Cash, carrots, and sticks: Open Access incentives for researchers

1) The Finch Report and the RCUK report recently came out. These reports have taken stances concerning green and gold Open Access in the UK. What are your thoughts on the issue of green vs. gold open access policies?

“The fact that this was front page news [in the Guardian] it already shows that it is doing a great deal of good because, it raises the awareness level. It allows people to understand what this is”.

“There is no one-size-fits-all for everybody. So, by offering both of them, I think there is the best possible balance, that there will be something for everyone”. “By suggesting that gold OA is the way to go, it is catering to academics who don’t want to be pushed out of their comfort zone too quickly”.

“People get too focused in their own research areas. Researchers will publish their work in niche subject areas”. “What works for some people will not work for other people”.

“Academics will jump through hoops that their funders make them jump through. That is the biggest stick of all. The funders are starting to act on this”.

“Funders will be working on open data next, not just the research articles”.

“There was a perception that the Finch Report was downgrading green OA”. “On its own, green is not a sustainable model since it relies on the journals to provide the peer review”. “If you don’t have the publishers providing the peer review, then green doesn’t work anymore”. “Green was not seen as a sustainable publishing system”.

“Green still has an important role, because of the investment [in institutional repositories] that has taken place in libraries”.

“There has been a lot of work in advocacy and in promoting the use of the repositories… and it did feel as if the Finch Report was saying that was just wasted time”. “A: the value of the work being done to date was being diminished and underappreciated, and B: the potential for green to act as a catalyst for change was being downgraded”.

When the RCUK policy came out, “it looked like the emphasis was on gold. That was the preferred route”. “There was no time for a feedback loop between when the Finch Report came out, and when the RCUK Policy came out”.

“The RCUK is not downgrading green, it still a valid part of the landscape as one of the alternatives”. “But, the way it is worded at the moment, you go for gold, and if there is no gold option, then you can go for green”.

When comparing disciplines such as chemistry and physics and their treatment of preprints and post-prints, “there is a huge disciplinary difference in the way the cultures work”.

“If you can’t get access to the final version, the preformatted [post-print] version might be good enough for you. That is better than no version at all. In the long term, moving over completely to open access journals is where we want to get to”.

“The debate in the UK has been around whether or not we are at a stage yet where we can get to full open access journals without sidestepping that transition period. Green open access repositories provides a way” to get there.

“There is a danger that you’ve just replicated the serials crisis, but on the author payment side of things”. “Some journals could say that their APC is $5,000, and if you don’t like it, then tough”.

“I am not convinced that Gold open access is a sustainable model for all of scholarly publishing”.

Some organizations in Europe “do not agree with the Finch Report, we need to support both green and gold open access for the immediate future while we see where the transition is going to take us. And, I think that is a sensible approach”.

“The RCUK had been charged with looking at the recommendations of the Finch Report to put the policy in place”. “The interpretation of the RCUK has been more broadminded”. In terms of implementing the policy, “they’ve taken a broader view that certainly embraces green, and no one is going to be penalized for it”.

“The scientific community, the research community doesn’t want a chaotic transition from one funding model to the other”. “We have to find a way to move from subscriptions to get to alternative modes of payment. At the end of the day, it will be cheaper… but it won’t be free, obviously, so the money has to come from somewhere”.

“Is the UK out of step with many other countries around the world?” “The European Union is moving towards a green mandate for its next big phase of research funding”.

“Both [green and gold routes] are legitimate and potentially effective routes to use to get to an open access end game. I don’t favor one over the other. In general, I like the idea of policies that support researchers choosing whichever route works better for them”. “The main reason it is hard to pick one over the other, is that despite the amazing growth and terrific progress we’ve had in creating high quality open access journal outlets, there is not always the perfect OA journal outlet for every researcher in every discipline. It is tough to ask people to wedge themselves into something that is less than perfect for them”. “I also think that in different disciplines, and particularly in different geographic regions, such as the developing world, a solution that doesn’t have a fee associated with it… may be a more desirable option”.

“Making a choice on that is a good way to get in trouble, as an advocate. The people who prefer one or the other tend to spend a lot of energy attacking the other side”. “I tend to buy into both, but I think we should hold green to a higher standard than it is currently held. Green, far too often, allows for a crappy version of the paper with no good license to be the acceptable open access alternative, and I think that’s bad”.

“My ideal world would be one in which green open access means the final peer-reviewed version of the paper under a creative commons license, and it is simply a matter of the author or the journal depositing that into an archive later”.

“The idea that an early version of a paper without a copyright license is sufficient for open access—I don’t agree with that”.

