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The second wave of transition on the way to open science

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The second wave of transition on the way to open science
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Production Year2022
Production PlaceKyiv, Ukraine

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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
I thank you very much for inviting me here. It is truly an honor. And I want to, yes, congratulate you on the incredible efforts that you have gone to to create this conference and share knowledge, which is so important in this critical time
under the conditions that you're living, which are terrifying. So thank you so much. And yeah, I'm very happy to be here to share what I can with the library community and the research community in Ukraine. Okay, I will talk today about a bit
of the initiative that I coordinate. And even though this is an open science conference, before we can really dig into the benefits of open science, we're working on another important transition.
And that is open access. I'm going to talk especially to the librarians who happen to be participating in this call, but not only librarians. So primarily librarians, but also research administrators, researchers, this is an important bit of information
for you as well to understand what we're working on. When we think of scholarly communication, we have to recognize we have already lived through one big transition. We moved from the print world to the digital world in the 1990s.
But when you stop to think about how we do business as libraries with the publishers of scholarly journals, the business practices are the same as what they were in the print era.
So very backward facing. We are now in the midst of a second wave of transition. And that is the open access transition, which is vital before we can move to the third transition. I'm sure all of you have been involved in open access initiatives.
You are working on open access to develop your institutional repositories. Probably you have your own journals, diamond journals that enable authors to publish their work without having to pay fees. But we also need to think about the bulk
of scholarly journal publishing, which is provided by commercial publishers and which is still behind a subscription paywall. So we will start by looking at the scholarly publishing landscape right now.
If you are a librarian, you will recognize the names in the description of the legend of this graph as some of the biggest publishers that you deal with. And these are the journals, the publishers of the journals your researchers want access to.
And this is a view of scholarly publishing today. The majority of research articles, and these are indexed in Web of Science, the majority are published by commercial publishers. Okay, we can recognize this fact.
And as libraries, we look at these in terms of how can I get access to the journals of these publishers for my authors, for my readers, my researchers. But increasingly, we need to think in a different way about the scholarly publishing market. Here is a view of the past 20 years,
articles published in the last 20 years. And we can see in 2020 in Web of Science, they indexed around 2.5 million articles, research articles and review articles. So actual research, it's a lot of articles.
And you see how the growth trend has continued over the past two decades. But now we're going to view this graphic in a different way and look at what this means in terms of open access. Because if we normalize all of that publishing
over the past 20 years, we can see this gray area here are the articles still be published behind a paywall. Here we have the articles, the green is open access in a repository. Then red is where you have open access
on a publisher platform, but the publisher holds the copyright, so bronze. Then you have the hybrid in the light yellow and orange is fully open access journals, gold journals. And look at how striking
the increase of gold open access is. And we know that if you look at DOJ, the directory of open access journals, the majority of the journals are on a non fee based model.
But when you look at the actual article output, the majority of articles are published under a fee based open access publishing model. So an APC, for example. And this creates an enormous problem for our researchers, right? And for also libraries,
because if we think about what is our role in the future as open access continues to grow and becomes the norm in scholarly publishing. So we're gonna take yet another look at what this market looks like. And I want you to focus on the right side,
the column to see the revenue. This is what publishers, commercial publishers are making in revenues through their open access, through their journal publishing. We have more than 10 billion US dollars that we globally pay every year for subscriptions.
And you see that 1.6 billion US dollars is now the size of the open access market, publishing market. And that is increasing year on year, an incredible increase. So not only do we need to think about
the publishing landscape, but also what does that mean for our investments? There are implications to the current situation. Right now we have the journal subscription market, which we know is not transparent.
We don't know the fees paid by libraries and library consortia around the world are not disclosed because we have non-disclosure clauses in our agreements with publishers. So we cannot compare pricing and assess,
is the pricing fair? And the publishers are at liberty to charge the prices they like because we do not have that market pressure as libraries. But in the meantime,
we also have a growing open access publishing market. And in the case of hybrid journals, this means that the fees that publishers ask to publish articles open access, those APCs come on top of subscription fees. So a duplicate revenue stream going to the same publishers,
which is double dipping, and that is not, it's not fair and it's not efficient. And authors who pay APCs, they are one single author interacting with a global publisher
and they don't have any over, there is no one there to give them oversight and to help them with their open access publishing or to negotiate on their behalf for better conditions for open access publishing, right? Even in the case of a discount or a waiver on an APC,
an individual author has to write and ask for a waiver. And this is not regulated or negotiated on their behalf by the author's institution or even at a national consortium level. This is the situation we are in now
that we are trying to change. That situation is what prompted the creation of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, which has signatories and participants from around the world. And they are libraries and library consortia, funders, research organizations,
higher education institutions, all simply stating this, this is our expression of interest, stating that we need subscription journals to transition to open access because open access is good for science.
