Open Access Week 2023: Open access publishing – the growth of a community

Kate Petherbridge (Press Manager, White Rose University Press) on challenging the commercial focus in academic publishing

Open access (OA) publishing is no longer new, though the OA landscape continues to evolve. There are now a range of publishers offering OA publishing routes. Numbers of new OA university presses continue to grow as more institutions see the value of offering in-house, practical support for OA publishing and for their academic authors who are engaging with this.

Road sign indicating no entry ahead and a turning point to the left
Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

The current publishing landscape is very different to that which the earliest OA presses joined. Presses like the University of York’s own OA university press, White Rose University Press (operated in collaboration with the Universities of Leeds and York), and UCL Press opened around 2015/2016. They found new OA presses like themselves were fairly isolated voices in a commercially-dominated world. They were in the vanguard of a growing movement, however. Indeed, the 2017 report Changing publishing ecologies:  A landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing by Janneke Adema and Graham Stone, discussed this emerging new wave of university and scholar-led presses, the majority of which were OA or part-OA, and highlighted the impact this trend could have on what had become a very commercial publishing industry. The growth of, and increasing funder focus on, OA dissemination drove development, and brought the publishing industry to a turning point.

A growing sense of community

Many OA university presses are library-led, or connected to the university library. Some, including White Rose University Press (WRUP), have press managers and staff with library backgrounds – though many others come from the commercial publishing sector too. A theme that unites many OA presses is the drive to deliver “publishing as a service”, with a strong connection to the open research and scholarly comms support institutions offer to their academic staff. As well as this support for the local academy, a central part of WRUPs vision and mission is a commitment to support the wider OA movement. It’s notable that OA presses and publishing operations see their peers not as competitors but as allies in making the change to an open scholarship environment.

The emphasis on this shared goal, and the drive to support each other as part of a wider publishing movement, is a strong foundation on which to build a community. As the first wave of OA presses emerged, there was an initial sense of togetherness and of sharing of new knowledge and processes as presses established themselves. This was done informally across what was, initially, a small number of presses. Over time, we grew in numbers and experience and were able to work together as a community in more concrete ways. 

An active OA publishing community emerges

Screenshot from Jisc New University Press Toolkit
Screenshot from Jisc New University Press Toolkit, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) licence

In 2021, some of the more established of the new OA university presses came together to work with Jisc on a toolkit. This was designed to support other universities who were looking to set up their own OA university presses. The New University Press Toolkit gives advice on different business models, on setting up editorial and management structures and processes, and also shares examples of governance documentation. It is based on the experience of the presses (including White Rose University Press) that make up the toolkit’s editorial advisory board. These publishers were happy to come together to support new players in joining the OA publishing arena. This would be counter-intuitive in a commercial-focused environment. The switch to a service and support ethos means that aiding the growth of the OA sector brings benefits for all involved. Increasing the OA publishing options, and helping new voices join the debate, adds further weight to the OA publishing movement and strengthens the community behind this.

A diverse institutional OA publishing environment

To this point, this post has focused on OA publishers and presses. An OA university press is often the most visible way an institution can deliver OA publishing activity, but the OA publishing ecology is actually very diverse. The numbers of universities who are founding their own OA presses continue to increase. However, for some institutions this is not a viable option, or not an option they currently want to pursue. Universities without a formal OA press can still undertake institutional OA publishing activity. Some institutions, for example, host open infrastructure that supports publication of OA books and/or journals by their academic colleagues. In some cases, like Edinburgh Diamond, these services are also offered externally, to the wider academy. Some institutions offer formal OA publication options to their academics via institutional repositories. Some provide infrastructure to host open teaching resources. All these OA publishing activities are equally valid and are important elements of a successful change to an open scholarship environment. Some may not consider themselves as publishing, however, or perhaps to this point have not felt able to join discussions that have focused primarily on formal university or scholar-led presses.

The increasing recognition of the diversity of the OA publishing community, and the value this diversity brings, is important. It is another difference between this and commercial publishing, where the focus is on formal publishing via a recognised publisher. All those who undertake OA publishing activities face similar issues, however. Discussions about funding, policy, compliance, licensing, rights, dissemination, academic rigour, production processes, will be common across all these activities. The different perspectives and approaches they bring can only help in e.g. establishing best practice, and in finding new solutions or ways to communicate key messages. 

The importance of open institutional publishing in all its forms is recognised in the founding of a new association, the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA). WRUP has been instrumental in setting this up, and it is designed to bring together a community of practice that supports OA publishing activity at HEIs in the UK. 

