Tag Archives: publication reform

Journal-flipping

As a board member of MathOA I have been involved in helping the editors of Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics to break away from Springer and found the replacement journal Algebraic Combinatorics. This is part of a much larger effort to reclaim community ownership of research journals and run them according to the FairOA principles. Anyone interested in helping with the administrative work, persuasion, and fundraising needed, please contact me.

Fair Open Access Principles for AOASG blog

The AOASG blog carries a piece by me and Alex Holcombe, which can be read below (minus hyperlinks, so please look at the AOASG version for best reading).

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In March 2017 a group of researchers and librarians interested in journal reform formalized the Fair Open Access Principles.

The basic principles are:

  • The journal has a transparent ownership structure, and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community.
  • Authors of articles in the journal retain copyright.
  • All articles are published open access and an explicit open access licence is used.
  • Submission and publication is not conditional in any way on the payment of a fee from the author or its employing institution, or on membership of an institution or society.
  • Any fees paid on behalf of the journal to publishers are low, transparent, and in proportion to the work carried out.

Detailed clarification and interpretation of the principles is provided at the site.

Here, instead, we put these principles into context and explain the motivation behind them.

Our basic thesis is that the current situation in which commercial publishers own the title to journals is untenable. Many existing journals were begun by scholars but subsequently acquired by Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and other commercial publishers. These publishers now have a strong incentive to oppose any reform of the journal that would benefit the community of authors, editors and readers but not help the short-term interests of its own shareholders. We have seen several examples of this in recent years (the Wikipedia entry for Elsevier, for example, collects many examples of malfeasance.

The evidence is now overwhelming that the interests of large commercial publishers are not well aligned with the interests of the research community or the general public. Thus Principle 1 is key. Changing a journal to open access but allowing it to be bought easily by Elsevier, for example, would be a pointless exercise. We must decouple ownership of journals from publication services. This will allow editorial boards to shop around for publishers, who must compete on price and service quality rather than exploit a monopolistic position. In other words, a functioning market will arise. Also, journals will have more chance to innovate by not being locked into inflexible and outdated infrastructure.

Principle 2 (authors retaining copyright) seems obvious. Large publishers have claimed that having authors assign them copyright to articles protects the authors. We know of no case where this has happened. However, publishers have prevented authors from reusing their own work!

Open access is of course the main goal and thus the associated principle (Principle 3) needs little explanation. Some authors appear to believe that posting occasional preprints/postprints on their own website is as good as true open access. This is not the case – some of the reasons are licence issues, confusion about the version of record, lack of machine readability, inconsistent searchability, and unreliable archiving.

APCs (Article Processing Charges) are a common feature of open access journals and a main source of income, particularly for “predatory” journals whose sole function is to make money for unscrupulous owners. Large commercial publishers have responded to pressure by offering OA if an APC is paid. These APCs are typically well over US$1000. The fact that over 60% of journals in DOAJ do not charge any APC, and the low APCs of some high quality newer full service publishers (such as Ubiquity Press) shows that there is much room for improvement. In many fields there is considerable resistance to authors paying APCs directly. For example in a recent survey of mathematicians that we undertook, published in the European Mathematical Society Newsletter,
about a quarter of respondents declared APCs unacceptable in principle and another quarter said they should be paid by library consortia. We do not deny that there are costs associated with OA publishing, and are not advocating every journal run using self-hosted OJS and volunteer time (although there are many successful and long-lived journals of that type, like Journal of Machine Learning Research or Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, and we feel it still has untapped potential). We aim to ensure that unnecessary barriers are not erected for authors, in particular fees – Principle 4. Any payments on behalf of authors should be made in an automatic way – the idea is for consortia of institutions to fund reasonable operating costs of OA journals directly.

Principle 5 (reasonable and transparent costs) will automatically hold if the journal is sufficiently well run and independent as described by Principle 1, and is included in order to reinforce the point that a competitive market is our main goal rather than wasting public money to maintain the current profits of publishers. Recently, initiatives such as OA2020 have emphasized large-scale conversion of subscription journals to OA. We believe that if the ownership of the journals isn’t simultaneously changed, there will remain little incentive for publishers to keep prices down. If a researcher believes that a paper in Nature will make her career, will she be denied this by the APC-paying agency if Nature choose to charge a premium APC? In addition, if journal ownership is not taken from the publishers, they can lock us into their existing technologies, which hinders innovation in scholarly communication.

