I see that the vast majority
are the students in the PFP course,
not surprising at all that I'm glad you're all here.
I'm Karen DePauw serving as
Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education.
It's been my pleasure for what?
Two and a half years now, I think,
where we always have an open access conversation.
We used to have it without the library,
and now that the library has contacted us,
it's much better, I think,
for everyone to have our conversation that
guided by many of the things that are going
on in the library world.
Thank you all for being here.
Now, I get to sit down and
[LAUGHTER] bring in all the people.
[NOISE] All right. Thank you, all.
I know you don't have to be here, most of you.
This is Open Access Week which is
an internationally recognized event and where we
promote the virtues of
open access and discuss the pros and cons.
It works out very well to be able to coordinate.
What?
Unmute them. Yeah, awesome.
Reading all the signals.
It works out very well for us to be able to hold
this Open Access Forum in conjunction with the class.
We hope everyone will feel like they can ask questions.
We want this to be a back and forth.
We're trying to put it in the context of you as
graduate students thinking about your career and a lot
of nervousness around publishing
and how you're going to
publish and where you're going to publish
and all the impacts of new technology in publishing.
We'll try to explore some of that tonight.
My name is Peter Potter.
I work here in the library.
I'm Director of Publishing Strategy.
I'm cohosting with Philip Young,
who is a scholarly communications librarian,
and now is the Director of
the Institutional Repository VTechWorks.
Our panel tonight is
made up of Karen DePauw, who you all know.
To her right is Sylvester Johnson who's
our new Assistant Vice Provost
for the Humanities and founding
director of the new Virginia Tech Center for
the Humanities which will be launching this coming year.
Elsewhere.
Yeah. So that's a new venture for us.
Sylvester joined us this summer,
and I thought this is a good way to break him in.
To Sylvester's right is
Brian Hole who's the founder and CEO of Ubiquity Press,
which is a open access publisher
and they're based in England,
but they now have a US office.
Virginia Tech, through the libraries,
we are working with Ubiquity on providing
an open access publishing platform
that's going to be called VT Publishing.
This is our attempt or our effort to
get into really the publishing
of open access scholarship.
At the end is
Marie Paretti who's professor of engineering education
and co-director of
the Virginia Tech Engineering Communication Center
here at Virginia Tech.
Marie is, she's already
I know on the board of other journals,
but she's looking to launch an open access journal in
engineering education among [LAUGHTER]
other things she's doing.
[LAUGHTER] She provides a long-term perspective.
So we have a diverse group of people
here that that I'd like to be able to do
then is I'm going to provide a little bit of
background on the state scholarly publishing
just to give you a quick overview.
Then Philip is going to talk about open access,
just to give you the basics of open access.
Then I'm going to pose a question to
the panel and give them a chance to respond,
and then I hope we can have a conversation
about [NOISE] open access.
Again, interrupt me if you have questions,
if there's anything you see
that you have a question about,
and we hope there'll be a lot of exchange here.
My own background is in
university press publishing so then
in the scholarly publishing business for my whole career.
One of the things that I find is that people often don't
realize how big a business scholarly publishing is
because you tend to think of it as the publications,
scholarly articles and books that
get read by just a few people,
your peers, your academic colleagues.
But it's actually one of
the biggest businesses in the world.
It's $28 billion by
some estimates how big of a business it is,
which is bigger than the music industry,
the movie industry by far.
As you'll see, it's becoming increasingly
concentrated in the hands of a few publishers.
But here's a quick little breakdown
of how that 28 billion is divided up.
It's 40 percent is journals.
You can see books in terms of scholarship.
It's a very small portion of it.
Then you got all these other areas of publishing.
Then just to give you a sense of globally
how it shakes out,
the United States is well over half of the market,
but China is part
of this rest of the world
[inaudible] part of Asia Pacific.
The numbers on this are really hard
to determine but China is
the growing player in all of this, and these numbers,
it's hard to tell, [NOISE] China's growing
very fast in terms of being a
major producer of scholarly content,
but also readers and consumers of it.
[NOISE] It's important to think about
scholarly publishing as a ecosystem
and made up of the researchers.
That would be all of you who are going to be
both authors and readers, the publishers.
Publishers are a diverse group as well.
Scholarly societies like [NOISE] IEEE, or
American Historical Association,
American Sociological Association.
These are publishers of scholarly content.
Then there are academic and university presses.
There are about 100 university presses
in the United States,
a lot more worldwide.
They tend to be much more concentrated
in the book side of things,
but they also published journals.
Then there's the commercial publishers,
those who are in it to make money.
The academic university presses are non-profit.
Then the libraries, still the
major source of revenue for these publishers,
and then the research funders are
the other important part of this.
The NIH, NSF, in the UK,
the Research Councils UK
that are funding a lot of the research.
I always like to give a bit here,
just a little bit of facts and figures.
There are 79 million active researchers worldwide,
since there are the global spending on R&D,
2.5 million articles published per year.
What's interesting this diagram here.
It actually has grown in a remarkably steady rate
since the first journals were
published back in the 16th century.
It's been a steady three percent annual growth
remarkably over that time.
Today, it's an average of
2.5 million articles published per year,
30,000 journals, journal titles,
5,000 publishers, 11 billion in annual revenue,
and that's just for the journal part of it.
So if it's at 28 billion,
this the journal part of it.
Eighty percent [NOISE] of this market is
controlled by 10 publishers.
Probably, it's going to be even a smaller number if
these keep getting bought out by big conglomerates.
But just to give you,
and have to pause on that to think,
that there are 10 publishers
controlling scholarly communication,
basically, in the world.
Here are the top seven,
and you probably don't know a lot of these
but you'll see these names; Elsevier,
Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Sage,
and then a couple of the university presses,
that's Cambridge University Press
and Oxford University Press.
Know that they're controlling 80 percent
of the scholarly journal market.
Part of what makes this whole system work
is that the journal
remains the primary vehicle
for a form of communication of scientific research.
It's the means of dissemination or it's
how scholars continue to register discovery.
It's how we manage quality control through peer review,
and we use it for tenure and promotion,
so we're stuck for the time being with journals.
Books serve some of the same function,
but, again, it's in a smaller part of the realm.
My final career, I worked almost solely in books,
but the journal's where all the real money and volume is.
Thinking about that in terms of where we are now,
the advent of the Internet just
really potentially disrupted everything.
It's this old tradition,
combining with new technology and
made possible open access,
and open access, Philip will talk about,
will give you a greater sense of, but really,
open access is the idea
of making this research available for the public good.
You have, on the one side,
these commercial publishers that
are trying to control it,
and then academics in the academic world
trying to say we should be the owners of our own content.
What gave this a boost was in 2013, here in the US,
was the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy started
this releases directive requiring
federally-funded research to be made publicly available.
That really launched all of
these different agencies and
foundations developing their own open access policies.
pushed Central has become
the place where a lot of the particularly
in bio-medical and life sciences journal literature,
all of these get deposited
and you have access to them openly,
and they now have 4.5 million articles.
You get a sense of how big that is,
but still in this country,
we're still building the infrastructure
to support open access.
Here, just to give you a sense of
where we stand in terms of the total open access market,
I gave you that figure of 11 billion,
is the total global market for journals.
[NOISE] In 2016, that was 470 million,
which is in the range of 4-9 percent of the total market.
It's 20-29 percent in terms
of the actual volume of works published to open access.
It's still a small portion of what gets published.
That's right now a problem,
and we're facing this issue of can we flip
the system from this
paid subscription [NOISE] access to open access,
and I'll let Philip take it from here.
Thanks, Peter. I think
most of us know what open access is,
but I just wanted to go into some of the background,
the definitions, and the
problems that we're trying to solve with open access.
Most people realize that open access is the ability
to access a research article
if you have Internet access anywhere around the world,
but this definition, which comes from Peter Suber,
one of the leaders of the open access movement,
emphasizes the 2nd part,
which is that it's free of
most copyright and licensing restrictions.
This means open access is not only open on
the web but also has an open license on it.
[NOISE] What this allows is freedom of sharing.
For example, if you'd like to use
a photo or illustration or something like that,
you can do it without permission.
You just need to attribute that work.
[NOISE] The problem we're trying to solve
is all the groups who don't have access.
This includes researchers at other institutions because
each institution subscribes to
a particular set of journals.
I don't know what researchers in
my field have access to at
UVA or Ohio State or wherever.
Often when we publish behind a paywall,
we're leaving a lot of our colleagues in our field out,
and we may be emailing you for access to your article.
Also increasingly,
we've called ourselves a public land grant university,
but even more recently,
we've called ourselves a global land grant,
but we can't be global if we're not
providing access to our work,
to researchers around the world.
Most researchers in low and middle-income countries
are not part of institutions that can
afford the subscriptions to these journals.
So we're leaving out a lot of researchers around
the world when we publish behind paywalls.
Most research is supported by taxpayers in
one way or another either through federal grants, NSF,
NIH, or through public universities like Virginia Tech,
we're partially supported by Virginian taxpayers.
We're leaving out a lot of government policymakers
and non-governmental organizations.
These are groups that are having a big effect on
the field or impacting different fields,
and we want them to have access to our work.
Often we don't realize that they don't have this access.
Alumni themselves don't have access to the work.
When people graduate from here,
you lose your affiliation with Virginia Tech,
[NOISE] you no longer have access to the research.
Citizen science is becoming big in some fields,
crowdsourcing. Of course, us.
