2016-04-01

by Laura Bowering Mullen  (Behavioral Sciences Librarian; Open Access Specialist, Rutgers University Library of Science and Medicine)

and David Ross  (Executive Director, Open Access, SAGE Publishing)

In a rapidly evolving scholarly communication landscape, some have felt that the agendas of institutional repositories and publishers are on somewhat of a collision course, or at least that they must maintain a somewhat uneasy alliance.  Each year, there are more institutional repositories (see ROAR, http://roar.eprints.org/), and more institutional and funder Open Access (OA) policies (see ROARMAP, http://roarmap.eprints.org/).  Most OA policies target peer-reviewed journal article-type literature and one of the major roles of the institutional repository (IR) is to gather together, disseminate and preserve the scholarly work of the institution’s authors.  Adding to the momentum created by institutional OA policies, there is also an ever increasing number of funder mandates, including many in new disciplinary areas.  Compliance for the majority of these OA policies requires author self-archiving of Accepted Manuscripts (AM) through an institutional IR.  Along with this need to comply with OA mandates, it is clear that record numbers of scholars want to harness the power of the internet to share their work widely.  Repositories hold millions of articles, many in multiple versions.  What does a sustainable and successful future look like for both traditional publishers and IRs?

For publishers and libraries, OA is a disruptive force.  However, now we see that OA can breathe new life into both enterprises, and opportunity exists in collaboration while publishers’ business models and IRs evolve.  We need to move forward together in order to ensure that scholars are well-served.  We both need to understand needs of the researcher/scholar/author more in order to develop top notch publication outlets and user-friendly IR workflows as the focus of the IR is often on the self-archiving of the AM by the authors themselves.  SAGE Publishing emphasizes that it is essential that the Version of Record (VoR) remains the final validated and permanently archived version that the community refers to, but as long as that is the case, having previous versions available isn’t a problem per se.  It is possible that a little usage of the VoR may be lost, but the greater goal of making it as easy as possible for authors to comply with mandates and enabling institutional partners to promote their output more widely outweighs those concerns.  There have been some calls for the librarians to “get out of the way” of author self-archiving in the IR and leave that practice to the researchers.  Many authors still seem to want to make sure that they comply with all publisher permissions personally, even as Harvard style OA policies continue to emerge in more universities.  Authors want to understand their rights, and how to share their work legally online.  Librarians and publishers alike need to provide clarity for authors, ensuring that they are able to succeed in publishing their work while complying with all institutional and funder policies — of which there can be multiple for a single article.

The implementation of university OA policies has the potential to be a game changer for IRs, further integrating one of the larger functions of the library into the mission of the university.  In general, OA has opened up a new and exciting focus for academic libraries and librarians, and many OA policymaking and implementation teams have benefited from the inclusion of librarians.  Librarians are able to bring to the table an extensive knowledge of scholarly communication issues, including the complexities of green and gold OA.  The number of libraries and librarians deeply engaged with green OA through IR development, liaison outreach, and other scholarly communication-related initiatives continues to grow as does the list of OA policy institutions — the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) now includes a long list of member institutions.  The task of policy implementation usually falls to university libraries, via their IRs and liaison efforts and these are the same institutions, both public and private, that are also the major customers of commercial and nonprofit publishers (in terms of subscription sales).  Moreover, the scholars of these institutions form a large author, editor, and reviewer base for the publications of these same companies, and they now find themselves needing to comply with institutional and funder OA policies adding, for many, a new aspect to their publishing behavior.  It is clear that libraries (and their IRs), publishers, and researchers are all part of this rapidly developing OA policy landscape.

Questions remain as to the eventual mix of business models that will exist in the publishing ecosystem.  Of course, there are many types of publishers varying significantly in philosophy and corporate structure.  Larger ones also tend to publish on behalf of many learned societies and those societies retain ownership and control of their content.  These societies are also part of the OA policy landscape, and all must be mindful of their interests and concerns.  There is no crystal ball in which to view a future world that includes IRs filled with sometimes multiple versions of published articles.  In many ways, the system of self-archiving relies on the health of the subscription journal publishing system — it is the journal that filters articles and confers authority on the work.  Some have prophesied that the eventual end point of a high rate of green OA could be the collapse of the subscription publishing system and there are many in the scholarly communication system that would like to see the entire system transform;  whether by “flipping” the system from subscription to gold OA, replacing traditional publishing with new paradigms including library-based publishing, or by upending traditional systems that record impact.  Whatever the long term holds, librarians working with researchers and IRs today are very well aware of the need for authors to publish in the journal of their choice, while also having access to the subscriptions they value.  There has been some inertia or even resistance from the research community to the idea of the IR as the locus of deposit for all institutional scholarship and one thing commonly heard in discussions about OA with researchers is that their interests may be more aligned with the disciplinary repositories of their fields (in the case of arXiv, for instance).  In addition, the IR may not have developed an approach that resonates with senior scholars as well as early career researchers.  In general, for time pressed authors, OA has been a complex topic with a very steep learning curve.

The IR landscape has now matured, with IRs now an integral part of university (and library) budgets and workflows.  Certain publishers facilitate the work that the IR must accomplish, but others create unnecessary roadblocks.  SAGE has been a partner to IRs in many ways, facilitating self-archiving in practical ways.  SAGE believes that the most important thing is to have clear and consistent guidelines that are easily accessible to authors and IR managers.  Funding agencies are placing the burden of compliance on authors (or the institutions as the grant holder), but publishers can help by having a clear and consistent policy that is easy to find.

There is need for conversation and collaboration between librarians developing IRs and publishers, but opportunities seem lacking.  Librarians find themselves negotiating with publishers on the subscription side, while at the same time assisting authors in self-archiving their work.  Subject specialist liaison librarians consulting with faculty about self-archiving their work may be running up against a frustrating and often-changing set of publisher rules around this practice.  At the same time, these same librarians may be called in to consult on cancellations of subscription titles in the discipline.  Scholarly communication responsibilities are being written into position descriptions of subject librarians and many will find themselves consulting with faculty and students on various aspects of green OA.  It can be particularly difficult for librarians to watch the evolution toward the longer embargoes and added rules of some commercial publishers.  Librarians are aware that the institution is paying ever higher prices on the subscription side, while at the same time making it increasingly difficult for that same institution’s authors to self-archive their work in the IR.

SAGE makes the self-archiving process as seamless as possible and has a very liberal archiving policy for AMs, enabling their deposit in IRs with no embargo.  SAGE works with various parties to make this deposit as easy as possible.  For instance, in the UK, SAGE is working with Jisc on their pilot “Jisc Router” project (a service that automates the delivery of articles from publishers to IRs) and liaises closely with SHERPA/FACT to ensure that their database is accurate for all their journals.  As SAGE believes that that they add substantial value through the publication of the final Version of Record (VoR) they see little risk to the author’s AM being made available in IRs immediately on publication.  Restrictions on the use of the VoR are essential to protect the business model of the very subscription journals that authenticate the articles in the first place.  SAGE also feels that usage patterns differ between disciplines, and that embargoes on the VoR should reflect that.

There are questions about whether to include discussions about self-archiving in subscription negotiations.  Issues of authors’ rights are best separated from subscription negotiations (most especially in OA policy institutions).  Those institutions with Harvard-style permissions-based policies may function a bit differently.  However, some institutions seek out an approach that includes self-archiving language in subscription negotiations.  SAGE’s view is that there is no “one size fits all” approach.  As the library is more often than not the IR manager, it is natural that archiving discussions will be part of license negotiations and SAGE is happy to address them in tandem.  SAGE would rather that archiving agreements were flexible so that they could more easily facilitate any future changes in funder or institutional policy independent of the main license agreement, but they do sometimes include language in the main agreement if a customer requests it.  Flexibility and openness in approach to green OA by publishers would seem to preserve good relationships with the libraries that purchase or access their subscription publications.

