In part two of the State of Open Monograph Series (Economics of Open Access Monographs), we continue our conversation with Lara Speicher, Head of Publishing at UCL Press and Erich van Rijn, Director of Journals and Open Access at University of California Press. 

We previously discussed the real and perceived costs of open access monographs in part one. Here, we take a look at where funding for open access monographs should come from as national funders (e.g., UKRI, NWO) consider open access mandates, return on investment and a sustainable future. 

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Sara Grimme and Charles Watkinson spoke to Lara and Erich about investments in open access monographs.

How Will We Pay for Open Access Monographs? And How Do We Justify the Investments?

Erich: “Last year the Association of University Presses charged an open access task force to investigate some of the issues around open access publishing. Lara and I served on that group. When the task force asked university press directors and staff what their biggest challenge in open access book publishing was, around 80% indicated it was finding funding. I don’t think that this is something that presses are going to be able to solve for themselves. Different presses have such different financial situations. Some presses, for example, have a commercial operation that cross-subsidizes their money-losing monograph program. Given the current financial state that a lot of universities are going to find themselves in, I don’t know if there is still the library appetite to come up with a collective-funding consortium. There are a lot of interesting roles that private funders can play but they’re not going to be able to provide an operational subsidy in perpetuity for monograph publishing. There has to be institutional commitment at a national level.”

“Compared to the US, it’s clear that OA publishing has a lot stronger foundation in the UK and in Europe where national governments have made great strides in the central funding direction.”

Lara: “I would say similar things. I think what we’ve already seen is that the sources of funding for open access are varied. They include philanthropy for major projects or individual books or series, institutional funding, library funding, research grants, crowdsourcing, national funding, book sales . . . .  There are so many different sources of funding, but even all of those have only funded a very small number of books to become open access so far.

It seems unlikely that there will ever be a single source, and I’m not sure how the money is going to be found to flip everything. Currently 86,000 monographs are published globally every year as reported in the 2019 State of Open Monographs report. How we get to scale is another question.

What Erich is saying about national funding is really important because in Europe in particular there’s already an acceptance that scholarly works, particularly in other European languages from English, are just not commercial but still need to be made available. Participating in the European OPERAS framework are a number of publishers that expect to be fully funded at the national level and have no expectation that they could operate commercially. It’s ironic that the way in which a very few scholarly publishers in the English speaking world have been very successful commercially still influences how many people see publishing as a whole. There needs to be a wider understanding of why certain types of publishing cannot necessarily fully cover costs, especially when they are mission driven.

“There also needs to be a greater understanding of the difference between journals and monographs to understand why monograph publishing in particular needs a different approach to funding.”

Erich: “I think the transformative agreement route is an interesting one to think about for books, but… one of the challenges with transformative agreements is actually implementing them. When you’re talking about publishers with the scale of an Elsevier or Springer Nature, you need that scale to implement and manage transformative agreements, particularly those that involve multi-payer workflows where you might have money coming in from third party funders, the University Library, etc. It’s a tremendous amount of overhead to administer those deals and I think it will be difficult for university presses to manage that, even the largest among us.

However, I do think that a bulk support model is part of the equation. The library membership model we set up for Luminos has been partially successful in taking money from the library budget that was previously used for other things, and diverting it to help build an open monograph ecosystem. This kind of consortium library membership model is something to think about going forward but asking libraries to shoulder the burden of supporting the open monograph ecosystem on their own is not, I think, going to be a successful strategy. That is one of the reasons why I was encouraged when the TOME initiative was developed and involved the Association of American Universities because you do need to get the chief academic officers involved to get institutional commitments beyond the library to funding monograph publication.

Lara: Do you think there is a future for monograph publishing in the current commercial model?”

Erich: “Well, I’ll give you an anecdote from the Choosing Pathways to Open Access conference in late 2018. They were talking about the monograph ecosystem and the funding dynamics around monographs and said, “if you’re going to experiment with open access models in any type of publishing, monograph publishing would be the place to do it because the economics are already broken. So why not break it a little bit more and then at least you would learn something.” I think that it’s valuable for people to think that now might be the time where we’re getting pushed to do some experimentation. Having said that, if you’re a press that can afford to do that experimentation or have the ability to cross subsidize your monograph program with other activities, that would lead you to be more adventurous than if you’re a smaller press that doesn’t have the resources to do that and where your cost recovery is something that’s being demanded of you by the university administration.”

Lara: “Moving to your question about how to justify the value of open access monographs, for us, it’s clearly about making research more widely available around the world and seeing global usage – UCL Press has recently celebrated exceeding 3 million downloads for its books and journals since launching. In terms of return on investment, the value is in making the research available to as wide an audience as possible which benefits the author, the institution, and the reader. As well as how to justify open access, I wonder if in straitened financial circumstances whether there are also questions of how to support the current monograph system if library budgets are going to be squeezed very severely.

“In the current pandemic situation, the value of open access is being seen more clearly than ever.”

