I've been thinking about my trip to RLUK16 last month, and thought I'd write a few lines about the talks that stuck me as the most interesting. I've had some interesting conversations with colleageus about how I can work what I learned into the support sytems for my current role.
Gerard Meijer (Radboud University Nijmegen) - The Open Access (OA) transformation in the Netherlands
If you want to negotiate properly with publishers completely opting out and cancelling that subscription must be a possibility.
Gerard oversaw negotiations with Elsevier as part of a move toward 100% OA by 2024 via the Gold route in the Netherlands. Thye talk was especially well-timed, as intitutions in the UK prepare to negotiate with Elsevier for the renwall of our subscription services.
In the end, the negotiations took 20 months. The resulting deal was for 3 years, to 30% OA by 2018. As a result of this deal, universities do not pay APCs, and instead are covered by their subscriptions. Instead, progressive collections of titles are made OA. Subscription costs were capped at a 2.5% increase per year. Gerard stressed that negotiations with publishers need to be handled at the highest level within institutions as a matter of importance. The involvement of university senior management is crucial. According to Gerard, if you want to negotiate properly with publishers completely opting out and cancelling that subscription must be a possibility, or you're not serious! He noted that consortia are an essential component in negotiations.
Negotiations also need communication strategies – for example no one from Elsevier was allowed to meet with anyone from the negotiation organisations (outside of the negotiations themselves) for the whole 20 month period. That included training etc. but Elsevier also sent emails to academics and researchers spreading misleading information.
Lastly, all stakeholders need to properly involved - not just academics, librarians, and publishers. For example, politicians need to be informed – Elsevier used the tax revenue they generate for the Netherlands as a reason to involve politicians in exerting pressure on universities. For this same reason, research organisations and funders also need a seat at the table.
Gerard ended on a positive note - next stop, American Chemical Society!
Danny Kingsley (Cambridge University) - The value of embracing unknowns unknowns
Just because you can publish an article does mean that you are au fait with the greater mechanisms of publishing.
Danny spoke about founding the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge in early 2015 and the process behind publishing her article; "Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing."
Danny argued (quite convincingly) that the majority of problems that people have with Open Access are actually issues that are part of the greater system of scholarly communications. For example, publishers have misappropriated a lot of the language surrounding open access which has caused a lot of confusion. To avoid this we need to standardise the terms we use when we talk about OA. There is also some confusion among academics concerning the actual process of publication.
Danny also argued that Librarians need to become heavily involved in study of scholarly communications. Sadly, this isn’t currently taught in LIS programmes and we need to incorporate the full cycle of scholarly communication, from discovery and creation of knowledge, to its dissemination, preservation, and reuse into all aspects of our work if we want the continued success of academic libraries.
Sally Rumsey (Oxford University) - Act on Acceptance
Communications were completely exploited by everyone everywhere.Sally spoke about the work the Library has done to increase academic engagement with Open Access, increasing deposits in the institutional repository from approximately 100 a month to over 1200 month. Prior to this there was not much engagement with green OA at Oxford, and there were multiple deposit tools in use by people all over the place. The Library developed service recommendations, drafted a (massive) communications plan, and a report. They made sure that communications were completely exploited by everyone everywhere. The resulting Act on Acceptance message was enthusiastically received. This is something that we actually copied (with permission!) at my own institution, and it's proved very popular!
Sally also spoke about how Oxford University has streamlined the deposit workflow for academics. The key to this was to ensure that as many tasks as possible were automated so that what staff they did have could work at scale. This was achieved by capturing publication data at time of acceptance; sources including CrossREF, DOI, and information from Sherpa. Though it was mentioned during the discussion that it would be simpler if publishers were made to include this metadata in the publication information.
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