Transcript: Getting the Combination Right for Transformative Agreements
with
- Niamh O’Connor, PLOS
- Sara Bosshart, IWA Publishing
- Adam Blow, Cambridge University Press
- Jennifer Goodrich, Copyright Clearance Center
For podcast release Monday, March 16, 2020
KENNEALLY: Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series. I’m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book.
Earlier this month, London Book Fair organizers announced cancellation of the 2020 program schedule for March 10-12. The news was disappointing, of course, though not unexpected at a time when the world is confronting the pandemic spread of the COVID-19 corona virus.
At CCC, we recognize the difficulty in making the decision not to go ahead with this year’s London Book Fair given global health concerns. We also believe in the strength of the content we had prepared to present as well as the importance of information sharing for the publishing community.
Over the next several weeks, CCC is delivering a series of virtual programming originally intended for London Book Fair presentations. For a complete schedule, please visit copyright.com/lbf2020
This is a podcast edition for “Getting the Combination Right For Transformative Agreements,” scheduled for the first day of London Book Fair 2020.
For the transition to Open Access to be sustainable over time, publishers are innovating to create frictionless, flexible, and scalable workflows for funders, institutions and researchers. Panelists Niamh O’Connor of PLOS, Sara Bosshart of IWA Publishing, Adam Blow of Cambridge University Press and CCC’s Jennifer Goodrich will share insights on how they’ve adapted systems to support emerging needs under terms of Transformative Agreements.
Niamh O’Connor is Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS, a nonprofit open access science, technology, and medicine publisher. She is also head of PLOS’s office in Cambridge, UK, and is currently chair of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. Previously she was Director of Publishing at the Biochemical Society Portland Press. And at the Royal Society of Chemistry she held a variety of publishing roles including publisher and editor. Niamh O’Connor holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the National University of Ireland. Niamh O’Connor, welcome to the program.
O’CONNOR: Hi, Chris. Thanks very much for inviting me.
KENNEALLY: It’s interesting to have you join us because at PLOS, you are a very special part of this evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem. I have to ask you to open our discussion as to where PLOS fits in, in this time of transition and transformation.
O’CONNOR: So I think PLOS has always been at the forefront of transition. We are really proud to be a publisher that has made open access and open science a reality, and we recognize that in that, we’re still early in making sure that everybody is able to participate in that transition, and that it happens in a really meaningful way that’s inclusive and equitable for everybody. And I think that’s what we see as really the next step in open access and the transition to open science, and not just open access. So we think we still have a lot to contribute.
KENNEALLY: Indeed. Just recently PLOS concluded an agreement with the California Digital Library. It is not, per se, a transformative agreement in that business models aren’t under transformation, but something else is. I guess what this really is addressing is the idea that transformative agreements are a part of the way publishers address the challenge of Plan S, but they are much more than that, and certainly that’s the case with PLOS.
O’CONNOR: It is, and I think one thing we’ve been concerned about in looking at a lot of what’s been written about Plan S and the transition, in looking at journals like ours, which have been aligned with the Plan S values from when PLOS started publishing first, so since 2003, we can really see that one of the things, understandably, that’s happening is that there’s a huge amount of focus on how to transition subscription publishing models to an open access/open science culture. We want to make that those of us who are already there and have been publishing open access for a long time are part of that conversation, and that we don’t see the legacy pricing and unintended consequences where you might just get a narrowing the market and really focus on very large publishers who, of course, do also have an important part to play. But we want to be part of that conversation, as well, and make sure that funding is available for those of us who are already there and who are not transitioning, but just looking at ways that we can make sure that our journals are open for everybody.
KENNEALLY: Now, Niamh O’Connor, you mentioned Plan S values, they could just as easily be called PLOS values. I suppose they are, indeed, open access values. Tell us what those values are for you.
O’CONNOR: Well, I think that the really important things for us are the value that making sure that there is knowledge available for everybody, that information and research and discoveries that come from that research are made available to people to be shared as quickly as possible, and that people are able to build on those, both to further research, and also to further innovation, so leading to things like improved medical treatments. Also, even though I know you mentioned our publishing in science/technology/medicine, which of course we do, but we also, in PLOS ONE, publish across a range of other disciplines in social sciences and humanities. We really recognize the importance of all aspects of knowledge, and having that be available for people to be able to improve society and to make all our lives better.
