Pending issues around APC management workflows
Notes for the Mar 17th CCC round table on APC management in London
Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian, University of Strathclyde
We have recently received this FOI request above – together with the rest of Scottish HEIs. The request looks very sensible and we’re happy to share the data we have at the Library. We do however know that this is but a fraction of the APC payments that are being made within the institution, and we suspect many other universities find themselves in a similar position.
There's a lot of justified resistance against the APC business model, but when considering this topic, librarians should perhaps try to also see themselves as service providers for researchers besides advocates for a specific way to deal with scholarly comms. Regardless of the strong opinions around article processing charges in Libraryland, researchers everywhere are regularly paying for APCs with their grant budget or directly from their own pockets. This is because they believe in the advantages of Open Access, and it is ironic that the OA advocates at their institutions will refuse to provide them support for a better management of such payments because they oppose the specific business model.
The first step in the design of such a supporting service is to know what the landscape for APC fee payments looks like at a specific institution. The OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot held a workshop in April 2015 with experts in Open Access implementation from institutions in different countries. When asked to provide an estimation on the percentage of the total amount of paid APCs at their institution that the library was able to 'see', the UK rep (UCL) said 80%, the Dutch rep (TU Delft) said 60% and the Spanish rep (CSIC) said 20%. The Library Director from the Spanish research institution added that it was not the library's role to chase the APC payments directly made by researchers, but rather the publishers' responsibility to provide data to the institutions around a business model that provides a large additional source of income for them.
The challenging process for collecting such data in the UK – where the research funders' support for the APC-based Gold Open Access model via block grant transfers to certain institutions makes it much simpler for centrally-managed workflows for APC payments to be implemented – is accurately described in Theo Andrew's text on 'APCs paid in the wild'. Even if the collective effort is being of much help for clarifying the workflows, it's easy to see there are still plenty of inefficiencies in the system.
Libraries can do much to get as comprehensive a picture of the APC payment activity as possible via the right dissemination strategies, and are jointly collecting impressive sets of data around centrally-managed APC payments. However, the behavioural change required for researchers to resort by default to their library for at least tracking the APC payment activity may well need support from publishers, especially where there’s no institutional Gold OA fund available to centrally support APC payments. Keeping in mind that APC management is regularly a source of headaches for publishers too, it should not be that hard to come up with mechanisms to jointly tackle the issues posed by APC management at an institutional level. This would be very much in the spirit of the Jisc’s Desiderata on how publishers can help meeting the Open Access policy requirements from research funders.
The CCC RightsLink service for Open Access is a potentially interesting concept in this regard, allowing publishers to team up around a single tool for dealing with APC management. There may be other areas where a dialogue with the CCC may not be that fluid, but there’s no harm in jointly trying to identify potential opportunities to improve the workflows for this specific one.
After leading an APC funding initiative, centrally managed by the funder like the EC FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot, the rationale behind a system like the Gates Foundation’s Chronos also looks very well-thought and attractive – this is of course a research funder’s perspective, but there’s no shortage of examples for centrally managed APC funding initiatives. If distributed APC management raises such complexities, why not restrict the conversation to funders, publishers and authors leaving institutions outside the loop? Institutions may rightly complain that this is their area of expertise and that it's aligned with other Open Access activities such as institutional repository management and the wider work around Green OA, but there are also many voices complaining that this specific APC management task overloads libraries with a very complex task to perform if researchers do not follow the proper procedure for their APC payments.
There are best practices out there, even excellent practices, see the UCL payment dataset at OpenAPC. However, this is only possible if there is an institutional Gold OA fund that allows quick centrally-managed APC payments.
It’s also possible to receive information on APC payments for a given institution directly from the publishers – or at least from some publishers, see an example below. However, this will normally require the institution to either have a subscription or to be in the process of deciding whether to join an offsetting agreement. If publishers were able/willing to regularly share this info with institutions as part of the commitments linked to a national-level offsetting agreement, then things could perhaps start to improve.
We also need better means for tracking APC payments – spreadsheets are a rather medieval mechanism for this purpose. EPrints may well be the best option thus far, but publishers could also help here. In the end it all comes down to system interoperability – Chronos has for instance linked its manuscript submission option to every major manuscript processing system out there, thus ensuring a kind of funder-publisher system interoperability that leaves institutions out. Research Information Management Systems (CRIS) like Pure or others would be a suitable option too if vendors managed to apply the required data model.
There’s clearly an interesting discussion on APC management workflows to be had among different stakeholders in the landscape. The CCC round table tomorrow at the Institute of Directors in London may well provide a very useful opportunity.
