Okay obviously we have a different setup this evening and as advertised this is on the topic
of open and I've noticed that many of you are still kind of in the location where you have been
but some of you have moved around so just you know I'm going to say something like that. Anyway
a couple of things. I'm going to dispense with the proclamations announcements all of
those so that we can get right onto the panel but I did want to remind you that next Monday
we're starting into global and international so those of you who are international you will have
the opportunity we'll figure out where we're going first which part of the world but no powerpoints
no slides just a conversation so I'm assuming those of you who are international are ready to
roll next week okay any questions on on that okay Peter it's all yours. I have one more announcement
yes if you're sitting next to a mic can you just turn it on I think we're going to leave them on
the whole time and hopefully we won't have to pass them around for questions and everything.
Good evening everyone, my name is Anita Walz
and I'm the assistant director for open education at the university libraries. We are very honored
to be here my colleagues and I and various faculty from around the university who will be introduced
later. I wanted to give you a few words about how this session is going to work. There are three of
us that will give five-minute overviews of some of the opens. If you have questions during those
very short presentations regarding something that doesn't make sense if you can't hear us
please tell us otherwise we're asking you just to hold your questions until the panel starts so my
after that we will have the faculty panelists join us so Dr. DePauw, Dr. Mueller, Dr. Carey
will will join us and Peter will moderate the section from there so each person will
introduce themselves so you'll get a chance to meet each of us this is for you we hope
that you learn a lot we hope to have a really engaging discussion because if we don't it's
kind of boring for us so we think that you'll find this really interesting as
future professors so I'll keep it over to Peter and this class is usually not shy
Good do you like that all right hello everybody my name is Peter Potter,
I am the director of publishing in the library here at Virginia Tech and is my mic going okay
great so tonight we're going to talk about the different kinds of open in research and
what I want to do to start is to give you some idea of the
the kind of the enormity of the issue of the problem that we're facing
just so you can get a sense of that. Philip will talk about open access in particular,
Anita will say a little bit about open ed, and then we'll open it up for discussion.
So when we talk about the opens connecting the opens we think about open access open source
open data open research open science and you can go on and on it's
open is the word right now in terms of scientific research.
And the way I want to frame this is to say to start with I don't know if many of you were or
any of you saw follow the news recently over this past year the University of California system
which is a 10 campus system huge they account for 10 percent of the research output in the
United States. The University of California boycotted Elsevier journals and Elsevier's probably you
know one of the big big publishers of scholarly journals and other things so this happened
in February they were negotiating with Elsevier for months and months and finally
at the end of February they said you can't do it and they called off the negotiations
it took about five six months but over the summer
Elsevier finally cut the University of California off so if you were a graduate
student at the University of California right now and you wanted to access
current Elsevier content it doesn't it doesn't count for the previous stuff before
the agreement but anything new coming out you have to give it to an alternative means and this
alternative access to Elsevier articles that's what the University of California is telling their
faculty and students this is how to find the research that you want so it's a big deal.
And to give you a sense of how brutal it's becoming right now many of the UC,
of the University of California faculty may serve on on some of the Elsevier journals a lot
of the Elsevier journals and they got together as a group and threatened to resign from their
positions as editors of Elsevier journals and these are like all of the Cell journals
so again it's a big deal and that was in August and we're at a kind of a holding pattern right now
so why does this matter or why is this problem coming up I'd like to show this chart just to
give you a sense of how much journals are growing in terms of the how much they cost universities
like ours to subscribe to just in the last 20 years they've gone up in 20 years they've gone
166 percent in the last 30 years they've gone 500 percent to give you a sense of how much
and you can see these other charts the the top of the red one includes the serial expenditures
and you can see like books books is way down at the bottom so books have been a kind
of casualty of all of this happening so a lot of what we're going to focus on tonight is journals
but it affects books as well and we'll talk a little bit about that so
just to give you a sense of the size of this so the University of California
was paying 10 million a year so they had a contract for 50 million dollars to access
Elsevier journals that's just Elsevier that doesn't include any of the other publishers
we're in the same boat here in Virginia we have seven research universities in Virginia
that collectively negotiate an agreement with Elsevier ours is currently worth
46 million over five years so we're on a par as a state with the University of California system
and our deal is set to expire at the end of 2021 so you're going to be hearing a lot about it
here at the university we have a website um through the library where we keep people updated
and we'll be talking to the community and trying to
educate folks on what's like what exactly is happening and what's at stake
and it becomes in many ways an ethical question Elsevier the profits are completely out of control
and as John Adler has said publishing is so profitable
because the workers don't get paid and that's you.
Just in terms of the bigger picture it's a 26 billion dollar
business scholarly publishing to give you a sense how that compares to other industries
and it's controlled, scholarly publishing is truly controlled, by these five publishers
Elsevier Springer Wiley Blackwell Taylor and Francis and Sage those five form an oligopoly
and they control over 50% of the market so every time you're considering a publisher think about
this when you are choosing who you want to publish with and give you a sense of the profit margin
so this was this was four years ago but it hasn't changed significantly it's one of the most
profitable businesses so to give you an example i would like to show this one as an example of
what we're dealing with in the library trying to purchase access to journals so this was in 2002
at the time it cost twelve thousand dollars if you wanted to subscribe to the journal
of polymer science applied polymer science you could buy a Toyota Corolla for that same
amount that was in 2002. So anybody have a guess on how much that has changed since then
yeah all right Toyota Corolla is now up to 19,000 journal of applied polymer science 35
so just multiply that by how many journals are out there now it's a little bit misleading in the
sense that some journals they publish more content so it's not a apples to oranges apples to apples
but the principle is still true because we have to pay those subscriptions
so um the question now is is the tide turning so some of you have has anybody heard of Plan S?
Plan S is an initiative that came out of Europe
and it was from the leading funding agencies in Europe and they initially started in 2018
and they called for publicly funded research to be published in compliant open access journals
compliant meaning they had to follow certain rules originally it was to take effect into 2020
it's now been delayed until 2021 but it's been signed on to by many of the different funding
agencies including some American ones but here in the U.S. it's had less of a I'd say less of a
take-up than it has in in Europe and the UK but it's still people we're all following what's
happening with it and in the meantime while while California is not signing a deal with Elsevier
they've signed the kind of deal that they wanted to with Cambridge University Press
Springer has Springer and Wiley have both signed the kinds of deals that the University
of California is looking for with the with the um with Germany because that's all centrally uh
negotiated those um big agreements so
things are changing meanwhile something like PubMed Central 5.7 million open access articles
but there's still a long way to go this this little graphic tells you sort of how much
of in these disciplines the how much open access accounts for so it's saying biomedical research is
around 50 but you can see in many of the other disciplines is much less all the gray is closed
access so Philip will now talk a little bit about open access and what exactly that means.
Thank you, so I'm Philip Young, I'm the manager of VTechWorks which is Virginia Tech's institutional
repository. So we provide global access to Virginia Tech scholarship. It's where our ETDs end up,
many research papers, presentations, posters and so on
and I'll be talking a little bit more about VTechWorks in a moment.
So what is open access? This is the canonical definition from Peter Suber. It's digital,
online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. So there's two parts:
one, you can get to it, you have internet access. The other part is often ignored:
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. So if you see most an article from an open access
journal you'll notice that it has a Creative Commons license on it like the one in the bottom
left and so what this does is it gives permissions in advance for people to use that article and not
have to write the journal and get permissions to reuse a figure or something like that make
copies of the article and so on and so forth so it really is a two-part definition however
the first part has kind of become a de facto definition - if you can get to it freely online
then it's open access but technically it also has a Creative Commons and open license on it.
So why is open access important?
So the primary thing is is just giving access to all those who don't have it
so our colleagues at other universities -- there's no way for me to know when I publish an article
in a subscription journal who has access to it. I can assume that some universities
have subscriptions to that, but many universities don't. This is especially an issue internationally
because many universities in India, South Africa, Brazil, you name it, may not have the money
to subscribe to these journals. So it's a big problem for researchers in the developing world.