Open Institutional Publishing Association logo
OIPA logo © 2023 Open Institutional Publishing Association

Formalising this gives a shared voice to often small OA publishing undertakings that nevertheless, together, make a significant contribution to OA support in the UK. This new association is open to membership applications and is in the latter stages of setup and launch, with the inaugural meeting set for November 2023. The level of interest and membership applications already received show the engagement of the OA publishing community. It reinforces the position that this area of publishing is focused on collaboration and mutual support, rather than commercial competition. In strengthening the OA institutional publishing community, we are also strengthening the support this community can give to academic authors as the move to open scholarship continues. 

Open Access Week 2023: Every week is Open Access Week at York

Paula Schirrmacher (Research Intelligence Analyst) introduces a new dashboard which visualises the University’s open access publication practices.

Screenshot from the Open Access dashboard showing a pie chart for article publications, segmented approximately by the following open access types: 30% gold; 30% hybrid gold; 20% green; 20% not open access. Routes to open access are mostly 'other', but about 50% of hybrid gold articles are through transformative agreements.
Screenshot from the Open Access dashboard

To monitor our progress in open access practices, the Open Research team combined internally collected data on open access routes and publicly available data on open access formats for University of York publications in this interactive dashboard. Cycle through the years and discover how open access publication formats at the University of York develop over time and explore the evolving role of our transformative publishing agreements (TA) and the York Open Access Fund (YOAF)!

We maintain a growing array of transformative publishing agreements that allow our researchers (corresponding authors) to publish open access in gold and hybrid gold journals without additional charge. Alternatively, any author affiliated with the University of York can apply to the York Open Access Fund to make their publication open access. Whilst the above promote gold and hybrid gold open access formats, we have recently also launched a new research publications and Open Access policy, enabling researchers to reuse and share their work in any journal without giving up rights to their scholarship.

Different formats (green, hybrid gold, gold) come with their distinct advantages and disadvantages. Green open access formats allow authors to self-archive their articles and are usually free of charge. Gold and hybrid gold make articles permanently and freely available on the publishers website for anyone and anywhere, but usually involve a fee. Our open access and publishing your research web pages provide further guidance and we will soon be launching a new Practical Guide to help consolidate and clarify publishing processes for researchers.

Of course, we practise what we preach and made all code and data for our dashboard available in this GitHub repository.

Open Access Week 2023: Promoting preprints

Ben Catt (Open Research Librarian) describes the benefits of research preprint sharing and support provided by the University Library

Stacks of papers on table

‘Stack of books on table’ by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The Open Research team recognises the importance of preprints – early versions of research publications, typically articles which have yet to undergo peer review – to many in our research community. The sharing of preprints is common practice across a range of disciplines and ties in with the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week as a fundamentally noncommercial and community-based approach to open research dissemination. 

The opportunities presented by preprints and considerations for researchers are addressed in our Open Research Skills Framework. Preprint sharing has been widely championed in recent years by proponents such as the Center for Open Science (COS), and strongly encouraged by funders including UKRI (in particular MRC and BBSRC) and Wellcome. Preprint sharing benefits authors by enabling them to disseminate their work rapidly and directly to the research community at a global scale through subject-specific open access repositories or servers. Preprints are versionable (they can be updated or corrected) and provide a route for researchers to receive feedback and commentary from peers. They are indexed by the likes of Google Scholar, PubMed and Scopus, and can help authors to improve the visibility and reach of their work. Many repositories now provide item-level DOIs (digital object identifiers) which make preprints easily citable and part of the permanent scholarly record.  

Preprint workflow diagram: a manuscript can be posted to a public preprint server within a 48 hour screening process where it is subject to community feedback, ideas and discussion. This is contrasted with a peer reviewed paper which can take months to years to reach the public via a private process of journal submission, peer review, rejection and revision.

‘Preprints enable rapid dissemination’ by Jessica Polka from Preprinting to broaden scholarly dialog, incorporating FxEmojis by Mozilla; provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

It’s difficult to measure the full scale of activity across the University, but many researchers have recorded their preprints in Pure and several of those recognised in our York Open Research Awards have shared preprints of their work. This includes Early Career Researchers (ECRs) for whom preprint sharing provides an opportunity to contribute to their field and establish the priority of their findings and ideas ahead of publication or for inclusion in grant applications. Our Graduate Engagement Leads will soon be launching faculty-specific surveys into open research at York which will help us better understand the current rate of engagement with preprints and other practices amongst our community. 

