Month: April 2021

Where scholarly communication and scholarly publishing diverge

In the realm of academia and scholarship, Jean-Claude Guédon, Professeur honoraire, Université de Montréal, Canada, has been my touchstone since becoming a scholarly communication librarian. His guest post, Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Publishing, on the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) blog delineates the divergence of the two. Knowledge production relies on an ongoing interrogation through rigorous, transparent processes. Before WWII, knowledge sharing through print publications was publicly subsidized because there wasn’t a commercial market for it. Commercial enterprises subsequently entered scholarly publishing and generated profits by expanding the global market with English as the primary language of discourse, making libraries the market for journals and creating competition for “value” through rankings and impact metrics. Gradually scholarly publishing’s purpose became revenue and profit generation above knowledge production and sharing. The journal and the “version of record” owned by the publisher became the primary commodity. As the digital age develops and matures, different possibilities emerge. Platform as a medium for scholarly communication offers alternatives to journals, versions of record, and commercial control over research commodities:


“A platform handles three relationships: between individuals and documents, between documents, and between individuals. A platform should be open to both readers and scholarly contributors with no financial barriers. A Platform is the site of open knowledge.”

Guédon notes that large sums of money are flowing from libraries, universities, funding agencies and private foundations and a good portion of this is going to profits for large-scale, international businesses. Once again, he advocates for re-allocating these funds to public platforms that support the needs of scholarly communication. He reminds us that scholarly publishing has not always been the purview of publishers controlling research commodities for the purpose of generating profits, and we have alternative platforms to return to scholarly communication for the advancement of knowledge production for public good.

Do commercial interests undermine open science?

In Open Science for Private Interests? How the Logic of Open Science Contributes to the Commercialization of Research, Manuela Fernández Pinto talks about commercial interests in the research itself and how those interests are promoted through open science. He makes the case that open science practices are not always in alignment with the open science ideals of transparency, sharing, collaboration and accountability. The open science movement generally applies to publicly-funded research but the vast majority of scientific research is either conducted (72%) or funded (67%) by businesses. The author identifies three known problems with privately funded research: 

  1. Corporate sponsors can (and do, examples given) suppress research results in conflict with their interests;
  2. Financial conflicts of interest have a statistically significant effect on research results;
  3. Strong intellectual property rights give corporations control over research, with the power to both suppress research results and inhibit new research.

Those who participate in publicly-funded open research are strongly encouraged by various bodies to put no commercial restrictions on their works. Businesses are free to use and commercialize open research, while selectively applying open research principles to the research they sponsor. Pinto uses two case studies, publication planning and citizen science, to illustrate how business-funded research skews research and scholarly communication. The author provides compelling reasons for evaluating research sponsorship and potential conflicts of interest, and raises awareness of commercial interests in both promoting and suppressing research.

Supporting new open access business models

In the Scholarly Kitchen post, New Open Access Business Models – What’s Needed to Make them Work?, David Crotty provides his takeaways from “Making the Future of Open Research Work” at the third CHORUS Forum. Panelists were from Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), PLoS, Annual Reviews and MIT Libraries and a recording of the session is linked from this post. Crotty’s points:

  1. Incomplete author data creates a huge hurdle for publishers and libraries when libraries have contracts to provide funding for works produced by researchers from their organizations. Persistent identifier adoption, including ORCiD IDs and ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs, are keys to solving this challenge to library-funded open access.
  2. Usage data has been used as a metric for demonstrating value for subscribe-to-open funding models. Usage data for open access materials cannot be connected to institutions unless user affiliation data is collected. This violates user privacy which has been fiercely protected by libraries historically. 
  3. To move to different funding models, organizations need to have an understanding of their finances. Currently publisher and library accounting systems lack the granularity of detail and the flexibility to support analysis and tracking of different and multiple financial models.
  4. There’s been a call for publisher financial transparency by Plan S, funders, libraries and others, seemingly in response to what are viewed as excessive profit making by some publishers. Crotty notes that publicly-traded businesses do disclose their financials and he questions why this is demanded of publishers and not other service providers.

Crotty gives a nod to libraries and universities underwriting or subsidizing publishing because it aligns with principles of open scholarly communication, but mostly he’s focused on models consistent with research-as-commodity and demonstrated value in market economy terms.

Seismologists push for diamond open access

The Seismica Initiative: towards a community-driven, Diamond Open Access journal for seismological research is a post on the European Geosciences Union blog that describes a response to a tweet from Nature announcing their author processing charge of €9,500/article (roughly $11,400) to publish open access. By contrast, Volcanica is a fully open access journal that has published 37 peer reviewed articles in the past 2 years without charging any author fees. Seismologists were inspired to create a task force to replicate this model for a diamond open access journal in their discipline. The post includes an excellent graphic (though not Creative Commons licensed) that illustrates the diamond open access space: free to authors, authors retain copyright, free to users and peer-reviewed. In the case of Seismica, the journal will be managed by members of the seismological community and “in the absence of any financial incentives, we ensure that the journal serves the needs of the community before anything else.” A researcher-driven, inclusive process is designed:

“to map out a route towards launching the journal that ensures a sustainable future. Core tasks include finding an administrative/financial host (a library or university press), identifying technical requirements for the manuscript submission platform and journal website, and acquiring the necessary funding.” 

Volcanica, and potentially Seismica, give us examples of platforms for non-profit scholarly communication as envisioned by Jean-Claude Guédon.