Open Scholar Café: Prioritizing and Supporting Open Access through Publisher Agreements

And what these what these the difference in these agreements is basically they deliver not just the ability for a campuses users to read the content, but it does. These new agreements will do that.

01:04 - And in addition, it gives our our campuses authors the ability to publish their work, open access under the agreements that the library is making.

01:15 - So this is very, very different. These agreements have been around, I would say, in Europe, different versions of them for probably going on five years. But it’s really accelerated just in the last few years. And I’m going to talk to you just a little bit of what we’re seeing with the trends, with these types of agreements in the United States, as well as what we’re doing and the progress that we’re making here at Iowa State.

01:41 - So I want to talk just a little bit more about what these agreements are, and there’s actually a lot of different varieties of these of these agreements. They’re also called they have different names. Another umbrella term you will hear for these agreements is transformative.

01:58 - Agreements in a transformative agreement is basically something that is taking that traditional subscription spend and going toward these new types of open access agreements. And the different models that publishers are using to do this really depend, you know, on the size of the publisher, you know, what kind of articles and journals that they’re actually publishing. So there’s a lot of different varieties of these under these underlying models.

And it gets pretty complicated. But, you know, the bottom line for the publishers and the challenge that they’re up against is how do they take a new model that is going to replace this subscription model that’s basically been in place since, you know, post-World War Two. So publishers not just the big commercials, but also our smaller society publishers are self publishing societies. They have really had a stable revenue flow for many, many, many years.

And the relationship that they’ve had with the library is pretty much just been one of figuring out how to renew these subscription that deliver, you know, outsized profits to the commercial publishers. But for our university presses and our self publishing societies really generate the revenue for those societies to be able to do the type of work that the society needs done. In a lot of cases, it’s the publishing revenue coming in to these societies that underwrites a lot of the other things, a lot of the other work that the society actually does.

So when you think about moving away, you know, publishing director and moving away from that stable subscription model, it’s there’s a lot to take into into consideration. So just real quick, kind of at a high level, I want to just mention three different kind of buckets of these agreements that that publishers are using in the libraries are signing on to the first is the Redon Publish Variety. And Iowa State has done several of these, including our most recent reading public agreement, which is with Wiley.

And we are the only we’re the first institution in the United States that has had an agreement with Wiley. It’s our largest to date. We will have approximately 130 articles by Iowa State authors come out open access in 2021 because of this agreement. But many other publishers are using this model. And in this model, what you basically take is you look at what a library is spending on their subscriptions. You look at how much publishing is coming out of the campus, and then you put together a an agreement that basically has two fees.

And it one is to maintain that traditional subscription read access.

04:44 - And the other part is to cover the anticipated publishing that’s going to be coming off of the campus. So Cambridge University Press, Oxford and the rest of those that are listed there in that left group are all experimenting and piloting with this model. Now, I will say the publisher that is the farthest ahead in the United States with this is Cambridge University Press. Those of you who are not familiar with Cambridge, you know, there are a little stronger in humanities and social science journals.

But I was on a on a on a webinar with the head of Open Access Strategies for Cambridge just a few weeks ago. And they started 2020 with about 20 libraries in the United States, signed up to their new read and published model.

05:34 - They ended the year with over 130 and they are on track to fully transition from their subscription model to this new reading publishing model within three years. So most of the other publishers are not moving that fast, but that’s the direction things are going. The second model in the middle is subscribed open. And a lot of ways it’s the simplest of all of them. It’s it’s basically an agreement between the library and the publisher that if as long as the libraries maintain their subscriptions.

The publisher will make the content open and in every year, the way that these these are structured is that there is a threshold of of subscribers that have to maintain their subscriptions. And if if 95, 97 percent of the libraries all renew, then every year the publisher will make the decision to publish the content open.

06:32 - Now, the problem with a model like this is, is the free rider problem. And if you end up with, you know, a significant amount of attrition and libraries dropping off, what happens with the subscribed open model is then they have the option year to year, then to publish the articles coming out behind the paywall. So there’s a built in check on freeriding, which is a is a long standing collective action problem with with models like this.

But there are a lot of smaller in kind of niche publishers that are experimenting with these subscribe to open model to replace their subscription, their traditional subscription model.

07:09 - And then the last one is what I’m calling those co-op models. And there’s tiered models. Those are two different things. Iowa State worked with MIT and Carnegie Mellon and the UC system to actually develop the tiered open model that the that the Association of Computing Machinery is using. And there are other publishers that are excited about that one. So, you know, I think this is getting in the weeds a little bit far. But just to show that there are quite a few models, sustainability is a huge concern.

