Real Choices, False Colors
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The document discusses an institutional policy portfolio approach for scholarly publication and dissemination. It advocates that institutions require faculty to assign limited rights to the institution and deposit works in an institutional repository. Institutions should support open access publishing through direct and indirect funding. A portfolio approach should constrain funding by evaluating how faculty publication choices impact dissemination goals of accessibility, rapid access, discoverability, reusability, cost effectiveness, quality assurance and prestige.
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Real Choices, False Colors
- 1. Real Choices, False Colors Policy, Publishing, Repositories and the Institutional Mission
- 7. Policy for preservation “Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles…” https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/hfaspolicy https://www.flickr.com/photos/bswise/5008063253 CC BY
- 8. Policy for preservation “…a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.” https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/hfaspolicy https://www.flickr.com/photos/bswise/5008063253 CC BY
- 9. Policy for preservation “Unless their publication is in the repository, then it doesn’t exist” Bernard Rentier, Rector, University of Liege http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2013/11/22/ some-reflections-on-the-berlin-11-conference-berlin-november-2013/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/bswise/5008063253 CC BY
- 13. Dissemination is changing Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured New audiences More content Greater function Larger impact
- 24. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 25. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 26. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 27. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 28. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 29. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Quality Assured
- 30. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Prestige
- 31. Policy Portfolio • Require (limited) rights assignment and local repository deposition • Support Open Access publishing via direct and indirect resourcing • Constrain resource allocation by managing dissemination as a portfolio • Observe and Report how faculty choices effect dissemination
- 32. Policy Portfolio • Require (limited) rights assignment and local repository deposition • Support Open Access publishing via direct and indirect resourcing • Constrain resource allocation by managing dissemination as a portfolio • Observe and Report how faculty choices effect dissemination
- 36. Investing in the future https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/14908447586 CC BY
- 37. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Prestige
- 38. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Prestige
- 39. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Prestige
- 40. Reducing costs Discovery Publication Infrastructure Review Submission Systems
- 41. Reducing costs Discovery Publication Infrastructure Review Submission Systems
- 42. Reducing costs Discovery Publication Infrastructure Review Submission Systems
- 43. Reducing costs Curated content Communities of practice
- 44. Reducing costs Evaluation Infrastructure Curated content Communities of practice
- 45. Reducing costs Evaluation Infrastructure Curated content Communities of practice Publication Infrastructure
- 46. Reducing costs Discovery Infrastructure Evaluation Infrastructure Curated content Communities of practice Publication Infrastructure
- 47. Accessible Rapid Discoverable Re-usable Value for money Prestige
- 54. Not a choice…a portfolio
- 55. Illustrations by Richard Swan – Used under a CC BY-NC-ND license http://www.themoonunderground.com/
Notes de l'éditeur
- Many people involved with, or observing Open Access have a visceral reaction to the colours on this slide. It’s as though we have created opposing teams at war with with each other. In this talk I want to argue that this has created a divide which is distracting us from the real issues. To illustrate that I will allude to these colours throughout the talk without ever actually referring to them.
- Institutions have real choices to make about how the manage scholarly communications and limited resources to do that. For those charged with scanning the horizon and planning for the institutional future there are real hard choices ahead about what can and cannot be resourced.
- Those choices need to be framed in the context of the institutional mission. What are universities FOR? And with that mission comes the responsibility to deliver on it.
- That obviously means thoughtful, efficient and effective resource allocation. There is only so much money to go around.
- But it also means a responsibility as stewards of a complex and interdependent ecosystem. And long term stewards. Many of the major universities world wide are OLDER than the nation states around them. Institutions are in many ways a better steward for the long term than countries. And they can take the long term view. They can (but do they?) understand their role as one that is not a narrow pursuit of one form of success but that the institution as a whole, the complexity of the ecosystem, is a strength in itself. And something that needs to be preserved.
- So lets talk about preservation. That may seem like a strange place to come into a discussion of Open Access but again, I want to emphasize the long term nature of institutions. And we’ve reached a strange place. A century ago, a university could reliably preserve the work of its scholarly by ensuring it had a physical copy. Those copies could be preserved, curated (weeded when appropriate) and made available for future scholarship. But today we’ve got into a place where institutions don’t even have the legal rights to preserve the work that they support.
