Transcript: On OA Week 2019, Researchers Rule

Interview With Kurt Heisler

For podcast release Wednesday, October 23, 2019

KENNEALLY: From October 21st through 27th in dozens of countries around the world, colleges, libraries, and research institutions are holding seminars, panel discussions, and meetups to explore open access publishing and the open sharing of knowledge. As momentum builds in the movement for open scholarly communications, International Open Access Week 2019 is asking, open for whom? Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center’s podcast series, I’m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book.

Now in its 12th year, International Open Access Week has chosen as a theme for 2019, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge.” Participants are urged to consider not only what open access means to publishing, but also what open access means to researchers and others whose voices may have been excluded in the past. CCC is marking OA week 2019 with a special series of posts available on our blog, Velocity of Content. Kurt Heisler, Director of Publisher Sales and my CCC colleague, joins me now for a quick review of highlights. Welcome to Beyond the Book, Kurt.

HEISLER: Hi, Chris, it’s nice to be here.

KENNEALLY: We’re looking forward to chatting with you and marking the occasion of Open Access Week 2019. The blog post that will be featured on Velocity of Content this week, I suppose the one to mention first of all, is our open access must reads, it’s a quarterly roundup of headlines from across the industry, and we’ll be covering a number of points. There have been several conferences looking at the varieties open access and how to approach this particular challenge. You attended the Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing, COASP, in Copenhagen, recently. What were some of the hot topics discussed?

HEISLER: Two main points that came across to me at the conference were these transformational agreements that are being set with publishers and institutions, and then also how to reward researchers and how to encourage them to publish within open access. When you think of transformational agreements, they’re coming in a lot of different varieties – read and publish, publish and read, deposit accounts, tokens, all those sort of things, all of them trying to encourage that anything that’s being published from an institution is done in an open access manner.

But that then drives a lot complication of trying to manage those deals, and so that is a lot of the hot topics. And along that way is what’s going to work for the commercial publishers, what’s going to work for the scholarly society publishers and small people that publish on their own, all of these back and forths within the ecosystems.

But probably the one thing that got my attention the most was when Max Planck, the German funder, stood up and said, there’s enough money in this ecosystem already. You don’t need more. We just need to figure out how to reallocate it so open access and open research can happen today.

KENNEALLY: And the real problem here – the challenge, I should say – is that when it comes to these kinds of agreements, they’re like children and snowflakes, there are no two alike. Every consortia, every country, all the publishers, they really see things differently, and that’s really hard. It’s a negotiation that has to take place.

HEISLER: It is. If you’re a top 10 publisher, you probably get the attention of these institutions or these consortium or these country deals. What happens when you’re number 11 and so on? That was a lot of the discussion. There are a couple of great new reports out where people are exploring all the different types of deals. Here at CCC, we’ve been really trying to map all of these new agreements within our RightsLink author workflow, and we’ve done it. We can serve any of the agreements that come up. And by January 1st, which was sort of the timeline of January 2020, to have this due date for plan as originally, we’ll be able to assist our publishing partners. And actually we’re doing it today.

KENNEALLY: Well, we are just back from Frankfurt Book Fair, and we held a series of discussions about these transformative agreements. I got a chance to moderate those, and we’ll be posting a podcast to Beyond the Book, podcast recordings of those programs, as well as accounts of what went on. And so we do hope those listening will check those out. They were in two parts. There was a discussion about Projekt DEAL, which is the consortium in Germany, and the Anatomy of a Transformative Agreement for Open Access Publishing. That featured Dr. Ralf Schimmer from the Max Planck Digital Library, he’s the Director, there, of Scientific Information, as well as Deirdre Silver, who’s the Associate General Counsel of Legal Research at John Wiley & Sons. In January of this year, Wiley and Projekt DEAL concluded one of the most important such transformative agreements.

Then following that, we looked at things at a higher level. We talked about the future of transformative agreements, and that featured Sybille Geisenheyner from the Royal Society of Chemistry, James Milne, who was just recently appointed the Acting President of the American Chemical Society, Mark Seeley, who is a public policy consultant, and Susie Winter, Director of Communications at Springer Nature. So those were well-attended and well-received discussions, and we hope that you will check all the various blog posts on that.

We will also be featuring this week, as part of our OA Week highlights, a post on Ringgold. We’ll be featuring a special guest post from our partner there at Ringgold and looking at the complexities of this transitioning that has to happen for the business model.

So I suppose, Kurt, the question for you is, why are identification questions so important in this open access environment? Ringgold is the international standard identifier for more than 500,000 organizations in all sectors, including academia and corporations and hospitals. And so really, tell us briefly about that. Knowing who’s who and where the money’s coming from, all of that is really critical to getting this right.

HEISLER: It is so critical, and with every publisher that I speak with, this is one of those sticking points of how do you identify the institution or the country or the consortium that you’ve done a deal with and then honor that special pricing, whether it’s free, discounted, or included in your deal or special price. And if you don’t have good identifiers, the whole system breaks down.

KENNEALLY: And what the funders are looking for, what the institutions are looking, and I’m sure, ultimately, the authors and the publishers, as well, is to be able to comply with the various mandates and to really fulfill their obligations in this continuum of scholarly communication.

HEISLER: We’ve worked for the last five years to try and make sure all of the systems within the ecosystem have the correct identifiers to drive rules that are metadata driven and allow us then to honor these pricing things in an automated way. You don’t want to have spreadsheets on the S drive tracking what you’re doing for Cambridge University, order-wise. You want to be able to automate it, and you can only do that with the right identifiers. And the joy of Ringgold, what we’ve found is they have a nice parent-child setup, so if you have a deal with Cambridge University Press overall, you can honor that, or if it’s with one of Cambridge’s smaller colleges or departments or institutions, you can adhere to those. So it’s so important and we find metadata is the secret to how we drive the business in the next five years around these new deals or around different sales tactics – all these elements that you want to bring around the metadata – it’s all coming back to that as the important part.

KENNEALLY: Right. And publishers care about that, but the authors do, and the institutions that they work for do, as well, because everybody wants to get credit for what they’re doing.

HEISLER: Exactly.

KENNEALLY: And we have been speaking today with my colleague at Copyright Clearance Center, Kurt Heisler, he’s Director of Publisher Sales, looking at our highlights for blog posts on International Open Access Week 2019. Kurt Heisler, thanks for joining me today on Beyond the Book.

HEISLER: Thanks, Chris.

KENNEALLY: For much more about open access and all of our OA Week posts, we hope you will check out Velocity of Content at copyright.com/blog.

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’m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on CCC’s Beyond the Book.