New US Federal guidance on open access publishing

[Hibush]

The Office of Science and Technology policy has issued new guidance for all Federal agencies that fund research.

Since 2013, agencies that spend more than $100 million on research have required that peer-reviewed research publications be open access after no more the 12 months.
The new guidance applies to all Federal research, and removes the 12 month embargo.

This mean all Federally funded research will be published open access. Some journals have had a lower page charge if you have the embargo because that makes it worthwhile for libraries to also pay for a subscription to get access to the latest articles.

This policy will shift the publishing economics a fair bit further to author pays. On that topic, the memo says "federal agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, management of data, and special handling instructions as allowable expenses in all research budgets." I think they do now, but the guidance is likely to become more explicit.

Researchers who question paying the few thousand in publication costs will now have an answer: you have to and you have to budget for it.

The 2013 rule took a bit of time to implement, and is taking even longer to become accefully understood in the research community. You still hear comments like "journals that charge a publication fee are not reputable." That is untrue now, and should disappear quickly as a sentiment among researchers who do federally funded work. It will be interesting to see how that change happens.

[dismalist]

The Office of Science and Technology policy has issued new guidance for all Federal agencies that fund research.

Since 2013, agencies that spend more than $100 million on research have required that peer-reviewed research publications be open access after no more the 12 months.
The new guidance applies to all Federal research, and removes the 12 month embargo.

This mean all Federally funded research will be published open access. Some journals have had a lower page charge if you have the embargo because that makes it worthwhile for libraries to also pay for a subscription to get access to the latest articles.

This policy will shift the publishing economics a fair bit further to author pays. On that topic, the memo says "federal agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, management of data, and special handling instructions as allowable expenses in all research budgets." I think they do now, but the guidance is likely to become more explicit.

Researchers who question paying the few thousand in publication costs will now have an answer: you have to and you have to budget for it.

The 2013 rule took a bit of time to implement, and is taking even longer to become accefully understood in the research community. You still hear comments like "journals that charge a publication fee are not reputable." That is untrue now, and should disappear quickly as a sentiment among researchers who do federally funded work. It will be interesting to see how that change happens.

This is very interesting. I believe it is efficient. Government pays for the research, government owns the research. It's a public good, paid for by the government, so open access is the way to make it, well, public.

[As ancillary costs are being paid for by the government as well, so there is no shift to "the author pays". Journals having a lower page charge for embargoed articles will have to find a new way of price discriminating. :-)]

[fizzycist]

I was trying to describe the US science publication system to a friend in law the other day and he was just dumbfounded.

Our system is so illogical and wasteful. Glad to see OSTP taking a bold stance.

I'm interested now to see what the big societies like ACS, APS, SPIE, IEEE, etc. do in response and what role federal agencies choose to take. This could go the way of Plan S (mandatory arXiv but ppl still pay APCs to the usual piblishers) or it could lead to truly transformational change. I think eventually it has to be the latter because there is no way this mess we have now is a stable equilibrium.

[Puget]

This is a step in the right direction, but APCs need to be limited to the actual cost of processing and posting articles, otherwise we are still wasting taxpayer money (just on grant budgets instead of access fees). I've seen estimates that this is more like $500 at most, not several K as some journals charge. Make publishers negotiate a rate with federal funders like universities do for indirect rates.

[waterboy]

By the time some research is done, the grant has ended. Where then does the funding come to pay for open access 1-2 years (or more) down the line?

[Puget]

By the time some research is done, the grant has ended. Where then does the funding come to pay for open access 1-2 years (or more) down the line?

This is a good question, and something I think the federal funders are going to have to address, e.g., by allowing funds in the final year budget that can be set aside for future publication charges, like an automatic no-cost extension for publishing charges. It isn't insurmountable just requires they think a bit outside the box.

[Hibush]

By the time some research is done, the grant has ended. Where then does the funding come to pay for open access 1-2 years (or more) down the line?

This is a good question, and something I think the federal funders are going to have to address, e.g., by allowing funds in the final year budget that can be set aside for future publication charges, like an automatic no-cost extension for publishing charges. It isn't insurmountable just requires they think a bit outside the box.

This will indeed be a big challenge. The current system works ok for those who have sequential grants on similar topics. Then one can slip in the page charges on the next grant. But currently it prevents those who have sporadic funding, or grants on disparate topics, from publishing. That is a blatant inequity, as well.

I've wondered about buying coupons good for one publication, redeemable within five years. Obviously an issue if you don't get the article accepted, but something like that might work. I did roughly that once by submitting an ms that wasn't ready, paying the APC, then getting a "Major revisions" with the understanding that they would be really major (the editor considered the topic and claimed conclusion to be of considerable interest). Those revisions happened well after the grant was over.

[mamselle]

The other side of the question is the humanities.

If publishers find the sciences more lucrative to publish (as they already do), humanities journals will continue to decrease in numbers (as they already are).

Likewise, while an important discovery in cell biology might benefit by earlier rather than later disclosure, the discovery of, say, Vico's aesthetics on Longfellow's decision to write about national identity issues won't seem to merit immediate publication or support.

The issue, by my observation, in part, is that the sciences, finally, and especially the biomedical sciences, offer a chimerical promise of longer life, with less pain, etc.

The humanities might offer a deeper, more considered, life, with qualitative values on offer, but they don't directly lead to a cure for cancer or a better pain-control regime.

There's an underlying greed, it has always seemed to me, for longer life over better life--quantity over quality--that makes the two systems function so differently....and having worked in both--often being decently paid in one so I could afford to try to do half-decent work in the other--it's somewhere between ironic and tragic, at times.

