Things I still don't understand or wish I knew the answer to about Open Access...
I've started seriously studying and blogging about Open Access since 2012, starting off by reading books by Walt Crawford and Peter Suber and since then I've continued to read and muse about the issue covering everything from
How academic libraries may change when Open Access becomes the norm (2014)
The question of whether librarians have to be open access advocates by definition (2017)
as well as practical pieces like how to determine level of OA for your institution via a free dashboard (2020), how I used Unpaywall to check and fix issues with regards to indexing in the service (2020) and much more
Of course, at the time I started, in my very first post on the topic, I noted I felt I didn't fully understand everything and in 2014 I wrote
I freely admit squabbles between open access advocates on the exact definition of open access, on the best way to provide/reach it etc often threaten to confuse me.
As such it's not surprising, everything I have written has not stood the test of time (in fact most are wrong) but we grow and learn but surely by now I understand quite a bit on Open Access, right?
In fact, would it surprise you to know that I still feel pretty much the same sense of confusion around Open Access the way I did 10 years ago? If you think I'm prone to intellectual modesty, I can say I honestly feel I don't have that sense of confusion with regards to LIS areas like say article discovery.
As such I have decided to write out this blog post that summarises my current thinking about Open Access as of this moment in Oct 2022.
Warning: You should never accept what I write without a big pinch of salt, but this goes even more so for this blog post!
Definitions about Open Access do you really need to go deep into the rabbit hole?
One thing off the bat that confuses me is the myriad definitions of Open Access, despite writing what I thought was a definitive post on Why Open Access definitions are confusing(2021) , I still see twitter debates by the usual suspects that eventually confuse me.
The latest involves a reaction to the latest 2022 OSTP memo with the idea of a proposal to measure "Green via/by Gold OA" which as usual led to extreme arguments. While I can understand the reason for wanting it (I've may have mused along similar lines in the past but have never attempted to name it), if I wade too far in the arguments, I get the feeling of confusion come surging on.
I suspect, at the end of the day trying to go deep into the rabbit hole to understand the different ways people want to define Open Access types is a fun game but ultimately just semantics. You can define things in any reason way and as long as both parties can communicate clearly the way they are defining things, you can map definitions from one way to another.
Example does Gold OA journals include Diamond OA journals and APC bearing Gold Journals or does Gold OA journals purely mean APC bearing Gold Journals only? On the face of it, it seems to me either definition doesn't really have ground shaking implications as long as you aware which definition is used.
That said, I'm not unaware that there are political reasons for trying to impose your side's definition of Open Access.
For example, the publishers have completely won in creating a semantic equalvance between Gold OA (and maybe even OA) and APC bearing articles for not just researchers but also many librarians such that most tend to assume APC is the default or only model. This of course ignores Green OA or Diamond OA (if you want journal hosted OA). Possibly the debate over whether Gold OA includes Diamond OA or not might have similar political implications.
And as new business models and characteristics of journals/articles are added, the definition and labelling game will get increasingly confusing.
I guess if you are one of those who are extremely bright and can keep straight all these semantic definitions, it might be fun to mentally joust around on these matters with your equals. For me, it just makes me more confused.
How bad is the confusion? It's so bad now, when someone says "Gold OA" or worse "Gold OA Journal" I have to stop and think a moment if it includes Hybrids all not! (Spoiler, there is no definition I know of that puts Hybrid Journals as Gold OA Journals which shows how badly I managed to confuse myself!) , that's how confused I made myself.
As such I will no longer try to go deep into the rabbit hole whether someone proposes a new novel way to define OA types. It probably isn't helpful to me.
Why OA advocates disagree
One thing I did figure out is Open Access advocates differ because they often actually have vastly different goals. Sure everyone wants Open Access so scholarly content can be freely accessed, but they want it under radically different conditions.