“To understand these different policies, you’ve got to actually understand the different motivations that have been brought to bear”. “So traditionally, a lot of the open access movement had been focused on the public good aspect of giving people access to read things in which they are interested”. “A lot of public good thinking has been focused on what do you do with repositories to make things more available to people”. “When you look at the actual motivations for the Finch group, the thing you notice is that the motivation is quite different. The government does really care about the public good per se. That is a harsh way of putting it. What the policy is focused on is achieving greater return on investment for the public investment in research”. “While that return on investment is of more than just economic terms, it includes social returns, educational returns, all those kinds of things, economic return is a big part of it”. The Finch report addressed the question, “How do we maximize the value of this public investment in terms of driving innovation, economics activity, and cultural enrichment”.

“So the [UK] government has a strong view… that they want to ensure that the downstream users of research both have access and can use it. That is an important distinction between past policy developments which have largely focused on taxpayer access to government funded research. This is very much about ‘how do we ensure that things are used and exploited’?”

“The government is focused on the need to ensure not just that research is accessible but also that it is licensed so as to ensure the ability for reuse”. “The most efficient way to do that is through a journal based approach to open access”.

“The government is quite serious about paying [the publishers] to gain the leverage to ensure the licensing that it wants”. “The government could have taken a Harvard style rights retention approach…, but that was not politically achievable”. They didn’t want to damage the publishing industry, and “that tended to bias the results somewhat”.

“Universal gold [with APCs] is probably the only way in which you could make the current system worse”. “Because, the journals where we have to publish can charge whatever they want because we have to publish there” to get tenure. “All else being equal, as long as journal rank stays the way it is, as long as we have to publish in those journals, this would be worse than what we have now”. “If you have 20 PLOS Biology papers, you will likely lose out to a guy with one or two Nature papers. That is how it is”. “The applicant pool has grown so huge” that universities can “ignore basically everybody who doesn’t have any of those top publications”.

“It is a complex grown ecosystem that is very stable because it is self-reinforcing. Once you’ve made it there, you feel like ‘Well, this is how I got there.’”

“Green means that you publish twice. You publish with a publisher, and then you go through the motions again, and then publish a different version [in a repository]. So this means you have extra work, and this takes time that scientists just don’t have”. “As ethically good as this would be, it just means that” the person will have to do the work twice. “While I support both approaches, simply because they get people to start thinking about the problem, neither of them are really rational solutions. Both of them are neither rational nor sustainable, so there is no real point in supporting them beyond a transitional period that you need to try to build opinion” concerning a rational sustainable solution. “One of them would be to simply have our institutions do the publishing”. “There is no point in splitting the literature up into 31,000 journals. There is no point in this day and age. If you want to split it up, you use tags, you use categories, use all kinds of things”. “Put it all into one system which is run by the libraries”. “Technically, it is easy; politically, it is impossible”. “The rational thing to do, which maximizes the benefit for scientists and the general public, is politically almost impossible to do”.

“Everybody that I’ve talked to thinks that peer-review has a beneficial effect, but nobody knows if the benefits are justified by the costs. That is very hard to quantify”. “Peer review is not a sacred cow. Let us use evidence to decide whether we keep it”.

Concerning post-publication review, “there are many different ways of handling peer review”. “Once the scientists are in control, each peer group could decide how they want to do this”. “The publishing process could be tailored to the standards of each community”. “You don’t have to run to publishers”.

“Open access policy should be green, not gold”. “Good policy provides the direction, the goal - it says what is to be done, but not necessarily how. The how is best left to the people who do the work (some might say the market)”.

“Green OA, on the other hand, seems to me to be an appropriate and useful way of seeking to change the system, so long as it is based on self-archiving mandates, and mandates with teeth”.

“So whether we get there by the Green or Gold route is much less important than that we get there. I care much more about full BOAI compliance (i.e. freedom to reuse, not just to read) than I do about Green vs. Gold”.

“I suppose in principle I slightly prefer Gold, because that way there is only one definitive version of the article. But publishers have a lot of work to do to persuade me that their contribution (as opposed to the editors’ and reviewers’ freely donated contributions) are worth £2,000 a pop, or even $1,350”.

“The Finch group was a very smart political move to get the publishers signed up to something, and RCUK basically said ‘We are doing the same thing’ but with subtle differences. The incumbent publishers had no way to fight back because they had already signed up”. “The bottom line is… the most effective way to get research in its final published form available in a coherent fashion with the right licensing is to do that through journals”. “The mechanisms are in place, you gain the kind of leverage you need and you can make it happen. The flip side of that, if you use the money to pay for leverage, then you want to make sure there is a mechanism for keeping costs down. That is where I think the Finch group really missed a trick in terms of framing repository based open access as a really valuable mechanism”.

The Finch Group missed the opportunity to frame repositories as a “transitional mechanism and as a competition mechanism”.

“The repository method should have gotten a much stronger airing” at those meetings. Repositories could be used to “provide a different arm for innovation”.

2) PLOS ONE is a well-known large open access journal that covers a broad range of disciplines. Because it has been deemed successful, other publishers have also proposed or started similar journals. What is your opinion of this new type of publication outlet?

