Wellcome Trust and open access: experience with author-pays model
ASA Conference
21st February 2011
Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services, Wellcome Library, Wellcome Trust ([email protected])
Overview
• Overview of the Trust’s OA policy and how researchers can comply
• Consider levels of compliance
• Changing landscape
• Report on results form a small “author-pays” study
• Conclusions
The Wellcome Trust
• Independent charity; UK’s largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research
• Spends £600 million p.a. in the UK & internationally on our mission; supporting and promoting research to improve human and animal health
• Seeks to improve understanding of the ways science & medicine have developed, & how research affects people and society today
• More information at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
OA at the Wellcome Trust: policy
All research papers – funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust – must be made freely accessible from the PubMed Central and UKPMC repositories as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication
How to comply with Trust’s OA mandate?
• Route 1 Publish in a open access/hybrid journal if available – preferred route
(and often the only route) When fee paid, publisher must deposit “Version of record” into PMC at
time of publication, and attach a licence allowing re-use
• Route 2 If Route 1 is not available, self-archive the author manuscript (including
changes from peer review process) and make that available from PMC & UKPMC within 6 months of publication
• If a publisher offers neither route then: Author can suggest revision to the journal’s copyright agreement –
boilerplate language provided on our website – and see if the publisher will accept this
Look for an alternative publisher
Funding to support mandate• Trust believes that dissemination costs are research costs
• Provides funding to cover OA costs when publisher provides the following service:
– deposits the final version of article in PMC on behalf of author
– article is made available at the time of publication (no embargo)
– article is licensed in ways that allows re-use
Total Open Access funding commitment Oct 2005/06 to Jan 2009/10Includes Open Access Block Grants and Supplementations
£0
£500
£1,000
£1,500
£2,000
£2,500
£3,000
£3,500
2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 2009/10
Financial Year
Va
lue
£'0
00
Grand Total Open Access
Working with publishers
• Trust has worked with all the major STM publishers – encouraging them to develop “Wellcome-compliant” OA options
In 2009, 98% of papers – attributed to the Trust – were published in journals that had a “Wellcome compliant” policy
• Looking to simplify process for authors to select an OA option
• Seeks to make explicit the relationship between subscription costs and uptake of OA option
Figure 1: OA integrated into workflow
Figure 2: Follow-up campaign
Providing infrastructure to support mandate
• Established UKPMC – with 7 other UK research funders
• At its core UKPMC provides functionality for:
publishers to deposit papers (via PMC) and
authors to self-archive papers
Fact extraction from text mining Questions generated in response to query
Compliance? – around 50%• Significant increase from 2006 – but still a long way to go…
Compliance with Wellcome OA mandate
% of papers in PMC
0
10
20
30
40
50
60D
ec-0
6
Mar
-07
Jun-
07
Sep
-07
Dec
-07
Mar
-08
Jun-
08
Sep
-08
Dec
-08
Mar
-09
Jun-
09
Sep
-09
Dec
-09
Mar
-10
Month
Co
mp
lian
ce (
%)
% of papers in PMC
Author pays model & the changing landscape
• The Trust believes the publisher adds value to the research process Wellcome only meet OA costs if publisher provides the full suite of
services (e.g. deposition in PMC, no embargo, full re-use licence)
• Hybrid titles: increasing uptake of this model OUP: 11.4% uptake in 2009 (up from 11.2%) Source
Bioinformatics – 31% (2010); 25% (2008) NPG’s Nature Communication hybrid option – 40% of articles are
published under the OA option
• Full OA journals: increasing in number Raft of new OA titles announced including Scientific Reports, Springer
Open, SageOpen, BMJOpen, Wiley OA journals…. PLoS One published 6749 articles in 2010 making it the largest peer
review journal on the planet!
Author pays model: double payment with hybrid titles?
• Is there risk of “double payment” – subscriptions and author fees? Yes (but is this new? e.g. page charges, colour plates etc.)
• Are subscription costs sensitive to OA payments? 2009 Oxford Journals average journal price increase was by 6.7%; for Oxford
Open titles the average increase was 4.4% Royal Society:
From 2012 we shall implement a new and more transparent pricing policy in which the price of each journal is tied to the number of non-open access articles published in that journal…
NPG2012 site license pricing for hybrid open access journals will be determined by the percentage change in the amount of subscription access articles (2010 versus 2009 content). This means the subscription price will be based on only the amount of subscribed content, independent of the open access content.
