Professional & Academic Publishing
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In another blow to Elsevier, Norway let its contract with the publishing giant lapse. The decision not to renew its agreement is part of a coordinated effort including other European national consortia and the University of California to pressure Elsevier and other large publishers into publish and read deals. Elsevier responded to the announcement by the Norwegian Directorate for ICT and Joint Services in Higher Education and Research (UNIT) with a short message (of which the following is an excerpt):
While Elsevier is working hard to accommodate the desire of some for an author-pays-to-publish (open access) world, the reality is that current author choices mean that 85 percent of journal articles globally are published under the reader-pays (subscription) model, where authors publish for free. It’s possible to come up with a negotiated agreement at reasonable costs, and Elsevier offered Norway multiple low-cost options for a rapid transition to gold open access publishing, but open access is a service that has to be funded in some form. Norway is essentially asking to receive two services for the price of one.
This echoes Elsevier’s statement with regard to their impasse with the University of California (UC). Elsevier’s position is perfectly reasonable. If European national consortia (and UC) want to pay to make their content free for the rest of the world to read, they need to, you know, actually pay to do that. Saying “we’ll pay APCs but then want all the subscribed content for free” isn’t actually paying for OA—it is moving a euro from one bucket to another and pretending there are two euros.
The counterpoint to this, however, is Wiley. On the same day that Norway announced its impasse with Elsevier, it also announced the successful conclusion of a publish and read deal with Wiley. The question is why such a deal works for Wiley and not Elsevier?
One possible answer is that Wiley is taking a narrowly opportunistic approach. Wiley appears to be saying “If we can get a bit more money out of Norway (and Sweden and Germany and so on), why not?” And Wiley’s deals set it up to do exactly this. The Wiley agreement with Projekt DEAL in Germany, for example, uses the German consortium’s current subscription spending as a baseline for a gold open access deal. However, the Wiley/Projekt DEAL agreement pays Wiley more if the volume of papers published with Wiley increases. Given Germany’s growing research output and Wiley’s first-mover advantage, it is a reasonable bet to make.
The bigger bet that Wiley appears to be making, however, is that it can increase its revenues in Europe via publish and read deals without giving up those gains elsewhere. Wiley, in other words, appears to be convinced that it can maintain its subscription business without price reductions elsewhere—which is to say that it thinks that despite all of the national publish and read deals it has signed in Europe, the volume of its subscribed content will also continue to rise.
Whether they realize it or not, this is also the bet that the national research consortia of Europe are making. If the deals they are signing with Wiley and other publishers result in the publishers having to make price concessions elsewhere (or if they actually were to trigger a global flip to OA), the costs of gold OA deals in Europe will rise—some of them substantially.
Elsevier, not known as an organization to leave money on the table, has analyzed the situation and apparently come to a different view than Wiley. Of course Elsevier has a different journal portfolio and different deals in place elsewhere. Meanwhile, Wiley’s actions put Elsevier under even more pressure.
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Source: The Scientist, Nature, Twitter (@ElsevierConnect)
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Just as The Brief was going to press, we saw this announcement from the University of California and Cambridge University Press confirming they have inked a read and publish deal for the UC system’s ten campuses. Few details have been released as yet, but it does seem to be a read and publish deal (as opposed to a publish and read deal), where there is both a subscription access fee and fees related to publication of research from UC authors. From the release:
Under the agreement, UC will have full and permanent access to the Press’s entire collection of over 400 journals, and open access publishing in Cambridge’s journals will be available to authors across the UC’s 10 campuses. Because the subscription “reading” fee will go down as UC’s open access publishing goes up, the university will see no significant overall increase to the cost of its contract.
This is the first such agreement reached by UC and comes on the heels of their cancellation of system-wide contract with Elsevier. While a relatively small deal, this nonetheless marks a milestone for UC.
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Source: University of California
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In other notable publish and read news, the Max Planck Institutes and the American Chemical Society announced that they have inked a new deal. What caught our attention about this agreement is the following statement:
… individual authors from any of the Max Planck institutes will no longer need to arrange direct payment of open access publication fees. Instead, their publishing costs will be supported through the “read and publish” arrangement between ACS and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), with processing of licensing transactions handled seamlessly with ACS through novel eCommerce functionality it has implemented jointly with the Copyright Clearance Center.