And there is significant movement with these publishers in adopting these and piloting these at this time. And then a motivation.

07:53 - You know, there’s a couple of motivations for publishers to do this. I mean, there’s if you’re familiar with plants, that is the group of funders in Europe that have basically said the research that they fund the articles coming out of that need to be published, open access. So there’s there’s that sort of funding mandate, motivation to publishers. But there’s also things like this.

08:15 - These are some numbers from annual reviews.

08:18 - They’re doing the subscribe to open model. So what we’re looking at is four of the titles that they included last year in their subscribed open offer.

08:29 - So in December 2019, all four of those titles were subscription, they were paywall. If you did not have a subscription, you could not read them in December 2020. They had opened all of this up under their new subscribed open model. And that’s the factor by which downloads increased around the world. So, you know, four five point six, four point seven times the readership of their content.

08:54 - Once they opened it up in four annual reviews, which is similar to a society, publishers and a lot of ways, and that their mission driven, they want to get this content out there in order to have an impact. This is a huge motivator for them to figure out how to get to open access because they have about 25 of these annual review titles and they would like to flip them all to open access. So there is broader readership of the content that they’re producing.

So so that’s kind of my quick external scan of things that are going on with with the publishers and the societies in the models that they’re doing and then bring it back to the Iowa state. I wanted to start real quick with the library’s journal Negotiation Principles. So before we embarked upon making these types of agreements, recognizing that moving away from traditional subscriptions was a major change for this library and how we’re spending, you know, most of you probably don’t have much of a sense of the library’s budget, but the about half of the library’s budget goes toward collections.

The other half goes toward, you know, the other things that we pay for, primarily salary and benefits for staff. So we make a significant investment at this university and the library’s collections. And so the library in approaching trying to take the biggest piece of that collection budget, which is our journal subscriptions and doing something different with it. We thought we needed to come out to campus and, you know, identify some shared principles for what it is that we are setting out to do.

And that’s what these principles are. And they’re very straightforward. And we took these through our library collection groups. We took it to library administration. We took it to our faculty advisory board. And then these principals, we we took them all the way out to the faculty Senate where they were unanimously endorsed. And what the principals say is that we’re going to prioritize openness in our negotiations, financial sustainability and transparency and, you know, the process of getting these principles out.

You know, it was an education and outreach effort and it was about getting people, you know, basically our stakeholders across campus informed about what it is the library is setting out to do as we approach doing these new types of open access agreements.

11:11 - So this scary pie chart, which do not try and look at the tiny little numbers there, that’s not the point. It’s really more about the pie slices and the colors.

11:22 - One of the things that the library needed to do, in addition to getting stakeholder buy in and informing campus about our new approach, we really needed to think in new ways about, you know, how we will approach both our spending of this money and how we will think about publishing. You know, publishing has not actually been something that the library has been greatly concerned with in the context of journal negotiations. So now these new agreements are completely based upon, you know, at least in a large part on the amount of publishing that’s happening with the different publishers.

11:58 - And so what you’re looking at here are the top publishers by corresponding authored by corresponding authors on our campus. And there’s a couple of things to note here. One, that concept, a corresponding author, you know, that is where responsibility lies as libraries make these types of agreements. The articles that we are covering are the ones that are by Iowa State corresponding authors, if you are a co-author on a paper with someone from the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin author is a corresponding author.

Well, that would actually be covered under the Wisconsin agreement, not the Iowa state agreement. And this is just the way, you know, with the, you know, research being more interdisciplinary, trying to figure out who actually is responsible for covering the article. That’s just where this is all settled out. The corresponding author is where responsibility for being under agreement, that’s where it sits. And so just a few quick things on this, this pie chart.

I mean, some other things that jump out at you as it is that, you know, we have five publishers that make up 50 percent of campus publishing output. And this is not unusual.

13:09 - Other institutions that have done this same analysis have seen the same thing. And the 20 other top 20 publishers make up, you know, whatever that is, 85 percent of the total publishing. And so the work that we did going into this, it was actually quite complicated to create this pie chart because you can’t just go into a web of science or Scopus and hit, you know, run publishing profile. This was Eric Sheriffs’ at our library, our data analyst, you know, going through, you know, I don’t know if you got the data through the API or how he got it, but getting that actual data down, working at having to do a lot of cleanup in order for us to get to to this view.

13:49 - And again, the whole goal is to get our arms around where the publishing is happening. So when we go into a negotiation with Elsevier or I, triple E or AICS, we have some sense of the publishing that is happening with that publisher.