Also taxpayers often fund the research so if you have a grant from NSF, NIH,
or any of the federal agencies, they're funding that research and then the results of that
research behind the paywall where they can't access it so that's an important issue. If you're
doing research in any kind of policy area, many government policy makers don't have access
to the evidence base so these are folks who would really benefit from access to the peer
reviewed literature that they don't have, the same with non-governmental organizations.
It's also a basic scholarly value, right, so if we're all researchers in the same field we
want to be exchanging what we're doing freely and as efficiently as possible.
That knowledge must be available for us to build upon. So the most efficient way to do that
is to immediately have access. It's a waste of all of our times to be hitting paywalls
that are asking for thirty dollars, forty dollars whatever we have to find workarounds,
when we could be doing research. It also benefits the authors of open access papers.
There's considerable research showing a citation advantage for open access works not
every study about disadvantages about the citation advantage has shown an advantage for open access
but most of them have shown an advantage because it's openly available for everyone
around the world to access and then if it's relevant to them decide it in their own papers
there's also an altmetrics advantage. Altmetrics
as opposed to the citation advantage which is sort of a within academia advantage altmetrics
are links coming from anywhere towards the research object so for example it might be
the New York Times or CNN or somebody writing an article and linking back to your research.
It could come from social media, it could come from policy documents. If you're an environmental
researcher and your work gets cited in the policy document from EPA, that's pretty important.
These are collecting links from anywhere on the web towards your research article
and there's evidence that there's an advantage there because it's openly available.
Open access also facilitates other uses like text and data mining so this is a
big thing right now if you're interested in text and data mining most disciplines
are split among all the different publishers so you would have to go to Elsevier and work out do
we have a little widely worked out you have to go to Taylor and Francis to work on a deal this
is why there's not much text and data mining in a lot of fields is because of these barriers so when
things are open access you can collect them bring them together and do sort of meta research on it.
So as authors how do we make our work open access? There's two ways to do it. The first is publishing
an open access journal and the second is archiving work, a version of our article
in a repository. So first if you want to publish in an open access journal one of the
keys is finding a legitimate one because i've been moved to open access journals online
in the advent of publishing fees for some of those journals this has allowed basically anyone
to put up the journal website and submit your work so it's important to check the journals
if you've never heard of the journal if people you work with have never heard of the journal
to do a little due diligence and make sure that that journal is legitimate.
One of the directories that we use a lot is the Directory of Open Access Journals, doaj.org.
It has a pretty significant, demanding process to be listed in that index. They do a lot of checking
of the journals they're in that so you can feel fairly confident that if the journal is listed
there then it is legitimate. Also the library has access to the Ulrich's periodical directory and so
if you go into Ulrich's through library access you can limit to peer-reviewed journals and then again
to open access journals and see what open access journals are in your field. There's also a site
called think check submit which has a number of criteria that you can use for evaluating internal
websites if you're not sure if it's legitimate or not. Also because we have the open access
fund we do a lot of evaluation of journals and so if you go to our open access fund website there's
contact information there and you can ask us a question, what do we think about this journal.
So not all open access journals charge and charge a fee but a significant number of them do.
When you have an open access fee typically that comes out of a grant. So if you have a federal
grant like an NIH or NSF grant typically you can use some of that funding for the open access fee.
If you do not have a grant we have a fund here at Virginia Tech out of the libraries
the subvention fund and graduate students are eligible to apply for that
and so I have that linked here on the slides which will share and so that's a valuable resource here
if there's a fee and you're publishing an open access term we also have a number of discounts
because of our relationships with publishers. For archiving, the most important thing to know
is whether you have the right to post an article version. So when you're archiving your work it's
important to note that you're archiving a version of it not the publisher's final PDF. This is how
some folks some publishers have sent take down notices to some sites because of this.
So you're posting your submitted version, you're submitting your accepted manuscript.
Your contract will typically tell you the what, when, and where,
the what version you can share whether it's the accepted manuscript or the submitted one,
it'll tell you when you can do it can you do it right away or do you need to wait 12 months or
sometimes even more than that that's called an embargo typically and then where you can do it
so sometimes they will say well you can share this in six months on your personal website
or 12 months in an institutional repository so it's important to know that "what, when, and where"
from your contract. There is a site that aggregates all these journal permissions called Sherpa Romeo
and that's a very useful site based in the UK where you can just enter a journal name or an ISSN
and it will bring up a page that will tell you what version you can share,
the what when where, so that's a very valuable source. You can also negotiate your contract
in some cases when they happen and they say congratulations your article is accepted
now just please sign this copyright transfer agreement often you can negotiate with an editor
or add or add an addendum to the contract to get the rights that you want. Also here at Virginia
Tech we are proposing a faculty open access policy which expands and simplifies rights for faculty
essentially we have the right to post our accepted manuscripts immediately as soon as it's accepted
so that would be a vast expansion of our rights particularly since some journals have no sharing
whatsoever. I've talked to some faculty in mechanical engineering, they say, I publish in
this journal but you tell me about sharing in that and there's no sharing so this would
actually give us the right to share articles where we previously were not able to.
So where can you post articles? I'm the manager of VTechWorks, so it has about 75,000 items, it's
indexed in Google Scholar, Google, all the major search engines. We get more than 3,000 downloads
a day so this is indexed around the world it's in Google Scholar, so it is a
very effective dissemination platform. You would have to register and then email us about
which collection you want to submit to work to but all students here graduate students and
faculty have access to this there are also many disciplinary repositories and pre-print servers,
arXiv is probably the most famous it came about in the mid-90s early to mid 90s i think in physics
and astronomy, bioRxiv is one of the life sciences that has really taken off in the
last two or three years and I know a lot of folks in the life sciences who are posting preprints
there now and so you can find a repository for most disciplines now
there are also some broadly based ones such as OSF preprints and preprints.org
where you can't find a good disciplinary one you can post preprints there many of these
journals will allow you to post on your website so there are some disadvantages to that.
It will get picked up by Google Scholar and search engines but for example if it's on the VT domain
your website is going to go away your website could also go away in the future so if you're
going to use your website I would highly recommend putting in a repository somewhere because every
repository has staff like we do here to look after that make sure the metadata is updated make sure
it's indexed we'll make sure it's preserved so it's going to be around for a long time
many of the journals are putting language in their contracts now about
not posting on or you can post on non-commercial sites
so what does this mean non-commercial? Well it turns out that a couple of the biggest
repositories are commercial, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. They are for-profit entities
and it's unclear exactly how they're making money they're using people's data
or serving up advertising and that sort of thing a lot of the publishers particularly in STEM fields
don't like the fact that they're aggregating all these articles from all the publishers in
one place so if you see that non-commercial language that's what they're talking about
I want to briefly mention open data unfortunately we couldn't bring one of our data experts from
the libraries in but we have tremendous data services department in the libraries who can
help you with your data needs more and more journals and funders are asking researchers to
post their data in addition to make their making their article openly available
so this is something that you need to be aware about aware of. So open the open availability
of data improves research integrity so people can check it. Often peer reviewers will ask for
access to it, can I check the data that sort of thing so a lot of it's about research integrity
and replicability, can this study be reproduced it also becomes a cyber object most data repositories
now assign a DOI, digital object identifier, to a data set and then it becomes something
else that can be cited, a work of yours that can be cited so if you have a particularly
valuable data set it's possible that the data set itself could get more citations than your article
and we also have lots of help for data management plans which are required
for many funding agencies when you're applying for a grant NIH, NSF and so on
we have lots of help for putting a data management plan together and that's really important
to think about how your data is going to be shared with others particularly
when you're dealing with human subjects and issues of an optimization
so i briefly just wanted to share a few of the library services for open access and data
we have an open access guide so if you just go to the VT website you can find our open access
guide which talks about some of the issues we've already talked about both OA journals
and archiving your version of your work there are links to our subvention fund again graduate school
students are eligible to apply for that if you want to publish in an OA journal that has a fee.
