Category Archives: Publishing

OA Policy Changes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has recently announced a “refreshed” Open Access Policy, to start in 2025. There is a lot to unpack.

The headline change for publishers is that the Foundation will no longer pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its funded researchers to publish Open Access. However, they have not stepped back from their support of Open Access. Rather than paying for post-publication OA, they are requiring posting all manuscripts on a preprint server. Not just any preprint server – one approved by the Foundation, with “a sufficient level of scrutiny to submissions.” The works must be licensed as CC-BY 4.0, or something similar. Interestingly, authors also must assign the license to an Author Accepted Manuscript of the article if it is published later. Any data that is used in the manuscript must also be made immediately available.

The Foundation is working with F1000, a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis, to create a preprint platform named VeriXiv. The platform will do a series of “ethics and integrity checks,” looking for things like plagiarism and image manipulation, as well as author-related conflicts. One thing that it is not doing is peer review. An author can still publish the article in a journal as well, as long as that journal respected the OA requirements of the Foundation, and the author would have to pay any APC themselves.

The question is how will this affect the publishing ecosystem? The Foundation awards more than five billion dollars in grants per year, which is enough to create real change. On the one hand, authors could decide that traditional publishing is not worth the time and cost, which the Foundation’s policy strongly suggests, and just move to preprints. On the other hand, authors may still have other institutional incentives tied to publishing output and prestige. Will this just shift the cost of traditional publishing to authors, and indirectly to libraries and universities that support them? It might work out that this is a lever to reduce prestige-based incentives at institutions, or it might work out that authors with fewer resources fall a little further behind.

This may also just be a business fight between funders and publishers, with researchers caught in the middle. Publishing is a bundle of services, including ethics and plagiarism checks, peer review, distribution and preservation. Commercial publishers charge a lot for that bundle. Starting with posting a preprint and then layering on other services could be cheaper, especially if one thinks different research outputs need differing levels of service. This opens the door to new business models, like stand-alone peer review services, as contemplated by the Publish-Review-Curate model of publishing. We will see who steps in to fill those needs.

Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication (C4DISC)

Earlier this year, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication (C4DISC) held their first community meeting. The main mission of the coalition is “to work with organizations and individuals to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communication.” The coalition officially launched in 2020 – and January’s meeting was in fact the coalition’s very first community meeting. Among its members and partners, the coalition boasts Crossref, the Library Publishing Coalition, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and more. As the push for more equitable models of publishing continues to be at the forefront of the minds of scholars and librarians, best practices around diversity, inclusion, and accessibility will lay a key foundation in assuring that scholarly publishing is not only published and consumed by the most privileged layers of our society.

To provide some context as the meeting started, coalition members presented on some of the priorities and outcomes from the past year – including toolkits and surveys developed by the coalition as a means of getting librarians and scholarly publishing practitioners thinking about their own roles in creating a more diverse scholarly record. Thee were also tools to help proactively change the culture around scholarly publishing so that marginalized voices can be centered, rather than continually obscured.

As the coalition continues to hold larger community meetings and launches its communities of practice, librarians and practitioners can start to think about best practices for ensuring diverse, equitable, and inclusive academic publishing that highlights marginalized voices and works as seminal parts of a collection or publishing portfolio.

Toolkits

As a means of providing helpful ways for institutions to build more equitable diverse models for themselves, the Coalition provides links to toolkits that have been put together by leaders in publishing and higher education.

In addition to the Toolkits above, the coalition is also currently working on an Equity on Editorial Boards toolkit – a resource that will aim to assist journal and editorial managers in figuring out the best ways to ensure an attitude and editorial board that reflects a global population.

Surveys

In addition to the toolkits, the Coalition also provides links to the 2018 and 2023 Workplace Equity Surveys. While the results and analysis from the 2023 is still being published, an article from Learned Publishing gets into some of the details from the 2018 survey.

The State of Scholarly Publishing

For folks interested in the current state of scholarly publishing, especially regarding Open Access, there are two recent reports that do a great job of summarizing publishing’s move toward OA.

In November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its “Report to the U.S. Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research.” This report, required by a 2023 appropriations Act, describes the different business models currently being used to comply with the requirement of public access within a year of publication (remembering that the U.S. government uses the term “public access” to denote free-to-read access, and not any of the other rights OA implies). It also provides top-level statistics about the rapid growth in OA publishing over the last ten years.