We are presently working on disciplinary organizations aimed at helping journals flip from a subscription model to Fair OA, and have so far started LingOA, MathOA and PsyOA. We plan a Fair Open Access Alliance which will include independent journals already practising FairOA principles, flipped journals, and other institutional members with a strong belief in FairOA. The idea is to share resources and harmonize journal practices. We hope that these activities will yield a way forward that avoids sterile debates about Green vs Gold OA. We welcome feedback and offers of help in our wider effort to convert the entire scholarly literature to Fair Open Access.

Fair Open Access Principles

I have been working for the last 18 months with a group of talented and committed people to accelerate conversion of subscription journals to open access. There are many barriers, and many pitfalls. For example, so-called “predatory” open access journals that take authors’ money and provide no quality control have gained considerable publicity and must be avoided. Large, inefficent and greedy commercial publishers have attempted to “double-dip” by introducing Hybrid OA. Otherwise well-run open access journals still have high publication charges.

Our aim is to avoid these problems by retaining community control of journals and adhering to high ethical standards. Here is a list of our basic principles, based on the original version introduced by LingOA. This list was developed after extensive discussion and some consultation with other OA advocates such as Peter Suber and Marie Farge. We hope it will be useful in delineating what we see as the ideal way to publish journals. This is not to say that all other ways are necessarily “unfair”, of course, although some of them clearly are!

The Fair Open Access Principles

  1. The journal has a transparent ownership structure, and is controlled by and responsive to the scholarly community.
  2. Authors of articles in the journal retain copyright.
  3. All articles are published open access and an explicit open access licence is used.
  4. Submission and publication is not conditional in any way on the payment of a fee from the author or its employing institution, or on membership of an institution or society.
  5. Any fees paid on behalf of the journal to publishers are low, transparent, and in proportion to the work carried out.

Clarification notes:

  1. This could be ownership by an editorial board, or by a democratically controlled scholarly society, for example. Key points are that the controlling organization, not a commercial publisher, must own the journal title, so that a change of service provider can be achieved without changing the title, and so publishing companies simply compete to offer services to the journal. We strongly recommend that the ownership structure allow for democratic input by the community of readers, authors and referees, in addition to editors, and that procedures for making key decisions about the journal’s future be formally (even legally) specified. We strongly recommend that the governing organization be fully nonprofit (for example, IRS 501 (c) (3) in USA). A for-profit company accountable only to shareholders is not compatible with Principle 1.
  2. The  journals and their publishing house can still propose, among their services, to take care of possible legal issues pertaining to copyright on the author’s behalf, under the author’s oversight. We strongly recommend that reviewers also retain copyright of their reviews, and journals retain ownership of all correspondence and mailing lists compiled on the electronic submission system put at their disposal by the publisher.
  3. Any form of subscription paywall is unacceptable, including “hybrid OA”. We  strongly recommend that the industry standard CC-By licence be used. All content of the journal should be easily accessible from the journal website to anyone with a standard internet connection.
  4. The key idea is that journals be “free at the point of use” by authors and readers. Principle 3 deals with readers and Principle 4 with authors. Compulsory APCs (article publication charges) are not compatible with this principle. Journals should ideally be funded by general contributions from universities and research funders, with these contributions not tied to individual articles or groups of authors. Principle 4 is not compatible with “APC Big Deals”, whereby institutions pay for APCs of their employees but do not contribute to a general fund. Also not compatible is the practice of charging APCs by default to the author’s institution, with waivers for authors who do not have institutional funds. The principle does not preclude voluntary APCs, but requests for these must be unobtrusive and no barrier to publication. APCs must be “opt-in”, never “opt-out”.
  5. “Low” depends on the particulars of each journal, but we strongly recommend an absolute maximum of $1000 per article published or $50 per page for the total expense of any journal, and substantially lower fees in all possible cases. We recommend that an itemized price structure be made public in order to ensure transparency and make the proportionality principle apparent.

 

What happens to journals that break away?

Although it is still a relatively rare occurrence, several journal boards have broken away from large commercial publishers. A good list is at the Open Access Directory. These journals usually are required to change their name, because the previous publisher will not relinquish it. They are cut off from the enormous support provided by large commercial publishers (after all their subscription prices are so high, the money is surely being put back into developing better infrastructure, rather than, say enriching shareholders, giving inflated honoraria to editors or paying inefficient support staff). Thus one might expect that these journals would struggle.

