Consultation response – NPOS2030 Ambition Document

In November-December 2021, the Dutch National Program Open Science (NPOS) set up an open consultation (archived link) to give all Dutch stakeholders the opportunity to provide input on the NPOS2030 Ambition Document, comprised of NPOS’ vision for 2030, the guiding principles underlying this vision, and the proposed program framework and key action lines.

Here we share our submitted response to the consultation. The response was drafted in collaboration and submitted on 2021-12-22.

Jeroen Bosman  (@jeroenbosman)
Bianca Kramer (@MsPhelps)
Jeroen Sondervan  (@jeroenson)

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NPOS2030 Ambition document infographic (source)

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Part 1: NPOS Guiding Principles

General remarks:

• The document lacks a sense of urgency. Apart from the Citizen Science aspect it is not sufficiently clear in what ways this ambition document adds to or deviates from the previous NPOS programme. We also miss reflection on the previous programme. Has that been successful in all respects and if not, how does the current ambition address that? Will those acting in this space (esp. on open access and FAIR data) do anything differently because of this ambition? Will they feel inspired or supported by guidance offered in the abition?

• We are somewhat disappointed by the relatively narrow scope of the ambition and by the lack of concrete proposals to make real steps forward in practising open science. Especially so, because this should be an ambition for the next 8 years. A period in which it is expected to see lots of developments in different aspects regarding Open Science.
  
  Just a few suggestions of the type of actions and goals that we miss:
  • in open science in education: embed the open science skill set and mindset in all bachelor and master programmes at universities and universities of applied sciences;
  • in open access: move towards 50% diamond article publishing by 2027 and create a national open source and publicly governed ORE type publication platform;
  • also in open access: create a national campaign to deposit all retrospective output of current  affiliated researchers using Taverne;
  • in rewards & recognition: foster a culture in which journal/publisher level evaluation of publications/researchers is no longer desired;
  • in public engagement: create support to help researchers to add plain language summaries to all their publications and deposit those with the articles in repositories and also create infrastructure to leverage those summaries in public engagement
  • also in public engagement: explicitly reward researchers for using 1% of their research time to check and improve wikipedia on their topics

• Overall the structure of the entire document could be better and we suggest shortening of the document. Parts of chapter 1 (especially section 1.3) could be integrated in the following chapters 2, 3 and 4. As a reader it is confusing to first read quite elaborately about these topics and then see them detailed even more in separate chapters. We suggest to integrate 1.3 into the three following chapters, thus dealing with the vision, mission and action lines in a coherent way in one place for each of the three domains.

• The structure of Chapter 1 is unbalanced. It begins with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, But on further reading, this definition seems to keep standing on its own. Throughout the document, little or no connections are made with the recommendation and to what extent the NPOS adopts this definition in full. By making this more clear and more importantly justify the choices being made that are guided by the UNESCO Recommendation, it would make the NPOS statement much stronger and ‘embedded’. By doing so, it is probably also much easier to connect principles to vision and action lines. 

• In line with the previous comment, the ‘Guiding Principles’ as they are currently presented seem to be a selection. Moreover, it is not well motivated why especially this set of principles is chosen. This should be explained/justified more. Now section 1.1.1 works as a perfect hook, but the following section(s) are not using that hook sufficiently.

• We suggest adding a glossary with definitions of the main concepts, to make the document more accessible to readers that are new to open science discussions. It will also help with the consistent use of definitions throughout the document (e.g. now confusion is created by using all kinds of alternatives to the ‘as open as’ adage). 
  

Remarks on specific Guiding principles:

• The concepts of digital and academic sovereignty need much more explanation, especially as they are relatively new concepts and because they play an important role in various parts of the document. Also, it should be made more clear to what extent these are considered a driving force for open science (‘the interest of transparent, inclusive and reliable knowledge creation’) or, conversely, as a barrier to openness.
  
• The concept of subsidiarity also needs further clarification. It is implied that it will guide the process of the transition and which stakeholder will take up which role. It invokes the question of who this document is for. Is the document voicing the ambition of all stakeholders in NPOS? Also, the implications of this principle should be made more clear. What type of issues do require more national or centralized action even if that might deviate at some points from when and how all individual stakeholders would have acted (as for instance has been done in the case of national read and publish deals). The report mentions several instances of national initiatives, esp. for a number of platforms, OKB and such, as if decisions have already been taken. How does that fit into the subsidiarity principle?

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Part 2: NPOS Vision for 2030

• We miss a more elaborate and contextualised vision for those aspects in the ambition that are new compared to the previous programme. It should be made clear why aspects like citizen science, digital/academic sovereignty, and the ambition to look at public values and to become less dependent on (commercial) publishers are so important. It should be clear to the reader what would go wrong if these were not addressed in the ambition. That is the case as the document is now. We also miss reference to the latest version of the Guiding Principles on Management for Research Information and its recommendations.

• We appreciate the aspect of making open science normative, but would suggest to not only leave this as something for open science communities to address. There is a clear need for leadership and influential role models to explicitly state a preference for practicing open science and expecting it from others. These could be deans, prize winners, and others.

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Part 3: Programme lines and requirements

• The justification for the programme lines should be made much more prominent. Further on in the document, it is stated that the three programme lines are not the only developments that are deemed important, but that these are the ones where central coordination is considered crucial. The question why this is crucial is unanswered. This should be made much more prominent as an explanation of the choices made for NPOS2030. Also the reason for disregarding other aspects of open science (Open Education, Research Integrity and Reproducibility of scientific results are mentioned) is not very strong. It is stated that these are either already being taken up or relatively new. In our view both do not justify leaving these aspects out
  
• The central role of recognition and rewards in the transition to open science should be mentioned early on in the document, and a justification given as to why it is not in itself considered part of NPOS2030. Currently, it is only explicitly linked to Open Access. Similarly, research integrity gets a mention in relation to the organization of publishing, but in the current ambition document it does not seem to be considered an integral aspect of open science.
  
• We support the suggestion for alternative programme lines as proposed by the Open Science Communities Netherlands in their feedback (available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B4XGJQQSGwvGy1LzevB6n2nUoHiB2qDz/ ).
  
• The programme line Citizen Science seems to take a specific view on the relation between Open Science, Citizen Science and RRI (Figure 3). The emphasis on these as separate developments with only limited overlap encourages compartmentalization, rather than considering open science as an integrated approach towards more relevant, robust and efficient research. 
  
• The requirements are not well integrated with the rest of the document. In the introduction to the requirements, it is mentioned that ‘(…) the Programme Lines will address a set of essential requirements needed for this culture change‘ – but this is not reflected in the description of the programme lines themselves.

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Part 4: Key lines of action for the programme lines:

We only highlight the most pressing issues here. We won’t go into specific details (issues around consistent use of definitions, terminology and (business) models, etc.) 

Open Access

• The action line on applying open access to all output is great but there is not a beginning of ideas on how to realize that. Also it is unclear whether the 100% OA goal is also applied to all outputs.
  
• The importance of metadata is lacking in the mission and action lines for open access, though it is said to be part of the OA programme line. Explicit attention for metadata is important in relation to OA of all scholarly output, as well as openness of this metadata. It could be part of negotiations with publishers as well as a consideration in creating publishing infrastructure.

FAIR data

• We regret that there is no action line on increasing the amount of publicly shared research data sets. It is somewhat disappointing that there is no guidance or ambition on what is expected regarding making data open and open-licensed, beyond just making it FAIR. Additionally we regret that the adage ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ has been watered down to ‘Open as early as possible, and closed when necessary’. We welcome that early opening up is seen as important but would advise to maintain the gradual nature of closedness, as in the original adage. In that context the concept of protected sharing introduced in this ambition should be framed as a way to share data that would otherwise remain closed and not as an excuse to not share in a fully open manner in cases where that is perfectly viable.

Citizen science

• We suggest adding a few lines defining citizen science. Also it would help to make clear how citizen science and public engagement are related, but also how they are different concepts.

• Currently the Citizen Science sections feels not very well integrated with the other sections. We would welcome a vision on the relation between FAIR and open data, open access and citizen science.

