Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/Recent Policy Developments

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Recent Policy Developments
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​ 5. Recent Policy Developments

5.1. Finding ways to improve the flows of the available stock of knowledge has become in recent years a matter of increasing interest to Governments as well as for organisations involved in funding and conducting research. Such measures are seen as promoting

  • enhanced transparency, openness and accountability, and public engagement with research;
  • closer linkages between research and innovation, with benefits for public policy and services, and for economic growth;
  • improved efficiency in the research process itself, through increases in the amount of information that is readily accessible, reductions in the time spent in finding it, and greater use of the latest tools and services to organise, manipulate and analyse it; and
  • increased returns on the investments made in research, especially the investments from public funds.

5.2. For all these reasons, there is an increasing tendency across Government and other bodies, both in the UK and elsewhere, to regard the information generated by researchers as a public good; and to promote the reduction, if not the complete removal, of barriers to access. Such ideas are associated with pursuit of the mutual benefits that can arise from the free movement of goods and services, and, by extension, information; and from open innovation in a world where knowledge is widely distributed, and where much ‘intangible’ innovation activity is underpinned by openness and collaboration. Also associated with such ideas is a recognition that communication and dissemination are integral parts of the research process itself; and a growing acknowledgement that the costs of those processes are a proper call on research budgets.

5.3. There is also a recognition, however, that existing barriers should not be replaced by new ones; that moves to promote open access must therefore include measures to ensure that the costs can be met; and that the performance and standing of the UK research community should not be put at risk.

5.4. A number of studies in recent years have sought to identify the costs and benefits associated with moves to increase access to the published outputs of research. There are considerable difficulties in gathering the data necessary to underpin such studies; and the modelling on which calculations of costs and benefits are based is complex, involving assumptions which are often controversial.[1]

​ 5.5. But the overall picture seems reasonably clear: that on the most plausible assumptions, significant efficiency savings, and many wider social and economic benefits could be achieved if we were to move worldwide to an open access regime, complete with peer review and with effective search, navigation and other value-added services currently provided by publishers, libraries and others. The key policy questions are how to promote and organise such a move; and how such a regime might be organised so that it is sustained by flows of funding to support continued investment and innovation in high-quality services that provide a key underpinning to the success of the UK and other research communities.

5.6. In that context, Governments, funders and others have recently announced new measures to promote open access. The European Commission has thus announced that it will take further steps to promote open access in the Horizon 2020 programme,[2] moving from the pilot in Framework Programme 7 (which covered c20% of the research funded through that programme) to a position where the EU will require all the publications arising from projects funded under Horizon 2020 to be made available on open access terms. Similarly, the Spanish Government is considering how to implement a law on science, technology and innovation passed in 2011[3] which requires publicly-funded researchers to make the accepted manuscript of published articles available as soon as practicable, and in any case within twelve months. In the US, the proposed Research Works Act, which would have forbidden open access mandates for federally-funded research, was withdrawn in February 2012; and the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require federal research funding agencies to provide online access to research manuscripts stemming from their funding within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal, was reintroduced.[4] The National Science and Technology Council is currently considering how best to increase access to federally-funded scientific research.[5]

​ 5.7. In the UK, the Government announced in its Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth[6] in December 2011 a commitment to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge; and that it would work with partners, including the publishing industry, to achieve that goal. In the light of the discussions in the Working Group, the Research Councils are also now proposing to update and enhance their policies on open access; and the Higher Education Funding Councils are proposing to make open access a condition for the submission of published outputs for any Research Excellence Framework (REF) or similar exercise that follows the forthcoming one which will be completed in 2014.

5.8. In the light of developments such as these, it seems likely that the transition towards open access will accelerate in the next few years. The Group’s aim is to support that process, but to ensure that policies are implemented in ways that do not disrupt the essential features of a high-quality and continuously-developing research publishing ecology, or the high performance and standing of the UK research community.

Repositories

5.9. Funders’ and institutional policies relating to repositories have for the most part up to now sought to address publishers’ concerns about sustainability and risks to the viability of their journals. They do so by making reference to the restrictions imposed by copyright and other intellectual property rights, by allowing embargos on access and so on. They thus reflect a widespread acknowledgement[7] that repositories on their own do not provide a sustainable basis for a research communications system that seeks to provide access to quality-assured content; for they do not themselves provide any arrangements for pre-publication peer review. Rather, they rely on a supply of published material that has been subject to peer review by others; or in some cases they provide facilities for comments and ratings by readers that may constitute a more informal system of peer review once the material has been deposited and disseminated via the repository itself.