KENNEALLY: It’s quite an ambition, and it’s one that in digital publishing era really requires good data, reliable, clean data. Talk about the importance of data, the growing importance of data when it comes to this movement towards open access – sustainable open access. And describe how that is important to you at PLOS.
O’CONNOR: Sure. So I think anyone who has been involved in arranging any kind of publishing deal will be able to tell you whether they’re coming from the perspective of a publisher or a funder or an institution librarian. The data are central to everything. In order to make sure that you have deals and agreements that are appropriate, that they are inclusive, that the risk is shared appropriately, that people are able to see that they are transparent, so funders and institutions who are paying are able to see what they are paying from. And in the same way that the publisher is able to see that this is something that is going to be a sustainable business model for their journals.
I think as part of that there have been some – are ongoing some really interesting discussions, as well, around price transparency as part of the work that cOALition S is doing to look at how we can make sure that this information is available and that funders can know and see where that public money is going to fund research. And all of it comes back to good data.
KENNEALLY: Yet that really raises the question of the burden of collecting the data, providing the data, delivering it to the various stakeholders. How do you address that challenge? Technology is an important piece of this. You want to make it as touch-free as possible, I imagine.
O’CONNOR: Yes, sure, and I think as models evolve and the discussions and conversations evolve, we do see, not just for PLOS, but I think publishers and libraries and consortia needing to look at how their workflow systems and processes are set up because a lot of the time we are trying to work with systems that were set up, perhaps, for slightly different discussions, and then retrofit those to provide the data that we now need. I’ve certainly been part of a lot of conversations over the past couple of years and I’ve seen that also through – not just at PLOS, but through discussions at industry events, about how important it is to be able to know, for example, how many articles different institutions have published. Funders are interested in knowing whether researchers received funding from them, they actually accessed that funding to pay for particular research articles. And all of this comes back to needing a very large amount of data and being able to provide that accurately is a challenge for everybody.
KENNEALLY: Indeed, and I would imagine this is a challenge that varies according to the kind of publisher that is trying to meet that change. Niamh O’Connor, in addition to being Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS, as we mentioned, you are also Chair of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers – ALPSP. Describe this situation from the perspective of that role as ALPSP chair. How is such a broad church of publishers meeting this challenge of complying with Plan S and other directives from funders, but also getting towards a model that allows for sustainable publishing over time?
O’CONNOR: It is a real challenge, and it’s really interesting at ALPSP because we do have such a broad group of members, going from those of us who are native open access publishers right through to smaller society publishers, also in different geographical regions where funding setups might be quite different, even between the UK and, I suppose mainland Europe, and the US, we see big differences in how funding is available and how researchers in different communities are accessing that.
So what we have really tried to do at ALPSP is to make sure that we provide a voice for different types of publishing, that the conversation doesn’t become just about STEM, which I know is something that (inaudible) in social science publisher colleagues often feel can happen, that we remind people regularly that books are also important and it’s not just journals. And of course, we see in the current UKRI consultation here in the UK that there is a lot of discussion in there, and proposals around making books open access, as well. And so I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more discussion there in the coming months.
We have been working with groups like UKRI and Wellcome to support opportunities to enable society publishers to be able to be part of this transition because one of the real challenges that smaller and society publishers have faced is that you’re down the list. When a consortium or a library is looking to have conversations, well, there are only so many people, there’s only so much resource available, and it’s really difficult sometimes to be the person in the room. So we were really delighted to be able to support a pilot project, as I say, with UKRI and Wellcome, which was run by Information Power to enable some societies to pilot business models to see if they would be able to part of this transition, and that seems to be going really successfully. So it’s really great to see that we’ve been able to contribute meaningfully to sustaining the business and to really maintaining that vibrant and diverse ecosystem of publishers, and of community-led publishers, who are really in turn in their research communities that they serve.
KENNEALLY: Niamh O’Connor, Chief Publishing Officer at PLOS, and chair of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. Thanks for joining me today on the program and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s Virtual Book Fair.
O’CONNOR: Thanks very much Chris, been a pleasure.
KENNEALLY: Sara Bosshart is Open Access Publisher at IWA Publishing, the publishing branch of the International Water Association, where she is responsible for implementing a strategic transition towards open access. Originally a marine geologist, Sara began her career in publishing in 2013 at Frontiers, where she helped to launch a suite of new open access journals, including Frontiers in Marine Science. Sara Bosshart, thanks for joining us on the program today.
