Friday, 11/8/13, 4:30 pm

1. The British National Approach to
Scholarly Communication
Lorraine Estelle
Executive director content and discovery and
divisional CEO Jisc Collections

2. JISC today
• Vision: To make the UK the most digitally advanced
education and research nation in the world
• Mission: To enable people in higher education, further
education and skills in the UK to perform at the
forefront of international practice by exploiting fully
the possibilities of modern digital
empowerment, content and connectivity
• Transformation programme lasting 12 months, now
nearing completion
• Focus on strategic priorities for our sector
• Different parts of the organisation now either
combined or working closely together

3. Jisc Collections: overview
• Now part of Jisc Content and Discovery
• Jisc Collections supports the procurement of
digital content for education and research in
the UK
• Customers include
– Universities
– Library consortia
– Further education colleges
– Skill and training providers

4. Mission
• Direct provision of key digital media resources
– Licensed on behalf of the UK community
– Made available at little or no cost
• Selection and negotiation for wide range of thirdparty content
– Mediate successfully between commercial and
academic interests
– Obtain the best possible pricing and licence terms to
support research and education
• Ensure the availability of data and tools to
measure value for money and ROI

5. Based on an informed view of our
community
• Research and knowledge sharing
– Examines the needs and behaviours of modern students
and researchers to inform resource development and
licensing
– Explores how innovative tools and technology can support
efficient procurement
– Develops effective and sustainable business models for eresources
– Leads to collaborative licensing for wider access
– Keeps us, and our members, at the forefront of the
scholarly communications environment.
• Strategic view of economic issues facing
education, research and libraries

6. Jisc Collections and OA policy
• Universities and other research organisations
respond to policy changes
• This manifests itself in changing requirements
• Jisc Collections responds to those changing
requirements
• What matters to us is how the universities
decide to respond to policy developments
– Their requirements are paramount
– We aim to help implementation

7. Open access: responding to an
increasing demand from universities
• Policies driving UK universities
– Finch report
– Funders’ policies
• Not just for journals
– Monographs
– Textbooks

8. Finch report overview
• Funded by Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the Higher
Education Funding Council for England, Research Councils UK, and the
Publishers Association
• Objective: how to expand access to research publications
• Ten recommendations, including:
– Support for publication in open access or hybrid journals, funded by APCs, as
the main vehicle for the publication of research
– The Research Councils and other public sector bodies funding research in the
UK should establish more effective and flexible arrangements to meet the
costs of publishing in open access and hybrid journals
– During the transition to OA publishing, funds should be found to extend and
rationalise current licences to cover all the institutions in those sectors
– Support for OA publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise
restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, and on the ability to use the latest
tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content

9. Finch report overview
– Future discussions between universities and publishers on the pricing of big
deals should take into account the financial implications of the shift to
publication in open access and hybrid journals, of extensions to licensing
– Universities, funders, publishers, and learned societies should continue to
work together to promote further experimentation in open access publishing
for scholarly monographs
– Infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should be developed so
that they complement formal publishing
– Funders’ limitations on the length of embargo periods should be considered
carefully, to avoid undue risk to valuable journals that are not funded in the
main by APCs
• Accepted by government and policies being implemented

10. Influential policies
• Funders operating mandates
– Research Councils UK
• Gold and Green options
• Provide funding to APCs
– Wellcome Trust
• Gold and Green options
• Provide funding to APCs
• HEFCE
– Mainly green OA policy
• No funding

11. Jisc Collections APC strategy
• Focus on sustainability for all stakeholders
• Identify and provide practical solutions
• In the UK, that means helping universities and
publishers implement funders’ policies
• Practical help with managing APCs
• Development of pricing models for uncertain
environment

12. Universities’ concerns
• Based on preliminary consultations
• Main issues
– Overall cost of APCs including administration
– Uncertainty about long-term future of grants from
researcher funders
– Increasing number of APCs arising from research
funded in other ways
– Small universities likely to break through funders’
grants
– Combined cost of subscriptions and APCs
– Compliance, including correct licenses

13. Universities’ concerns
• What do universities want Jisc Collections to do?
– We are consulting them at the moment
– Indications are that they would most like support
with:
• Cost of APCs in pure and hybrid gold OA journals
• Combined cost of APCs and subscriptions in hybrid OA
journals
• Ensuring compliance
• Help with gathering data on overall cost and modelling
impact
• Efficiency and accuracy in making payments

14. JISC APC: practical help for libraries
and research managers
• Online administration platform enabling
universities, researchers, funders and publishers
to manage article processing charges (APCs)
• Aims to:
– Reduce the administrative burden on the various
parties involved in making an article available
– Offer increased security of payment
• Currently being tested by selected universities
and publishers

15. Practical help for researchers: Sherpa
services
• RoMEO
– Summarizes publishers’ conditions and categorizes
publishers, indicating level of author rights
– Shows which publishers’ comply with funding
agencies’ conditions on open access
• JULIET
– Summaries of funding agencies’ grant conditions on
self-archiving of research publications and data
• FACT
– Tool to help researchers check if journals comply with
their funder's requirements for open access

16. Looking ahead
• Integrating OA into “normal life”
– University systems adapting
• Takeup will expand quickly under the impact
of advocacy and compliance
• Financial impact being modelled but already
looks significant
• Finding ways to work with publishers

17. Some publishers leading from the
front
• Royal Society for Chemistry
– “Gold for Gold”
– Links APCs to subscriptions
– Vouchers to cover the cost of APCs for RSC Gold
subscribers (RSC Gold is premium collection of journals)
– 1 voucher per £1,600 subscription value
• Sage
– Covers APCs in Sage journals
– Authors based at subscribing NESLi2 institutions are
entitled to APCs at a discounted rate of £200
– Between 75% and 85% discount depending on APC

18. Some publishers leading from the
front
• Universities are very pleased to see
willingness to try different approaches
• Need to encourage experiments, but cover a
wider range of models
• Need to experiment with different models to
see which works best for both universities and
publishers
• Watch this space!

19. Thank you
Lorraine Estelle
l.estelle@jisc-collections.ac.uk