Er is wel degelijk een open access citatievoordeel -maar misschien gaat het daar niet om

Reactie op het ScienceGuide artikel ‘Publicaties in open access worden minder geciteerd, maar hebben meer impact’

Bianca Kramer & Jeroen Bosman

[This post in Dutch is a reaction to a Dutch language article in the online magazine ScienceGuide. In it we point at methodological issues in that article where it concerns calculating citation advantage ratios of open access publications.]

Een recent artikel in ScienceGuide ‘Publicaties in open access worden minder geciteerd, maar hebben meer impact’ ‘stelt dat open access (OA) artikelen vaker gedownload, gedeeld en bediscussieerd worden dan artikelen die niet open access beschikbaar zijn (vooral door lezers buiten de academische wereld), maar minder vaak worden geciteerd.

Het artikel rapporteert over onderzoek dat door Springer Nature is uitgevoerd met medewerking van de VSNU en de Nederlandse universiteitsbibliotheken. De stelling dat open access publicaties minder geciteerd worden is echter gebaseerd op een eigen analyse door ScienceGuide van de database Dimensions. Op deze analyse valt ons inziens het een en ander af te dingen, wat we hier met een korte check hopen te laten zien.  

ScienceGuide stelt dat ‘een OA-artikel in 2020 gemiddeld 17 keer geciteerd werd, terwijl verwijzingen naar betaalde artikelen gemiddeld 20 keer voorkwamen’. Als gemiddeld aantal citaties per artikel in één jaar zouden dergelijke hoge aantallen sowieso vraagtekens moeten oproepen.  Voor zover wij kunnen nagaan, is in de analyse van ScienceGuide het aantal citaties in 2020 naar alle OA publicaties in Dimensions gedeeld door het aantal OA publicaties uit 2020: 51,462,310 / 3,092,745 = 16,6 en idem voor gesloten publicaties: 61.099.078 / 3,007,612 = 20,3 (data van 6 maart 2021). Daarbij is niet gefilterd op artikelen, terwijl in de tekst wel wordt gesproken over artikelen. Waar we hier echter op in willen gaan is dat de berekening zoals die is uitgevoerd niet zinvol is en een onjuiste suggestie wekt.

Als de intentie is geweest om na te gaan hoe vaak in 2020 gemiddeld verwezen werd naar een een OA artikel versus een gesloten artikel, zou het aantal citaties in 2020 gedeeld moeten worden door het totaal aantal artikelen in de database (voor zowel OA en gesloten artikelen). Die grove berekening, eveneens uitgevoerd in Dimensions, wijst op een citatievoordeel voor OA artikelen (49,664,551 / 28,393,702 = 1,7 citaties per artikel) vergeleken met gesloten artikelen (56,164,426 / 67,479,719 = 0,8 citaties per artikel).

Het is ook mogelijk om te kijken naar het totaal aantal citaties per artikel (dus niet alleen citaties uit 2020). Als we dat doen voor artikelen uit de jaren 2012-2020 (zie data en berekeningen), zien we opnieuw een citatievoordeel voor OA artikelen, dat toeneemt naarmate artikelen langer geleden gepubliceerd zijn (en dus langer de tijd hebben gehad om geciteerd te worden). Als we de artikelen uitsplitsen naar type OA, blijkt het citatievoordeel het sterkst voor green OA (artikelen gedeeld in een repository) en hybrid OA (OA artikelen in abonnementstijdschriften, die ook gesloten artikelen bevatten). Green OA betekent hier ‘green only’: artikelen die niet ook gold of hybrid of bronze open access zijn.

Omdat gemiddelde aantallen citaties per artikel sterk beïnvloed kunnen worden door een klein aantal artikelen dat extreem vaak geciteerd wordt, hebben we ook gekeken naar de mediaan van het aantal citaties per artikel, een parameter die ook getoond wordt in Dimensions. Hieruit blijkt voor artikelen uit de meest recente jaren geen algemeen citatievoordeel voor OA artikelen versus gesloten artikelen, maar nog steeds wel voor green OA. 

Ten slotte hebben we gekeken naar het percentage artikelen dat (volgens de informatie in Dimensions) ten minste één keer geciteerd is. Het stuk in ScienceGuide noemt de lage citatiegraad van artikelen, naar we aannemen die uit 2020. Dat is niet verwonderlijk omdat artikelen uit dat jaar nog nauwelijks de kans hebben gehad om geciteerd te worden. Sommige artikelen uit 2020 zijn pas net verschenen. Zoals te verwachten is het percentage geciteerde artikelen hoger naarmate artikelen ouder zijn. We zien hier dat, in vergelijking met gesloten artikelen, OA artikelen die ouder zijn 2 jaar wat vaker minimaal één keer geciteerd zijn. Dit geldt in sterke mate voor green OA artikelen, waar het effect voor alle jaren zichtbaar is. Al deze berekeningen en data in deze post zijn overigens beschikbaar.

In tegenstelling tot de berekening die ScienceGuide heeft toegepast, lijken al deze data te wijzen op een (licht) citatievoordeel voor OA artikelen, wat in lijn is met een aantal eerdere onderzoeken, waaronder de grootschalige studies van Archambault et al. (2016) en van Piwowar et al. (2018) en de overzichtsstudie van Lewis (2018). Tevens is er een nuttige lijst van SPARC Europe met tientallen studies waarin is gekeken naar het vermeende citatievoordeel. 

Ook in de studie van Springer Nature die door ScienceGuide besproken wordt, is behalve naar downloads en altmetrics data, gekeken naar citaties. Voor 350K publicaties (artikelen, conference proceedings en boekhoofdstukken) uit 2017 die gerelateerd zijn aan de Sustainable Development Goals werd in Dimensions geen direct citatievoordeel gevonden voor OA versus gesloten publicaties, maar wanneer een regressiemodel werd toegepast met correcties voor ‘meerdere variabelen op het niveau van de publicatie, auteur en tijdschrift’ leek er alsnog een citatievoordeel te zijn voor hybrid OA (zie de figuur hieronder, overgenomen uit het Springer Nature rapport, p. 15). In de studie van Springer Nature is overigens in het geheel niet gekeken naar green OA. 

Het is goed te bedenken dat de door ons uitgevoerde analyses afhankelijk zijn van de compleetheid van publicatie- en citatiedata in Dimensions. Elke database met citatiegegevens heeft zijn eigen beperkingen, maar een vergelijkbare analyse in Lens (een vrij beschikbare bibliografische database) geeft hetzelfde beeld (zie data en grafieken). En uiteraard impliceren statistische verbanden niet automatisch causale verbanden. De populaties waarnaar gekeken wordt kunnen onderling verschillen op andere aspecten dan alleen open access status, wat een effect kan hebben op de gevonden patronen. Het kan om die reden bijvoorbeeld ook interessant zijn om te kijken naar verschillen tussen vakgebieden (zie data en grafieken). Een analyse hiervan voert hier echter te ver.

De gevonden opvallend hogere waarden voor artikelen die via green OA zijn gedeeld komt overeen met wat werd gevonden in de studies van Piwowar et al. en Archambault et al. Hogere waarden voor green en ook hybrid OA, vooral ten opzichte van artikelen in full gold open access tijdschriften kunnen mogelijk worden verklaard uit het feit dat green en hybrid open access vooral van toepassing is op traditionele tijdschriften, met gemiddeld een grotere bekendheid en op dit moment nog vaak sterkere reputatie dan veel van de nieuwere full gold open access tijdschriften. Specifiek voor green OA komen daar mogelijk nog 2 effecten bij: het effect van de glossy tijdschriften waarin open access publiceren tot voor kort niet mogelijk was (zoals Nature, Science en Cell), en waar green OA dus de enige mogelijkheid was, en het effect dat veel tijdschriften in Life Sciences artikelen green OA beschikbaar maken via PubMed Central en dat veel auteurs in Physical Sciences artikelen delen in arXiv. 

De stelling in het ScienceGuide artikel dat OA artikelen minder geciteerd worden dan gesloten artikelen, blijkt in onze analyse niet door de gebruikte data ondersteund te worden. Er zijn wel degelijk sterke aanwijzingen dat open access artikelen vaker geciteerd worden. Los hiervan zijn we geen voorstander van het tegen elkaar afzetten van citaties en ‘externe impact’ als doelen, zeker waar dit laatste wordt afgemeten aan een eendimensionale maat als een geaggregeerde Altmetric score. Het doet geen recht aan de vele manieren waarop impact bereikt kan worden en doet tevens geen recht aan aan de vele beweegredenen om open access te publiceren.

