The UKCORR 2019 Members’ Day included a presentation by Chris Banks titled Retaining academic choice and restraining institutional costs in a Plan S world: the role of the UKSCL model institutional open access policy. The talk was recorded and is now available via YouTube.
This is the text of a presentation that Chris Banks gave to the OASPA 2019 Conference.
I’d like to thank the organisers for accepting what I acknowledged when submitting it, was rather a cheeky proposal which sees me standing here today talking to an association of Open Access Scholarly Publishers about the role of an institutional open access policy in fulfilling cOAlition S’s aim of “making full and immediate open access a reality”. A “green” policy.
Here’s why:
And then:
Then, along comes cOAlition S – a significant and growing group of research funders which, judging by Plan S aims, are immensely frustrated with the stalled transition, and are seeking to accelerate the transition but not at any cost.
Plan S should create the much sought for level playing field for funder Open Access policies. But at best, it should act as the lever to drive transformation and innovation in open access publishing. For the latter to happen, a LOT needs to change.
Here’s the bit that I can influence. It comes from the perspective of a research-intensive institution where maintaining researcher choice and constraining costs are key to supporting that transition, particularly if we want to enable support for publishing innovation and OA infrastructure.
This is where a Model Institutional Open Access Policy comes in to play:
The model is not new: it is the Harvard model open access policy adopted by 76 institutions across the globe. We have worked to make it applicable in the UK where a different copyright regime is in play. Our solution – the UKSCL Model Institutional Open Access Policy – now sits ready and waiting as an enabler of the Plan S aim to make “full and immediate open access a reality”.
Yes, it is a green policy. I stand here in front of a group of publishers to assure you that whilst I don’t believe that the future should or will be “green” OA, nonetheless repositories, supported by institutional open access policies are an essential part of the transition, particularly for research-intensive institutions like my own.
The UKSCL was originally conceived to smooth policy complexity. It was called a “licence” because our original proposal was to deploy a “decaying licence” which, over time, would resolve to CC BY for self-archived materials. Whilst a solution that struck a balance between publisher & funder policies, it was deemed too complex by the community. Personally, I believe it could still have a role in balancing competing concerns around Plan S implementation. Another discussion.
Some argue that there are enough funds in the system to support a transition
Here is my conceptualisation of what would play out if the only thing that were to change were the funder mandates. It is not to scale!
None of us want this as a longer term outcome but all of us need to change something if it isn’t to become embedded as the norm, including.
Having undertaken the process of making the Harvard model work in the UK, I’m happy to share the recipe with others. In short, it involved academic consultation, making the policy work within the UK legal © and iP framework, and ensuring that institutional policies and practices were aligned. At all stages we engaged legal © and IP input.
Policy should incentivise. In the case of the UKSCL model institutional open access policy there are:
Finally, If I were to have one wish, it would be this: that, having done all this work to establish this legal approach to solving first, the OA policy stack, and now, the challenges for implementing cOAlition S aims, that the policy was not, in the end, needed, and that we were instead able to find an affordable and workable route to full and immediate open access.
Chris Banks
September 2019
A PDF of the response can be downloaded here
The UKSCL community comprise a number of UK HE institutional libraries[1] who have been working since 2015 on a model Institutional Open Access Policy to support academics seeking to make their work open access, to comply with funder OA policies and to ensure eligibility for the Research Excellence Framework.[2] We believe our Model Institutional Open Access Policy and the benefits it can provide in helping cOAlition S meet its objectives more effectively.
The UKSCL community welcomes the move to align funder Open Access Policies. It also recognises that research and publication are global and collaborative ventures and that collaborators do not all have equal access to research funding, nor are most of them covered by funders with open access policies and aims.
In feeding back to cOAlition S separately from our institutions, UK-SCL is seeking to share our experience following our proposals to roll out a “one size fits all” Model Institutional Open Access Policy in the UK, in the hope that the information might help inform cOAlition S’s next steps with Plan S.
Whilst the UKSCL community supports a general move to open access to the research findings of academics at its institutions, the overall context must be taken into account:
At present, it is estimated that cOAlition S signatory funded research results in the production of less than 8% global published outputs arising from research and that wholesale changes of publisher business model are likely only once that funder base increases substantially. In the meantime, it seems inevitable that a mixed model will need to continue to exist.
The Implementation Guidelines as they currently stand present issues which have the potential to reverse inadvertently the trend towards greater OA in the UK. This is because they would:
This Feedback is both aimed at eliciting clarification and at suggesting further actions that might be considered by cOAlition S funders. We believe these actions would afford an opportunity for practical, achievable and affordable steps to be taken towards accelerating Plan S aims of making full and immediate open access a reality. In summary, these include:
As requested, our detailed feedback is now given under the headings you provided:
It is essential that we seek clarification as to how Plan S interprets journals covered by transformative agreements[3] and that we analyse and communicate the consequences arising from that clarification. A discussion with one cOAlition S signatory raised alarm bells because they were talking about journals, not about publishers. In stating taking this position, they drew attention to Section 2 of the Guidance on the implementation of Plan S which includes the following two statements:
To understand the implications of these guidelines, it is important to understand how content is licensed, how current and emerging transformative deals work, and to recognise that universities, often as part of wider consortia, mostly subscribe to publishers (Bundled Deals) and not to individual journals. If Plan S really means journals, then we anticipate considerable challenges, challenges which essentially set Plan S up to fail unless an exceptional set of circumstances come into alignment within the very short transition timeline indicated.
If, however, we are talking about publishers, then, under the publisher scenario above, it would be possible for all academics outputs at cOAlition S funded institutions to meet Plan S aims, provided that the deal is affordable to institutions and as long as it scales to 100% of that institution’s publishing over time.
