He who pays the piper… Open Access: a funders perspective Robert Kiley Head of e-strategy Wellcome Library Conference: First Bloomsbury Conference of e-publishing and e-publications UCL, June 2007

Overview l About the Wellcome Trust l Look at the current model for scholarly publishing – and show why this does not work in the interests of the research community l Look at an alternative model – open access l Discuss what it might cost and who pays l Look at major players – funders, publishers, and authors – and highlight their current attitudes to OA l Conclusions

The Wellcome Trust l Largest charity in UK; second largest medical charity in the world l Funds innovative biomedical research in the UK and internationally l Currently spends around £500 million per annum – supporting the brightest scientists with the best ideas l Supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and well-being l Home of the Wellcome Library and Wellcome Collection l More information at:

Web has transformed awareness of research results…..

Free Publishers Libraries Researchers Shareholder s & Societies Public funders & HEFCE £ Profit Free £ ££..but the traditional publishing model..does not always work in the interests of the research community

Funded by the Wellcome Trust and MRC Issue 1 – Access problems Research by BMC shows that: 90% of NHS-funded research available online full text 40% immediately available to NHS staff 30% immediately available to public See:

Issue 2 – Research potential not fully realised l Internet provides new opportunities for text and data to be fully integrated l The web – and web 2.0 developments – provides the ability for researchers to data-mine and mash-up data to generate new knowledge l The read-only access rights favoured by many publishers, limits these developments

Integrating text and data

Developing new resources from mining the literature: textpresso l Ability to computationally mine the text and data to enable new facts to be discovered The abstract is just not good enough. TextPresso developers found that "full text access increases recall of biological data types from 45% to 95%. Some specific types of data (e.g., antibody data, mapping data, transgene data) are very unlikely to appear in abstracts ( 10% recall) but can be found in full text (70% recall)

Developing new resources from mining the literature: Malaria Atlas Map Data mined from the research literature Mashed-up with Google earth

Solution – open access l Open access: a definition (Bethesda definition) The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship l Under an open access model, publishers move from content ownership model to a service model

OA at the Wellcome Trust: policy All research papers – funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust – must be made freely accessible from the PubMed Central and UKPMC repositories as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of the journal publishers official date of final publication

How do Wellcome Trust grantees comply? l Compliance can be achieved by following one of two routes: l Route 1 – open access publishing [preferred route] Publish in OA/hybrid journal Typically incurs cost - met by Trust l Route 2 – author self-archiving Publish anywhere - but self-archive a version of the author manuscript (must include all changes that arise from the peer-review process) and make that available from PMC/UKPMC within 6 months No fee l If a publisher offers neither route: Author can make revision to the journals copyright statement – boilerplate language provided – and see if the publisher will accept this Look for an alternative publisher

Publishers response to the Wellcome grant conditions l Significant number of commercial and not-for-profit publishers now offer an OA-publishing option that is compliant with the Trusts requirements (e.g. PLoS, BMC, Springer, Elsevier, OUP, CUP, BMJPG, Sage etc) l Other publishers allow the author to self archive a version of the final article and make that available within 6 months (e.g. Nature, AAAS, AMA, Am. Physiological Assoc) l However, some publishers have policies that do not allow Wellcome-funded authors to publish in these titles High profile publishers that do not offer a WT-compliant policy include the American Association of Immunologists, and the American Association for Cancer Research

Open access publishing – who pays? l Open access publishing still incurs costs Management of peer review process Copy & language edits l But rather than charging readers – and creating artificial access barriers – the OA model looks to shift these costs l Author pays model (more accurately funder pays) is gaining in popularity All UKPMC funders recognise that OA fees are a legitimate research expense RCUK have indicated that publication fees for open access journals would be a legitimate use of indirect research expenses See: for further informationhttp://

What will it cost? Costs and business models in scientific research publishing publications

Total cost of paying for OA? l Trust estimates that providing OA to all the research papers it helps fund will cost between 1%-2% of its annual research budget Approx 4000 original research papers published every year. If every single one of those papers was published as an open access article, with an average cost of £1650 per article, the total cost to the Trust would be £6.64 million; just over 1% of our annual research budget. Trust is rarely the sole funder of a research team, and more than 80% of papers that acknowledge our support also acknowledge the support of one or more other funders. In time these costs will be spread throughout the research budget and fall below the figure estimated here.

Will OA lead to lower costs? l Although the OA funder pays model incurs costs around administration and collection of these payments …. l …in the longer term, the move to OA should lead to lower costs Dispense with print – offer print on demand at cost (e.g. PLoS) Eliminate subscription management Eliminate DRM systems Reduce legal overheads (drafting, monitoring, & enforcing licences) Reduce marketing fees

Is OA sustainable? NAR and OUP - a case study l Nucleic Acids Research moved from a subscription, to hybrid and then to full OA journal l In % of authors paid the OA fee (8% waived) l Income per article has fallen: 2003 $4224 income per article 2004 $4647 income per article 2005 $3622 income per article l..but OA costs increased to offset this fall: Member £300; Non-member £ Member £500; Non-member £ Member £625; Non-member £1250 l Additional titles are joining the Oxford Open programme 2005 – 21 titles 2006 – 49 titles 2007 – 60 titles

OA and the future: funders l Increasing number of funders recognise that full OA ensures that that the fruits of their investment can be accessed and built upon No rowing back - OA is here to stay l Increasing numbers of funders are making funds available to cover OA costs… l …but will only pay these costs when: a publisher agrees to undertake a number of services (e.g. deposit in PMC, in XML format) on behalf of the author Allows these articles to be fully re-used for research purposes

OA and the future: publishers l Increasing number of publishers are offering a form of OA – but the OA flavour may not always be sufficient to meet funders demands ACS Author Choice Programme: The ACS version of the article must not be changed, modified or enhanced ….prohibited examples include adding of Internet links.. l Publishers increasingly demanding full recognition for their services Recent ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM paper agues that publishers should be able to derive the revenue benefit from the publication ….. and its further distribution and access in recognition of the value of the services they provide Wiley/Batts spat is clear evidence that the commercial publishers are increasingly concerned about re-use of content.

OA and the future: authors l Awareness of the issues around OA still relatively low In only 32% of the funding the Trust made available for OA publishing was claimed l More concerned with the impact factor of a particular journal – rather than its OA policy l OUP study showed that 78% of authors agreed or strongly agreed that unrestricted re-use of their article after publication is important l Expectation that authors will comply with funder mandates l Funders need to develop author-friendly services so the benefits of OA become manifest

Conclusion l Providing unrestricted access to research outputs is good for science and society Allows research to be freely accessed and built upon Helps funders evaluate impact of their funding portfolio In time, overall publication costs should fall l Funding is available for authors to meet OA costs This should allow publishers to begin moving to an OA model Dissemination costs are research cost l Still in a period of transition Publishers and funders trying to define their positions and (hopefully) reach a common understanding Authors slowly beginning to recognise benefits of OA l OA will prevail Scholarly publishers will evolve and develop business models based on providing services, rather than perpetuate the model which is based on access barriers and artificial scarcity