“PLOS ONE is a phenomenon, for sure”. “The popularity that it has achieved among authors speaks volumes about the desire for researchers to have this type of an outlet”. “Business model wise, it has been an eye opener for the publishing community as well as the broader academic community”. “Seeing that model break even in the first year, and become so profitable so quickly, I think changed people’s perceptions about the sustainability and the long term viability of open access publishing models”.

“With the PLOS ONE clones, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and clearly, they’ve hit on a model”.

“PeerJ is breaking that mold, and it is wonderful to see a completely different model be introduced to the OA landscape to shake up the notion that it is an all ‘author processing fee’ world or bust”. “The sign of a healthy growing marketplace is diversity of business models and PeerJ’s entry to the scene is a really good harbinger on that front”.

“It has been a very interesting development, and I think it is encouraging”.

“Let everybody else decide if the paper is any good or not because as we’ve seen time and time again, if you ask the opinion of two or three reviewers, they don’t always agree, and they don’t always get it right”. “Therefore, we have these skewed distributions in all journals in terms of the numbers of citations that the papers get. Journals are playing a funny artificial game trying to manage their reputations, but I think their time is going”.

“In some sense, PLOS ONE is a journal, in other ways it isn’t. It is just a massive publishing repository. I imagine scaling it up to be just everything”. “It would be better for people to make judgments about quality, impact, and importance for the scientific community afterwards because you’ll get a better judgment because more people will be involved. If it is open access, then everybody can be involved”. “The days of the [traditional] journal may be numbered”.

“I am very supportive of PLOS ONE”. “We are calling it a megajournal, because we are comparing it by the standards of print journals”. “PLOS ONE isn’t a megajournal on the Internet, it is just a journal”. “I don’t think that the niche journals are going to get absorbed…”. “The niche journals focus on the very specific topic that the researcher is interested in”. Authors “like to have their articles in that context”. “There will be space for niche journals on the Internet”.

“If we are going to break the hold of commercial publishers on academic research, and I think we are going to need to do that ultimately. Peer review has to change”. “More and more of our scholars are creating scholarship that isn’t subject to the normal publication process, such as digital humanities, visualizations, all kinds of things that can’t be published in the normal way and can’t be sent through the outsourced peer review that we’ve become used to”. “Universities, scholarly societies, disciplinary groups are going to need to and probably want to set up other kinds of peer review”.

“There is already this explosion of open access publishers, but I am not sure that we will see many journals in that space”. “I think we will see a lot of OA journals which are much smaller, but operate under a similar model”.

“When you look at different distribution models of content on the Internet, they all have these certain features like an API or they visualize the content in the browser…. If you look at the features that define YouTube or Flickr, or other ways to disseminate content, academic publishing should be copying that”. “If there are more [publishers] like that, it is a good thing”.

“PLOS ONE has been so successful, it is hard to see why that won’t be a trend”.

“One of the inefficiencies we have in the system is submit, reject, submit, reject, submit, reject…” “It can take a long time, and you can also get referee fatigue. The reviewer may say ‘Hold on, I’ve seen this paper before. I’ve already rejected it for journal A’”.

Currently, there is no disincentive for authors not send a mediocre paper to high ranking journal. “I am going to send it to Nature and see what happens. It might just slip through”. “In the meantime, the comments from the reviewers who rejected the paper have made it better, and the author may submit the slightly better paper” to a different journal.

“As a community, I am not sure that we can continue to pay for these inefficiencies. The library pays for it with the cost of the journals”. “Much of the cost of journals goes into rejecting 50-60-80 percent of the manuscripts that are received”.

Some journals have a submission fee, whether it is accepted to the journal or not. “That is a really interesting model”. “If the paper is accepted, then the submission fee goes toward” the APC. “But, at the moment, it is not very attractive if you are a publisher because your competitors don’t have it”. “It only works if a lot of publishers decide to do it”.

“I actually applaud the rise of the megajournal because it is an example of how innovation in scholarly publishing is actually starting to drive change”.

With CC-BY licensed content, “I could see a model whereby others could then harvest or represent papers from across megajournals, and say ‘Here are this month’s hot papers’” in a subject area. “It could drive some real interesting innovation in the publishing market”.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Elsevier came up with a megajournal”. “It makes things easier”.

“I am all for PLOS ONE, and the market could support several of them”.

“This type of publication is clearly better, both for academic mission and for social good, than closed journals”.

“The other thing that no one has a finger on the moment, in terms of the big disruption, is, there are a lot of potential technologies out there for extremely cheap publication infrastructures at essentially zero cost. Storage is cheap. Server access is cheap, and there is some pretty good, if not good enough open source software out there for the hosting and management of journals”. “The challenge they have is that it doesn’t scale out. To build something that is on the level of a PLOS ONE clone, you have to invest a lot to make sure it still works” at a larger scale. “You don’t do that at wordpress. It just isn’t going to happen”.

