FEATURE Open access
undertaken by research council award holders. ‘We’re not going to change how academics behave overnight,’ he says. ‘So, rather than asking universities to keep separate records in terms of compliance monitoring, we have to find more automatic ways of using reporting tools such as this.’
In a similar vein, Neil Jacobs, head of scholarly support at Jisc, advocates the use of the organisation’s Sherpa/FACT compliance tool. This allows academics to check if the journals they wish to publish research in, comply with funder’s open access requirements.
The tool covers the open access policies of RCUK as well as research charities such as the Wellcome Trust. According to Jacobs: ‘We recently partnered with HEFCE to launch Sherpa/ REF beta... so researchers and institutions can easily check if journals comply with the [HEFCE] Research Excellence Framework open access policy.’
Coming to terms with cost But beyond compliance, the cost of open access is perhaps the thorniest issue, with tensions rising over article processing charges (APCs) assigned to authors and institutions when research is published in an open access journal. This is particularly true of hybrid journals, in which individual articles can be made open access, but the journal is still published under a subscription model.
RCUK, which offers so-called block grants to fund APCs, calculated that the cost of implementing its open access policy in 2013/2014 came in at around £20 million. Of this, a hefty £11 million came from expenditure on APCs.
Louisa Dale, director of Jisc sector intelligence
In a similar vein, figures from Professor Peter Bath at the Information School, University of Sheffield, indicate that in 2013, APCs constituted some 10 per cent of all publication costs. Bath’s research on APCs was recently published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
As he highlights, APCs in hybrid journals are consistently higher than those in fully open access journals, with industry
‘In 2013, APCs constituted some 10 per cent of all publication costs’
heavyweights scooping up a significant portion of the payments. Elsevier and Wiley each publish more than a thousand hybrid journals and, as Bath pointed out, from 2007 to 2014, Elsevier took around 20% of all APC payments, while Wiley, received a little more than 15 per cent.
‘Most APCs have been paid to the large ‘traditional’ commercial publishers that also receive considerable subscription income,’ he wrote. ‘Publishers such as Elsevier and Wiley, which dominate the subscription market, are capturing a substantial part of the open access APC market.’ These industry trends have not gone unnoticed by Jisc and, as Neil Jacobs points out: ‘Elsevier makes up nearly a quarter of all UK APC expenditure and captures 1.4 times as much revenue from APCs as its nearest rival, Wiley. Elsevier is one of the very few major publishers not to have put in place [an offset] arrangement to limit the costs to UK universities.’ Not
6 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016 Neil Jacobs, head of scholarly support at Jisc
surprisingly, industry backlash has ensued. As F1000’s Tracz puts it: ‘I worry about the state of open access in general. [The hybrid journal] has been a terrible development that’s impeding the progress of open access publishing. Right now [these journals] are too expensive, support closed access, and this is a real problem to solve.’ And many appear to agree. Earlier this year, some 1,200 cognitive-science researchers signed a petition for Elsevier to lower fees to publish open access articles in hybrid journal, Cognition. The petition came after all editors and editorial board members from Elsevier’s, Lingua, resigned, partly because the publisher had rejected requests to lower APCs.
Meanwhile, several research funders, including the German Research Foundation and the Norwegian Research Council, have stopped funding APCs for hybrid journals, largely due to high prices and poor levels of service. And both Elsevier and Wiley recently came under heavy criticism from The Wellcome Trust, on high APCs and poor compliance with depositing and licensing requirements across hybrid titles.
Given these issues, Jisc has also been following publication costs closely, as detailed in its recent report ‘APCs and subscriptions’. The report reveals the majority of APCs are paid to hybrid journals despite higher pricing, and the average APC has increased by six per cent over the past two years, a rise well above the cost of inflation. To counter the OA costs of publishing in hybrid journals, Jisc has devised a variety of mechanisms to offset the cost of a
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