(Voice over: Darren Purcell)
This presentation summarizes key points from the report, "Finding the Balance: Creating an Open, Sustainable Future for OU." The report is a product of the Scholarly Communication Task Force, appointed by the University Libraries Committee. Our presentation communicates key actions and best practices OU scholars can take to have the most positive impact upon the creation of an open and sustainable system of scholarly communication. 

We're starting out by illustrating and reminding you of what you already know: the cycle of scholarly publishing which involves funders, researchers and authors, peer reviewers, publishers, editors, and universities, including university libraries. But this doesn't simply illustrate the cycle in which we all participate. It also illustrates the imbalance in the system. If you take a closer look, you'll see that the system is heavily supported by individual authors, funders, institutions, and libraries who either pay or provide their labor, often more than once so that the publishers can do their work.

We've highlighted these various interests here with different detail. Scholars are interested in disseminating their work so that it can be discovered, read, and cited. Ultimately, they want maximum recognition or impact for their work. Universities and libraries want to provide the most access to their researchers' outputs in order to enhance their institutional reputation and to serve the public. Scholarly societies and funding agencies have similar goals. They also want to maximize public access, and they often want this so they can justify future budgets. Again, we can see that the motivations and interests for traditional publishers are different from those of the other stakeholders. Traditional publishers want to maximize their profits and often have an imperative to do so, since they answer to their shareholders. Publishers, therefore, control accessibility to works via subscriptions and ownership of copyright.

And we can see that some of these publishers are making profits that rival the most successful tech companies. A 2018 presentation from the University of Virginia Library put commercial publisher profits in line with – or higher than – those of tech companies, banks, and pharmaceutical firms. By way of contrast, according to the NYU Stern Database of more than 7,000 U.S companies, the average profit margin across all firms in 2019 was 7.9%.

Universities employing the authors and editors of journal content then buy it back through their own libraries at a considerable markup so that faculty and graduate students can have access to their own work. Overwhelmingly, academic libraries are the major purchasers of scholarly journal content.

(Voice over: Lee Fithian)
Academic libraries being the major purchasers of scholarly journal content is problematic for a number of reasons. The first reason is libraries' budgets. This chart from the Association of Research Libraries demonstrates that in a 20-year period there have been increases across the board in academic library costs, but none so marked as in periodicals, a.k.a. journal subscriptions. These increased 166% over the 1998 costs. Monograph purchases are up 23% over the same period, but have declined from a peak in 2012. OU's data displays a clear increase in the proportion devoted to serials from 2010 to 2018, and a concomitant decline in monograph purchases. The costs of database access increased slightly.

Despite withdrawing from several comprehensive subscription packages, the larger issue is that OU's library budget has remained largely flat or has seen declines. This included a $1 million permanent reduction across fiscal year 19 and fiscal year 20. As you're all aware, the impacts of these costs include hard choices about what resources OU is able to subscribe to, and cuts to resources negatively impact the access to information that you and your students need to remain competitive. These graphs clearly show that as the average price per journal has increased, the number of journals OU Libraries are able to subscribe to has decreased.

To a lesser extent, this has occurred with book purchases as well. But in this case, book purchases have primarily declined as a result of the increase in journal subscription costs.

(Voice over: Caroline Schroeder)
The Scholarly Communication Taskforce report makes ten recommendations, but the Taskforce believes that understanding and taking action on our open access options is one of the most valuable actions the OU community can take. Open access is the free, immediate online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use those articles fully in a digital environment. Over the past decade, open access has become central to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, businesses, and the public. 

There are four primary ways to facilitate open access, and we will cover all of them in the next several slides. The first way to facilitate open access is to manage your rights as an author.

Traditional journals require authors to transfer their copyrights to the publisher, which limits dissemination and impact of a scholar's work. When authors retain their copyright, they have a maximum freedom and flexibility to share their work in any way they choose. OU Libraries offer services to ensure that authors understand publishing agreements, which is where these copyright transfers take place. The Office of Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication assists OU authors in publishing with modified contracts that maximize the retention of copyright, as many journals are willing to license back to authors, the right to share their own work. Publishing in open access journals generally allows authors to retain their copyrights.

(Voice over: Mike Bemben)
The second mechanism to facilitate open access is via open access publishing.

In traditional publishing, you publish in your choice of journal. You transfer your copyright, and the articles in a journal, are only available to those with a subscription. In addition to subscription fees, authors or their institutions often pay page charges or figure charges to publish in these journals. This is not an open access publishing option, and it is shown here in the gray box only as a departure point with which you are all familiar. Traditional publishers have begun offering a hybrid publishing model in which in any given journal issue, some of the articles are freely available and some of the articles require a subscription. In order to make individual articles available publishers levy an article processing charge, or an APC, on individual authors. There are still problems with hybrid publishing, as the cost of APCs are rising at triple the rate of inflation, and universities find themselves paying for content twice – once in the form of the APC, and then again for the journal subscription itself. So while individual articles can be made open access, this is not a sustainable model for existing library or institutional budgets. In green open access, authors publish in their choice of outlet and also deposit a version of their article in an institutional or disciplinary repository, which we will cover in a moment. Finally, complete access to all journal content is considered gold open access. Generally, authors retain their full copyrights and the contents of the journals are free for anyone to read. Some gold open access journals collect article processing charges, because publishing isn't free. However, 70% of gold open access journals do not collect an APC from their authors. Their publishing costs are covered using other means. And all gold open access journals utilize peer review.

(Voice over: Katherine Pandora)
The third mechanism for facilitating open access is through an institutional or disciplinary repository.

