Transcript: The Transition to Open Access

Recorded at the 2018 London Book Fair

For podcast release Monday, April 23, 2018

KENNEALLY: Among the scholarly publishing community around the world, open access is a well-established fact. A study appearing in February 2018 in the OA mega-journal PeerJ estimated that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA – some 19 million articles in total. The researchers also found that the OA proportion is rising, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid business models. The same study also corroborated the so-called “open-access citation advantage” – finding that OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.

What, then, is holding up any declaration of the New Age?

For one thing, the research world has largely accepted Open Access as a requisite of funding. The mandates to authors and publishers from the Wellcome Trust as well as various governments have advanced the OA cause considerably and raised many questions for all the key stakeholders in academia.

What remains is development and adoption of sustainable and integrated publishing workflow solutions that will minimize costs, promote transparency and support a range of business models. A December 2017 report for the Universities UK Open Access Coordination Group reviewed the nation’s transition to Open Access and rated the UK “well above global averages of open access publishing and… at the forefront of a significant global movement which is fundamentally changing the way that research is conceived, conducted, disseminated and rewarded.”

Responsibility – even congratulations – for driving this remarkable change across the scholarly publishing landscape is widely shared. Nevertheless, the evolving relationship of publishers and institutional libraries particularly faces critical challenges. Whether it’s God or the Devil you find there, the details are getting all the attention these days. There is simply no cutting corners at the cutting edge of scientific research – where humankind expects to find solutions to pressing problems in health

I want to welcome to engage in that discussion my very distinguished panel today. And I’ll start on my far end here with Sven Fund. Sven, welcome.

FUND: Thank you.

KENNEALLY: Sven Fund is managing director of Knowledge Unlatched, an online platform that provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support open access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives. From 2008 until 2015, he was managing director of De Gruyter, Berlin. Sven lectures at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

And then immediately to my right is Dr. Danny Kingsley. Danny, welcome. Danny Kingsley is the deputy director scholarly communication and research services at Cambridge University Library. Her role has responsibility for managing funder mandates for open access and research data management. This includes working closely with colleagues within the university, the UK, and internationally to ensure good policy development and implementation. Before moving to the UK, she established the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, and Danny worked as a science communicator for 15 years, including two years with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

To my left is Chris Leonard. Chris, welcome.

LEONARD: Thank you.

KENNEALLY: Chris Leonard is head of product at the Emerald Group Publishing, covering the fields of health and social care, education and engineering, as well as the research and practice of business and management. Chris Leonard has worked for 20 years at the interface of publishing and technology. He has experience setting up open access (inaudible) operations with BioMed Central and Qatar Foundation, and is currently looking at all things open within the research environment.

And finally, Matthew Day. Matthew Day, welcome. Matt is head of open and data publishing at Cambridge University Press. He has worked in publishing for over 20 years, including developing open access journals and databases at BioMed Central and later Nature Publishing Group.

I wanted you to hear their backgrounds because I think it’s important. These are people who are steeped in open access, who may be coming, in a couple of cases, from traditional publishers, but whose roots are in the very origins of open access, and what we’re looking at today is where we stand – the state of open access in 2018. Where have we come and how much farther do we have to go?

And I think I want to start with Danny Kingsley, because you are playing a pivotal role in a position that didn’t exist only a few years ago. So tell us for the audience to understand better just what the role of a scholarly communications librarian is today.

KINGSLEY: Well, actually, the last three jobs I’ve had didn’t exist before I had them. So I did my PhD looking at why different disciplines were engaging at different levels with open access, and during that process – I was at the Australian National University – I realized that there was a real lack of understanding about what facilities were available to our researchers and started kind of rattling the cage internally, and they created a new role for me as a scholarly communication manager, with the idea that I would be developing policies around open access and also fixing up our repository, which was a DSpace repository, a place to put our copies of our research outputs.

And so I did that for a few years, and then it was meeting the advocacy side of things, because I realized that the question had been which technology should we be using? Which repository should we build? And all the technologists had the idea of we will build it and they’ll come, and they didn’t. And so we realized we needed to do something about advocacies, so I started up the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group to try and do something along those lines.