And we don't want to pay extra money for this transition. We don't want to pay for hybrid open access on top. We want to use the funds that we spend on subscriptions should be transitioned, transformed into funds to cover open access publishing for our authors.
And we need to enact this transition together with our researchers, with publishers, with funders. We need to change the way we are supporting scholarly publishing.
The method that is now most used to put that transition into practice is what are called transformative agreements. So in the past, a library or library consortium would negotiate a subscription agreement with the publisher. Today, we have transformative agreements.
And in the agreements, you are basically taking the money you used to pay for access and using that investment to support open access publishing so that authors can keep their copyright and science can be made open.
But just very briefly here, I will say that these agreements have multiple functions. They are a way to drive more openness in the publisher portfolio, pushing them to a flip to open access,
but they are also an instrument for institutions and for libraries and countries to begin to understand, to track, where are the authors publishing? What are they paying? Are they paying APCs?
How can I transition? How can I change the investments of my country, of my institution to support open access instead? What processes do I need to change? They're very much an instrument of change,
a framework for change, which is sustainable because it doesn't require extra money. And it is also stable in that it continues to support the journals where authors most frequently publish. It might be nice to destroy the whole system
and start over again, but maybe that's not feasible right now until we can take care of changing research assessment criteria. So we need to work on multiple fronts to arrive at an open paradigm. This concept of transformative agreements started in Europe,
but they have grown and are being negotiated in countries all around the world. I would also like to mention that thanks also to the work of Eiffel, they are being negotiated by and for library consortia
in resource limited contexts. And it's not only a case of changing your investment. I mean, there are consortia that do not have funds to pay for subscriptions, but we still need libraries and library consortia
to negotiate on behalf of their researchers to enable those that discounted APC or that waiver for my authors to publish openly so that it is a general condition and it can be easy for authors
and they don't have to ask individually for those equitable conditions. Through all of these agreements over the past few years, we have been able to create more than half a million articles immediately published open access.
So that's an incredible result, I think. We are also seeing the impact of these agreements on publisher portfolios. So you can see in the pink or light orange color here, those are articles published in the publisher's portfolio
thanks to a transformative agreement. So if you look down here at Cambridge University Press, for example, they're well on their way to flipping their whole portfolio to open access. You can see Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Wiley.
Their progress is not so aggressive, but there is certainly, at least in the case of Springer, Nature, and Wiley, there is progress being made. As more and more institutions and consortia negotiate these agreements, we can create that delta of openness and drive them to flip to open access.
You see down here also, I'm showing the growth of one fully open access publisher just to reiterate that we as libraries and institutions need to understand how much open access publishing is growing and we need to think about how we can intervene
and interact with publishers to make sure our authors get the best conditions possible for their accepted manuscripts. So ultimately, these agreements are working to rein in the spending on hybrid open access.
They should lower the overall investment in scholarly publishing. The agreements negotiated today often include not only hybrid journals, but the fully open access journals of a publisher. So think Springer, Nature hybrid journals plus Springer, Nature fully OA journals
where there's been huge growth, negotiating discounts on those APCs to lower the overall cost for the research community. And some like to, we have another strategy, which is rights retention
that the funders are proposing here. And that is a wonderful strategy to enable open access, but it's not necessarily enough to reign in the APCs that are being charged. So really we need to think about negotiating with publishers as part of our broader
open access strategies so that all of our investments are under oversight. We can see that they are going toward open access and not continuing with paywall system. One last thought is as we are enabling more
and more open access and we are changing how we work with publishers, that work is not complete. We know that it's not enough to negotiate a discount for my authors on gold APCs. We want open access publishing provided
that is provided by commercial publishers to be globally equitable. So we need as a community, a global community to start conversations on a global level on what criteria could enable,
for example, differentiated pricing of open access publishing services. Not everyone should pay the same APC. We need, we want to take this opportunity to ensure as we transition to a fully open paradigm that the conditions are globally equitable.
And this is something we're working on. I will leave you the slides with links so that you can consider participating in the workshops and yeah, getting involved in these discussions that we are having as a global community. And that is the direction we are heading. And of course, reworking, changing our,
how our investments support scholarly communication is a first step as we continue toward an open science paradigm. So thank you very much for your attention.