“Which happens faster? Do things like OJS and Wordpress become good enough so that people can just throw things up on a server and get things running quickly for themselves, and 1,000 flowers bloom, and once those flowers have bloomed, someone thinks, oh god, we’ve got to bring it all back together. Or,… someone builds something that does scale out, and it is really, really good, and then lots of people adopt it, and then there is consolidation”. “The end result is the same either way, there is a lightweight scalable infrastructure that makes it very easy to run journals at relatively low cost”. “Both will be in competition, which one gets there first?”

“We [need to] reassess the process of peer review completely, and we rethink what we want”. “That turns the economics upside down, it turns the process upside down, the technical needs, the social requirements, the tools, the whole thing”. “My gut feeling, having argued for that over the last five years, is that it isn’t going to happen quickly”. “What will happen first, is there will be a rebuilding of the technical infrastructure”.

“The peer-review at PLOS ONE is as harsh as it is anywhere. What’s lite, and indeed completely absent, is selection by trendiness and sexiness. Which is exactly as it should be. We are scientists, not marketeers. (sic)”

“So I am keen to see many other venues with the same approach. That’s important because, as good as PLOS is, we don’t want to see a monoculture develop, not even a PLOS monoculture”.

“One important point to note about PLOS ONE is that it accepts all sound science. This just makes sense; the reason journals have high rejection rates (now seen as a badge of quality) is because in the print medium you can only fit in so many articles. This adds considerable waste to the system (rejected articles are usually still published, it's just that they tend to go through several rounds of review rather than just one). It's good to see competitors, too”.

“Simply put, they are probably not radical enough. They seek to marry the traditional journal model with one that would seem to imply a post-publication peer review world, but end up in an unsatisfactory midway position”.

“I think it's a good move. For a long time now it's been clear that we don't need 'journals' in the traditional sense. The Web and good search services can do the job journals do. People argue that journals are needed to provide a stamp of quality, or to create a recognised hierarchy of quality”. “Personally, I think this has been very damaging in many ways over the years and a move to database publishing like PLOS ONE is welcome”.

3) Harvard university has recommended to their faculty to “consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access” (http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448). The concept of “moving prestige to open access” is an interesting statement to the Harvard faculty authors and researchers. What do you think of this statement?

“We are in this intermediate phase where it is pretty clear that open access is going to become the distribution mechanism for vast majority of scholarly research”. We are still not sure “how that is going to play out in specific deals, in specific institutions, and specific sectors” of research. “It is easy to make this argument for prestige in open access in the life sciences or in physics because you’ve got SCOAP3 for physics, and you’ve got PLOS in the life sciences”. “For the humanities and the social sciences, it is kind of hard to say ‘Publish in a prestigious open access journal’ because there aren’t very many”. “There is no money in some fields for article publishing charges. If you don’t have any funding other than your salary, then you don’t have a pie from which to cut a slice to pay for an upfront charge. That makes it harder to have this one-sized-fits-all policy that says ‘Just publish in a prestigious open access journal’”. “What we need is an ecosystem of open access that is a little more sustainable, and it needs to be flexible across sectors and fields. In some places APCs are going to work really well”. “In some places it could be green, but green has to result in quality and true open access content”. “I am not sure that this process can be accelerated, and I am not sure that that is a bad thing”. “I think that giving it time to evolve may result in it having the right biodiversity that we need in the market”.

One of the things that Harvard was saying was that “We need to get over this cultural logjam, that prestige only resides in a handful of subscription access impact factor-ranked journals”. “Harvard, with its perceived status, is a great spot to start the discussion of saying, look, ‘prestige is in the eyes of the beholder’ and we are actually the folks creating the system of prestige and living by the system of prestige. So, if we really lead the charge in terms of voting with our feet and saying we believe prestige can rest in open access journals, equally or even more so than in subscription access journals, then this is something that we have an obligation to do”. “It is easier for Harvard to start there, but once that snowball gets rolling, the conversations start happening”. “Why are we judging this journal by its business model rather than by the actual quality of the articles that are in the journal? That conversation gets really interesting really quickly, and this is something that all schools can participate in”. “The questions concerning article level metrics also come into play”. “All schools, not just Harvard, really have an opportunity to drive the prestige conversation and the change in perception of what is impactful, what is meaningful, and what is high quality in terms of research output”.

“The commercial publishers don’t have the power, the universities have the power”. “In two very radical steps, universities could completely revolutionize the scholarly communication system. One would be to claim work for hire over all of their publications (I don’t actually advocate that), but they could do it and license the works back to the faculty members in very broad terms”. “Second step is to evaluate in a different way. Stop confusing prestige with relevance”. “Just because an article is published in a high impact journal, it does not mean that it is relevant. The journal impact factor is at the journal level, not at the article level. The data for the journals are aggregates”. “Now we have the ability to assess scholarship on the article level”. “University promotion and tenure committees should insist on article level metrics, which would basically require open access. And, that is not so radical”.

“Institutions need to take some responsibility for moving from evaluating prestige, to evaluating actual quality and impact”.

“There is a difficulty in moving that up from anecdote to policy because a lot of policy makers want to buy into the established metrics”.