And then the position at Cambridge came up, which is quite similar to the Australian National University role, with the added impetus that now the government here in the UK and the funders are saying we need to do something about it. So those three roles have all been new as I’ve started these jobs, and I’m glad to say they’ve continued on behind me. They didn’t disappear after I left. But it does indicate that this is a new space, and I’ve been working now in this space for 10 years.

KENNEALLY: Well, I think it’s a great point. This is a very new space, and you are hardly alone in inventing these jobs as you go along. And it is changing the work of the research librarian tremendously, so they are becoming much more than the resource person. They are now data scientists, they’re almost partners with the researchers themselves. Explain their role, because I think publishers may not really understand how important the research librarian really is to this workflow chain.

KINGSLEY: So a couple of months ago, I said to my husband, oh, this is interesting. There’s a conference coming up in Canada, and it’s looking at the changing role of libraries. And he said, I don’t understand your job. You seem to only go to conferences to talk about the changing role of libraries. And it’s kind of true. I think that libraries in the academic space are really struggling with what is this in the future. If we took open access to its complete end goal, what is a library in a fully open access environment? That’s a really interesting question.

So there are those sort of really fundamental questions that the industry’s discussing and trying to work through, but what you’re talking about is like a functional librarian – not as opposed to a dysfunctional one. But a functional librarian is one that focuses on a particular thing, like research data management or open access facilitation. That’s quite different to, say, a subject based librarian, who might have in-depth understanding and knowledge of, say, ancient Roman history or something. So those things are quite different. And so the research support work tends to be across functional lines, and that, for a lot of institutions, is quite a new role, and one that my team that I look after is primarily responsible for.

KENNEALLY: And finally, Danny, with regards to this new role, you’re interacting with people that, as librarians, you might not have interacted with before. How well do the other communities respond? So for example, the researchers – they’re being asked to provide you with information, to tell you about their publications, to come to you for budget money. Is that a challenge to work with the researchers? Are they willing to engage?

KINGSLEY: So they range. So there are some people who are just so delighted they found somebody who can help them, then they’re really happy. And there are others who are really, really cross that this is even happening to them in the first place, and they think it’s our fault and they get angry with us, because somehow we were the ones that invented these policies. So the range is enormous, but generally, I’d say it’s more heavily weighted on they’re grateful there’s someone to give them a hand side of things.

KENNEALLY: I was going to say so it comes down to customer service.

KINGSLEY: Yeah.

KENNEALLY: Absolutely. Well, Chris Leonard, I want to turn to you now because you as well as Danny have invented your work as you’ve gone along, because you go back to the days of – well, maybe the phrase open access was out there, but it was hardly very well known, because you worked, as I understand, with Vitek Tracz, who is really the godfather of open access, as I see it – the founder of BioMed Central. And so you go back quite far in time, and you can remember the mood at that moment, at the opening days of BioMed Central. Tell us about that. Reminisce a moment, and then give us a sense of where we are today.

LEONARD: So that was quite a while ago now. It feels a long time ago, because it was. We’re talking about 1998, I think this was.

KENNEALLY: Twenty years ago, they passed that.

LEONARD: Twenty years ago, right. And everyone thought we were crazy. Why would you charge authors to publish when they could have a free option with an established publisher with impact factors? Why are you doing this? And we thought it was the right thing to do. There was a wave –

KENNEALLY: There was a principle. I just want to sort of tease that out of you. There was a principle there. There was a kind of revolutionary sense of changing publishing.

LEONARD: Yeah. Even then – I think this situation has existed for a long time, but librarians can never afford to buy everything that they wanted to provide for their patrons. And even in the mid ’90s, there was a push against rising subscriptions. So this was seen as a way to open up – to free, I think the word was at the time – to free access to scientific literature. We had a mural on the wall at BioMed Central, which was a bird flying out of an open cage. And it certainly felt like we were freeing information out there to make it available to everyone.

But it was hard work in the early days. The first month or so, we had a decent number of submissions, but then for about the next five or six months, it was single figures each month, and we were starting to think maybe this open access thing isn’t so great after all. But it started to snowball when people saw the advantages of being able to search and cite and read scientific literature for free from an end user point of view, anyway. Then they were a lot more supportive, and we were quite fortunate to get librarian support at an early stage, as well.