The most interesting takeaway is how difficult it is to estimate how much federally funded researchers paid to publish in the last few years. Even the U.S. government has very limited data. The best guess from OSTP was slightly more than $378 million in 2021, a 39% increase from 2016. The other highlight of the report is the Appendix, which describes the economic concepts related to publishing that can be used to analyze the system.

Also in November, a group of faculty and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the report “Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing.” Much like the OSTP report, it spends most of its time discussing the recent history of publishing, highlighting growth in both scholarly outputs and in spending. There is more detail here on specific publishers and their business models, especially the growth of massive fully-OA publishers.

The benefit of this report is that it takes a slightly larger view of the entire scholarly communications ecosystem. The Nelson memo applied to both publications and data, and this report poses some interesting research questions about open data, like how it should be shared, and what is it going to cost? It also presents questions about preprint servers and peer review, two issues not covered by OSTP.

The New York Times v. OpenAI & Microsoft

Over the holiday break, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The lawsuit covers both using New York Times content for training, for reproducing the content in response to prompts.

The New York Times may not be “scholarly,” but the suit could be a preview of how large scholarly publishers deal with OpenAI. First, it is fair to call both the Times and scholarly journals high quality content, the kind that OpenAI likely prefers for training its model (Complaint, p. 29). Second, there are unauthorized copies of much of the content online, so it would be possible to initially train a model on the content without permission. Finally, there is the financial angle. This lawsuit comes after negotiations between the companies to have them pay for the New York Times’ content. While some publishers are exploring ways to use AI with their own content, they may find it profitable to license that content to OpenAI and other companies.

One other interesting note here is how Microsoft is brought into the lawsuit from several different angles. First, it is a big investor in OpenAI. Second, it offers products based on OpenAI’s models, in particular anything branded “Copilot,” and Bing Chat. It is also being accused of helping OpenAI make copies of content in training ChatGPT, or at least overlooking the copying OpenAI was allegedly doing. But the most interesting claim that could have far reaching implications if a court agrees is that Microsoft is committing copyright infringement by “storing, processing, and reproducing” the models on its platform. (Complaint, p. 60). That being copyright infringement could greatly chill AI research, as a researcher would need to know the provenance of a model, and every document used in its training, to be safe from a copyright claim.

Given that this lawsuit is following negotiations over a license agreement, it would not be surprising if this settles before trial. The New York Times may be well-resourced for a big legal fight, but there are no guarantees they would win, risking a lot of licensing revenue. At some point there will be a copyright suit regarding AI that goes to trial (no guess as to which, as it can take a long time to go from filing a case to a trial), but maybe not this one.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications

Part of participating in an evolving society is the recognition that there indeed exists inequality between people on the basis of their identity. As certain groups are afforded more opportunities, or as the culture shapes itself around a set of particular experiences, it becomes the work of those who strive for equity and equality to think about the ways in which our society perpetuates cycles of oppression and systems of power. Though academia sometimes enjoys a reputation for being generally progressive, without intentionally thinking about how our institutions can better serve marginalized identities, it is inevitable that inequality and inequity will continue to grow further systemic roots.

As a counter to this, the University of California recently published a post detailing some of the ways that inequality impacts the production and publication of scholarly articles, and how that in turn can contribute to an even more inequitable and unequal academic space. To inform people of some of the pitfalls that normally befall scholarly communications groups and academic publishers, the post highlights a few areas of the publication process, how they may currently contribute to growing inequality, and how scholarly communications professionals can address and hopefully correct some of these practices now and in the future.

Additionally, a little over a year ago, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication produced their Guidelines on Inclusive Language and Images in Scholarly Communication. The guidelines cover best practices around avoiding implicit biases in writing, covering topics such as crime and incarceration with objectivity and care, ensuring images are accessible to all readers, and much more. Among its members, the coalition has OASPA, the Library Publishing Coalition, the Association of University Presses, the Council of Science editors and others. As many different organizations fight for more open models of publishing, libraries will continue to have a leading role to play in ensuring their collections reflect the full community of the world around us – and supporting independent publishers that may not have access to systemic privileges and massive contracts is an important step in building a fuller, more complete scholarly discourse.

Featured image from Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication.