News in Open Science and Open Access

 There was a time when the topics of open science and open access (OA) journals were the primary interest of specialized academic libraries.  However, because these paired movements have access to information and the business model for journal subscriptions at their heart, they are of interest to most library workers.

For those of you who aren't familiar with open science and OA, I wrote a column a few years back that addresses these topics (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LHTN-09-2016-0040/full/html).  You might have to search for the article title in your discovery service in order to get access to it or request it on ILL.  Earlier this year I published a related column on scholarly communications that might also be of interest (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LHTN-01-2020-0007/full/html).  If you work in an academic or research library, you likely know quite a bit about the topic already.  However, those working in public libraries and some special libraries may be less familiar with the topic.  I suggest that technical services workers, especially those who work with serials and electronic subscription acquisitions do a bit of reading to get the basics of what is going on with OA and open science.  To get everyone started, I'll give a brief introduction to both topics.

The goal of open science is to make all scientific information and data readily discoverable and accessible to all with as few barriers as possible.  For many around the world, the cost of journal subscriptions is a significant barrier.  Consider that a library in a wealthy country is generally charged the same price for a scientific journal subscription as a library in the developing world.  Journal costs alone create a significant barrier for the open science movement.  This is where OA comes in.  While this is a bit of an oversimplification, in the OA model, authors are charged a fee for having their article published in a journal and the journal publisher makes that article freely available online to all without any sort of subscription or paywall.   It is often not the author themselves who pay for the costs of getting the article published.  It might be the author's employer or a funding body.   When I worked for a research centre, I often looked up article publishing fees for our scientists and found that the fees run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars per article.  I also found a few journals which had a sort of sliding scale for fees depending on the country in which the author is located and the type of funding available to the author. The important factor is that the cost of making scientific information accessible is transferred from the reader, or the library that purchases the subscriptions, to the persons doing the research and publishing the paper.   So, as you can see, a change in the model for funding scientific article publishing is likely to impact all aspects of the business model for serials publishing and acquisitions.    We can expect that this will eventually have an impact on library budgets.  For those of you who are actively working with serials acquisitions, you may feel as though a sigh of relief is in order.  However, even though OA has been around for a while, we are still in the early days of learning what OA and Open Science really mean for the publishing industry and libraries.  This is why I say that library workers and especially anyone who makes serials budget and acquisition decisions needs to stay on top of this issue.  

Today I read an interesting article in my Nature journals newsfeed https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02959-1?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=09f8ca53cf-briefing-dy-20201020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-09f8ca53cf-45590586.  Its called Nature journals announce first open-access agreement.  For those of you who are now interested in learning more about OA and how it is impacting the journal publishing market, this article is a good read.  Personally, I found the charges that the publisher proposes to be outrageous and agree with the librarian cited in the article that the purpose of open science is defeated when institutions are charged tens of thousands of dollars to get articles published in certain journals.  It is true that the Nature journals are highly prestigious and most universities will publish few if any articles in one of their journals in a typical year.  Yet, it's hard to deny that the type of agreement that Springer Nature created for wealthy and highly prestigious German universities is completely out of reach for researchers in many other countries.  For me, the article is a strong indication that we still have a long way to go before we see any sort of solidification in how publishers deal with the OA movement and how, in turn, library budgets and acquisitions processes might be impacted.

As usual, I encourage readers to leave comments in the comment section for this blog or email me directly at d67frederick@gmail.com.