14:04 - So that’s a big change for us. And looking at the data in this way and I wanted to quickly just show we just ran our numbers for. For 2020. So these are the publishers that we have agreements that we had agreements with in 2020 and the number of articles that were covered under the library’s agreements, and you’ll see a mix of of, you know, what I would call traditional more subscription publishers. There’s also some pure way publishers.

14:34 - So like Frontiers and plus, you know, these are publishers that we’re already publishing open access. But what we’re doing at the library is we are trying to bring in and cover even those charges with the pure OEI publishers. And that’s I mean, there’s a couple of reasons for that. The biggest one being we’re trying not to create incentives on where authors might try to publish by where we have agreements. So we want to be pretty evenhanded and we want to basically try and figure out how we can cover the open access publishing for all publishers, including with the pure away.

So the big change, you know, we about doubled the number of open access articles from 2019 to 2020. And for 2021, with the large Whiley agreement, we’ll be adding another hundred and thirty articles onto here. So you can see that this is ratcheting up quite quickly as we enter into more and more of these agreements. So I wanted to talk just briefly about some of these changes at the library that this has led to for us.

15:36 - I talked a little bit about the data piece, the data analytics piece. We have really had to ramp up our skills and how we work with data. So modeling in order to do the projections on the publishing output, that has been really important.

15:51 - Another significant change in the library has been around the workflows these new agreements have created. They’re very different than a subscription agreement with the new open access agreements. We actually have to do author verification. So, you know, an article goes through and as you know, goes through a process.

16:09 - It’s submitted, it ends up being accepted at a publisher we have an agreement with. We are then interacting with the publisher through their publishing platform to actually verify that. That is one of our authors to approve that article before it gets charged to our account would be one way to think about it. But that’s something we have never done before. So we have moved this into our electronic resources unit. We have trained our staff to work on it.

And it’s it’s been a significant change in doing new types of work in the library. And, of course, that our staffing implications. A couple other quick things. The collaborative approach and what I’m thinking of here is the collaborative approach with the publishers and the societies. I spend a lot of my time, you know, in the past when someone in my position would have just been engaging in a transactional way with the publishers around, you know, the actual terms of our subscription agreement.

What we’re doing now is actually working more collaboratively with them to try and figure out sustainably how we do this together and move forward into this new open access paradigm.

17:16 - So it’s been quite different with our relationships with the publishers, including even with the big commercial publisher like Wiley that these relationships used to be in the past. And then the last thing I will just mention is, you know, communication around these agreements, you know, doing this in a cafe and trying to talk about it. We really are realizing that we need to share information out about what we’re doing. Lots of folks are starting to see or hear second hand maybe that we’re covering open access.

And then they want to know, well, if I submit to this publisher, will the library cover it? Well, I’ve linked to the bottom. That’s our website where we’re keeping a running list of all of the open access agreements that we have. If you have not been there, I’d recommend going to that site and taking a look at it. As we get new agreements, we we add those to this page and you can reach out to myself or Abbey Elder as well if you have questions about any particular publisher.

And then the last thing I’m going to mention, and this could be some some points of discussion for us in the in the the less formal part. When we move past my presentation here, what are the challenges with libraries, you know, taking this new approach, you know, what are the challenges that we’re starting to see in our library? And I would absolutely say the you know, the budget cuts that we’re we’re facing are making this a little more challenging.

18:46 - We did some work with the California Digital Library approximately three years ago to analyze our subscription spending in our publishing and to run projections on, you know, to what extent would the libraries journal subscription spending be able to cover campus publishing in? At the time that we did that analysis, it looked like the Libraries Journal subscription budget based on our on our publishing. What? They actually transitioned pretty well to covering open access publishing on campus and what we’re seeing now, we the library took a six and a half percent or six point four percent cut to the collection budget this year.

It’s going to be a probably a five percent cut next year. We’re not sure that that calculation is going to hold up when we come out of the other side of covid. And so what I mentioned cost shifting. What I’m talking about there is you know, there are some publishers who we publish more with, but maybe we didn’t pay a lot in subscriptions. And then we have other publishers who we were paying a lot with our subscriptions, but maybe we don’t publish as much with those.

And so through these agreements and negotiations, what we need to figure out how to do sometimes is bring down our spend with one publisher so we can bring up our spend with another publisher. And you can imagine every conversation with the publisher where the spend needs to go up. That’s a pretty easy conversation.

20:11 - The conversations with the publisher where our spend needs to come down. Those negotiations, as you can imagine, aren’t quite as easy.

