Webinar - New Horizons in Open Access publishing October 25th 10.00-13.00

Open Access publishing is well established in our research landscape, and the advantages of OA are clear but unfortunately the mechanism and metrics are still tangled with for profit publishers meaning at some point someone must pay. 

Diamond Open Access refers to Open Access journals and platforms that are free to both authors and readers. Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR) recently presented an action plan on Diamond OA and the landmark Open Access Diamond Journals Study found that Diamond OA contributes 45% of OA publishing globally. This coincides with the finalising of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment which aims to move us away from publish or perish metric to an ecosystem that recognises the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research. 

In this webinar we will hear from Dr Samuel Moore about the potential that could be unlocked with a move towards Diamond OA and from Prof. Toma Susi on how the reform of research metrics and assessment could enable this move. UCC Library Scholarly Comms Librarian Donna Ó Doibhlin will outline the options for OA publishing in UCC and we will hear more about CORA UCC institutional repository. We will also hear from the editors of some of our homegrown Diamond OA journals Boolean and Scenario on their journey and the support that UCC Library has provided along the way.

To register for this event please click on this link

Keep reading for speaker information and abstracts.............

Samuel Moore      

 Dr. Samuel A. Moore is a scholarly communication specialist at Cambridge University Library and a research associate at Homerton College. His research in library and information studies explores the ethics and politics of scholarly communication. He has a Ph.D in Digital Humanities from King’s College London and over a decade’s experience as a publisher, educator and researcher specialising in open access and academic publishing. He is also one of the organisers of the Radical Open Access Collective.     

https://www.samuelmoore.org/

'Scaling small', or why there are no BIG solutions to the problem of ethical open access

As Plan S gains steam in Europe and the US mandates public access to all research published from 2026, subscription publishing seems likely to be an increasingly unviable business model in the near future. We are rapidly moving to a time in which all academic research articles – and increasing amounts of books – will be available to access and share without payment. Yet although open access has won the day, it is worth considering why this victory also feels like something of a defeat. Publishing is still largely controlled by a handful of profiteering companies who are rapidly expanding into areas beyond research articles, such as research data, user data and other elements in the knowledge production workflow. At the same time, many researchers remain unengaged and motivated by regressive research cultures that promote competition over collaboration, seeing open access as an imposition or something to be ignored entirely. But what is to be done here, and why are there no easy or big solutions? This talk will argue that the all-encompassing solutions promised by open access mandates, funder platforms and transformative agreements are part of the problem. Instead, open access practitioners need to consider the necessity of ‘smallness’ and local solutions in nurturing a diverse and ethical diamond open access publishing ecosystem.

Toma Susi 

Toma Susi is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Vienna in Austria. In his research career, he has worked on materials synthesis, spectroscopy, electron microscopy and modeling, authoring over 80 peer-reviewed articles and reviews, and contributed open data and code as well as an open grant application. He coordinated science policy as the Vice-Chair of the Young Academy of Europe, recently chaired an open science task force at the Initiative for Science in Europe, and was a member of the core drafting group of the European agreement on reforming research assessment. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Open Research Europe and on the Editorial Board of Scientific Data.  

https://www.mostlyphysics.net

Twitter @mostlyphysics

Reform research assessment to unlock the potential of diamond OA

Processes of research evaluation and rewards are coming under increasing scrutiny, with critics convincingly arguing that they have adverse effects on research quality and support a research culture of competition to the detriment of collaboration. Accordingly, many have called for a wide-ranging reform of research assessment. The overarching aim would be to enable a positive change in research culture that not only helps improve the transparency, reproducibility and reliability of research, but by rewarding excellent science on its own merits, also de-emphasize those forms of evaluation that contribute to toxic competition. These long-overdue efforts to reform research assessment are finally underway. 

A prerequisite for a successful reform is to increase the involvement of researchers themselves in designing reward and evaluation systems. However, it has become clear that although there is increasing recognition of the need and desire to move away from flawed prestige-based metrics, there is little consensus on what should replace them. Considering the increasingly strong drive from policy-makers, it is now vital that different research communities both urgently and concretely consider how they wish evaluation systems to be adapted in each of their individual circumstances.

At the same time, the efforts to achieve immediate availability of publicly funded research outputs accelerated by cOAlition S and now the US Federal Government seems set to flip the entire academic to open access publishing. There is a valid concern that this may further entrench existing commercial players and lead to ever-inflating article processing fees, shifting access barriers from reading to publishing. However, this may also make researchers finally aware of the exorbitant price we pay for publishing – and should we succeed in the assessment reforms, this may be a perfect opportunity to unlock the potential of scholarly-led diamond OA.

Donna Ó Doibhlin

  Donna Ó Doibhlin is the Scholarly Communications Librarian in UCC Library and CORA manager. Her role involves promotion and support for OA publishing across the university and she provides regular outreach, training and skills development sessions in OA.  

https://libguides.ucc.ie/OAatucc

https://cora.ucc.ie/

Twitter @CORA_UCC

The Library Research Services enabling OA publishing in UCC 

Research Services and the CORA Team in UCC promotes Open Access publishing throughout the University by encouraging staff and researchers to publish their research findings openly through our OA repository CORA.  

