#rcuk

Further to attending the JISC & CNI 2016 Conference in Oxford last week and seeing the released blog on the update of the Springer Compact Deal I have some concerns, and wonder if I am not alone!  The Springer Compact Agreement is being pushed as the way forward for open access, portrayed as a great success.  I am slightly concerned as to what this agreement and the predictable “success” of this will lead to when the agreement needs to be renewed, and the price cap is removed.

The Springer Compact enabled Universities to pay “a set fee for unlimited APCs based on their 2014 APC expenditure with Springer and a top up fee to cover access to all the subscription content1”  Thereby combining the subscription and article processing charges costs (APCs). I would assume that Springer intend to use the same pricing model to work out the costs for institutions to renew this agreement in three years time.  By which time our academics will have become accustomed to publishing with Springer for “no cost”!  

Whilst the cost is absorbed by the library, as an academic, the cost for the article processing charge is zero, therefore making Springer a good choice of where to publish if there is no funding available, especially when similar journals would cost around £2000. We are continually told that academics don’t take the cost of APCs into consideration when choosing where to publish, but I would beg to differ, especially amongst our early career researchers, and those with no funding from RCUK/Wellcome Trust.  If funds are not available, and the academic is keen for “gold” open access, with immediate access to their work (as is often the case in the sciences), then the cost can become a major factor in decision making.

Within my open access role, I have been contacted by a number of academics who want to know the prices of the article processing charges for various journals, and what discounts are available, and what the embargo periods are if going the “green” route prior to submitting their articles.  Based on this information I am aware of a number of academics who had been looking to publish elsewhere, choosing to instead publish with Springer.

The increase that we are seeing as an Institution in relation to academics publishing with Springer, as would be expected is mirrored across the UK.  “In only five months (January to May), 86% of UK institutions have already published open access articles equivalent to or in excess of their total 2014 APC spend1.”  That is great for now, but when this deal needs to be renegotiated, do we not anticipate that the prices will increase substantially to take into account the increased amount of APCs covered?  Jisc states: “This means that researchers from these institutions are publishing more OA articles than they did in 2014 but the cost to the institutions is capped.1”

Which is, incredibly positive… That is until the period of the cap is over and Springer renegotiates… based on number of articles published… Which to my mind is an extremely good business plan for Springer, but a dangerous prospect for future library budgets.  IEEE has recently begun marketing to follow the same pathway, with emails and tweets informing us of how many articles we published with them this year, and how if we pay that same price, then all our articles will be made open access “for free” for the next year.  Firstly, there is no guarantee that we would publish as many articles in the next year with IEEE.  Which if we did not, would lead to a loss for us, and a gain for IEEE!  Secondly, out of the 40 articles that we as an institution published with IEEE this year, no APCs came from a library budget (we don’t have an institutional account for APCs), 9 were funded by RCUK, which leaves 31 that were either published “green” or came out of departmental or other budgets.  We are now being presented with a “deal” that will cost us the price of having paid for all 40 articles to have been made “gold” open access – which we would never have done!

Most, if not all of IEEE journals meet RCUK and HEFCE open access requirements via the “green” route, with no requirement to pay for an APC.  It is fairly easy to predict that if such “flipped” models are accepted, then the number of articles published will increase, much as it has with Springer. I am sure that our faculty of Engineering would be delighted if all their articles in IEEE had the published version made open access immediately on publication at no cost to them, and many would be encouraged to publish there.  If all major publishers follow this same pattern then I fear that we will be in much the same position as we were before, with journal subscription costs reaching a record high, and being unable to determine the true cost of an article processing charge, as it has been lumped together with the cost of the journal subscription.

On one hand the Springer Compact deal does cut down on the financial administration of APCs and speeds up the process of publication for authors.  However, the claims that all articles published with Springer are “automatically compliant with funder requirements.1” is far from true. Being open access and published under a CC-BY licence whilst going a long way towards compliance, is not enough to meet funder requirements.  Especially RCUK and Wellcome Trust/COAF – where acknowledgment of funders and inclusion of information about the datasets used must be included in the paper.  If authors have neglected to do this, there is no checking mechanism in place.

Some Institutions say that these papers wouldn’t have previously been picked up as being non-compliant, and seem content to count these as non-compliant for RCUK purposes.  However, I am unwilling to take this route, and with the work processes we have in place at our Institution, if funding were required for the APC, then they would not have been funded until they were compliant. We now carry out a check prior to approving with Springer that the author is affiliated with our organisation, and thus we are able to ensure compliance, so far, approximately 5o% of the articles that we have published with Springer have needed funder acknowledgments added to the papers submitted. It is an extra administrative burden, but one that I feel is necessary.

So, is the Springer Compact deal the best option that we have for efficient and cost effective payment of APC’s or is there a better way?  What will the costs be when it’s time to renew this deal? Will compliance rates with RCUK/Wellcome Trust be affected?

The Springer Compact Agreement started in October 2015, whereby rather than paying for an annual subscription fee and then additional article processing charges (APCs) per articles, the cost of the subscription fee (an amount considered to be equal to the cost of subscriptions and APCs from 2014) would cover all APCs that were written by academics within the Higher Education Institution (HEI) in addition to the journal access.  The articles would be published under a CC-BY licence, thereby meeting the open access requirements of funders.

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