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THE NEXT�BIG DEAL

Brianne Selman @ CRKN 2020

I live and work in Winnipeg, in the territories of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree Nations. Treaty 1, signed in 1871, took this territory from seven local Anishinaabe First Nations in order to make the land available for settler use and ownership. Winnipeg is also the home of Idle No More, #JusticeForEishaHudson, and many other movements towards indigenous sovereignty and justice. This acknowledgement is an expression of respect and appreciation for these ancestors and their present-day relatives, and in support of indigenous land and livelihood defenders.

Today starts with a rapid fire coverage of transformative agreements and their discontents. I’m using “transformative agreements” in a big-tent way, though many of them are now read & publish, where reading (subscription) costs are bundled with publishing costs (in the form of APCs, article processing charges). My slides contain my speaking notes as references, for those following along.

There are a couple of sources for various Transformative Agreements, if you are interested in knowing just how many there are – ESAC have a registry https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry/ , and Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer’s list at https://tinyurl.com/Oaagreements

Full Zotero Library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/2420384/transformative__offset_agreements_alternatives/ �

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TRANSFORMATIVE GOALS

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TRANSFORMATIVE GOALS

Country/ Institution X’s output is fully OA
Costs are “Contained”/ Unified
Money from non-OA is shifted to OA, and perpetual access is secured
Eventual full transition to OA/ Publishers make more titles OA

These goals are a synthesis of most of the folks we heard from at least year’s CRKN, as well as JISC in the UK. (Bibsam [Sweden], UNIT [Norway], Projekt DEAL [Germany], University of California and Max Planck – all members of ESAC, Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges, hosted by Max Planck Digital Library).
There are some main themes:

Output is fully OA
Costs are contained/ unified – this definition may include inflationary increases
Money from subscriptions are shifted to OA
And sometimes there is vague language about an actual transformation, though rarely much on how this will actually happen! (JISC, for example, merely repeat these same goals under their section on what transition looks like.)

Where does CRKN fit in this? Vision = “The World’s Knowledge IS Accessible to All” but are these practices actually fulfilling that?

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OUTPUT IS FULLY OA

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How are we doing? From Sugimoto and Lariviere, we know that the rates of Tri-Agency results being Open Access are abysmally low in Canada. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07101-w ,

Scholars at Curtin University in Australia recently released a meta-analysis of global OA outputs, finding in general large increases in OA, but showing anglo North America is lagging behind.
Green OA (repositories) are largely driving Europe and North America’s OA growth. Green OA in Europe is largely driven by much stronger funder requirements, as well as things like the REF in the UK, which require researchers to deposit in repositories if they want their publications to count. In their analysis of the Netherland’s transformative agreements, the researchers found that it only increased publication in those hybrid journals, not overall gold Open Access.
In Latin America and Africa, however, the Gold/diamond Open Access publishers continue to contribute to their excellence. Gold/ Diamond OA in Latin America has historically been driven by SciELO, a strong network of university supported publishers, who transitioned to full OA early on.
This analysis shows three key things – while OA continues to grow, no one is at 100%, transformative agreements are responsible for very little of this growth, and that Canada is lagging behind both places where repository use is more strongly enforced, and places where publishers are largely OA.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/57067

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COSTS ARE CONTAINED

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NEGOTIATION CRITICISMS

Need to Negotiate Better/ Harder
Be Willing to Walk Away
Need Better Data

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Resource Intensive to Negotiate

Can we “win”?

So the first perspective:
We need to negotiate better or harder, we need better data (actual knowledge about our APC spend, for example) and even “we need to be willing to walk away”, but as a negotiation strategy.
This school of thought strengthens the case for consortia/ larger ‘blocs’ who may have better negotiating power
But what of recent analyses, such as that of the Dutch agreement, that shows that even when we think we’ve “won”, we may actually have lost, in terms of having signed over researcher data that is much more valuable? (Sam will expand on this “datafication”)
Underlying all of this is the belief that we, as a consumer or market, should have more leverage. This may be an overly utopian view of how markets function.
Applying “market pressure” to lower prices – one of the early claims for what transformative agreements could do - seems to have failed, especially when we see the latest TA for Nature journals with APCs of over $14,000.
Indeed, in oligopolistic markets – those with high market concentration – there is a much greater ability of those few companies to set their own prices, and not to have to respond to things like “consumer demand”.
the 2019 SPARC landscape report – looking at just how deeply these former publishers have now become “data analytics” companies, is a must read https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis

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Big Deal for APCs Instead of Subscriptions (Meg Wacha)
Can’t Unbundle

A NEW BIG DEAL CRITICISMS

Is It “Containing” Costs?
Can Have Hidden Admin Burden (eg, JISC/Wiley – Kevin Sanders)

Thus common criticisms from scholarly communications librarians based on the premise that over time, the money we have given scholarly publishers has led to oligopolistic conditions – a few companies buying up everything else and controlling the majority of the market, with a much greater ability to set their own prices. It is these familiar conditions that led to the rise of the big deal, and there are many who criticize that nothing about Transformative Agreements changes these conditions.
Are TAs much different than BDs? Both take up major parts of the budget
TAs can’t be unbundled, and may offer even less budget autonomy for smaller institutions or those facing severe cuts
Some of the deals being negotiated actually don’t differ in price – “cost neutral” often includes inflationary increases, which many library budgets simply aren’t going to be seeing
In Canada in particular, Library budgets and personnel haven’t had a great deal of responsibility for faculty publishing, so the Admin burden on us may actually increase. Even in the UK, where there is already a much higher degree of Library involvement because of things like UKRI, the recent “pause” on the JISC/Wiley deal should ring warning bells, because the labour of sorting out which publications do/ don’t count for the deal is entirely falling to library workers

