This year’s annual ALPSP conference once again focused on the key issues facing society publishers – from Plan S and open access to diversity, copyright, and Brexit – offering a wide range of perspectives on how to navigate this changing landscape.

In the day’s opening keynote, The

Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA): Opening up the measures of success,

 

 

 

Professor Stephen Curry, chair of DORA, gave a wide-ranging overview of the

deficiencies of our current market-driven measures of success, suggesting many

urgent opportunities for improvement. Though metrics can be useful, he

suggested, too often they are too closely tied to extrinsic rewards or

misapplied by those who fail to understand their context. Our focus on journal

impact factors, for instance, slows publication, creates a bias towards

positive results, and even incentivises fraud. Many of these problems, Curry

argued, might be mitigated by the complementary adoption of article-level

metrics – which shift attention to the quality of articles themselves – and the

sharing of preprints, which increase circulation speed and encourage greater

scrutiny, thereby revealing flaws that might be missed by reviewers. More

nuanced journal-level metrics that assess the range of activities that journals

perform – from evaluation to archiving – would also be helpful. Ultimately, our

assessment of research should ensure that it is reliable and rapid, accessible,

and high quality, transforming our understanding of the world and changing it

for the better.

 

 

 

 

 

The following panel session, Breaking the

Glass Ceiling, chaired by Rebecca Asher of Sense About Science, saw

four industry leaders discuss the glass ceiling that still affects women within

 

 

 

the scholarly ecosystem. Leslie Yellowlees, the first woman president of the Royal

Society of Chemistry, described change within STEM as ‘glacially slow’; Amy

Brand, director of the MIT Press, noted the ‘subtle slights’ that discourage

women from developing their careers, from not receiving invitations to

overhearing negative comments, and recommended that women ‘engage head on’ with

these microaggressions. Sarah Greaves, publishing director at Hindawi, agreed,

arguing that women need actively to retrain themselves to challenge the

assumptions of authority, such as the persistent assumptions noted by Allison

Lang of the BMJ that, as a woman, she would make the tea and book taxis, and

act as her children’s primary care-giver.

Day two began with the launch of

the results

of the Society Publishers Accelerating Open Access and Plan S (SPA-OPS) project

in a panel session on Open

Transitions within Plan S, chaired by Alicia Wise of Information Power.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust and UKRI and conducted in partnership with ALPSP,

the project has issued a collection of outputs including 27 business models, a

model transformative agreement, and an implementation toolkit. Commenting on

the more than 100 responses received – two thirds from STEM societies; a third

from HSS – Rachel Bruce, Head of Open Science for UK Research and Innovation

(UKRI), noted society publishers’ reliance on hybrid models and the difficulties

they encountered in dealing with consortia. Lorraine Estelle of Information

Power then gave an overview of the toolkit while exploring the possibilities that

transformative models offer for society publishers, repurposing existing

institutional spending to provide predictable and attractive revenue streams

that nevertheless made content openly available. More than 90% of the library

consortia consulted for the survey, she noted, were keen to work with

publishers on exploring such models; and though they tended not to see current

spend as sustainable in the long-term, they were willing to accept a

cost-neutral transformation in the short term. Following Bruce, Gaynor

Redvers-Mutton shared some of the lessons the Microbiology Society had learned

from developing a Publish and Read

model as part of the project, flipping their business model

institution-by-institution and country-by-country through offering ‘all you can

eat’ access to all their journal content on payment of a single upfront fee.

The process was essential to the society’s own mission of sharing and promoting

biomedical research, but it had also been time-consuming and involved risks –

particularly financially – that they had attempted to mitigate through the

setting of time limits. Responses had been hugely positive, though some were

concerned that the society might be displaying commercial naivete. Shelley

Allen closed the session by discussing Emerald’s new open research platform

Emerald Open Research, launched in partnership with F1000 and focused primarily

on the humanities and social sciences, where funding for APCs is rarer and open

access content less common. Describing the platform as not a journal but a

web-based platform with an author-led approach, Allen explained that – as Curry

had suggested the day before, talking about preprints more generally – it

enabled rapid publication, open peer review, and for research to be judged on

its merits, not its place of publication.

 

 

 

 

Thursday’s second plenary session

saw

Sarah Faulder, Chief Executive of Publishers’ Licensing Services discuss ‘The

Changing Copyright Landscape Across the World and the Impact of Brexit’

with Elisabeth Ribbans, Director of Policy and Public Affairs for the British

Copyright Council. Conversation began with a discussion of the new EU copyright

directive, two years in the making, which has introduced a mandatory copyright

exception for text and data mining the contents of scientific journals for

scientific and research purposes; Faulder noted also that a new ‘bestseller

clause’ allowed authors to renegotiate contracts for works that outperform expectations.

However, given that the UK is set to leave the European Union during the

two-year implementation period, and that the government has as yet made no move

to implement the directive, its future status in UK law remains uncertain.

Considering further the UK’s position after leaving the European Union, Ribbans

observed that existing copyright law adopted by the UK should largely remain

unchanged, excepting databases, whose infrastructure would no longer be

protected; however, future trade agreements with the more copyright-liberal US

might threaten current protections.

 

 

 

 

Friday’s final sessions returned

to the subjects of open access and Plan S. In the first, Transforming

publishing: Sharing perspectives on the latest models to expand open access,

chaired by Dan Pollock of Delta Think, Springer Nature’s Steven Inchcoombe

explained that though publishers had been served well by subscription models,

they must accept the benefits that open access offers science, and find ways of

making it work for them. Ralf Schimmer of the Max Planck Digital Library

insisted that open access was the only legitimate business model in a fully

digital world, reminding listeners that there was already enough money in the

system to pay for it, while Niamh O’Connor of PLOS noted that the move to open

access would have its own long tail, with the timeline for open access books

looking very different to that for journals. Malavika Legge of the Biochemical

Society’s Portland Press shared some of the lessons drawn from the adoption of

open access models by a society heavily dependent on subscription revenues to

support its other work: don’t be distracted by deadlines, but learn by doing;

talk with other publishers, consortia, and institutions; and, be open about

routes to sustainable OA.

 

 

 

 

The session concluded with

discussion of Plan S – broadly welcomed, though with some concerns over its

prescriptiveness.  This led neatly into

the conference’s closing session, Plan S - the

road ahead, in which Johan Rooryck, newly-installed OA champion at

cOAlition S, discussed the principles behind Plan S and recent changes in its

implementation guidance. With timelines extended by a year, a range of

transformative agreements would now be supported until the end of 2024, but

hybrid journals would remain uncompliant because they had been shown not to

work; immediate green OA would, however, be acceptable. Rooryck stressed that

the coalition was listening to stakeholders: it was working with researchers –

and particularly those in their early careers – to understand and then mitigate

their concerns, and with learned societies too: it would work with publishers

and other stakeholders to define the services involved in publishing and then

price them. Libraries would play a vital role in the transformation too,

particularly in converting subscriptions to open access payments.

 

 

 

 

In addition to the plenary

sessions, this year’s conference once again included a wealth of parallel

sessions covering such key topics as diversity, early career researchers,

innovation, open peer review, open monographs, and the future of the book.

Thursday evening’s awards dinner also saw Ann Michael, Chief Digital Officer

for PLOS and founder of strategic consultancy Delta Think, honoured for her

lifetime contribution to scholarly publishing, while the award for innovation

in publishing Scite, a platform to

evaluate the reliability of scientific claims using deep learning models

alongside a network of experts. Also shortlisted were BMJ Best Practice from BMJ with

67 Bricks, preLights from the

Company of Biologists, and Ripeta. 

went to