Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Ubiquity Press
1. Ubiquity Press is a researcher-led press based on campus at University College London. Our mission is to achieve the widest possible dissemination of research, with the greatest recognition and impact for those who produce it (1,2).
2. Both as a publisher and as academics we are fully supportive of initiatives that make research content open access, particularly where the content is a result of research funded by taxpayers.
Gold and Green
3. Where researchers opt to publish taxpayer-funded research in traditional paywalled journals, we believe that it is absolutely right that these articles are also shared via deposition in accessible repositories.
4. Our preference however is strongly for Gold open access, because publishers add value to research content—through for example editorial services, markup, indexing, and dissemination. This is where a model that requires authors to self-archive in order to achieve open access misses the point.
5. The ability to discover and cite articles accurately is crucial to the researcher, both in terms of finding new content and receiving academic credit. We believe a model where articles are published behind a paywall and a secondary version is self-archived does not serve researchers well in this respect.
6. It is difficult to imagine an infrastructure that would ensure preprints were consistently deposited, while also ensuring that articles could be clearly cited and discovered. Even if such an infrastructure were created it would be cumbersome at best, and many readers would not benefit from the value added by the publishers.
7. Whichever route of academic publication selected by the author there is a cost to be covered. The key difference is that paywalled journals restrict value-added content to a privileged few, while open access journals make the value-added content freely available to everyone.
Creative Commons Licensing
8. Maximising the impact of content means not only ensuring it is available to readers, but also ensuring that it is available to be reused and repurposed. We therefore welcome the RCUK and Wellcome Trust’s preference for the CC-BY license.
9. Allowing figures to be represented in new papers, content to be used in teaching, and data to be mined and reproduced in infographics are all examples of the benefits of derivations. Equally the public may benefit from commercial reuse of tax-funded content, for example in education and health. Licenses that restrict reuse in derivatives and commerce therefore weaken the potential impact of content.
10. In some circumstances, such as in data publication, we encourage authors to go beyond CC-BY by applying a CC0 licence to their work. The CC0 license makes the terms of reuse explicit, minimising legal and technical barriers for valuable research activities such as data mining. Attribution is part of academic culture and does not necessarily have to be enforced by law (3).
Article Processing Charges
11. Under the traditional academic publishing model, authors publish for free while libraries pick up the bill via subscription agreements. This model allows publishers to obfuscate the costs of publication through complex distribution arrangements with libraries and has led to well-publicised criticism (4,5,6).
12. Article processing charges on the other hand are widely applied by open access publishers, and create an open market where the cost of publishing in a journal can be compared against the competition. We believe that making costs openly visible in this way will help to drive costs down, making academic publication more affordable and better value.
13. Research leads to progress when new knowledge is shared. It therefore seems reasonable that a small proportion of research funding is allocated to communicating research developments. Where research is not effectively communicated, funding is likely to be wasted through duplication of work. This highlights the need for research data and software to be shared too, so that efforts are not unnecessarily repeated at cost to the taxpayer.
Impact and Competitiveness of UK Higher Education
14. A number of studies have shown that there is a citation advantage associated with publishing in open access journals (7,8). In addition the sharing of research data has been shown to be associated with increased citations (9). On top of this open access articles have a readership beyond the research community.
15. Researchers will benefit from increased accessibility to their work by commercial organisations, policy makers, and the public. By making their work open access therefore, researchers within UK Higher Education will benefit from increased visibility and a broader impact.
7 February 2013
References
1. Ubiquity Press: http://www.ubiquitypress.com/
2. The Chronicle of Higher Education: Open Access Ahoy. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ubiquity/43312
3. Schaeffer (2011) Why does Dryad use CC0? http://blog.datadryad.org/2011/10/05/why-does-dryad-use-cc0/
4. The Cost of Knowledge: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
5. Harvard University Faculty Advisory Council (2012) Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448
6. Taylor (2012) What does it cost to publish a paywalled paper with anyone? http://svpow.com/2012/07/18/what-does-it-cost-to-publish-a-paywalled-paper-with-anyone/
7. Eysenbach G (2006) Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles. PLoS Biol 4(5): e157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157
8. Swan (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268516/
9. Piwowar et al (2007) Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE 2(3): e308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000308