20:21 - So other challenges, you know, modeling and projections of both the financial modeling and the publishing modeling that we need to do for these in order for us to, you know, manage our risk and for publishers to manage their risk. That’s a challenge just because the the metadata and the underlying platforms that the publishers have and the resources that we have in order to do these projections, the data is not great. Sometimes it’s hard to pin down, you know, who all of Iowa State’s authors, you know, the adoption of unique identifiers like Orchid and there’s unique identifiers for institutions that is all not been done.

And so we have received bills, for example, for articles published by the University of Iowa.

21:08 - That’s why we have to look at each and every one to verify that it’s one of our authors. So and then you extend that out to trying to do modeling based on this data. That’s not perfect. And, you know, it just leads to, you know, maybe not the sharpest projection that we. So that’s a challenge.

21:23 - We need to be able to do more accurate modeling and projection projections and then sustainable open models. I mentioned all of those models. I think some of those are going to prove sustainable, but I think they’re going to need to be tweaked along the way. And I know that there is probably a lot of anxiety with publishing boards around whether or not this these moves are going to prove as stable as the subscription paradigm had as proof for those publishers.

And then, you know, the ongoing concern over publisher diversity and consolidation. You know, just a quick example of this would be Wiley is a publisher that I think wisely only owns about 50 percent of their journal titles. The other 50 percent of the journals that are published by Wiley are actually owned by society partners. And so a concern going forward is that if we can’t figure out how the small societies can manage this transition to open access on their own, there is a risk that those societies will feel compelled to join under the umbrella of a large commercial publisher like Wiley, perhaps.

So that’s more consolidation in this market, which I don’t think that’s what we want to see. And then the last concern is publishing equity for authors. And what I’m getting at here is we are moving away from a subscription paradigm where readers did not have access to the literature. And as we move into, you know, a new paradigm where. Publishing is being, you know, really influenced by these institutional level agreements, what happens to the authors that are in low and middle income countries where, you know, there’s not institutional agreements like we’re doing at Iowa State? What happens if you’re in the United States but you’re at an under-resourced institution where there’s not money to pay for the publishing? And so there are a lot of conversations going on around this transformation and how do we achieve equity in this transformation? So.

23:35 - For most of you, I think all of this is new. I have a feeling I probably went a little far down in the weeds. Hopefully it all made sense. But I am going to stop there and I will stop sharing.

23:47 - And I would welcome any questions or comments or thoughts on the overall open access transition that’s underway or how we’re approaching it here at Iowa State.

24:04 - And I see there’s all kinds of chats that were buried. It’s mostly me, it’s all right. Oh, you were providing running commentary.

24:23 - Well, we’re a small enough group, I think you can feel free to just on mute and.

24:29 - Welcome your comments or questions. This sounds really great. Last time I looked at your guys aside, I think it was just frontiers and there was one other. So to know that you guys now have open access for like Oxford and some of these other journals that I know I publish and it’s fantastic. And Andrew, what about what you discipline, where you add on campus? I’m a novice biotech. I help a lot of faculty. I run the genome informatics facility.

So I do a lot of data analysis. And so a lot of genome assembly type works, a lot of people from biology departments and engineering and and whatnot. I can help spread the word.

25:19 - That would be great. That would be great. Yeah.

25:21 - And I do think that that landing page is probably our best source of information for these. I didn’t mention it, but we you know, we’re we’re continuing to have conversations and roll out new agreements. I think the one that we’re working on next is with AIPAC, the American Institute of Physics. That’s a license that we’re working on right now. So there will probably be another two or three publisher agreements added in twenty twenty one.

And what are you what how are you ever announcing this to the faculty? Because, I mean, I, I try to read like the E news and all this stuff, and I did not see this. Yeah. You know, it’s been covered in different, different places. You know, we’ve had probably a couple of articles in inside Iowa State. There was a press release for the Whiley agreement that we just concluded. It came out in the library newsletter. We’re trying to pardoner a little bit with the VPA office to try and get the bigger agreements out in the VPA newsletter.

But that’s why what I you know, the communication piece of all of this, you know, I think we’d be very open to any suggestions on how we can, you know, you know, spread the word a little better. I don’t know if that’s. Go ahead.

26:37 - You mentioned that you’ve done all this analytics where you’ve identified all the authors on campus and where they’re publishing.

26:46 - Yes, I’ll batch email with targeted specific information, hey, guess what, this this this publisher is now free and open access. You can publish this in for free and then make sure it’s coming from the library at Iowa State. You know, the emails are a lot harder to get out than the people’s names, sadly. Oh, well, but I think lists are very locked down on this campus.

