In this paper the author examines from a library perspective some of the complications with transitioning to an open access model for journal publishing; how costs that support publishing efforts may shift from readers to researchers; what’s happening within the library community with regard to assessing the value of subscriptions; and what universities may come to expect from content providers as private funders take a more visible role in mandating the “openness” of research information

Levine-Clark, Michael

English

University of Denver

University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship University Libraries 10-25-2018 Open Access and Its Impact on Access and Subscriptions Michael Levine-Clark University of Denver, michael.levine-clark@du.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/libraries_facpub  Part of the Scholarly Communication Commons, and the Scholarly Publishing Commons Recommended Citation Levine-Clark, Michael, "Open Access and Its Impact on Access and Subscriptions" (2018). University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship. 42. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/libraries_facpub/42 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Libraries at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact jennifer.cox@du.edu,dig-commons@du.edu. Information Services & Use 38 (2018) 41–43 41DOI 10.3233/ISU-180008IOS PressOpen access and its impact on access andsubscriptionsMichael Levine-Clark∗Dean of Libraries, University of Denver, 2150 E Evans Ave, Denver, CO 80208, USAAbstract. In this paper the author examines from a library perspective some of the complications with transitioning to an openaccess model for journal publishing; how costs that support publishing efforts may shift from readers to researchers; what’shappening within the library community with regard to assessing the value of subscriptions; and what universities may come toexpect from content providers as private funders take a more visible role in mandating the “openness” of research information.Keywords: Open access, scholarly publishing, big deal, article processing charge, business models, subscription modelsAt the recent NFAIS Annual Conference [1], I was asked to speak about the impact of open access(OA) on academic libraries. I chose to focus on some of the barriers that make it difficult for us totransition from a subscription model to an open future. Open access is undoubtedly a good thing. Itmakes the published output of scholarly research available to the widest possible audience, making furtherresearch and knowledge development possible. Free availability of published research benefits scholarsat institutions that cannot afford to subscribe to expensive journal packages (“big deals”) or who have noaffiliation at all with an institution. The end goal of a truly open scholarly communication system is onethat is tremendously appealing, but how we can get there is not entirely clear.Academic librarians have led the open access movement from the beginning, because OA will lead tothe broadest possible access to information – a goal that aligns perfectly with library values – and becauseOA has the potential to solve pressures that see huge portions of library budgets dedicated to maintainingbig deals. Librarians have been exploring models to “flip” subscription-based journals to OA, and a MaxPlanck Institute study determined that there is enough money in the global subscription system to coverarticle processing charges (APCs) for all published articles [2]. But when we look at some of the detailsof these models, it becomes clear that changing the model will not be easy. First, the Big Deal itselfis a messy model, inconsistently applied across libraries, so a transition away would likely be equallymessy and inconsistent. Second, research output and subscription expenditures do not closely align at allinstitutions. There are universities with relatively high research output and low subscription expendituresand vice versa, so a transition model that assumes a switch from subscription to an Article ProcessingCharge (APC) business model would be difficult.Let’s look at the big deal first. This is a model in which libraries have negotiated with a publisher foraccess to most or all of that publisher’s journal content for a heavily discounted price, but at the expense of*E-mail: michael.levine-clark@du.edu.0167-5265/18/$35.00 © 2018 – IOS Press and the authors.This article is published online with Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNon-Commercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0).42 M. Levine-Clark / Open access and its impact on access and subscriptionslocking in a continuing commitment to pay that publisher. Big Deals are generally based on the library’sspending level with that publisher at the point when it transitioned from print to digital subscriptions. Thelibrary agrees to continue paying that amount plus an increase for inflation annually and the publisheragrees to provide access to far more than the titles that are nominally subscribed. These deals are oftennegotiated at the consortium level, and they usually allow the institution to provide access to a bigger poolof titles than would be possible with a title-by-title subscription model. There is little transparency in howthese deals are constructed, and it is very hard to understand the cost at the journal level (and even harderat the article level). If a library is paying for some “subscribed” titles and another amount for access tothe “unsubscribed” titles, then it is hard to consider how to convert subscription costs for a Big Deal topayment costs toward conversion to Open Access. And that is made harder still by the fact that the sharesof the costs are unevenly borne across the consortium.We tend to measure the value of the Big Deal in terms of cost-per-use, but this is a flawed model.Cost-per-use assumes that all use is good use, but perhaps use of many articles is a sign of inefficiency.Increased choice (more content available) may mean more use, but perhaps it also means less critical use,since users confronted with an abundance of content “use” articles to determine what is not relevant. Aslong as we assume that use is the way to measure value, it’s very hard to move beyond