BOSSHART: Hi, Chris, thanks for having me.
KENNEALLY: We appreciate your joining us for what would have been a panel discussion at the London Book Fair, and your participation is very important, as the publishing sector you represent is a pretty critical one for the transition to open access, and that is society publishers. Indeed, IWA Publishing has been a real leader among society publishers in moving towards transformative agreements. Tell us about that.
BOSSHART: So were one of the first smaller society publishers, really, to start establishing some of these transformative agreements. We really started the process back in 2018, early on in the year, and we were really fortunate to get into contact with the KEMÖ Consortium in Austria and TU Delft and (inaudible) Universities in the Netherlands. And they were really excellent because they were very pro-OA, they were willing to work with a small society publisher right off the bat to try to develop models which there was no precedent for. So really we came to them and said, look, we want to do this. We’re really not sure what it’s going to look like yet, but we’ll come up with a few proposals and can you give us feedback? So it was really good to have those two partners willing to work with us. And we went through various iterations of models and eventually came up with two different models that worked for both of those kinds of – so a consortia on one side and two individual institutions on the other. It was definitely a learning process, but what we came out with was something we thought was both fair for us as a publisher, but also for the institutions, and also very transparent. So you can actually find both of those deals on the ESAP website (sp?) too, to look into the details of the contracts that we signed.
KENNEALLY: Can you tell us briefly about some of the key points in those agreements? What were some of the things that really were important to you at IWA?
BOSSHART: For us, we were really focusing on remaining sustainable through this transition to a more open access world. So we’re looking at taking what was historically subscription revenue and APC revenue, and tying that into a deal which will hopefully take us over the three-year period of the deal into a place where we are more fully open access after the deal, and also give us leeway to transition more of our general portfolio to open access. So the deals that we established with those two initial trial deals does take into account the historical subscription revenue with those institutions, as well as the APC revenue. What we did the TU Delft and (inaudible) deal is we established a mechanism that then takes into account how publications change over the course of a deal. So that means that in the three years, they can go up or down and the rate will change accordingly, as well. Which was something that the institutions liked as well because it was fair for them, fair for us, as well, so if they’re publishing less, they’re paying less. If they’re publishing more, they’re paying more. And of course in order to add a level of predictability so the massive swings, there’s a 5% cap on either end so the rate doesn’t go up by too much each year.
KENNEALLY: What you’re describing are the so-called read and publish deals. Describe for the audience a little bit about how those work. It is a combination of reading and publishing, as it sounds, particularly critical as you were describing just now is the publishing component, but reading is also important, as well. Reading is a important to researchers, perhaps, as publishing.
BOSSHART: Yeah, no, that’s correct, and these deals encapsulate full access to our entire publishing portfolios, that’s 14 journals for us, across water and wastewater, as well as unlimited open access publication. So that means that authors, readers from these institutions can access all of our content, but they can also publish an unlimited number of articles. All they have to do is insert their institutional affiliation and they’ll be eligible to have that waiver on the publication for the open access, as well.
KENNEALLY: And what have you learned at IWA from administering these various agreements? None of this sounds easy. It’s a very different approach to working with your customers than you have done in the past. Subscriptions – I’m not suggesting that they were easy to work either, but nevertheless they’re a lot less detailed. This is very complex, it really requires monitoring a whole variety of factors, right?
BOSSHART: Yes, definitely. So that was something that we realized really early on that in order to have these deals work seamlessly we really needed to have systems in place that first of all can identify authors as eligible for the deals, and then that can waive those open access fees. So we use RightsLink for all of that, which has worked really well for us. So the authors will submit the manuscript, and they can tell pretty early on in the process that they’re eligible for the deal so that they don’t have to pay open access fees. And then it’s a pretty easy process for them, they pretty much just go through the publication workflow and their APC is waived. So that is one component.
Another component is just gathering all of the data, firstly to put together the proposals for these deals on the one end, and then on the other end, when we’re doing reporting, to go back to these institutions, particularly for the deals that are based on changes in publications, to make sure that we have accurate data on that side, as well.
KENNEALLY: How difficult is gathering all that data? As you say, it’s not only on the incoming piece of the publishing workflow, but it’s the outgoing part. It’s the compliance requirements that funders and institutions have that you need to help them fulfill.