We've all had a paywall at some point or another,
and this is a barrier to us completing our research.
We need access to all the research that's
out there in order to do our own research.
Some of the advantages of implementing open access or
providing open access to your work
are that it provides more attention to your work.
Some of this is intuitive
because everyone can see your work,
everyone can view your work,
download your work, and as part of this,
open access work is generally more cited.
There are about 70 studies on this and
about 46 show there's
a citation advantage to open access articles,
both archiving your work and in open access journals.
It's very discipline-specific, but generally,
there is an advantage,
a citation advantage to open access work.
It also allows things like text and data mining,
which are huge in some fields.
You can't do this without permission of the publishers.
If you want to take some data mine, web or science,
you can't do it without permission
from Periscope or something like that.
You can't do it without permission from Elsevier.
It also contributes to research integrity
both in terms of plagiarism and
more eyes on the work to spot
errors and to make it more replicable.
You can also use in teaching and research
without getting permission if it's open with license.
It's just a more efficient way to do research.
If we invented this system,
we wouldn't invent the system that we have now where
it's in my interest that
everyone has access to my article,
but that's not the case right now.
When we're publishing a journal,
their business model is restricting access,
so there's an inherent conflict
between my interest and the journal's interest.
If we really wanted efficient knowledge building,
we would build and share into that system.
There are two ways to make your work open access.
The 1st is by self-archiving your work,
posting a version of your work online,
sometimes called Green OA.
This is depositing a pre-print
or post-print in online repository.
Here at Virginia Tech we have one
called the TechWorks, which anyone,
including the tech, can put scholarly work into articles,
presentations, and so on.
The archive was active for physics, computer science,
and other fields starting back in
the 1990s and still go on,
and more lately, we'll talk about pre-print servers,
but now there's a pre-print server
for almost every visit.
The other way to do this is publishing
in a open access journal.
There are fewer of these,
but there are about 10,000 open access journals now,
and so Public Library of Science,
PeerJ are some examples of those.
There's a lot of misunderstandings around open access.
Most people think that it means
publishing in an open-access journal,
but as I've just mentioned,
you can't archive your work even if
you've published in a subscription journal.
The second misunderstanding is
that these journals always charged a fee,
which is also not true.
Most journals do not charge an article-processing charge.
The third misconception is that that
fee is meant for you to pay out of your pocket,
which is always not even the case.
Usually it's paid out of grant fees
or departmental fees or
from an institutional fund like we have here.
The libraries, we have an open access fund
that anyone on campus can use.
It's also not intended to apply to
truly creative works like if you have
a novel or screenplay or something like that.
It's really meant to apply to the results of research.
It's not a way to bypass peer review,
articles go through exactly the same process
as they would in the any other term.
It doesn't say that publishing is cost-free,
we're just supporting that publishing in other ways.
Are you open for questions now?
This is my last slide.
[LAUGHTER]
Some of the issues that have come up around open access
recently are lack of
awareness about our article archiving.
As I mentioned there's this conception
that to give open access,
you have to publish in an open-access journal,
but 75 percent of
publishers allow you to archive a version of your work,
[NOISE] you just have to save
that last version of the work.
There's problems around article processing charges,
if you don't have a grant,
you don't have access to funds, and so on,
it can be a problem,
although many open access journals offer a waiver.
There's also requirements from many funders.
If you do have a grant,
that should work to become part
of their repository like PubMed Central.
Predatory publishing is a problem that's come up with
the article processing charge model, in other words,
someone could just set up a journal in
their apartment and charge
people that have submit articles,
put them online with no peer review, and so on.
If you get an email spam about,
please submit to our journal,
you need to vet that journal,
if you haven't heard of it, if you don't know it.
Preprints have been very active
in the last couple of years.
This is a way to provide immediate
open access to your work.
It's also a way if you've fear of being scooped,
you can submit it to a preprint server,
get a timestamp and get a DIY on
immediately and get feedback on
preprint before you submitted to a journal.
You just need to know the journals
preprint policy before you do that.
Academic research networks like ResearchGate and
Acadamia.edu have been under a lot of attention,
both have been subject to take
down notices from publishers,
so these are for profit generally venture funded efforts,
and they're not truly an open access repository.
We [NOISE] usually recommend that
people also put their work in
an open access repository or
disciplinary repository only if
they want to make their work available.
Open access books are also a relatively recent thing.
Here in libraries we support a number
of efforts to support open access books.
Peter can probably address this better than I can.
There's much greater costs
associated with an open access book.
There are problems there.
One last perspective on open access is
that maybe we are thinking too small,
maybe we should think open scholarship.
More and more people are talking about open data,
open software, and all the things
that contribute to the research process.
Maybe open access is just a part of that,
and we should be thinking about
the style of the workflow in
general and making that entire system work.
Questions? Yes.
What do you think about the relationship between
piracy and open access? Let me clarify that.
The idea behind, for instance,
Predatory Publishing, which is
technically a legal endeavor,
it's the inverse of piracy in a lot of ways,
in the sense that piracy, for instance,
provides for a certainly open access
that still is embedded
within the vetting processes
that scholarly articles go through
whereas [NOISE] you just make
everything open maybe that
kinda does it.
[LAUGHTER] I guess what I'm asking is that,
maybe we need to allow for a certain space of piracy
within an open access framework or something,
but [NOISE] the idea
is that you allow for a certain level of
transgression within a symbolic network,
a symbolic order.
But I think a lot of that is happening
now with sites like Sci-Hub.
Does everybody know what Sci-Hub is?
No.
It's basically a Napster of research articles.
What's the Napster?
[LAUGHTER] Yeah. That's right.
Basically, it's a legal site
where all these articles have been uploaded,
and I think the server is based in Russia or somewhere.
A lot of publishers are trying to shut it down,
Elsevier has been in court about it.
Now there's proposal to
[NOISE] shut it down when rebooting.
But this isn't all legal access because
these are articles behind a paywall.
These journals use a copyright,
it's basically copyright infringement
to upload something that
has copyright to the site. [OVERLAPPING]
This is the problem with open access and piracy
is that copyright is not
the same thing as intellectual property.
Copyright regards access whereas
intellectual property regards actual creation.
The difference is that I can
purchase the copyright access
to all of Michael Jackson songs
without having written them.
Where or for [OVERLAPPING].
All you're doing if you
are trying to access Michael Jackson's music,
they give you the information, they're
not giving you any share of the copyright.
Yeah, but in the sense of scholarship,
we are using them.
I'm going to argue even
that in the sense of Michael Jackson,
we also use his songs,
take for instance, Puff Daddy and
his use of rips from popular songs for instance.
What is the difference between that and a quotation
from who cares who?
Why does it matter that,
let's say I pirated that same copy
of whatever book that I'm going from?
The copyright is a thing
that is a market-based mechanism,
it has nothing to do with intellectual creation.
It's part of intellectual property.
I mean, this is something that
I'd like us to be able to get into,
but I want to start.
Let's hold that thought because it's a big subject,
it could take over the whole session.
I want to get back to that,
and I'd like to get the panel involved in it.
Actually, does anybody here
have initial thoughts on that question,
anything you wanted to throw in?
Or do you want to just get to it when we get to it?
Me. [LAUGHTER]
I mean, [LAUGHTER]
Can I use one of these little things, this one?
Yes.
Is that working?
Yeah.
I guess the copyright is there
to preserve the profits of
the publishers and you're right.
Then that's not necessarily
in the interests of the academic community,
but that's the way it's been set up to date.
I would disagree with that, but we leave it to them.
[LAUGHTER]
Let me start.
I wanted to back up a little bit before we
get into that because
this whole issue of Open Access is
something that's relatively new.
Many of you, your professors,
your advisors started their careers
at a time when they didn't have to deal with any of this.
What I wanted to get from the panel was I
wanted to throw out to them a question which was,
when they initially became aware
of Open Access and how it's
impacted their career or where they see it
going the impact that it's going to have on scholarship?
Is this an important subject
[NOISE] that we should be grappling with?
Karen, would you like to start?
Sure. I'll start because I'm sitting right here.
[LAUGHTER] Doesn't make [inaudible]
I guess Open Access as a term and a concept,
I really picked up in the last 10-12 years,
not surprising, because I
think that's when it started taking off.
From my perspective, it has
less to do about my scholarship,
but it has a lot to do with my awareness of open access,
open education, resources, journals,
et cetera, for the future faculty.
That's how I came into it.
In fact, I think it was the first speaker of
Open Access Week some years ago,
and I sat there in the audience going "OMG,
I need to bring this into the future prof course,
because we need to think about it."
I've always had the view
that if we're doing
scholarship or when we do scholarship,
we ask the question,
we answer the question,
and we tell [NOISE] people about it and one of
the ways is through publishing that is presenting.
So I'm delighted that we have
Open Access because I really think we need to be
spreading the knowledge rather than just
containing that behind firewalls.
Thanks. I'm glad to be here.
I want to give a [NOISE] brief description.
When this first came on my radar,
so I coedit a journal, the journal of Africana Religion.
It is not an Open Access journal.
It is the journal that's behind a paywall.
A point of the story
is to show some of the complications behind it.
As one publisher told me some years ago,
Open Access is not a moral issue,
it's an economic issue,
and this is what he meant by that.
I was at a meeting of journal editors,
just two years ago,
and one of the journal editors who was there
was talking about his journal that he edited,
which is an Open Access journal.