5.10. The restrictions imposed by publishers seem to have succeeded so far in limiting any potential impact on take-up of subscriptions to their journals. The National Science and Technology Council in the US notes that since the introduction of the NIH requirement for publications to be made available in PubMedCentral within twelve months, there has been strong growth in the number of bioscience and ​medical journals, and in their price.[8] Whether large-scale access via repositories in other, less-fast-moving, fields would have similarly limited effects on publishers is less clear; and the possible impact of embargo periods of less than twelve months remains a concern for both commercial and learned society publishers.[9]

Open access journals

5.11. With regard to publishing in open access and hybrid journals, one of the key challenges is the lack of systematic arrangements for the payment of the APCs that are charged to authors by open access journals. The Wellcome Trust has been the pioneer in the UK. It provides funding to meet APCs in two ways. For some thirty universities in the UK it provides a block grant to meet APCs for papers arising from Trust-funded research; authors typically then submit to the university research office claims for funds to meet APCs. Researchers in other universities have to submit a claim to the Trust itself, which then supplements the research grant. A key point is that funding can be provided beyond the time when a grant has come to an end. Arrangements are also in place to allocate costs among different funders who are members of the UKPMC consortium (including MRC and BBSRC as well as the major medical research charities) where papers are the result of funding from more than one of them.

5.12. Research Councils currently make provision to enable researchers to meet APCs in two ways. First, the costs can be included in grant applications. This method is not always helpful because it is difficult at a stage long before the research project has started to identify what publications it will generate; and because the rules require that the moneys provided should be spent during the lifetime of the grant, whereas results may be published months or even years beyond that point. The second method allows universities to include provision for meeting APCs across the institution when they calculate the full economic costs of the research projects for which they seek grants. But it is not clear how many institutions have found it possible to adopt such arrangements.[10]

​ 5.13. A recent study[11] indicates that seven UK universities have established a co-ordinated approach for the payment of APCs, though the precise nature and extent of those arrangements differs from institution to institution. Nottingham has the biggest and longest-established arrangements, and it spent over £318,000 in 2010-11 on APCs for over 260 articles. Some have suggested that the development and implementation of research information systems by universities will ease the linking of research publications to specific research projects and funders, and thus simplify the process of recouping costs from funders. Some intermediaries such as subscription agents are also considering the possibility of managing accounts and handling the administration of APCs.[12] And the larger open access publishers such as BioMedCentral, PLoS and Hindawi have membership and prepayment schemes to ease the administrative burdens .

5.14. Nevertheless, it is clear that difficulties in securing funding to meet APCs is a significant barrier to wider uptake;[13] and the administrative arrangements add to the difficulties. Even where university funds are available, as at the University of Nottingham, only a small proportion of the papers produced by researchers are published in open access journals: Nottingham authors publish around 3,500 papers in journals each year, and a further 500 conference papers. Simplifying the funding and the payment arrangements is essential if there is to be wider take-up by researchers in all institutions.

Current developments

5.15. The various problems and difficulties relating to both repositories and open access publishing outlined above—along with simple inertia—have acted as brakes on moves towards open access. Moreover, for many researchers, the key goal remains to secure publication of their results in the highest-status journal they can manage, in order to secure the credibility and the career rewards that follow from such publications, as well as to maximise readership and impact in their fields. Open access tends to be a secondary consideration, even though the evidence seems to indicate that it leads to increased usage.[14]

5.16. But the policy proposals we have referred to earlier from Government, the Funding Councils, and the Research Councils, together with those expected from the European Union, are likely to give a further push towards open access. We consider the possible impact of these policies in Sections 7 and 8.

​ 5.17. There are also signs that initiatives from both established and newer organisations are beginning to make a significant impact on how researchers in the UK and beyond discover, gain access to and manage the published resources that are relevant to their work. We have already noted that the major publishers—subscription-based and open access—are transforming the ways in which articles are presented online, with ever more sophisticated links and interactive features. Many publishers, libraries, and other intermediaries are developing systems to enable them to analyse patterns of usage and impact more deeply; and to present those to their users.

