The future of scholarly publishing: where do we go from here?

Research Information in Transition: a meeting organised by the RIN

Monday, 11th October, 2010

Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services, Wellcome Library, Wellcome Trust (r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk)

Agenda

• Review how scholarly communication has changed over the last 5 years

• Look at current landscape - OA publishing, repository development, peer review etc.

• Consider what needs to change if we are to realise the ambition of providing open access to all funded research

A changing landscape (1)• Growing number of mandates – at both funder and institutional level

• Publishing landscape changing Most publishers offer “funder compliant” OA options OA publishing becoming mainstream

PLoS One is one the biggest journals in the world – publishing over 4400 articles in 2009

Raft of new OA titles - mBio, PLoS Currents, BMJ Open. Starting to see a changes to the peer review process

EMBO – publish referees reports ASM mBio – authors identify 3 ASM members to handle review + 5 other

people to review it BMJ Open – will use “Open Peer Review”

– Reviewers will sign their reports and will declare competing interests to editors, and reviewers’ reports will be posted online

A changing landscape (2)• More funding available to meet author-pays costs

– At least 6 UK universities have an “institutional fund”

– Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity

• 11 universities have signed the Compact including Harvard, Columbia, MIT

– RCUK

• “ Chief Executives of the Research Councils ..will support increased open access, by: extending their support for publishing in open access journals, including through the pay-to-publish model. [April 2009]

– Wellcome TrustTotal Open Access Expenditure Oct 2005/06 to Jan 2009/10Includes Open Access Block Grants and Supplementations

£0

£500

£1,000

£1,500

£2,000

£2,500

£3,000

£3,500

2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10

Financial Year

Va

lue

£'0

00

Grand Total Open Access

A changing landscape (3)

• Repository developments All Russell Group Universities have

established IR’s, as have most of the other UK universities

Central, subject-based repositories (like UKPMC) continue to develop

UKPMC has around 2 million full-text documents and a range of value-added functions

Projects, such as Repository Junction, are working to develop automated workflows to move metadata between repositories

UKPMC functionality: text mining

Results of text mining the full-text

UKPMC functionality: citation services

Cited-by and cited data + API to WoS

UKPMC functionality: FactFinder (goes live early in 2011)

Answers extracted from the full text document

Questions automatically generated in response to query

Grant Reporting tools“My Impact Report” “My Grant Report”

Usage at UKPMC

UKPMC usage: 2007-2010

4310 9289

132582

213774

13310

65566

316226

764308

0

100000

200000

300000

400000

500000

600000

700000

800000

900000

March 2007 March 2008 March 2009 March 2010

Usage in a single month

Unique sessions

Downloads

However, full potential of OA not realised..

% of papers in PMC

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Dec-06

Apr-07

Aug-07

Dec-07

Apr-08

Aug-08

Dec-08

Apr-09

Aug-09

Dec-09

Month

Co

mp

lian

ce (

%)

% of papers in PMC

Compliance with Wellcome OA mandate

Improving compliance with mandate: role of Funders

• Funders must be explicit about how researchers and institutions can access funding for OA

Develop guidance about inclusion of OA publications costs within indirect costs; include specific line in grant application forms to include publication costs (direct costs)

Or, set up dedicated budget (e.g. the Wellcome approach)

• Monitor compliance & enforce sanctions Actively monitor compliance

Following letter from Wellcome to VC’s significant there was a 52% increase in author depositions

Trust also checks End of Grant Reports for compliance

• Communication Demonstrate the benefits of OA to the researcher (as well as the research

community more generally)

Improving compliance with mandate: role of institutions & researchers

• Improve access to OA funds Institutions to ensure OA publishing costs are requested as direct and

indirect costs when applying for research funds Establish dedicated budgets to meet OA costs

• Better communication Arrangements for meeting OA fees to be effectively communicated

• Support from senior staff WT Sanger Institute has a compliance rate of 82%

• Encouraging authors to self-archive 2009 data shows that only 42% of Wellcome-funded papers –

published in Science and Nature – were archived in UKPMC

Improving compliance with mandate: role of publishers

• Simplify process for authors who wish to select an OA option

Build OA option into manuscript submission workflow

• Make explicit the relationship between subscription costs and uptake of OA option

This will give confidence that funders and institutions are not paying access fees twice (“double dipping)

• Top tier titles (Nature, Science) to consider developing OA publishing option

Access to “top-tier” articles remains an issue

2009 - WT/HHMI papers / available through PMC as of Oct 2010

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

Nature Science Cell

Total papers attributed to WT/HHMI

Number of WT/HHMI attributed papers inPMC

2010 (Jan/June) WT/HHMI papers / available through PMC as of Oct 2010

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Nature Science Cell

Total papers attributed to WT

Number of WT/HHMI attrubuted papers inPMC

Last slide..

• OA has made significant progress over the last 5 years

• However, the majority of research papers that will be published in 2010 will not be made OA

• The primary actors (funders, researchers, institutions and publishers) need to continue to work together to realise the full benefits of OA