27:15 - However, however, through the publishers know who the authors are and have the email address, I think that’s actually a really good idea, I think especially for some of the Netsch. And one thing about these that I didn’t mention is say that you are submitting to to Oxford and you know, you didn’t know anything about it. It’s a journal you would have published you were going to submit to anyway. When you submit and you go through that process, each of these publishers now have a workflow where at some point it it’s really an acceptance.

Once that article is accepted, it’s gone through peer reviewed, it’s accepted. They will identify you as belonging to Iowa State and then they put you down a different track in that author’s submission workflow where they have identified you. They notify you that you are covered under a central open access agreement and then they actually give each of these it’s pretty standard practice to default that the author is going to be published and covered open access under the agreement.

But authors do have the choice in each of these agreements where they can opt out. If, for some reason, an author does not want their article open access, they have the choice in that in that author workflow to actually make that selection. But you will be identified if you’re submitting to one of these publishers. And that being said, I was criticizing the data that the publishers have and so say you are submitting you have a, I don’t even know, a good example, but say you have a a grad student who’s making the submission and for some reason they use their Gmail.

Right. So then they wouldn’t notice you coming from Iowa State because they’re looking at that that email domain. Right. Eventually this will get to where authors are all, you know, hopefully using their orchid, which is the unique identifier, and then they would really hone in that you are from Iowa State covered under this agreement. And we would probably have less slippage with authors that might might, you know, not get identified.

And that’s that’s for corresponding authors. Right. This is yeah.

29:20 - Everything here is about the corresponding author.

29:23 - So if you’re not the corresponding author and this is leading to some you know, with our ACM agreement, the Association of Computing Machinery, they are ACM is starting to notice that an author will be the third author on the paper. You know, their colleague submits it from, you know, from UC Berkeley, which is covered under the agreement.

29:47 - And what they’re finding is that they’re jockeying for being corresponding author based on where the agreements are. And so then after the fact, they’ll say, oh, I didn’t realize that, you know, this corresponding author wasn’t covered under an agreement. I am. Can I be switched to the corresponding author? That’s leading to some confusion there, which, you know, why wouldn’t you do that? Right. You know, if you knew it beforehand, you would have had, you know, the one who’s covered on the agreement, be the corresponding author.

But there’s a growing awareness, I think, among faculty of how these things work. And I think that will be a conversation between co-authors that happens probably more frequently going forward.

30:25 - The part about that that cracks me up is that that kind of eliminates the whole purpose of what a corresponding author is supposed to be, because that’s just who pays the bill. It’s not who you should contact about the research, right? No, what I mean, to some degree, because there are in my domain, there are typically three main points in the authorship list that you get credit for in some academic sense. And that’s the first, the last and the corresponding.

And a lot of times the last is the corresponding and whatever. But there is technically three spots. And with being a buyer from a position, it’s not, you know, like there was always a little bit of a you know, should the person that’s the domain expert be the corresponding author on a genome assembly paper, or should the person that did the assembly be the corresponding author? You know. And in this way, there might be incentive either way, but it’s interesting that that that’s going to change that dynamic in some sense, as you say.

Yeah, it sure will. And it’s interesting, I didn’t realize this just how across disciplines, you know, that corresponding author in some there actually is a bump in stature in being the corresponding authors and in some other disciplines. It seems like that’s just the person who’s handling the transaction of getting it submitted and it’s really not any bump into the corresponding author.

31:53 - So that’s different across different disciplines, but it can also be here. Who do you ask questions to when you have a question about the paper? That’s and if it’s highly technical, you want the guy that did the research. I mean, sometimes it can be the first author that did all the research.

32:13 - Yeah. Well, anyone else on Earth, anyone else who I see, Jackie, Jackie, Jackie could speak up. Come on, Jackie, did she just disappear? Oh, there she is now. She just appeared here with the video. Hi, Andrew. Thanks for calling out. You’re welcome.

32:36 - Welcome to the cafe. Yeah. And I have my espresso machine behind me, so. Oh, nice. I’m jealous of a real espresso machine.

32:50 - Well, I mean, thinking that especially for paper is just basically accessing them right now as a researcher for me, because basically I’m just like Andrew. I’m basically, you know, like a glorified meditation and data curator. So I just do a lot of number crunching. And and in cases where I’m writing a paper and I need to do data creation and I contact the corresponding author.

33:22 - I basically go on this most days, I’m trying to find the data that they have, they don’t have it.

33:29 - Oh, there’s this YouTube video I share all the time I get I have to go find it on the chat about the bears finding the data that Leegin did four years ago. And he was on a us you Megan’s lap and she knows what this is. Maybe maybe Megan didn’t find it and put it in the check.

