
4. As we heard from Elsevier, that company has a system whereby reductions in subscriptions occur after a 2-year delay (presumably accounting practices make it difficult to shorten this timespan). The important point is that the reduction in subscriptions is effectively a gift to the rest of the world from the UK, since it applies across the board, across all subscribers. Meanwhile the UK has paid for the subscriptions and for the individual article-processing charges.
5. The bulk of the money RCUK is allocating to Gold OA will go to publishers already charging for subscriptions, since RCUK’s unusual (indeed, unique) ‘preference for Gold’ provides the incentive for these publishers to offer the ‘hybrid’ Gold option. It is questionable whether this is a good use of taxpayers’ money.
   A functioning market
6. We have seen three or four decades of above-inflation price increases from scholarly publishers. One of the opportunities that a move to Open Access brings is the chance to correct this and create a properly functioning market for scholarly information. There are a number of things wrong with the current academic publishing market, apart from the fact that a handful of large companies dominate it. In a subscription-based academic publishing world, the users of the products are not the purchasers: libraries make the purchase decisions. In an Open Access world where there is a per-article charge for publication, market pressure on prices could be brought to bear by a system where authors make the purchase decision and use money from their research grants to pay for publishing charges. This at least enables authors to decide on how best to spend their grants and makes them weigh up for themselves the value of different routes to Open Access.
7. RCUK’s model, where block payments are handed to universities to pay for publishing costs, will not help improve the market. The danger is that institutions, or national bodies acting on their behalf in a consortium model, may find it easiest to accept the offers of large publishers to set up a ‘block payment’ system. A university, or a consortium, could simply pay an amount upfront to a publisher which would cover the cost of a certain number of papers from that institution to be made Open Access. Publishers will claim (rightly) that this can save a university some administrative overheads. There is some attractiveness to it for institutions, therefore, and publishers certainly prefer this sort of arrangement to having to work with micropayments from thousands of authors.
8. What such a situation represents, however, is a move from a world of big-publisher ‘Big Deals’ on subscriptions to a world where we will have big-publisher ‘Big Open Access Deals’. The smaller (often learned society or researcher-led) publishers, and the ‘pure Gold’ Open Access publishers will be yet again elbowed out and the market will remain broken.
9. The way to create better pressure on prices is to allow authors to make the purchase decision themselves by permitting grant funds to be used for publishing charges. This is the model employed by almost all research funders around the world (excepting the Wellcome Trust which pays the charges itself on application).
10. We heard from Alicia Wise of Elsevier that the Competition Commission held an investigation into the academic publishing market in 2001 when Reed Elsevier proposed to purchase Harcourt, itself a large publisher.  My company, Key Perspectives Ltd, was contracted by the Competition Commission to help gather market data for its investigation, so we had more than a passing interest in the process and its outcome. The full report by the Competition Commission is here: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/reports/2001/457reed.htm#full
11. Dr Wise stated that the Competition Commission concluded that there was no public interest issue involved. This is not an accurate portrayal of the case. The truthful way of reporting what the Competition Commission at the time concluded is that there was a split, with two of the three panel members concluding there was no public interest issue and one concluding the opposite. The Commission decided to use the majority view as its official conclusion, but it is important to note that the level of disagreement with this by the third panel member was such that a note by him explaining his disagreement was included in the Commission’s official report at the end of Chapter 2 here:  http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/reports/2001/fulltext/457c2.pdf
12. Since 2001, when this investigation took place, the industry has seen further mergers and acquisitions, including the joining of two large publishers, Wiley and Blackwell, a few years ago. Whilst the long tail of tiny publishers has almost certainly grown longer in the past decade, the market has certainly not become any less dysfunctional.
13. The other issue is that of transparency. Big Publisher ‘Big Deals’ have long been a topic of discussion within the academic library community, and one of the reasons is that discussion of prices is generally not allowed: libraries are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements when they conclude such a deal. During the hearing last week Dr David Prosser, director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), tweeted this:”#bisoa perhaps have a librarian on the panel? We could tell you all about non-disclosure clauses (although not an #oa  issue)”. (https://twitter.com/RLUK_David/status/324117270773256192)
    Policy leadership
14. RCUK is still claiming leadership in policy development. This is belied by the facts. Despite the efforts of Janet Finch and David Willetts to persuade the European Commission and other funders to adopt the same ‘Gold preferred’ model as RCUK, none have yet done so. The policies announced since that of RCUK (Australian Research Council, the consortium of Irish funders and research institutions, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy) are policies that mandate Green OA. Other policies in the pipeline are the same.
15. RCUK has a table (created by Science Europe) showing the results of an analysis of European funder policies. This did not indicate funder preferences, merely recording whether Green or Gold OA are permissible by each funder. Thus the subtlety of funder preferences was lost, making it look as though RCUK’s policy was in line with many others. These others, however, are those that permit Gold OA as a route to Open Access but none of them express a preference for that and none top-slice money from the research budget to pay for any costs involved.
16. In fact, no other policy is like that of RCUK in stating a preference for Gold OA. A number of funders permit grant funds to be spent on publishing costs if authors so choose, but this is very different from allocating money up-front purely for publishing fees (and allowing this money to be spent on ‘hybrid’ OA). Our own analysis of funder policies (worldwide, not just European) shows RCUK out on its own because of this stance. The SPARC Europe policy table is presented in Annex B.
17. There is one outlier, the Austrian national funder, FWF. This funder has agreements with publishers to pay for Gold OA and the publisher automatically charges the funder – the author has no say in the matter (for example: https://plus.google.com/100061319416663890162/posts/KAJ6gUeST5Z Perhaps this can be counted as ‘preference by practice’ for Gold OA: most of the money goes on ‘hybrid’ OA while Austrian universities continue to purchase journal subscriptions.

