ANALYSIS AND NEWS
OPEN ACCESS DISCUSSIONS DOMINATE LONDON BOOK FAIR
Alastair Horne reports back on discussions in the scholarly information stream of this year’s London Book Fair
I
nevitably, the subject of open access (OA) dominated discussion of academic publishing at this year’s London Book Fair. In the first of a series of sessions hosted in the Faculty auditorium, chair Audrey McCulloch, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), was joined by Sam Bruinsma of Brill, James Butcher from Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Fiona Hutton from Wiley, and Arend Küster from QScience, the OA publishing platform run by the Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, to discuss things to consider in launching OA titles. Asked whether OA might offer possibilities for widening the audience for scholarly research beyond academia, the panel was non-committal. Küster said that QScience was exploring ways to make its content more accessible to a more general audience. Both he and Hutton also emphasised the role of social media in widening the circulation of research. In a later session on ‘New trends in academic research’, City University lecturer Ernesto Priego offered a convincing example of such practices – explaining how he used Twitter to extend his teaching and research beyond the lecture theatre. Nevertheless, the panel largely agreed with Butcher’s observation that the vast majority of the papers they publish are of interest to a rather a specific audience, with only a small proportion achieving wider circulation. And with neither Butcher nor Hutton able to answer whether the OA papers they publish are viewed more than articles funded by subscription, the audience was left to question whether the model is increasing circulation at all. With the gold model of OA switching the costs
of publication from reader to author, one audience member asked whether the high costs of article processing charges would lead to authority being bought by those with the deepest pockets. The panel disagreed, with Küster pointing out that many OA publishers, including QScience, waive fees for research from developing economies specifically to avoid this situation.
This panel discussion was followed by a session entitled ‘Beyond Open Access: what’s next for academic publishing?’ in which Michael Cairns,
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CEO of Publishing Technology, was joined by representatives of both the newer and more established sides of publishing. Representing, as she self-deprecatingly acknowledged, the more traditional kind of publisher was Sam Burridge, MD of open research at NPG and Palgrave Macmillan. The newer types of approaches to scholarly communication were to be found
‘The panel was frank about the difficulties faced by publishers in this changing environment’
in Euan Adie, co-founder of Altmetric, and Cameron Neylon, advocacy director at the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Cairns kicked off the session with a discussion of the learning curve that publishers experience with OA. Customers expect more flexible content, more sophisticated aggregation, and increasing levels of personalisation. The last of these in particular requires new skills from publishers, who had until recently known little about the people who consumed their content. Although reporting and usage statistics (what Cairns termed ‘the exhaust from publication’)
are already being gathered, the skills required to interpret such data are mostly still lacking. The motivations for publishers to gain these skills are high, he explained, as new revenue opportunities open up for those possessing them. As Adie pointed out, these statistics are of particular importance in OA models, where the people who have paid for publication need detailed information on usage that goes beyond the conventional ‘how many people have downloaded this article’. Researchers need these metrics to get grants, and funding bodies need to know that their money has been well spent. The panel was frank about the difficulties faced
by publishers in this changing environment, as systems and processes struggle to adapt to changing circumstances. Neylon suggested that the recent cases of supposedly open access articles being found behind paywalls might be attributed to the failure of older systems to deal with new requirements, and noted that even the systems adopted by newer publishers like PLOS are beginning to feel the strain of the sheer numbers of articles being published. New systems are urgently needed, he argued.
In demonstration that publishers are already taking steps to solve these problems, Burridge mentioned the significant restructuring undertaken by both Palgrave Macmillan and
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