Open access FEATURE


university’s APCs against its subscription fees. For example, the organisation has negotiated offset deals with the likes of Springer, SAGE, Wiley, the Institute of Physics and more, to ensure these companies do not receive double income through subscriptions and APCs revenue for the same journals. However, for some in the industry, offsetting deals simply aren’t enough. Kai Karin Geschuhn from Open Access & License Management at Max Planck Digital Library, Germany, believes the hybrid approach is reassuring for publishers as subscription income continues, but reckons APCs are too high. What’s more, she is sure that offsetting deals from the likes of Jisc, can only achieve a limited impact and is certain a more ambitious plan is needed. In a recent ‘open access policy white paper’, Geschuhn and her colleagues made a case for the large-scale transformation – or ‘flip’ – from today’s subscription-based publishing model to an open access model.


They believe this could be achieved by ‘liberating’ library acquisition budgets;


instead of paying subscription fees, library budgets could be re-directed into a large- scale open access business model to pay for APCs.


According to Geschuhn, the global annual outlay for subscriptions comes in at some €8.5 billion, but this figure could be more than covered by an APC-funded model.


She adds: ‘In the last 20 years, other strategies just haven’t worked... but this could be the chance to set funding free.’ Global flips have been touted before but myriad difficulties have stymied progress. For example, coordinating the many interests of publishers, librarians, researchers and more would bring massive challenges to librarians, tasked with taking on many publisher responsibilities. Geschuhn isn’t fazed: ‘Librarians would have to organise entire processes and workflows with publishers. But that’s where their expertise is very helpful; they know how to deal with publishers and work with these processes.’


Many in the industry also highlight how proponents of ‘flipping’ typically


reside in nations with well-funded library subscription budgets, but under-funded institutions from less-resourced countries could suffer.


Still, as Geschuhn says: ‘This issue wouldn’t grow any bigger than it is right now, and at least these nations would have the chance to access the open access research, which would be a huge advantage. I think before we decide ‘OK, an APC-based model is not possible as it will exclude half the world’, we should find


‘Elsevier makes up nearly a quarter of all UK APC expenditure’


out what exactly is the publishing output of these developing countries and work out how this can be financed.’ Without a doubt, the Max Planck Digital Library concept for transforming today’s subscription-driven publishing system is an adventurous approach to open access and, as such, has received a mixed response from scholarly publishing pundits. As Mark Thorley, RCUK asks: ‘Is it a little one dimensional to say you can put this in the hands of librarians and simply divert subscriptions?’


According to Thorley, Jisc and other organisations are now considering the concept that publishers produce a set of publishing services, rather than simply publishing papers. ‘It’s a huge administrative overhead to chase up authors and ensure papers are lodged in a repository with the appropriate metadata, and who is placed to do this most effectively?’ he asks. ‘Publishers, as they have access to the peer-reviewed manuscript and can produce the metadata, and some already offer services such as deposit into Euro PubMed Central.’ No doubt, over time, these and many more models will evolve, to ease the transition to open access. Tracz, for one, is confident that his company’s latest partnership with The Wellcome Trust will profoundly alter scholarly publishing. But as Thorley concludes: ‘For me, the headline message is that implementing open access at scale is a lot more difficult than any of us initially imagined. A lot of people jumped into open access saying ‘this is great’ and have now discovered the realities of trying to make it happen.’


www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2016 Research Information 7


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