And our repository is VTechWorks so if you have a presentation a poster a report anything like that
that you want to share with the world you can register and put it in VTechWorks and it'll be
available to anyone in the world to find. For data we have a data management guide and we also have
separate guides for NIH and NSF if you're applying for grants to those agencies we also have a couple
of studios in the libraries that might be of assistance the first is a data transformation lab
and we also have a data visualization lab and we have a separate repository for data
so called VTechData and so you can link between VTechWorks and VTechData if you
have a large data set also there are a variety of private settings on this
if you're not quite ready to share your data you can keep it
behind the VTechData and not share it or put it up say let's share it in a year
you can do that as well and the same is true for VTechWorks, if you have
a 12-month or 24-month embargo from the publisher on it you can deposit it now
and just choose an embargo it'll automatically become available in 12 months for example.
so that is my part and I think I'm going to turn it over to Anita now to talk about
open educational resources.
[Anita Walz] I'm going to attempt to keep this microphone on and put it in my pocket at the same time.
So please raise your hand if you have heard of open educational resources
okay a few people um for those who have heard of this um do you think uh this is the same as open
access and i'm just curious okay not sure okay maybe maybe not so um this is a large part of
what i do and i'm going to tell you a bit about how this connects to open access open access as
Philip mentioned is historically thought of as a very open license things are freely available
they're free of copyright restrictions very this is a very very open way of talking about
resources that definition aligns very closely with the creative commons attribution license
please raise your hand also if you've heard of creative commons
okay pretty well good um so are they the same is this a different name for the same thing
uh yes if open access only equals cc by uh no with open access means three online nothing more
so how do we talk about open access and open educational resources as you're leaving the
room there's a copy of this handout that i'm about to explain so if you want to
pick one up feel free we'll also make sure that it is available to you on your course site
so open access open educational resources tend to be two different types of materials
that are created for different purposes open access resources tend to be scholarly
they tend to document knowledge in a field they tend to further a scholarly conversation
open educational resources tend to be resources that are put together primarily for teaching and
learning for stimulating discourse in classes they can be a lot of different things video software
formats you wouldn't think of as being officially academic they also include things like textbooks
so while we talk about them as totally different realms there's some overlap so in analog
environments you can have printed open educational resources or OER you can have printed open access
journals that you would print from from maybe your computer or copier but in general all
open educational resources are by definition open access and are available in a digital environment
what is the difference between um the types of licenses that are available
that are classified as open educational resources and those that are open access
as you can see there's a lot of overlap here the licenses on the top which include public domain
which is not a license are the most free the ones at the bottom are the least free so at the top
we have public domain resources things that have graduated from copyright or we're never eligible
for copyright we have a range of creative commons licenses that allow you to adapt so you can share
you can adapt you can customize and then there are a number of licenses that say you know
you cannot make any changes but you can share um and then we have things that are just simply
free online that are in copyright but don't have an additional license at the very bottom things
that are in copyright where access is restricted you have to log in you have to be affiliated
with the university to have permission to see something so this diagram shows you some of the
reasons why talking about open access and oer can be really confusing
i invite your comments on this this is new as of uh about two weeks a week or so ago
um i created this for faculty senate because they said what are the differences
so all these types of licenses the creative commons licenses still allow
fair use and fair use is a really powerful tool for you as educators to use materials
for criticism for teaching in limited and reasonable portions many of these allow adaptation
not all all of them allow redistribution except for things that are in copyright and
all of them according to scholarship you should always attribute but legally or contractually the
creative commons licenses always require a particular kind of attribution
so what are these things what can you do with them if you run across material
that has one of these cc license on it that allows you to adapt to the material
in general you can retain it you can reuse it you can revise it or makes it redistribute it
uh the five our permissions are pretty traditional um permissions that have been it's just a nice way
of explaining what these sorts of works can do or what what you can do with these kinds of works
so a few examples um a professor came to me in 2014 and said my textbook is $200
and i don't want to do that to my students what are my options and i showed him an existing openly
licensed text we worked together for 14 months and we created this book which is an adaptation of
that first book that this fits this course it's available free online it's available under an
open license and if you want to buy a print copy we sell them or the uni we don't sell them
but they're available at the cost of printing and shipping so this is one example of something that
um that professors are doing here at virginia tech and i should mention are there any canadians
here yeah okay so there's a canadian version because some really smart canadians decided
that they wanted a version that fit for their country for their students
um because they have a different health care system they have different gdp
there are different laws uh leading us examples are not very good for canadian context so
they've canadianized um the book and offered much in the same way
as we do it's free online you can get a pretty common demand copy and a little cost yourself
so this is a really it was really exciting to find out that that was happening um some other examples
of the authors of this book took an existing book i used it in a course and said
show us what you know about instructional design by adapting this book about project management
so one of the capstone projects of the course was to improve an existing book this is done by grad
students so they they were published authors very early on of learning resources which is wonderful
especially for instructional design folks to have that in your portfolio
another example is an anthology of english literature and maybe derek can comment on this
later i don't know if you know of this one but this is an anthology of public domain literature
how many of you have spent money on a morgan anthology or something likewise it's a
book about this thick it has all the readings for your english lit
i bought one when i was in college um this is a replacement for that um doesn't cost you 120 or 80
and you don't feel like you might want to download a label copy of it or go without it
um so this would allow you to access that those readings because they're in a public domain
so going beyond oer there are a number of practices that are related to
using open materials in your courses
as i mentioned earlier working with with students for those of you who will be teaching working with
students to create things that are meaningful beyond the classroom so the project management
book is a great example of something beneficial to the world but is also useful for demonstrating
knowledge as part of a course assignment so i will pass around one other book
and we do more than books but books are the most portable kinds of things uh is anyone here
in uh computer engineering electrical computer engineering okay so this is a book that is created
by Steve Ellingson who is a professor in that department and he said i have written books before
i would like to do this open textbook thing and we worked with him to design and develop
a resource that is very remixable it's written in latex people who know latex can move the chapters
around it's a really fun way of looking at learning resources because everybody teaches
a little bit differently so i look forward to your questions and um i think we'll turn it over to you
for introductions Anita before you leave that what about um uh syllabi okay open syllabi yes
because one of the darren established something like that uh there is so i don't know the
the update on deron's project right now maybe you can fill this in there are some open syllabi
projects um they're not quite as advanced as i would hope they would be but um if you go to
you know something like MIT open courseware that's a project that was established in 2001 or two
about 40 of MIT professors who actually don't just teach engineering they teach english literature
and history and a lot of core topics as well they have put their syllabus online they've put
any material that they have available that they own under their copyright under put it under an
open license and shared it openly so there are lectures there are um sample assignments it's
a great place to get ideas of how would i teach a course on X topic how did this other person do it
um it's a great place to to also see what kinds of resources they might use in their courses so
yeah um all right um before we turn the panel any immediate questions anything that came up that um
you want clarification on the definitions or um so in your slides you had mentioned three levels of
open access i think it was gold silver and bronze right that would have been in Philip's
yeah is there your last slide that had all those colors there right yeah that's right yeah
um yeah i don't really know how the um i want to make sure i'm on i don't really i'm
not sure how those colors got assigned to the different uh types of open access but somehow
published open access in an open access journal got the moniker gold
if you archive your work either as a preprint or accepted manuscript in a repository it's
called green so you might run into these colors more recently there's been one called bronze
which was things that are openly available and they can't figure out why
and some of that is journals making their articles available after a certain time
there are several journals that will make articles more than a year old openly available so they'll
still be under copyright which means you have to ask permission if you want to reuse the photograph
or figure or something like that but they'll be you can get to them so i don't know how many of
those there are but there's a fairly significant terminology seems to evolve over time so
i look there's a new color so i'm not always aware of everything yeah and there's a tool called
unpaywall, unpaywall.org it's a browser extension that you can add to your browser
chrome and firefox i think and it will put a little tab on the right side of your browser
and it will color the tab whatever color it thinks so it'll be gold or green or bronze i'm finding a