Deze post heeft een CC BY 4.0 license.

Green OA: publishers and journals allowing zero embargo and CC-BY

Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University, July 2020
Accompanying spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/green-OA-policies

Introduction

We witness increased interest in the role of green open access and how it can contribute to the goals of open science. This interest focuses on immediacy (reducing or eliminating embargoes) and usage rights (through open licenses), as these can contribute to wider and faster dissemination, reuse and collaboration in science and scholarship. 

On July 15 2020, cOAlition S announced their Rights Retention Strategy, providing authors with the right to share the accepted manuscript (AAM) of their research articles with an open license and without embargo, as one of the ways to comply with Plan S requirements. This raises the question to what extent immediate and open licensed self archiving of scholarly publications is currently already possible and practiced. Here we provide the results of some analyses carried out earlier this year, intended to at least partially answer that question. We limit this brief study to journal articles and only looked at CC-BY licenses (not CC0, CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-ND, which can also meet Plan S requirements).

Basically, there are two possible approaches to inventorize journals that currently allow immediate green archiving under a CC-BY license:

• policy-based – by checking journal- or publisher policies, either directly or through Sherpa Romeo or Share Your Paper from Open Access Button.
• empirically – by checking evidence for green archiving with 0 embargo and CC-BY license (with potential cross-check against policies to check for validity).

Here we only report on the first approach.

A full overview of journal open access policies and allowances (such as will be provided by the Journal Checker Tool that cOAlition S announced early July 2020) was beyond our scope here. Therefore, we carried out a policy check for a limited set of 36 large publishers to get a view of currently existing options for immediate green archiving with CC-BY license, supplemented with anecdotal data on journals that offer a compliant option. We also briefly discuss the potential and limitations of an empirical approach, and potential publisher motivations behind (not) allowing immediate sharing and sharing under a CC-BY license, respectively.

Our main conclusions are that:

1. Based on stated policies we found very few (18) journals that currently allow the combination of immediate and CC-BY-licensed self archiving.
2. Based on stated policies of 36 large publishers, there are currently ~2800 journals with those publishers that allow immediate green, but all disallow or do not explicitly allow CC-BY.

Large publishers – policies

We checked the 36 largest non-full-OA publishers, based on number of 2019 articles according to Scilit (which uses Crossref data), for self archiving policies allowing immediate sharing on (institutional) repositories. Of these 36 publishers, 18 have zero embargo allowances for at least some of their journals for green sharing of AAMs from subscription (incl. hybrid) journals in institutional or disciplinary repositories. Overall that pertains to at least 2785 journals. Elsevier only allows this in the form of updating a preprint shared on ArXiv or RePEc. From these large publishers, those with the most journals allowing zero embargo repository sharing are  Sage, Emerald, Brill,  CUP, T&F (for social sciences), IOS and APA. Notably, though not a large publisher in terms of papers or journals, the AAAS also allows immediate sharing through repositories.

None of these policies allow using a CC-BY license for sharing in repositories. Three explicitly mention another CC-license (NC or NC-ND), others do not mention licenses at all or ask authors to state that the copyright belongs to the publisher. Sometimes CC-licenses are not explicitly mentioned, but it is indicated that the AAM shared in repositories are for personal and/or non-commercial use only. 

For the data see columns F-H in the tab ‘Green OA‘ in the accompanying spreadsheet.

Other evidence

From the literature and news sources we know of a few examples of single publishers allowing zero embargo sharing in repositories combined with a CC-BY license:

• ASCB:
  • Molecular Biology of the Cell (PV OA (CC-BY) after 2 months,
    AAM 0 embargo with CC-BY)
• MIT Press:
  • Asian Development Review (full OA but PV has no open license)
  • Computational Linguistics (full OA but PV=CC-BY-NC-ND)
• Microbiology Society
  • Microbiology
  • Journal of general Virology
  • Journal of medical Microbiology
  • Microbial genomics
  • International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology
  • JMM case reports
• Royal Society
  • Biology Letters
  • Interface
  • Interface Focus
  • Notes and records
  • Philosophical Transactions A
  • Philosophical Transactions B
  • Proceedings A 
  • Proceedings B 

A check of the long tail of smaller publishers could yield additional examples of journals compliant with 0 embargo / CC-BY sharing from smaller publishers. 

Empirical analysis of green archiving

Empirical analysis of actual green archiving behaviour (e.g. using Unpaywall and/or Unpaywall data in Lens.org) could also provide leads to journals allowing early sharing.

Since Unpaywall data do not contain information on the date a green archived copy was made available in a repository, a direct empirical analysis of zero-embargo archiving is not readily possible. As a proxy, a selection could be made of articles published in a period of 3 months before a given database snapshot, and then identifying those that are only available as green OA. A period of 3 months, rather than 1 month or less, would allow for some delay in posting to a repository. 

The benefit of using Lens.org for such an analysis is the availability of a user-friendly public interface to perform queries in real time. The disadvantage is that, although Lens sources OA information from Unpaywall, no license information for green OA is included, and no distinction is made between submitted, accepted and published versions. Analyses could also be done on a snapshot of the Unpaywall database directly, which includes license information for green OA (where available) and provides version information.

Gap analysis report

In our previous gap analysis report that gave a snapshot of publication year 2017, we did harvest policies from Sherpa Romeo systematically for the subset of journals included in the gap analysis (journals in Web of Science publishing articles resulting from Plan S-funded research). As explained above, updating this approach was beyond our scope for this exercise. 

In our original gap analysis data, we found no examples of journals that allowed 0 embargo in combination with CC-BY. 

Journal policies for green OA: embargo lengths and licenses
(source: Open access potential and uptake in the context of Plan S – a partial gap analysis)

Potential publisher motivations 

From checking policies and behaviour, different publisher approaches emerge regarding embargoes and licenses for self-archived article versions. It seems that the reluctance of publishers to allow immediate sharing is weaker overall than the reluctance to allow CC-BY for green OA. That may have to do with the reasons behind these two types of reluctance. 

The reason to not allow immediate sharing may concern fears of losing subscription income and perhaps also a dwindling effect on visitors to their platform. However, several publishers have noticed that this fear may be ungrounded, as libraries do not unsubscribe yet just because some percentage of articles is also immediately available as AAM, not only because of incomplete open availability but also because of the wish to provide access to published versions in their platform context. Some publishers (e.g. Sage) have also publicly stated that they do not witness a negative effect on subscriptions. 

For the reluctance to allow CC-BY licenses we expect other reasons to be at play, primarily the desire to be in control over how, where and in what form content is shared. This relates to  protecting income from derivative publications (reprints, printing-on-demand, anthologies etc.) and also to preventing others having any monetary gain from including content on competing platforms. 

Another aspect is the inability of publishers to require linking back to the publisher version in cases where the CC-BY licensed AAM in the repository is reused, rather than depending on community norms to provide information on and links to various versions of a publication.

Looking at the empirical evidence and these considerations, it can potentially be expected that across publishers, a move towards shorter embargoes might be easier to achieve than a move towards a fully open license for green-archived versions. It should be noted that while there are examples of publishers allowing shorter embargoes in response to specific funder mandates (e.g from Wellcome, NIH), to our knowledge there has not, prior to Plan S, been funder or institutional pressure to require open licenses for green archived AAMs. Thus, it will remain to be seen whether publishers would be inclined to move in this direction in response. The reactions to the letter cOAlition S sent to a large number of publishers to inform them on the cOAlition S Rights retention Strategy should provide clarity on that. 

In addition to funder policies, institutions and governments could further support this development through policies and legislation relating to copyright retention, as well as zero embargoes and licenses for green OA archiving of publications resulting from publicly funded research. This could provide authors with more rights and put pressure on publishers to seriously reconsider their stance on these matters. 