subscriptions. It istime for a new model: value linked to outcomes. A model of this sort might make it easier to cancel theBig Deal and transition to paying for Open Access. Transitioning our subscription expenditures to a newmodel is hard enough without fully understanding the value of usage.The structure of the Big Deal itself causes difficulties in pondering a transition. If you imagine a typicalBigDeal of one thousand titlesmanaged across a consortium, you have libraries with different subscriptionbases - one might subscribe to one hundred titles and pay a fee for access to nine hundred. Another mightsubscribe to five hundred titles and pay a fee for access to the other five hundred. And a third mightsubscribe to twenty journals and pay a fee for access to nine hundred and eighty titles. All have access tothe same titles for their users, but pay radically different amounts. Now imagine that some of the titles inthat mix are hybrid journals, with varying amounts of content made open by an author paying an ArticleProcessing Charge (APC). And imagine that some of these journals become fully open. If these open orpartially-open titles are part of a library’s subscription list, then it is possible to calculate some sort ofdecrease to the subscription cost, but if something becomes open and is part of the unsubscribed (access)list then the potential discount is negligible. This is made even more complicated if the authors at thesethree institutions have paid APCs to make some of these articles open. If a newly-open journal is part ofthe subscribed list at one of these institutions, but on an unsubscribed list at the other two, then the overallimpact on the consortia deal is even harder to measure.How easy is it to transition to Open Access? Funding for APCs tends to come from the institution inconjunction with the grants awarded to that institution’s researchers. But there is a very uneven distributionof publishing outputs and subscription costs from university to university. Take the University of Denver(DU) and California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) for example. In 2016, Web of Science indicatedthat Cal Tech scholars published thirty-seven hundred articles. Since we know that many articles are notindexed in this source, we can add in about 25% more articles, giving us a total of forty-nine hundred.Assuming that 60% of these articles had a Cal Tech scholar as corresponding author that now reducesthe total to two thousand nine hundred and sixty articles. At a conservative $2,500 per APC, Cal Techwould have had to spend $7.5 million on publication costs. In 2016, though, Cal Tech spent $3.1 millionon continuing resources. Their subscription costs are far lower than their publication costs would everbe, and even if half of their APCs were covered by external funding, they would come up short. The Pay43M. Levine-Clark / Open access and its impact on access and subscriptionsit Forward study from the California Digital Library and University of California, Davis demonstratesclearly that most other high-research institutions would experience similar effects [3].Meanwhile the University of Denver accounted for seven hundred articles in 2016 in Web of Science.Using the same logic, adding 25% brings us up to a total of eight hundred seventy five. Assuming 60%come from corresponding authors, the figure is reduced to five hundred and twenty-five articles. At anAPC of $2,500 per article DU would spend $1.3 million on publication costs. Meanwhile DU’s budgetfor continuing resources in 2016 was $4.1 million. Clearly DU, as a net consumer of information, wouldcome out ahead in a transition away from a subscription model while Cal Tech, as a net producer ofinformation, would have to come up with new funds.These are both research institutions, though with quite different profiles. What about a smallerinstitution without a research mission? While it is appealing to assume that a small teaching-focusedschool could participate in a transition to OA, it seems more likely that such a school would be tempted tobecome a free rider, using the necessary expenditures of research institutions to gain access to publishedcontent, but not covering the costs of publication for its own faculty – for whom research is secondary.This is just a brief investigation of some of the complications inherent in a transition from a subscriptionmodel to open access in North America. The tremendous disparity of research output across institutionscombined with the wide range of expenses for subscriptions and the variance in how Big Deals areconstructed means that it will be tremendously difficult to affect such a transition. I hope it happens,but I’m not optimistic about it being an easy process.About the AuthorMichael Levine-Clark is the Dean of the University of Denver Libraries. He writes and speaks regularlyon trends relating to academic library content management, discovery, and scholarly communication. E-mail: michael.levine-clark@du.edu.References[1] National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS), 2018 Annual Conference, Information Transformation:Open, Global, Collaborative, February 28 – March 2, 2018, Alexandria, VA, USA (see: http://www.nfais.org/2018-conference-program. Last accessed 14 June 2018).[2] R. Schimmer, K.K. Geschuhn and A. Vogler, Disrupting the Subscription Journal’s Business Model for the Nec-essary Large-Scale Transformation to Open Access, a Max Planck Digital Library Open Access White Paper,28 April 2015, http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2148961:7/component/escidoc:2149096/MPDL_OA-Transition_White_Paper.pdf, last accessed 14 June  2018.[3] University of California Libraries, Pay it Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article ProcessingCharges for Large North American Research Institutions, Funded by the Mellon Foundation, 30 June 2016, revised18 July 2016, http://icis.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/UC-Pay-It-Forward-Final-Report.rev_.7.18.16.pdf. Lastaccessed 14 June 2018.

Open Access and Its Impact on Access and Subscriptions

https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&amp;context=libraries_facpub

Open Access and Its Impact on Access and Subscriptions

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Denver