For example, there are huge differences between
a) a publisher who wants genuinely to transition to a Open Access World as long as they are not worse off in such a world i.e. maintain the same revenue in a subscription world
b) a publisher who is sitting pretty right now in a subscription world (or is just risk adverse) and has no real ambitions of transitioning to Open Access World but is happy to milk both subscription and APCs to earn more if they can.
c) A librarian who wants to transition to a Open Access World but only if revenue paid fro their institution to publishers are much reduced (perhaps immediately or in the long run)
d) A librarian or researcher from global south who wants Open Access via a equitable system that does not prevent researchers from their institution from publishing
e) A researcher or librarian who wants to not just transition to a Open Access World but wants the ownership of the journals or Scholarly comm system to be in other hands than that of the current legacy publishers
f) A researcher or librarian who wants to reform the whole Scholarly communication system and even revamp if not abolish the whole idea of journals! (see latest Elife announcement)
These are just some non-exhaustive end goals and even those with the same goals might have different motivations driving them.
Naturally, this leads to different recommendations and tactics on the road to OA.
But what about people who apparently want the same thing, why do they still disagree on what to do ?
Disagreement on tactics due to empirical matters
Take the case of a fairly uniform group, librarians who want to not just get OA, but lower their wage bill. Even in such a group, they may still differ because not all institutions are in the same position
For example, if your institution isn't very research intensive but as a large user base (a READ institution), a world based on APCs would probably be very favorable for you, since in such a world, the burden of supporting the Scholarly comm system would not fall much on you and you no longer need to pay for subscriptions for your institution to read despite a large FTE.
So, to avoid that let's assume it's two librarians in the same institution, might they still disagree? Yes!
For example, one might reasonably disagree on which of the following models or strategies are best or the right timing or mix of them.
a) Transformative deal - Read & Publish
c) Create or support Diamond OA journals and open infrastructure to create competition
d) Unbundle first
One of the things I've been trying to do recently is to think of it from the Publisher point of view. For one, I'm starting to realize there is a lot of complexity in cases where Publishers co-operate with Societies and Associations. The shift to OA is upsetting a lot of these long standing revenue/profit sharing agreements between publishers and such societies and for those societies who have allowed the Publisher to legally own the rights to the journal title, they are out of luck if they disagree with the new direction.
In any case publishers are faced with the same uncertainty on strategic choice even given the same goals, it's unclear what is the right move since this often involves predicting what other parties might do in reaction to your moves.
For sure this uncertainty or disagreement can only be resolved by empirical study or the fullness of time.
Take the idea of "transformation deals" where the idea is roughly for journals to transition from a subscription model to a Open Access - Pay to Publish model via APCs by funneling the money institutions now pay from subscriptions to APCs.
While this idea sounds simple in theory, in practice it is incredibly complicated. Even if you assume a Publisher who is sincere in switching over to a APC world without increasing revenue, it's still a risk for them because the full transition/flip is only worth it if enough of their subscribers agree to the new model and there will be winners and losers among institutions in such a flip and not all will agree to sign such agreements for numerous reasons we already mentioned.
Instead, what is happening is that while some institutions (typically the richer ones) are signing Read and Publish deals where their researchers get to publish Open Access (some agreements have caps/quotas , some don't, depending on the strength of the negotiation team), other institutions are still on the same subscription only deal.
Nobody but the publishers knows of course, but I'm guessing they are no worse off now than under the old 100% subscription system and might even be earning more than before!
And even if Publishers earn sufficiently from TA deals that they decide to flip to full Gold OA, the question becomes what then?
In the current subscription world, publishers routinely raise prices at 3% or more yearly. In a APC world, would such a thing be doable?
Or in an APC world, will researchers truly be price sensitive, and this competition drive down APCs leading eventually to a cheaper world? As some hope?
If you believe that in the long run, APCs will be price sensitive and researchers will shop around, then you may be willing to transition to a world where APCs are the norm by signing Read and Publish or Publish and Read deals. I think this is the general belief of the people who negotiate for the University of California System.