If there is no paywall and
anyone can download
the content, they can read this journal,
but the way that he
described their mechanism for doing this,
I thought was quite striking because he
said that when asked how their model was able to work,
he said, "Well, we're able to."
He said, "Actually, it costs
almost nothing to run this journal,
our authors do manuscripts,
and we have then
copy-edited and printed out and reuploaded to the web."
And I said, "What do you mean it costs
almost nothing to run
this journal because I run the journal,
and our manuscripts don't copy-edit themselves."
[LAUGHTER] He said, "Oh,
just the graduate students do that
and you can pay them almost nothing."
[LAUGHTER] There were about 50 people in the room,
and I was shocked
that he found this something to brag about,
that he was exploiting his graduate students.
So, I was taken aback and I said,
[LAUGHTER] "Wow, this is labor exploitation.
It's actually a serious issue.
How do you feel so
comfortable just exploiting your students this way?"
He said, "They're very desperate for money,
they'll do almost anything for something."
[LAUGHTER] We'd all stopped there.
The conversation did not get any better at that point.
[LAUGHTER] One of the reasons why we decided to run
our journal the way we did is because we
wanted to launch the journal in a certain time frame.
We had institutional support to start the journal,
but that institutional support was
going to provide us with funding,
in order to pay people to do the work that we needed,
in order to run that journal.
Most of that work was called the production process.
Our authors don't pay us anything.
They send us a manuscript.
We get professionals, experts
in the area of the manuscript in order to review it.
We don't pay them anything.
They do this because of this network of obligations,
at times [LAUGHTER] a lot of what happens in scholarship.
But when it comes to actually producing that
and copy-editing it and putting it in order,
putting it on servers,
we have funding to pay people.
Sometimes they're graduate students,
sometimes they're professional copy editors
to do this work,
and we pay them at market rate. It's not cheap.
The point of all of that is that,
as one of the presenters which I was showing you,
there is no client that Open Access is not without cost,
just as there is no such thing as a free launch.
There is no such thing as
a free journal article or research output.
There has to be some way to support that,
and that's what that Publisher meant when he
said to me that Open Access is not a moral issue,
it's an economic issue.
It will be hard-pressed to find
anyone who thinks that inherently
that people should have
to pay in order to reach scholarship,
just inherently, because they should just have to.
The question is, how do you make it
sustainable so that this can actually get produced?
So it's just a little bit about why
we did the journal the way we did.
There's still is an issue of the paywall.
Faculty at research institutions will usually not
have to pay themselves to read these journal articles,
but their institutions are subscribing,
and that revenue model is supporting this business.
As Peter Potter said at the opening of this talk,
he talked about the business of publishing.
There has been a business model for a reason,
is because this is
an economic issue and that labor has to be paid.
So [inaudible].
Okay.
How I came to open access?
I used to work for the biggest publisher
in the world which is Elsevier.
I don't often say that in
libraries [LAUGHTER] because people
throw things at me or I get kicked out.
We like you anyway.
I'm not getting a WebX signal once
you have that mic on [OVERLAPPING]
Should we use this one?
So we don't need the mic?
Yes.
All right, I'll project.
It was probably 2006, 2007,
I worked for Elsevier in
product development and during that entire time,
I was not aware of the term open access.
It just wasn't something that came up.
At the company, most people who worked there thought that
everything they were doing was for the public good,
they were about knowledge dissemination.
They didn't really realize that most of
the people in the world can't access that information.
I came to open access when I then left
Elsevier and went back to
University College London to do my
Ph.D. which was in archaeology,
and I started doing my research in India.
I discovered that nobody there could read
anything even though there are
programs that publishers have that are
supposed to disseminate information.
Pretty much none of
my colleagues in India could read anything at all.
I came back with my mission to try and improve that,
certainly within archaeology, and we
had a small journal in
the Institute of Archaeology in London,
which was [NOISE] a
subscription journal published in print only,
about 200 copies a year,
and we looked at ways to bring it online in open access.
The cheapest thing we could find was
about $20,000 a year,
the cheapest system, so we decided to do it ourselves.
Basically, my reaction to
learning about open access was to get very angry
about the fact that the large publishers
weren't supporting it and they
weren't making it easy for people to publish that way.
They were trying to make it expensive and push it back
because it endangered their existing
business model of subscriptions.
We formed our company based on the idea that
we should try and increase
open access publication and make
it low cost and cost-efficient so that,
especially, the humanities could afford it.
What we've managed to show is that you
can do all the production work and
editorial work and run a profitable company
for about $500 an article.
Whereas the larger publishers charge anywhere from
1,000 - 2,000 - 3,000 per article.
That's probably where I
was talking about profit margins before,
I agree it's not the entire story behind copyright,
but the large publishers are mostly on
the stock market and every year they
have a mandate to increase their profit,
so they pushed prices up and up and up, and in the end,
they're charging us a lot more for
that work, than they need to.
That's how we started in great anger.
[LAUGHTER]
For me, there's two parts to the question.
I figured out that open access
existed a decade or so ago when I realized, hey,
some articles you can just find on
the Internet and some articles I had to be
at the library or on campus and connected to a network.
It's like, well, these two things are different.
I've published in some open access journals.
There are some journals in a couple of
different fields that I'm in that are open access.
I had that experience as an author and then
I've also published in subscription journals.
My background is a little split,
I'm an engineer by undergraduate degree and
my graduate degrees are in English and
my position is in engineering education.
It's a weird space and I've moved back and forth
between the humanities and engineering,
but one of the things I found when I came to
engineering was that in fact, journals here,
not only charge a subscription fee to libraries,
but they charged authors to publish in the journal.
Which in English, people do not do.
My libraries is going to pay you to
subscribe to the journal and I'm going to pay you
750 or $1,000 to publish in it. How is that working?
Engineering has been an interesting
exploration for me as a world,
but It made me think a lot about where I publish,
how I publish, where things get published,
and who has access to it.
One of the things about the field
that I'm in now in engineering
education is we are an extremely tiny academic field.
All academic fields are tiny relatively,
but those numbers on how
many billions of dollars are spent are astonishing.
But engineering is a small field and it
doesn't have a lot of journals right now.
We have far more researchers
than we have available publishing outlets.
That's one of the reasons that we're looking at starting
another journal and in thinking about that question of,
here in 2017, if we're going to start a journal,
what's that going to look like?
It was almost a no-brainer to think about doing it as
an open access journal at
this point because we're not going to do a print journal.
Nobody, I shouldn't say nobody,
but very few people read
print journals in academia anymore,
most things we access, we access online,
so the printing costs are not there.
The cost piece that we have to figure out is
the copy editing costs because that's the expense.
One of the interesting things for me in
this process is the question
of who bears the costs associated with open access?
I'm all excited that we're going to start a journal,
then I find out the Virginia Tech Library hosts
open access journals for free to me as a faculty member.
It's interesting to me
that what's happening in that model,
we still have to figure out how we're
going to fund copy editing,
but the cost of the server,
the cost of the software,
because managing a journal is no small task.
You have to get submissions in,
you have to send submissions out to reviewers to review,
you have to get reviews back in,
and if you have any substantial number,
you're not doing this from your email account,
you want some database that's managing all of it.
It's interesting to me that,
Virginia Tech as a University has
invested in the resources to pay
for a system that will
actually structure that part of it,
it'll look like many of the systems in the paid journals.
The university is absorbing in some way that cost,
and that leaves us with the question of copy editing,
which is a more manageable piece of that, but even there,
that's a space where we will negotiate
with various and sundry people.
I might go with my handout to various deans,
and department heads, and foundations,
and whoever to try to figure out
how to get the copy editing piece of it.
But given where the web is and how people access
information and engineering it
is a practice-oriented field,
we want faculty to be able to read the research we do,
we want to be able to publish longer articles.
You can imagine in engineering,
if you're paying by the page,
you write very short articles,
which is a limitation.
We're looking at being able to put out longer articles
which you can do in the web
without this publication costs,
but we still come back to copy editing.
I find Virginia Tech's choices
around open access and host for journal support,
I don't know if other universities do this,
if I'm just lucky or how this, I don't know.
The library publishing field is growing and there's
an association of library publishers
and I don't know how many are in it now,
but it's becoming a large organization now.
It's a new development.
The library doesn't get money by magic.
That's your tuition dollars and
my overhead research dollars and
somebody's some, less taxpayer's,
tax state support is in the basement,
but it's some combination of tuition and
research overhead and foundation that's paying for this.
Does anybody want to
ask the panel after hearing that you may have
a specific question in light of
what you just heard or throw out a question?
I know you said
the Department of Publication or whatever,
you had the professors there to review your articles.
How do you call people way
from ASE or other articles and say,
"There's lots of reviews to be
done and not enough people reviewing this"?
How do you entice
people to come to your articles instead?
Could you repeat? How do we entice them to do what?
How do you find people to review your articles?
To review the articles?
Yeah.
We ask them.
We have a very large editorial board of about 35 people
and we are very keen on
maintaining really good relationships with them [NOISE].
We pay them kindness words,
we give them through that, thank you,
we give annual reports every year,
we see them at conferences, we've bought dinner.
[LAUGHTER] We try to
cultivate good relationships and
show that we appreciate them.
We of course have to go well outside of
that 35-person editorial board network.
The software's that was being described by Paretti
is the Manuscript Management software and so,
our publisher provides that for
us so we don't have to pay for it.
