Hi everyone, good afternoon. First of all, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you to PKP for inviting me. It's a real honor and I'm happy to be in Montreal. I'm gonna take a little bit of a kind of shift in gears and talk to you about a project

that I'm working on with PKP and the Open Access Cooperative Study and particularly testing a model for the flipping of subscription journals that we are calling a subscription equivalent transition. So that is me. As James mentioned, a doctoral candidate at Stanford.

John Walensky is my wonderful advisor. I also work for a publisher and a subscription publisher at that. I am the director of partnerships and initiatives for a nonprofit publisher called Annual Reviews. And that is relevant and I will tell you about that in a moment. So I do two full-time things and if you're wondering why I look a lot older

and tired than that picture, that's what two years of doing two full-time gigs will do to you. So this is the study. This presentation is gonna be available to all of you, I hope, and there's lots of live links in there for you to use.

But part of the study that we're working on with PKP is to look at exploring sustainable paths for transitions of journals to open access. For many of you, or for any of you that may be familiar with some of the major OA flipping work that's going on,

a lot of it being led in Europe, some by the OA 2020 group from the Max Planck Institute. A lot of it is focused very much on the sciences, on primary research, and is using the APC as the essential basic unit for the flipping of journals. As John mentioned in his talk yesterday,

we believe that the APC model isn't really the right model to be pursuing because it only focuses on a certain set of literature. Also, it only benefits a certain set of countries. So we're looking at exploring paths for alternate kinds of literature,

paths that may be more suitable for the humanities and social sciences, but also may be paths that are for research outputs that are not primary research. So what we, an idea that John had advanced is this idea of the subscription equivalent transition.

And so it's an alternative model for the transition of OA which does not work on APC. It's inspired by the scope three knowledge on latch and open library of the humanities initiatives for those of you who are familiar with that. The basic idea is that we have an existing economy

for subscriptions which may not be ideal but there are transactional relationships in place between libraries and publishers and why don't we use that as a starting point for transition to open access. So in this kind of model, for those of you who know

scope three will know, it in effect works this way. We're asking libraries to think of redirecting subscription funds towards supporting OA publishing of journals. So in this way it is revenue neutral for publishers. They continue to get the same money and it's expense neutral for libraries. We ask for three year commitment

and if the economics of a transition for a sustainable open access setup didn't work, there was always the option for publishers to revert back to the original subscription model. We initially tested this with libraries through a library survey.

There were about 256 participants from 220 institutions. Most of the response was from US and Canadian libraries although we did get a spread for some other countries. So this isn't really a whole lot of very useful information here other than the blue meaning that people agreed

or somewhat agreed with our approach. So libraries did see this as a kind of useful model to at least explore. 95% of them thought that this was something that they should look into. So wearing my hat at Annual Reviews

I thought okay well why don't I put my money where my mouth is and see if I can get us to transition one of our journals to open. And so this is gonna sound a little bit of a kind of marketing speak for the publisher but I think it's useful for you to know about our publishing model and how that

has essentially helped play into this. We're a non-profit publisher and when I say we're a non-profit we're not like some of the societies that are non-profit and have business models that are a little more like commercial publishers. We're very much a non-profit publisher.

We don't have a society to finance. We don't have shareholders to satisfy. For the last few years we've actually made less money than we've spent on our journals. We're working to correct that. The company is old. So is everyone on the board. Which is problematic in its own right

and I'll talk to that in a moment. It was established in 1932. I think the only way you can exit the board is by dying. We just lost the board member sadly.

But not funny. So we have 50 journals in the biomedical, physical and social sciences. We consider ourselves small but mighty. We have the same number of number one ranked journals as Springer Nature does, being only a very small company.

But increased visibility of our content is an important organizational goal. So we really do believe that there's tremendous value to our content being open. But sadly there have been no prevailing models that exist for transition of review articles

kind of like we published to be made open. So we thought with this kind of merging of research work being done at the Open Access Cooperative Project that we would see if we could transition at least one of our journals to open. We started this year with the annual review of public health.

And it is a journal that's been published annually since 1980. It has an impact factor of 10.29 for those of you who care about that kind of stuff. It's ranked second in the category in the JCR, second only to Lancet Global Health which is an open access publication.

So that was another kind of motivating factor for us to see what were the impact of making this journal open beyond citation rates. So it's a great and important journal. It being public health also meant that it was a much easier case for us to make this journal open to our board

who didn't necessarily see open access as being a viable business model for our company. But also that we publish stuff that really is relevant to people all over the world particularly in this journal. So just a little bit about the economics of the journal. So our company is a $15 million company.

We publish 50 journals. 15 divided by 50. About $300,000 it costs to publish a volume for one of our journals. We have 11,000 online journal subscribers. 878 that subscribe through a collection which means that they're buying kind of a bundle of journals.

About 120 that have a custom collection of journals. So they select just their own kind of customized collection and just under 100 that subscribe to the journal and just that journal. The subscription cost of one of our journals or at least for the annual review of public health

is $254. I say approximate because for some people who purchase through a collection they may get a 10% discount so some may be paying a little bit less. We have a handful of corporate customers maybe five or six who pay a little bit more. But on average it's about $250.

As a small company with a very small sales force we've primarily only really had an academic audience so we've only really reached out to universities around the world. We have pretty good penetration though amongst all the major universities so we have customers of all the major institutions around the world.