- This is the Harvard Open Access policy. But I want you to see it, not as an access policy, but as a preservation policy. If an institution takes it’s long term stewardship seriously a policy like this is the absolute MINIMUM required to secure just the legal rights to allow preservation. Again, remember the institution may survive longer than countries, certainly longer than publishers or third parties that might provide preservation services…
- …so to exercise that responsibility, that obligation of the institutional role it is crucial that institutions reserve some rights, that they require them from their scholars. Again, think of this, not as an Open Access policy, but as a preservation policy.
- Here is another policy. This one from the University of Liege, a very successful OA policy. Here the Rector of the University, Bernard Rentier is expressing one of its most powerful aspects – that only those objects that are deposited in the repository will count for internal appraisal, promotions and grants. But it is also true within the scope of preservation. If it isn’t in the repository, then in the long term it may as well not exist. Who else can the institution trust. When I gave this talk at Harvard it was pointed out that the New England Journal of Medicine (200 years younger than Harvard) had to resort to obtaining paper copies of its own journal from the Harvard library when they wanted to digitize.
- Of course it’s not just policy. The infrastructure also needs to be there for preservation. Properly funded, properly supported and strengthened with good policy. A solid institutional preservation framework will include a range of repositories, digital and physical that complement the policy framework, and the policy decisions that need to be made in choosing what to preserve. My point here is that even before we start talking about dissemination or Open Access, institutions need good repository infrastructures and policies that include rights retention to discharge another core responsibility. That of safeguarding scholarly outputs.
- Now you might say that there are sufficient exceptions in copyright law to allow institutions to preserve content. This might even be true, but in the digital age preservation alone is next to useless. If it is to be worth preserving then it must be available for use in the future. Format shifting, copying and distribution are central to the USE of digital content. A preserved grain from an Egyptian tomb is a curio unless we can study it, sequence its genome, use it to bake bread or brew beer. Dissemination is part of preservation.
- …which brings us to that second part of the mission. Dissemination, and via dissemination to wider access and Open Access.
- Clearly the web has changed scholarly communications and has the potential to change it much more. We can reach new audiences, and old audiences better. We can share a wider diversity of research outputs, supporting different kinds of downstream use. There is the potential for much greater functionality and dynamism in the way we interact with research outputs. Ultimately there is the opportunity for research to inform better, find wider application and in general have a greater impact.
- And this is not a zero sum game. Those discipline and communities that have used the web effectively to widen dissemination are moving forward. And those that haven’t risk being left behind. Whether through institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories or open access publishing, whole communities are making their work more widely available – and we know it is being read.
- So where does this leave the institution? Looking out to the horizon. What choices does the institution have and what resources does it already have in place? How does your institution ensure that it stays out ahead of this change, but also ensures that it preserves the good things that are already found in the ecosystem that it stewards? How can it take a long term view while ensuring it is at the forefront of innovation?
- Well if an institution has a good repository infrastructure in place then it also has a good local dissemination infrastructure in place. Those policies that are necessary as we’ve seen to support preservation also support wider and more effective dissemination. Repositories are a cost effective (when properly supported and properly resourced, they’re not free!) of expanding dissemination without needing to break the existing system. They’re also a LOCAL infrastructure which is directly under the control of the institution and can therefore be a locus of rapid innovation without requiring permissions from or collaboration with other players.
- We also have an existing shared dissemination infrastructure. One that is not generally under the control of individual institutions but is an important element of the overall ecosystem in which institutions and their scholars sit.
- This is of course the infrastructure provided by our existing journal and book publishing system. An infrastructure that is both symbiotic with and sometimes parasitic on the research institution. It remains to most scholars the core of how their work is disseminated.
- It is also a complex ecosystem, with venerable old trees and many new shoots. The old trees have prominence, some of them provide crucial elements of the canopy, others may be rotten to the core. Where the old falls the new will grow. For the long term steward the question should be less about individual plants and more about the system. How do you cut back, where do you protect new growth and where from time to time do you fell an old tree? Think of this as infrastructure. After all, universities pay for it for the most part.
- So we have both local and shared infrastructures, some under the control of institutions, some less so. When it comes to policy choices, some would have us believe that this is an either/or choice. That policy must demand improved dissemination through repositories OR through journals.
- …Or that there must be a focus on Open Access through publishing with repositories as a poor back up…This is a false dichotomy.
- It’s a false dichtomy for at least two reasons. The first is based in the present. Just as in an ecosystem a monoculture is an unstable state, taking a single path to the solution of a complex problem, increasing access to scholarly outputs, and increasing the USEFULNESS of scholarly outputs is also unstable. Complexity brings complications, but it also brings robustness. Remember again we are looking to the long term, to the health of the system, not of any single piece of it.