Researchers in a wide range of scientific disciplines will already be familiar with arXiv, the original preprint distribution service launched in 1991 and now hosted at Cornell University with over two million papers in their repository. The Library has been an institutional member of arXiv since 2018, one of our early efforts to help fund external infrastructure which enables open research practice (see Supporting the wider open research ecosystem for more of our commitments in this area). Preprint sharing has become established in other disciplines in recent years and we are pleased to announce that we have made small donations to four other repositories, spanning each of our academic faculties at York:

Preprint repository logos: arXiv, engrXiv, MediArXiv, PsyArXiv and SocArXiv

Logos are the legal property of their respective owners, used with permission or in accordance with their terms; arXiv logo is a registered trademark of arXiv and Cornell University; MediArXiv and SocArXiv logos are provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

We acknowledge that there are issues to be addressed in the rise of preprint sharing, principally how the dissemination of unreviewed papers may contribute to the spread of misinformation in certain fields. This is especially serious when it comes to questionable medical research which made headlines at the height of the pandemic, although advocates may argue that this is not a new issue and that problematic preprints can be addressed rapidly whereas it has taken years for published papers to be formally retracted by journals. Many repositories have responded to concerns of quality-control with moderation and screening processes as well as crowd-based open peer review features to help scrutinise submissions and tackle misinformation. The Library also supports the PCI (Peer Community in) non-profit organisation which provides a review and curation process for preprints across many scientific fields, as well as facilitating onward publication in around 100 compatible journals. 

Most publishers accept preprint sharing as standard practice and encourage authors to engage with the process, for example BMJ supported the launch of the medRxiv preprint server for health sciences in 2019 which became an important source of Covid-related research the following year. Big commercial publishers have also been investing in preprint infrastructure, for example Elsevier’s acquisition of the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) in 2016. However, some publishers and journals may still reject papers which have been disseminated prior to submission so it’s important for researchers to understand publisher policies when considering their options (Sherpa Romeo provides a useful policy search tool).

We know that some researchers see limited value in preprint sharing, or regard the practice with scepticism or concern. We would therefore like to invite our research community to contact the team directly (lib-open-research@york.ac.uk) to share views on preprinting, raise suggestions for training needs or to propose any other repositories or initiatives that the Library should consider lending its support to. 

Further reading:

Additional guidance on preprints can be found in this Primer from UKRN (video embedded above) and ASAPbio have shared resources and activities to promote good use. Other useful resources include OSF Preprints, a search tool covering all of their hosted repositories and a wide range of disciplines, and the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories provides a comprehensive list of services. A recent paper by Doron and Branch-Elliman examines and makes recommendations on the state of preprinting in medical research since the height of the pandemic, and Knöchelmann goes in depth on the applicability of preprinting in the wider context of ‘open humanities’. Finally, a critical take on preprinting culture is offered by Emily M. Bender, who makes a nuanced case that Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow.

Open Access Week 2023: Like an open book – an open access future beyond the journal article

Jon Cook (Open Research Project Officer) discusses the latest development in open access publishing for monographs and chapters

Stack of hardback books
‘Book stack on white background’ on Rawpixel.

Are you publishing your work open access? Until recently, the answer probably depended on the format of your research output. Open access for journal articles is extremely well established, having developed over the past thirty years to the point where nearly 85% of York-authored journal articles are now made freely available on (or shortly after) publication. This is a success story but also something of a double-edged sword. It has led to a perception that open access is uniquely linked to the journal article as a format, and of relevance only to those subject areas where research articles are the predominant mode of publication. For this reason, open access for books has, until very recently, been an alien concept. This has been gradually changing, and 2024 looks to be the year that the revolution truly begins. 

The book is an older concept than the journal article and remains the primary way that we transmit written knowledge. To a greater degree than a research article, a book “is not simply a linear text”. Its form and physicality are part of the reading experience, layout and images more central to the presentation1. This has made the very act of transferring books to an electronic format difficult. With academic texts this is further complicated as they often include third-party materials that it may not be in the author’s right to share openly. Perhaps then there are functional reasons behind the slower uptake of open access for books than for journal article. 

On the other hand, time and technological progress have, to some extent, blunted the edges of these historical challenges. Whilst e-reading is not perfect and has been somewhat slow to evolve past a basic functionality, its popularity remains stable. It has proven, in the fiction sector especially, to be an enduring format rather than a fad. Likewise, in the academic world there is now practical guidance for authors looking to manage copyright for third-party materials in their work. Perhaps most importantly, there is a recognition that print and electronic formats can, and should, co-exist. For many people and in many situations, print books will continue to have a relevance and pre-eminence. Yet there is a growing realisation that open access electronic materials can complement print by providing wider access, especially in areas where printed copies may be less obtainable for financial reasons or because they have gone out-of-print. This is especially important for monograph materials in the arts & humanities, which tend to have a longer period of academic relevance than scientific journal articles, which can be more quickly superseded by newer studies. Far from being irrelevant to the humanities, electronic provision, and open access more specifically, can be central in meeting some it its traditional challenges.