I looked at the fortunes of the mathematics journals that have taken this route. Below I list the original title name, the approximate date of the breakaway, the new title and publisher, and citation impact measures taken from 2014 data at eigenfactor.org, and compare them to the results for the original journal. Those measures are EF (size-dependent measure of importance) and AI (analogous to Impact Factor, but based on the same kind of reasoning as underlies PageRank – not all citations are equal). Each has a maximum value of 100. These are of course not the only measures one could use. I also list CE, the 2013 cost-effectiveness rating from journalprices.com (essentially, subscription cost per citation) – the smaller the better.

Old: Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier), changed name more than once to Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, still publishing, EF = 0, AI = 0, CE = 84.73
New: (1999) Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (Cambridge), EF = 31, AI = 40, 42.33

Old: Machine Learning (Springer), EF = 77, AI = 92, CE = 27.01
New: (2001) Journal of Machine Learning Research (diamond OA), EF = 94, AI = 97, CE = 0.0

Old: Topology and Its Applications (Elsevier), still publishing, EF = 78, AI = 33, CE = 32.34
New: (2001) Algebraic and Geometric Topology (Math Sciences Press), EF = 77, AI = 77, CE = 3.67

EDIT: I received email from Alex Scorpan saying: “The facts are that AGT was born by splitting off from “Geometry & Topology”. The resignation of the board of “Topology and its Applications” may have occurred at the same time, may have involved people on the board of AGT, and may have involved the same ethos that moved the founders of GT and AGT, but otherwise the two events are not connected.” Alex has edited the OAD wiki to fix this. I haven’t looked into the question any further.

Old: Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier), stopped publishing after 6-7 years.
New: (2003) Transactions on Algorithms (ACM), EF = 60, AI = 76, CE = 5.57

Old: Topology (Elsevier), stopped publishing after 6 years
New: (2006) Journal of Topology (Oxford), EF = 70, AI = 93, CE = 39.24

Old: K-Theory (Springer), stopped publishing very soon, and archives disappeared.
New: (2007) Annals of K-Theory (Math Sciences Press) (after an intermediate change to Journal of K-Theory (Cambridge), EF = 59, AI = 79, CE = 102.47), too new for EF, AI

Old: Journal of Philosophical Logic (Springer), still publishing, no EF, AI or CE listed (the website lists only “interim editors”)
New: (2007) Review of Symbolic Logic (Cambridge) EF = 35, AI = 49, CE = 222.58

It seems clear that the new journals are doing considerably better than the old ones overall. I wonder whether the idea often touted by radical leftist OA advocates that large commercial publishers don’t add much value could have a grain of truth in it.

We have met the enemy, part 2: clueless authors

In recent discussions, an editor-in-chief of an Elsevier journal made the assertion that there is no point in going through the hassle of switching to an open access publishing option, because authors are allowed to post the final accepted version (“postprint”) publicly, for example at arXiv.org.

Ignoring the rather cavalier attitude to readers (what if the author doesn’t bother to do it?) and the tacit admission that journals serve no real purpose other than (possible) post-publication peer review improvements and giving a 0-1 quality stamp, let us focus on the authors.

After all the hard work involved in writing and paper and having it accepted, few authors relish the extra work involved in ensuring that the readership of the paper is maximized. But this is a very small amount of work in comparison to the total for the project. Uploading to arXiv takes only a few minutes, and there are plenty of other venues with similarly low overhead (institutional repositories, sites like ResearchGate (if ethically acceptable to the author), and other subject repositories). Even putting the postprint on a personal webpage is better than nothing.

Yet despite the ease of making their work available, a large fraction of authors simply don’t do it. In 2011 Kristine Fowler surveyed mathematicians’ views on various issues (the linked article is well worth reading) and found that only about half of authors practise self-archiving (some publish in open access journals but this is relatively rare). She lists several other barriers to self-archiving found in previous studies: lack of time, not regarding it as an important dissemination venue, concerns about copyright, publishers’ attitudes, the quality of the archive, inadvertent changes to the work, and the deposit procedure.

Fowler’s survey also discusses author rights. The results are remarkable to me, two striking quotes being:

Several open-ended comments indicate that some mathematicians do not know or do not care about author rights issues: “I don’t usually think much about this aspect of publishing” and “I have to say that I generally just ignore any associated author rights and do what I like with my paper.”

and

… only 16% of mathematics authors (91 respondents) report having tried to improve the terms of publication, whereas most have signed a publisher-provided author agreement, either before (27%) or after (59%) reading it (participants could report more than one action). Among those who have negotiated with publishers to retain more author rights, 92% report they are usually or always successful.

So: my working hypothesis is that a sadly large fraction of my colleagues just don’t think it is important to ensure that their work is available to read, use excuses for inaction, and are happy to live up to the stereotype of the unworldly academic. For me, this is unacceptable.

