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Institutional Repositories and Open Access – a threat to society publishers or an opportunity?

Nick EvansChief Operating Officer, ALPSPnick.evans@alpsp,org

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What I shall talk about

• Are Institutional Repositories a fact of life?• What is the likely effect on journals?• Does it matter?• What should societies do about it?

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Are IR’s a fact of life?

• Not much evidence that academics actually want them

• But if self-archiving becomes mandatory, most say they will comply

• Growing number of research funders and institutions leaning towards voluntary or mandatory self-archiving policies

• Increasing inter-operability will heighten appeal

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What is the likely effect on journals?

• Two surveys showing very clearly that when a sufficient percentage of the final version of author articles is freely (and easily) available, cancellations will follow

• Mark Ware: Factors in Journal Cancellation (ALPSP, 2006)

• Chris Beckett & Simon Inger: Self-archiving and Journal Subscriptions – co-existence or competition? (PRC, 2006)http://www.publishingresearch.net/

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Ware• 340 responses• 81% said availability in an

OA repository would be a ‘very important’ or ‘important’ factor in cancellation decisions (but behind pricing (95%), usage (95%), user needs (93%))

• Preprint/postprint versions not seen as adequate substitute (but PDF is)

• 32% think publishers should not be worried

• 11% think they should• 54% think it’s too early to

tell

Beckett & Inger• 424 responses• ‘a significant number

of librarians are likely to substitute OA materials for subscribed resources, given certain levels of reliability, peer review and currency’

• Author’s unrefereed, uncorrected original MS is least adequate substitute

• Post-peer review version (irrespective of publishers’ editing) is adequate

• 38% think publishers should not be worried

• 38% think they should

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What is the likely effect on journals?

• Publishers’ experience to date: subscriptions– British Medical Journal: when all content was free on BMJ site, print

subs (and ads) fell dramatically. Now that only research articles are free, revenue has almost recovered

– Molecular Biology of the Cell: in the 3 years following introduction of 2 month embargo, average annual subscription growth fell from 84% to 8%

– Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: 1 month embargo in 2000 11% fall in subscriptionsin 2001; 6 months embargo reduced this to 9% in 2002

What rational librarian, faced with the need to cancel some journals, would not choose those whose content is freely available elsewhere?

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Does it matter?

• If many subscription journals disappear, will this matter?

• We all need to be aware of the likely of the likely consequences of our actions

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Revenues from subscriptions support other activities

Nonprofit and commercial journals (Crow)

38%

17%

45%

Self-publishednonprofit journals

Commerciallypublished nonprofitjournals

Commerciallypublishedcommercial journals

Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory, 2005 (analysis by Raym Crow)

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• Non profit publishers put any surplus back into their other activities

• In particular, Learned Society publishers use surplus to support:– Conferences (33% of respondents applied median 7% of

their publishing surpluses to this)– Membership fees (32% of respondents, 15% of surpluses)– Public education (26% of respondents, 7.5% of surpluses)– Bursaries (26% of respondents, 7.5% of surpluses)– Research (21% of respondents, 25% of surpluses)

– Christine Baldwin, What do Learned Societies do with their Publishing Surpluses? (ALPSP/Blackwell, 2004)

Knock-on effects for the scholarly community if publishing surpluses are reduced or eliminated

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Which journals are most vulnerable?

• Single- (or few-) journal publishers– ‘Over 97% of society publishers publish three or fewer

journals, with almost 90% publishing just one title’. – Raym Crow, Publishing Cooperatives: an

alternative for society publishers (SPARC, 2006)

– Society publishers limited to specific discipline

• Niche journals– Low circulation higher price

• Low-profit journals– Less room for manoeuvre

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What should publishers do about it?

• Awareness– Publishers need to make sure that the communities

with which they engage understand the likely consequences of widespread mandatory self-archiving

– Funders and others need to understand that ‘one size does not fit all’

• subjects differ• journals differ

– The information must be based on factual evidence – research should continue into theactual effects as self-archiving mandates begin to bite

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Publishers must

• Make content as available as possible (without going bust!)– Decide if they can switch to Open Access publishing or

not (one-fifth are experimenting)• Hybrid/author-choice model a possible first step

(as advocated by David Prosser)– If not, decide whether they need an embargo period

to protect subscriptions, and if so how long• Will authors abide by this?

– At the same time, be creative about adding value to scholarly communicationin new ways

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Adding value . . .

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What should we do about it?

• Understand what journals are for– Journals serve authors and readers

(directly) and funders and institutions (indirectly)

– Both publishers and those whom journals serve need to analyse the functions currently carried out by journals, and

– establish which of these must be preserved

– and work out ways of doing so

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Librarian

Author

Publisher

Peer review tusksRAE Canopy

OA Advocate

Institutional Repository Handmaidens

Research seeking tool

Grant locators

Web 2.0 tools

Bank Manager

Google

The elephant in the room?

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Thank you

Nick EvansChief Operating Officer, ALPSPnick.evans@alpsp.org+44 0(20) 8789 2394