Recent changes in institutional Gold Open Access funding practices at Strathclyde
Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian
Sometime in mid-November, the situation that most other research-intensive universities in Scotland had already reported when we met last Sep for the Autumn 2018 Open Access Scotland working group meeting in Aberdeen also hit Strathclyde Uni: the block grant awarded to the library by the Research Councils UK (now UK Research and Innovation, UKRI) to cover Open Access publishing fees (APCs) in the period spanning from Apr 1st, 2018 to Mar 31st, 2019 ran out. This typically marks the introduction of APC funding restrictions and a subsequent change in Gold Open Access funding eligibility criteria. Open Access librarians do not enjoy this situation, as institutional researchers are notoriously difficult to be made aware of such sudden changes in policy, but there is not much alternative given the circumstances.
It's not the first time we run out of block grant funding at Strathclyde – this was also the case last year, but back then we managed to complete the funding period by overspending in the knowledge that a new tranche of funding would eventually arrive. This year however, following the release of Plan S and the updated Wellcome Trust Open Access policy, we have decided to take a different course: while we will still overspend and charge the excess expenditure to the next block grant to be awarded later this year, a tightening of the eligibility criteria in line with the above-mentioned recent pieces of policy-making will take place, very much in line with what our colleagues at fellow research-intensive Scottish institutions have been doing for some time. This means enforcing a no-hybrid Open Access funding policy.
It has occasionally been the case in the past few months while we still had some budget that researchers would come to us with a request to fund Gold Open Access for a top-of-the-class accepted manuscript whose leading institution had refused to pay an APC for, instead sticking to the Green Open Access line of action, namely depositing a copy of the accepted author manuscript – typically under a 12-month embargo – into the appropriate institutional systems. Since the manuscript (accepted in a hybrid journal) was technically eligible for Gold Open Access funding, we granted the funding request. Comments from the co-authors of the publication celebrated that "at least some universities still cared about the subsequent increase in research impact". This is an interesting remark. It again proves the fact, well-known by any institutional librarian dealing with APC funding, that every single researcher thinks that their accepted manuscript is the sole one that the library will process.
The remark also hints at the need to better coordinate institutional Open Access funding services across HEIs, something that has already been advocated in the past.
This post is not aimed however to discuss possible improvements in cross-institutional coordination around APC funding, but rather to examine the effects of the sudden introduction of the no-hybrid policy on the APC funding distribution by publishers and on researchers' attitudes. On the former, the impact of the updated eligibility criteria on the distribution of funded journal titles has been immediate. Although it's still too early to assess, early results suggest it could mark a more permanent element in our policy even beyond the arrival of the new tranche of UKRI funding on Apr 1st, 2019. This is mainly because a return to the hybrid funding policy would automatically result in running out of budget in the midst of the funding period again sometime towards the end of 2019 (if not earlier).
The APC funding by publishers resulting from the first weeks of no-hybrid policy shows, as expected, a much more balanced distribution between hybrid and fully Open Access publishers. Publishers like MDPI or PLoS have suddenly become a regular entry behind the titles that are receiving funding, while hybrid publishers like the IEEE, the Optical Society of America or Elsevier still feature on the list thanks to fully Open Access journals of theirs like IEEE Access, Optics Express or Materials & Design. SpringerNature is the sole publisher that sees almost no impact from the updated eligibility criteria, since their hybrid journals are covered by the Springer Compact agreement and – assuming the deal gets renewed in the UK as it has in the Netherlands – are hence not affected by the policy update. Critically, the APC distribution is not only more balanced across publishers, it is also significantly more affordable – and this is one of the main objectives at this stage.
On the latter aspect, i.e. the reactions from institutional researchers whose Gold Open Access funding requests are turned down due to the lack of funds, the findings thus far are that authors understand the situation and do not insist on having their paper published Gold Open Access via the library. Whether this means that they'll choose the Green Open Access route or that they will instead try to find some alternative source of funding is hard to tell at the moment, but the evidence so far tends to suggest the former choice.
One unexpected – if not unwelcome – outcome of the new policy is that it takes longer to address the funding requests than in the past, when they would just be routed into the default payment workflow for the specific publisher. Now it's often necessary to explain to the authors that the current limitations in funding availability prevent the library from accepting their funding request, and this requires a higher level of customisation in the communications than it used to be the rule.
Another potential outcome of this updated eligibility policy might be a stronger case for setting up an Institutional Open Access Fund at Strathclyde. Centralised APC funding via block grant budgets from research funders inevitably introduces a strong bias towards the more intensively UKRI- and COAF-funded departments (in our case, Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Physics and the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy & Biomedical Sciences, mostly to the detriment of Social Science and Humanities Schools and more generally of unfunded authors anywhere). An updated funding eligibility policy that resulted in lower expenditures could reinforce the feasibility of serving a significant fraction of unfunded authors with a limited amount of institutional funding.
From the Scholarly Comms team at the library we would see such a development – which is already operating at fellow Scottish institutions like St Andrews or Stirling – as a desirable outcome in line with the Plan S requirements. We’re at the same time keeping a close eye on potentially complementary ways forward such as the much-discussed ‘Read and Publish’ deals that publishers are currently offering. The issues around these agreements will be addressed in a future post, and we will also provide regular updates on the progress around the updated APC funding eligibility policy, ideally including a list of the funded journals since the change in the policy.