A DEAL for open access

Abstract

The German DEAL project negotiates full open access publishing with the major publishers for many academic institutions in Germany. If successful, it could have a global impact on funders’ publishing policies.

Open access (OA) publication dates back at least 40 years in some fields such as computation research, but, for the past decade, has attracted increasing attention among scientists from all disciplines as an alternative to subscription‐based journals as the main route for disseminating the results of research. The life sciences were rather slow to join the movement for OA, which took root early in the Millennium. One important step then was the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” in October 2003. It was inspired by Germany's Max Planck Society and the European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO) to support “[n]ew possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet” (openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin‐Declaration). The declaration sets out two key principles, firstly that authors grant “to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship”. The second principle is that authors deposit copies of their work in a suitable OA repository.

Back then, proponents of OA had hoped that the mandate would help to transform scientific publishing towards payment for publication rather than subscriptions, especially as it gained support from other major funding bodies, such as the UK's Wellcome Trust and the US Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI). Yet, progress towards OA has been patchier and slower than expected. “I think that most people involved in the open access debates in the early years, including myself, did not expect that changing the scholarly publishing system would take that long”, commented Georg Botz, Coordinator for Open Access Policy at the Max Planck Society. “We have learned that it is very hard to change institutional and publishing practices in a complex and global academic landscape. The main reason has been described as cultural inertia”.

… proponents of OA had hoped that the mandate would help to transform scientific publishing towards payment for publication rather than subscriptions…

This cultural inertia includes the vested interests of publishers and the varying appeal of the OA model to journals depending on their circulation levels, said Bodo Stern, Chief Development and Strategy Officer at HHMI. “Open access is not more broadly adopted because the subscription model is much more profitable for publishers, especially for publishers of highly selective journals”, he explained. “Open access publishing is financially most viable for high‐volume journals and that's where open access has already had a big impact”.

Negotiations with DEAL

Impatience over the slow progress has been particularly strong in Germany, where universities and funding institutions have been at the vanguard of the OA movement. It eventually led to the DEAL project (https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/) set up in 2014 by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany and led by the country's Rectors’ Conference (HRK). A key objective was to establish national licensing agreements for the entire electronic portfolio from the large academic publishers. In addition, DEAL aims to further advance OA; one of its goals is to make all publications from corresponding authors of eligible institutions in Germany open access immediately upon publication, that being the publish part of its strategy. By the same token, DEAL institutions should have full access to the complete e‐journal portfolio of the publisher—the read part of DEAL. Equally important, DEAL wants to establish fair article‐processing fees to cover publication costs.

DEAL began negotiating with Elsevier late in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley in 2017. Negotiations proceeded relatively smoothly with Springer Nature and Wiley, according to DEAL. Both publishers accepted that the journals market was undergoing radical transformation and agreed to continue existing agreements on an interim basis with prices frozen in order to allow negotiations to conclude. A new DEAL licence is now expected to start during 2018.

However, agreement has not been reached yet with Elsevier, the biggest of the three, whose offers have so far failed to match the project's goals, according to DEAL. For example, Elsevier would only offer green open access—that is, self‐archiving in an open repository—in accordance with its own rules, which would mean that scientists would not have open access to the final, published version of their papers. Above all, Elsevier wants to keep the publish and read components separate, whereas a non‐negotiable red line for DEAL was to integrate them in a single model, because they are entwined and determine overall access rights and costs.

Impatience over the slow progress has been particularly strong in Germany, where universities and funding institutions have been at the vanguard of the OA movement.

Elsevier had perhaps been hoping to continue with models it had successfully negotiated in other countries, such as the Netherlands, where it agreed to make 30% of Dutch‐authored papers freely available from 2018 onwards and even then only after a significant increase in the annual sum paid by institutional libraries. DEAL's spokesperson and president of the German Rectors’ Conference Horst Hippler declined to comment at this stage of the negotiations, but referred to the principles that papers must be immediately open access and that the associated processing costs must be affordable and proportionate.