We were given funding support by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for this effort. And through their initiative on increasing transparency and openness in research the project had two objectives which was to examine the impact of open access on the journal and to develop and test a sustainable collective open access model.

We received funding in April 2017. We delayed publication of the volume which usually publishes in March to when we actually received the funding and then published volume 38 open access and then all 37 previous volumes are I guess now bronze but on the website freely available

but we didn't go to the effort of relicensing everything because that would have taken forever and been a nightmare. But this is the journal now. It's open access. It's linked on the presentation so you can go to it from there. This is one of the articles marked OA, CC by share alike license for one of the articles.

This doesn't really show very well but the very first article is an annual reviews article. I think it's from microbiology. So if you're not on a campus and you search for annual reviews you find one of our articles that's what it's gonna look like. It's gonna take you to a paywall site.

For others it may show a PDF to something that, to a version which is likely submitted manuscript version at an institutional repository possibly through researchgate or academia.edu. For any of you of public health now even if you're not on campus

you get the exact same experience that you would if you were on campus and on the right you'll see the link HTML annualreviews.org. So it's a subtle change for the user experience through Google Scholar but an impactful one. So as I said objective one of the project

was testing the impact. This is only, I only have three months of usage data but this is just to show you what it looks like. So the black line is showing you 2017. I don't know how visible this is all the way from the back but that is, the spike that you're seeing is the moment from when

the volume was published open access. This red line at the bottom which kind of ends at March was our denial data. So those were people that were trying to get to the journal and trying to access an article but were turned away by the paywall. So it's nice to see that go away and if you think of attempts prior to March

at accessing the volume as being the successful attempts which were about 30,000 plus the denials which was about 35,000 we ended up in the first month hitting 70,000 so it indicated that we weren't only reaching

potentially the initial audience of people that has successfully and then unsuccessfully tried to get to the article but we are reaching a whole new audience by making the content open. Now as much as that decline looks a little discouraging this is comparing to the same period last year. We usually go through a summer slump in usage.

What this is showing you is in April we had 126% increase in usage, in May it was 100%, and in June almost 180% increase in usage over previous years. So I can go to my board and say hey you know open access is good we should be doing more of this.

I had to take Iran out of this table because their percentage increase was so high it was basically dwarfing all of these. They had a 3,800% increase in usage in the last three months and I'm not sure what that's attributable to

but possibly, I don't know, I believe there's Sci-Hub mirror sites in Iran so maybe there were some bots downloading. But for France, Japan, India, Russia, Germany everyone had an increase of over 200%. In the UK and USA the increases

are a little more modest but still 25, 30% increases. I guess in that case it might suggest that through our subscription business we had already reached much of that audience so we weren't seeing as much of an increase. France, we don't have a lot of customers so it was nice to see this big increase in France.

And just as a sample for Sub-Saharan Africa we saw some huge increases in usage from the journal as well, like really important and encouraging to see that, particularly for a public health journal. So next up, as we're pretty early on in this project we're gonna be mapping usage and citation

over a long period of time, tracking all metrics of the articles. I'm gonna be working hopefully with Juan to do some surveying of readers for demographic info. We've started syndicating content to other platforms to try and get awareness of this stuff in front of the public health practitioner community.

This is one that actually appeared today on the AS Association of Schools of Public Health Programs Friday letter. One of the articles is being highlighted there. So next, talking about testing the subscription equivalent transition model.

So this is where we ask institutions to redirect their subscription spend towards supporting OA publication costs because we received funding in April we had actually already invoiced everyone in January for 2017, but then we received funding to essentially make the volume open.

So institutions had already paid for 2017 so we had to go back to our institutions and ask them if they would be willing to contribute their 2017 spend, so what they had already spent on the journal, towards keeping the 2018 volume open. If they didn't, they could ask for a refund or a credit,

so we're in the process of doing that. And if there's a shortfall, we will seek alternative funding sources. So we're in the very initial stages. We have contacted only consortium customers of which there are 600. We've heard from 35 of them. I was able to add 11 to the contributions this morning

because the consortium in the Netherlands agreed, so it was not looking as good as it was. If we don't hear response, we must refund the money to the customers. We'll be doing a couple more rounds of solicitation from libraries for contributions. A couple lessons are that timing is critical, so this whole thing about receiving the funds

after we had invoiced libraries has proven to be really problematic. We need ways to demonstrate early impact, so we're tracking usage. I'm trying to think of more engaging, maybe even interactive ways for people to see how usage is changing and across the world.

It's complex working with consortia and also with agents. Everyone has a different way of doing business, and that's been somewhat tricky to navigate. We've also encountered the problem of some people interpreting the language of the email in which we have solicited their contributions

to the collective fund. They're thinking of it as a donation, and in some areas like in Georgia, states prohibit the use of library funds for donations, and so that is something that we're gonna try and get around. An alternative approach would have been to use the funding to manage free ridership,

so to push the funding to a future year to try and build a collective for the next volume, and then if there was any free ridership, to then use the funding to buffer that, but we had put it in the proposal, so that's what we had to do.

The collective offer for us also needs to be bigger, so we're working to model and build new collective offerings. We're working with Rain Crow. We're gonna work with libraries in the process of doing this, and we're gonna try and frame it to circumvent this donation restriction.

How can you help? I'm gonna ask for librarians in the room to be an advocate. Speak to your collections librarians of these kinds of approaches. Let them know what you think. If you'd like to tweet about this project, use the hashtag OpenPublicHealth, and thank you very much.