BOSSHART: Yeah, I’d say gathering the data is one of the most difficult aspects of the whole process, particularly in that it’s very difficult to differentiate between various institutions – or, sorry, to collect them together and say – so in one instance, an author might put in that they are with TU Delft, whereas in our records we have the full name of the institution, Technical University Delft, or it could also be in Dutch. So being able to identify each of those variations of an institution as being the same can often be incredibly challenging at the early stage where we have data coming from various different systems, and to reconcile that is a real challenge. So getting accurate reporting is still quite tough, and we put a lot of our time into deduplicating, looking into the detail of all of the individual publications. So it is a real time sink, currently.
KENNEALLY: We said at the top that IWA has been a real leader among society publishers in moving towards these transformative agreements. But it has to be said, as well, that IWA is, relatively speaking, a smaller player in this ecosystem. Does size matter when it comes to working with the institutions? Is it difficult to get their attention when I’m sure they are distracted by these really big deals that they have to conclude?
BOSSHART: Yeah, definitely. So that’s one of the things that we found very early on as we were contacting various institutions. Often the response would be come back in a year, come back in two years. Often, as you said, the consortia are very busy allocating their resources to deals with the larger publishers. That said, we have found that there are ways to bypass some of the consortia. For instance, the deal that we set up in Sweden is a deal with six institutions, and we acted almost as the consortia in negotiating that deal in that there was a lot of going back and forth between the individual institutions and negotiating various rates, where if a certain number of them signed up, we would have them be lower. It was a lot of work, so I would say that if publishers are willing and keen to get these deals set up that there is a way and that most institutions – the willingness is there. They’re very excited when you go talk to them and say look, why don’t you change these subscriptions to read and publish deals? It’s just often they don’t have the staff that can handle the lengthy discussions that these kinds of deals take to set up in the first place.
But we have also trialed a number of collaborative efforts. We’ve worked with the Society of Publishers Coalition, and through that partnership, we had many talks with Max Planck Digital Library. We’re very enthusiastic, as well, to work with smaller publishers. We’ve also used and worked with the SPA OPS Project, and used their toolkit. So that was a project led by Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle of Information Power, which was commissioned by Wellcome and UKRI, and through that partnership, we established our Gist (sp?) deal, which was our largest UK deal, so far, so that was a bit of a different deal for us, but it meant that by working with other society publishers through that project, we were able to get discussions with them going much quicker than they might have gone if we were going individually to them.
KENNEALLY: We’re discussing today how transformative agreements can be sustainable over the long term, and you’ve been telling us about the business issues, about the technology-related issues. But it’s also important for sustainability that communications with these various players are strong, and these relationships are changing as well. How important is communications with authors and with the institutions as part of these deals?
BOSSHART: It’s incredibly important, yeah. So we’re putting a lot of efforts this year into making sure, firstly, that authors know that these deals are in place. I think initially we thought oh, we have these deals, they’ll somehow know. But you really need to make sure that the communication goes out when the deal is signed, but often researchers are busy people, they’re not looking out for the kind of press releases that go out about this kind of thing. So we found that we really have to make a concerted effort to e-mail the individually, often, so we’re working on very targeted approaches to letting the researchers know, who have published with us previously who are eligible for these deals, that they can publish with us. We have also run a number of workshops and webinars trying to get the news out that we have these deals in place and that they are eligible for them.
But as you say, yeah, it’s hugely important, especially as the model moves more from how many people are reading your content to how many people are publishing with you? It’s very key for the future sustainability of us as publisher, as that becomes much more important.
KENNEALLY: And finally, Sara Bosshart there at IWA publishing, which as we say is the publishing branch of the International Water Association, another changing relationship is the relationship that you have with your members. So I want to ask you how the work you’re doing to agree to these kinds of transformative deals has changed the relationship with your members. How are they reacting?
BOSSHART: Yeah, so we’ve had really positive feedback from our members, particularly those that are affiliated with the institutions with which we’ve established the deals. They’re very excited, understandably, now they can publish with us seamlessly, for free, open access and they can access all of our content, as well.
That said, we are a very international organization and so far our read and publish deals are limited to four European countries. So it’s serving a very small percentage of our membership currently, but that’s something we’re actively working on, trying to set up deals in other countries, in other regions. And we’re always very excited to work with different institutions. So we’re hoping, also, that we’ll reach a point where they’ll start coming to us, as well as we get the word out that we are keen and flexible to work with people.