Global ambitions

There is an important aspect of DEAL not explicitly stated, which is that, although focused on Germany, it is global in ambition and scope. “Open Access by its very nature involves global accessibility”, said Wolfgang Marquardt, chairman of the German Jülich Research Centre, one of Europe's largest interdisciplinary organizations. There is no ‘open access only for Germany’”. This has also been a sticking point in Elsevier's negotiations with DEAL, because the publisher wants to continue with current arrangements in other countries, including the subscription model. This would conflict with the arrangement proposed by DEAL, which requires that papers published by German authors are open access anywhere in the world.

As negotiations with Elsevier continued to stall, some German scientists decided towards the end of 2017 to take more drastic if largely symbolic action by resigning from the editorial boards of various journals owned by Elsevier, Marquardt being one. “We wanted to emphasize that the German research community works together and back the HRK in its ongoing negotiations with Elsevier”, he explained.

Elsevier declined to comment directly on the negotiations but issued a statement indicating that it was keen to find a compromise while indicating that this should apply just to Germany. “Researchers should know that Elsevier is working diligently to find a mutually acceptable solution with the HRK and to put a national agreement in place”, the company said. “Elsevier agrees with HRK's basic requests for a national license and open access, and this is reflected in the numerous constructive proposals that we have submitted to HRK. As the world's third largest open access publisher, we are happy to support a transition to Gold Open Access in a sustainable way”.

There is an important aspect of DEAL not explicitly stated, which is that, although focused on Germany, it is global in ambition and scope.

Indeed, a major disagreement between publishers and OA proponents is the definition of OA or rather the underlying business model. The model that Stern was referring to includes high‐volume journals such as BMJ Open, Scientific Reports or PLOS One that offer full open access after objective peer review for a relatively low article‐processing fee. The second model is journals, such as Cell, that impose an initial embargo period, often 6 months or a year, during which the articles are locked up behind a paywall and after which they become freely accessible. One variant of this is self‐archiving or green open access: The published version of the article is behind a paywall, but the journal allows authors to deposit copies of their paper in some public repository or their institution's website.

Lastly, some journals have a hybrid model: They still sell subscriptions but give authors the option to publish OA upon payment of an article‐processing fee. This model in particular has come in for criticism as it allows publishers to “double dip” by extracting both subscription and article‐processing payments for those papers that go OA immediately. More generally though, there has been impatience over the perceived slow rate of progress towards OA. “There is a striking gap between the widespread embedding of open access as an objective in science policy‐making and the fact that, despite all this support, only about 15 per cent of scholarly papers per year are published as open access”, Botz commented.

… the big publishers are already preparing to become providers of publication services by exploiting big‐data analytics to help researchers conduct searches and identify relevant papers …

DEAL therefore wants to go further than just establishing golden open access for German research institutions and bring about a larger transformation in science publishing. “In my personal view, DEAL can only be a first step”, said Anton Möslang from the Institute for Applied Materials at Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), who also resigned as an editorial board member. “The business model of Elsevier is quite profitable and largely at the expense of the tax payer, at least in those countries where the Universities and the National Research Centres are paid by the governments or the local states”, he commented. “We see that for our libraries it is more and more difficult to afford the increasingly high costs some of the big publishers request. One has also to keep in mind that these huge costs are paid at the bottom line by the tax payer in most of the countries”.

Funding agencies’ role in publishing

This wider ambition of DEAL is supported by HHMI, which in 2007 became the first large research funder in the USA to oblige its investigators to make published results openly accessible. Its policy on Public Access to Publications requires HHMI Investigators to ensure all biomedical articles on which they are a major author are made freely accessible at most 6 months after publication and be deposited in PubMed Central.

“We think the DEAL project is an essential initiative to realign payment streams with publishers”, commented Stern. “Subscription and open access fees are typically paid from different sources. Libraries pay institutional subscription fees, while funders and institutional research budgets typically pay open access fees. This separation of funding sources has allowed commercial publishers to tap into open access funds without reducing their subscription income. In principle, open access should reduce the overall cost of publishing, but this cost saving will not be realized until open access payments are offset from subscription payments and open access publishing grows at the expense of, not in addition to, subscription journals”.