One of the barriers to broader adoption of read and publish deals is the administration of payments and all that goes along with it (validating that a given author is covered by a given arrangement, logging the transaction, processing the payment against a central account, and so on). Only the largest publishers can build such systems—and even if smaller publishers could, how many systems do authors and funding organizations have the patience to deal with? The ACS/CCC system is therefore interesting if it were to become broadly extensible and offered at a reasonable cost.
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Source: American Chemical Society
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Meanwhile, Sweden pulls out of Plan S. In a public statement, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, one of Sweden’s largest private research funders and an early signatory of Plan S, notes that it remains in sympathy with the goals of Plan S, but has reservations about the way the plan was developed and announced. A particular concern is the lack of consultation of the various constituencies within the research community. The Swedish funders, however, plan to remain within the coalition with the aim of altering the policy and its expression.
With Germany and Sweden out of Plan S, and the UK maybe or maybe not withdrawing from the EU (whose Horizon 2020 initiative was the impetus for Plan S), the future of Plan S remains in some doubt. Robert-Jan Smits, the architect of Plan S, had forecast that Plan S would encompass 30% of the world’s research output by the time he left his post last month, whereas the actual number is closer to 3%.
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Source: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
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Richard Poynder is the master of the long introduction. His introductions are often longer than his interviews, but here he sets a new record in this 27-page preamble to a relatively short interview with Omar Barreneche, Executive Secretary of Uruguay’s National Agency for Research and Innovation. The preamble is an essay unto itself and is ostensibly about OA and the Global South. Poynder, however, does an excellent job of framing the current global climate in scholarly publishing and providing the historical context for how we are where we are. A long read but an important one.ntent here
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Source: Open and Shut
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Predatory publisher OMICS International and its owner, Srinubabu Gedela, have been fined $50 million for fraudulent practices related to journal publishing and conferences. A judge in Nevada “granted summary judgment without a trial, accepting as uncontroverted a set of allegations made in 2016 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington, D.C., in its capacity as a consumer watchdog.”
The court’s decision can be read in full here, and there are some entertaining tidbits, such as the part where the FTC has shown that whereas OMICS claims to have used a pool of 50,000 reviewers and editors, it could, in fact, only produce evidence of 380 individuals actually agreeing to serve as editors.
The New York Times reports that the $50 million fine represents “the amount that OMICS netted from its customers between Aug. 25, 2011, and July 31, 2017” per the FTC. That means that OMICS collected an average of $8.3 million annually during this period, an astonishing sum for a business that does very little. Most of the costs of publishing are associated with things like peer review, quality control, copyediting, the care and feeding of editors, and the complex systems to manage all this. If one just publishes every article one receives essentially as-is and performs effectively zero quality control or review, one’s costs are likely to be very low. Which is all to say that while OMICS’ gross revenues are nothing to sneeze at, its net revenues are likely higher than publishers several times its size.
This explains why OMICS acquired two (previously) reputable Canadian science publishers (and attempted to acquire a third) and then converted them to predatory publishers. You would think that if one had a fraudulent business that threw off a bunch of cash it might be prudent to buy a legitimate business to, you know, provide a front or launder the money or whatever (see: Breaking Bad). But then again, another school of thought apparently is that when the margins on the fraudulent business are so good, why bother running a legitimate business at all? Just convert the legitimate business to fraudulent practices and presto—more money!
While there is no doubt that OMICS is a fraud, the real question is: who has been deceived? Were the researchers and scholars who paid OMICS for publication dupes, or willing participants in the scheme? The problem for OMICS may not be the $50 million fine, which the FTC will have a hard time collecting; the larger problem may be the notoriety that comes with the $50 million fine. The service that OMICS was providing many authors had a faint aura of legitimacy and enough smoke and mirrors to provide plausible deniability (“Really? Their website says they are indexed in MEDLINE and that they have a very respectable impact factor. I am shocked at this news. Shocked!”). Along with a $50 million fine (and an article about said fine in the New York Times) comes the inability to provide plausible deniability. It is at times like these that one might wish one still had a legitimate publishing operation in Canada.
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Source: Science, Courthouse News Service, New York Times, Ottawa Citizen
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In other predatory journal news: a pivot to video.