Universities want to increase their rankings in the US News and World Report or the Times Higher Ed rankings. “I haven’t seen anybody yet say that the strategy for doing that [to move higher in university rankings] is to adopt an open-access policy”.

“‘Moving prestige’ entails the perception of a financial risk” for the researcher. “I can move my prestige, but that might mean that my department will get less money next year. It has not been causal, but people believe it to be causal”.

“The reason researchers aim for the top journals is because the journal they publish in is a shorthand for the quality of the science that they have done. So, that is why they do it”.

“If no one cites your Nature paper, what is the use of having published it?”

“One would hope that as the open access journals get to be more prestigious, then publishing in PLOS Biology is as good as Nature”.

“If the leaders on campus could recommend Open Access to the lower level faculty, then it just becomes the norm”. “That is what we do now. We publish open access because scientifically, that is the best thing to do in terms of public value for the money”. The focus on the impact factor “is a major sticking block, so I would like to see all universities adopt an open access mandate for all of their research—at least have a repository, a green route to open access”.

The spouse of one interviewee gets letters from university administrators saying that he/she needs to publish in journals that have “an impact factor higher than five”.

“Prestige is something that comes from a community itself. It is an intangible thing that is very difficult to pin down”. “Prestige fundamentally is money. Money turns into prestige pretty quickly. When you start the process of saying ‘this is how we determine funding’ and you have statements right from the top saying ‘We don’t care about the journal, we care about the quality of the work, the importance of the work, or the influence of the work,’ whatever it might be, that becomes an important thing”. “A very large part of it is top down. The other part of the prestige argument is bottom up”.

The uptake of Open Access could be the same as the bell curve for technology integration. There are a small number of early adopters, a large number in the middle, and a small number of late adopters. “The incumbent players are configured in such a way that it is essentially impossible for them to innovate in a disruptive fashion”. “The question becomes one of how do you pull that entire bell curve along, and one of the things you learn about that process is that the one thing you don’t bother doing at all is to talk to the late adopters. They are simply not worth talking to”. “This is part of the thinking about how we advocate for open access. We have to move beyond the ‘this is something we should all do’ which is how you get the early adopters, people who want to do it because it is the right thing to do, and we have to speak to this mainstream of people about why it is important for their future, that they will get more citations, or whatever the story might be. There are lots of different pieces of functionality that we can offer them”.

“The people at the back end who happen to be senior researchers, heads of departments, are exactly the people that we just shouldn’t bother with at all because it is a waste of time talking to them. So, what we need to be doing is talking more to younger researchers and students, just talk about this as though it were normal. It is just obvious that it should be this way. They become the early mainstream. They want this because it is obvious that it is the best thing to be doing”. “It is obvious to them that if people can’t read their research, then they are wasting their time. That kind of logic follows very clearly”.

“People talk about prestige, but what they really mean is the ability to earn money, the ability to bring in research income”. The institution can “pick out and celebrate those things that are going well. Once the institution starts saying ‘this person is doing something really great’ that’s all it needs to be is a story about something that happened or worked well”. “Those kinds of things build a momentum up internally, they build up a culture internally”. When talking to Deans and vice presidents, they can see that this will provide “better performance on the kinds of metrics that they are looking at”. And that “funding policies are shifting to respond to that, so they can be ahead of the curve or they can be behind the curve, and that is an interesting option to put before a president or a vice president of a university”.

As a scientist, “the choices and possibilities that we have to influence the publishers are fairly limited, which is one of the reasons why we should cut the ties with them”.

“We need to convey to job-search, promotion, tenure and granting committees that open-access publications ought to count for much more than paywalled ones”.

“The bottom line is, if a paper is behind a paywall, it’s not really published. The academic community is less able to benefit from it; that is even more true of the broader population, which in most cases funded the work”.

4) University presses and many societies are concerned about how the open access movement will affect their financial bottom line. What concerns do you have about open access and society publications?

“Some authors in the sciences view the society journals as a third option. The first options are the high profile journals like Nature, Science, and Cell, the second option is a megajournal like PLOS ONE, and the third option is the smaller society journal”.

“The humanities situation is perplexing in a couple of different ways”. “In the humanities and the social sciences in the UK at least, there is a much stronger sense that the money that runs the existing journals is just growing on trees”. “It has been difficult to get people to come to grips with the fact that those journals are being funded out of the public purse”. “There is a much stronger culture among the humanities and some parts of the social sciences that these are people who work alone, often work at home, and to a much greater extent, they feel like they are lending their work to the institution”. Some humanities scholars “have much less identification to the institution”.

“Some of the humanities journals could consider being funded using a SCOAP3 like system”. “SCOAP3 may work because it is a tightly bounded community”.

Other models and options are available. SCOAP3 is one option. “The Royal Society of Chemistry is another option”. “Keep paying us the subscriptions, and we will give you a voucher in exchange, and we will manage this as a transition process”.