KENNEALLY: So from here, we’ll fast forward to 2018 and where we are today. Quickly, what is your sense of the status of open access, and describe what you think is the image of open access. As you imagined it in 1998, it was a movement to free all those texts. How do you think people perceive open access in the publishing and in the research community today?

LEONARD: So in those last 20 years, I’ve worked on both sides of the fence for open access publishers and also for traditional subscription publishers, so I have a fairly rounded view of it, I would say. And in 1998, I thought by now over half of the world’s scientific research literature would be freely available through open access, and also that within the next five years, it would be 100%. Now, the fact that we’re still quite a long way from that – so we’re talking 20 years, and I think that research article you mentioned said we’re at 24%.

KENNEALLY: Around about 20 million, yeah, and 24%, right.

LEONARD: So that’s fairly slow uptake, I think. You would hope at some point it will hockey stick upwards. But I think in order for that to happen, something fairly fundamental needs to alter.

KENNEALLY: Well, that’s what we’re going to come back to you about, because in your role at Emerald, you’re looking at the future of open, and I want to hear more about that. But, Matt Day, that’s also what you’re doing at Cambridge University Press. And as you listened to what Danny had to say and what Chris had to say, how do you see the state of open access today yourself there? It was a revolution, but today, it’s more of a question of mechanics. I’ve heard it put in this way, that it’s gone from Woodstock to Wall Street, from a kind of revolutionary movement to one that’s very much business focused. Would you agree?

DAY: Yes. I think the day-to-day realities of open access are very complicated at the moment. Is my microphone working?

KENNEALLY: There we go.

DAY: The day-to-day realities of open access are very complicated and more complicated than perhaps I certainly imagined in the early days of BioMed Central. I would certainly echo Danny and Chris’s comments that there’s a – in the early days, it was seen very much as an ethical, a hearts and minds thing. And help to understand open access and its implications – let me just see if I (inaudible) here.

KENNEALLY: There you go.

DAY: Helping people to understand what open access is I think is still an ongoing issue, particularly for Danny and us. But the mechanics of it have become a much bigger part of certainly my life. Making it work internally so that we do actually – are able to publish open access material that goes through the system properly. And for us, I think diversity is a big theme for us. We work with many different stakeholders. They have different feelings. Some of them embrace open access. Some of them are more cautious. Some people are outright hostile still, I think.

So working with these different stakeholder groups is complex, and it’s evolving, as well, so that makes planning for the future very difficult. The landscape is changing greatly, I think, still. It’s definitely not at kind of a status quo that’s going to continue, I think. So that complexity and diversity I feel is a feature of today.

KENNEALLY: And as I understand, your role at Cambridge University Press is almost as an open access counselor. In working with societies and others, you have to guide them through the development of open access policies, perhaps present to them the range of choices they may have, talk to them about where this is going to lead them and what it’s going to take to get there. Tell us about that.

DAY: Yeah, so I think my job is a mix of just supporting teams that have to think about open access, and it really does touch pretty much all parts of the academic division of Cambridge University Press. The academic division publishes books and journals. So there are different editorial teams. There’s sales. There’s marketing. There’s the finance team. There’s the legal team. All of these teams have to think about open access and interact with it and with each other. So a big part of my role is helping raise awareness and helping those interactions, helping people understand.

And then a second part of my role is really the more forward thinking, if you like. What should we be doing? How should we be focusing for the future? And I think a key feature of that at the moment is actually open access is really transitioning to a more general open research agenda. So we’re kind of at some early stages of that, but that’s a big thing for us.

KENNEALLY: And what you just described, Matt, is this opening up of various silos. And it’s funny – on the outside, one of the thinks of the siloes that had existed in the past – and we’ll talk about some of them in a moment – of authors doing their research, publishers doing publishing, librarians collecting the materials, and funders providing funding, and not having much interaction among them. Open access opens up those siloes on the external side of things, but also it sounds like inside publishing, it opens up the various siloes of all these departments you mentioned.