Erich: “Monographs have to be published because it’s the way that academic work is done in some disciplines. It’s also about enhancing the university’s global impact. When we look at where open access monographs that are the product of so much academic work get used, it’s globally. There are places in the Global South where I would have never expected to see large usage for our monographs. The use is in territories where, generally, library budgets just can’t accommodate adding monographs to their collections. But we can see geographically that they are used, or at least downloaded, in those locations. Even through the rudimentary data gathering that we’ve been able to do is absent some of the more advanced solutions that are being explored by the Open Access eBook Usage data trust initiative, we’ve been able to see enough to indicate to us that these works have a global impact. If you shut them up, either in a print library collection, where only 150 or 200 libraries will buy them, or in ebook collections where they need to be purchased to be added to a library collection, it’s going to restrict usage. The authors that come to us who want to publish open access do it because they want to see use. That’s the driver for them and, even absent a national funding landscape, they’re willing to go knock on department chairs’ doors to try to get funding to help them in that endeavor. So right now the OA monograph ecosystem in a lot of cases is being driven by passionate faculty who understand the value of openness and ultimately I think they’re the best advocates.

Lara: “We certainly also see interest in societal impact in certain disciplines. Academics in, for example, anthropology explain that they’re very keen for their books to be widely available to the subjects of their research as well as to other researchers. That’s one of the reasons open access is really important to them and for some of our authors that’s also influenced the way they write the book. They’ve wanted to make sure it’s written in a very accessible style and jargon free because they wanted to have that societal impact and for the book to be not just freely available but also accessible to a very wide audience. We also see this in some of the books we publish on sustainability and area studies where the authors feel that their book will be very beneficial for policymakers. 

In the UK, showing societal impact is one of the expectations of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Some authors who’ve published with us are submitting REF impact case studies about their work, and they use the download figures to demonstrate impact, although that’s not necessarily enough on its own because you have to show that your research has led to policy change or other very tangible change.”

Erich: “I worry anyway about applying those kinds of numerical usage metrics to some kinds of publishing that we do. Those kinds of quantifiable metrics are useful in some ways, but a lot of the impact of a monograph is in how it shapes the discourse in a field of inquiry, and that’s a lot harder to measure.

SEE MORE POSTS IN THIS STATE OF OPEN MONOGRAPHS SERIES

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Open access monograph funding appeared first on Digital Science.

Welcome to the first post of a specialized and dedicated book blog series supported by Digital Science. Like many colleagues working in scholarly publishing we have seen rapid changes in the industry over the last few years. Following a discussion on the future of the monograph with key leaders in the university press space at the 2018 ALPSP conference, we collaborated with thought leaders from the book space to produce a report on The State of Open Monographs. This report was well received by the community, so as a follow up we wanted to continue to explore this specialized, but very important, type of content.

With this blog series we aim to:

• Further the goals of the original report to bring a community together to discuss many topics important to books
• Educate, inform, and serve as a platform for sharing ideas that will be instructional for book publishers
• Work with a variety of people who care about book-specific topics and are experts in certain areas of book publishing
• Discuss ideas for overcoming certain challenges in the book space

We care about the book space – books are critical to the scholarly ecosystem

Through our exploration of the book space, we have come to understand that long-form research in the form of a monograph is a primary method of research communication in the social sciences and humanities. STEM fields, on the other hand, tell the world about their work in the form of journal articles. All segments of research contribute to society and the publishing community needs to be in a place to support all forms of output. The research ecosystem has come a long way from its early days when topics were siloed, research was printed, and various research communities did not talk to each other. Today research is continuing to be more and more interdisciplinary as topics in Social Science and Humanities cross over with STEM fields of study.

“Books, as the primary method of research communication in Social Science and Humanities fields, deserve to be treated as first-class research publications. It is time to weave them more strongly into the scholarly narrative and address challenges that stand in the way of doing just that.”

Monograph publishing has seen significant change in the last few years, particularly as a result of open access and funder mandates. However, it has also stayed frighteningly the same, with little changing in the metadata and publication space, leading to a continued state of disintermediation and fragmentation across publishers.

If we start with the state of funding, there has been significant confusion over the last 12-18 months regarding Plan S and open access mandates. Authors of monographs still find it extremely challenging to secure funding for their monograph (or even their book chapter!), and funders supporting journal publication feel very differently about the price of a £10-14,000 monograph – even in the face of an open access mission.

Disintermediation and fragmentation also remain an issue for monograph authors, whether publishing open access or not. A lack of consistency in metadata collection, paired with the fact that books tend to appear on multiple platforms, has led to issues around discoverability, access, and fragmentation of books.

In 2019 Digital Science worked with members of the scholarly community – in particular, Peter Potter and Charles Watkinson – to write a report on the current state of the open monograph. As Michael Elliot wrote in his introduction to the report:

“At a time when the research mission of higher education – particularly the research of the humanities and the social sciences – remains poorly understood beyond the academy, the mission of making our research widely and openly available could be more urgent than ever.”

The report exposed a number of issues in the open monograph ecosystem, or, as Michael put it, opportunities.

Key in the report was the fact that:

• The true value of monographs is obscured by a lack of metadata, identifiers, and a slow lag in the uptake of DOI’s
• Costs to transition monographs to a more open world are expensive, confusing, and lacking structure
• The publication of monographs tends to be driven by the needs of a print-based market, and as such, lag behind journals

We hope to explore each of these points in more detail over the course of this year. There are, in addition, many other themes that we see beyond those highlighted in the examples above.