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Source: Ottawa Citizen
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Annual Reviews has introduced an innovative OA program called “Subscribe to Open,” which “converts gated access journals to open access using existing library relationships and subscription purchases. Institutions and individuals that already know and value Annual Reviews content simply continue to subscribe—there are no APCs or other additional costs—and as long as subscription revenues are maintained, the year’s volume will be published open access and the back volumes made freely available. If subscription revenue is insufficient to cover costs, for example as a result of institutions deciding to ‘free ride,’ the journals will remain gated access. Thus, Subscribe to Open can be seen as an alternative subscription offering.” It is indeed an alternative subscription option, with the special twist that if an institution decides Annual Reviewsis no longer central to its collections, the withdrawal of the fee will reverberate to other (non-subscribing) institutions that had access to the OA material. This puts a particular social pressure on current subscribers, as they lose the flexibility to alter their payments without hurting other institutions.
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Source: In the Open
Libraries
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The MIT’s OA Task Force published its draft recommendations. Notable in this document is that MIT’s committee took a broad view and advocated for openness in multiple forms: open monographs, open educational resources, open platforms, and so on. The announcement is filed under “OA” but it feels like a much stronger statement for “Open Science.” We note that the statement and the ensuing public discussion were hosted on MIT’s own PubPub platform, which is a piece of open source infrastructure that MIT is making available to further Open Science.
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Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Commentary on the recent cancellation of an Elsevier contract by the University of California (UC) continues apace, but we thought that a guest post on the ARL website provided an interesting perspective. The piece, by Judy Ruttenberg, ARL Program Director, argues that a key element of UC’s action is that the funding of research must include the funding of publication. Insofar as U.S. funding for academic research is about $72 billion a year and academic institutions underwrite 25% of that (the federal government picks up just over half), a coordinated action on the part of research institutions could bring the transformative aspect of Plan S to a significant portion of U.S. research. Of course, doing so would cost research universities much more than they are currently spending. While there is interest in supporting open access initiatives among libraries, it is unclear how large the appetite among major research universities is to substantially increase their spending.
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Source: ARL Policy Notes
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When the library media services company Hoopla dropped an “anti-vaxxer” video from its streaming service, it entered the ongoing conversation about the role of libraries in identifying factual resources for their patrons. Should libraries be staunchly opposed to censorship of any kind, or should libraries exercise discretion as to what to add to their collections? There are problems with the exercise of discretion, however, the first of which is simply the question of who gets to decide. But some insist that curation is essential; a representative of the Immunization Partnership asserts that “libraries should adequately research new materials before making them available to patrons and evaluate those already on the shelves.” This is a breathtaking assertion when one considers how many objects libraries have in their catalogs and what it would cost to put everything through an editorial review. We are not aware that anyone has offered to pay for this. We anticipate that this debate will continue without resolution for the foreseeable future.
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Source: Undark
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You can now get a cocktail at the Boston Public Library. In a revamp of one of its rooms, the library established a tea room, which also serves literary-themed cocktails. Sign us up for a “Tequila Mockingbird.”
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Source: Boston Globe
Copyright
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The EU Parliament’s acceptance of its new copyright directive was made official. Once member states approve the new directive it will be up to them to plan how each will be implementing the rules within two years’ time. This is a notable failure for the tech lobby, which has predicted that paying content creators will result in the end of civilization as we know it. For a lighter take we recommend Jaron Lanier’s “love letter” to those in Europe opposing the copyright directive (in particular the European Pirate Party or PPEU), which has thrown in with the tech lobby. Lanier has become notable as a tech industry insider who is simultaneously a deep and thoughtful critic of industry practices, especially with regard to content creators. Here his commentary is both humorous and stinging: “Oh, we know, you’ve heard that your data isn’t worth much anyway. Please: believe that! That belief, and nothing else, is our fortune.”
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Source: Washington Post, Billboard
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Noting that public policy about copyright and the economic shares of the cultural industry are subject to “data asymmetry” between large commercial entities and the many artists and others who of necessity must work with them, Joe Karaganis, Vice President at the American Assembly at Columbia University, argues for legislation that would require the participants in cultural industries to make public disclosures about their commercial arrangements. Thus an artist signing with a record label would have access to information concerning other artist relationships with that label, and a small label would be able to see the terms with Spotify, Apple, and others afforded the largest labels. Such transparency would level the playing field (or reduce the degree of asymmetry) among negotiating entities, and would also serve to inform policy discussions concerning copyright and the regulation of media. We wonder about the implications for arrangements between society publishers and the huge commercial companies that provide services to them, not to mention the financial terms provided to journals’ editors. While a move toward such transparency does not seem like a strong short-term bet, Karaganis notes that there are already stirrings on this topic in the EU. Among other things, Karaganis was the founder of the Open Syllabus Project, whose tag line is “opening the curricular black box.”
