Society for Endocrinology Society for Endocrinology BES March 2007 Steve Byford Society for Endocrinology

Society for Endocrinology Open Access: what is it, and how might it affect your society?  Society for Endocrinology was historically heavily reliant on revenue from its journals  Set up trading company, BioScientifica Ltd, in 1996 to evolve away from this  Journals still major contributors to funding our charitable activities

Society for Endocrinology The Open Access debate Two approaches by Open Access advocates:  Open Access journals: author pays, free access – the ‘gold road’  Open archives or repositories: authors deposit their own articles elsewhere for free access – the ‘green road’

Society for Endocrinology Author pays, free access: points against  No ‘one size fits all’  Authors from poor countries  Funding of rejected papers  Loss of revenue from industry  Not yet clear whether it’s financially viable in practice  Making the transition is risky

Society for Endocrinology Author pays, free access: points for  Free access is attractive to academics  Dissemination funded in proportion to research funding  Forces a link between price and quality  Therefore theoretically more sustainable?

Society for Endocrinology Open archives: types  Institutional repositories (IRs) eg universities  Subject repositories eg arXiv.org for physics  Funder repositories eg PubMed Central (NIH) and UK PMC (Wellcome Trust et al.)

Society for Endocrinology Open archives: some issues  Peer review – do readers need it? Rely on external bodies?  IRs bypass current business model for assigning and validating quality stamp  Version control – preprints, post-prints and when is a version final?  Extra task for authors – why bother?

Society for Endocrinology Wellcome Trust policy (UK)  New UK version of PubMed Central (‘UK PMC’) launched January 2007  Authors must deposit in UK PMC  Public release within six months of publication

Society for Endocrinology Research Councils UK (RCUK)  Originally adopted an ‘umbrella’ policy  Policies of individual councils have now diverged  Medical Research Council (MRC) – same policy as Wellcome  Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) – softer policy

Society for Endocrinology NIH policy (USA)  Optional submission of accepted manuscript to PubMed Central  Can delay public release up to 12 months after publication  May well tighten to 6 months, compulsory

Society for Endocrinology European Commission Commissioned report on the ‘evolution of scientific publication markets in Europe’, which recommended  All EC-funded research to be placed in open archives (after embargo)  Exploring how open archives could be implemented!  Experimentation with different business models  ‘Extended quality rankings’ of scientific journals  Not-for-profit long-term digital preservation  Remove unfavourable VAT treatment of online journals

Society for Endocrinology EC conference, Brussels, February 2007 EU Commissioner summarized:  Publishers have been at the forefront of technological advances  What constitutes fair remuneration for publishers?  What would be a fair embargo period?  OA fees to be an allowable cost within EC grants  Authors should archive on repositories  Seventh framework programme (FP7) to allocate funds…

Society for Endocrinology Institutional Mandates  MIT asks its staff to qualify publisher agreements by adding an addendum

Society for Endocrinology How to move forward? The SfE’s policy response  All articles already made free after 12 months  If no author/funder payment, 12-month embargo on self- archiving  If funder requires free release before that, compulsory fee of £ VAT  Article then free to all on journal web site immediately upon publication  Society deposits onto PMC on author’s behalf, for immediate release  Wellcome Trust are willing to provide funding for the fee

Society for Endocrinology Concluding questions  Will repositories eventually by-pass journals?  Will journals, and peer review, therefore collapse?  How can journals show competitive value?

Society for Endocrinology Steve Byford Society for Endocrinology & BioScientifica Ltd