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Pathways to Open Access –

UC’s big-tent approach to transforming scholarly communications

Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost & Executive Director, California Digital Library

FORCE 2019 Keynote�October 17 2019

@guwa

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Pathways to Open Access

Let me start with a story. In the fall of 2018, I moderated an event entitled “Community Pathways to Open Access,” organized by the UC Libraries, on the UC Berkeley campus. The morning of the 2nd day, my 6-year-old daughter drew this colorful cat. We wound up incorporating it into the kick-off for the 2nd day, and dubbed her lovingly our “OA Kitty.”

OA Kitty is beautiful because she likes lots of colors, and we were trying to get conference attendees to embrace the many pathways to OA, and an experimental spirit - you can see that my daughter started coloring in blue tones, but at some point, she unabashedly switched to green, and ended with a yellow and orange flourish.

My central thesis today is that we need to embrace and celebrate the many pathways to open access that are available. And that open access is a journey - you may start out on one path, and then branch out from there. Let’s be open to that journey, and where it might lead us!

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What’s at stake?

“Imagine if instead we said we will no longer conceal cancer’s secrets in a paywall journal [...] and instead make all that we know open to everyone so that the world can join the global campaign to end cancer in our lifetimes? [...] This question matters.”

Joe Biden, (at the time) Vice President of the USA (2016)

https://medium.com/cancer-moonshot/here-s-what-the-vice-president-said-to-the-largest-convening-of-cancer-researchers-in-the-country-3007bb196dbd

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Room for improvement!

https://peerj.com/articles/4375/

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Progress requires many coalitions (not just one)

vs.

and

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Necessity is the mother of invention

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Faculty: The Declaration of Rights and Principles

At the center of our OA universe at the University of California are not the libraries, but the faculty. In 2018, our academic senate library committee issued a Declaration of Rights and Principles. I’ve heard that Rich Schneider, the chair of the committee at the time, discussed this document with you last year, and he created quite a stir.

That same year, the UC libraries issued a comprehensive Pathways to Open Access plan, laying out all of the avenues for engagement and investment open to the UC Libraries, and, for that matter, the broader community. These Pathways, if you will, represent the practical and tactical ways in which the values of the Declaration of Rights and Principles can be instantiated.

In a community as diverse as the UC, this Pathways approach ensures that all can find a meaningful way to contribute to the big project of getting to 100% open access, and see themselves and their priorities reflected.

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The California Digital Library Strategic Vision

Through CDL’s commitment to sustainable open scholarship, an ever-wider range of freely available research informs ever-more potent responses to real-world challenges. Together with the UC campus Libraries and our other partners, we amplify the academy’s capacity for innovation, knowledge creation and research breakthroughs and enable the University of California to produce a measurable impact valued by the state, the nation and the world.

https://cdlib.org/about/mission-vision-and-values/

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Zooming in on a pathway:

Publisher negotiations for transformative agreements

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Why? The people of California would like to know...

UC Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley

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Today...

*Only 15% of UC authored articles are immediately OA

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Tomorrow...

In the world we want to live in, our authors are at the center of the picture. All funding follows our authors, and is triggered by them. The still leverage their grant funding - but when they do, those $ are not added revenue to the publisher. The grant funding actually defrays the cost to the library. The library offers a subsidy to all others, and funds the full APC for authors who don’t have grant funds. All of this is regulated through a single contract with a capped cost. If the publishing volume increases, the contract may allow publishers a reasonable percentage increase. If the publishing volume decreases, the contract may allow a reasonable percentage decrease of the total owed by the university. This protects both the library as well as the publisher from risk during the transition.

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The Author Experience: incentivizing OA

● Library financial transactions are handled in aggregate each quarter ●

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Benefits for authors

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Why we like this model

Good for the academy → Mission aligned for a public research university

Good for faculty → Increased readership and impact

Good for library budgets → Research funders pay their share of publication

Good for the publishing ecosystem → Authors become economic actors

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In summary, here’s the journey we’re on

Today - _unmanaged, escalating OA economy_�Subscriptions and APCs are funded and paid for separately in the same journals, without any relationship between them

Tomorrow (or sooner) - _transitional OA agreements_�Subscriptions and APCs covered by a single, transformative agreement, with one type of fee offsetting the other to eliminate double-dipping and help control the total cost to the university

Eventually - _a primarily OA world_�Subscription payments largely disappear with funding re-allocated to OA support (both APCs and other funding models)

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It didn’t quite work out that way...