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Source: Wired, Open Syllabus Project
Technology
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We talk a lot about Amazon around here, but what exactly is it? Zack Kanter wants to know and has written a deeply thoughtful long read on the subject. Kanter himself is a successful Web commerce entrepreneur, and his admiration of Amazon is palpable. He traces Amazon’s evolution and identifies the inflection points where a key management decision was made. Prior to Amazon there was (and still is) Wal-Mart, which solved the problem of optimizing growth within the bounds of a physical store. Amazon set a harder problem: how to optimize growth when the stores of a virtual store are literally unbounded? Kanter’s essay serves, among other things, as a sophisticated introduction to the economics of the Internet, noting that Amazon kept running into barriers to growth, but then found ways around them. By 2002 “we start to see the emergence of a pattern: 1) Amazon had encountered a bottleneck to growth, 2) it had determined that some internal process or resource was the bottleneck, 3) it had realized that it could not possibly develop and deploy enough resources internally to remove that bottleneck, so 4) it instead removed the bottleneck by building an interface to allow the broader market to solve it en masse.” This, in other words, explains how an online storefront evolved into a platform. We note that the widespread fascination with Amazon has now spawned a highly literate daily newsletter by Tim Carmody dedicated to Amazon alone, Amazon Chronicles.
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Source: Zackkanter.com, Amazon Chronicles
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Amidst the waves of scrutiny into how exactly it has been using all of the user-generated and supplied data in its stores, Facebook has new aspirations to draw a curtain over the activity on its site—making data private and encrypted, even from itself. The announcement came with the departure of key executives, including Chris Cox, the chief product officer credited with invention of the News Feed, which captivated users for over a decade. There is a plethora of good writing on Facebook’s plans, but we recommend two articles in particular: the first from The New Yorker illustrates the problem that Facebook is trying to solve with the change of direction (and what unfortunate problems are likely to remain—the frustrating and sometimes dangerous impact of Internet trolls not being due to any failure of privacy). The second insight from Stratechery responds to calls to break up Facebook by outlining how it is we got here in the first place, and what, apart from its size, makes Facebook so unique. Facebook’s pivot is welcome to the degree it comes true, but the real challenge remains the battle against misinformation. Facebook is in the somewhat impossible position where some of its best and savviest users contribute to its worst feature. Getting this right is critical: Bloomberg noted during a recent Facebook outage that when Facebook disappears users spend less time online, but they are also less informed.
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Source: Inc.com, The Verge, The New Yorker, Stratechery, Bloomberg
Science
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Are we entering the post p<0.05 era? More than 800 scientists have signed a letter against current standards of “statistical significance,” noting that the mechanical use of such a standard (the p-value) could force researchers to disregard important correlations because they do not rise to a pre-approved level. The current push against mechanically designated significance draws on a statement from the American Statistical Association from 2016, which identifies “six principles underlying the proper use and interpretation of the p-value.” As ASA’s Executive Director said at the time, “The p-value was never intended to be a substitute for scientific reasoning … Well-reasoned statistical arguments contain much more than the value of a single number and whether that number exceeds an arbitrary threshold.”
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Source: Nature, The American Statistician, ASA News
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Duke University has settled a suit with the federal government for committing fraud in its applications for research grants. Duke will pay $112.5 million in the settlement. The fraud came to light when a whistle-blower charged that a researcher was falsifying data used in numerous applications for grants to the NIH and the EPA. The researcher ultimately pled guilty on two counts. An interesting twist in the story is that the whistle-blower gets to share in the settlement—he will receive just over $33 million. Which prompts us to ask: Would you mind if we took a look at your data?