lot of the bronze is hybrid open access so these are the journals that are subscription journals
but they offer you an option to make your paper open access for a fee and typically those fees are
a little bit higher they can be as high as three thousand dollars so when the journal comes out
maybe most of the articles are behind a paywall it could be maybe two or three that are openly
available open access and that's because those authors paid the open access fee and um i think
maybe they're just being incorrectly classified they should be gold but they're ending up their
bronze tag yeah so yeah it gets complicated all the reasons why an article might be open
anyways so um with the open access textbooks you said especially like this business one that it was
kind of based off when the professor wanted to use are there any
hurdles there by then the original publisher in that it's like i don't know how active they
are with looking at these things but like oh this textbook's very similar to ours and
they're not buying ours anymore or is there ever any kind of comment of interest there
tourism and then open access and things like that i think there's definitely competition
but you can't you can't use one unless it's openly licensed itself so the publisher shouldn't have
any objection to you doing because you have to use one that is already openly licensed or you have to
get rights forever right yes so you can't just do this with any book okay so the book had the
original book had an open license on it and that's why we were allowed to adapt it to be something
a little bit different from for the purposes here yeah good question sorry that wasn't clear
um as you know there's criticism and concern uh that are expressed
by some faculty and grad students about uh not wanting to do open access to protect their um
intellectual uh you know enter their intel their intellectual interest and all of that
how would you address that why should we be going to open access when my faculty member says
uh-uh i don't want that to be out in the public we need to publish it in elsevier yeah
it's a very good maybe the faculty members can answer that too yeah i want there actually let
me introduce just again so that Cayelan Carey is associate professor of Biology correct and Derek
Mueller is associate professor of of English but you you direct the a direct composition
program composition program okay and so we wanted Derek on here as a our token humanities person
i do more than that i'm from the humanities background too so i can say that um
so i i find this some of these issues become much more complicated in the humanities and
Derek you might want to say something about that about why you might not want a fully
open license on something that you've written did you so you've written a book you might mention
the book yeah there's a lot of background context to put to that i guess um i mean
i i walked along a project for several years that um uh culminated as a book manuscript and i chose
to publish that open access and uh and that was for reasons of believing that publishing
means circulation i mean to publish actually the the root of publish is the same root as public so
so to choose not to have your work go public and to circulate if you if you
really want your data kept secure and private and you want your writing not to be read red
put it in a buried in a lead box you know put it under the ground and then no one will see it
ever no one will ever interact with it i don't think those are the goals of intellectual life
in a public academy certainly i don't i don't see that as really the purpose of the work it's for
uptake and circulation so um but to the point of uh caution that's felt where people feel a little
reserved maybe about you know i'm not sure i want my data just in anyone's hands there's a little
bit of a timing question that goes with that too um you know if you're a grad student and you have
work in progress ideas they don't necessarily need to free circulate if you if by doing that you make
yourself vulnerable to sort of being scooped or or having idea having data or or your written
work circulate um in ways that might it might not be fully formed yet right so i think there is a
patience to be urged with the choice to move to uh open access publishing so that's enough to know
Cayelan, did you have uh you want to weigh in on that too?
[Cayelan Carey] sure so um i'm a freshwater ecologist and so i do a lot of work
on studying how climate change is affecting drinking water in lakes and reservoirs
around the globe and so for me open access of both our the papers that i write and my lab writes
as well as the data we collect is an ethical issue and that i really feel like the earth is kind of very kind of
all hands on deck mode and so for me i see open access of sharing my data
sharing my papers as a way of trying to promote collaboration and getting people working together
in regards to karen's question about putting data out there um so in my lab we publish every
single data set that we collect within a few months of after it's gone um qaqc so quality assurance
quality control procedures which is a big deal because that means that i'm publishing um literally
tens of millions of data points every few months because we are collecting uh sensor data
that are out in lakes that are collecting measurements on the minute scale.
This past year we were scooped in the sense of there was a paper that got published using data that my lab had collected.
It was not from a collaborator it's not by anybody that i knew um and the first step i
had was i was horrified i was like oh my gosh this is totally undermining my intellectual and kind of
my mission of my lab but then from realizing this there's two things that emerged one is that they
were able to do an analysis that my lab can't do so therefore that's advancing the science
two i think there's something also about the idea of having the confidence that i will have other
ideas and i will have other opportunities and that this is how science works we're
building on each other and if we can't promote that as academics then why are we doing this
Did they attribute? They attributed the data so did you have second thoughts
after that no i mean i was upset for an afternoon but i think that this is a really good lesson for
me and this is only going to happen more and more and i was really excited so this past week
the funding program that i work apparently gets supported from the national science foundation
just released their new request for proposals and they're now requiring that all the data that are
collected from your previous proposal has to be published in a public repository with dois
before you can get next round of funding so this is massively going to change how
my colleagues do science and i also think that i feel i felt just so
fortunate and that our lab already has those kind of workflows set up that we're already
doing that so i don't have to have any change in procedures but 95 of my colleagues will so
do you talk to the people that published with your channel at all like about it
like for a possible future collaboration or i don't know
i don't know a lot about how that works but yeah so this was really recent so i'm still concerned
this is just last week
but i am i know this research group i've known them for a while so i just haven't
met them personally and i'm hoping to kind of meet with them at a conference maybe kind of
sit down have a coffee and talk this through and also one of the things that's really important to
me is just making sure that my students see this as a process because i think they have
concerns as well and so i think derek's talking about the timing is a really important one of
most of the journals that my lab publishes in require the data to be published
um but they um if you look really carefully that says something about
it has to be this is not just like published at the time of submission but at the time
of the revision and so i think that that timing kind of gives some protection for students when
you're kind of on time-sensitive deadlines is anybody dealing with uh data right now
or you're here kind of that that's going to be an issue for you um publishing your data
there's a question how many of you have published in open access journals
one of you not one of you do you even know if it's published in open access no and i'm serious
because there are some times when you may not know if it's just a natural you know process so
yes so i have a few questions about open access um and i know you uh phyllis you
talked you spoke about um the fact that you guys have funding to pay for open access journals
um so my advisor wants to you know embrace the open access um but you guys do not accept hybrid
journals that publish um like that you can pay for that uh open access um and that actually deters us
from wanting to go open access so we're kind of wondering like is there any way the library could
potentially like pay for those hybrids to kind of step us because a lot of the journals that
are open access in my field are either not so reputable or they aren't going to be read and
so the point of our work is to be read and people in my field i'm a computational biochemist so i'm
in a really weird spot like we don't know where to publish to begin with so we find one place
and all published there and so we publish in biothis and we publish in the acs phys b
um so like those aren't necessarily open access journals but nobody's going to read them otherwise
so kind of asking like would you be consider opening that up to hybrid journals like acs
um the fund actually happened
the fund actually changed its policy it originally did fund hybrid when we started we
started the fund in 2012 and it accepted hybrid applications through 2018 and we had very few
but also there were many objections from the open access community in general against hybrid because
the fees in general tended to be much higher in the open access journals that was one issue
also one of the um thoughts behind hybrid was that eventually these journals would
flip to open access journals enough if enough people went hybrid and they'd say
okay we just need to be an open access journal and hardly any of that happen
also many of the publishers who are benefiting from the high hybrid apc fees are the oligarchs
that peter talked about so they're the elseviers and taylor taylor and francis and
wiley's of the world so that are profiting greatly from our scholarship so those are
the are few of the reasons um but i don't know gail our director of the fund is here
and maybe can answer even some things that i didn't touch on i think i'll just say it another
thing i'll just say it another way the reason that we funded so few hybrid journals is because
the condition under which we would um fund those articles was if the journal was not
what we call double dipping so the library is already paying the full subscription price
then you're asking us to pay them again to have your article published and we would pick
we would pay the article processing charge in hybrid journals if the publishers reduced their
subscriptions based on the number of open access articles that they published very very few do
that so we would have ended up paying them twice so that was the reason funded so few
if you can see another way around that you know we'd be something to consider
yes um so i'm a geologist and pre-print servers are still a really new thing in our field where
they're going to be really embraced by sort of certain sub-disciplines um i think myself
they're just kind of starting to get there um i don't really have any experience with