Consultation on Guiding Principles on Management of Research Information and Data

For the sake of transparency and to stimulate discussion we share our submitted responses to the Consultation on Guiding Principles on Management of Research Information and Data, held in June 2020 in the Netherlands by the Dutch association of universities (VSNU). Below, please find the responses by:

Jeroen Bosman orcid.org/0000-0001-5796-2727 (@jeroenbosman)
Bianca Kramer orcid.org/0000-0002-5965-6560 (@MsPhelps)
Jeroen Sondervan orcid.org/0000-0002-9866-0239 (@jeroenson)

The responses were drafted independent of each other and were submitted on 20200619.

A detailed annotation of the guiding principles, with comments from all three of us, can be accessed here:
https://tinyurl.com/vsnu-gp-comments

Finally, in the appendix we share information on a discussion session on the topic at the 2020 Open Publishing Fest.

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Consultation response Jeroen Bosman

Do the principles offer clear and effective guidance for Dutch research institutions?

• The principals come too late. They have been spurred by and drafted during the most important negotiation for which they should apply. That means that they have lost a chance to make a difference and perhaps more important that the issues dealt with in the principles are potentially too much oriented towards the type of deals and collaborations of that specific deal. They are molded for that (Elsevier) deal but not applied to that Elsevier deal.
• Overall the principles are too vague in content and language. Terms like community and knowledge institutions, scholarly capital etc. should be used more consequently and should be better defined.
• Overall it should be made much more clear who has which role in the process and who is to be held to which principles.
• It should be made more clear to what type of projects/services, with what type of partners, these guidelines pertain. Currently that scope is not exactly clear.
• The decision process, roles and timeline for an OKB should be made more transparent. There is reference to an ambition, but it is unclear where that comes from. 
• Many aspects of the guidelines pertain to scholarly metadata. It is common practice for most publishers and certainly for institutions practicing open science to share data fully openly, often with a CC0 license. For those (meta)data you cannot strive to be in control, because you already set the data free. So the guidelines partially conflict with the institutions’ own open science practices.

Are there any significant aspects missing within the principles?

• The decision process, roles and timeline for an OKB should be made more transparent. There is reference to an ambition, but it is unclear where that comes from. 
• Many aspects of lock-in and oligopolistic market behaviour are not addressed by these principles. Especially package deals, UX-compatibility, procedure adaptation and collaboration opportunity still make it difficult to switch to another vendor of combine offerings from vendors. See Figure 1 below with forms of lock-in.
• Principles currently do not preclude public investment to be commercially appropriated, while they allow creativity and IP created collaboratively to be become fully owned by the commercial partner, without the right for institutions to re-use its own creativity and investment in future collaborative endeavours. The principles should very clearly reserve the rights of publicly generated IP to the institutions, allowing them to share in any way they like, preferably fully open with a very liberal license allowing reuse for any purpose by any party.
• The principles should make it clear that collaborations to create infrastructure or contracts to buy services should not be an integral part of a publish & read contract for content, but dealt with separately and publicly procured. That is important to make sure there will not be too much pressure to creatively search for options that are barely compliant with the guiding principles just to not jeopardize the deal as a whole.

Figure 1 – Six forms of vendor lock-in

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Consultation response Bianca Kramer

Do the principles offer clear and effective guidance for Dutch research institutions?

There is unclarity regarding both the scope of the principles and how they are to be implemented:

• It is unclear whether the principles apply to infrastructure regarding research information (metadata on research outputs) or also to infrastructure supporting the creation of research output (e.g. data analysis and archiving, publication from preregistration to peer review). 
• More specifically, it is unclear whether the principles apply only to the creation of a ‘Dutch Open Knowledge base’ (or projects that could contribute to that) or also to collaboration on, or procurement of, other research tools/platforms – either by individual institutions and/or consortia of institutions.
• It is unclear whether the principles apply only to collaboration with commercial parties, or equally to collaborations with non-profit and/or public parties. This is not simply a distinction between ‘buy’ and ‘make’ – as collaborations with external non-profit and public third parties can be considered and invested in similar to agreements with commercial third partners.
• It is unclear to what extent the main aim of the principles is to ensure open availability of metadata (including provenance) for any party to use and build upon (consistent with open science practices), or conversely, to control access to and use of metadata. If the former, it could be helpful to separate requirements for provenance and openness of metadata from ownership and governance of the infrastructures themselves. 

The above points are fundamental questions that are, in my opinion, not sufficiently answered in the document. Part of this is due to ambiguous use of terminology in the document. More clarity on scope, and specificity in use of terminology, would be helpful. 

Are there any significant aspects missing within the principles?

• In the principles, focus seems to be on transparency and interoperability at the level of (meta)data: “data in-data out” (including attention to enriched/derivative data, which is good). However, what is lacking is attention for open source, open algorithms, and IP for creation of the infrastructure.
• It is not sufficiently outlined what the role of public procurement in the selection of third parties will be, and what measures are envisioned to prevent soft vendor lock-in, for instance uncoupling unique content provision from exchangeable service provision.
• The participation of third parties in infrastructure governance (GP6) should not jeopardize the principle of community-owned governance. In particular, public contributions to infrastructure should not be allowed to be commercially enclosed, but should remain open to the community to use and build upon, also after a contract with a third party has ended.
• The fact that these principles have been developed as an extension of an initial set of principles agreed upon with Elsevier for collaboration on services for a Dutch Open Knowledge Base remains deeply uncomfortable. It would have been far preferred if the Dutch Research Institutions would have independently drafted and consulted on such principles, and defined ambitions for a project like an Open Knowledge Base, prior to negotiations with any third party.

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Consultation response Jeroen Sondervan

Do the principles offer clear and effective guidance for Dutch research institutions?

This set of principles is a good and important start for the urgent discussions on this topic and which we should be addressing continuously within academia for the next few years. But this is only a start. It seems that important aspects (e.g. ownership, interoperability and ‘community’ governance) are being addressed, but what is confusing in the entire structure of the document is how ‘metadata (and research information)’ and ‘research data’ are as it seems being used as similar entities. 

The introduction (heading 2) is focusing on metadata and the importance of this type of data to be open for others to ‘access, reuse, enrich and describe according to existing, open standards, identifiers, ontologies and thesauri’. Principles for research data, which are very much needed and may have similarities with, but also specificities compared to metadata, are not made explicitly. 

However, it’s important to make these principles meaningful for both categories from the start to leave out any ambiguity in following discussions. This must be made much clearer across the entire document. Are these principles applicable to both categories? Are there any exemptions, and why? Will they differ regarding the use of third party infrastructure and services? Are there principles missing, which can only be applied to one of the categories?

Another important issue, which can lead to a tunnel vision in the discussion(s) is the use of the term ‘commercial third parties’. This is too narrow. These principles should be applied to every entity (profit, non-profit, governmental, etc.) academia will be dealing with outside its own premises in regard to developing infrastructure and publishing services. 

The way in which the ‘Open Knowledge Base’ is presented in the document reads as it is already in jugs and jars. A sentence like ‘the Dutch research institutions have the ambition to create themselves an Open Knowledge Base (OKB)’ could be read as if the idea of the OKB was first, and we needed these principles to back it up. 

Is this idea of the OKB consolidated amongst the institutions? Have discussions being held in faculty and amongst universities? This is unclear. I’m not aware of any consolidation of this idea of an OKB other than two public blog posts published recently that address the concept of an  OKB. The discussion should be the other way around. We first work on a common ground and broad acceptance of these principles and then we should start thinking about an OKB and its features.

Are there any significant aspects missing within the principles?

• It’s important to have clarity on definitions that are being used throughout the document. What do ‘we’ mean with specific terms being used. What do we mean by e.g. ‘community’, ‘ownership’, etc. etc. A list of definitions could help clarification.
• The word licensing, or better ‘open’ licensing is nowhere to be found. The document would gain strength if this is explicitly stated as part of the principle(s) (e.g. in the ownership and/or interoperability sections). The scholarly metadata should ideally be licensed under a CC0 license in order to be reusable as much as possible. How does this relate to the ownership as stated in GP6 – Community owned governance? This principle seems to focus on research data only. For this type of data other licenses could or should apply. Here you see the evident importance of being absolutely clear about the typologies of ‘data’.    
• Make more explicit under what conditions the future infrastructure (and/or publishing services) would be operating (e.g. open source, open standards/APIs, data licensed under CC0, etc.etc.). Important to define the bare minimum. 
• Add ‘control’ to ownership, so it is clear that academia not only owns but also keeps control (under these guiding principles) of the research (information) data. 
• How to achieve transparency in the entire process should be made more explicit. Something like the ‘transparent agreement system’ (GP3) is too vague or even more so unclear and should be explained. So, not only transparency measures for ‘technical, legal and operational agreements for metadata sharing’ but for the entire governance on these guiding principles. 