DAY: Absolutely, and it comes down to the question of what is our role as a publisher. CUP is a part of the University of Cambridge. Fundamentally, we’re about serving academics. Well, what do they need and how do we serve those needs? So there’s a lot of day-to-day level detail, but it really does speak to that fundamental question about what’s our role and how is that role changing.

KENNEALLY: Well, Sven Fund, that’s a great way to transition to you and what you do at Knowledge Unlatched, because you come from the publishing world, but you are now really actively engaged in the future of that question. What is the role of the publisher? How is the publisher to get their material to the libraries of the world? How are the libraries to interact with them?

And I think it’s an opportunity for you to give us a one minute pitch on what Knowledge Unlatched does, because even though open access – perhaps the most early days that Chris Leonard remembers – was to eliminate the role of the intermediary. You are inserting an intermediary into this process – a new intermediary. Tell us about that.

FUND: Yeah, I think it’s a very interesting question, because you see these large building blocks of the academic publishing environment, which is publishers, the intermediaries like the (inaudible) in the world and so on – CCC, probably. And then you see libraries. But it seems that everybody sees open access somewhere at the outskirts of their own fields. At least, we don’t see anybody who really integrates and helps making open access work.

We are trying to be very pragmatic about what’s needed in libraries and also in publishing houses, and at the same time, we are discovering, if you want, every half year a new topic, whether it’s metadata, whether it’s hosting, whether it is accessibility of content in certain countries to certain target groups. So what we are trying to do is really respond to the market situation right now – the situation in the UK, for example, about REF 2027. What’s coming up there? What is the environment, and how can we help as one of these intermediaries that is not really part of a building block, but rather fluid and trying to fix the cracks that are in the system?

KENNEALLY: So making open access work – I think that’s probably what we’re all driving at in this conversation is what will it take to do it? And from the book side of things – and we should emphasize that Knowledge Unlatched, at the moment, is about books, and that’s a very particular piece of the open access puzzle. We often think about OA as regarding articles, and of course there are APCs – article publishing charges – but they have been developing a world of open access books with BPCs, as well. We’re trying to – or at least Knowledge Unlatched is trying to move beyond that and think about it as a kind of crowd funding. Explain that.

FUND: Yeah, that’s true. We believe that libraries are great and publishers are great, but they find it very difficult to coordinate among themselves and also the whole system. So the system is not a system, but it’s basically different subsystems, different actors trying to optimize their respective positions, and that’s completely legitimate. So we see that as soon as five librarians are in a room, you have how many – three to four different opinions on something, and it’s really difficult in consortia, in different settings, to agree on one policy and not one plus 17 policies. And the same for publishers, by the way. Everybody has their own formats, their own metadata standards, and so on.

So what we are trying to do is really set a minimum bar and say we are just the transactional component. We are trying to make sure that the large library budgets are being shifted more or less in one go into an open access funding which is not APC-based, because I strongly believe that there is a limit to APC funded open access models. There will be a point for organizational reasons where librarians want to keep their roles, for example, but also for other practical reasons, where it will be necessary to really shift large portions of a budget in one go from paywalled content to open access content, and that’s what we are trying to help with.

So in that respect, Knowledge Unlatched is really not at all revolutionary, if you want, but rather trying to keep the ecosystem of publishers and libraries and also vendors, if they want to cooperate, in place.

KENNEALLY: I’m sure people are asking how this works. So there’s a catalogue on offer, and rather like crowdfunding or sort of a fund me campaign, you look for funders. If you get the sufficient total, then you can unlatch, as the phrase goes – you can open those works into an open access catalogue. Do I have that right?

FUND: Correct, yeah. So we basically have right now – just four weeks ago, we got a lot of submissions from publishers – 1,250 titles submitted to our pledging round, as we call it.

KENNEALLY: And these are books that will be published in the coming year?

FUND: Correct. They are either being published already, so there are back list books in it, but there’s also front list. And certainly the library can see that. Then we have a title selection committee of librarians. It’s 170 people right now in the world that select those titles that they want to see in the package. Then we go back to publishers, which happens hopefully this week. If not, everybody’s at London Book Fair. And publishers will then clear the rights with the authors where that is necessary. And then in two weeks from now, we will approach the market – the library market, if you want – and say these are the titles from Cambridge and a lot of other publishers in a package. Please support us financially. And as soon as we have a certain level of support, which is 300 like full pledges or full universities, then the titles get all unlatched in one go.