it so if you speak on some of the like pros and cons i guess of putting a free print up online
um anybody who's had experience with that i can i can but if you want to thank it
you guys posting pre-press yes we are i just started um and the bio archives um
my colleagues in other disciplines specifically computer science have been doing this
in the archive for much much longer um so i think it's a discipline by discipline it's
really interesting to see who's coming on board with that um in my case um
so i've had two kind of situations in which this happened one is that we are submitting to a
journal which we know has a really long turnaround time but we want to cite it for example in a grant
proposal or we want to get it out there and be attributable um for example at a conference or
whatnot and so that's kind of the one approach but it's ultimately going to go into you know it's in
a peer review outlet as well it just takes a lot longer the immediacy of getting that doi
when you upload is pretty awesome on the other kind of situation that i'm in right now i am
a mentor many students do undergraduate theses and not all those kind of products are necessarily
at the point where they're ready to go through peer review and so we're using the bioarchive
to solicit feedback from colleagues that can see it out there it's open reputable and searchable
i can refer back to it and they can cite it you know for them moving through their undergraduate
careers and whatnot and so i see that as another pathway to use that as a way of sharing data and
sharing ideas can i ask if would any are there any publishers that would say okay well you have
this in a pre-print service or i'm not going to [ __ ] we're not going to publish your article does
does that happen i haven't experienced that in my field and from my colleagues
in computer science um that have been doing this for much longer they've said that their journal's
over because it became such an important pathway for sharing their work that over
time the journals in those fields changed so that that's no longer an issue for them
so i think that that would catch up as more people in that discipline do as well
that is something to be aware of though if you're in a discipline that's not pre-print heavy if your
you and your research group has a target journal you should look at their policies first because
when you post a pre-print you just rule yourself out of publishing in that journal
if they have a no preprints policy so but um like kalin said um it does tend to
flip the discipline so journals see all these great preprints out there and they
realize they have no pre-print policy they're going to change their policy because they see
how much great work is out there and they say it's okay to pre to post a pre-print and then you can
submit to us and uh seems like researchers are doing um sometimes they're just putting
a preprint out there and at other times they're submitting a pre-print at the same time they
submit to a journal so um i don't know if you have any thoughts on that you put pre-prints
out well before you submit to a journal um so well the the situation with the undergrad thesis
we don't know where that's going to go but for the other ones there's no formatting requirements
and so you basically format your paper to whatever journal you're going to send it to and at the same
time you just upload it to bio archive and that's great so yeah i know there's earth archive now
in the geosciences that's really starting to take off um one other thing that i wanted to mention
is that i think there are some journals when bioarchive really took off started recruiting
from pre-print servers so this really flips things so instead of researchers hunting for journals
that'll publish their work the journals are using preprint servers to find articles that are
appropriate for their journals and sending you an invitation to submit and that that did happen to
me for um a special issue and a computer science an article as a co-author on we got the editors
contacted the corresponding author and then that went into a special issue of a journal so
yes i don't know how to ask this question necessarily but um the free printing thing like
how does that work with plagiarism and not having her articles out there in multiple courts because
i thought you were not supposed to do that like ethically or been part of like the irv process
i thought my training said but it could be wrong so does that make sense yes yeah i mean it's it
there actually my my uh my daughter actually in college published something in a pre-print server
and then she submitted a paper later based upon it and they accused her of plagiarism but she had to
she had to go through this whole appeal process but it was wrong and she was clear but that that
there was there's something that could happen but preprint it's different than publication in a
term it's what you publish or when you post online to a pre-print that's why it's called pre-print
server it is considered pre-publication right so it's a different different category
yeah i think this gets back to our previous question we were talking about journals that had a
no preprint policy basically that policy is saying your work should not have appeared anywhere else
yeah right so journals are gradually changing those policies you know in computer science
physics astronomy they all accept preprints now because everyone puts it on the archive and it's
in the process of flipping for life sciences and people who post on bio archive so i don't know
that it's quite so much a matter of plagiarism as it is journals wanting to kind of have a monopoly
on that on that work and make sure it wasn't published somewhere else in another journal
yes
this might be a naive question but if if i become a professor in 15 years and i decided
to write a book why would i not like what would hold me back to have it open to everyone like
if i'm publishing with a certain publishing house do they have right to tell me okay you
cannot share this book you have to make this book super expensive like why books are so expensive
well yeah it's a very good question because i mean and i'll let derrick weigh in on this but
i'm from the book publishing world and um the whole book publishing industry is based upon
sales recouping the cost of publishing the book so a book costs typical book if you're going to
publish a book with a publisher or that's a an academic book it costs when you add in all of the
expenses of the editors and the production people and the paper and the printing and everything
it can cost as much as 25 30 000 for a single book so publishers have been reluctant many of
the book publishers are reluctant to go to open access because they lose their
their money source that's understandable because that's their business model but
derek actually has an interesting experience of how his book did sales wise as well as
uh open downloads yeah i mean this this book it's called network sense and it's and it's really um
it's a series of sort of uh attempts to kind of use data visualization to understand a vast
sort of disciplinary network all this kind of activity that constitutes an academic discipline
so there's topic modeling with um sort of some keyword analysis and 25 years worth of
publications there's some stuff that uh looks at bibliometrics like citation frequency and
and sort of a growing range of who's cited in five year increments um all along i was committed to
interactive data visualizations that would be published online and it would be
part of the book and so so the problem with the printed page was that it wouldn't do things that
that i wanted that i felt like were foundational to the project
my commitment to that essentially is what led me to a series and an editor who i felt i could
sponsor that work and walk it along so that it would so that it would be published online
the full monograph with these interactive digital elements and that it would also then a year later
actually roll out as a as a um a physical book that you could hold in your hand and that would
have that would have essentially screenshots with captions for the the interactive elements um those
were all things that mattered to me and what i learned is that actually i just checked in on the
the sort of the sales of the paper copies and the number of downloads just a little over a week ago
after we had a session um on etheneum uh maybe two weeks ago with someone who's sort of an open
access advocate too and and what i what i learned from both the entity uh the the colorado state um
system that's sort of a consortium of people who are handling the print side of publishing
is that it's not quite up to 200 um print versions sold which in the humanities is
i mean it's you know if you sell 200 copies you're doing all right but the online version has been
downloaded 7 400 times in 130 countries so so i could be i could be the kind of you know i could
go to my you know go by myself to the garrett where i write and just sort of work in isolation
and not have anyone ever see or hear about this book or i could make the choice right to have
it drop online it's not making anybody it's not making me any money it's not
but i feel like i'm a public employee i worked for university of michigan for a long time i've been
here for not quite two years i consider myself as a as a as a university a public university
employee i consider myself as a public employee right i don't care if i make a dollar out of that
project and that's maybe that's a distinction i think in the humanities and some of the social
sciences as compared to certain other fields um it was all about circulation so so the choice to
not really i don't know to make sure it was just uh accessible was that was the priority all along
that quite answers your question um i'm sorry a follow-up question so
uh for our for a reader like for for someone like me who doesn't know a lot of about these things
if i see two books one of them is open access and the other is from a reputed
publisher is there a general trend to go for the recruited publisher one
like generally you mean to publish with no or not for leaders or for someone who's trying to
access those books or to phrase it otherwise does people usually think that open access books are
lesser of a quality than uh reputed publishers sometimes that's an issue but it's if it's a book
that you're you're using for a class or you're assigned to students or you're using for your
research it's really on the reader or on the reviewer to determine what kind of quality it is
we've had this question with regard to our textbooks and to our other open educational
resources what are you doing for peer review and we do peer review with external reviewers
from other research institutions we do in-class field studies to get student feedback and find
out what students think of the work so there's a there's a lot of work that goes into it but
it honestly depends on who's producing it and how
yeah there's i mean there is i think there's a lot of attachment to um sort of inherited prestige
that's assigned to these presses and because they're long-standing there's a lot of legacy
weight to that um i think we're finally in the academy beginning to see maybe it's a generational
shift i mean folks who are who are receiving or earning tenure who have taken some of these
chances to publish where does the quality rating come from really like if you do good work and the
work stands let that show i mean i i've never really been so fond of deference to the press
as the press is where the quality comes from the quality the quality comes from the work right and
and i guess in my case at least i've been i've been very fortunate um because over the past year