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Appendix:

Fig. 2 Open Publishing Fest session

On May 28, we organized and moderated a 1-hour panel discussion on the proposed guiding principles during the Open Publishing Fest, with participants including researchers, non-profit and for-profit tool providers, and proponents of open infrastructure. A video registration of the session is available on YouTube.

Below some of the points that were raised in this discussion:

• It is important to take a values-driven approach, which can then be translated into what is built and how
• Focus should be on providing rights, rather than on regulating/restricting collaboration
• Opportunities and barriers for (smaller) players, and the need for clarity on the criteria for participation
• Do the principles represent the needs of the research community?
• More clarity is needed on what is wanted, also in terms of openness
• Better alignment with existing principles, like the SPARC NA Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services
• Tools from external parties can be used, but implementation and control of infrastructure has to remain in an academic-controlled organization

 

Open access potential and uptake in the context of Plan S – a partial gap analysis

Today we released the report Open access potential and uptake in the context of Plan S – a partial gap analysis, which aims to provide cOAlition S with initial quantitative and descriptive data on the availability and usage of various open access options in different fields and subdisciplines, and, as far as possible, their compliance with Plan S requirements. This work was commissioned on behalf of cOAlition S by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), a member of cOAlition S.

The reports builds on the work described in two of our 2018 posts: Towards a Plan S gap analysis? (1) Open access potential across disciplines and Towards a Plan S gap analysis? (2) Gold open access journals in WoS and DOAJ. The new report extends the methodology and range of data used, including more information on hybrid and green OA from Crossref, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall directly Also, it provides more detail, with narrative sketches of publication cultures in 30 fields. In the appendix of the report, some other aspects of the open access landscape are addressed, such as journal size distribution and publisher types.

Main results
Within the limitations of our approach using Web of Science (see below), the results show that in all main fields, including arts & humanities, over 75% of journals in our analysis do allow gold open access publishing. This currently consists predominantly of hybrid journals, which authors can only use in a Plan S compliant publishing route when the journal is part of a transformative arrangement or when authors also immediately share their article as green OA. The most striking result is the very large number of closed publications in hybrid journals, also given the fact that most of these journals do allow green open access.

Regarding licenses we find that a sizeable proportion (52%) of full gold OA journals already allow Plan S compliant licenses as well as copyright retention and importantly, that these journals are responsible for a large majority (78%) of articles published in full OA journals by cOAlition S fundees. Results on the green route to open access show that almost all hybrid journals and about half of the closed journals in our analysis do allow green OA archiving. In physical sciences & technology and life sciences & medicine, a 12 month embargo is most prevalent, with longer embargoes more common in social sciences and especially arts & humanities. At the same time, there are examples of journals with a 0 month embargo in all fields, and especially in social sciences these have a considerable share.

Overall, one could say that while there currently is limited compliance with the various Plan S requirements, there is huge variety among fields and at the same time also a lot of potential and opportunity.

Limitations of using Web of Science
We acknowledge the limitations of the report caused by using Web of Science as the sole source to identify cOAlition S-funded research output. The choice to use Web of Science relates to availability of funder information and field labels, that are essential in this analysis. However, apart from not being an open data source, relying on Web of Science inevitably introduces bias in disciplinary, geographical and language coverage, as well as in coverage of newer OA publication venues and many diamond OA venues. In this light, this report should be seen as a partial gap analysis only. In the appendix of the report, we provide an overview of characteristics of a number of other databases that influence their potential usage in analyses of OA options at funder or institutional level, as well as their coverage of social sciences and humanities specifically.

Feedback and next steps
The narrative sketches of a number of subdisciplines provided in the report are largely informed by the quantitative results of the report. It would be interesting to learn to what extent and how they reflect the image that researchers in these fields have of the availability and usage of open access options in their field, and how these are influenced by the publication culture in that field.

The report is intended as a first step: an exploration in methodology as much as in results. Subsequent interpretation (e.g. on fields where funder investment/action is needed) and decisions on next steps (e.g. on more complete and longitudinal monitoring of Plan S-compliant venues) is intentionally left to cOAlition S.

We want to thank our colleagues at Utrecht University Library for their contributions to this work. Any mistakes and omissions remain our responsibility.

The data underlying the report are shared at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3549020

See also: press release by cOAlition S on the report.

Nine routes towards Plan S compliance – updated

by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

Changes in Plan S compliant options as of May 31, 2019

On May 31, cOAlition-S, the group of funders responsible for Plan S, published the updated Plan S principles and implementation guidance, addressing feedback received during the public consultation period.  Based on these details we updated our scheme of nine routes towards compliance.

The information in the principles and guidance document involves some changes and additional details compared to the draft implementation guidance that was made public on November 27, 2018:

• the option for cOAlition-S members to approve the use of the CC BY-ND license for individual articles
• addition of transformative model agreements and transformative journals to the options for transformative arrangements that allow hybrid journals to be compliant
• specification that funders can (but are not obliged to) financially contribute to transformative arrangements, up until 2024
• removal of the requirement for transformative agreements to include a scenario for  subsequent full transformation to OA

Some of these  changes effect the compliant routes available. We hence made adaptations to the scheme and the list of routes. For each of the routes the scheme shows examples (please treat them as such), assessments of effects on various stakeholders and on overall cost and also whether the route aligns with expected changes in the evaluation system.

Other changes in the principles and implementation guidance do not have a direct effect on the possible routes, but do have the potential to  influence their feasibility and effects. These include the postponement of the formal commencement point of Plan S with one year to January 1 2021,  the relaxation of some of the requirements for repositories, requirements for transparency  of costs and prices, the stipulation that funders will only financially support transformative agreements after 1 of January 2021 where they adhere to the ESAC Guidelines and the elevation to the 10 principles of the commitment to revise evaluation criteria.

The routes

In our view it is useful to discern 4 potential gold routes, 1 hybrid route, 1 hybrid/green route and 3 potential green routes.

1. Using existing or new APC-based gold journals / platforms.
2. Using existing or new non-APC-based gold journals / platforms (a.k.a. diamond).
3. Flipping journals to an APC-based gold model, by publishers or by editors taking the journal with them.
4. Flipping journals to non-APC-based gold (diamond), by publishers or editors taking the journal with them.
5. Using a hybrid journal that is part of a transformative (model) agreement with a funder, institution or consortium, or that is a transformative journal. Funders can choose to support this route financially until the end of 2024.
6. Publishing your article open access and CC-BY(-SA) in a non-compliant hybrid journal and self-archiving that article in a compliant repository.
7. Archiving the publisher version, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
8. Archiving the accepted author manuscript, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
9. Sharing preprints (e.g. in dedicated preprint archives) and using overlay journals for peer review.

Discuss

We hope this is valuable in supporting discussions or that it will at least provoke some comments. For the latter you can either use the comments function below, use Hypothesis or use the Google Slides version of the scheme.

The scheme (click to enlarge)

Plan S feedback

Feedback on the guidance on the Implementation of Plan S by

Bianca Kramer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5965-6560

Jeroen Bosman https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5796-2727

Dated 20190208

 

 

We have a few overall recommendations:

• Improve on the why: make it more clear that Plan S is part of a broader transition towards open science and not only to make papers available and OA cheaper. It is part of changes to make science more efficient, reliable and reusable.
• Plan S brings great potential, and with that also comes great responsibility for cOAlition S funders. From the start, plan S has been criticized for its perceived focus (in intent and/or expected effects) on APC-based OA publishing. In our reading, both the principles and the implementation guidance recognize for all forms of full OA publishing, including diamond OA and new forms of publishing like overlay journals. However, it will depend to no small extent on the actual recognition and support of non-APC based gold OA models by cOAlitionS funders whether plan S will indeed encourage such bibliodiversity and accompanying equity in publishing opportunities. Examples of initiatives to consider in this regard are OJS journal systems by PKP, Coko open source technology based initiatives, Open Library of Humanities, Scoap3, Free Journal Network, and also Scielo and Redalyc in Latin America.
• The issue of evaluation and assessment is tied closely to the effects Plan S can or will have. It is up to cOAlitionS funders to take actionable steps to turn their commitment to fundamentally revise the incentive and reward system of science in line with DORA into practice, at the same time they are putting the Plan S principles into practice. The two can mutually support each other, as open access journals that also implement other open science criteria such as pre-registration, requirements for FAIR data and selection based on rigorous methodological criteria will facilitate evaluation based on research quality.  
• Make sure to (also) provide Plan S in the form of one integrated document containing the why, the what and the how on one document. Currently it is too easy to overlook the why. That document should be openly licensed and shared in a reliable archive.
• In the implementation document include a (graphical) timeline of changes and deadlines.