That is the core product, and what we have added last year already and are adding this year even more is a marketplace functionality. So where other open access initiatives that are looking for funding can also use that infrastructure that we have built, so that we know whom to talk to at Cambridge Libraries, what they are interested in, not always approach them with stuff at time when they are not in a decision making mode, hopefully. So as an intermediary, you build a lot of knowledge, of course, about both publishers and libraries, and we are trying to share that with both sides.

KENNEALLY: I was just going to ask you about that, because Matt Day was talking about this role of open access counselor. It sounds a bit like what you do.

FUND: Yeah. Well, we just don’t counsel basically the author’s side or the researcher’s side, but there are still a lot of libraries who need to understand how open access for books, particularly, but also beyond that works. And there are still a lot of publishers who are afraid that open access might kill their business model or throw them out of business, whatever. And we are trying to tell them that this is at least not our intention, but there are probably parts of this open access, if you want to call it, movement that have that intention. But our intention is rather to keep what works and just remove the access barriers, and at the same time simplify the workflows. I know that that is a big goal and everybody in the publishing industry has that. We are just contributing small parts to that, but that’s the intention.

KENNEALLY: Danny Kingsley, it seems we are at something of an inflection point with regards to open access. The Fitch Report going back five years set a lot of these wheels in motion. There’s going to be review of that. There is, as I understand, a review underway by Wellcome Trust of their own OA policies. Everyone’s sort of realizing we’ve come a certain distance, but maybe we didn’t wind up where we thought we would. Is where we are today where you thought we would be? Chris told us that he expected a lot more to have happened. Are you happy with the progress that’s been made? Are you frustrated? How would you put your mood?

KINGSLEY: So as I said before, in the early 2000s, the question was the technology. What kind of repository were we bringing in place? The only kind of open access was put a copy in a repository or publish in the very few open access journals that existed. And then in 2012 with Fitch, the decision was to push the gold open access side of things and to throw a whole lot of extra cash into the system here in the UK, with this idea that somehow the rest of the world would see enlightenment and come along the trip with us.

They did not see enlightenment and come along the trip with us, probably because they watched what we were doing and realized it’s actually a complete disaster. So generally, what is happening in other countries is the same – don’t do what the UK did, because it did not work.

KENNEALLY: You have to expand on that. What did not work?

KINGSLEY: What didn’t work was the plan had been that by us putting more money into hybrid open access that the hybrid open access percentages would increase to a large enough extent that publishers would flip their journals. The problem is that in the UK, we only produce 6% of the world’s research output. So if we’re on our own, that’s not enough. So it would have perhaps worked if other countries had come on board and also joined the fun. They haven’t.

And so what has happened is we have put a lot of extra money into the equation. Yes, there’s a lot more that’s been published open access, which is presumably the goal, so that’s good. But in terms of trying to transition into something else, that has not happened. And so what we’re seeing is actually we have allowed publishers to develop systems to further establish their ability to create more money out of the system, in some cases.

Now, there are exceptions. The Springer Compact is an arrangement where, based on what we published in 2014, we are now paying a certain amount of money for our subscription – our right to read – and also a certain amount for our right to publish, based on how much we had paid for in the previous years. And so what that does is that, with that one payment, it means that everything that our institution publishes is made open access via Springer.

Now, this is a great deal for us, because we were only paying originally for the funded research, which was a fairly small proportion of all of the research that we publish for Springer. So under that arrangement, our effective article processing charge is down under the 200 pound mark. That’s a really big difference. Like (inaudible) communications is 4,200. There’s a bit of a difference in those costs. So there are some experiments that are working, but that’s one publisher, and we’re not seeing the movement on the others.

KENNEALLY: Well, Chris Leonard, I want to turn to you, because I know you’re looking at open and all of the things that open can mean – open access journals. But far beyond that, Matt Day alluded to the world of open research. As you at Emerald look at open, what are the things you’re asking yourselves? Are you finding what Danny Kingsley has to say informing your own thinking right now?

