Presentation made at the ISMTE annual meeting in Washington, DC, August 2012

1. Open Access Update
Caroline Sutton
Publisher, Co-Action Publishing
President, Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association
(OASPA)
ISMTE Meeting
August 9, 2011, Washington, DC

2. A bit about Co-Action Publishing
 Founded by three former executives from academic
publishing industry
 Established as Swedish limited liability company in
2007
 Founding Member Open Access Scholarly
Publishers Association, OASPA, current President
 Publish journals across disciplines, including Social
Sciences and the Humanities, but primarily medicine

3. Established October 2008 by:
 BioMed Central
 Co-Action Publishing
 Copernicus Publications
 Hindawi Publishing Corporation
 Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther
Solomon)
 Medical Education Online (David Solomon)
 Public Library of Science (PLoS)
 SAGE Publications
 SPARC Europe
 Utrecht University Library (Igitur)

4. Mission
OASPA offers a forum for bringing together the entire community of
Open Access publishers.
Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA)
journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and
scholarl disciplines. This mission will be carried out through
exchanging information, setting standards, advancing
models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation.

5. Definitions
of Open Access

6. OPEN ACCESS
= Free Access + Re-use

7. Creative Commons
Licenses
Most common:
 Attribution 3.0
(CCBY or CCAL)
 Attribution-
Noncommercial
3.0
(CCBY-NC)
8/16/2012

8. Copyright Notice
Authors contributing to Global Health Action agree to
publish their articles under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported
license, allowing third parties to share their work
(copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it, under the
condition that the authors are given credit, that the work is
not used for commercial purposes, and that in the event of
reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made
clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work, with first
publication rights granted to Co-Action Publishing.
However, authors are required to transfer copyrights
associated with commercial use to the Publisher. Revenues
from commercial sales are used to keep down the
publication fees. Moreover, a major portion of the profits
generated from commercial sales is placed in a fund to
cover publication fees for researchers from developing
nations and, in some cases, for young researchers.

9. ”Green Open Access”
 Achieving Open Access through the self
archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles.
 Different publishers have different policies on
deposition of articles.
 List and policies available at SHERPA-RoMEO
(www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo)

10. The changing landscape of arguments
Open Access

11. The financial argument
“Serials Crisis”

12. The financial argument
“Tax payer access”

13. The funder argument
“Maximize investment in research”
30 Europe
10 United States & Canada
7 Internationally

14. The new arguments:
Open Access as key to innovation and economic growth
2010 Communication from the Commission on the
Innovation Union :
“In 2012, the Commission will propose a European
Research Area Framework and supporting measures
[...]. They will notably seek to ensure through a
common approach to [...] dissemination, transfer
and use of research results, including through open
access to publications and data from publicly funded
research”.
The Commission “[...]will promote open access to
the results of publicly funded research. It will aim to
make open access to publications the general
principle for projects funded by the EU research
Framework Programmes [...]”.
COM (2010) 546.

15. The changing landscape beyond academic publishing:
”living in a free world”
Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a
Radical Price

16. The changing landscape beyond academic publishing:
”Wikinomics”
”A new kind of business is emerging –
one that opens its doors to the world, innovates
with everyone (especially customers), shares
resources that were previously
guarded, harnesses the power of mass
collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational
but as something new: a truly global firm.”
Don Tascott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics. How mass
collaboration changes everything

17. Understanding knowledge
as a network (vs. property)
Knowledge as an
infrastructure
”A social network diagram”, Screenshot taken
by Darwin Peacock, accessed through
Wikimedia; distributed under a CCL 3.0.