But specifically for our members, we also do other open access initiatives, like giving them discounts on their APCs. So this year we’re trialing giving our members a 50% discount on the APCs to see how that affects their choices and whether they publish more open access with us. So we keep trying to make open access a compelling option for our members, as well.
KENNEALLY: Sara Bosshart, open access publisher at IWA Publishing, the publishing branch of the International Water Association.
Thanks so much for joining us today on the program, and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s Virtual Book Fair.
BOSSHART: Thanks, Chris. It was a pleasure to speak to you.
KENNEALLY: Adam Blow is Academic Sales Development Manager at Cambridge University Press. He works with Cambridge’s sales teams around the world to create Cambridge’s transformative journals agreements. Adam Blow, welcome to the program.
BLOW: Hi, thanks for having me.
KENNEALLY: We appreciate this opportunity to catch up with you. Our panel is called “Find the Right Combination: How Transformative Agreements Unlock Sustainable Open Access.”
And so, Adam Blow, I want to ask you about how CUP views read and publish agreements as part of this sustainable transition to open access.
BLOW: Sure thing. That’s kind of the whole key, isn’t it? It’s about sustainable ways of moving towards open access. As far as we see it, Cambridge is very, very much on the side that read and publish agreements are, at the current state of play, the best way for us to look in a very real way making gold open access happen for our list.
A few years ago, we signed a deal in the Netherlands, though, with the SNU, (sp?) it was 2017, because even back then we were thinking that the reality of a gold open access future was something we wanted to start exploring. The catalysts have come around over the last year or two have really helped to accelerate the area that we wanted to move into. I think that sustainable angle is one of the big buzzwords right now because the fear is that publishers will ask strained higher education institutes for an APC for every article that they publish. I think the widespread acknowledgement is that that would be far too expensive for any budget to bear.
So how, when you know that, do you support a program of – well, we publish 400 or so journals a year, and the vast majority of our portfolio is humanities and social science. We’re more HSS (sp?) dominated than we are STM. Managing that concept of sustainability around a list that doesn’t traditionally attract the kind of research funding that a more STM-focused list would do is what I help to do.
Sustainable has to be sustainable for both parties. It’s about making sure that we get the revenues that we need as a not-for-profit academic press, support the communities that we represent around the world, and it’s about making sure that we don’t place unnecessary administrational or fiscal burdens on our customers.
KENNEALLY: Well, Adam, you point out that this agreement with the Netherlands goes back to 2017, and you mentioned other catalysts, presumably Plan S being one of the most important such catalysts, but this is an effort that has been underway at CUP since really before Plan S was announced.
BLOW: Yeah, that’s right. It’s because of who we are, it’s because of our partnership with Cambridge University, and it’s because expanding access to academic content all around the world is one of our biggest priorities. It fits in with our mission statement and who we are as publisher, which is why we’ve been investigating this for a bit longer.
KENNEALLY: You have recently concluded a deal with the University of California, which is the first of its kind, or was the first of its kind, for both University of California and for CUP in North America. How did that come out as a win-win for both parties? What were the negotiations like? It’s something that I think becomes a model for other publishers.
BLOW: Yeah, the California deal came out of some conversations we had a little while ago now, and we were very, very keen to discuss with California, who are such an industry leader in this sphere at the moment, and again, as you’ve hinted at, giving a steer to how other institutions across the US might react to the conversion to open access that we’re all looking at, at the moment.
It came out as a win-win because we didn’t have that much experience with these things. We had our Dutch deal, but that’s all we had. And we wanted to partner with a US institution and really start experimenting in a very hands-on way how we can make something work that would allow all of the University of California system campuses to publish their output as gold open access across our list. And also something that would allow funding to flow through the institution itself to CUP, but also in a way that doesn’t request the library to pay for every single article coming out of the institution. It’s kind of a cost-sharing system that we’ve worked on that’s been to extremely helpful.
We have had weekly calls with California, I think, for a very, very long time now, of course with RightsLink who are helping us to develop new types of software for that platform to make this thing as easy as possible.