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Source: New York Times
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The Trump administration has proposed a budget that would cut deeply into science funding. The National Science Foundation would lose $1 billion if the proposal went through; the NIH would be cut by $5 billion; the budget for the EPA would be reduced by a third. It seems unlikely that such cuts will go through, as Congress usually musters bipartisan support for science funding. (It is worth noting that the offices of science agencies are spread around the country, giving many in Congress a reason to support the expenditures.) Indeed, last year the administration also proposed sharp cuts, but Congress restored the funding and then added some money on top of that. Even so, the proposal puts scientific groups on the defensive. Lest anyone working in STEM fields worry that they are being singled out, the administration is also proposing to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in their entirety. For those Americans who look to the north for a more enlightened society, it may be dispiriting to learn that Canada, after sizable increases in science funding last year, is proposing increases this year that Nature describes as “disappointing” and “modest.” Looking to the south, the outlook is even more bleak with Brazil’s government freezing nearly half of its science spending.
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Source: Wired, Inside Higher Ed, Nature
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Along with everyone else we wonder whether or not Brexit will happen and, if it happens, whether there will be a deal in place with the EU at the time or if the UK will simply crash out of the EU, leaving any number of activities suspended. Contingency planning is the order of the day, for the research community as well as for every other aspect of British life. There was therefore some consolation to learn that the UK government has begun to plan for the possibility of a “hard” Brexit by guaranteeing to fund all research activity previously funded by the EU and to explore a research fund that would be open to the international scientific community and not just to UK citizens. The intent of this planning is clear: although the UK may leave the EU, the scientific community is determined to continue to work with its global collaborative model.
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Source: Nature
Miscellany
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Surely we are not—we cannot possibly be—the only fans of the novels of John Williams among readers of The Brief. We read with pleasure an appreciation of Williams in the pages of The New Yorker, which seeks to explain the history and rediscovery of the lost novel Stoner, a small gem set in Missouri about academic life. Williams was not always obscure; in 1973 his Augustus shared the National Book Award for fiction with John Barth’s dazzling work of metafiction, Chimera. But the literary taste of the twentieth century tended to divide writers into two camps, and the chiseled classicism of Williams lost out to the Romantic exuberance of Gravity’s Rainbow and The Adventures of Augie March. But what if Williams’s team had won the trophy? The canon—the list of works deemed to be of high cultural importance—would have been rewritten. This piece proposes what that alternative literary history would look like and nominates several works, not all of them familiar, for reconsideration. Start reading.
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Source: The New Yorker
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“The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters … announced that Karen Uhlenbeck has won the 2019 Abel Prize, a Nobel-level honor in math. Uhlenbeck won for her foundational work in geometric analysis, which combines the technical power of analysis—a branch of math that extends and generalizes calculus—with the more conceptual areas of geometry and topology.”
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Source: Science
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Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day for March 10 was “newspeak.” “The term newspeak was coined by George Orwell in his 1949 anti-utopian novel 1984. In Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state, Newspeak was a language favored by the minions of Big Brother and, in Orwell’s words, ‘designed to diminish the range of thought.’ Newspeak was characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another, the interchangeability of parts of speech, and the creation of words for political purposes. The word has caught on in general use to refer to confusing or deceptive bureaucratic jargon.”
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Source: Merriam-Webster
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Using Mailchimp? Make sure you have a backup plan for the zombie apocalypse (Section 32 “Force Majeure”).
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Source: Mailchimp
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Using WordPress? You are not alone: one-third of the world’s websites run on WordPress.
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Source: WordPress
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Slaughterhouse-Five turns 50. Ferlinghetti turns 100 and celebrates with a new novel.
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Source: New York Times
From Our Own Pens
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Joe wrote a piece for the Scholarly Kitchen on “strategic and non-strategic society publishing.” Joe’s argument is that the many disruptive events in the scholarly publishing environment are leading some societies to think the unthinkable, which is to sell off their publishing assets. Facing this prospect forces societies to think hard about whether their publishing operations are central to the mission of the society, or increasingly simply a source of revenue to fund other activities.
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Source: Scholarly Kitchen Times
Meetings & Events
We will be attending the following events. Let us know if you would like to set up some time to chat. We’d love to hear from you (info@ce-strategy.com).
- Council of Science Editors Annual Meeting, May 4–7, Columbus, OH
- Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, May 29–31, 2019, San Diego, CA
- Association for University Presses Annual Meeting, June 11–13, Detroit, MI
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How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. ― Henry David Thoreau