Stern thus supports DEAL's further ambitions to ensure that open access once established continues to work in favour of science as a whole and improve quality of content as well as ease of access. “While we consider open access necessary, it is not sufficient”, he said. “An author's payment for publication in the current open access model creates a strong incentive for publishers to accept papers independent of their quality, elevating the risk that publications become paid advertisements”. This has led to the rise of so‐called predatory open access journals that try to solicit and publish as many papers as possible, often without any peer review. “The best insurance against open access fees compromising quality control at journals would be to make the quality control process itself transparent”, Stern said.

Publishers’ new business models

There is also the question of the publisher's role in a possible future world of total open access. Clearly, the big publishers are already preparing to become providers of publication services by exploiting big‐data analytics to help researchers conduct searches and identify relevant papers as efficiently as possible—akin to becoming the Googles or Amazons of the science publishing world. Indeed, Elsevier now describes itself as a global analytics business rather than a publisher to highlight it is already well along this path of transformation. “I have been observing for many years that some of the large publishers have been internally setting a course towards a future when access to research articles is free”, Botz commented. “They are developing tools and systems to support the research workflow. This comes with many risks, for example lock‐in effects, as well as tracking of users. So, in my view, academia should not repeat the mistakes made in the domain of scientific publishing many years ago. We should not outsource research assessment and evaluation to third party actors, like publishers”.

Against this background, it is not surprising that both research institutions and major funders are revaluating their OA policies. Wellcome announced in March 2018 a full review of its OA policy to take account of these changes, some of which it has instigated itself. In summer 2016, Wellcome launched its own publishing platform, encouraging grant recipients to publish there with fast turnaround and article‐processing fees paid for them. This is contracted out to F1000Research, which charges Wellcome per article on the basis of word length, at US$150 for articles of up to 1,000 words, US$500 for 1,000–2,500 words and US$1,000 for longer articles.

Against this background, it is not surprising that both research institutions and major funders are revaluating their OA policies

Wellcome presented this as a model for other publishing platforms paid for by funders and there are signs it might have had a domino effect. The Gates Foundation announced the Gates Open Research platform in March 2017, modelled on the Wellcome Trust with the same stated objective of accelerating publication of articles and data from research funded by the charity.

The European Union is following suit, having announced in December 2017 proposals to fund a European Commission Open Research Publishing Platform. The stated aim is the same: to offer beneficiaries of its Framework 2020 research programme a free and fast publication option for peer‐reviewed articles and pre‐prints. This platform will complement the current policy in Horizon 2020, which makes open access publication mandatory. The Commission says its proposal is modelled closely on both the Wellcome Trust and Gates Foundation models, being free at the point of delivery. It is also going to outsource building and running of the platform, with a budget of 6.4 million Euros over 4 years.

This gathering momentum behind funder platforms is one reason why Wellcome is now revaluating its whole OA strategy, according to Robert Kiley, its Head of Open Research. As Kiley noted, while its platform has reduced costs of publication per article, overall costs of its OA publishing are rising. Wellcome's average processing charge per article is down from £2,044 in the 2015–2016 academic year to just £793 now as a result of its platform. But these savings are being offset partly as more Wellcome‐attributed research is being published OA, as well as through increases in third‐party OA processing charges. Kiley also drew attention to other emerging publication services, such as Unpaywall, a free web‐browser extension that trawls for papers in more than 5,000 repositories worldwide, including pre‐print servers and institutional databases. Unlike other tools, Unpaywall only looks for legal sources of papers and yet claims to retrieve 47% of all articles its users search for.

As publishers’ invest in analytics and search tools to expand their publication business and to become indispensable for time‐stressed scientists to conduct literature research, open access for publications may well be just one option to ensure that researchers are served by a competitive and diverse market for both publishing and analytics tools.