The number one win from – well, one of the big wins from our side has been the amount we’ve learned – just sheerly the amount we’ve learned about what’s really required to make a deal like this work, where all the different touchpoints are on the author journey from submitting an article to any one of our submission systems, or indeed to some of our journals that have submission systems, and how we can communicate the deal to our author base through that entire process, and also keeping visibility there for the librarians who wish to keep an oversight over the behaviors of their academics.
KENNEALLY: And that’s an area I’d like to explore a little further with you, Adam, because the kind of agreement you have with the University of California, as you describe, is a very ambitious one. It requires managing a lot of moving parts. Presumably it all comes down to data and having the right kind of data, quality data. Describe the growing importance with these agreements of data for CUP, but for all the stakeholders who are involved in scholarly publishing today.
BLOW: Yeah, sure. Data’s so important to all of this. At the moment it’s either – it can be really brilliant when you have an article that comes through, I don’t know, ScholarOne and it has the right kind of metadata to it. By that I mean we use open source institutional identifiers, the grid ID at the moment, so you can get one article that comes through the grid ID supplied by the author. And so our production system, we pick up on that on our end. We can see a (inaudible) against each DOI (sp?) coming from California, let’s say, and we can pair that grid ID with the grid ID we receive from RightsLink in our transaction reports to monitor the kind of waiver or the kind of payment that was made for that grid ID against that article, and use that to monitor compliance, essentially.
At the same time, however, we do have a mix of submission systems and a mix of data quality. At the moment so much of it comes down to what we’re given by academics or what comes through in the metadata that perhaps we won’t have that much control over.
The most important data points for all of this, I would say at the moment, and the challenges that therefore come with them, we’ll primarily identify in the corresponding author of a single journal article. This can be such a mess and such a headache. I spend a lot of my job trolling through thousands and thousands of rows of article data to try and pick out who should take responsibility for this article. I’m sure there are lots of other publishers that have the same headache.
We get say 30 authors on a single paper, and in areas such as mathematics, corresponding authors aren’t indicated on your manuscript. Everyone takes the same amount of credit for the research that’s being produced because that’s how the field functions, and that’s how it’s always functioned, with the emphasis from Plan S, from funders, from most statements being made at the moment around open access, with the emphasis there being on the corresponding author taking responsibility for paying the APC for that article, and therefore publishers like us attributing institutional affiliations with corresponding author data. It can get really, really murky when we’ve got a 30 author collaborative paper in mathematics with no corresponding author indicated, and 30 different institutions from theoretically 30 different countries, how we figure out which read and publish deal or which author should take responsibility for that manuscript is really murky waters. Yeah.
KENNEALLY: You’re describing, Adam Blow, the process you’re going through with a mathematics paper, and it strikes me it really adds up. You’ve got this multiplicity of authors, multiplicity of data points, all of the various stakeholders that have to become involved, responsibilities for compliance and so forth. How important, then, is communications with authors and with institutions to the success of these transformative agreements?
BLOW: I would say that communications are the – they’re the lynchpin, they’re the – they are whether a deal succeeds or fails, I would say. Because all of the operations that are put in place here, the agreement itself, the nuts and bolts of how an APC is either waived or paid, or however all that stuff works, it’s kind of redundant if nobody knows that the deal exists.
Now, communications, they’re so integral because they cover every single part of the author journey, not only from saying, hey, you guys, your institutions has signed a deal for you, and it’s there, and you can take advantage of it. It’s not just that, it’s well, what about if an author doesn’t know about the deal and they submit a manuscript to us? We need to make sure that we have the right communications in place at all the right touchpoints throughout the journey. It’s a supportive thing. We need to make sure that the comms come in from submission to tell an author, your article’s been accepted. Looks like from your affiliation you’re at this institution. Did you know you had a read and publish deal with Cambridge? And from then on it’s about providing the right information at the right time throughout every single point in the author journey. And making sure they know everything they need to know throughout what is quite a complex thing.
Publishing as open access requires different license forms, different copyright transfer forms. Just making sure that’s all as smooth as possible is one of our biggest, biggest priorities at the moment. It’s also of an increased importance during our negotiations, our institutional customers, they want to know how we’re going to let their authors know. They want to know how their authors are going to see, step by step, through the journey when they can make an article open access, why can they, why could they not? They want to know that we have all that to hand so that their authors have that to hand, as well.