But if you don't believe this be true, you would be adamantly against APC, without even considering the additional problem due to inequity caused by pay to publish for researchers in the global south.
I'll be cynical and guess that in the APC world, APC levels will not fall, rather they will increase ,given it's about prestige. I think there are some studies starting to suggest that.
I suspect it's only a slight exaggeration to say Elsevier and its peers are probably one of capitalism's most ruthless and refined machines at drawing profit from customers.
BTW this doesn't just refer to only for profit organizations, we have long learnt the lesson that non-profits publishers including those owned by societies can and often are as aggressive in trying to do the same except it's called surplus not profit.
Yet think about it OA advocates disagree on simply everything except one thing - Open Access is "good" or a "good". Given that everyone agrees OA is good and desirable, do you expect one of capitalism's favourite's sons to just leave money on the table and try not to charge for such 'value'?
Viewed from this lens, it feels somewhat delusional to think transition to an OA world would makes things cheaper perhaps even in the long run. Perhaps achiving the OA transition and getting away with no or minimal differences would be a huge win?
Do libraries use levels of Open Access as a factor to cancel journal subscriptions?
Another area of grave disagreement which needs to be resolved by empirical study is how much the level of Open Access affects renewal and cancellation decisions.
A long tenet of faith long held by Green OA advocates is that libraries do not cancel subscriptions based on level of OA, and therefore there is no reason, journal publishers should force embargos for deposits to repositories, particularly on accepted manuscripts (Green OA).
There were two ways to resist this argument.
Firstly, one could argue up to recently a high enough level of OA was not reached. For example, most people would not expect libraries to cancel if level of OA was 10% or only 20% and cancellation would only start appearing at higher levels of OA.
Secondly. one would observe Green OA copies in repositories are usually accepted manuscripts and that because researchers value Version of Record/Publisher copy, libraries still can't cancel even if level of OA is high, if the OA copies were mostly not version of record.
But with the rising popularity of Transformative deals like Read and Publish , hybrid journals are starting to see an increasing % of journal articles becoming available OA and these would be Version of Record copies so the second argument is starting to lose it's force.
The question here then is while you may not cancel when OA level is 10% for a journal, what about 50%? 60%? 70%? 80% ?
Logically speaking there must be a point where libraries go, it's probably cheaper to just cancel the title, and rely on ILL or other options. Of course, ILL is less convenient so each institution doing these types of decisions will have their own calculus on the pros and cons of cancelling.
Another point that some might not appreciate is that cancelling may not mean losing full access, some might have perpetual backfile access, so cancelling isn't as big a catastrophe as it seems. An article notes (though it's more about cancelling a big deal)
There’s a “masking” effect of post-termination access (PTA) on interlibrary loan (ILL), at least for journal titles that have PTA following the cancelation of a big deal. That is, directly after cancelation of a big deal, the library has access to all newly published articles for the title. As time goes on, the library has a decreasing proportion of the newly published articles. We know from Unpaywall what people actually read—and what they read in most disciplines are the newest articles from the most recent few years. So, right after cancelation, the library has what people want to read—new articles. But as time goes on the library has fewer and fewer of the newest articles, leading to a potential increase in ILL. In summary, right after cancelation a potential increase in ILL is held off because of PTA.
We know for sure some libraries are looking at OA levels as one decision point, certainly that is the whole point of the Unsub service and all their client definitely consider OA levels but how common is this and how big the weight does OA level hold in the decision process?
Why is this important? As a recent article puts it
A hybrid journal can increase its income by publishing a greater number of open access articles. However, institutions tend to stop paying for subscriptions if the ratio between open access and subscription-based publications exceeds a certain threshold.
From the publisher's point of view as I mentioned before they are themselves deciding at the right time to "flip" a hybrid subscription journal to full APC Gold journal
Take the case of a publisher of a hybrid journal who is sincerely aiming to achieve 100% OA as long as they can be sure the revenue from APCs they get is the same as from subscriptions.