It's included in our business relationship with
the publishers and that software allows
us to keep track of how many times we've asked people,
when was the last time they've reviewed something.
We have to pay attention to that as well because so far,
our journal has been running for almost seven years now,
and we have very good participation
for asking for reviews,
meaning that probably about 60-70 percent
of the time people say yes.
We have a manuscript,
I can load in the names of
eight people into the software and it'll ask three,
and when those three say no,
it will go to the next three,
and then when two of those say no it
will go to the next two, etc.
That software will end
up maybe asking 10 people to review,
one article but I don't have to
constantly send out 10 emails.
The software does actually help
with that process and again,
it's managing it so that we're not over asking.
It's also appreciating people when they sent in a review,
we send them a note and say,
"No, we really appreciate it, thank you."
Then I'll see him at a conference and say, "Listen,
thanks so much for reviewing that article."
Everyone depends on this.
We all republish articles and journals,
so we all need people to review our work.
It does come back around and eventually,
in the very larger sense,
but those are some of the things
that we've tried to pay attention to.
It's important to point out in light of that,
just hammer home the point that so much of
the academic publishing relies upon unpaid labor and yet,
there was a time when journals were
just published by departments,
by universities, by small publishers,
and there was no idea of the big conglomerate publisher.
But these publishers like Elsevier figured
out that if you buy up all of
the journals in a field or in multiple fields take,
for instance, Elsevier is
a corporation that has investors,
they make a 30-36 percent profit,
so all of this unpaid labor
and then they're charging back to libraries.
Our budget for Elsevier is in the millions and that
is a system that is
corrupt as far as I'm concerned. [BACKGROUND]
I was going to say that the whole process of reviewing,
I want to push a little bit against it
as completely unpaid labor because
to some extent it is
an expected part of a faculty member's job.
The university has a triple mission
of teaching, research, and service.
Typically in a dossier
and when you're talking about that,
your work as a reviewer of
journals falls under the service category.
I would say in the same way
that serving on curriculum committees,
showing up at a panel,
doing all these kinds of things,
reviewing journal articles is part
of our service mission as faculty.
I push a little bit that it's completely unpaid.
Well, it's unpaid in the sense that it is to Elsevier.
Yes. It's unpaid to them.
[OVERLAPPING] [LAUGHTER] The journals get it for free.
Yeah.
That's more challenging.
But I think the other piece of building reviewers,
and I'm an associate editor for one of
the major journals in our field for
the journal of engineering education,
and it is that combination of your winning smile,
and your arm-twisting, and begging.
But also one of the things that again,
because we're a small field,
we're very conscious of is training reviewers.
How do you build a review pool?
We think about, and we're doing
some more thinking about how do we work with
graduate students to talk about
the process of reviewing journal articles?
That's actually in classes and in workshops.
Being a reviewer is actually
an important step in being an author as well.
When you review other people's articles,
you begin to learn what journals are looking for.
Most of the journals that either
I'm a reviewer for or an associate editor
for send the reviews back to the reviewers blinded.
So I review for a journal
of business and technical communication,
I send in my review a few weeks later,
I get back a blinded decision letter
from the journal editor that's sort of,
"Dear author, here are the three reviews."
We do double-blind reviews,
so there's no name on the author's
and no name on the reviewers,
but I can see my review in the context of
the other two reviewers and in
the context of the editor's decision about the journal.
Now, I've learned a whole lot about: A,
my work as a reviewer,
B, my work as an author, C,
the editor's perspective on the journals.
It becomes embedded in that whole process and as
we cultivate reviewers and if journals are doing
a good job at sharing those reviews back,
there's a lot of learning that goes on
that is also beneficial as an author.
Yes, Elsevier doesn't pay for it,
that's why we're going open access,
but I do think that it's important
to recognize that the review process
itself is part of our scholarly service to the field,
and that's where, maybe in a sense,
whatever university you worked for
is paying you to be a journal reviewer.
We actually do have a journal that does pay reviewers.
It's called Pellagra and
it's run by the University of California.
I'm going to review for that journal. [LAUGHTER]
A hundred bucks, so it's not a lot,
but the idea is that
you are doing something and it should be valued for it.
If the author is paying
$600 or something for the article,
then they give $100 of it to the reviewer,
but the reviewer can choose to either pocket that money,
or it can go into the area's institutions,
or open access funds and this has been
running for about 2-2.5 years now.
No reviewer has taken the money.
They've all said, "Give it to my institutional fund."
It's an interesting experiment.
[BACKGROUND]
You've all mentioned the cost of doing this.
How do you cover those costs then?
I guess I'm just going to think from
like Internet perspective.
All of a sudden you have this advertisement on
the side which is why I
don't want to look at them anymore.
Or a [OVERLAPPING] free,
and then ultimately these costs are to accrue and then
suddenly it's a small fee or whatnot.
So how are you covering those costs?
Thinking from that long-term perspective,
how are you covering this class?
So with our journal, as I said,
it's behind a paywall.
We work with a small publisher
that works with small journals.
We had to pay a subvention,
as it's called, in order to start this.
Which means we gave them money knowing that for
the first five years we would make nothing.
They would grow our subscriber base,
and then at some point if there was
net revenue [NOISE] that would be
shared with us after year five.
So we now are generating revenue as a journal,
and that money is going
to help to offset the cost of paying copy editing.
It doesn't cover it all,
but it covers probably about close to one third of it.
Most of the- 25 to 30 percent.
But up until now, all of that cost
has been borne by our host institutions.
My co-editor and I have basically
negotiated with our institutions
to have support for the journal.
So that has been the basis for that until now.
Now we're getting this little revenue stream
from our share of the revenue from the Journal.
So that's been a significant source.
Most of it has been borne by the institution.
That's the place where we're going to look.
Don't tell my department.
[LAUGHTER] [inaudible] my department.
The two options are either you charge authors and you
pay the copy editors out of the authors' fees,
or there's institutional support.
Or you find some generous donor
somewhere who says, "Sure,
here's $50,000 to pay
your copy editors for the next, however many years."
I think long-term, for it to be sustainable,
we have to look at what's called flipping the system.
Which is, they said libraries are
paying millions of dollars to these publishers.
If that money didn't have to go to
those publishers and it had to go to
some work open access journals,
suddenly, the economic equation would look very different.
So that's the long-term goal,
but you're dealing with huge megaliths in the publishers.
I was going to say, I think one of the things that as we
think about starting an open access journal.
When you go with a publisher, particularly Elsevier,
for whatever evil they might be in the world,
also has a reputation as a scholarly publisher.
Wiley has a reputation as a scholarly publisher.
So there's an automatic credibility that comes from that.
One of the things my co-editor and I are
thinking very carefully about
and assembling very carefully is,
book an advisory board and
an editorial board of scholars who
themselves have enough name recognition,
power, clout, whatever you want to call it,
such that the journal itself
has a high recognition level to begin with.
Because I think that's thinking about open access, right?
Sure. I could come along and launch it with no copy
editing it and Virginia Tech would pay
the cost and I can do it however I want it.
But having an editorial board and
an advisory board of
well-known scholars in the field is an important part of
that equation for us in
establishing credibility because we're not coming
out with Wiley stamp on us or Taylor and Francis or Sage.
We had the same thing. We had
a Linguistics Journal called-
it was at Elsevier, it was called Lingua.
They kept asking to be published
open access but Elsevier kept saying, "No,
it would be $2000 per article,
and we don't really want to do it."
So they broke away the entire board,
resigned about 30 something people,
and they came to us.
Since then, we were a lesser known publisher of course.
But because the entire board came
over and they brought the entire community with them
that journal [NOISE] was now massively
outperforming the Elsevier journal,
which scrambled to find
new people to be the editor-in-chief and so forth,
and is probably going to fold in a few years time.
So it really, like you said,
it's the entire community saying,
"We want this to be open access and we're
prepared to stand up for it."
I just want to underscore a point
that's been made a few times- more specific information.
Our annual institutional subscription costs
for our journal,
which is a humanities journal,
is under $150 a year.
You want to take a guess at the high-end of
the subscription costs for
a scientific journal, say in oncology?
$1000. No way, you weren't.
Way up.
Easily over $15,000 dollars even.
Yeah, it could be up to $20,000 a year for one journal.
In fact, I've actually toyed with
the idea of starting one of
these scientific journals [LAUGHTER]
to fund my humanities journal.
So then we could pay our copy editors.
But that's just to give you a sense of
some of the unevenness.
I mean there's a huge gap between $150 a
year for this humanities journal,
which has quality research
and research has been published in it.
The labor that's involved to produce it
is not more than the labor to
copy edit a scientific journal,
and the $20,000 for one journal.
We had a question over here.
Yeah, I was going to say [inaudible] I actually
mentioned the same on my classes,
and I personally feel that we are,
as a community for the open access.
How's that going to affect tenure?
How do you even manage the distinction between what
is going to talk to
your journal or talk to your open access tool?
I strongly believe it's institutional.
So what you're doing now is
brilliant because it's somebody who's coming into
the academia from a new perspective [inaudible].
How has the [inaudible] , it's institutionalized.
If you want to be obviously tenured,
if you want to graduate and publish,
it's just wierd to me from an outside perspective.
I think there's less concern now on
whether a journal is open access or published
by Wiley because for good or for bad,
we live in an age of metrics.