Publishers can create extra workload and cost (even added programming) for the IR.  Publishers that require authors to procure a waiver (from an OA policy) as a condition of publication is an example of a practice that creates added IR workload as well as author confusion.  The IR must make these waivers available at the author’s point of need.  The author often comes upon this rule unexpectedly at the eleventh hour.  Publishers utilizing lengthy embargoes only create ill will when the author wonders, for instance, why three years must elapse before the AM of an article can be shared online.  This type of rule may be an eye opener, creating a negative impression for the author that wants to (or needs to) self-archive.  Librarians may be asked to interpret such rules, and may need to contact a specific person at the publisher’s office to answer questions about self-archiving of various versions, and often this important contact is simply unavailable.  SAGE makes a high level contact available to answer questions that IRs may wish to ask.

For IRs to be able to make deposit simple and easy for researchers (which is key), publishers can: allow immediate deposit without embargo; include information in publication agreements for authors about self-archiving; keep all information listed in the SHERPA/RoMEO database current;  refrain from constantly changing the “rules” that authors and IRs must follow; forego requiring publisher waivers; avoid asking for specific wording to be inserted on cover sheets on every article, and use consistent NISO versioning language (NISO JAV), for example.

IRs provide links back to the publisher’s VoR whenever possible.  All IR users that have subscription access can access that VoR directly, while others can read the AM version and then, if desired, purchase (or request via ILL) the publisher version.  There has been concern about the possibility of cancellations of subscriptions (no evidence yet) due to a large numbers of free versions of articles available without embargo in IRs.  Alternately, it could be postulated that extra reader traffic may find its way to published versions when accepted manuscripts are self-archived in IRs.  SAGE does not have evidence of this extra traffic yet as it is hard to isolate any meaningful effect of self-archiving at the article level.  That said, SAGE understands the benefits to institutions and, of course, that more and more authors are now required to do this.  It believes that this added visibility can only strengthen the scholarly communication chain and through return links should drive people to the final VoR, with all the added value and functionality available on the SAGE Journals platform.

Keeping up with the rapid development of numerous new mandates for publications and data is a challenge for researchers, IRs, university research offices and publishers alike.  Publishers and IRs will have to grapple with making available the whole “package” of the article in an acceptable OA format.  The article will need to include text as well as any supplementary data, all while accommodating various versions.  Publishers and librarians need to work with authors to understand versioning.  Multiple article versions are now commonly found gathered together on article records in Google Scholar.  Increasingly, publishers and IRs will find common ground while working with initiatives such as ORCID, CrossRef, and DataCite, for instance.

The IR landscape is still evolving, and it is unclear what the eventual world of connected, interoperable repositories might look like.  BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, http://www.base-search.net/about/en/), an aggregator of repository content, now includes more than 84 million documents from over 3900 sources, many from IRs (60-70% in full text).  Clearly, there is a critical mass of scholarly articles in IRs, but it is unclear what the effect is on the traditional publishing ecosystem.  Going forward, it is important that publishers and IRs work together to ensure that researchers can self-archive their scholarly articles as they seek to comply with open access policies and share their work online.  The roles of the IR and the publisher can be complementary.  There is value in establishing better relationships between publishers and IRs, and SAGE is interested in this kind of future, believing that as all of the stakeholders in the academic publishing community are grappling with the same changing landscape, it is essential they work together.  One example is the need to develop standards — both technical and best practice — in order to make deposit as straightforward as possible.  We have to work closely together to develop appropriate solutions.  The key thing is transparency and a willingness to adapt.  There is no reason at all that subscription journals can’t co-exist with IRs as long as appropriate checks are in place to ensure that the journals can continue to provide the crucial role of reviewing, verifying and authenticating academic research.  That authors, funders and institutions themselves want to increase the dissemination of scholarly work is a good thing.  Those at SAGE believe the key is to not introduce unnecessary barriers.  Those working on facilitating green OA through IRs can certainly agree.

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