“In the past, many societies had high revenue streams. There is no guarantee that will continue. It could go away and not come back”. Societies may need to “develop new lines of revenue”. “Entrepreneurs could help societies make the transition”. Some societies could consider using “PubMedCentral as a publishing platform”. There is “no need to build the technology layer underneath” the system.

“It is definitely a concern for some of the smaller societies who are single journal publishers”. “The trend of the megajournal is the most concerning” Societies “could consider using the hybrid model as a transition strategy”. This “option to select open access and to manage the transition by balancing article submission fees with subscription fees over a reasonable period of time is a palatable and manageable transition strategy” for some of the smaller scholarly societies. “I worry that the time that is left for the strategy to be viable is running out, because of the advent of these megajournals, so many authors are opting to submit their articles to these large open access outlets. I worry that the societies that have not yet made a move towards offering some type of an open access solution, those authors are going to be siphoned off, and the demand for the society journal might lessen”.

There are many good models with Oxford University press being successful, the optical society of American being successful. “We use those exemplars and say this is one way to do it that really does mitigate your risk because you don’t reduce your subscription price until you have that OA uptake, and you know what the demand looks like in your sphere”.

“They just need to find a way to do it. They could just start creating gold open access journals, and move the costs from subscribers to authors”.

Subscriptions journals use “a funding mechanism that is going out of fashion with the rise of the internet”. “We’ve seen throughout history that the free market will not support industries that become obsolete”. “There is not a lot of money to be made making candles these days, compared to a hundred years ago, because of the light bulb”. “This is the sort of thing that happens, and it is happening to the publishing industry”.

“Some publishers have been making huge profits, so there are savings to be made by eating into the profit margins”.

“Scholarly societies are in a better position to transition to OA than commercial publishers like Elsevier”. “Elsevier still has to pay shareholders and such, while societies do not. Smaller societies may be able to get a better handle on their costs”. “The first thing any group would need to do is to figure out what it actually costs them to publish”. “We (libraries) are having this acrimonious debate with commercial publishers who are always telling us about all of their costs, but we can’t actually pin those costs down very often”.

“Societies started working with traditional publishers in order to make themselves more sustainable”.

“Societies have adapted in the past to stay afloat”, and they will continue to do so.

“The bundling issue is something that Open Access is going to disrupt”. “Publishers are coming out with innovative models because they have to adapt”.

“It is very hard for them”. “They should be looking to reduce their costs”. Societies could consider moving their content to a system like “OJS which would allow them to publish very, very cheaply”. “Some of that overhead could be pooled” between different societies.

The past is not a good predictor of the future. Some societies see that moving to open access is a rocky road, and they don’t want to go down that path. Because of the big deal that larger publishers have implemented, the smaller society “publishers face a very, very rocky road with the subscription model, fighting for a smaller and smaller percentage of the library budget, or a rocky open access road”. “They need to look at both of those roads and weigh the risks and the opportunities”. A third road is to partner with a larger publisher which then incorporates the title within the big deal, but then the society “may lose independence”.

Societies could “also see that open access publishing can be profitable”. “There is money to be made in open access”.

“Societies should allow researchers to provide green OA as a route to open access. This will provide more exposure for their journals and articles”.

“Some societies are perfectly adaptable to change, but they just don’t want to change because they see the subscriptions as a cash cow”.

Instead of the printing press, “imagine if the cash cow of the society was the pony express or the telegram, would you then think that this would be a valid argument for keeping the pony express running?” “The way publishers do this is outdated and costly”. Concerning library subscriptions to society publications, “one could make the argument that this is really unfair subsidization, and that the societies should actually try to find other revenue streams, maybe those that are better tailored to the community that they serve”.

“If it comes to a choice between the society thriving at the science’s expense or vice versa, then the science has to be the winner every time”.

“So far as I am aware, university presses were struggling long before open access had acquired much in the way of mindshare, and the causes of their pain surely lie elsewhere. Learned societies may indeed feel threatened by open access. But if they do, surely that is because they have been treating journal publishing not as a service to the scholarly community, but as a cash cow. They need to refocus on their original mission, and not assume that this can be funded from their journal publishing programme”.

“Societies have a mission to serve the interests of their community. Hampering access to research information is the exact opposite. There are some excellent examples of visionary, able societies doing their job well and there are many that are not. I'm afraid the future is not bright for those that won't adapt. There are ways for societies to lead this movement, but most of them don't have the skills or vision to take up the challenge, sadly”.

“Those goals--spread of information; density of conversation--are what matter. If a new, better way to spread information or support conversation appears, we in the academy should adopt those ways, because they are in keeping with our goals. If existing journals and societies have structured themselves around older and now worse ways of doing things, what we cannot afford to do is let them preserve the problem to which they happen to be the solution”.

5) AltMetrics is gathering steam as an additional method for faculty to determine the impact of their work (http://altmetrics.org). Do you plan to take advantage of this data for either your work, or for the benefit of your institution or department?