33:52 - And that’s kind of like the thing I basically have to deal with is hunting down the corresponding data that wasn’t put into the paper itself because there wasn’t enough room. And it’s one of those cases where.

34:10 - I I. I have a kind of a love hate relationship with a corresponding author, because I know basically it’s the P. I. or it’s like the guy, the main person on the ground who barely did anything. He just wants his last name on there to be one.

34:28 - It’s little things. Oh, yes, they can make it.

34:31 - She’s on it. That watch it later. It’s about ten minutes long, but it’s absolutely hilarious. And that’s basically what I have to deal with a lot.

34:42 - But one of the main things I work with is maybe a topic for discussion, for a different topic, because I don’t want to drive the cafe discussion too far away from publications right now. But I would love to kind of just ask a whole bunch of different library staff or of questions of how to deal with basically database subscriptions, because that’s becoming the new thing. There was a loss of funding. It went to a subscription model and basically as libraries to pay for it.

But you just stated basically the budgets can handle it.

35:19 - So to do any libraries have. Different ideas on how to help because like, for example, major databases that applied for this corresponding data that they don’t put in the publication, but they need to put someplace else they can put in that database. And it’s fair they’re losing funding.

35:42 - One, the major. In people just for the town of. One of the major human model databases, zebrafish, just lost its funding, so they don’t know what to do. So where was it? Where was that funding coming from before? Where where did they lose the funding? NIH National Institute of Health. Yeah. And terror was getting their funding from and until it it’s a war on terror, we weren’t going to be able to afford them. I know that this is like and I’m sorry, Megahed, I make it I go by a lot.

Did you like Jackie? Jackie, you have a database. Can’t you just kind of all that data up and and manage it? Oh, yeah. We can just, like, watch the YouTube video. I don’t understand, with a column on the Excel sheet that says see a name like they don’t they don’t document their work. They don’t tell me what these things mean. It’s like me trying to find metadata. And I’m like, no, no, I meant this.

36:54 - You said zebrafish just lost their funding. Yeah, that that’s like corn. Yeah. You can just harvest soybeans. Sure. I’ll take that. Sure you can do it.

37:04 - You’re saying, you know, I don’t think you know what I was talking about with the the library budget with, you know, to have this happening. At the same time, the libraries are actually under probably the biggest, you know, austerity time that I have seen.

37:25 - And Iowa State belongs to kind of an expanded library consortium. It was the big twelve, but now there’s probably 35 libraries and they’re called the Greater Western Library Alliance. And and in that consortium, we probably back in October, we did a just a quick survey to see what kind of budget cuts folks were up against. And Iowa State, it’s kind of in the middle of the pack. You know, there’s certainly some libraries that at least this year didn’t have significant cuts all the way up to libraries that had like a 20 percent cut to their collections budget.

So when you talk about these databases losing funding right at the time that, you know, libraries are losing significant amounts of their collection money, there’s just not like in our budget, there’s we have to have a very sharp pencil because there’s just not any extra money for doing these things. And back to the modeling and the projecting, the projections that we’re running in order to make sure that we can do these things and minimize our risk.

It’s really challenging. It’s a lot more challenging than it was just just recently.

38:37 - Exactly, and that’s one of the things where there’s got to be a different way to handle this.

38:42 - There’s got to be a different way to make this sustainable. And then there’s actually I’m part of a group that Megan knows about, about data. And we’re basically thirty five different databases around the United States and now two from Japan, from Korea, just trying to figure out how do we become sustainable. Some of us some of the databases here actually are on campus at Iowa State are sustainable because they’re sustained by the USDA.

But there’s a number that aren’t zebrafish here. They’re not USDA. So. Just getting someone else’s opinion, how do you make it sustainable? So it’s I don’t want to take this too far off topic. Well, you know where the overlap is here, right? Is that, you know, what we’re talking about is, you know, the over the more broad shift toward open scholarship and open science and the publications are part of it. The data is a part of it.

The methods are a part of it. And to me, there’s you know, it’s a really interesting time to be involved with all of this because so much is changing at this time. And there’s there’s lots of opportunities, I think, ahead of us. But again, you know, if you think about what some of the commercial publishers are doing with around the data, you know, I there’s a long history of distrust between big commercial publishers and libraries.

Right. Because they have just beat our brains out, you know, on negotiations and subscriptions for so long. So we tend to look at Elsevier and Springer. You know, we’re a little skeptical of them. And and I do think that there’s a lot of risk ahead with commercial publishers being in a position where they can step in. I’m not saying that they’re going to figure out how to take over the zebrafish database, but I think there is some risk of that of commercial publishers stepping into the breach here and seeing opportunities to latch on to more content.