If there is nothing in the format of the book itself that should disqualify a move to open access, perhaps the sluggishness to move in this direction has been more rooted in the makeup of the publishing landscape. The uptake of open access for journal articles, especially in the sciences, has been made easier by institutional agreements. These see universities pay an annual fee that allows their authors to publish articles within a range of the publisher’s journals without paying an article processing charge (APC). APCs charged on individual articles cost an average £2,000-£3,000 per article but can reach as high as £10,000. They are a significant barrier to authors who are looking to publish in journals outside of institutional agreements and can dissuade them from committing to make their articles openly available. As Roger Schonfeld points out, academic publishing in STEM is populated by a number of large-scale conglomerated publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Their scale, and share of the academic literature, makes deals with university consortia easier to negotiate and more worthwhile for all parties. Humanities on the other hand has not seen the same accumulation of power with just a handful of publishers, and there remain many independent humanities houses.

Person holding a Kindle ebook reader with coffee, croissant and print books in background
‘Person holding kindle ebook reader’ on Pexels.

Whilst institutional agreements do favour STEM subject areas, this has left a far from barren open access environment in the humanities, and for academic book publishing in general. Monograph publishers have simply had to be more inventive in their offerings. What we see as a result is real diversity in models for funding and producing open access books. University presses, such as our own White Rose University Press, continue to flourish and many provide an established route for authors looking to publish in an open access format, with their business models usually being supported by author fees. Elsewhere, the independent Open Book Publishers offer a fee-free publishing route on a framework underpinned by profits from the print sales of their open access books. Consortial funding models also look to avoid charging authors to publish their work. The Direct to Open initiative, facilitated by MIT Press, asks supporters to make a donation towards its yearly target. When this is met, its entire corpus is made openly available. Society publishers such as the Royal Historical Society (RHS) are also forging ahead with partner funding models such as that which RHS use to produce their New Historical Perspectives series. Whilst many such initiatives are in their formative stages, they show a real desire by book publishers to provide their authors with open access solutions. Additionally, the York Open Access Fund provides funding for York authors to allow them to explore their options and choose the best fit for their work. 

White Rose University Press logo
White Rose University Press logo

The existence of open access publishing routes doesn’t necessarily drive an uptake of open access though, and without other factors influencing development it would likely remain a niche interest within predominantly book-based research communities. For journal articles, open access in the UK really gained traction with the introduction of UKRI (then known as RCUK) policies beginning in 2006. These required authors to publish via open access channels but also made funding available to make this possible. That UKRI, the UK largest funding body, have previously held off on similarly mandating open access for their funded books, can be taken as an admission that they felt the landscape for this type of publishing was not yet mature (though the Wellcome Trust’s open access monograph policy dating back to 2013 must be acknowledged as a trailblazer on a smaller scale).

The 2024 introduction of a mandate from UKRI requiring authors to make their books openly available on publication is therefore a real step change for open access in this area. It has the potential to normalise the open publication of monograph material and give authors the same freedom to make their work openly available as they would enjoy if they were publishing a journal article. Initially £3.5 million will be ringfenced for this purpose. There will be challenges in implementing the policy: as Samuel Moore and Niamh Tumelty point out, the hope is to avoid some of the unsustainable funding models that arose after the advent of journal article funding mandates 4. Yet, if the policy is a success it will go a long way to dispelling one of the more persistent myths around open access: it need not apply especially to one format of research output, nor to particular subject areas only. With the right backing, and support for equitable and transparently funded publishing models, we can be successful in more widely sharing the substantial segment of the University’s world-class research that is currently published in book form.

Further Guidance

The Open Research team can help with any questions relating to the new UKRI monographs policy. UKRI have also published guidance about complying with their policy, and are hosting a webinar aimed at researchers and support staff on 8th November. The York Open Access fund can also help authors to publish via fully open access routes where alternative funding is not available. Any staff or student affiliated with the University is able to apply to the fund. 

References

1 Crossick, G. (2016). Monographs and open access. UKSG Insights, 29(1), p.17. Available at: doi: 10.1629/uksg.280 [Accessed 18 October 2023].