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MONEY IS SHIFTED TO OA

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Does not shift power from monopolies (Dave Ghamandi)

STRENGTHENS OLIGOPOLIES

CRITICISMS

Increases market share / prestige of particular publishers (Also Dave)

Small Societies/ niche publishers are limited in negotiating

Questions of free labour, prestige, shareholder profit extraction, speculative finance (what Cameron Neylon refers to as “money leaving the system”) and what all of this means for scholarship is almost never broken down when we are “merely” discussing taking what is currently paid out, and trying to apply it to something else.
Is it *fair* that these costs, even if kept neutral, protect a sometimes 40% profit margin?
TAs may in fact exacerbate the price inflation we have seen in the past, by making “deals” with publishers that have the effect of changing publication habits. While there have been lots of studies showing that researchers aren’t price sensitive when it comes to *reading*, many of them are when it comes to *publishing* (particularly non-grant holders, or people from Winnipeg!).
Think of this as the “brand name” issue – prestige brands, like prestige journals, can charge a higher price precisely because there IS someone – not everyone, not by a long shot – willing to pay that price.
Dave Ghamandi reminds us that TAs are *part* of the system of prestige, which is why they are so expensive. The “biggest schools are in a mutually beneficial relationship with the biggest publishers” (https://twitter.com/saggiotipo/status/1317197584692281344 ) and pay-to-publish actually fits this system of prestige and reward – and its barriers to entry - quite well
TAs also have significant barriers for entry for smaller publishers, widening the divide in “market” share

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As a side note, doing political economy of any type sometimes ends up sounding like a detailed conspiracy theory, because of how entangled things like private equity firms and investors ARE with each other.
One of the backers of Springer’s (yet again failed) IPO (initial public offering) is “BC Partners”, a private equity/ buyout firm. Even *Bloomberg* agrees there are potentially many negatives to the rise of private equity firms – they essentially burden companies with debt, force them into restructuring for efficiency, and squeeze out every bit of return possible. These are not the people we want operating our scholarly communications system, yet we keep giving them more money. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-03/how-private-equity-works-and-took-over-everything

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SCHOLARSHIP�CRITICISMS

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TAs focus on “business models” instead of scholarship

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FULL TRANSITION TO OA

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Cements Hybrid Journals/ APC model

OA GOALS

CRITICISMS

Few Journals flipping – more hybrid journals proliferating

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Keeps “prestige” in play – prioritizes and rewards “legacy” publishers

EQUITY AND DIVERSITY

CRITICISMS

Becomes “pay to publish” rather than “pay to read”
Keeps the global system unequal

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IS THIS HAPPENING AT THE EXPENSE OF

ALTERNATIVES

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NATIONAL POLICY/ LAWS

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SCHOLAR-LED OA

Nationalized/ Collective Publishing Systems

SciELO (Redalyc/AmeliCA)
AESA
ESAC countries - Sweden (soon), NL, DK, Finland
*ERUDIT*

- We also need to be doing more to support scholarship that has infrastructure governed by academics, not private equity firms.

- Latin America isn’t doing TAs – they never had big deal subscriptions in the first place, and instead invest in a large scale publishing endeavour across the continent supported by Universities and shared infrastructure.

(and are VERY concerned with how heavily TAs prioritize APCs: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/05/20/the-commercial-model-of-academic-publishing-underscoring-plan-s-weakens-the-existing-open-access-ecosystem-in-latin-america/ )

“SciELO is a program based on international cooperation, in which nations work together to adopt common technical standards for academic publishing” in Chapter 21, from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/Reassembling-Scholarly-CommunicationsHistories

- In Africa, African Open Journals and AESA are looking to replicate this kind of system, largely with journals hosted and supported by Universities and societies.

Interestingly, seeing some of the ESAC countries start to build their own national publishing infrastructure -

- And of course we have *our* own.

- What would it look like if all of our collective effort and cost on negotiating transformative agreements instead went into supporting Erudit? Identifying Canadian journals that have sold themselves to Wiley for sustainability? Increasing University capacity to host these scholar-led endeavours? Giving the weight and prestige to Erudit instead?

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THANKS!

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BONUS SLIDES

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339,968,592$

Total APC spend thus far on OpenAPC

0$

Total Canadian spend on OpenAPC in 2019

39,050,335$

Total APC spend for 2019 on OpenAPC

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Antithetical Desires:

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FUNDERS/ GOV’T

Rationale: to make publically funded research available to the public (often with weird data management alliances)

FOR-PROFIT BUSINESS

To capitalize on the government rationale with double-dipping and other profit maximizing strategies

ETHICAL IMPERATIVE

Make the means of publishing more possible – no barriers to readers or authors

- Eileen A. Joy

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No one seems to like transformative agreements for OA. Is this because it's not really possible to get a good deal (because publishers hold all the cards) or are the priorities of negotiators not aligned with the various expectations of different OA advocates?

- Sam Moore (@samoore_ on Twitter)

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Was the problem with Big Deals that we stopped being able to afford them, or that some never could?

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Transformative agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services.

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Should an increasingly few international commercial publishers, whose exorbitant profits have been among the reasons for the Open Access Movement itself, act as important partners in building the future of Open Access”?

- Dominique Babini

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