 

Looking at your first question for feedback (Is there anything unclear or are there any issues that have not been addressed by the guidance document?) we would like to bring a number of issues to your attention.

 

Feedback on article 2:

• There is uncertainty over acceptance of overlay journals and generally journal external peer review systems. The implementation document lists as a basic requirement for journals and platforms that they are registered in DOAJ or applying for registration with DOAJ. The problem is that we are not sure whether DOAJ will list/accept non-journals peer review platforms or overlay journals. They do list SciPost physics, but Scipost considers itself a full fledged publication platform. We understand that it is the cOAlition’s intention to support this route, but as it is in some ways unchartered territory, it would be wise to specifically indicate how quality certification is done for non-journal venues

 

Feedback on article 8:

• Acknowledging the resulting limits on potential (re)use, consider including an opt-out of the license requirements by accepting CC-BY-ND when requested, in order to increase support of humanities.

 

Feedback on article 9:

• Acceptance of separation of publishing and peer review in 2 locations/systems.
  The implementation guidance text potentially casts some doubts about the eligibility of overlay journals when the publication (including any revisions following peer review) resides on e.g. a preprint server or repository, rather than being published on the overlay journal platform. In these cases, only the peer review is taken on by the overlay journal, and the article would of course be listed as being included in the overlay journal. In terms of the four traditional functions of publishing, the overlay journal would serve the functions of certification and dissemination, but not those of registration and archiving.
  Open Access platforms referred to in this section are publishing platforms for the original publication of research output (for example scholarly articles and conference proceedings). Platforms that merely serve to aggregate or re-publish content that has already been published elsewhere are not included. In this regard, it is also interesting to note that Jean-Sebastian Caux commented on our earlier version of the then-eight routes that he does not consider SciPost an overlay journal in that sense of the word, because SciPost does publish articles on its own platform (https://101innovations.wordpress.com/2018/10/22/eight-routes-towards-plan-s-compliance/#comment-203). A possible way to elucidate the intent of cOAlition S in this regard  might be to explicitly mention (perhaps added to the paragraph quoted above) that overlay journals taking on peer review and publishing the resulting articles are compliant, even when the articles themselves do not reside on the platform of the overlay journal. But this is indeed relatively uncharted territory.

 

Feedback on articles 9 and 10:

• The are quite some (technical) requirements for journals and repositories. We would like to see cOAlition S to commit to support the implementation of those requirements by smaller (esp. non-APC-based) journals and repositories. This can be done by (financially) supporting technical solutions and co-organize training, materials (e.g. video) and meetings to help implementation.
• The requirements for journals do not seem to apply to hybrid journals in transformative agreements. This creates the strange situation that a lot of hybrid journals will be held to much lower standards than full OA journals, platforms and repositories and do not have to invest until (in some cases, depending on agreement timing) 2025. To redress this to some extent, we would like to advise relaxation of the technical and other requirements mentioned in article 9.2 and 10.2  (XML, JATS (or equivalent), API, CC0 metadata incl. references, and transparent cost/prices) for instance until 2021 (instead of 2020).

 

Feedback on article 11:

• It says now “COAlition S acknowledges existing transformative agreements. However, from 2020 onward, new agreements need to fulfil the following conditions to achieve compliance with Plan S”. There is a chance that by pre-2020 signing of long term contracts hybrid could remain compliant even after 2024. To avoid that we would change the wording to include a maximum running period length for existing (pre-2020) contracts to be acknowledged. E.g. change this into “COAlition S acknowledges existing transformative agreements with contract periods that do not go beyond 2022”.
• We also recommend replacing ‘existing transformative agreements’ with ‘existing off-setting, read-and-publish and publish-and-read agreements’ to prevent confusion as to what is meant by ‘transformative agreements’.
• It says now “The negotiated agreements need to include a scenario that describes how the publication venues will be converted to full Open Access after the contract expires.” To avoid leaving room for multiple interpretations of the flipping deadline we would change the phrasing in such a way that it is beyond any doubt what is meant exactly. (E.g. “at the moment the contract expires”, or “within a year after the contract expires”.)

 

 

Towards a Plan S gap analysis? (2) Gold open access journals in WoS and DOAJ

(NB this post is accompanied by a another post, on open access potential across disciplines, in the light of Plan S)

In our previous blogpost, we explored open access (OA)  potential (in terms of journals and publications) across disciplines, with an eye towards Plan S. For that exercise, we looked at a particular subset of journals, namely those included in Web of Science. We fully acknowledge this practical decision leads to limitation and bias in the results. In particular this concerns a bias against:

• recently launched journals
• non-traditional journal types
• smaller journals not (yet) meeting the technical requirements of WoS
• journals in languages other than English
• journals from non-Western regions

To further explore this bias, and give context to the interpretation of results derived from looking at full gold OA journals in Web of Science only, we analyzed the inclusion of DOAJ journals in WoS per major discipline.

We also looked at the proportion of DOAJ journals (and articles/reviews therein) in different parts of the Web of Science Core Collection that we used: either in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) / Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) /Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), or in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

The Emerging Sources Citation Index contains a range of journals not (yet) indexed in the other citation indexes, including journals in emerging scientific fields and regional journals. It uses the same quality criteria for inclusion as the other citation indexes, notably: journals should be peer reviewed, follow ethical publishing practices, meet Web of Science’s technical requirements, and have English language bibliographic information. Journals also have to publish actively with current issues and articles posted regularly. Citation impact and a strict publication schedule is not a criterion for inclusion of journals in ESCI, which means that also newer journals can be part of ESCI. Journals in ESCI and the AHCI do not have a Clarivate impact factor.

Method
We compared the number of DOAJ journals in Web of Science to the total number of journals in DOAJ per discipline. For this, we made a mapping  of the LCC-classification used in DOAJ to the major disciplines used in Web of Science, combining Physical Sciences and Technology into one to get four major disciplines.

For a number of (sub)disciplines, we identified the number of full gold journals in Web of Science Core Collection, as well as the number of publications from 2017 (articles & reviews) in those journals. We also looked what proportion of these journals (and the publications therein) are listed in ESCI as opposed to SCIE/SSCI/AHCI. For subdisciplines in Web of Science, we identified 10 research areas in each major discipline with the highest number of articles & reviews in 2017. Web of Science makes use of data from Unpaywall for OA classification at article-level.

All data underlying this analysis are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1979937

Results

Looking at the total number of journals in DOAJ and the proportion thereof included in Web of Science (Fig 1, Table 1) shows that Web of Science covers only 32% of journals in DOAJ, and 66% of those are covered in ESCI. For Social Sciences and Humanities, the proportion of DOAJ journals included in WoS is only 20%, and >80% of these journals are covered in ESCI, not SSCI/AHCI. This means that only looking at WoS leaves out 60-80% of DOAJ journals (depending on discipline), and only looking at the ‘traditional’ citation indexes SCIE/SSCI/AHCI restricts this even further.

Fig 1. Coverage of DOAJ journals in WoS

Table 1. Coverage of DOAJ journals in WoS (percentages)

We then compared the the proportion of DOAJ journals covered in SCIE/SSCI/AHCI versus ESCI, to the proportion of publications in those journals in the two sets of citation indexes (Fig 3). This reveals that for Physical Sciences & Technology and for Life Sciences & Medicine, the majority of full gold OA articles in WoS is published in journals included in SCIE, indicating that journals in ESCI might predominantly be smaller, lower volume journals. For Social Sciences and for Humanities, however, journals in ESCI account for the majority of gold OA articles in WoS. This means that due to WoS indexing practices, a large proportion of gold OA articles in these disciplines is excluded when considering only what’s covered in SSCI and AHCI.