Even after the deal goes live – lots of our deals, and I’m sure other publishers find the same thing – we can sign a deal in March that’s for the same year, and at that point we’ll have manuscripts in our submission systems and going through production that were received back in say January, which would also be in the timeframe of the 12-month agreement. So we do what’s called – what we’re calling, at least, retroactive open access, so not only do we ensure that – well, we strive to ensure, of course – that the communications to authors are as clear as possible during the submission process, but also we reach back to authors that have already published with us to tell them, hey, two months go, there was not agreement in place, but there is now. You’ve published with us really recently, do you want to make that article open access under the agreement you signed? And we then – we guide them through the process, as well.
So I would say that communications is of such importance, not only to the health of a deal because you want to be able to look at a 12-month period, and you want to see the number of gold open access articles from that agreement shoot up. But of course if the comms aren’t quite up to scratch, or you feel like there are some touchpoints that aren’t really as fluid as they could be, then it couldn’t be great. So no, communications are absolutely key.
KENNEALLY: Adam Blow, Academic Sales Development Manager at Cambridge University Press. Thanks for joining us on the program today and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s Virtual Book Fair.
BLOW: You’re quite welcome, thanks for having me.
KENNEALLY: Jennifer Goodrich is director, product development, publisher solutions, at Copyright Clearance Center. She leads the development and evolution of CCC’s RightsLink for Scientific Communications solution, an innovative e-commerce platform that automates payment and collection of article publication charges for open access content. Welcome to the program, Jennifer Goodrich.
GOODRICH: Thank you, Chris. Pleasure to be here.
KENNEALLY: We have been chatting throughout this session with the panelists who would have joined us in person at London Book Fair but are joining us online here as part of this podcast that we call Find the Right Combination: How Transformative Agreements Unlock Sustainable Open Access, and we have heard from the various panelists – Sara Bosshart at IWA Publishing, Niamh O’Connor at PLOS, and Adam Blow from Cambridge University Press – about their own approaches to not only transformative agreements, but to achieving the objective of sustainable open access publishing programs.
I wonder before we get into your own thoughts on this subject if you have some reflections on just where we all are with transformative agreements. They’ve emerged in the wake of the Plan S announcement nearly two years ago, but they are about much more than just responding to Plan S.
GOODRICH: Oh, definitely. I think we are in a momentum time. I think with the passing of 1/1/20 and the Horizon ’20 date, there is added pressure to implement some of these transformative agreements that the different publishers and their institution and consortia partners have been working on for some time. I know that we, for example, really expedited some functionality to be able to support certain kinds of transformative agreements in December of 2019 to help publishers and institutions launch at the beginning of the year some of the transformative agreements.
These take all different forms. So sometimes these are known as membership agreements and sometimes deposit agreements, and sometimes they are read-and-publish and publish-and-read. So they go by many different names, including pure OA. And I think vocabulary aside, it is all about getting to open access more quickly and efficiently and in a sustainable and scalable way.
KENNEALLY: Really, the drive from the funders to push publishers into open access models really does kind of push the burden of achieving that goal onto the publishers – and in part to the institutions, too, but publishers primarily. Talk about what that really means to publishers and why that may be driving a call for a common platform.
GOODRICH: Yeah, I think the publishers are definitely feeling a great deal of the burden of making the infrastructure work for the entire ecosystem. Part of that is obviously because they are doing the actual publishing, and they are engaging with the authors from submission forward all the way through publication. But it is a challenge, because they are trying to manage their workflows end to end, and there isn’t a single system that sort of provides an end-to-end workflow. So you have submission systems connecting to payment systems connecting to production systems connecting to author platforms.
So common, shared platforms in those interim pieces are really important, because what institutions and funders are saying is, OK, this is great that we’re having more platforms coming about, but I can’t learn 100 platforms or 200 platforms. I need a consolidated set of tools and services that I’m using across publishers to be able to respond quickly to funding requests, to be able to pay them quickly, or to be able to track against a spending threshold or a deposit type of account.
KENNEALLY: And the other directive that has come from the funders – and indeed, some of the institutions – is to begin to pull the authors, the researchers, out of the model. They want them to have as little to do with the process of publishing as possible. The emphasis is on the research and the writing, but the actual production piece of it is a place where they would rather see the authors have really very little contact with the model. Why is that important?