40:50 - So, yeah, so I see these things are all connected and we talk about open access in the context of open scholarship and open science. And I think we need to have that broad view because it’s all it’s all connected.

41:08 - If you guys want to do an economic discussion of research funding, we can do that. I won’t have any answers, though. I’ll just have examples.

41:17 - Everybody says, oh, this is a great time to write a grant and like running around grant funding. How are you doing? And it doesn’t have to write grants anymore. He’s pretty lucky, right? But now I make sure I am. I actually help other people write grants to make sure they include funding for my life. So it’s still by you’re right. It that’s a lot less work involved when you don’t have to be finding collaborators and and trying to write the whole thing from scratch.

You know, I always thought that was a smaller percentage of my time, but it turns out there was a lot of my time. So I’m I’m appreciating being out of the rat race because as soon as you get a grant, you’re beholden to somebody objectives. So the objectives you have in the grant and once you hire somebody, you have to constantly look for more funds to support that those the staff. And so especially with the way science funding in the US has continued to dwindle, a lot of times you accept smaller amounts of funding to be able to have funding to be able to do the research.

But that isn’t always the best model to ensure the long term stability of staffing. So, yeah, so, you know, I’m a fee for service facility and I like the idea of being able to have more than one potential income stream. But this is probably a better model at the moment for us.

42:44 - Because everybody needs that analysis, right? I mean, they’re still going to be lots of grants, full funding, but the data keeps the big data keeps getting bigger and there’s always more there’s more people that we need more and more people to be able to take that data and translate it into something that’s really informative for whatever problem you’re working on and all that.

43:05 - We keep training them. They get sucked up by industry and academia and the. There are there are lots of us, but there are also not a lot of us, I don’t know how else to explain. It’s. It’s challenging. Sounds like it sounds like a. Well, we have a few other people on here, we haven’t heard from Kathy Jordan. I’m going to start calling some books that I think we’d love to hear any thoughts you all have what your position is at Iowa State and any questions you might have around open access, open scholarship, open data.

43:55 - There’s a term I learned from my my kids with playing their video games, which is when there’s like a virtual character just standing there that usually isn’t doing so well, afk away from keyboard, which is maybe some of the folks at the cafe are AFK. They just want their participation points like, oh yeah, we were there. I took a picture, I took a screen test. See. Well the. We do have a couple people who have unmuted so on this other shot, I’m faculty in mechanical engineering, and I was just interested in what are the what is the current status of open access.

And I think this was a great presentation. I think I got a lot of new information. Wonderful, with our open access agreements, are you or your colleagues publishing under any of the agreements we have in place so far? Not yet. So.

44:57 - To be honest, like. Almost 90 percent of our work goes to Elsevier. So it’s been a challenge to get it and get get get them published, but unfortunately, so most of our top rated journals are in this area. So. We we are and, you know, we’ve been in conversation with with Elsevier for a couple of years, they’re a unique, you know, a publisher for us in that, you know, just a couple of years ago when we were still in what we call their big deal journal package, where we were basically subscribing to all 70, 100 journals, Iowa State and the University of Iowa, for historic reasons, you know, going all the way back into print journal subscriptions.

We were priced at the very highest point of what they charge libraries for those large subscription packages.

45:56 - So as you probably know, we have. Unbundled and we are no longer we could no longer afford to have all of those subscriptions, and so we have lowered our spend with them, you know, probably by 40 percent. But the good news of it is, is our spend is still at a point where I think it would be viable for doing an open access agreement with Elsevier. And and I just had a call probably four weeks ago with their main open access strategist talking through what that might look like.

So it seemed like with Wiley, it was two years of conversation for us with Wiley before we were able to figure out what our open access agreement would be. And I’d say we’re probably another year out with Elsevier. But, you know, there are the biggest, you know, publisher we have, you know, by by a large margin. So it’s a priority for us to figure out how we can get an open access agreement with them in the coming year or two.

That’s. I also had another question, though, is that any conversation with, like the Nature Publishing Group and the science publishing group to.

47:12 - To epitope not just because most of their journals are Open Access Journal, so I wouldn’t mind paying them to get my paper published, but then.

47:25 - Like having having an agreement might help in such situations to. Yeah, so you can imagine that Springer nature, his move pretty cautiously with those Nature titles and moving toward these open access agreements, but there have been two recent agreements, you know, with the Max Planck Institute in Germany, their spring or nature agreement now gives their authors the ability to publish in the Nature journals, as well as in the Springer journals and California’s new agreement.