Fig 2. Gold OA journals and publications in WoS

The overall patterns observed for the major disciplines can be explored more in detail when looking at subdisciplines (Fig 3). Here, some interesting differences between subdisciplines within a major discipline emerge.

• In Physical Sciences and Technology, three subdisciplines (Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences) have a large proportion of full OA journals that is covered in ESCI rather than SCIE, and especially for Engineering, these account for a sizeable part of full gold OA articles in that subdiscipline.
• In Life Sciences and Biomedicine,  General and Internal Medicine seems to be an exception with both the largest proportion  of full OA journals in ESCI as well as the largest share of full gold OA publications coming from these journals. In contrast, in Cell Biology, virtually all full gold OA publications are from journals included in SCIE.
• In Social Sciences, only in Psychology a majority of full gold OA publications is in journals covered in SSCI, even though for this discipline, as for all other in Social Sciences, the large majority of full gold OA journals is part of ESCI, not SSCI.
• In Arts & Humanities the pattern seems to be consistent across subdisciplines, perhaps with the exception of Religion, which seems to have a relatively large proportion of articles in AHCI journals, and Architecture, where virtually all journals (and thus, publications) are in ESCI, not AHCI.

Fig 3. Full gold OA journals and publications in Web of Science, per subdiscipline

Looking beyond traditional citation indexes

Our results clearly show that in all disciplines, the traditional citation indexes in WoS (SCIE, SSCI and AHCI) cover only a minority of existing full gold OA journals. Looking at publication behaviour, journals included in ESCI account for a large number of gold OA publications in many (sub)disciplines, especially in Social Sciences and Humanities. Especially in terms of an analysis of availability of full OA publication venues in the context of Plan S, it will be interesting to look closer at titles included in both SCIE/SSCI/AHCI and  ESCI per (sub)discipline and assess the relevance of these titles to different groups of researchers within that discipline (for instance by looking at publication volume, language, content from cOAlitions S or EU countries, readership/citations from cOAlition S or EU countries). Looking at publication venues beyond traditional citation indexes fits well with the ambition of Plan S funders to move away from evaluation based on journal prestige as measured by impact factors. It should also be kept in mind that ESCI marks but a small extension of coverage of full gold OA journals, compared to the large part of DOAJ journals that are not covered by WoS at all.

Encore: Plan S criteria for gold OA journals

So far, we have looked at coverage of all DOAJ journals, irrespective of whether they meet specific criteria of Plan S for publication in full OA journals and platforms, including copyright retention and CC-BY license*.

Analyzing data available through DOAJ (supplemented with our mapping to WoS major disciplines) shows that currently, 28% of DOAJ journals complies with these two criteria (Fig 4). That proportion is somewhat higher for Physical Sciences & Technology and Life Sciences & Medicine, and lower for Social Sciences & Humanities. It should be noted that when a journal allows multiple licenses (e.g. CC-BY and CC-BY-NC-ND), DOAJ includes only the most strict license in its journal list download. Therefore, the percentages shown here for compliant licensing are likely an underestimation. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that this analysis reflects the current situation, and thereby could also be thought of as pointing towards the potential of available full OA venues if publishers adapt their policies on copyright retention and licensing to align with criteria set out in Plan S.

Fig 4. Copyright criteria (CC-BY and copyright retention) of DOAJ journals

*The current implementation guidance also indicated that CC-BY-SA and CC0 would be acceptable. These have not been included in our analysis (yet).

Towards a Plan S gap analysis? (1) Open access potential across disciplines

(NB this post is accompanied by a second post on presence of full gold open access journals in Web of Science and DOAJ)

In the proposed implementation guidelines for Plan S, it has become clear there will be, for the coming years at least, three ways to open access (OA) that are compliant with Plan S:

• publication in full open access journals and platforms
• deposit in open access repositories of author accepted manuscript (AAM) or publisher version (VOR)
• publishing in hybrid journals that are part of transformative agreements

Additional requirements concern copyright (copyright retention by authors or institutions), licensing (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0), embargo periods (no embargo’s) and technical requirements for open access journals, platforms and repositories.

In the discussion surrounding plan S, one of the issues that keeps coming back is how many publishing venues are currently compliant. Or, phrased differently, how many of their current publication venues researchers fear will no longer be available to them.

However, the current state should be regarded as a starting point, not the end point. As Plan S is meant to effect changes in the system of scholarly publication, it is important to look at the potential for moving towards compliance, both on the side of publishers as well as on the side of authors.

Method
To get a first indication as to what that potential for open access is across different disciplines, we looked at a particular subset of journals, namely those in Web of Science. For this first approach we chose Web of Science because of its multidisciplinary nature, because it covers both open and closed journals, because it has open access detection and because it offers subject categories and finally, because of its functionality in generating and exporting frequency tables of journal titles. We fully recognize the inevitable bias related to using Web of Science as source, and address this further below and in an accompanying blogpost.

For a number of (sub)disciplines, we identified the proportion of full gold, hybrid and closed journals in Web of Science, as well as the proportion of hybrid and closed journals that allows green open access by archiving AAM/VOR in repositories.  We also looked at the number of publications from 2017 (articles & reviews) that were actually made open access (or not) under each of these models.

Some methodological remarks:

• We used the data available in Web of Science for OA classification at the article level. WoS uses Unpaywall data but imposes its own classification criteria:
  • DOAJ gold: article in journal included in DOAJ
  • hybrid: article in non-DOAJ journal, with CC-license
    (NB This excludes hybrid journals that use a publisher-specific license)
  • green: AAM or VOR in repository 
• For journal classification we did not use a journal list, but we classified a journal as gold, hybrid and/or allowing green OA if at least one article from 2017 in that journal was classified as such. This method may underestimate:
  • journals allowing green OA in fields with long embargo’s (esp. A&H)
  • journals allowing hybrid or green OA if those journals have very low publication volumes (increasing the chance that a certain route is not used by any 2017 paper)
• We only looked at green OA for closed articles, i.e. when articles were not also published OA in a gold or hybrid journal.
• Specific plan S criteria are not (yet) taken into account in these data, i.e. copyright retention, CC-BY/CC-BY-SA/CC0 license, no embargo period (for green OA) and being part of transformative agreements (for hybrid journals)
• For breakdown across (sub)disciplines, we used WoS research areas (which are assigned at the journal level). We combined Physical Sciences and Technology into one to get four major disciplines. In each major discipline, we identified 10 subdisciplines  with the highest number of articles & reviews in 2017 ((excluding ‘other topics’ and replacing Astronomy & Astrophysics for Mechanics because of specific interest in green OA in Astronomy & Astrophysics)
• We used the full WoS Core collection available through our institution’s license, which includes the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

All data underlying this analysis are available on Zenodo:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1979937

Results

As seen in Figure 1A-B, the proportion of full gold OA journals is relatively consistent  across major disciplines, as is the proportion of articles published in these journals. Both are between 15-20%. Despite a large proportion of hybrid journals in Physical Sciences & Technology and Life Sciences & Medicine, the actual proportion of articles published OA in hybrid journals is quite low in all disciplines. The majority of hybrid journals (except in Arts & Humanities) allow green OA, as do between 30-45% of closed journals (again except in Arts&Humanities). However, the actual proportion of green OA at the article level is much lower. As said, embargo periods (esp. those exceeding 12 months) might have an overall effect here, but the difference between potential and uptake remains striking.

Fig 1A-B. OA classification of journals and publications (Web of Science, publication year 2017)

Looking at subdisciplines reveals interesting differences both in the availability of open access options and the proportion of articles & reviews using these options (Fig 2).