GOODRICH: Yes, indeed. I mean, some of the agreements do contractually call for the author not to be involved in the APC payment workflow. And I think that’s all about trying to create the efficiencies and remove the touch points, because it can be expensive if – the APC workflow isn’t really like an Amazon transaction, where you go to an e-commerce site, and it’s the same price, and you know exactly what you’re looking for, and you check out quickly. It’s really dependent on the agreement that’s in place between your publisher and your institution or your publisher and your funder, and there’s all sorts of variables being considered, whether they’re geographic or your article type or all different things that might impact the actual price of the APC.
So where the author can be removed from that part of the workflow and not challenged with trying to navigate – what does VAT mean, and am I responsible for taxes? I have a question, and who do I go to? It’s really about automating that process and allowing a transaction to be created on behalf of an author based on really good, strong metadata, applying rules that have been codified around an agreement, and then being able to push that transaction forward for an institution to review if they wish – or if they don’t wish to, automating that approval process as well.
KENNEALLY: In addition to this reduction of friction, it improves transparency. It lowers costs. So really taking the author out is of advantage to the author, but also to everyone else on the spectrum.
GOODRICH: It is. And one of the nice things that the RightsLink platform does as well, and this was in response to publishers and institutions really wanting to promote the impact of their agreements, the author isn’t involved in the actual payment workflow, but they’re notified once the funding approval has gone through that they have been funded – that their APC has been funded because of this agreement between their publisher and their institution and/or funder. And they’re benefiting from that, but they don’t need to take action. So it’s a nice promotion of that value, and that is part of the communication among the various stakeholders that’s really necessary in this ecosystem and necessary to support these different types of agreements and really different types of workflows.
KENNEALLY: One important piece of that communication among stakeholders is, of course, the collecting and the sharing of data. I have been asking the other panelists about the importance of good data to their own processes and to their own success with transformative agreements. From your perspective, then, Jen Goodrich, and as you see things from Copyright Clearance Center, why is good data so essential, even when it comes to, say, a zero-dollar transaction?
GOODRICH: Good question, Chris. All parties need to understand, are our agreements working? Were the goals of the agreements coming to fruition? Are we publishing open access at the rate that we all expected? Are the institutions getting the right pricing and discount per the terms of the agreement? Is the spending threshold being depleted faster than we thought? Are we seeing uptake in certain journals or geographic regions? So all of these types of questions are questions that publishers and institutions and funders are asking. Everybody’s trying to look at, are we making the right investments? Are we signing the right types of deals? Where are we seeing the output and the activity?
Common reporting between publishers and institutions is one of the things that we focus on at RightsLink, and we have publisher portals and we have institutional portals, and we allow all parties to see the same data at the same time and in real time so that folks can answer those types of questions. And as we move forward, we’re building more and more dashboards and analytics to help the stakeholders really project forward, think about new types of agreements – how could we support them – as well as evaluating existing agreements and publishing activity.
KENNEALLY: And the kinds of transformative agreements that publishers like Cambridge University Press and IWA Publishing, and PLOS, for that matter, have entered into are really a collection of a tremendous amount of moving parts here, Jennifer. So there are a variety of challenges in that kind of multiplicity of touch points, and there really is a need for flexibility. There isn’t a sort of one-size-fits-all here.
GOODRICH: There isn’t, and I think that’s one of the things that might not be well understood is there isn’t a single workflow that can support all authors and all agreements. Not even every author has funding available to them. So there have to be workflows that are recognizing authors not having funding, but recognizing authors that could have funding or do have very explicit agreements in place with very strict rules about what is the Creative Common license that needs to be applied or something like that. So indeed, we have found that it’s really important to analyze the types of agreements and the types of attributes related to those agreements and then make sure that there are workflows that are spawned spontaneously to meet those types of agreements.
KENNEALLY: Jennifer Goodrich, director, product development and publisher solutions, at Copyright Clearance Center, thanks so much for joining me on today’s program and for participating in Copyright Clearance Center’s virtual book fair.
GOODRICH: Thank you, Chris. My pleasure.
KENNEALLY: For a complete schedule of virtual programming from Copyright Clearance Center originally intended for London Book Fair presentations. please visit copyright.com/lbf2020.
Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center. Our co-producer and recording engineer is Jeremy Brieske of Burst Marketing. Subscribe to the program wherever you go for podcasts and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. The complete Beyond the Book podcast archive is available at beyondthebook.com. I
I’m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on CCC’s Beyond the Book.