So you can get things like citation counts and what's
the impact factor of the journal,
and if you build the credibility into the journals.
So we're toying with things like the first issue,
or sometime in the first year we'll probably have
a by-invitation issue in which we
invite the top scholars in the field to publish.
So then you start to
build credibility and it's a way to build up
your citations that you get
the appropriate impact factor.
Because more and more sat on
p and t and then into the college p
and t. People aren't going,
Oh, what is this journal open access or not?
What's its impact factor?
What are your citation counts look like?
How do we measure the impact of your work?
Which is increasingly important
in ways that are both good and problematic.
I think the interest in the impact of
scholarly work is an important question.
Why do we do what we do?
Is it making any difference in the world.
Whether or not citation counts are the right way to
do that is a whole other question but-
Is everybody familiar with
impact factor and what that means?
Brian, who is it that controls the entire sector?
It was Thomson Reuters,
now it's Clarivate Analytics,
which is also the nameless corporation that's
buying up lots of small league companies.
That's another aspect of this is that
we've turned over in
this control [OVERLAPPING] our metrics,
how you determine the impact to a big corporation.
It's not a statistically viable metric either.
It doesn't actually make sense.
[OVERLAPPING]
You can influence it.
[OVERLAPPING] This is related to
the TMT process and
the incorporation [OVERLAPPING] it's all right.
That's so our WebEx folk scan.
Sir, this question is mostly related to
the TMT passes and
the incooperation's presence that you brought up,
especially in the area of the kitchen and feels
that application or these you're not going against it,
you're just going to get
used and you're never going to know,
so how is Virginia Tech working towards
incorporating Altmetrics such as downloads or online engagement?
I went to a great session
in NLI this summer that was all about this kind of stuff.
There are sort of Altmetrics sites.
One of the things the university is in the midst of at
the moment is a re-exploration of
the criteria for tenure and departments are going through
processes around benchmarking and
identifying those kinds of things.
I would say that we're in a time of transition in which
people really are asking that question
and what is the value of?
Altmetrics will tell you things like
social media mentions and other places.
We are just beginning to understand those,
the standard is still bearing number of citations,
impact factor of your journal,
but it's also looking at,
I think the university writ large,
not just Virginia Tech,
is beginning to think about,
but I don't think we're there yet.
I don't think we have good ways of doing it.
I think we have ideas.
The platform we will be using will have Altmetrics.
We'll have views, downloads,
citations, tweets, Facebook mentions,
Wikipedia mentions,
and we're starting to explore new metrics as well.
It's something that's going to keep evolving,
but one of them is now people can annotate paper
online and private annotations,
group annotations, and so we can
actually say how many times paper's been annotated.
It's not just how many times it's been downloaded
and stuck in a folder.
Someone's actually made notes
on that so that they're using it,
that kind of thing,
slightly more meaningful metrics.
One thing I'd say about Altmetrics do,
that I think is important,
is the way it's most effectively used
as it is as a source of
qualitative information that can tell a story.
That's one of the things we talked
about a lot in the library
is that in Altmetrics,
you're not going to get an impact factor out of that,
but out of that you're going to find
out all the people who have tweeted,
all but people who have cited you.
If you had a story in the New York Times,
you can find out about it,
but I think you would have found out about
it, that kind of thing,
then you can take those details,
and you can work them into a narrative and increasingly
that's a part of the process.
Yeah, and I'm just going to say that I review
tenure information packages for
people at other universities as well,
and there's always a narrative section.
I think in every dossier I had ever reviewed,
and that is a place where you begin to look for,
how is this person talking
about the impact of their work?
Sometimes it's and I was cited
122 times and that's great but sometimes it's also,
''But I've worked with this professional society and now
these people here are using this thing I've developed.''
That narrative piece becomes an important place,
but it's in flux and I think we are done.
Why is a majority centric determination of quality?
Why is that in effect?
What I mean is, why does a larger number of people
citing Senate article mean anything
about the quality of the content because it doesn't,
it in fact, [OVERLAPPING] we can draw
a correlation between the same thing
that happens in popular culture.
The most popular stuff is the shitty stuff.
[LAUGHTER] It's like [LAUGHTER] why metrics?
Why is that the determining factor?
I guess a lot of these companies that produce
the metrics will say it's the best way we know
that universities often want to come
down something quantitative so they can base a decision.
I don't think it's the right thing.
Also like the Altmetrics,
those are also predicated on popularity.
Like what is the most anything in this category,
the Nazis were a popular institution in their time.
[OVERLAPPING] It doesn't mean anything.
Yeah, and I think that's why
when this gets into the
whole promotion and tenure process,
which I don't know if it's where we want it to go or not.
But I think generally when I review PNT cases,
often you're trying to do a holistic estimation and yes,
it might has an H index and that's great.
They have citations, but typically
people also send articles that they've written.
I have a stack, here's their narrative,
here's their CV and what they've accomplished and here's
what they've selected as
they're depending on the university,
3, 4, 5 of their best articles.
Then part of what that process is,
is a holistic attempt to look across.
If I hadn't read their work before,
I'm sitting down and reading
those articles and trying to
understand where that fits in.
I'm trying to assess their narrative so
it's complicated because yes,
we have numbers in universities like numbers,
so look, you have a citation count
and I can do something with it.
But thinking about the process
that you will go through as faculty and
then when you become tenured and you think about
doing reviews of other faculty,
we are the us.
We are the people who set what
these standards look like and we're the people who do
the reviews and it becomes incumbent
on us to be able to contextualize and say,
I've read these articles,
they're addressing critical issues in the field,
they are theoretically smart, they're empirically robust.
Yes, they do or don't have citation counts.
I would anticipate those might go
up in time because of the quality of the work.
I think part of it is a conversation
that we as faculty have.
I think that's one of the values of open access as well,
is the work gets out there more,
it can become commented more,
more people can access it so I can
do a review and whether or
not I have time to go into Iliad and
request three copies of your article,
I can find it.
It's not as simple and even as I've said
in department and college discussions around PNT,
It's not just about the numbers,
it's about a letter writers
address these issues of quality on a much broader scale.
You've been talking a little bit something
[inaudible] I guess this could be more
towards all of the
out of your, I'm in biochemistry,
so everything in biochemistry I've heard stories from PIs,
other PIs that make their graduate students get one of
the big three science publications before they graduate
which is Cell, Science, and Nature.
They have to get one of these publications
before it [NOISE] they can prove that
they've worked in their graduate as it is.
I guess that's the culture change that,
that's happening who want to move
towards open access right now.
But I guess my question is,
how can science fields where they're
competing with cell [NOISE] itself papers,
nature and science and medicine,
there are big models and they run,
how can they keep having open access
begins when those articles, I pay $5000,
$5500 and $6500 as an author to
publish it [NOISE] plus a library pays
millions of dollars to
those companies just for people to read my work
There are more and more journals
starting to compete with them.
We have journals like PeerJ or eLife things like that.
Like you said, it's a matter of journals establishing
their own credibility by
having good people and good boards.
[OVERLAPPING]
And PLOS, PLOS wasn't around ten years ago,
roughly 2002 actually, 15 years.
I think it's also a generational
change in the researchers.
Researchers realizing,
I'm being told to publish in this journal but
its limited access and no one I
work with and 80 percent
of the world will be going to read it.
Maybe I'll be better served by publishing open access,
maybe opening my data.
Creating more collaborations internationally
and maybe I'll be rewarded if I can
demonstrate that I'm good at building collaboration,
therefore networking past,
bringing in international funding
to make projects where it's been
publishing and more closed access journals.
Maybe you can make an argument that
those were statistically won't bring
in as much Network benefits. If that made sense.
[BACKGROUND] I have two questions,
the first one that seems really like
the only downfall to open access is the economic aspect,
is that true, is that what you all would say?
Could you tell me more about the downside of open access?
I guess the downside right now is that
the market is slanted towards subscriptions.
Open access should be a more efficient way to publish
because the publisher just charges for what they do.
If they're transparent, they charge
for editorial support,
typesetting, copy editing, and publishing.
That's just paid once.
Whereas currently the subscription model
is, no one pays up front,
but they pay many times for the same content.
Theoretically what matters should be
a lot more efficient.
It's just that we also have the subscription
model at the same time.
[BACKGROUND]
Well again I guess the big journals
don't want to loose their incomes.
[OVERLAPPING] My second question
is hopefully in the future we can see things
shift towards more of an access and in that world,
do you think that impact factor would continue to exist?
[BACKGROUND]
I think we're already seeing
that disruption of impact factors.
This is what you were describing with the altmetric data.
There's an interest in trying here at Virginia Tech,
in trying to figure out the best way to capture that.
It's been said already,
that's going to continue to evolve.
I think the open access
is one example of what's happening
in a lot of domains of the economy,
and that is disruption.
That's going to be the word for years to come.
[LAUGHTER] A lot of things are going to get disrupted.
It's going to change significantly.
Right now what is controlling most of
the publishing as has been shown is a subscription model.
It's [NOISE] hard to imagine
that that will forever be the case.
Adding to that, they're really
separate because PLOS, for instance,
the Public Library of Science, their journals,
PLOS ONE, has a very high impact factor,
and it's an open access journal.
One thing doesn't mean the other.
You could have impact factor in an all open access world.
That's another fight to be fought.
Well, I think the whole issue of data mining,
I think people are going to continue to try to
figure out ways to quantify.
