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Publishers fully support expanding access to publicly funded research but only as part of a model that is financially viable
Much has been written about journal publishers over the past few months but unfortunately this has focused almost exclusively on one side of the debate: the desire for greater access to peer-reviewed research outputs, especially journal articles, which publishers are painted as somehow resisting and restricting.
To be clear from the outset, we fully support expanding public access to publicly funded research. One only has to look at what has happened over the past year, especially since the publication of the government's Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth and the convening of the Finch Group to recommend strategy for extending access to global research for UK researchers. This is a process in which publishers have engaged fully and are making great strides to promote enduring, financially sustainable, open access models.
We also made a significant announcement on 2 May – on the day that the universities and science minister, David Willetts, came to speak at the Publishers Association AGM – that publishers are exploring fee-waived walk-in access via the public library network. As the minister pointed out, this proposed PA initiative would be a very useful way to extend public access to research outputs currently only available through subscription.
This is not merely words: a working group of journal publishers and public librarians is taking this work forward on behalf of the PA. A preliminary technical report should be available by mid-June with the objective of enabling access by the end of the year. This facility is already available through university libraries, although whether these libraries choose to allow walk-in access is a matter for them.
Much of the focus of this debate has been on the value of peer review and the role that scholars and researchers play in this process. By implication publishers are perceived as contributing very little, other than simply assembling articles into journals and pushing them onto cash-strapped libraries to make a gargantuan profit.
That is a gross distortion of reality. The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving. And the end result acts as a calling card and mark of quality, helping readers find content that is relevant to them and is trusted. At a time when we are looking for an export-led recovery, UK-based scholarly publishers account for over £1bn in export sales.
Perhaps most important of all, from an access point of view, is the amount publishers have invested in platforms that support researchers in numerous ways. These include investments in article enhancement, visualisation, social networking, and mobile technology; valuable tools such as searchable image databases, navigation, alerts and citation notifications, and reference analysis. Publishers are also working on text-mining tools; linking to the datasets behind journal articles; and research performance measurement tools such as SciVal.
These are all part of the academic ecosystem and are provided by publishers, not to mention that almost 100% of journals are available electronically - created, digitised, structured, tagged and disseminated by publishers. But it seems to be much easier to belittle the role of publishers than to have a serious look at what is being provided.
The debate about the cost of journals is made difficult by the fact that there are wide variations across the industry, and of course competition issues debar any collaboration. However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.
In 2010, universities spent 0.54% of their total institutional expenditure on subscriptions to journals and 20% of their library budget, which in turn was 2.7% of total institutional expenditure. Journal collections or "big deals", though often criticised, have contributed significantly to this reduction in unit costs by enabling the most popular material to be sold at a lower price with an added extra slice of research material on top. And of course libraries can choose either to subscribe to these broad collections (against substantial discounts) or to purchase individual titles.
It is clear, however, that further efficiencies can be made, for example in the peer review process. This is why publishers run peer review innovation projects. So far there seems to be no alternative to the view that pre-publication review by selected experts should sustain the production and dissemination of high-quality science over the longer term. This may, of course, change over time and publishers will continue to encourage innovation in peer review practices.
Given the budgetary challenges that libraries face, the profit margins of some of the larger publishers are portrayed as a moral affront. Unfortunately, publishers seem to be part of a broader backlash against perceived corporate greed and abrogation of social responsibility. But publishers are entitled and need to make a profit. Profits derive from efficiency, profits fund investment and drive innovation, and profits are taxed – which provides the public money to fund research. Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.
Clearly the costs of publishing services must be met somehow, and these are of course in addition to the costs of doing the research itself. If we lived in a world where all such services were paid for prior to publication, then all research content could be made freely available. But we do not, or do not yet, live in such a world. A similar point can be made about the transparency of contracts: there is no UK legislation that interferes in commercial contracting between two businesses. Companies are perfectly entitled to negotiate terms and conditions on a case-by-case basis and to negotiate those terms in confidence.
To reiterate, scholarly publishers are happy to work with any long-term financially viable business model for publishing services. We are happy to work with models where funding is provided on the author-side or the user-side of the publication process, or hybrids of the two. By contrast, mandated deposit in repositories is not a publishing model, has no associated revenue stream and, worse, threatens to erode the revenues deriving from the subscriptions on which the model depends.
Publishers have nevertheless said that we are happy to work with this "green" approach in combination with viable publishing models such as funded ("gold") open access or subscription, provided that the time gap (the "embargo period") between first publication and availability in a repository does not fatally undermine revenue streams. We are ready to work with funding bodies, government agencies, researchers, librarians and other stakeholders of all kinds to expand access in sustainable ways. But that's just it - they need to be viable in the long term. Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable. We all need to work together to achieve this.
Graham Taylor is director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association
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