Concerning the wider question of measuring the usage and reusage of research, “I think it is going to expand, and it has a long way to go before it reaches any sort of an equilibrium. At the moment, there is so little that we measure”. “The interesting question is the way that what we can measure couples to what we think we want to measure”. “When people start to measure something it becomes important, that is not necessarily because it is a good measure of anything, but because that is what is being used”. Altmetrics “is something that we can guide as a community in the right kind of direction”.

“Is this an open access tool or not? That is an interesting question?” “The principle is a general one that if we are going to measure things about science, we should be measuring the articles, the people, and the work, not the containers”.

“The Impact Factor was better than nothing”. Integrating altmetrics into the research evaluation process is “inevitable”. “Choose the kind of impact you want”. “Different departments will want different metrics”.

“It is one of the most interesting movements to come along in a long time. We view it as a little bit of an outgrowth of the open access movement, that the article level metrics are growing up around open articles. I think it is an incredibly promising route to help us introduce more granular ways to capture real information about the full story of the impact of individual articles and individual author’s works. We’ve been so dependent on the impact factor as a single metric which actually doesn’t tell us anything about an individual article or an individual author, it tells us something about the journal that they published in”. “This is something meaningful to them [the faculty and researchers on campus]. These metrics are a way for them to paint a much fuller picture about who is using the outputs of their research, how it is being used. It lets them tell their story in a much deeper and fuller way”. “They are very interested in then how can they publish in an outlet that is utilizing these metrics and on the flip side of that, we are hearing from library directors on a lot of campuses, asking if we can come in and talk to administrators who are responsible for doing the evaluation of researchers on campus, and they are hungry for indicators that actually tell them something new, and more than an impact factor”. “There are tons of unanswered questions about what is it that these metrics that we are beginning to introduce are telling us. How trustworthy and valid are they?” “It is super exciting to see this real possibility to have these new indicators to put into the mix in some way”.

“In each of the indicators, we have the ability to drill down and find out more about who is downloading the article. For tweets, it is the same thing, ten tweets on an article, that number may or may not be impressive, but if seven of those ten tweets [concerning a malaria paper] came from the WHO or the CDC or people who are highly regarded researchers in that discipline, the identity of the people who are using your work will be meaningful, and that can be reported in some way”.

“The global reach is something that administrators are interested in”. Concerning blog posts about articles, “If it is a scientific or research oriented blog, that may be of great interest. If it is a general interest blog, that is also kind of nice”. Administrators “like the press, press is good”.

“It is very early days, and nobody really knows what it is going to look like”. Concerning use data from Mendeley, “there is value in capturing that sort of data”. “I would imagine that the buzz there would probably capture” something similar to what the paper might get in the number of citations over the next couple of years. Mendeley would be a better comparison than shares on Twitter, since Twitter “is not necessarily a good indicate of scientific quality. And, plus, I would imagine Twitter is a much more public forum, and therefore, it will attract interest” because of the popularity of the topic, not because it is important research. Tweets can be positive or negative. “Just measuring the noise around a paper isn’t good enough. You want to look at downloads, you want to look at discussions in a community that you trust”.

“Anytime you try to measure something, you are perturbing the system, and people will be tempted to game it. I am sure we can be clever enough to stay ahead of that”.

Will altmetrics help people move away from using the impact factor as an evaluation tool for people or specific articles? “You can make that argument with the data that we already have without altmetrics, and it hasn’t worked”. “The large majority of the articles [in the high impact journals] are not cited any higher than any other article”. “They know that journal rank is a psychological phenomena, a figment, it doesn’t really exist”.

“They are extremely important. They have to be the wave of the future in evaluating scholarship because of all of the digital scholarship and because they offer us a much better picture of the actual impact of a particular piece of scholarship”.

“They really appeal to the ego of academics after all”. The researcher can find out “who is actually looking at my work; I’ve never been able to know that before”. With geolocation mapping, “It doesn’t tell you who, but it tells you where”. “One of the things that has really impressed them [researchers], is beginning to think about uses of their work outside of what they see as their normal channels”.

Some researchers might say that “my work is so complex and specific, that only 25 people in the world understand it, and I know who all of them are”. “One of the exciting things is to help people get past that view, to show them where their readers might be”. Altmetrics can help faculty find “the unexpected readers of their work”. “Most people are really excited by that, so I think that there is an educational task there”.

“Related to the Altmetrics side of things… I don’t know that we are going to continue to judge journals as a whole”.

“If you have a dataset that is getting more citations than the article, then [the researcher] should be getting credit for that”.

“The publishers that cater to the research needs on that level [with more altmetric data] will be the ones that survive”.

“In the UK, we are going to be looking for those sorts of measures more and more” when “the funders are asking what sort of effect is the research having?” “The more the variety of altmetrics we have, the better from our point of view. As you get more and more of them, it gets harder to put them back in the bag”.

When researchers are evaluated, it used to be done only on the impact factor. “We are going to move to a situation where [the evaluation process was] easy and wrong, to a position where it will be difficult but correct”.

