UCML Plenary 18 Jan 2013 Vice-Chair Research report 2

Naomi Segal

UCML Vice-Chair Research

Opening presentation on Open Access

1. Open Access is the talking point of the moment. It is a major change to the whole way in which academic research is disseminated, ie published. What this means is an end to the arrangements we have been used to up till now: we write a book or article, submit it to a journal or publisher (nearly all the latter currently producing the item in hard copy, or, in the case of ‘hybrid journals’, hard copy + online), who get it peer-reviewed and then say yes or no. If the answer is yes, our work appears in the public domain, under the publisher’s copyright and they make some money – not much, but more than we do. If the answer is no, this may be for reasons of quality, aptness for the outlet, or commercial considerations like the fact that ‘no one buys monographs any more’.

2. Hidden in this system are various problems:

a. Power of the middle-person (publisher), whose priorities may not be academic;

b. Peer review is unpaid, uncredited input by ourselves;

c. RAE/REF and thus HEI pressure to publish more, yet is there ‘too much out there’?

d. Whom are we writing for? (impact etc)

e. Who owns the copyright, & under what conditions?

3. Types of presses are changing along with changes in technology, eg books: POD, specialised presses; journals: publication by Subj Assns etc (often with commercial presses/UPs), who rely on this activity to fund rest of their ‘charitable’ service to the field. Book publishers rely on sales & journal publishers on subscriptions, both individual & institutional (university libraries). The many journals in HSS often have an online version but few are wholly online, and in any case these too generally have restricted access.

4. Talking to colleagues, I find that most academics have heard of OA only in a rather narrow way: they know HEFCE is likely to require all publications to be in OA for REF 2020; they may know the govt via RCUK (AHRC) is requiring all ‘publicly-funded research’ to be published in OA; they might know that this change is – as most are in academic life – led by the sciences, and that the very small dog being wagged by this enormous and bushy tail is social-sciences-&-humanities, with humanities stuck on the outer edge of HSS and modern languages at the microscopic end of everything.

5. I have already suggested, this morning, some aspects that are preoccupying colleagues who have started investigating the future of life under OA. Our three expert speakers will be able to fill you in much more on progress and concerns following the publication of Janet Finch’s report last July. It just remains for me to set up some of the terms of the debate.

i. Open Access = availability of a piece of research (and possibly also the data behind that research) online and free at the point of access, to anyone who wishes to read it. Also free re-use, subject to acknowledgement.

ii. Hybrid journals = A ‘hybrid’ journal is one that still operates on a subscription basis, but which offers an open access option for any article for which an article processing charge is paid.

iii. Green vs Gold = In the gold model, publication is through open-access or ‘hybrid’ journals, with the publisher’s version of record of the article being freely and immediately available; the cost is met by an article processing charge paid to the journal publisher. In the green model, the peer-reviewed and accepted (but not typeset) version of the article is made available in an institutional or subject repository, after an embargo period has elapsed since the article appeared in the journal (thereby allowing the journal publisher a window in which to exploit the article commercially).

iv. APCs = article processing charge: the cost charged under OA for publication of an article (infrastructure, copy-editing/translation, peer review, creating some hard copies, search engine indexing, usage/impact stats etc). This can vary hugely – from ca £500 to ca £3000. The key question is who actually pays this charge.

v. ‘Author pays’ = the author pays the journal (but the author wd normally get the money from their HEI – if they have one). The question then arises

· how the HEI funds this – will cash be used that is currently given to library for subs etc? in this case, how will libraries & librarians adapt?

· Will HEIs select sheep & goats for whatever funding they make available? And if so…

· Will these be individuals or subjects…?

6. Hidden in the proposed new system (Gold open access, to be introduced gradually) are also various problems. Some I have outlined earlier in my report, and more will be raised by our speakers. Here are the two that most worry me…

· Hums: most of our output, arguably, is in the form of books – chapters in collections or monographs; prestige is still attached to the latter, and impact in the hums is slower & longer-lasting than in science.

· MFL: our research domain is not just UK and not just English.

Introduce:

Dr Michael JUBB

Director of the Research Information Network (RIN). He has worked as an academic historian; an archivist; a civil servant; Deputy Secretary of the British Academy; and Deputy Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) from 1998 to 2005. Since then he has been Director of the RIN, a research and policy unit focusing on the changing needs and behaviours of key players in the scholarly communications landscape = researchers (in all disciplines), funders, publishers, libraries, and universities. He has been responsible since 2005 for over 30 reports on key aspects of the changing scholarly communications landscape, ranging from researchers' use of libraries, through cataloguing and discovery services, to the economics of scholarly communications.

Michael was a member of Dame Janet Finch’s Working Group and will talk to us now about the panel’s report and recommendations.

Ellen COLLINS

A social researcher with a background in the cultural sector. She previously worked for MLA London, the Government policy body for museums, libraries and archives, where she managed a series of projects around the knowledge transfer agenda. She has a Masters in Research from King's College London.

Ellen is based with Michael at the RIN and is now working with Caren Milloy on the AHRC-funded OAPEN-UK project, on which she’ll talk to us today.

Prof Paul ROWLETT

Head of the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at the University of Salford. He read modern languages (French and German) at the University of Bradford and then worked as a translator and interpreter in France and Germany before returning to the UK for postgraduate study in linguistics at the University of York. His own research is on the French language – translation & interpreting studies and linguistics. He was chair of the Linguistics Specialist Advisory Group of LLAS HEA Subject Centre, linguistics representative on UCML and founding chair of the University Council of General and Applied Linguistics.

He is editor of the Transactions of the Philological Society and a member of the advisory editorial board of the Journal of French Language Studies. It is as a researcher and editor that he’s going to present his thoughts today.