- As in any investment a portfolio approach is needed. Or as in stewarding a forest it is the preservation of the web of interacting species is needed. The large, the small, the young, the old. The safe, the risky. And also serving current needs as well as laying the ground for more radical change in the future. No existing offering in scholarly communication offers everything that is needed – so an investment portfolio is required.
- Institutional repositories are a great means of providing wider access. They do have some limitations. There can be delays to access where institutions accept publisher mandated embargoes (whether they should is a separate argument, the reality is that in many cases they do). IRs are poor generally at supporting discovery and are generally not set up either legally or technically to make it easy to normalise formats or work with the content. Of course, they are also not generally peer reviewed so quality assurance as we traditionally understand it is an issue.
- Disciplinary repositories tend to do a bit better on discovery precisely because the discipline goes to the repo to find stuff. But other there are often delays to access and licensing and technical support for re-use is often limited. It doesn’t need to be, but it hasn’t been a priority. There are exceptions of course with the large disciplinary preprint repositories, ArXiv, SSRN and RePEc being great examples.
- By comparison traditional subscription publishing has different problems and advantages. Access is an issue, but quality assurance in its traditional form is provided. Value for money is an issue, certainly compared to the base cost of dissemination but also affordability. However if you do have access you do get the content immediately – an issue for many disciplines.
- Open Access publishing can solve the access problem and many OA publishers are working hard to improve re-usability (not hard or fast enough for some but at least heading in the right direction). Compared to subscription publishing OA publishing is generally a lot cheaper on a per article basis, but if you ignore the costs of subscriptions then it looks expensive compared to putting a copy in a repository.
- …some will argue about quality assurance in the OA literature.
- I would argue that to the extent that OA has QA issues that subscription publishing has many of the same issues, they just get less reported. But of course I would say that. Let’s just say neither is perfect but quality assurance as we traditionally think of it is applied to the published outputs of serious journals whether they are subscription or open access based.
- And of course the real issue isn’t so much quality assurance per se. That really only happens in the long term. It’s the prestige that is conferred by the brand of the journal (or not) that is really at stake here when we compare to “slapping something up on the web”. But ultimately the point here is not that one path is better than another, but that none provide the full range of desirable qualities. A portfolio approach is required and that’s what institutions will have to decide on. Not to support one or the other, but what the balance of resource allocation should be.
- What should that look like in practice? This would be my institutional policy suggestion (it would be different for funders). Combining the two mission goals, both preservation and dissemination, and with a focus on a future that will be largely Open Access, institutions should ensure that they have the rights for preservation and repository deposition and should, as does Liege, explicitly couple internal assessments to objects that are in the repository. This provides a solid basis for institutional dissemination based on infrastructure and rights that are within the control of the institution. Institutions should support Open Access publishing – but there are a range of ways to do that. Resourcing is good in the form of institutional funds but choices need to be made about eligibility and the level of payments. Support could include provision for institutional publishing platforms or it could include consortial support for journals making the switch. Given this investment it needs to be constrained and institutions critically need to constrain overall spending. Expenditure on APCs should be coupled as far as possible to reductions in subscriptions. It may not be a zero sum game and there may be transitional investment but institutions will need to manage the full portfolio of scholarly communications activities and tension them against each other. Finally institutions need to be a lot better at tracking what is happening and how it is working. This can both be used to develop evidence based policy but also to develop funding instruments that promote efficiency in the system. At the moment most institutions are not able to measure either what they generate, nor what they use, relying on third party providers for that information.
- So lets focus a little on that support piece seeing as that is where most of the controversy lies.
- Support for the incumbents to move to an OA future is one piece. Careful planning and judicious arm twisting is required to ensure that if the institutions sees hybrid approaches as a viable transition that they are truly transitional. That means tight coupling between what the institution pays in APCs to reductions in subscriptions. These negotiations are happening in the UK right now. Where APCs are not appropriate institutions can support journals directly, transitioning subscriptions to support funds, perhaps with agreements in place for a number of years to assure publishers acting in good faith that they have the time and support to make the transition. And some of the old trees will simply need to be felled.
- There’s a need for fresh approaches. Many of the low cost technologies that will support scholarly communications in the future are being developed by PhD students in your institutions. Many of your scholars are experimenting with new approaches, sometimes with third parties, sometimes on their own. Other player are out there developing new approaches and new systems.