Small study of the author pays model: Wellcome experience
• Objectives Determine what the total spend might be for Wellcome Trust if
all papers were routed through the author pays model Ascertain the average and median costs Check that publishers were making these papers fully OA
• Methodology Looked at papers, attributed to Wellcome Trust, and published
in the last quarter of 2010, that were already available in UKPMC
By focussing on articles published within last 3 months – the core set should, in the main, be made-up of “author pays” papers (e.g. self archiving typically takes place after 6 months)
Baseline numbers
Total number of papers in PubMed, attributed to Wellcome Trust funding (Oct 1st 2010 – Dec 31st 2010)
1413
Total number of these papers already available in UKPMC (in January 2011)
460
“Immediate compliance”
[This is lower than the 50% figure, as this study is looking at papers with a zero month embargo. This figure suggests that about 66% of Wellcome papers that adhere with mandate are made freely available at the time of publication ]
33%
Total number of unique journals 188
Total number of unique publishers 42
Where was this research published: full OA journal, hybrid journal or other?
Hybrid v Full OA journals
Hybrid, 260
Full OA, 188
Green, 9
Other, 3
Hybrid
Full OA
Green
Other
N=460
Most used publishers (with OA option)
Top 10 publishers (by volume) constitute 83% of the Wellcome Trust output
Articles -- by publisher
ASM, 11
BMJPG, 12
Wiley, 16
Springer, 17
NAS, 18
ASBMB, 32
BMC, 48
OUP, 57
Elsevier, 66
PLoS, 106
Other, 77
ASM
BMJPG
Wiley
Springer
NAS
ASBMB
BMC
OUP
Elsevier
PLoS
Other
“Other” constitutes 32 other publishers
Most used journals (with an OA option)
Top 10 journals (by volume) constitute 43% of the Wellcome Trust output
Most popular journals
8 9 9 1012 12
1821
31
69
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
PLoSGenetics
PLoSPathogens
American JTrop Med
PLoS Negl.Trop Dis
Malaria Human &Mol. Gen
PNAS NAR J Biol Chem PLoS One
Journal name
Top journals
Hybrid titles
Author–pays: costs
Total number of articles in cohort that attracted an author-side payment
440/460 (95%)
Total spend of APC’s for these 440 articles (excl. VAT)
$1,041,645
Average cost per paper (excl. VAT) $2,367
Median (excl. VAT) $2,250
Mode (excl. VAT) $3,000
Distribution of costs
Number of articles - by $
20
6
91 89
53
163
21
4
13
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
Zero costs $1 to $1000 $1001 - $1500 $1501 - $2000 $2001 - $2500 $2501 - $3000 $3001 - $3500 $3501 - $4000 $4000 - $5000
Author–pays costs: extrapolated total costs for Wellcome Trust
Average cost per paper (excl. VAT) $2,367
Total number of papers attributed to Trust in typical year 5000
Total projected cost to Trust (5000 x $2154) $11.8m
Trust research spend in 09-10 (£586m) $945m
% spend on OA costs as ratio of total research spend 1.25%
Note: These figures assumes all journals offer an OA option, that this option is used by the author, and Wellcome picks up 100% of costs, even when other funders support the research.
Can the author-pays model apply outside of STM funded research?
• Why not?
• SageOpen - new open access publication in the social sciences, behavioural sciences, and humanities
APC of $695 (currently discounted to $195), a significantly lower fee that the rates used by STM publishers
Just as other STM publishers followed the lead of PLoS and BMC, might other humanities publishers will follow Sage?
• Growing number of institutions setting up “central funds” to cover OA costs
Harvard (HOPE) + 13 other members of Compact for OA publishing In the UK 8 institutions have central fund (Pinfield) Other institutions include Lund, Tromso etc have established OA funds
Conclusions
• Growing momentum for OA publishing
• Growing recognition of the benefits of OA SOAP study showed that over 90% of
researchers in the biological sciences believe that research would benefit from OA
• More funding available to meet APC’s Wellcome model; direct & indirect costs; central
funds
• APC fees beginning to fall New OA titles setting lower APC’s than hybrids
Scientific Reports ($1350) BMJOpen ($1500) SpringerOpen ($1065-$1730)
For a funder like Wellcome, OA fees likely to represent around 1.25% of our research spend