LEONARD: Yes, absolutely, and actually, also what Sven said earlier. We think there is a limit to where APCs can take us on this journey to 100% open access, which I think is inevitable. I don’t know when it will happen, but I think it’s inevitable. And then the other things we are looking at is open access research dissemination is just a small part of a researcher’s environment. So if you look at the open research environment, the publishing part is in the middle here, but there are a whole load of other parts to it. There’s authoring. There’s finding funding. And at the other end, after publication, there’s promotion of the work, ensuring it has impact in the real world.

So when you look at that whole continuum of effort, we’re only looking at a small part right now, and perhaps the idea that we can promote articles and improve the impact that they have at one end, or we can make an author’s life easier by introducing them to funding opportunities at the other end – that’s something to explore.

But finally, the third thing we’re also thinking about, and a lot of publishers are talking about this (laughter) maybe not very publicly, is what would we do in a world of 100% open access, where APCs are not going to match the revenue that publishers make now? Like I say, I think most publishers view it as inevitable that, at some point, the world will flip to open access.

KENNEALLY: Right, but it all depends what you mean by open access, and I think it’s come out in this discussion briefly that there’s a variety of models. The way the business will operate isn’t in a single way, but in a multiplicity of ways.

LEONARD: Well, that is certainly true. So at Emerald, anyway, we support green open access, which is where authors can publish their accepted manuscripts in any institutional repository, for instance, and then anyone can access that from the moment it’s accepted. I think for books, they’re a special case, and I think what Sven and Knowledge Unlatched are doing is a very interesting and potentially sustainable way to bring open access to the books area. For other things like education, I can see for textbooks and things like that that we can – we already have, anyway, a whole plethora of open access textbooks.

What I am specifically talking about here is journals and the articles within them. Where we are encouraged by librarians or funders to make everything open access, it changes the world in which we live in. And I think it’s only fairly recently that librarians have understood the power that they have. So we’ve seen just in the last few months, in France and in Germany, a rejection of some of these larger deals with subscription publishers. And that really is making the industry think, wow, if that happened everywhere for all publishers, then how do we adapt?

KENNEALLY: So the mood is not calm. If we were going to go from a one to 10, where one is over the moon happy and 10 is a very strong frowny face, as you think about that future where the ultimate end is open access, how do you feel about that as a publisher?

LEONARD: I feel happy. I think it’s only right, and I hesitate to use the word ethical, but it’s right that we be in a position to offer access to all of this knowledge to everyone. What I’m uncertain of and I would have a confused face for is how do we make that happen whilst at the same time not wiping out all of our revenue. So it’s a hard thing to get right, and I don’t have the answer right now, but I think we will all – between librarians and funders and publishers, we’re all going to have to find the answer soon.

KENNEALLY: And I imagine what it requires – and, Matt Day, I want to turn to you about this – is developing an infrastructure that allows for these various siloes that we spoke of earlier to be able to work together to make open access work in a way that Sven Fund was describing for books. How would you rate the state of the infrastructure today? This is really about standards, cross-publisher standards and so forth. Are we far enough along there? Are you happy with that situation for standards today, or do you identify areas where we need to do more work?

DAY: I think because so much of my life is actually devoted to thinking about some of the problems – the things we’d like to do that we can’t, and the things that we think we should be doing in the future – I have a tendency to feel that we’re a long way off where we should be. But I think a more balanced view is that the industry and we have gone a long way to putting in place infrastructure and open access, and I think that’s been very good. And the fact that we know we need to work better on metadata and systems to make it more efficient internally, support systems for different types of business models – the fact that we need to do that I don’t think is really a criticism, but clearly we’ll be doing a lot more than we’re doing at the moment.

KENNEALLY: Danny Kingsley, for researchers, we talked about the research librarian of today and the future. He or she is a data scientist sometimes, and what Matt is referring to is that the movement of data across the publishing workflow here – this involves, invariably and inevitably, the researchers themselves who have to begin to provide their data to you. And really, this can be everything, I think you said it to me – that it’s everything including the rat.

KINGSLEY: Yes.

KENNEALLY: How much of a challenge is that for librarians to manage that tremendous flow of data?

