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Elizabeth Marincola

CEO of PLOS (Public Library of Science)

COASP 2013

Why and How We as Leaders of the OA

Community Should Work Together

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The Need for Community

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The Need for Competition

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The Need for Collaboration

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About PLOSPLOS is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy

organization founded to accelerate progress in

science and medicine by leading a transformation

in research communication.

PLOS’ mission is to make the world’s scientific and

medical literature a freely-available public resource

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Outline

• Growth • Challenges• Collaboration and competition• Opportunities for the future• How can we work together?

Growth

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PLOS started as a protest movement34,000 Scientists Pledged to Support OA

PLOSOpen Letter September 2001

We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form. . . .

To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.

Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate, Director, National Cancer Institute

Patrick O. Brown, Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

Michael Eisen, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley

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A Grandmother of “The Movement”

• Executive Director of American Society for Cell Biology • Molecular Biology of the Cell first journal to participate

in PMC• First PMC National Advisory Committee• PLOS Board of Directors• Member, then Chairman of the Board of eLife• PLOS Executive Director

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PLOS is now a leader in research publishing

2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 20140

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

Art

icle

s P

ublis

hed

Growth of large OA Publishers

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2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 -

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

PLOSBMCHindawi

Source: Publisher websites

# Articles Published

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More Open Access Journals Each Year

From 100s of Journals to 1000s

Data: www.doaj.org

Graph: openscience.com/a-good-year-for-open-access/

Growth of accessible articles

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2008 2009 2010 2011 20120

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

1,727,165

415,104

196,796

26,370

PLOS Journal Articles

All APC OA Journal Articles

All OA Journal Articles

All Journal Ar-ticles

Source: Laakso and Björk 2012 (Table 1), which provides data through 2011. 2012 data calculated using average annual growth rate of prior four years.

Growth brings challenges

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Growth is Good, but brings challenges

• Logistics - No longer tens of articles but tens of thousands• Payment management, metadata systems• Quality challenges at scale• Shift in the discussion as OA moves to the policy mainstream• Can no longer be dismissed as fringe and therefore a serious political target

Image courtesy of Biatch at en.wikipedia

Operational challenges for publishers

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• Attract authors• Education of authors• Ensure a good author experience• Attract editors and match to papers• Run an efficient and well-oiled publishing operation

Source:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Lucifer_Butts.gif

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Operational challenges for institutions/funders • The logistics of payments. Move from small number of large subscriptions to many small payments• The logistics of metadata – how to track articles through to publication and afterwards• Demonstrating the impact of published work

Source:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Lucifer_Butts.gif

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Quality and service challenges

• Maintain quality peer review• Ensure low and decreasing

time-to-publication and satisfying publishing experience

• Continue to innovate• Deliver on promise of re-use

of the literature Source:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Professor_Lucifer_Butts.gif

These challenges are different as we scale

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Political challenges

Anti-OA Rhetoric from traditional publishers

Now a much bigger target

Need to bring our expertise to the center of policy making

We are no longer the fringe

Image courtesy of Biatch at en.wikipedia

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Educational Challenges

Confusion about what “Openness” means

Does the journal just provide free access (free to read), or free re-use also? What licenses are used?

How consistent is a journal’s policies with real OA?

Image courtesy of Biatch at en.wikipedia

Collaboration and competition

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We need to work together

• None of us have the capacity to tackle all of this alone• Together we can define best practice and build shared

tools and platforms that deliver the benefits of OA

We need to compete• The benefits of OA arise from effective competition

and transparent pricing• Diversification and experimentation are crucial to

deliver the benefits

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… and We Need to Collaborate Share ideas, concerns, data,

and questions

Discuss best practices

Propose solutions

Collaborate on ways to take OA to the next level

Communicate

Source: flickr.com; author: PYB

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OA publishing is not a fringe activity

• At the center of policy agenda globally

• Yet often the real expertise is not present

• How can we work collectively?

• How to share the load? • How to best bring our

expertise to the policy makers?

Source: flickr.com; author: infrogmation

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Contributing tools to support policy and decision

making:

The Open Access Spectrum

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Answering the Question: What is Open Access ?

Free Availability and Unrestricted Use

PLOS believes that published research articles should be

immediately and freely available online

without restriction,

for the benefit of scientists, science and

the greater public good:

Free access – no charge to access No embargos – immediately available Reuse – Creative Commons Attribution

License (CC BY) to use with proper attribution

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HowOpenIsIt?Measuring Actual Openness

Open Access Spectrum • Recognizes 6 components that

define Open Access publications• Defines what makes a journal more

open vs. less open• Invites informed decisions about

where to publish

A collaboration among:

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Open Access Spectrum Components

Reader Rights

Fees to read all articlesSubscription, membership, etc.