18. The changing publishing landscape
Types of publishers, Distribution of publishers, Output levels

19. Large Professional Publishing Organizations

20. Small Professional Publishing Organizations

21. University Libraries and University Presses

22. Scholar Publishers

23. 600 + societies publishing
OA journals (Suber & Sutton list at:
www.co-action.net/projects/OAsocieties/) Society Publishers

24. Size of publishers
Size of DOAJ % DOAJ journals %
publisher by publishers
number of DOAJ
journals
1 2271 88% 2271 56%
2 to 9 287 11% 849 21%
10 to 49 25 1% 358 9%
≥ 50 5 0% 554 14%
Total 2588 4032
Panayiota Polydoratou and Ralf Schimmer :Scholarly journals and
underlying business models’ attributes: preliminary findings from
analysing DOAJ journal level metadata,
Proceedings ELPUB2010 – Conference on Electronic Publishing
June 2010 – Helsinki, Finland

25. Size of Publishers
TA vs OA
No. % TA % TA % OA % OA
Jnls Publishers Journals Publishers Journals
1 83.7 31.7 87.9 55
10 0.3 1.0 0.1 0.4
11-20 1.0 5.4 0.8 6.9
21-50 0.8 8.8 0.2 3.5
51-100 0.3 7.2 0.1 2.6
100+ 0.3 29.7 0.1 10.3
Table adapted from: Frantsvåg, Jan Erik (2010): The Size
Distribution of open access publishers: A problem for open
access? First Monday, Volume 15, Number 12- 6 December.

26. Growth in published articles
35000
Published Articles
30000 from Atmospheric
Chemistry &
25000
ACP Physics,the New
20000
NJP
Journal of
OE
Hindawi Physics, Optics
15000
PLoS Express, Hindawi, Bi
10000
BioMed Central oMed Central, and
the Public Library of
5000 Science
0
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 est
Slide courtesy of Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing Corporation (Oct. 2009)

27. Growth in submissions and
publications at PLoS
25000
20000 Submissions
Publications
15000
10000
5000
0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Thanks to Mark Patterson, PLoS for sharing this slide and
the next two slides.

28. Growth in published articles
BMC
18000
PLoS
16000
Hindawi
14000
12000
Copernicus
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
Thanks to Mark Patterson for sharing the slide and to
0
BMC, Hindawi and Copernicus for 2005 2006 data. 2008 2009
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 sharing 2007 2010

29. Growth in published articles
35000
30000
25000
20000
15000
10000
Thanks to Mark Patterson for sharing the slide and to
BMC, Hindawi and Copernicus for sharing data.
5000

30. Trends and innovations
Thinking outside the box

31. Some trends and innnovations
in OA publishing
 ”Mega” journals
 Re-use and remixing of content
 Software & applications development
for science and scientists
 Linking data and publications

35. https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/

37. Copyright: Toria/Shutterstock.com

38. Sample Journal Transition
Food & Nutrition Research

39. Universe of a Subscription Journal
Researchers Access only for
those who have a
subscription – for
Food & Nutrition
Research, approx.
700-800
Corporate Biotech
Food Producers
Nutraceuticals, Gene mod techniques,
(Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft)
Additives
8/16/2012

40. Universe of the OA Journal
Researchers from
Researchers related fields
Healthcare Workers –
esp Physicians &
Nutritionists
Nutrition
advocates
Related
professions
General citizens
interested in their
Industries own nutrition
with links
Corporate Biotech
Food Producers
Nutraceuticals, Gene mod techniques,
(Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft)
Additives
Print and online
magazines
Pharmaceutical Co Gov’t agencies &
(e.g. Novartis Medical Nutrition) policy-makers
8/16/2012

41. Usage Increased
During first six months:
 Over 42 000 full text article requests
 Over 32 000 full pages viewed by over 6 000 different
visitors to the website
Visitors were from 120 different countries while
subscriptions had been from 14 countries
After three years:
 5-6000 visitors per month
 10 000- 17000 downloads per month
 Visitors from 190 countries, with the US accounting for
20% of traffic.
 Submissions are up, citations are up (Unofficial impact
calculation: 2.708)
 Over 700 members on LinkedIn, over
1100 registered users.

42. THANK YOU!
Caroline.Sutton@co-action.net