Survey of opinions on mathematical journal reform

I am running a survey (via Google Forms) on behalf of an international group of researchers and librarians interested in improving overall performance of the publication system in mathematics and other subjects. Its results will be made public later this year. We aim to get responses from a large and representative sample of the world mathematical community. The results will be used to focus efforts on improvements that have broad community support. As far as I know nothing like this has been tried before. Some commercial publishers have undertaken author surveys on open access, but our survey is much more.

The survey (for editors, referees, authors, readers on mathematical journals) can be accessed at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1r4LBUJk1VF9e4Dl4aXgS4fW-O8HR9yz1cqmXdzz0CjM/viewform?c=0&w=1&usp=mail_form_link. Google login is required for authentication and to safeguard data integrity, but no personal data will be stored.

Division of labour in prepublication peer review

It seems to me to be a good idea to separate out the traditional refereeing (pre-publication review) functions. In mathematics at least, a paper should be “true, new and interesting”. It is often easier to check the first rather than the second, especially for less experienced researchers.  It makes sense for more experienced researchers to be asked for a quick opinion on how interesting and new a paper is, while more junior ones check correctness. This has some other advantages: if it becomes widespread, authors will have an incentive to write in a way that is understandable to new PhDs or even PhD students, which will probably improve exposition quality overall. It would reduce the load on senior researchers (I received an email yesterday from a colleague who said he had just received his 40th refereeing request for the year!) Doing a good job as a junior researcher could lead to a good CV item, so there would be an incentive to participate. Some sort of rating of reviewers will probably need to be undertaken: just as with papers that pass “peer review”, postpublication feedback from the whole community will be involved.

Beyond the boycott

The boycott against Elsevier has been interesting so far. I have had some discussions with colleagues, most of whom have not signed. I am still struggling to detect any principled reason: worry about destroying the “brand” of the journal (from members of an editorial board of an Elsevier journal) is the only one I can sympathize with, although the fact (opinion, at least) that Elsevier has subtracted value from these brands after buying them from other publishers should be noted. Very few people have stated their reasons for not signing – Ariel Procaccia is a welcome exception. I suspect many researchers don’t give the issue more than a passing thought, others are too timid, and others like a free ride. Perhaps a few really think the current system is good, but in that case I would have to question their fitness for research work. The main feedback I have had informally is that it is all too hard, since they own the “best” journals in my field, I am an editor of one of their journals and I like it, etc. One interesting opinion is that although it is a problem, it will soon be fixed by advances in technology. I wish I could be confident of that.

In any case Elsevier has made some grudging concessions, so I guess that this will mean fewer people feel pressure to sign up. However, researchers shouldn’t have to waste their time to get such small concessions. The current system is clearly unsustainable and it seems almost impossible to imagine the commercial incentives of a company such as Elsevier ever allowing them to do what is right for society, or science/scholarship as a whole. Thus alternatives must be explored, and now is an important time for discussion. One forum for such discussions is Math2.0, which I read often and recommend highly.

Separating out the many related issues takes time and I will write several posts. For now, I have some concrete recommendations for mathematical researchers, none of them original to me. Many take very little effort.

  • Sign the boycott petition, or at least don’t work for journals that are exploiting free labour to make large profits.
  • Practice self-archiving rigorously. Use the arXiv and update your paper to the final accepted version. List all your papers on your own webpage. Encourage all colleagues to do the same – if you want to read their paper and can’t find it on their website, ask them to put it there.
  • Familiarize yourself with the policies of the publisher on author self-archiving. Stand up for your rights as an author (see this important article by Kristine Fowler in Notices of the American Mathematical Society).
  • When citing a journal publication, also give the arXiv version of the paper (if they are essentially the same).
  • Encourage those involved in hiring and evaluation at your institution to ignore journal impact factors and use article-level metrics and other more nuanced measures.
  • Encourage granting agencies you deal with to require open access to all publications associated with grants they award.
  • If you are on an editorial board of a journal run by Elsevier or the like, talk to your co-editors about moving to another publisher with better practices, or at least registering your displeasure to the current publisher and tell them they need to change if they want to keep you. Discuss with other editors of other journals, and share approaches that work.
  • Find out what your professional society (AMS, IMU, …)  is doing about these issues, and whether its publishing arm is helping the cause of open access, or harming it. Get involved on committees in the organization where possible.
  • Talk to your institution’s librarians. Find out what they can offer in terms of institutional repositories, hosting journals, etc.