… Free readership immediately upon publication

Reuse Rights

No reuse rights beyond fair use/ limitations & exceptions to copyright (all rights reserved ©)

… Generous reuse and remixing rights (e.g., CC BY license)

Copyrights Publisher holds copyright. No author reuse of published version beyond fair use

… Author holds copyright No restrictions

Author Posting Rights

Author may not post any versions to repositories or websites

… Author may post any version to any repository or website 

Automatic Posting(e.g. PubMed)

No automatic posting in third-party repositories

… Journals make articles automatically available in trusted third-party repositories immediately upon publication.

Machine Readability

Not available in machine-readable format: article full text /metadata

… Community machine-readable standard formats for article full text, metadata, citations, & data (community standard API or protocol)

www.PLOS.org/HowOpenIsIt

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We need to compete…• The benefits of OA arise from effective competition• Diversification and experimentation are crucial to deliver the

benefits• We should be competing to be the best implementers of the

OA vision

Can we collaborate on the frameworks that we compete within? What community structures do we need?

And we need to collaborate…

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Opportunities for the future

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How will PLOS contribute?

• PLOS enjoys “special status” as a community-driven entity that was a founder of the OA movement

• Must constantly respond and get ahead of community demands to retain respect and meet expectations

• Innovation is the key to maintaining cutting-edge

INNOVATION

ADVOCACY

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• A suite of leading journals

• Promote Open Access Adoption

• Technology• Practices• Mindset Changes

PLOS’ Mission

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PLOS’ Core Beliefs

We believe that published research articles should be

immediately and freely available online

without restriction,

for the benefit of scientists, science and

the greater public good:

Free access – no charge to access No embargos – immediately available Reuse – Creative Commons Attribution

License (CC BY) to use with proper attribution

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Building and sharing tools.

Article Level Metrics as an example

PLOS Article Level Metrics

http://article-level-metrics.plos.org

Move beyond traditional measures to assess different forms of article impact

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Building and sharing technology

The PLOS Article Level Metrics AppAn Open Source Platform for managing article metrics

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Making the data available for re-use

Re-use of ALM data by ImpactStory

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Sharing the story of how we succeed

(and also where we don’t)

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A stepwise process of growth…

• PLOS Biologyworks of exceptional significance in all areas of biological science

• PLOS Medicine

research on the major challenges to human health worldwide

• PLOS Geneticsoutstanding original contributions in all areas of genetics and genomics

• PLOS Computational Biologynew insights into living systems at all scales

• PLOS Pathogens

new ideas that contribute to understanding the biology of pathogens 

• PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseasesforgotten diseases affecting the world’s forgotten people

 

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…and innovation

• PLOS ONE

• A journal designed for the internet

• Innovation in peer review criteria

• Today, the worlds largest journal

• PLOS Currents

How can we innovate around the peer review process to deliver critical information at the highest possible speed, while retaining quality? 

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Financial Sustainability

PLOS revenues exceeded expenses for the first time in 2010

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…and experiments that didn’t work

• PLOS Hubs aimed to create spaces where communities could collect and promote papers

• Issues with take-up and the technology platform• Sunset during 2013

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Building community programs

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How to Promote Public Awareness of OA and Show

the Benefits of OA?

The Accelerating Science Award Program recognizes individuals who have applied scientific research – published through Open Access – to innovate in any field and benefit society.

• Three top awards of $30,000 each

• October awards event

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How can we work together?

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WHITE HOUSE Mandates agencies• Define Open Access within 6 months• Make manuscripts available 12 months

after publication • Set policy for data availability (2013)

Influencing policy

CONGRESS Considers Expanded Open Access legislation • FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act) (re-proposed in 2012)

• FASTR (Fair Access to Science and Technology Research) (put before both House and Senate in 2013)

U.K.RCUK Designates £17 million in 2013 to pay Open Access APCs via block grants to research organisations

E.U., Denmark, Ireland, Argentina, Australia…

U.S.

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• Shared platforms and logistics for payments• Effective transfer of metadata and information• Clarity on re-use rights

• Competition on product offerings that deliver real benefits for authors, institutions, and funders

Supporting OA as a Platform

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We need to work together…

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We need to compete…

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We Need to build the Communities to Support

Both competition and collaboration