The Transition to Open Access

The evolving relationship of publishers and institutional libraries faces critical challenges.

Among the global scholarly publishing community, open access is a well-established fact. A study appearing in February 2018 in the OA mega-journal PeerJ estimated that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA – some 19 million articles in total. The researchers also found that the OA proportion is rising, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid business models. The same study also corroborated the so-called “open-access citation advantage” – finding that OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.

Mandates to authors and publishers from the Wellcome Trust as well as various governments have advanced the OA cause considerably – and raised many questions for all the key stakeholders in academia. Indeed, the evolving relationship of publishers and institutional libraries particularly faces critical challenges.

At the recent London Book Fair, a panel offered CCC’s Chris Kenneally candid assessments of the state of OA today as well as possible directions for sustainable publishing workflow solutions. Joining the discussion were —

• Matthew Day, Head of Open and Data Publishing, Cambridge University Press. Matthew has worked in publishing for over 20 years, starting with editorial work on undergraduate textbooks at Garland Publishing, moving to Open Access journals and databases at BioMed Central and then Nature Publishing Group. Following a couple of years at Wolfram Research, he joined Cambridge University Press where he is responsible for the Press’s policies and activities in Open Access, and Open Research more generally, in both academic books and journals.
• Sven Fund, Managing Director, Knowledge Unlatched. In 2015, Sven founded fullstopp, a consulting and investment agency specializing on scholarly publishing as well as institutions in the educational space. From 2008 until 2015, he was Managing Director of De Gruyter, Berlin. He was Member of the Executive Board, Springer Science+Business Media (now SpringerNature) in 2007 and 2008. Sven is a lecturer at Humboldt University and publishes on Open Access as well as the digital transformation of the publishing industry.
• Dr Danny Kingsley, Deputy Director, Scholarly Communication and Research Services at Cambridge University Library. Her role has responsibility for managing funder mandates for open access and research data management. This includes working closely with colleagues within the University, the UK and internationally to ensure good policy development and implementation. Before moving to the UK she established the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group. This followed on from working for four years as the Manager of Scholarly Communication at the Australian National University, a natural extension of her 2008 PhD into the range of ways different disciplines engage with open access. She has worked as a science communicator for 15 years, including two years with ABC Science Online as a journalist for News in Science.
• Chris Leonard, Head of Product, Emerald Group Publishing. He has worked for 20 years at the interface of publishing and technology in a variety of roles at Current Science, Elsevier, BioMed Central, Qatar Foundation, and Emerald. His passion is making technology useful, usable, and accessible for academic researchers and information professionals. He has experience of setting up new open access publishing operations with BioMed Central and Qatar Foundation, and is currently looking at all things ‘open’ within the research environment and how these can be linked together to create a unique experience for authors and readers.