my books won two awards that are bigger sort of disciplinary recognitions of the quality of the
work that that didn't precede the book that didn't come from the press it was very much more just
sort of like a jury appears kind of thing so do good work i think is always the first answer and
i think because open access is still new inside the book publishing world it's it's it's still
a lot of people just there's there's not as much open access literature in book form as there is
printed the book industry is still very much print oriented so we're still sort of figuring it out
and there's a lot of misconceptions around what open access means and that will change over time
you had a question so i'm funded through extension which extension has part of its mission as
creating um programming educational programming that is all required to be open access educational
programming are there any like i've never heard that anything we publish needs to be open access i
think it's a great idea um but are there certain fields that that are starting to go to like an
actual demand or a preference for open access because of the public implication not the academic
implication i think in some medical fields yes for sure and i think that's i mean that's a matter of
urgency for trials and whatnot and that's really been pushing the field at least in biology
yeah i think we saw the chart that biomedicine was by the highest to have open access certainly when
certain diseases like zika and ebola are coming out it's sort of verboten to put that oracle mind
at paywall because there's so many groups who want access to that almost right away
like i talked about non-governmental organizations needing assets so properties about borders and
lots of other groups you're going to want access to that research right away and so
people doing research in those areas just open access is something that you do
so but it does vary tremendously by discipline
you can just talk this time i think it will work yeah hi um so i am based in uh engineering um and
i do robotics work and so there's elements to publications where um a lot of the existing ways
we write our publications um like you can talk about the math involved in something
but not sure the code and call it open access but like nobody can actually do it unless they
do a full phd all over again um and so like is there sort of open access journals that require
open source in addition to that or open design in addition to that like genuinely whole open access
for the entirety of the project in an engineering kind of like engineering endeavor kind of sense
philippines might have the answer to that i think there are some a couple of years ago we had lorena
barba here from george washington university she's an engineer there and she's on the editorial board
of the journal of open source software i believe and so i believe all of their works and they
expect the software to be available to people but yeah that's a really great point and that's
there's a lot of people talking now about open science or open scholarship that it's not just
about open access which is the article for the open data it's about everything together
that you needed to put that research and then include software then that software should be
available to folks too um so that's one journal i can think of there are probably others that
do require the the code to go along with an article um would you talk about um open science
the uva center for open science at some point oh sure yeah i mean because caitlyn
is that some of our journals require the code in regards and also in the data and so there's two
ways of handling that one is publishing your code with the data as metadata in the repository which
you're depositing whatever your data set is and the other is is that there's specific repositories
for code specifically um and then the second thing is as i've spent a lot of time recently
because i've been working on some software and we're trying to figure out the license
that should be attached to that and so um one of the great resources that i've found is github
you can set what type of license you want when you make that public and they have some really awesome
options you now have to specify that in your grant proposals for the science directorate um
and the mit license is the one that is generally the most used of my circle yeah i think it's going
to get this is going to become more and more of an issue because of the problems of reproducibility
that is that we're seeing more and more evidence that as more of this as more scientific research
becomes available and the code is available and the data that people can't reproduce those
experiments so that's going to become i think more and more of an issue in the future
yes um just kind of going off of that like reproducibility um one of the journals i've
like read and i actually wrote a post about open science or open access and i've talked
about plots the public library of science and i find that class has really um questionable
articles at least in my field um where the data is not reproducible um and it's like found on the doj
or whatever that was um as like a reputable site but i find the review process is not uh stringent
enough we need like it so like it's in the method it's like you read it and you're like i don't
even know what like salvage they use or like things like that where you could never go back
um so how do you trust an open access journal like that if that's the case for
not all but like some of the science papers that have been out there so is everybody familiar with
public library science applause um yeah it's a that's a really good question and i've been
following some of the reading some of the stories about claus and they're they're they're actually
um the number of articles they're publishing and decreasing significantly there seems to be
a concern about floss and what plos did was they developed this model this they're called mega
journal and there's there's real issues around if you're going to do a mega journal like that where
the quality control becomes an issue if you're publishing so much material that comes into you
so i i have concerns about that with plos and i that's why i've been sort of following when i
see a story about anybody else um have you seen anything about loss or do you have an opinion
of it i published several articles in the class one um and these are tend to be interdisciplinary
papers where there's not a good home in like a disciplinary journal and that i know that people
can access it a lot of people in my field are also you work a lot with community science data
for example we have you know 100 000 observations of someone on their app taking a picture of a lake
and it shows an algal bloom and so we want to make the data accessible and the those products
accessible so that journal seems to have been a home for these kind of studies in my field um and
i feel like those it's really important that you make sure that the people that you're suggesting
for peer review you give a long list because i think that's important in terms of the comment
you made about the data repositories though my experience has been is that there's very different
levels of stringency for metadata in different repositories and so um and something that
i've seen recently is that nsf is now making recommendations for which repositories they want
you to deposit your data in um and so at least in my field they specify which ones are accepted and
those tend to have much more stringent things like naming your solvents and how much was you
know pipetted in so that's something just to be mindful of what are some of the ones that they
recommend so knowledge base um the one that my the division environmental biology is recommended is
edi the environmental data initiative um who's partnered and actually brought sent people to
virginia tech to run workshops here um jonathan petters would be the person to ask about this
for which discipline would be the specified one but i've been really impressed with that
yes
hi um so i've heard i guess a bit of grant writing and how this relates to publications kind of
mentioned briefly but maybe our professors can kind of touch on that even if you need it to
include fees for publishing open access if that's a requirement so we'll make apps on that please
do you mind repeating the question i'm sorry i didn't hear all of it
i was asking about publications and grant writing including this funding
for publications and if you have to include some type of access you can just touch on that
yeah so i generally have to budget somewhere between 10 to 15 000 per nsf proposal for
open access fees that's really low that does not cover everything um that is needed um i've from
my experience serving on nsf panels um you will it comments will be made as to how large that budget
is um typically that's one of the things that gets trimmed when you're trying to get down behind you
know less than some thresholds but you can't get funded at least in my kind of division without
having that be at least 10k with the expectation that each journal will probably be around 2 000
to get one article published what does it cost to publish in print journals
i mean i'm trying to i mean you're saying 10 to 15 000 for open access
what would you have had to budget if you were not doing open access
nothing nothing no perfect no do they pay charges charges anymore
so some disciplines will have a trunk per page depending
my colleagues that are more on the computational modeling side
their budgets are much more in the range of like 30k per proposal for a million dollar grant sorry
yes uh so dr young talked a little bit earlier on about some of the good things about open
access and talk to some of the issues with it like like the taxpayer principle
and also the oligopoly issues i was wondering it seems to me
like there's a couple of disincentives for like we're just talking about one
uh public publishing open access i was wondering if you guys could expand on that a little bit
things like them not having as high impact factors things like the fees that you guys were just
talking about and then so what type of things would need to be changed like what mechanisms
need to happen for those types of things incentives to be changed
and then also is there a conflict of in potential conflict of interest with open access
journals in the sense that um traditional journals are getting revenue based off of
subscriptions so if the journal's publishing really quality work they're going to get
really wide subscriptions uh whereas um if it's based off of the fee that people
are paying with each uh with each publication and it seems like they the journal will have an
incentive to publish as many papers as possible as opposed to the highest quality ones thanks
model subscribe into being i think around 2000 or so
but typically the peer review process and the payment process are independent
and so i've never seen any evidence that that there's a conflict in fact so
you're still sending it out for peer review and people are either accepting it or rejecting it
based on the merits of the article and then it goes to the editor and says this article is
accepted and then you go into the um but yes that was a concern that was raised early on with that
and it seems to have kind of died out um i don't know that that's talked about too much um anymore
um then response to the other issues you know one is perceived that we already heard earlier
um journal titles that you've heard of and know in your field
maybe all subscription journals and people have heard of the open access journal so that's a
really naughty issue the issue of prestige a lot of people are kind of pushing back on that