KINGSLEY: So when I started in my role in 2015, the funding rules had changed. There had been a funding rule since 2011 saying if you publish work that we have funded, you need to put links to openly accessible versions of the data in your paper. So that had been in place for a long time, but in 2015, the EPSRC, which is one of the funding councils, said we’re going to start checking. And so suddenly, all the universities went we’ve got to do something about this.

And so what we went around initially was we had big town hall meetings, cross-disciplinary meetings saying these are the rules. You must do this. You must do this. And I had a delightful Polish colleague working with me, and she said, in the beginning, they were throwing the rotten vegetables at us, and that was the experience. There was just a very angry response by the research community, because data is very personal. People feel it’s their data and it doesn’t belong to somebody else, and I need to be able to exploit it to its full capacity, to publish as many papers. How dare you ask me of this, and so on.

And the other thing they’re thinking is, actually, I don’t know where it all is. Some of it’s on that USB, and I think I left some on my husband’s computer at home, and, oh, I think I’ve left that bit on a plane. So it’s all over the place. It’s also not in a state to be shared.

So what we worked out very quickly was we needed to talk to people about the beginning of the research data process, not the end. So our work with our research community with research data is about research data management. We do not use the term open data anymore. It’s just a swear word when it comes to academics. So we talk about research data management. Really simple things like file naming protocols, back up your work – really simple stuff like that through to metadata protocols, how to write a research data management program for your work. What are you going to do with this stuff? The GDPR is coming in. If you’re working with human participants, how are you going to manage that? Those sorts of conversations. They’re more like curation than being a data scientist.

KENNEALLY: And the other area of resistance from the researchers – and I always like to bring up the researchers, because they’re not here at the London Book Fair, but they deserve a voice. Is this resistance to what they see as a restriction on academic freedom? Can you explain where that comes from? Because I think publishers need to understand that.

KINGSLEY: OK. This is a slight bugbear of mine. The word academic freedom is thrown around a lot in this space. Let’s just make it clear about what academic freedom is. Academic freedom is the right to be able to say the outcomes of your work and not be imprisoned or killed as a result of that. That’s academic freedom. Academic freedom is not the right to publish wherever you want. If that were the case, every time Nature rejects a paper, then Nature is restricting the academic freedom of that researcher.

So when people talk about academic freedom being restricted by open access policies, what they’re saying is the rules have changed from when I started in academia and I don’t like it. That’s what this is about. And I understand that the rules have changed, but I also think you are funded by the taxpayer, and so it is not unreasonable for there to be limitations around what you do with that money and expectations on how you deliver with that money.

And so it’s fraught, this question about academic freedom, and I think really it talks about the position that a lot of academics feel themselves in now, which is under a lot of pressure to deliver in ways that they haven’t always been expected to. They see this as extra administrative burden. They feel that Big Brother is watching, that now their university is telling them to do things, and their funder’s telling them to do things, and now their publisher’s also telling them to do things, and it’s – I didn’t join all of this to become an administrator. I’m going to retire. So that’s what academic freedom’s about.

KENNEALLY: So, Chris Leonard, I’ll ask a question. How are you as a publisher, then, trying to help authors respond to all these demands, make it easier for them? And, again, it gets back to workflow challenges, doesn’t it?

LEONARD: Right, yeah. So we would very much encourage authors to self-archive their accepted manuscripts. I think that’s a start. I think in order to get 100% compliance on things like research data management, it’s going to have to be automated somehow, and you will be able to record the readings of your spectrophotometer, and you’ll be able to record the model number and the date, and it’ll happen automatically. You won’t necessarily even see it.

So I think we have the ability now to do quite a lot of this, but the compliance part is where it isn’t quite working as well as it ought to. If we can automate some of these workflow stages, then that will certainly help. As a publisher, we only see a subset, really, of the research output. We see the positive results, normally, of a small slice of their overall research, and we can certainly help. We can certainly be more helpful in making sure some of this stuff is returned to institutional repositories. But it’s a fraction of what happens in the research lab, really.