2 University of Oxford. (2023). Paying for open access articles. [Online]. University of Oxford. Available at: https://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/oa-payments [Accessed 17 October 2023].

3 Schonfeld, R.C. (2023). Will humanities and social sciences publishing consolidate? The Scholarly Kitchen, 22 February 2023. Available at: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/02/22/hss-publishing-consolidate/ [Accessed: 18 October 2023]. 

4 Moore, S.A. and Tumelty, N. (2021). Reflections on the new UKRI open access policy, UKSG Insights, 497. Available at: https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-497/reflections-new-ukri-open-access-policy [Accessed 23 October 2023].

Open Access Week 2023: Next steps for the open research community at York

Open Research Graduate Engagement Leads Kirralise Hansford, Luqman Muraina and Melissa Kays outline their ongoing work creating and nurturing an open research community of practice at York

International Open Access Week - Community over Commercialisation poster (Oct 23-29 2023), with images of researchers overlaid with open padlock symbols
Open Access Week 2023 theme graphics licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International Licence

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is ‘Community over commercialisation‘ and the Open Research team are dedicated to nurturing a community of practice for open research through new communication channels, surveys and case studies highlighting projects and initiatives from across the University.

One of the team’s recent successes has been the launch of an Open Research Newsletter, which we plan to publish approximately every two months. This serves as a valuable source of information, offering updates on open research initiatives, resources, and upcoming events. It provides a structured channel through which we can disseminate critical information and keep the community engaged and informed. The newsletter is a key tool for delivering the latest updates, ensuring that everyone is up to date with our efforts and activities. We’re looking forward to expanding the structure and formatting of this newsletter to make sure that it is continuously meeting the needs of our research community.

In addition to the newsletter, we have expanded the social media presence of Open Research at York to include a new Instagram account. The visual nature of this platform complements our existing Twitter/X account, offering a different way to engage with the community, in particular postgraduate and early career researchers. We’re excited to showcase the visual aspects of open research at the University through thoughtfully curated posts and stories. It will allow us to reach a broader audience and create a more engaging, visual narrative around both Library and practitioner-led initiatives. This, in turn, builds awareness and support for our team’s work and broader open research principles.

By expanding our communication channels through the newsletter and Instagram, the Open Research team are not only sharing knowledge but also aiming to strengthen the overall sense of community across the wider university. We are providing a clear and accessible window into our work, helping to build a more informed and engaged open research community at York.

Practising open research techniques can be tricky, and people sometimes do not know where to start or what support is available to help them integrate these practices into their work. One of our key next steps as Graduate Engagement Leads is to assess the current level of understanding of open research practices within each faculty. In 2020, a University-wide survey was conducted assessing adoption and understanding of open research practices, which concluded that most respondents had no experience of the majority of practices and did not know how important they were. The main barriers to open research were identified as lack of training, funding, clarity, and understanding. 

Open Research Survey graphic aimed at York staff and students with image of large pointing hand and 'We want you! text'
We want you! Open Research Survey graphic from Instagram

This semester we are running three new surveys within the faculties of Arts and Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences, asking staff and students to give their feedback on the types of open research practices they have used before, and which practices they would like to know more about. The surveys also ask the best ways that the team can support researchers and students to incorporate open research into their everyday work, and assess what form of initiatives and training would be most beneficial. 

Different departments and schools are likely to have different barriers to adopting open research techniques, and following these surveys we will be able to address these concerns in tailored support sessions at a local level. Reassessing University-wide understanding of open research practices will allow us to compare results from the 2020 survey to those being run in 2023, to see if adoption of open research techniques has improved or not. Maintaining our understanding of the challenges that staff and students face regarding the integration of open research practices in their work means that we can offer direct and accessible support to our research community going forward. 

Understanding what open research means can be tricky and researchers can find it difficult to incorporate it into their conventional research and research practices. This is the main motivation behind promoting visual awareness of open research practices through our series of case studies. These highlight how researchers have explored and embedded various open research practices in their projects, including open access publishing, preregistration and participatory and community-led research.

A new set of case studies will soon be published based on projects which were highlighted in our 2023 Open Research Awards as encouraging dialogue and broader thinking about open research and its implementation. We are planning to adapt the case studies to a range of formats including posters which will intend to explain and communicate at a glance various open research practices that can be explored by other researchers. We aim to create further case studies by looking into various projects across the three faculties, including those that have not already been recognised through our Awards scheme. 

We look forward to sharing more of Kirralise, Luqman and Melissa’s work throughout the year, including future events and new resources to engage our community of researchers. Further information about the University’s commitments, governance and support for open research can be found at Open research at York.