you might have seen that one of the recent nobilis posted or someone posted a rejection
letter from nature from one of the folks who won the nobel he published in another journal
there's actually quite a bit of research out there now showing that
that you don't necessarily need to publish in a high prestige journal to get lots of citations
so that's becoming more and more spread out and actually the the fellow who runs google scholar
has actually published on this as well that they've found that citations are becoming more
and more distributed and i guess a little bit more democratic in the digital era and it's not
quite so much about the title of the journal that you published in and so there's publish
there's sort of pushback on is it all about the title of the journal that you published in and
the impact factor of that journal because there's lots of problems with the impact factor as well
it's not a very great metric because it's an average um it's very citations are very
skewed in journals you can have one or two articles that get 100 500 citations
and all the rest might have 10. well what's the average so you get a high if for that journal
so you should be taking the median not the mean of those journals so this is just a fundamental
problem with the iaf but everyone talks about the impact factor just because it's a phrase that
rolls off everyone's tongue what's the impact so um impact factor definitely has some big problems
when it's used in evaluation of researchers yep the other thing i the point i'd make is that
open access when you talk about open access versus subscription that is simply a delivery
method and it's a business model it has nothing inherently to do with quality and that's where
the sometimes these things get confused because when you publish in an open access journal
open access doesn't mean that that journal is any less rigorous than another journal and you
can also make the case like elsevier one of the things that the big publishers have done
why those costs are going up is because they keep starting new journals and new journals
and forcing the libraries to subscribe we pay that big bundled fee and so there's all
these journals that nobody wants they get or a lot of people don't want um thrown in
to the mix and they may or may not be high quality journals but elsevier will live off of the overall
prestige that they they carry so i think over time these kinds of issues will will play out and will
have a more i hope a more balanced view of what that means can i add something else um one of
the factors that you did not mention that i think is an important barrier to acknowledges inertia
the way that we have always done things and this is something i think that i see in
the open educational resources adoption or non-adoption that i think is probably
typical also with regard to journal publishing how have we done things our traditions so there
there's some cultural change that that needs to happen could happen is happening in some corners
of and and some mainstream areas as well but i think that's also a significant factor i just
feel like the current model is so unsustainable like that's going to force things to change and
i see it like just in my experience of you know from the past 15 years in which i've been doing
science of just how rapidly the past few years there is now this real emphasis on open access and
i predict that over the next five years it's going to change even more rapidly and for all of you
pursuing careers in academia and publishing that it's going to be very different than as it is now
and did you have one follow-up question um yeah i really agree with what you're saying i i
was wondering so maybe from a mechanistic standpoint should it come from the
university what from the professors and maybe in their evaluation of new hires or something
maybe they're not paying as much maybe they're not putting as much weight into the impact factors
that these these assistant professors are publishing it seems to me like
they're still evaluating based off of the impact factor and what you're publishing in but uh it's
a great question and um people have a lot of thoughts about that there's there's an article
that was just published on the bio archive within the past few weeks of a survey of all of the hires
and life sciences of 900 hires in the 2010-2019 academic year who got faculty positions at any
kind of positions across the u.s uh the majority of them had preprints posted
and the majority of them did not have kind of a high prestige cell science nature article so
that might be a good place to look for data on that and their data are public yeah i
also wanted to point out the um that there's actually a research declaration now that
universities in europe are signing on to now it's called the san francisco declaration on research
assessment and it is highly critical of the impact factor and the use of metrics to to evaluate
researchers so um that's one thing that i think everyone should look at i think it's just that
sfdora.org that you can look up door admit that factor
and probably find it i don't know that many u.s universities have signed on yet but i know many
in the uk and throughout europe have signed on and said yes we're not going to evaluate
people based on this job applicants or people who are already on the tenure track based on the
iaf of the journals that they publish in because that's really just not a good way to to evaluate
folks i also wanted to follow up a little bit on your previous question about how things should be
and i think what everyone would like to see is no fees for readers and no fees for authors that's
the perfect world that we're trying to move towards and there's some examples out there
and hopefully this would be subsidized by finders to be subsidized by libraries
so that there's no charge for readers and no charge for authors
because you know these open access fees are now another thing that authors have to think about
if you want to publish in a journal without those fees so there's one initiative called scope 3 it's
in particle physics where a number of journals i'm not sure how many terms it is i think it's at
least a dozen maybe 20 journals where libraries have come together to fund these journals
behind the scenes there were existing journals subscription journals that flipped open access
and so they're free to read and authors don't have to pay anything to get those published open access
and so there are other initiatives like this in humanities called open library of humanities
based in the uk that hosts a number of journals and humanities no charge for readers no charge
for authors so that's what we're trying to work towards but it's a big collaboration problem
with funders and universities to fund these journals behind the scenes but i think that's
sort of the perfect world that we'd like to see where authors don't have to worry about this
i mean it's a lot of money but when you look at how much money is in the system
it there's enough to make this happen it's just a matter of flipping the system so that that money
that we're paying what is our scale our journal subscription the library budget
is about 10 million and we pay about eight million for journal subscriptions and vehicles
eight tenths of that is going to just the euro
yes um i'm curious about the el severe negotiation that's covered
are we prepared to i don't know we as a virginia tech prepared to go toe-to-toe like california did
um or like i guess the game plan when it comes around for negotiation
so yes we so as i said the there are seven research universities in virginia that have
collectively negotiated the most recent deals um so we got together recently to talk about this
and what our strategy is going to be and what we what we want in an agreement
but there are it's still early so we have basically another two almost two years so we
want to see what happens with california because that we have the advantage of being able to
we hope see some progress there but then there's one of the challenges for us is
unlike the university of california where it's a 10 campus system that
they have to be together we're seven different universities and we all have different ideas
so we have to be careful about how we approach this because some universities may want to take
more of a hard line than others florida state university recently pulled out they were part of
the florida-wide system and they pulled out and what they did was they said okay well we're gonna
put x amount of dollars that maybe a half of what they were spending for for the elsevier deal
and they said we're just going to pick the top journals and we're going to get as many
of them as we can for the amount we want to pay that's one strategy that a university has taken
by going outside of the the consortium modeling so we're going to see a lot
of these experiments and it's it's unclear what's going to happen here but that's what
where we will be talking a lot about that the next two years and our head of our library dean walters
will be doing all meetings and getting community feedback about that because we were very concerned
about we don't want to just pull the rug out from under our faculty and students on the other hand
we can't accept a deal where it goes up another 20 and then you just simply can't afford it so
how do we manage that so there are a lot of conversations that still have to happen
yeah so i had going back to that open access going back to the open access general question a lot of
the open access journals that i was finding are subsidiaries of those big five and when
we talk about inertia it seems like you want to support the little guys and but
you know even though you had said that the quality of these journals the peer review process
separate from that i i think that's got to be true to some extent but some of these smaller journals
like you know is there some inferiority and in terms of like how is like what's the best way
to pick an open access journal i'm just curious how you all feel about that if you should avoid
going to one journal that's you know within those big five because those profits
you know yeah that's part of the reason why the hyper journals i mean elsevier is now one of the
largest perhaps the largest publisher-level access journals but they are open access content i should
say um so there they know how to make money off of it and that there was a question as to
whether that's sustainable and that was part of the reason behind why with hybrid journals why
we didn't want to continue to support the elseviers and the springers with that money
philip you might have other advice just i mean he mentioned the various places
that you can go to look and find out are they reputable the directory of open access journals
um i mean you do have to do research you really do because there are a lot of there are a lot
of bad journals out there but um you know i think in the early days of of journal publishing print
journal publishing there were bad journals and good journals it's it's like this we have to
figure out how to make this new system work and as caitlin is saying i think we are at a point where
the current system is is unsustainable so it's going to have to change whether we like it or not
okay go ahead one thought that came into my mind of course checking the indexes that we
mentioned is important um director of open access journals um looking to see if people
in your field are publishing their people that you know are publishing there um but one thing
that came up that's sort of um i guess a little revolutionary and hasn't quite quite taken over
yet is open peer review and so there are a few journals uh open access journals that are
posting the peer review of the articles online with the article and so that is one