- The balance between old and new is a policy choice for the institution, but its one with consequences. The new investments will required protection and support, possibly for some time. They offer substantial possible return in the long term, but substantial risk in the short term. Where can institutions share that risk? How can it be amortised? What support and protection is appropriate. Perhaps most importantly, how big a role does the institution want to take? Because this is the central policy question, and the one which blows the artificial distinction between repositories and OA publishing out of the water. Institutions, if they choose have the resources, and the technology to reclaim scholarly communication for their community. Or they can support scholarly communities to do it, or they can step back and let others take the lead, but provide the resourcing and stewardship to ensure that in the long term we get where we need to go.
- So, what does that look like? What does the long term target imply. Or more realistically what are the medium term strategic needs to guide resource allocation?
- Lets go back to this diagram. Limited as it is…
- …what we want is new infrastructures and systems that give us green lights the whole way down…
- With the right policy and rights retention in place and the right technical infrastructures we could imagine combining the best of OA publishing and IRs. If we start for arguments sake with todays OA publishing models we would need to tackle two areas, the value for money, bringing costs down and the provision of prestige. If we can improve OA publishing on these two axes we can make massive progress.
- So lets look at costs. There are lots of reasons why the existing publishing system is expensive and its way too long to go into here but one is that journals are (generally) separate silos…
- …with different journals…
- …or at least different publishers replicating a lot of (mostly badly outdated and clunky) technical systems. All of this adds to the cost but more importantly it makes it harder for new technical innovation to firstly get a toe hold and secondly deliver benefits across the system.
- So if we take two chunks of this existing system that seem important, communities of practice doing review to create bodies of curated content, rather than separating these out, each with their own separate systems…
- …we could imagine a shared infrastructure. Actually this in some ways already exists but lets go further…
- …lets imagine that the actual underpinnings are shared across the system. That the publication infrastructure is not just shared and consistent, but is cheap and the subject of constant innovation. Some of that innovation might add additional layers that we don’t really have today…
- …such as general discovery, and perhaps more importantly we could focus the effort of review and curation on those pieces that need it and allow the others to just be surface through search. Now that bottom layer of publication infrastructure looks a lot like a repository, perhaps a shared repository across institutions. Or it could be produced by a publisher and run for institutions, or produced by a publisher and given to institutions. This isn’t a blueprint, it’s a thought experiment. The bottom line is that there really isn’t any difference between a repository and a publisher. The thing we think of as the difference is a thin layer of presentation (mainly missing from repositories for political reasons) and a quality assurance process. There’s no need for presentation to be coupled to storage and no reason for QA to be tightly coupled to either. And once they are separated the question is not Repository Deposit vs OA publishing, but where the infrastructure investment is needed and who is responsible for which bits? What do institutions want to keep in house, and what do they want to out source to service providers?
- But the technical side is usually the easiest…what about that bottom row? Prestige, the hard one.
- Traditionally this is the point where we throw up our hands and say. “It’s a hard problem” or “it’s a collective action issue” or even more commonly “that’s something for funders to do”. But actually I think this is far more in the hands of institutions than of funders. Institutions are where the policy rubber hits the road, and where resources get allocated and jobs awarded, or not. Institutions in the end deliver the wider community prestige though their brands, their names, who they employ and who they support. Some institutions have more leverage than others. But those with a lot are in a prime position to invest for the future to create a strong position. And that investment will be most wisely made in a portfolio of options. Including, yes, subscriptions but also quality repository infrastructure, shared investments in disciplinary systems, support for OA publishing and investment in the truly new and radical systems currently being developed. By bringing their brand to the table, by offering resources, and by celebrating new modes of communication institutions have a real opportunity both to take back control of the dissemination systems they have ceded to publishers but also to work with like minded service providers to ensure that the ecosystem as a whole is around for another 500 years.
- In a century we won’t be arguing about repositories vs oa publishing. We will be arguing about the most effective means of communication and the right policy measures to support it and resource it.
- So it’s not about repositories vs publishers
- It’s not about new vs old
- Or radical vs conservative, or humanities vs STEM
- It’s about how to bring all the resources together most effectively to deliver on effective scholarly communications and preservation. To deliver in the long term on the obligations for stewardship that come with being the homes of scholarship. To bring the best capacities of all our systems together to create a complex and robust ecosystem that delivers on the different needs of different communities but ensures the long term strength of all of them.