• In Physical Sciences and Technology, the percentage of journals that is fully gold OA is quite low in most fields, with slightly higher levels in energy fuels, geology, optics and astronomy. Uptake of these journals is lower still, with only the optics and geology fields slightly higher. Hybrid journals are numerous in this discipline but see their gold and green open access options used quite infrequently. The use of green OA for closed journals, where allowed, is also limited, with the exception of astronomy.  (but note that green sharing of preprints is not included in this analysis). In all fields in this discipline over 25% of WoS indexed journals seem to have no open options at all. Of all subdisciplines in our analysis, those in the  physical sciences fields display the starkest contrast between the ample OA options and their limited usage.
• In Life Sciences & Biomedicine, penetration of full gold OA journals  is higher than in Physical sciences, but with starker differences, ranging from very low levels in environmental science and molecular biochemistry to much higher levels for general internal medicine and agriculture. In the Life sciences and Biomedicine discipline, uptake of gold OA journals is quite good, again especially in general internal medicine. Availability of hybrid journals is quite high but their use is limited; exceptions are cell biology and cancer studies that do show high levels of open papers in hybrid journals. Green sharing is a clearly better than in Physical sciences, especially in fields like neurosciences, oncology and cell biology (likely also due to PMC / EuropePMC) but still quite low given the amount of journals allowing it.
• In Social Sciences there is a large percentage of closed non-hybrid subscription journals, but many allow green OA sharing. Alas the uptake of that is limited, as far as detected using Unpaywall data. In this regard the one exception is psychology, with a somewhat higher level of green sharing. Hybrid OA publishing is available less often than in Physical Sciences or Life Sciences, but with relatively high shares in psychology, sociology, geography and public administration. The fields with the highest shares of full gold OA journals are education, linguistics, geography and communication, with usage of gold in Social Sciences more or less corresponding with full gold journal availability.
• In Arts & Humanities, the most striking fact is the very large share of journals offering no open option at all. Like in Social Sciences, usage of gold across Humanities fields more or less corresponds with full gold journal availability. Hybrid options are limited and even more rarely used, except in philosophy fields. Green sharing options are already limited, but their use is even lower.

Fig 2. OA classification of journals and publications in different subdisciplines (Web of Science, publication year 2017)

Increasing Plan-S compliant OA 

Taking these data as a starting point (and taking into account that the proportion of Plan S compliant OA will be lower than the proportions of OA shown here, both for journals and publications), there are a number of ways in which both publishers and authors can increase Plan S-compliant OA (see Fig 3):

• adapt journal policies to make existing journals compliant
  (re: license, copyright retention, transitional agreements, 0 embargo)
• create new journals/platforms or flip existing journals to full OA (preferably diamond OA)
• encourage authors to make use of existing OA options (by mandates, OA funding (including for diamond OA) and changes in evaluation system)

We also made a more detailed analysis of nine possible routes towards plan S-compliance (including potential effects on various stakeholders) that might be of interest here.

Fig 3. Ways to increase Plan S-compliant OA

Towards a gap analysis? Some considerations

In their implementation guidance, cOAlition S states it will commission a gap analysis of Open Access journals/platforms to identify fields and disciplines where there is a need to increase their share. In doing so, we suggest it would be good to not only look at the share of currently existing gold OA journals/platforms, but view this in context of the potential to move towards plan S compliance, both on the side of publishers and authors. Filling any gaps could thus involve supporting new platforms, but also supporting flipping of hybrid/closed journals and supporting authors in making use of these options, or at least considering the effect of the latter two developments on the expected gap size(s).

Another consideration in determining gaps is whether to look at the full landscape of (Plan S-compliant) full gold journals and platforms, or whether to make a selection based on relevance or acceptability to plan S-funded authors, e.g.  by impact factor, by inclusion in an ‘accepted journal list’ (e.g. the Nordic list(s) or the ERA-list) or by other criteria. In our opinion, any such selection should be presented as an optional overlay/filter view, and preferably be based on criteria other than journal prestige, as this is exactly what cOAlition S wants to move away from in the assessment of research.  Some more neutral criteria that could be considered are:

• • Language: English and/or at least one EU language accepted?
  • Content from cOAlition S or EU countries?
  • Readership/citations from cOAlition S or EU countries?
  • Editorial board (partly) from cOAlition S or EU countries?
  • Volume (e.g. papers per annum)

Of course we ourselves already made a selection by using WoS, and we fully recognize this practical decision leads to limitation and bias in the results. For a further analysis of inclusion of DOAJ journals in WoS per discipline, as well as the proportion of DOAJ journals in ESCI vs SCIE/SSCI/AHCI, see the accompanying blogpost ‘Gold OA journals in WoS and DOAJ‘.

To further explore bias in coverage, there are also other journal lists that might be worthwhile to compare (e.g. ROAD, EZB, JournalTOCs, Scopus sources list). Another interesting initiative in this regard is the ISSN-GOLD-OA 2.0 list that provides a matching list of ISSN for Gold Open Access (OA) journals from DOAJ, ROAD, PubMed Central and the Open APC initiative. It is especially important to ensure that existing (and future) publishing platforms, diamond OA journals and overlay journals will be included in any analysis of gold OA publishing venues. One initiative in this area is the crowdsourced inventarisation of (sub)areas within mathematics where there is the most need for Fair Open Access journals.

There are multiple ways in which the rough analysis presented here could be taken further. First, a check on specific Plan S compliant criteria could be added, i.e. on CC-license type, copyright retention, embargo terms, and potentially on inclusion of hybrid journals in transitional agreement. Many of these (though not the latter) could be derived from existing data, e.g. in DOAJ and SherpaRomeo. Furthermore, an analysis such as this would ideally be based on fully open data. While not yet available in one interface that enables the required filtering, faceting and export functionality,  a combination of the following sources would be interesting to explore:

• Unpaywall database (article, journal, publisher and repository info, OA detection)
• LENS.org (article, journal, affiliation and funder info, integration with Unpaywall)
• DOAJ (characteristics of full gold OA journals)
• SherpaRomeo (embargo information)

Ultimately, this could result in an open database that would allow multiple views on the landscape of OA publication venues and the usage thereof, enabling policy makers, service providers (including publishers) and authors alike to make evidence-based decisions in OA publishing. We would welcome an open (funding) call from cOAlition S funders to get people together to think and work on this.

 

Nine routes towards Plan S compliance

by Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

NB Please note there is a separate, updated post based on the Plan S implementation document of May 2019

Changes in Plan S compliant options as of November 27, 2018

On October 22 we posted Eight routes towards Plan S compliance. Meanwhile, cOAlition-S, the group of funders responsible for Plan S, has put out a guidance document detailing  implementation of the plan. Based on those details we updated our scheme of routes to achieve compliance.

The information in the guidance document involves some changes and additional details compared to what was made public on September 4:

• compliance of self archived (green) publications, with a few strict requirements (it has to be immediate, with copyright retained and with a CC-BY, CC-BY-SA or CC0 license)
• compliance of hybrid journals if they are part of a transformative deal with maximum length of 3 years.
• publications in mirror / sister type journals are not compliant
• no cap (yet) on APC-levels

These and some other, smaller changes effect the compliant routes available. We have hence adapted the scheme and the list of routes. For each of the routes the scheme shows examples (please treat them as such), assessments of effects on various stakeholders and on overall cost and also whether the route aligns with expected changes in the evaluation system.

The routes

In our view it is useful to discern 4 potential gold routes, 1 (temporary) hybrid route, 1 hybrid/green route and 3 potential green routes.

1. Using existing or new APC-based gold journals / platforms.
2. Using existing or new non-APC-based gold journals / platforms (a.k.a. diamond).
3. Flipping journals to an APC-based gold model, by publishers or by editors taking the journal with them.
4. Flipping journals to non-APC-based gold (diamond), by publishers or editors taking the journal with them.
5. Using a hybrid journal that is part of a transformative agreement with a funder or institution. This is a temporary option (until the end of 2024).
6. Publishing your article open access and CC-BY in a non-compliant hybrid journal and self-archiving that article in a compliant repository.
7. Archiving the publisher version, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
8. Archiving the accepted author manuscript, on publication, with copyright retained and an open license.
9. Sharing preprints (e.g. in dedicated preprint archives) and using overlay journals for peer review.

Discuss

We hope this is valuable in supporting discussions or that it will at least provoke some comments. For the latter you can either use the comments function below, use Hypothesis or use the Google Slides version of the scheme.

The scheme