In fact, in some ways,
open access makes some of that data mining easier on
a much larger scale
because you can pull in many more journals at once,
and you don't have to pay fees to
figure out some of those kinds of things.
We've talked a lot about open access journals,
but the other piece of it that was
there that I think is important and I
don't want to lose is the open access of authors
putting various pre-publication versions
into a repository like VTechWorks.
I grew up, so to speak,
in a world where that wasn't really part of it.
There was no VTechWorks.
There's Academia,
ResearchGate, and all of those sorts of spaces.
I didn't grow up thinking about,
"When my article is accepted,
that's also the time that then I deposit,
depending on the journal,
the X version into VTechWorks."
I think that's another piece of this open access.
Typically, what you can
deposit is something before the publication version.
Sometimes it's the submitted version,
sometimes it's the submitted version
after it's gone through review,
and you've done revisions on it and
it's just before copy edit.
Which version it is can actually
make a difference to how people read it
because the review process can produce
substantial changes in a manuscript.
Then there's some things around
that I think we have to think about,
but there's a habit, I would say,
that I am not in yet
because I'm old and I don't change easy,
but remembering I got the acceptance,
that means I need to check
what version the journal allows me to
publish in and send it to VTWorks.
There's another step, I think,
for us as authors for the library archiving,
the open archiving of articles,
whether I've published it in a pay journal or not.
Yeah, very true.
That's also connected to
this question of impact factors and
metrics and how those things get counted in the world.
One of the things I would say about that is when
you publish an article and
the publisher sends you a contract,
you have to read that contract
and find out what you're allowed to do with it.
There are ways you can find out
by looking online what a journal's policies are,
but some journals are much more permissive than others,
and you have to be careful when you publish with
the journal that they allow the access you want.
If you want to post,
for instance, the copy-edited version,
they may not allow that or they may not even
allow even the originally submitted version.
You have to check with the contract.
Having been in publishing many years,
I know that authors
very often can't even find their contract,
let alone read. [LAUGHTER]
But there's this great website.
Wait, what's it called? I've learned this.
Sherpa Romeo.
Sherpa Romeo, [OVERLAPPING] that will tell you
the copyright rules for most journals.
[OVERLAPPING] That NLI session this summer
on your online scholarly profile was great. [LAUGHTER]
I've heard the big subscription publishers,
the Elseviers, the Wileys, how are they
responding to the open access movement?
Are they trying to suppress it or have they embraced it?
Elsevier just published a statement saying they
fully embrace and they'll do everything to support it,
[LAUGHTER] and whatever form
it takes just to let it happen. [OVERLAPPING]
Was that their own access statement?
[LAUGHTER]
Yes. I'll probably get a bill for it later.
[LAUGHTER] They charge a lot.
They charge as much as they can,
saying that it's very
expensive to do all of these things.
They're trying to make as much money as
possible of it and raise
their prices to the point they think the market will bear
it rather than what the actual cost is.
Behind the scenes, what they're doing is
they're lobbying very heavily against it.
At least one of the publishers has something like
three full-time lobbyists in Washington,
and these people basically,
they spend their time there going
out I would say lying to policymakers.
Go out and saying, "People don't want open access,
they don't want text and data mining,
it costs us a lot of money.
You have to legislate against it."
While they make these very public statements,
what they're actually doing is
they're trying to push it away
as long as they can to preserve their business model,
even if they think in the long-term it will come to pass.
[OVERLAPPING]
[inaudible] fake publications yet?
Fake publications?
Yeah. Like fake news [inaudible]
[LAUGHTER] Actually, there was a story in Nature I think
it was just recently about some
of these predatory open access journals
that major drug companies are taking advantage of
these journals and publishing basically
just doctored up research articles in these journals,
and then they get distributed,
people find out about them.
It's a way that they're trying to use
these journals to promote use of their drugs.
It's very complex.
A little while ago there was also
what they called an open access sting.
There were some fake articles
to a bunch of open access journals and
want to see how many of the journals would accept them,
how many would get through peer review,
and that was going to show that open access
was fraudulent and so forth.
But they didn't send them to any subscription journals.
It didn't really prove anything other than
the fact of what they wanted to prove,
that five percent of the journals published the article.
There's not reason why subscription
journal would've been any better.
The reviewer pool for open access and paid journal,
to a reviewer, it makes no difference whether I'm
reviewing for an open access journal
or a subscription journal,
except for this one that pays a 100 bucks,
[LAUGHTER] which I would give
back to the library I have to admit,
but it's the same
from a reviewer standpoint. [OVERLAPPING]
They're asking the same people to review the manuscripts.
Yeah, it's the same pool of people.
Right.
It's actually the same process. You got a question?
The main goal of the open access
is to allow other countries,
as you said, beginning to read the articles.
How would you educate them?
I know a lot of universities
outside that only know about Nature,
so these kinds of journals.
How would you educate them
and give the [inaudible] to them?
You mean marketing, so let
them know that your journal exists?
Is that what you mean by educating?
The impact of it because some universities
only care about that.
I think there's a couple of ways.
One of the ways we all figure out what to read
is you run a Google Scholar search or a database search,
and so one of the things
about working with a service like
Ubiquity or a per-page journal is that
they pay to have your articles indexed, right?
So that if I go into article
first and I do a little search on things,
my article's going to show up.
You get access that way.
You also publicize in terms of going to conferences.
That's one of the things we think about a lot is,
where are people presenting work in conferences,
and then as people are presenting at
conferences, you think "Hey,
that was interesting, have you
published on it elsewhere or are you publishing on it?"
Then if authors are saying,
"Well I'm publishing in a such and such a journal,
or I'm going to submit it here."
I think often we go to conferences on our countries and
so part of open-access too may be
thinking about how do we internationalize?
But that varies a lot by field.
They read articles, they read
the references, they know who wrote the journals,
and everyone I know in India knows what
they want to read, they just can't get it.
So every month I get five or six emails
saying can you get this from your repositories?
It's also about helping
them to publish at the same level.
So we have about 330, I think,
open access journals from the developing world already,
and it's about helping them to publish and be
part of our publishing infrastructure because.
No, the cost has to be low.
We have to find ways to make it cheaper.
I mean, right now we publish for something like
25 dollars a year for one journal for them.
That's big-time loss-making.
We have to find funders who are willing to
support that. Right now there aren't many.
So this is the question [inaudible].
Obviously, your statements have revealed that in
some departments it is strongly pushed
to publish these specific journals.
We've also made reference to the fact
that a lot of people see open access
as a fraudulent means [LAUGHTER] of publishing,
what is Virginia Tech doing,
or is there a plan to encourage faculty as [inaudible]?
[LAUGHTER] But in these departments,
they push for Nature, they push for specific ones,
and you almost get
strongly judged if you do not hit those,
even though there are these other legitimate journals.
Is Virginia Tech doing anything,
one, to encourage these options?
This is the first time I've really had
a conversation about open access.
You don't hear about this in
the classroom or from your advisors in most cases.
So is there a plan,
is there something that would encourage
faculty to consider the open access?
Good question, not an easy question.
[OVERLAPPING] Before I answer,
how many of you have published in an open access?
Okay. Just trying to get an idea because sometimes
I'm surprised that there are
more that are grad students
that have already published in an open access.
I think part of the "Do we have a coherent plan?"
No, not really, because
we're talking about a cultural change.
But I think what the library is doing is very important.
Tyler has put some resources into this.
We have these kind of sessions,
we have a conversation about open access.
I know department heads
and other faculty will actually know about it,
but it's a cultural shift,
and one college in particular,
has to go in the top journals to your one journals,
and that's going to be a very
challenging culture to overcome.
But I think the more we have these conversations,
the more you all know about it,
and when you go to do some publishing,
then look at the journals,
and there's a subvention for paid,
Gail can talk about that,
relative to how those costs can be covered.
So it's really an awareness and it's
a grand movement of
pushing things forward; it's how I see it.
The big challenge is tenure promotion guidelines.
It's the faculty who have been around for
a while and want to do things in
the way that they already know.
It's the existing system that rewards tenure in
traditional senses and that's going to take
some time to change, but it will change.
It has changed. I've seen change in
the short time that open access has been around.
Yeah, I wanted to mention that there are a number
of universities that have open access policies.
Which we don't yet.
So we're actually having a discussion now
at Virginia Tech over the past year talking to
faculty about having this policy
and so it doesn't involve OA journals,
you publish wherever you want.
But what it does is that if
faculty grant a non-exclusive license to the university,
they still have their work put in our repository.
So there are about 50 universities now that have
these policies and they're grassroots policies,
It's not a top-down thing;
It's faculty realizing as a group
that they want the right to post their work,
and so through this non-exclusive license,
they can do that.
That is a really important thing
that faculty could do here.
We're in the middle of
those discussions here at Virginia Tech.
With faculty senate?
Right. Thank you.
I want to take
advantage of this to join in the conversation. Thank you.
Yes.
The library has $180,000 worth in
access subvention fund that will provide support for
publishing in open access journals. It will provide $1,500 per
article if you want to publish in a journal
that is open access and has article processing fees.
It's a fund, it's open
to everyone in the university: faculty,
staff, students at every level.
There's an online form,
it's very easy to fill out and apply,
you'll get a response from me at once.
So I hope you'll take advantage of that.
That's Gail McMillan in the library.
Yes, my email is gailmac, G-A-I-L-M-A-C@vt.edu.