Submitting to an institutional repository is called green open access, and as just mentioned, it is when authors publish in the journal of their choice and deposit a version of their article in an institutional repository, such as OU's SHAREOK or a disciplinary repository. Repositories allow readers to freely access articles without the requirement of a subscription. We used to think this access was only important for scholars in low and middle income countries. But as library funding is reduced we see scholars in the United States who no longer have subscription access. Institutional repositories provide access to manuscripts, articles, theses, dissertations, and data sets, among other forms of scholarship. OU scholars depositing their items in SHAREOK also benefit from increased discoverability of their work, because SHAREOK is indexed by major search engines and harvesting efforts. Certain caveats about repositories should be noted. First, embargoes placed by traditional publishers can mean delays of a year or more before articles can be accessed from a repository. Publishers often allow authors to upload postprints, which is the final submitted manuscript after all peer review has taken place, or pre-prints the final draft before peer review, thus achieving the goal of wider dissemination. There are tools to help authors determine which version they can upload, and OU Libraries Office of Open Initiatives & Scholarly Communication can assist as well.

(Voice over: J.P. Masly)
The fourth mechanism to facilitate open access is by creating an instituting an open access policy.

Open access policies are most often passed by a vote in Faculty Senate. These policies provide frameworks for the open dissemination of research, most often through the campus institutional repository, like SHAREOK. In an open access policy, authors grant permission – or a license – to the institution to upload their articles before they transfer rights to the publishers. Such policies are not monolithic, and every policy the Taskforce studied provided an opt out mechanism for papers in specific circumstances. Why do we recommend that OU Faculty Senate consider a policy? Structural changes in academia have impacted the dissemination of scholarly outputs and the manner in which knowledge is shared. These changes have had different impacts on various disciplines. Institutional open access policies can support a common expectation of maximizing public exposure and the impact of faculty and graduate student research.

This graph shows that the cumulative number of institutional open access policies has steadily grown since 2005. Here, the term "research organization" refers to an academic institution. But it can also mean a research institute associated with an academic institution or a unit such as a department or college within an academic institution. Academic institutions are continuing to pass open access policies today, although the majority of them were passed in 2015. Over 900 academic institutions internationally have implemented an open access policy that supports making open access to research articles the default method for their faculty and students.

And this slide zeros in a bit more. At least 111 academic institutions in the US, including some of our peers and aspirational institutions, have passed open access policies.

(Voice over: Claude Miller)
The Taskforce spent much of its time familiarizing itself with the open access landscape, and the literature clearly demonstrates how open access has numerous positive impacts for researchers, universities, disciplinary communities, and funders.

For one thing, publishing open access, whether in a repository, in  a gold open access journal, or using hybrid publishing, leads to increased visibility. Simply put, when your work is openly available, more people can find it.

Moreover, citation rates are higher for open access articles than for those behind a paywall, which makes good sense. If more people are able to discover and access your article, more people are able to use it and cite it. This benefit has been demonstrated in research articles across disciplines and in the data found in review articles, such as the data shown here. Additionally, studies have found that making articles open access often leads to greater attention on social media platforms and greater visibility for authors. Increased access also addresses concerns about equity and availability of our research. Remember, one of the benefits of open access is that anyone can discover, read, share, and cite your work regardless of whether or not they're affiliated with an academic institution.

When we refer to equity and access, we'd like you to consider not only who will be able to find and read materials online, but also who will be able to build off of openly available content and publish their work via open access. Supporting open access also helps to promote OU's goals in diversity, equity and inclusion. Open access publishing, such as the open access journals hosted by OU Libraries, allows more voices to be heard, especially voices that have been historically marginalized or under-represented. Equity in access translates to promotion and tenure considerations as well. By decoupling authors' impacts from the journals in which they published, and instead, focusing on the merits of contributions at the author or article level, we can help ensure scholars from traditionally underrepresented communities can publish where their work will make the most impact for those communities, rather than in journals that may not represent them.

And even traditional commercial journals have discovered that open access increases their author citation rates. While this study includes gold open access publishers such as Frontiers, PLOS, and MDPI (those without a gray bar in this graph) it primarily focuses on traditional publishers that now do hybrid publishing. In fact, most of these publishers tout the benefits of open access on their websites.

(Voice over: Darren Purcell)
We've listed just some of the benefits of open access here. And we also recognize there are different benefits for different stakeholders. Some of those benefits for faculty and graduate students include reaching a broader audience, work being made available more rapidly, an increase in citations. Some of those benefits for OU include stimulating the pace of research and creative activity, since results are more rapidly disseminated, providing the private sector with access to the most recent research results, which could increase partnership opportunities and stimulate development, and increase in prestige that results from an increase in the visibility of OU's scholarly activity.

While many disciplines have already embraced open access due to policy changes and funding agencies and recognition of its advantages, the Taskforce recognizes there remain concerns that will need to be addressed. Namely, the differences among various disciplines and concerns over the role of open access in annual faculty evaluations, as well as the tenure and promotion process. These concerns tend to center on the impacts of choosing open access outlets that lack specific metrics, but – in fact – may be allowing authors to reach audiences more effectively. We addressed these concerns and more in the full report, and we've also created a list of recommendations based on our year-long study of this issue and based on the experiences of other academic institutions. We hope you will take the time to read the full report so that OU stakeholders can better contribute their knowledge and be better stewards of our resources, both intellectual and monetary. We'd like to invite questions now, and we'll do our best to answer them. We're also creating an FAQ section on the Taskforce website, and any of the Taskforce members listed here are happy to answer questions as well.

This text is licensed CC BY 4.0 International.