Get involved and help share this blog series

We hope to expand on these issues with members of the community so that we are able to give you a space to share your thoughts, frustrations, and hopes for the future. Most importantly, we want to make this blog series of use! So if we can share best practices around metadata tagging, delve into providing real-time feedback to authors, or find new ways to communicate open funding mandates and sources with the community (both authors and publishers), then we will be fulfilling the purpose of this series.

In particular, we look forward to working closely with guest authors, each of whom will work on a theme close to their hearts, passions or frustrations! If you have an idea that you’d like to explore, or are keen to get involved, we’d love to hear from you. Please email publishing@digital-science.com if you’d like to hear more.

See the other posts in this series

DOI for this blog series: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12347939

The post Blog series on the State of Open Monographs 2020 appeared first on Digital Science.

Over the next few months, we will be releasing a series of articles looking at NLP from a range of viewpoints, showcasing what NLP is, how it is being used, what its current limitations are, and how we can use NLP in the future. If you have any burning questions about NLP in research that you would like us to find answers to, please email us or send us a tweet. As new articles are released, we will add a link to them on this page.

Our first article is an overview from Isabel Thompson, Head of Data Platform at Digital Science. Her day job is also her personal passion: understanding the interplay of emerging technologies, strategy and psychology, to better support science. Isabel is on the Board of Directors for the Society of Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and won the SSP Emerging Leader Award in 2018. She is on Twitter as @IsabelT5000

NLP is Here, it’s Now – and it’s Useful

I find Natural Language Processing (NLP) to be one of the most fascinating fields in current artificial intelligence. Take a moment to think about everywhere we use language: reading, writing, speaking, thinking – it permeates our consciousness and defines us as humans unlike anything else. Why? Because language is all about capturing and conveying complex concepts using symbols and socially agreed contracts – that is to say: language is the key means of transferring knowledge. It is therefore foundational to science.

We are now in the dawn of a new era. After years of promise and development, the latest NLP algorithms now regularly score more highly than humans on structured language analysis and comprehension tests. There are of course limitations, but these should not blind us to the possibilities. NLP is here, it’s now – and it’s useful.

NLP’s new era is already impacting our daily lives: we are seeing much more natural interactions with our computers (e.g. Alexa), better quality predictive text in our emails, and more accurate search and translation. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many applications beyond this – many areas where NLP makes the previously impossible, possible.

Perhaps most exciting for science at present is the expansion of language processing into big data techniques. Until now, the processing of language has been almost entirely dependent on the human mind – but no longer. Machines may not currently understand language in the same way that we do (and, let’s be clear, they do not), but they can analyse it and extract deep insights from it that are broader in nature and greater in scale than humans can achieve.

For example, NLP offers us the ability to do a semantic analysis on every bit of text written in the last two decades, and to get insight on it in seconds. This means we can now find relationships in corpuses of text today that it would previously have taken a PhD to discover. To be able to take this approach to science is powerful, and this is but one example – given that so much of science and its infrastructure is rooted in language, NLP opens up the possibility for an enormous range of new tools to support the development of scientific knowledge and insight.

NLP is particularly interesting for the research sector because these techniques are – by all historical comparisons – highly accessible. The big players have been making their ever-increasingly good algorithms available to the public, ready for tweaking into specific use cases. Therefore, for researchers, funding agencies, publishers, and software providers, there’s a lot of opportunity to be had without (relatively-speaking) much technical requirement.

Stepping back, it is worth noting that we have made such extreme advances in NLP in recent years due to the collaborative and open nature of AI research. Unlike any cutting edge discipline in science before, we are seeing the most powerful tools open sourced and available for massive and immediate use. This democratises the ability to build upon the work of others and to utilise these tools to create novel insights. This is the power of open science.

Here at Digital Science, we have been investigating and investing in NLP techniques for many years. In this blog series, we will be sharing an overview of what NLP is, examine how its capabilities are developing, and look at specific use cases for research communication – to demonstrate that NLP is truly here. From offering researchers writing support and article summarisation, to assessing reproducibility and spotting new technology breakthroughs in patents, all the way through to the detection and reduction of bias in recruitment: this new era is just getting started – where it can go next is up to your imagination.

Look out for the next article in our series, “What is NLP?”, and follow the conversation using the hashtag #DSreports.

The post Launching our blog series on Natural Language Processing (NLP) appeared first on Digital Science.

This report is an analysis of the Open Access landscape since the turn of the millennium. It compares the leading countries for research outputs with those producing the most Open Access papers over a 16-year period, as well as Open Access collaboration trends. See the key findings from this report in our summary blog post.

Key findings from the report are:

• Countries that have invested in Open Access have typically increased their level of international collaboration.
• China has gone from not appearing in the top 12 producers of OA papers in 2010 to being the third highest in OA (2016).
• Brazil is another success story, second only to the UK, with 51.2% of its research output available through Open Access channels.

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The post The Ascent of Open Access appeared first on Digital Science.