So don't hesitate to contact me if you need more data
or search the library website.
I think the funds started at 40 K or something, 24.
I knew a four was in there.
So everyone's taking advantage of it, you should too.
Let's have a question in the back.
The question is how to approach professors about
publish open access or is there anything
we will achieve
[inaudible].
So that's one, how to approach that,
and second is, what is the role of the library?
I know the library by itself
[inaudible] but I can
think that as a network of libraries,
of public libraries, you're buying that,
and I can see these throughout the
[inaudible] even worse as a whole.
So I want to ask what is the role of the library.
Ask the Dean of the Libraries.
[LAUGHTER]
[BACKGROUND] We want to get this on tape. [LAUGHTER]
Yes, the world wants to know.
We want to get it to WebEx folks.
[LAUGHTER]
I've heard I don't know that. The other question was,
do I just need
to think about the open access policy information,
the policy in general,
all these universities all these resource institutions
are going through this.
What you want as an institution, how do we support our faculty, our researchers
[inaudible] and I think
a lot of this policy about repositories, etc,
are all about helping
faculty members retain their rights, gives it to us to
put it in the repository for preservation and access,
but that doesn't preclude them.
So our role as services,
and infrastructures, I think
the library and libraries in general,
you got a louder voice in terms of
policy at institutional level,
and also the dependency.
The state of California has an access policy.
There is, as was mentioned by Peter, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
put out a memo requiring open access.
[inaudible].
There is legislation in this Congress being discussed,
it's been discussed for years
and it's still has [inaudible] good.
So I think it's services infrastructure
in terms of his three-point policy.
Stop paying the bill to Elsevier.
Yes. Stop paying the bill to Elsevier.
The interesting thing there is,
and I just read a brief article noted
US academic libraries in 2012
spent nearly $2.8 billion on information resources.
So this where we go back to I don't have any money.
Oh, yes. We have money.
But we have to cooperate and work in the aggregate
and partner with faculty and researchers.
Of course, they're the leaders since it's their work, not ours.
I think that's what has to happen.
The money is in the system,
the systems broke, and
a lot of the money goes to stockholders.
So we the professoriate have to make a decision about
what environment we want and
how we want our works to be utilized in the future.
What these big publishers require is
that these confidential agreements.
In terms of communicating with
other libraries about what you've agreed to,
in terms of paying for subscriptions.
They do everything they can to keep
libraries from working together.
They're invested in that and
that's a big problem that in terms of right now,
some of you may know that in Germany,
the country of Germany
is boycotting Elsevier and said we're
not going to pay the subscription.
So they're at a stalemate
right now that Elsevier will come
down or go to open access and the state is saying,
we're not going to pay it, so we're
waiting to see what happens there.
A lot of people aren't missing the journals.
That's the thing that their noticing as well.
I've heard institutions here in
the US say that if we shut off the journals,
we don't think people would miss them
that much, which is interesting.
I was just going to say one thing to
your first point which was what to say to
a professor who's the head of
the journal that he's telling you to publish it,
[inaudible] because we want to reach a broader market.
But then also say, ask him,
will he have a discussion with
his publisher about taking that journal open access?
Encourage him to approach that topic.
Then there's also the possibility
that that publisher won't do it,
that somebody like VT Publishing
would support him in transferring the journal.
Just to understand that most academics
don't understand the business of publishing.
Even though we publish,
most of us actually don't
understand it and know very little about it.
So this is Open Access Week,
it's trying to raise awareness if you can invite
some of the faculty to these type of fora,
just so they can understand what's happening that
conscientization to effect this cultural shift
is going to be important because
most academics know shockingly
little about publishing as a business.
But they know more about what they
think about tenure and promotion.
That's what's driving this is
that system of tenure promotion as opposed to,
I think what Tyler you're
talking about, I think is excellent.
It's getting information out
there and the faculty need to
decide but they've got this big tenure promotion things.
To some extent, I don't want to say, change is happening,
but I feel like it's also incumbent on
the tenured faculty and on the full professors in
particular to be pushing that system
and so maybe that's within your departments
figuring out who the allies are
around that and having those conversations,
and it's also remembering as you
move into faculty positions,
not necessarily replicating the same system
that you might be frustrated with now,
at a certain point, when you
become a tenured faculty member,
you get a stronger voice.
When you become a full professor,
you get a strong voice.
Even though that seems like a long time
from now, it's not really.
That is the place and I think another place
where I think about those changes is also
in the university's hiring practices
and how we evaluate applicants.
One of the things we think a lot about is as we look at
applications and as we try to educate
faculty search committees around looking at applications,
it's easy to look and say,
oh, this person is new Assistant Professor,
published X many articles and x
high journal because they're
coming from MIT so therefore they have a better output.
But we're trying to educate
search committees to think about context.
As we're able to I think hire more diverse faculty from
more diverse backgrounds who also are going to bring
a different understanding of
publication and some of those kinds of things.
It's a long slow,
slow in this day and age is a hard thing to
say because most things happen so quickly.
But there is a lot of it.
Look at who in your department is publishing open access.
Look at who among your faculty are
publishing in those kinds of journals and
maybe have conversations with those people
about what their role is and find
those advocates rather than
trying to change your department heads mind,
right straight from the get-go.
I will say the first time we did this a year or two ago,
we had the then-head of faculty senate on the panel.
He came in very resistant.
Had his arms like this.
At the end, he was rethinking his ideas and
I've talked to him many times since and he's
now much more supportive of the idea.
So it's that kind of one person at a time approach.
[inaudible]
Oh, you mean to put it on the screen?
Yeah.
Sure we could [inaudible]
[LAUGHTER].
Okay. Well, there's a couple of questions over here too.
Yeah, I want to come back to
the example of the German libraries getting together.
I can see that coming to fruition in
Germany because they have a central governance system.
I guess coming back to this idea
of policy here in the US,
I was hoping to get a little [inaudible] library
is to how could libraries unite,
despite being in different education systems.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm probably not the right person to ask about that.
Tyler may be able to speak [LAUGHTER] a lot to it.
Easy question, really complicated answers for that.
A quick answer to that
is that libraries are doing things in unison,
say, in each of the United States.
There are challenges.
We all have different funders.
our major funder is the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Then go down to UNC Chapel Hill.
There's different interests, different policies,
different approaches to things.
That has a lot to do with, if you think about it,
those constituencies that we serve.
So we need to have a more global mindset.
[NOISE] Actually, when I hear
a global land grant and
some of the the things I think about, I say, "Well,
if you need to be a global land grant then
you need to lead, you need think
beyond our own political borders
and involve other states and other areas.
So there are some initiatives here and there.
There's actually a proposal
that just came out within the month
and there's a lot of chit-chat in my profession,
it's called, I forget it's name,
it's 2 1/2 percent [inaudible].
2.5. [OVERLAPPING]
2.5 percent proposal or something.
It was a proposal that academic libraries should be
spending a minimum of 2 1/2 percent of
their budgets on open-access infrastructure,
services, etc.
That's actually where I got that 2.8 billion number
from was that paper on
how much we spend on information resources
in the U.S. so you allocate 2 1/2 percent of that,
that's some hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'm sorry, those are millions of dollars,
there's a lot that could be done with that.
But also the author also mentions,
that's hundreds of millions,
but look at what Elsevier has they're in the billions.
So we're always going to be up
against that as a part of it.
So there's enough risk that we go with
these political boundaries is really a major challenge.
One of the things about that 2.5 percent
proposal that I think is really interesting
is that the idea would be that you
would create essentially a huge matrix that
all the [NOISE] libraries would be [NOISE]
able to use.
[OVERLAPPING] Every institution could
then coordinate after contributing.
So rather than everybody duplicating their own work,
[OVERLAPPING] you can contribute
a certain part of that matrix.
That would be cooperation
[BACKGROUND] without formal cooperation,
and that might be more legally viable than otherwise.
That's probably a good idea
for where the future of publishing is going anyway.
It will be more distributed.
[NOISE] In 10 years' time,
I don't think you will see the big
monolithic publishers the way you do see them now,
so I think it's a really good proposal.
Do we have the screen?
We want to have one more question.
Yes.
Less of a question and more of a comment.
I think industry and general
public will have to play
a bigger role on open access as well.
[NOISE] [inaudible] municipalities they
might approach the same.
I want to believe [NOISE] that I can find anything
[inaudible] and then actually have access to it.
Do not sound like, well,
there's a lot of things that are [NOISE] being monitored.
Not necessarily [inaudible] for yourself,
but I found a lot of them,
and I feel like, well,
[inaudible] you could have done this yourself.
Well, there's certainly something to be
said with open access.
A lot of the effort is going into
right now discoverability and
indexing, as we've talked about,
just making work that is out there more easy to find,
and as you can imagine,
[NOISE] it's an age of Google,
where you come up in the searches and you have
to be able to gain that system or figure out,
I shouldn't say that, but how you manage that system.
We're getting better at doing that,
and that's something we talked about with Brian today,
that they're working on [NOISE] ubiquity,
so trying to get better at
getting what we have out
there searchable, easily findable.
It's not just the local municipalities
and so forth and policy makers who need access things,
it's that private sector too.
[NOISE] That's one thing we didn't mention earlier on,
but a lot of private companies can benefit
an enormous amount from university-based research,
and it can drive the economy very strongly.
Everyone's worried about tobacco companies getting access
to research, but it's startups,
it's small industry and
especially in the developing world,
it can be a huge factor in driving an economy forward.