5.18. Established players are working together with new ones—such as Mendeley and Zotero—who are developing new services to help researchers to gather, organise and analyse published and unpublished resources more effectively, manage their workflows, and collaborate and share their work with others. There is continued experimentation with user ratings and comments, and the development of ‘altmetrics’ that measure impact based on readership and re-use indicators gathered from social media and collaborative annotation tools. The sharing of such metrics then acts as a filter in alerting readers to material that may be relevant and important to their work.

5.19. New journals open access journals have been launched recently both by established publishers—such as Nature Publishing Group, SAGE, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer—and also by new entrants such as PeerJ[15] and eLife,[16] a new journal to be published as a joint initiative between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. And the SCOAP3 consortium of institutions across the world engaged in high energy physics has recently announced the launch of a tendering process for open access publishing in its subject domain.[17]

5.20. It is important that in the UK and elsewhere we sustain an environment that supports and encourages innovation of this kind from both new entrants and established players; and that innovation serves the interests not just of the research community, but all the other organisations and individuals who are interested in access to publications reporting the results of research.

  1. ↑ Studies of this kind include Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, RIN 2008; Houghton et al Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: exploring the costs and benefits, JISC, 2009; and Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, RLUK, JISC, Wellcome Trust and PRC, 2011.
  2. ↑ Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of Regions – Horizon 2020 - The Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, 30.11.2011
  3. ↑ http://www.congreso.es/public_oficiales/L9/CONG/BOCG/A/A_080-22.PDF
  4. ↑ On the RWA and its withdrawal, see the Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 February 2012 (http://chronicle.com/article/Legislation-to-Bar/130949/). On the FRPAA, see Science Insider, 10 February 2012 (http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/lawmakers-reintroduce-public-access.html )
  5. ↑ National Science and Technology Council, Interagency Public Access Co-ordination: a report to Congress on the coordination of policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of federally-funded scientific research, 2012, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/public_access-final.pdf. The report notes that the National Science Foundation (NSF) policies are different from the NIH. In response to a requirement in the American Competes Act of 2008, the NSF introduced a requirement for award-holders to provide a Project Outcomes Report (POR) written specifically for the general public. These are posted on the Research.gov website.
  6. ↑ Cm8329, http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/innovation/docs/i/11-1387-innovation-and-research-strategyfor-growth.pdf
  7. ↑ Houghton et al Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: exploring the costs and benefits, JISC, 2009; and Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, RLUK, JISC, Wellcome Trust and PRC, 2011. Houghton suggests that a system of ‘overlay journals’, which would operate a peer review system, could be implemented to direct readers to the contents of repositories. But it is not clear on what basis such journals could operate, nor how they themselves could be made sustainable.
  8. ↑ National Science and Technology Council, Interagency Public Access Co-ordination: a report to Congress on the coordination of policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of federally-funded scientific research, 2012
  9. ↑ The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project funded by the EU was set up to investigate the impact of deposit and access via repositories. Results presented at the end-of project conference on 29 May 2012 suggest that providing access to accepted manuscripts via repositories for the short time covered by the study and under current embargo restrictions had little impact on the use of journal platforms. Indeed a randomised trial suggested an increase in downloads from the journal platform; but that may have been the result of improvements in the quality of metadata for papers involved in the study, which increased their findability via search engines and other gateways. http://www.peerproject.eu/peer-end-of-project-conference29th-may-2012/ .
  10. ↑ For an explanation of how such arrangements might work under the full economic costing (FEC)/ transparent approach to costing (TRAC) regime, see UUK and RIN, Paying for Open Access Publication Charges, 2009. (http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Paying-open-access-charges-guidance.pdf )
  11. ↑ Stephen Pinfield and Christine Middleton, Open access central funds in UK universities, Learned Publishing 21 (2) 2012
  12. ↑ A dedicated service for that purpose has been launched by Open Access Key: www.openacceskey.com
  13. ↑ Dallmaier, Tiessen, Suenje et al, Highlights from the SOAP project survey: what scientists think about open access publishing, available from http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1101/1101.5260.pdf
  14. ↑ The evidence depends on the reliability and consistency of download statistics from different publication archives. Evidence on whether open access leads to more citations is less even less clear-cut. See PM Davis, ‘Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing’, FASEB Journal, 25, pp 2129-2134, 2011
  15. ↑ http://peerj.com/
  16. ↑ http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/elife-a-journal-by-scientists-for-scientists/
  17. ↑ http://scoap3.org/
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