Recent funder OA mandates have strengthened the requirement to publish research openly and this has highlighted the value of institutional repositories to share this research.  The team also manage the current IReL-funded transformative agreements with publishers.  While this offers a level of support to our researchers it brings its own challenges.  This talk will highlight some of these challenges and identify potential solutions.

The Boolean: Showcasing UCC’s doctoral students 

The Boolean is a student led publication that gives doctoral students in the University a platform to communicate their research in a non-academic, accessible way. Students submit articles about their work written to be intelligible to a general audience. These articles are peer reviewed by staff and students from a different discipline to ensure intelligibility. The goal is to train students in both, non-academic writing, as well as get them familiar with the submission and peer review process. Thanks to the library the Boolean runs on the Open Journal System, OJS, this year. This means it has a fully integrated submission platform which helped in gathering over 30 articles publication this year.

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Plan S may be disruptive, but is it disruptive enough?

Michelle Dalton (@mishdalton), Librarian, Institute of Public Administration, Ireland.


Whilst open access has been simmering beneath the surface of scholarly communications for some time now, in recent months it seems to have finally reached boiling point, thanks in no small part to cOAlition S and Plan S. The uncertainty that has ensued around the implementation of the Plan’s ten principles has sparked much discussion and debate around what publishing could and should look like in an open access world, but as yet, a clear consensus has yet to emerge on what the best solution might be.

Whilst Plan S does not explicitly promote or endorse an APC-model, in reality, the condition that archived author accepted manuscripts must have a CC BY licence, and the technical requirements expected of repositories, are perhaps not so easily achievable in practice - at least in the short term. Moreover, whilst in theory increased green open access content might put downward pressure on subscription costs, in effect, this may be difficult to predict with certainty, which still leaves us with a potentially unsustainable financial situation, even if open access has improved. Some researchers also have concerns about making a postprint version that may differ from the “version of record” publically accessible, or fear that a CC BY licence will allow others to translate or reuse their work in a way that may misrepresent it. With question marks over the feasibility of this avenue of compliance, the “easier” solution seems to point towards some kind of APC-based model, with traditional subscription journals flipping to fully open access models in the coming years.

However, APCs are not necessarily a cheaper option, and left unchecked, may allow publishers to continue to generate and extract the same high profit margins they have enjoyed up until now through subscription revenue. COAlition S is keen to ward off such concerns in highlighting the requirement for transparent pricing and capped charges to ensure costs are sustainable. However, even with the appropriate governance structures in place, where does it leave those researchers who are not funded or have no means by which to cover publishing costs? It is unlikely that waiver policies can cover all such cases, leading to a “play-wall” rather than a “pay-wall” for researchers. Furthermore, with an APC model publishers may have an incentive to have higher acceptance rates (even if unmerited by the quality of submissions) as the cost of rejected papers must also be borne by those which are successful. The introduction of submission fees could be one way to perhaps lessen this risk however.

In some respects, Plan S seems to have adopted a “hands off” approach, leaving publishers and the market to work out the logistics of what a compliant business model might look like by themselves. What we have seen in recent times are new flavours of the big deal in the form of “read and publish” (RAP) and “publish and read” (PAR) agreements. Whilst some may view these deals as a short term, transformative measure, it is perhaps unclear what the exit strategy is from such agreements. Once these models have taken hold it may be difficult for libraries or research institutes to extract themselves from them. The recent pushback from libraries in stepping away from subscription deals has been broadly supported by researchers, however this is perhaps partly due to the alternative solutions or workarounds that exist for accessing such content though tools like unpaywall, improved document delivery services, and scihub, even if this is more inconvenient. However, if a library withdraws from a PAR or RAP deal and researchers are suddenly unable to publish in a journal of their choice without having to fund it directly themselves, sentiment may not be as favourable.

If APC-based agreements start to thrive, it may be a missed opportunity to force through deep-rooted change, such as moving towards open infrastructure, and more innovative and disruptive solutions such as the Open Library of Humanities, Wellcome (and HRB) Open Research, and the European Commission’s ongoing tender process for an open publishing platform. However as 2020 approaches, the clock is ticking on the Plan S timeline, and this may understandably push actions towards more easily achievable solutions, rather than more radical ones which may take more time, but could be worth it in the longer run.

Of course, it remains impossible to discuss scholarly publishing without reference to the reward system underpinning it, and until this changes fundamentally it is difficult to imagine any significant shifts in publishing behavior occurring. Plan S has certainly resulted in some confusion and uncertainty. What is clear however, is that change must happen. The current subscription model has worked efficiently in some respects, but the escalating costs (in addition to the pressure to transform to an open access model) make it unsustainable, even for those libraries with relatively healthy budgets. I just hope that whilst we drive towards achieving open access, that we do not miss the opportunity to address the escalating financial cost of scholarly publishing, and the need to regain control from the hands of publishers, at the same time.

DISCLAIMER: The above are personal thoughts on an issue I am still very much thinking through, and as such are subject to change... 

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