Clarity about which entity (journal or publisher) any cOAlition S funder policy applies, and from which date, are key factors in ensuring that Plan S aims are achievable. Publisher negotiations can sometimes take two or more years to reach a conclusion and negotiations are generally staggered so as to be manageable by institutions and consortia negotiators. Learned Societies do not yet necessarily have alternative publishing service providers to turn to, and the length of time from a decision to ‘consider a move of provider’ to ‘first publishing with a new provider’ can be three years or more. We recommend that the guidelines recognise these timelines noting that these will be directly influenced by the pace at which the cOAlition S group grows.
As written, the guidance appears to require publishers to undertake/facilitate the work of repository deposit and the repository criteria appear to have been drawn up with this in mind.
However, we envisage a scenario, particularly in the early years of Plan S implementation, whereby our community’s Model Institutional Open Access Policy, incorporating rights retention and Plan S compliant licensing and embargo periods, will be needed in addition to publisher negotiations for transformative publisher deals, particularly in the event that those deals proving to be unaffordable.
That being the case, author self-archiving will most likely be the means by which Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) will be deposited and made available through repositories. To this end, it would be helpful if the current repository infrastructure were also considered as a valid and valuable mechanism to meet Plan S aims.
With the above in mind, we support the COAR response[4] to the Plan S repository requirement statement.
To set this in context: at UKSCL community institutions we have already experienced strong publisher pushback on proposals to roll out adoption of the UKSCL Model Institutional Open Access Policy. Rather than contributing to the perpetuation of the status quo for subscribed content, it is our belief that widespread adoption of our Model Institutional Open Access Policy which meets Plan S requirements will provide a further legal lever to encourage publishers to develop their own affordable and transformative routes towards achieving Plan S aims and to demonstrate the value that they otherwise add to the scholarly communications process beyond the availability of the AAM text in a repository.
The Policy, based on the “Harvard model OA policy”[5], enables the automatic retention of rights by the institution, rights which individual academics at that institution can choose to exercise in full or in part.
The work undertaken in the UK has achieved a policy which works in the context of UK Copyright legislation. It’s development has been supported by expert IP legal advice.
The work was originally prompted as a result of the “policy stack”[6] situation in the UK: multiple funder OA policies with differing compliance criteria coupled with multiple publisher policies, some of which varied according to the funding received by the authoring academics. However, we also believe that the Model Institutional Open Access Policy has a potentially significant role to play in the realisation of cOAlition S aims of “making full and open access a reality”.[7]
The UKSCL Model Institutional Policy is fundamentally about rights retention and early release of the findings about research – all called for in Plan S. Despite the differing copyright regimes in the USA and the UK, we have been able to draw up a policy which works legally within UK copyright legislation.
It is important to understand how the UKSCL Model Institutional Open Access Policy works in practice as there are three components:
Discussions between institutions, academics and with some publishers on which Creative Commons Licence to adopt for the UKSCL took over two years. Nonetheless, even once we had settled on a CC BY-NC licence we continued to experience significant pushback, particularly from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences communities who, for a variety of reasons that their own community responses to Plan S feedback will outline, remain adamant that a CC BY-NC-ND licence is their preferred choice at this time. In the early days of discussion the UKSCL acted as a lightning rod for opposition to all things OA, irrespective as to whether either OA in general or the UKSCL in particular were the cause of those issues.[8]
Our solution was a pragmatic one: to propose, as indicated above, that our institutions move to adopting the policy but offer the opportunity for academics at our institutions to choose more restrictive licence and availability terms. This solution has helped with the dialogue with academics and learned societies expressing concern for the liberal licence originally called for in the UKSCL.
The UKSCL community would urge cOAlition S also to consider that ‘one size may not fit all communities’ – a more liberal approach to licensing in the early period of Plan S OA policies would do much to allay the concerns of academics and would, we believe, give an opportunity to evaluate whether the concerns play out in reality.
Nevertheless, even if cOAlition S continues to insist on the more open license route, the UK-SCL ‘step 1’ concerning rights retention has the ability to ‘fast track’ Plan S compliance in terms of making material open access more swiftly via the repository route as explained in the next section.
We believe that institutional open access policies have a role to play in meeting Plan S aims:
The main barrier to the success of Plan S is the relatively low percentage of content covered by cOAlition S funders. For Plan S aims to become reality, significant effort needs to be devoted to expanding the list of signatories to cOAlition S, or to other groupings seeking similar aims to Plan S. To this end, we see the recent announcement that librarians and funders in China are seeking immediate access to funded research outputs as a significant move, but unless there are similar moves with US funders the tipping point will be hard to reach. We would urge greater effort to be expended on this market as much publisher global policy is driven from the US.
Prepared by Chris Banks on behalf of the UKSCL Community
chris.banks@imperial.ac.uk
@ChrisBanks
[1] Over one hundred UK HE institutions are represented on the UKSCL discussion list, along with a growing number of institutions from Europe and Australia.
[3] Typically, these are deals negotiated at a publisher level. They are becoming known as “Read and publish” deals and over time they allow read access to all content from that publisher covered by the deal and allow an institution’s academics to publish open access in all journals covered by the deal.
[4] https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-response-to-implementation-of-Plan-S-February-6-2019.pdf
[5] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/modelpolicy/
[6] https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.292/
[7] https://www.coalition-s.org/
[8] Issues included those of third party rights, moral rights and translation, none of which are caused nor solved by the UKSCL
The Harvard model Open Access Policy has been in use since 2008 and has been adopted by over 70 organisations worldwide. Those organisations that have adopted the policy report that publishers request waivers in less than 5% of cases. Here we respond to communications from publisher representative bodies about this UK initiative to bring the Harvard model policy to the UK.