I realize there are a lot of other mid-ground issues and disciplines which are either just peripherally influenced by these concerns, or do a decent job in effecting a crossover, especially among the social sciences.

And I don't attach any particular umbrage to the differences, just sadness, perhaps, that it's so much harder for a humanities scholar to find funding and get publications out than one that is folded into the systemic programs the sciences offer.

Which comes to the point of asking--in a round-about way--to what degree will open access publishing for the humanities be affected, if at all?

I daresay it won't be completely within a silo.

M.

[Hibush]

OSTP was specific about limiting the charge to Federal science programs.
Could the same argument even be made for grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities? To what extent should NEH-subsidized creative or scholarly work be available to the public for free? 

Then there is the practical matter. How would you even go about giving away chapbooks?

[fizzycist]

This is a step in the right direction, but APCs need to be limited to the actual cost of processing and posting articles, otherwise we are still wasting taxpayer money (just on grant budgets instead of access fees). I've seen estimates that this is more like $500 at most, not several K as some journals charge. Make publishers negotiate a rate with federal funders like universities do for indirect rates.

This is something that funders can fix immediately, by setting a limit on allowable costs per article. The language the OSTP is using seems to allude to that (mentions of reasonable costs etc).

Bigger issues for me:
1. What happens when societies complain they can't keep their doors open with lost revenue (almost definitely not true, but they have and will lobby for this).

2. How to deal with the review-for-free system that doesn't seem to be working well now, and with less money in the system (for editors, prestige games, etc) not likely to get better. APC vouchers could be part of a solution, but suspect we need more (not sure what).

[mamselle]

OSTP was specific about limiting the charge to Federal science programs.
Could the same argument even be made for grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities? To what extent should NEH-subsidized creative or scholarly work be available to the public for free? 

Then there is the practical matter. How would you even go about giving away chapbooks?

Put 'em in a poetry store and wait six months.

I have it on good authority that that's what happens to many of them...

M.

[bio-nonymous]

At institutions that are not wealthy and give mediocre start-ups (or for unfunded middle-career researchers), those without grant funding (many, since the success rate for NIH funding, anyway, is abysmal--some institutes are ~8-10%), who had difficulty competing before will have even more difficulty when all papers are open access. I have seen many journals charging $2,3 even $4k per article. This doesn't effect big well funded labs--just ask for more money in your next grant. However, when you can barely scrape together enough to pay for experiments, how do you turn around and then pay $9k to get 3 articles published? Publish or perish is real (and not just for tenure). Catch22-->Without publishing you can't get a grant, and you need a grant to pay to publish? Is the answer close down the mediocre programs and let the strong survive? Or do the publishers get strong-armed (by who?) to lower their open-access fees to something more reasonable?

Thoughts?

[dismalist]

I have seen many journals charging $2,3 even $4k per article.

Open access by itself is good, obviously.

If those are production costs, they must be borne by somebody. If the publication costs can't be covered, there is no reason to publish.

However,

--we could have a dearth of funding agencies. Too much funding by a single agency with a narrow set of opinions. That's probably true. Break up the NIH!

--We could also have an  oligopoly of journals, keeping price above production costs. In that case, found another journal. That's probably true, too.

But you've given an example of how marginal improvements to regulation actually might make things worse overall. It's not uncommon.

Moral of the story: Solve externality problems [here, a public goods problem] at source.

[Hibush]

At institutions that are not wealthy and give mediocre start-ups (or for unfunded middle-career researchers), those without grant funding (many, since the success rate for NIH funding, anyway, is abysmal--some institutes are ~8-10%), who had difficulty competing before will have even more difficulty when all papers are open access. I have seen many journals charging $2,3 even $4k per article. This doesn't effect big well funded labs--just ask for more money in your next grant. However, when you can barely scrape together enough to pay for experiments, how do you turn around and then pay $9k to get 3 articles published? Publish or perish is real (and not just for tenure). Catch22-->Without publishing you can't get a grant, and you need a grant to pay to publish? Is the answer close down the mediocre programs and let the strong survive? Or do the publishers get strong-armed (by who?) to lower their open-access fees to something more reasonable?

Thoughts?

Largely agree with this scenario being a concern. Now the OA mandate is for people who do get the Federal grants that include the OA cost as part of the package. They are OK.

The question is about everyone else. If you manage to keep some interesting research going with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars from here and there. The publishing fee is a real hardship. If you are expected to publish a couple times a year, this is a real significant operating expense.

The immediate result is that this research is published in journals that don't offer immediate OA and charge much less or manage through subscriptions. Publishing in those places means a lot less visibility for the research, which means less influence and less likelihood of funding. The division will widen.

Universities and other research organizations will have to rethink. They have put a lot of money into library subscription budget in the past as an explicit way to support academic publishing financially. Those budgets have not kept up with the rapid rise in subscription costs, so that model has been failing for the last 20 years or so. There have been small efforts to directly fund publication costs, but they don't seem to come close to keeping up.

One solution is to include publishing costs in faculty operating budgets that approximately match the publication expectations. For instance, if faculty are expected to produce two publications a year, then to publication fees should be made available. I have looked closely at the publishing cost for a professional-society journal that is only online and uses volunteer associate editors and reviewers. The true cost of publishing an article is between $2000 and $3000. (That does include the cost of reviewing articles that don't get published, which is perhaps unfair to burden the published authors with.) So the school would have to budget about $5000 per faculty member at the very least. Or remove the publishing expectation.

[research_prof]

Why not just requiring authors to upload accepted versions of papers on arXiv?

Problem solved (and for free...)...