Kell, Gtretchen. (2019). Why UC split with publishing giant Elsevier. Retrieved from

https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/02/28/why-uc-split-with-publishing-giant-elsevier/

UC Office of Scholarly Communication. (2019). UC and Elsevier: Overview. Retrieved from

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-negotiations/uc-and-elsevier/

UC Office of Scholarly Communication. (2019). Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier. Retrieved from

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2019/08/fact-check-uc-and-elsevier/

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Post-Elsevier ILL: modest

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ILL forecast vs actual requests

UC’s Elsevier Usage:

Jan - Mar 2019 Article Downloads &

Estimated vs. Actual Post-Shut-Off ILL

(July - Sept. 2019)

2%

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Faculty reaction

“Boycott ELSEVIER and support affordable, open-access scholarly publishing” (https://www.change.org/p/elsevier-boycott-elsevier-and-support-affordable-open-access-scholarly-publishing)

“Support the UC's "publish & read" proposal to Elsevier” (https://petitions.moveon.org/sign/support-the-ucs-publish?r_hash=R6c4swQv&source=s.tw)

The Cost of Knowledge (http://thecostofknowledge.com/)

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Impact of a failed negotiation

https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/publisher-negotiations/uc-and-elsevier-impact/#library

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Zooming out to Pathways to Open Access

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UC Open Access policies

https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2019/chapters/chapter-9.html

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Publishing Infrastructure

& California Digital Library (CDL), the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), Longleaf Services, LYRASIS, and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos)

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Support
Incubate & pilot
Refer & consult
Advocate
Report

TSPOA

TRANSITIONING SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS TO OA

https://tspoa.org/

A group of like-minded individuals from libraries, academic institutions, publishers, and consortia have organized to connect society journal editors and publishers with support and useful resources to transition society publications to open access.

TSPOA helps connect societies, editors, and libraries with localized groups and individuals, and offers consultative services to support OA transitions
TSPOA evaluates opportunities to support or encourage new society journal OA publishing models or projects, and is organizing a pilot to this effect.
TSPOA conducts outreach and presentations to help societies, libraries, and other stakeholders understand how to support OA publishing by societies.

If you’d like their help transitioning your journal or to participate in a pilot, you can go to tspoa.org to get contact information.

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Back to transformative agreements: CUP agreement

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Join us!

If you’d like to learn more about transformative agreements, the UC Libraries have been eager to be a resource, and we’ve broadly published information about our model and our experience. I think it’s a particularly powerful path because faculty want to continue publishing in the publisher-supplied journals they know and value. Transformative agreements bring OA to your faculty, rather than insisting that your faculty change their behavior to find OA. Join us in exploring that path if that sounds intriguing. I have just spent two days at the OA2020 meeting of chief negotiators, where representatives from over 30 countries discussed the impressive progress the community has made in building coalitions for transformative agreements. Or join us on any of the other pathways we’re currently pushing ahead on. I’m happy to introduce you to the folks moving ahead this good work.

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What you can do!

Build a faculty + library coalition

your open access values are beating heart of the coalition

bring open access to life by advancing your faculty’s values

Faculty

Librarians

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FORCE11

I also think Force11 can play a vital role here. The beating heart of faculty open access values may not need to be recreated university by university. Perhaps we have enough exemplars by now to craft a collective principles and values statements for publisher negotiations. Force11 has done this to great effect with the Fair Principles for data sharing. I’ve heard that through the grapevine that some of oyu have had discussions whether Force11 can convene faculty in a working group to produce a document with the same kind of impact for open access and publisher negotiations. I want to close today by wholeheartedly encouraging you to take that on. Please talk to your incoming board co-chair John Chodacki, or any Force11 board member, to advance that idea. By the way, I’ve also heard through the grapevine that our UC colleague Rich Schneider, the primary author of UC faculty’s “Declaration of Rights and Principles” would be eager to work on a similar statement with faculty colleagues under the Force umbrella. If you want, I think you’ve got your first member for a working group.

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Thank you!

@guwa