ANNEX A: Costs of Green And Gold Open Access

These data are from the economic modeling exercise by Houghton & Swan (2012).

Unilateral OA

• Unilateral OA is much more expensive
• Costs exceed benefits
• Net cost of unilateral Green OA is much lower than that of Gold OA (£11m: £131m)

Worldwide OA

• In a Green OA world, benefits exceed costs by 4x
• In a Gold OA world, benefits exceed costs only by a factor of 1.4

ANNEX B: Research funder policies on Open Access

At 10 February 2013 the global picture was as below.

Overall numbers

Funders permitting Gold OA article processing fees to be paid from research grant, or by a request to the funder = 20

Green (repository-based) Open Access required: 33 funders

Either Green or Gold routes satisfy policy requirements (i.e. one or the other must be provided): 14 funders

Gold (journals) preferred where available: 1 funder

1 and 2 July 2013 – The British Library, London, UK

JISC Collections, in partnership with OAPEN Foundation, is holding a two-day international conference intended for all stakeholders in scholarly communications including European research funders, senior institutional managers, publishers, learned societies, librarians and researchers. The conference aims to raise awareness of open access, to increase understanding of key challenges and to identify where international common policies and frameworks could support the adoption of open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

Registration for this conference is free of charge. The final booking deadline is Friday, 21 June 2013. Please go to http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/JISC-Collections-events/oabooksconf/ for the full programme and online registration.

AGENDA

Erster Teil:

Hochschulbibliotheken, Universitäten und Freihandbibliotheken haben sich ganz wesentlich für die Förderung von Open Access eingesetzt. Mittlerweile entwickelt sich Open Access in Richtung Mainstream. Welche Maßnahmen sind für Bibliotheken zu ergreifen, um Open Access zu ermöglichen? Wie können Hochschulen die Umstellung auf Open Access unterstützen? Wie können Hochschulen den Übergang zu Open Access unterstützen, indem Sie das Vergütungssystem ändern. Können Bibliotheken/Hochschulen Finanzmittel aus Großprojekten zur Unterstützung von Open Access-Publishing neu verteilen.Dies sind die Themen- und Fragestellungen des ersten Teils.

Sprecher:

• Prof. Björn Brembs, Universität Regensburg, Germany Prof.
• Dr. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, Pro Vice Chancellor, University of Vienna, Austria
• Anna Lundén, Coordinator, the Swedish Library Consortium, BIBSAM, National Library of Sweden
• Berndt Dugall, Library Director, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Pause: Wein und Snacks

Zweiter Teil:

Open Access in Europa. SPARC Europe und andere Organisationen arbeiten intensiv für die Entwicklung sinnvoller Open Acess Richlinien für die EU. Was haben wir bisher erreicht und wie geht es weiter?

Informelles Gespräch im Anschluss zwischen:

• Dr Celina Ramjoué, European Commission and
• Dr Alma Swan, SPARC Europe’s Director for Advocacy

Wenn Sie Interesse an einer Teilnahme haben, senden Sie eine Email an: janna@arl.org
Sie finden die komplette Pre-LIBER Konferenz hier: http://www.liber2013.de/index.php?id=58

http://uit.no/Content/336173/Call_for_presentations_and_posters.pdf

The deadline for abstracts is August 1st.

The sub-title “Entering the Next Stage” reflects that publishing in the age of the internet is approaching a new phase, with new possibilities and new demands. This is also the background for our choice of keynote speakers. Research funders are starting to react, not least is this reflected in the new EU framework program Horizon 2020. Internet publishing makes it imperative to be conscious about how content should be licensed, this is beginning to emerge as an important discussion. And another example of a new phase is the fact that the humanities and social sciences  increasingly are moving towards internet publishing and open access.

We are very happy to introduce this year’s keynotes (with preliminary titles for their talks):

• Jean-François Dechamp, Policy Officer, European Commission: “Horizon 2020 (EU) and open access funder mandates”
• David Prosser, Executive Director of Research Libraries UK: “Licensing policies”
• Eelco Ferwerda, Director at OAPEN foundation: “Open access in humanities and social sciences”

The Munin conference is international, and the conference language is English. We will, though, consider posters in other languages.

We also have a call out for publishers’ presentations:

http://uit.no/Content/336174/Call_for_publishers.pdf

You will find more information about the Munin conference here: http://www.ub.uit.no/mc8

Follow us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TheMuninConference or Twitter @MuninConf

We are looking forward to seeing you and listening to you in Tromsø in November!

For the Munin Conference Organizing Committee,

Jan Erik Frantsvåg
Open Access adviser
The University Library of Tromsø
phone +47 77 64 49 50
e-mail jan.e.frantsvag@uit.no
http://en.uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43618&p_dimension_id=88187
Publications: http://tinyurl.com/6rycjns