Such a journal would be unlikely to suddenly flip to 100% Gold OA in one jump since they are unsure if such a move will earn APC sufficiently to match their subscriptions. Also as mentioned the dynamics of a full Gold OA journal model will be totally different from a subscription one and it's unclear how much revenue increases they can charge going forward which adds to the uncertainty.
On the other hand, if publishers see libraries cancel or start to cancel subscriptions for a journal as OA levels go up, and as a result the value of the subscription deal to the publisher plunges, Publishers have more and more reason to take the risk and just flip.
Indeed, it occurs to me even the discussion or perception of whether libraries might cancel based on OA levels might cause publishers to react
I don't have any evidence either way except to say there are definitely SOME institutions that use OA levels as a factor to cancel journals but how wide spread the practice is it's unclear to me. My guess is currently some of the leading more sophisticated academic libraries are definitely doing a huge amount of number crunching and OA levels has to be a point they consider but they may be the exception not the norm yet.
Of course, things can change very quickly....
Some quick thoughts on Diamond OA journals
As of Oct 2022, I'm starting to observe the idea of Diamond OA start to emerge (ie researchers throw the term at me).
This made me relook closely at the Diamond OA study. I'm sure as a librarian, you have heard faculty sometimes go... "these subscriptions are so expensive, why don't the library start a journal to compete!". They may even suggest hosting a Diamond Journal.
In reality of course this is a uphill battle, not all libraries have the capabilities (knowing a bit about Scholarly Communications like me, is far from knowing the nuts and bolts on what Journal Publishing requires!).
And then there is a prestige factor, faculty can say they want competition for the big boys like Elsevier, Wiley, Sage etc, but their knee jerk reaction when they see a journal that doesn't come from these publishers is suspicion. Particularly if they are hosted on open source systems like OJS.
The other option is to outsource some of the work to these commercial publishers so it looks "normal" but then you may be charged an arm or a leg for the privilege of it assuming you hold on to the legal rights, so it goes back to money flowing to the commercial publishers.
Some quick thoughts about transformative deals
The ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry lists known Transformative Agreements. Currently, I suspect this Registry is probably not anywhere near complete particularly outside Europe/North America but it's still the most comprehensive place I know to look.
The registry shows while the first such deal started in 2014, you can see by eyeballing it, the take up really started to rise in 2018/2019. It's also hard to get a sense on how widespread they are because the registry lists both consortiums and individual Universities but I believe they are spreading to the dismay of OA advocates who oppose such models.
While there are reasons to worry about APC models that potentially shut out researchers from the global south, my concern is slightly different.
The first such deals I believe were hammered out with great difficulty, negotiated by extremely professional and skilled teams, faculty led (not librarian), backed by massive amounts of data crunching and having serious creditability of being ready to walk away because they had backup plans (and some really did so and endured a cutoff of access!).
But because of these successes, they may have normalized the idea of doing a "Tranformative deal" because after all UC system, Consortiums in Netherlands, Germany have done it right? Publishers might then be approaching individual institutions or less experienced consortiums which are less equipped to negotiate, leading to adverse outcomes.
That said some of the negotiated contracts are made open to the public and this makes it easy for less experienced institutions to have a sense of the value of the deals offered to them. Some like ACM Open Model has fully transparent pricing which further reduces the risks.
But the tricky deals are the ones where the contract deals are not made available. If you are a institution first dipping your feet into such deals you may be extremely disadvantaged, particularly if Publishers approach you to consider one and you have only theoretically heard of such deals.
While library pioneers in this space have generously shared their experiences (e.g. general strategies), not all institutions are not ready to implement such plans.
After all, to get the best outcomes, a business per usual type "negotiation" isn't going to cut it. It takes a lot of time and groundwork to get faculty support so that one can be creditable at the negotiation table.....
Conclusion
This is a long rambling piece (even by standards of this blog), but I wrote this to capture my thoughts on Open Access business models at this point in time - October 2022. None of this should be relied on if you are really in a position to decide institution policy on such matters!