So that's another reason for it.
Okay. What question do we have here next?
[NOISE]
What I [inaudible] and I just looked
at the different invoice together.
If you look at the top 10,
it's essentially [inaudible] up
there, this is very [inaudible] to me.
[inaudible] I
have more real-world impact.
So this one did not
read the text side of [inaudible] people reading.
You have [inaudible] but why is this?
What do you think is a real problem here?
Can I just ask one question?
Is that number of journals with the act in their names?
For the number of journals involved 10,000 something and
there's about 35,000 notes for these journals,
and so this is just a list of the key words.
One of the things is that in science,
others can correct me if I'm wrong,
but you have a lot [NOISE] more
of what are called the mega journals.
So you have a PLOS One
that publishes a huge number of articles,
but it's only one journal.
In the humanities and more of social sciences,
you tend to add smaller journals,
so I would think this is skewed towards
a number of titles of which
doesn't reflect the amount of scholarship published.
So you'd have to look at
the actual number of articles published.
I think searching journal account
on keyword is also not very accurate.
If you browse DOAJ by their subjects,
you'll get more accurate [inaudible] have 10,247
journals that are published
and they cover all of the fields.
It looks like a list of colleges
and departments at Virginia Tech.
Are there questions, up here?
I was just curious. [NOISE] [OVERLAPPING].
Hold on a second.
Skipped a good workout [LAUGHTER].
I just [NOISE] operations Edward the library tonight,
introduced this shift from we could do it we wanted.
How often do the library drop journals?
What would it take the library to begin dropping them?
It seems like it's going to be [inaudible].
What would take for us start actually shooting
plans for what we'll be using [inaudible].
Well, one of the problems that we face,
that is what's called the big deal.
What Elsevier and the big publishers have figured at
one point was and who created this big discussion,
but they offer huge packages of journals to libraries.
As a library you don't have
the liberty of just picking and choosing.
Well you can, but you would
then pricing works against you, get your paper.
The big deal is the huge problem with this,
that's another way that
Elsevier kind of David and
around are or big publisher didn't
end around and figure it out how to lock institutions,
libraries and universities into
the big packages which grow by
the pricing that we pay
grows I don't know how many
percent a year, but it's a lot.
It literally is unsustainable,
we could not continue,
which was 18 years.
Our budget, we would just blow our entire budget.
It is going to break at some point.
What Peter is describing,
if you can say a little bit more about that bundling.
These are the databases.
You can explain it better than I can.
How the library actually gets these subscriptions.
Well, we do buy them or we buy access to them in annoys.
It's, I don't know how many
hundreds of hundreds of journals,
thousands of journals and
house thousands and you're locked in.
Some of them are journals that you don't want to be.
The other aspect of this
that's [OVERLAPPING] , [OVERLAPPING].
Worse because you're not
actually buying the content, you're leasing it.
Next year it's gone [OVERLAPPING] It's not like paper.
It's still like cable. [OVERLAPPING].
Then you'll be sued.
[OVERLAPPING] so the real
problems is that we have to remember
that we're actually talking about economics.
We're talking about here
plastic products and didn't
care and poses and our pulse
of Esther publishes an article,
goes to a publisher,
especially in commercial publisher.
They own favorite human rights so they own the earth.
We're going to hit a certain one source.
That's the other part of the problem because
they control the access and use to it.
They do get to drive the pricing
and we have to pay what they say otherwise,
we don't get it.
If you do not subscribe you'll be
given a library loan one to be a lot of
that is some slower horses move it from some other place.
Library, there's a charge to
that and switching resolutions,
$20 article or so unless we
get with this Virginia and it's
free all the way to operate.
So it's inelastic.
That we don't have enough time to get into it,
but it does bring back
that point the question about piracy
and at this site outside hub,
that is an illegal site.
Now as basically every journal article
published and you can get
those articles illegally through that site.
They're located somewhere, we think in Russia, I think.
Everybody trying to sue them,
the publishers and trying to sue them,
but who do you sue?
That in itself could potentially bring down the system.
As a publisher myself,
I am of very mixed emotions
about this because there ought to
be a way to work within a law.
I can't support with PSI hub is doing, on the other hand,
part of me in the back of my head there's,
I would also say you [LAUGHTER].
How can you support
the illegal activities of all these major publishers,
because by a certain day either
they're illegal activities should be, right.
But I'm talking about just
using an infrastructure that we're creating.
We're going about it in a way that would work very well.
If the different rows rational system its monopoly.
You're right. The law isn't working in our favor.
I think this way.
In a practical way,
can we use website or at
least rather than the nasty, dirty ones.
Well, that's the journal we were just talking about.
The site we were talking about.
The directory of open access journals,
DOAJ lists, what is it over 10 thousand now,
Gayle can speak to that.
Well, this is the subject.
Subject browse your own ancestors and that's
one of our other.
One. You can search by sorting.
Sorted by open access students.
There are a variety of sources.
The DOAJ also fits the journals and it makes sure that
they're operating in the proper way.
It's also a predatory journal,
for example, should not be in there.
It's quality measure as well.
Personally, I think it is a [inaudible]
But then also listening to the discussion,
I just feel like it just comes to me like a vicious circle and
whatever you're talking to
about trying to basically break the monopoly,
the idea is great, but the way we are working and trying
to put the strategies for the wording,
[LAUGHTER] I'm not very impactful
because I feel like we're getting trapped in
the same vicious cycle
because these are the additional
institution changes that we require.
For instance, you find me as a student,
I bang my head to the professor and say,
"Fine I want to go and publish in
this," but at the end of the day,
I get again charged into it and
then looking for [inaudible].
How are we achieving any [inaudible]?
This is a moment that I feel like I'm
entitled to just getting [inaudible]
I would say, for myself,
I go through moments of
optimism versus despair when it comes to this subject,
[LAUGHTER] but I go back to the point I made earlier,
which is we literally cannot pay or we
cannot afford to pay for the journals at
the rate the [NOISE] subscriptions are increasing.
If we'll come to a head,
the question is will we be well enough
organized when that happens to be able
to reconstruct a viable system that replaces it?
That's the best I can offer to you.
Anybody here have a better comment?
I think part of it is the willingness to start
open-access journals and in fields to be able to say,
''Yeah, I'm going to talk to
some of the most important persons
and scholars in the field,
that's who I am putting on my advisory board,
[NOISE] that's who we've got as editors,
that's who we've got as associate editors.''
Because I think faculty are also frustrated,
and none of us like the fact that
people can't get to our research.
[NOISE] There is something about creating those options.
I feel like I am in it for the long haul,
and so there's things I could do pre-tenure,
there's things I could do post-tenure,
there's things I can do as a full professor in terms
of time and availability that push that forward,
but as more of us have
conversations about this and say,'' Okay, what is it?''
Starting a journal is not a trivial task.
I do not recommend it as a graduate student.
There is a lot of time that goes into that,
and I probably don't recommend it pre-tenure.
Associate, maybe, depending on where you are.
Full, sure.
That's part of what you're paid to do,
so that's the place where,
again, talking with faculty,
thinking about people in the field it's a lot of work,
but in some ways, it's not that hard.
Starting a journal is not that complicated a task,
and so that's what we do.
The two last questions or comments from the back.
There are some decisions that you can
make as a graduate student and as
a younger faculty member
of if you choose what [inaudible] to do,
if you choose wrong or right for a degree.
[OVERLAPPING] If you choose to reserve
some of your copyrights for yourself to do the things that you need to do.
There's not a lot of things that you can do as
a senior professor [inaudible]
Final question in the back.
I guess my question was answered,
but [inaudible] back to the system of
[inaudible]
That seems like it is rather black and white.
Is it really [LAUGHTER] that pronounced?
Yes.
It was only one journal
and all the others were lower quality?
Definitely. This needs more sciences
[inaudible] either your body or
organization that will receive
open-access journals and [inaudible] [OVERLAPPING]
[NOISE] There's no organization,
but we have talked about that,
like the Directory of Open Access Journals
that are increasingly groups that
are stepping up to
provide quality assurance. Is any more of that happening?
I just wanted to raise something that
I've heard from the last three or four questions,
which are very OA journal-focused.
Do not forget there are two roads
[OVERLAPPING] you can archive your work.
It does not matter if it's Nature, Cell,
or the top journal in your fields,
it doesn't matter that that's a subscription journal.
Read the fine print and see
what their archiving policies are.
About 1/2 the publishers will let you
archive immediately on publication.
Seventy-five percent will let
you archive something at some time.
It might be an embargo,
six months to12 months,
but they will let you archive something.
So don't forget the archiving part of it.
You can publish anywhere and still achieve open access.
I would say if the publisher tells you you can't,
come and ask the library for
advice because at my institution,
we've had publishers giving out
incorrect information to researchers and
threatening to sue when they didn't have a right to.
For instance, I think if you get
an article accepted in this top-tier journal,
then you are in a perfect spot to negotiate.
Already they're planning on
you agreeing to let them publish your article.
They're already seeing where
it's going to fit within the journal,
what the layout is going to be,
where the pages are
going to fall. So you're in a good position to negotiate.
You have nothing to lose, I believe,
from asking about making your journal article open access.
Even if they said no,
you've at least dropped the issue
forward to them. [inaudible]
Thank you all. This was a fabulous conversation.
I appreciate everybody.
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