KENNEALLY: And, Matt Day, Cambridge University Press worked with authors to make (inaudible) – sorry, it sounds like there’s a mouse. Speaking of your mouse or your lab rat, I think he got into the microphone.

DAY: I think I might have had a loose connection earlier, so I don’t know –

KENNEALLY: That’s fine. So I’ll re-ask the question, then. So there was an announcement recently from Cambridge University Press talking about the expansion of a kind of author platform. Can you describe that and what its goals are?

DAY: Well, actually I’d like to answer a slightly more general question, which is, as a publisher, we have to support authors in many ways, and I think part of that is about information around open access. Part of that is making sure that we’re clear about our policies and how our policies might support them and what their funders and their institutions are asking of them. And I think some of that we’ve done well, and some of it could be done better, and that’s a constant challenge for us to get better at those kind of communications.

In terms of underpinning open access and open research, I do think it’s not just people’s behavior, but it’s about enabling technologies, and that’s a big thing for us. I think continually developing our platform at Cambridge, of course, so that it can support researchers in the types of information that they want to publish and how they publish it and how people can interact with that. So we’re working on new technologies to help people share code, for example, or to share annotations and thoughts on articles. There’s a bunch of stuff around technology, and I think that’s a key part.

But I also want to come back to something that Danny said that I found really interesting about academic freedom. Because we have to serve so many different stakeholders, and even within a class of stakeholder, there are many different views, we do have to support really – certainly at the moment – a very diverse range of offerings, if you like. And I’m curious if, Danny, you would say that an author’s right to choose which journal to submit to is an academic freedom, even if the journal reserves the right to reject.

And before you answer, I think a key challenge or a key thing that I’m thinking about at the moment is how to make hybrids work a little bit better at CUP, because it is a part of the landscape at the moment. Aspects of it are not working particularly well. I think some people feel that it may be fundamentally flawed. I’d like to see it working a little bit better, because ultimately, we’ve got large parts of the world that are behind gold and large parts of the world that are behind green. And we somehow have to balance these and make it all work together, and I would hope that we can find a way to make hybrid journals be a part of that mix of business models that are out there, that are working, that are serving different people in different ways. So it comes back to that question of diversity, really, and making sure that, with our diverse offerings, we are communicating to a diverse range of people that we interact with.

KENNEALLY: Well, I want to give Danny a chance to answer your question, though, Matt. So how do you take that different notion of academic freedom – to be able to submit to any journal?

KINGSLEY: That’s perfectly fine, and no one is stopping that. What the complaint is, is if a funder were to say we will not support payment of article processing charges in this particular journal because they don’t meet our requirements. So nobody’s saying don’t publish in that journal. The funder’s just saying we will not pay for you to publish in that journal. They’re quite different. So there’s no restriction on where you want to submit your work to. And, in fact, if one of our researchers publishes in a predatory journal, we will pay the article processing charge. We’ll advise them that we don’t think it’s a very good journal to publish in, but if that’s what they choose to publish in, it’s up to them.

KENNEALLY: Fair answer. And, Sven Fund, I want to give you the last word in all this, because we’ve been talking about trying to throw a light into parts of the scholarly publishing ecosystem that didn’t normally see it, and you have this very special place between the libraries and the publishers. First part of the question – are publishers living up to what they are preaching regarding open access, and are the libraries living it up – they’re not living it up – are they living up to their part of the bargain here?

FUND: Well, I guess it would be helpful on both sides if people would leave their sandboxes and really go for open access full force. So I think publishers have to really make titles open access, submit titles into systems which are attractive, and not just the ones that they would have made the same amount of money than in a crowdfunded model. And libraries have to start spending big money on open access, not on the paywall journal packages, where they still spend whatever – 80% of their budgets. But they really have to stop talking and start acting. And I think that’s the case for both sides of the battle, for publishers and for libraries.

KENNEALLY: Well, we’re going to stop talking right now, then. I want to thank our panel today – Sven Fund, managing director of Knowledge Unlatched. Talked to Danny Kingsley, deputy director of scholarly communication and research services at Cambridge University Library. Chris Leonard, head of product, Emerald Group Publishing. And Matt Day, head of open and data publishing at Cambridge University Press. Thank you all. Thank you all for coming.

(applause)