way of radical openness uh for you to check the peer reviews and see what people said
um i know the journal pure j which publishes a lot of life science and paleontology has gone to
this model and it's uh i forget exactly how it works but it's a matter of choice on both both
the author's side and their viewers side i believe the authors have the choice whether or not to have
open peer review or have it have their reviews posted or not and the reviewers have the choice
whether to attach their names to their reviews or not um and so i think they had maybe 40 take up
something like that there's another journal f-1000 research that basically posts the after an initial
check basically post the article online like a preprint while it's being sent out for review
and then the reviews um are posted openly and the names are posted openly of their viewers
so that's one way of kind of radical openness where you can like just read the reviews and
see what people said about the article is this so what would happen in that instance if the reviews
come in and they're bad the paper gets rejected it gets rejected so it gets pulled down do they keep
it even the the pre-print wouldn't stay up or would they just for f-1000 i'm not sure i
think they stay up so the way that the so that european geophysical union which is
um publishes in a journal which i've published in called biogeosciences where they do this and you
when you submit your article it gets published and gets a doi in biogeosciences discussions
and then that's where it's open and that will stay up but then if it goes through peer review and
it's required that the reviewers um are public so you put your name on it and then um
if it the edit there's an editor and it values it just as it would for a normal journal and then
um if it gets accepted then it goes into biogene sciences as the like the flagship journal so
um but i want to comment just on your point sam one approach i've taken for finding open access
journals is that there's a lot of society journals um that have published or kind of societies that
published now um journals that have open access that just kind of inherent to that journal
and i feel like that's a really nice way of supporting your home society
um such as like ecosphere um and oh no letters um and so that they're generating revenue that goes
back to your society because that's where that's supporting but then it also um i find that because
it's within that umbrella of journals that the the quality of the peer review tends to be higher
i would just add that if you um don't find a journal or if you want to evaluate a journal
and you don't find it someplace like the directory of open access journals
there are two organizations um open access scholarly publishing association and a committee
on publishing ethics that if i was evaluating a journal i would go and see if the publishers
aren't members of those organizations and even if they're not members they have a code of conduct
and so i would evaluate the journal along the lines of that code of conduct
and basically what you're looking for is how transparent are they with their policies
do they tell you who's on their editorial journal do they tell you if there's a fee
before you submit your article so you kind of know what you're getting into
yes so uh in an ideal world um say we get rid of the day five or they all switch to open access and
now we're looking at okay who's going to bear the cost for for the open access publishing
um who who should vary the cost so you mentioned funding agencies uh for example and if a lot of
the funding agencies are taxpayer funded um is it right for the taxpayers to bear the cost of the
research and also the cost of the publishing or should because i think about it from my
family's perspective i'm probably the only person in my immediate family that gives two cents about
the published literature um so uh you know is it right for the taxpayers period that cost or
should universities still bear that cost this university is the ones that are predominantly
using the literature um but we obviously just wouldn't have the oligopoly huge profit charges
you really want to take that one out i mean i i have thoughts about it i mean again as i said
there's so much money in the system right now i mean we libraries are paying huge amounts of money
billions of dollars to pay for subscription journals that's money that
could go towards paying on the front end for works that you publish open access
that so that's money that the universities and colleges are already putting into the system that
i don't it's there's a question as to whether there's enough money there to cover it
when you combine funding agencies and government support and university money
already that the universities are paying that you can get pretty far along towards
towards making that possible will elsevier will the big five go away
i don't think so i don't think they're going away anytime soon because they know how to
i mean they they're they're very shrewd and they know how to manage any kind of it that if
the writing handwriting is on the wall and they're gonna have to change an open access
they will find a way to make money off of it so i think that's that's a question to me that i think
a lot of the people um currently negotiating these agreements with elsevier think somehow
that elsewhere is going to go away and i just don't think that's going to happen myself
so so i wanted to say two things one
i don't know what the answer is and in part because there are scholars around the world
for whom two thousand dollars and that's not a lot of money um
whereas other scholars would say two thousand dollars is a ton of money we want to hear from
those people too we want to hear from people who whose universities don't have a lot of money
and in places where the exchange rate is not favorable um i forgot my other point
i had a couple of thoughts on that the first is that
some people have pushed back on that taxpayer argument to say that it never should have been
truncated this truncation between doing the research and publishing the results
never should have been there in the first place because publishing results is part of the research
so it always should have been open and funded by the taxpayers
and now i'm forgetting in terms of openness we have uh i think what we're finding is that
the articles get a remarkable amount of use when they're open we have an increasingly educated
populace um it's often surprising to people how many downloads how many views that they get when
their articles are open and it's really hard to predict who might find use in that work so that's
another thing that's come out of the open access movement as well i remember with this mistake
there is a movement to hold publishers to pay for to be paid for their services period
um and to define what those are um so i think that benefits there is a big
pushback on abc's right now though particularly with scholars in the developing world article
yeah article processing charges right so this is the charge that you uh pay uh when your article
is accepted in an open access term not all of them but a good number of them do have these charges so
if you're a scholar in the developing world and you get an article accepted
in one of these journals then you know two thousand dollars is insurmountable
for a lot of these scholars so some open access journals do have waivers so if you're from a
certain group of countries defined by unesco then you might get a waiver for that article
but it raises abc's for everyone else because you still have to pay for the articles published
but there is a significant i think pushback for abcs because now things have flipped if more
things are open access more people around the world can read those articles but then you're
putting up a barrier to publish for a lot of these open access journals so if you're a scholar in
developing world suddenly you can read a lot of stuff but now you can't publish your research
so because of the open access fees so again the ideal is to try to make it free for both sides
um so um two questions one hopefully quotes um the first one being um what so we talk about
like the uh charge associated with open access on for an open access journal like especially like
a non-profit open access journal what is that money actually going to in the first place are
they seriously still printing off physical paper copies when it's all available publicly online
like uh just like what is that money actually going to do is it all just server hosting costs
not peer review but um the editorial process and you still have type setting layout you just don't
have the printing pause which is small printing is now a small portion of overall cost okay um and so
then a bulk of that work is in the way could there be the editing from a content perspective and also
the editing from a formatting perspective with the formatting being like a standardization sort of
okay cool awesome thank you very much and there's like a lot of expertise that goes into that and
it gets it's sometimes under appreciated that publishers are there for a reason when they
do they perform a service and if that all fell on the shoulders of academics that we all had to then
edit our own work we'd be in a very different world there is very little transparency
on apc costs for sure that's a huge gap and i might only know like a handful of journals
who have tried to be transparent on that ubiquity is one which is a service that we use to publish
journals here in the library we have several journals including some graduate student journals
they're pretty transparent on what each step costs and that sort of thing and there's a few other
journals that have done it but in general there's very little transparency and they tend to scale
with prestige so like nature communications is 5200 now which is a ridiculous apc for all of us
but you know for some of these publishers make i don't know what their acceptance rate is
but some of it is taken up by just the amount of papers they have to reject their editorial
costs they're managing if you're only accepting 10 percent of your papers or something can they
pay their reviewers though well they'll pay an editorial manager to you know oversee the
editorial process and peer review sending things out for peer review and that sort of thing and
a lot of the money that they're paying the other part of it that's would go away is there's a lot
of money that goes into access control so making sure that that you know the subscriptions are paid
that people can't get in or i mean that is hugely expensive so that that's hard to tell
how much of the of that goes into it but it's a big big expense so that would be a savings
so this is the case also with textbooks as you know
i have a feeling there's many of us not just me in here who would be first-time publishers
any advice for getting the first article out there
um the beneficiary of you know i did my phd at syracuse and i was in a culture there
it was very much encouraging me to look at independent
independent publishers smaller journals lesser known journals
open access journals and in my field book reviews were a really good first choice for publication
but i also i also started my career at an r2 uh and so i was surrounded by colleagues there
was a culture there that was actually quite encouraging about risk um this is really just
a sort of a footnote maybe to your question but it's like to take the temperature of the
departments that you perspectively foresee trying to become a part a part of assuming you foresee
an academic future right like kind of gauging what are what are these institution types how
different