47:59 - The UC system’s new agreement, I’m pretty sure, also covers the nature and the outcome of all of that. Right, is that we’re just a couple of months ago, Springer nature for the first time actually put an APC price on publishing in nature, which and it’s around ten thousand dollars. So they have said all along that, you know, because of the rejection rate at these prestige journals, that the APC rate is going to be super, super high.

But they never said what it is. And I think that’s actually there’s some transparency that’s coming from this that is actually really helpful, because when the libraries are paying for these really expensive subscriptions to these prestige journals and no one on campus sees that, there’s no awareness of the costs behind all of this. But when when faculty are actually given that choice, if you want to publish an open access in nature, it’s going to cost 10000.

If you want to publish underneath this journal, it you know, Cambridge, where the average APC is like eight hundred dollars. You know, we need price sensitivity by authors. They need to be able to see this because really ten dollar are not really sustainable, I don’t believe. Exactly. Yeah, that’s a great point.

49:14 - Yeah. We you know, we’re probably two or three years out with doing anything with spring or nature. I think science, of course, is a very different question. Right, because triple A. Yes.

49:24 - Is you know, what they’ve just announced is they’re going to get short term compliance with the plan as funding requirements by by by being more generous. Anyone who is funded by a plant as author is going to have the right to deposit their article in a in a repository. That’s how they’re going to get compliant. I’ve been part of several Kali’s I work with a group of kind of activists, librarians in this space, who have been proactive in reaching out to publishers and having these conversations.

And we’ve had several meetings with the publishing director at Ehsaan. You know, how they might think about like the subscribed open model or a model that might actually work pretty well for AAA. So I think look for science to probably do something in the coming years. I think that will be a pretty easy transition, you know, compared to, you know, libraries trying to figure out how to foot the bill for the nature publishing on their campus.

You know, for us, we don’t publish that much in nature. So it wouldn’t be a huge hit to us. But if you think about, you know, back to like the UC Berkeley’s in these high research output institutions, you know, the cost of prestige publishing on those campuses is going to be really prohibitive. Yeah, and we have a few more minutes. Cathy, I saw you at unmuted. If you had a comment, we’d love to hear it or question. Oh, I was just going to say I work for the grants and we’re under the vice president for research.

So we accept the applications for the publication subvention program. And we had a question about a month ago about an open access request or Wiley and I spoke with AP and she helped me get appreciated that thanks. Yeah. I think that the subvention grant is actually a nice companion program to the open access agreements that the library is doing. You know, I showed that pie chart that had like twenty publishers on it. You know, we only have agreements with, you know, whatever, seven or eight of those.

So we still have some of our top twenty. You know, we still have like twelve agreements that we need to make.

51:37 - But if you get down to that that fifteen percent pie slice, which is that long tail of publishers that we only publish with infrequently, there’s a hundred publishers in that make up that fourteen percent. And so the time it will take the library in order to make all of those agreements, I mean we may never have, you know, direct agreements with all of those publishers. So I think something like the subvention grant program can pick up, you know, and and I haven’t talked to Jim Resee about this or to Peter about this, but, you know, based off of that conversation with the with the grant and with Wiley, I was thinking that, you know, the subvention grant will be very helpful in picking up the publishing for, you know, these many, many, you know, the long tail of publishers that our faculty might publish and infrequently so we can offer, you know, balanced campus.

Wide support, you know, to publish where an author might want to publish, because something we’ve been sensitive about is not wanting to create incentives for the author on where they publish. We feel like authors are in the best position to decide where their work should be published. And what we need to do is just figure out how to equally provide support to make that work open access. And I haven’t mentioned this, but, you know, this is all right in alignment with our land grant mission.

Right. We’re supposed to create knowledge and share it to make, you know, when the world a better place. And so that sharing peace just fits so nicely, not just with open access, but with the open data and open scholarship and open science. So glad you’re here, Kathia, we consider you all one of our primary allies in this in this movement to make our content open. You.

53:20 - Um, Abby, I think that’ll be it for today. Yeah, yeah. So thank you, everyone, for stopping by today. I hope you appreciate the presentation again. Feel free to reach out to Curtis or me if you have any questions about open access Iowa State or want to learn more about this topic. Next month’s Kafe is going to be about open education projects and support on campus. So if you’re interested in learning more about open educational resources or open education broadly, you can feel free to visit for that one.

And next month’s topic is going to be more of a casual conversation sort of mode. So if you’re interested in that, please stop by. And for April, May and June, we’re still looking at topics. We have a couple of suggestions so far, but if you have one, you’d like to push for it. You can use our suggested topic page on our website linked in the chat.

54:08 - So thank you for coming, everybody. .