“We are not going to shut Pandora’s box on this”.

“It could allow for more [journal publishing] competition because it might help to break down this innate conservatism” among researchers. But, at present, “there isn’t much understanding of altmetrics”.

“If you have to have a number to judge the paper by, then use its own citation count if you must—not the citation counts of other papers that appeared in the same journal. And judging a researcher by the IFs of the journals that her papers appeared in transcends the merely idiotic and achieves the level of moronic”.

“I have serious concerns about the rush for AltMetrics, particularly AltMetrics based on social media. Before anyone even begins to think about using such metrics for assessing the work of scholars, much work needs to be done. For example, I argue that it is reasonable to hypothesize that any AltMetrics based on social media (whose work is tweeted, promoted on Facebook, etc.) is likely to reflect and amplify existing social biases”.

It “should not be used for assessing the work of scholars”.

“In general I applaud the altmetrics work and aims. We need to move away from poor, dated indicators and develop new, meaningful ones”.

Altmetrics “provides a more nuanced and refined way to assess the nature of someone's work”.

“I’m impressed by the work that is being done [in altmetrics]. I recognize the problem that we have with the current model of journal impact factors. In our stance, we regard the value of the paper as opposed to the value of the journal it is placed in. If altmetric tools can demonstrate the value of the paper more effectively, then I think that is a good thing”.

6) The Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK notes: “No sub-panel will make any use of journal impact factors, rankings, lists or the perceived standing of publishers in assessing the quality of research outputs” (http://www.ref.ac.uk/faq/all/). While this is a valid statement for UK based research evaluation, it would be impossible to get a majority of academic tenure and promotion committees throughout the United States to agree to a similar statement in the near future. Since the UK has the REF, and the US does not, how much is this holding back the US from adopting greater OA policies at various institutions?

The interviewee has empathy for scientists “who placed their bets on a structure that doesn’t work very well”. “They resist fads, and they move slowly on major decisions”. “We are in the middle of a meaningful change in the scholarly publishing business”. “This isn’t what they [the established scientists] signed up for”. “The real surprises are still out there”.

“In the UK, the Wellcome trust does not take the impact factor of the journal into consideration”. However, “some people don’t believe that the REF guidelines are followed”.

“If you are not an expert in that field, then it is quite difficult for you to judge whether the work is good or not”. With eLife, “for each paper, they are going to write a lay summary”. “That would enable people outside the field to get a sense of the quality of the work”. “People are not going to drop the shorthand [using the journal title or publisher name as a proxy for prestige] unless you provide them with an equally easy shorthand” for determining the quality of an article.

“How do you change hundreds of universities tenure and promotion policies? Answer: Slowly”. “Funder policies will help for a lot of universities”. “A lot second tier universities that have a research component are trying to amp that up for obvious reasons”. “Funder policies will begin to drive changes”. When tier one universities start to change their policies, it will drive some changes at tier 2 universities and even small colleges. Change will occur “when the faculty begin to create scholarship that is simply not amenable to traditional publication and to traditional impact factor evaluations”. “That kind of work… is going to trickle down through the academic world and more and more tenure and promotion committees are going to be confronted with genuine scholarly production that they need evaluate, and they can’t rely on an impact factor or the prestige of a journal title”. “Change is going to be slow”.

“In the UK, we are obsessed with this thing called the Research Evaluation Framework”. “Basically, this is a way the government decides how to split money between universities based on how successful they are in research”. “For the past 20 years or so, the funders have said, it is the value of the research; it doesn’t matter where you publish”. Even though that is what is said, “Everybody believes it is where you publish. Everybody you talk to, every researcher says ‘of course they say that’” but they still want to publish in the high impact and prestigious journals.

“There has been a real pressure in the UK to make sure you publish” in the prestigious journals because “there is the perception that that will directly feedback to the amount of research income you get in the future”.

“That view has been an inhibitor [for researchers in the UK] to move to open access”. “Most open access journals are new; they don’t have the same prestige levels. They have sort of a natural disadvantage to start with. But, that is changing now”.

Using impact factors to judge the quality of individual articles is “exactly as rational as high-school kids judging their classmates by the label of the clothes they wear. We’re scientists. We’re better than that”.

“The REF is not all honey and spice. It's had some very perverse consequences over here, as has the Australian version, and I wouldn't recommend the US goes down the same road in quite the same way”.

“It is unfortunate that a lot of research is evaluated based on the container (the journal) and the not the article itself. I don't see that this will change in the near future”.

“There is a potential driver for this in the UK”. With the REF, “one of the factors that is being put into this, and it is pretty controversial, is something called ‘impact.’” This is different from impact factor. One could show that the research had impact in the wider world by noting “that it had been picked up by the Times or the Guardian”. “Other impacts would include having your work mentioned in a briefing paper about education policy, or if you were invited to talk about your research on a local radio program”. “These are altmetric types of things”. “It can be part of the narrative describing your impact”.