[GOAL] Recommendations for Next Generation Repositories

[Kathleen Shearer]

(sorry for the cross-posting)



COAR is pleased to announce the publication of the work of the Next Generation 
Repositories Working Group, Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the 
COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group 

 
In April 2016, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) launched 
the Next Generation Repository Working Group to identify new functionalities 
and technologies for repositories. In this report, we are pleased to present 
the results of the work of this group, including recommendations for the 
adoption of new technologies, standards, and protocols that will help 
repositories become more integrated into the web environment and enable them to 
play a larger role in the scholarly communication ecosystem.
The current system for disseminating research, which is dominated by commercial 
publishers, is far from ideal. In an economic sense, prices for both 
subscriptions and APCs are over-inflated and will likely continue to rise at 
unacceptable rates. Additionally, there are significant inequalities in the 
international publishing system both in terms of access and participation. The 
incentives built into the system, which oblige researchers to publish in 
traditional publishing venues, perpetuate these problems and greatly stifle our 
ability to evolve and innovate.

At COAR, we believe the globally distributed network of more than 3000 
repositories can be leveraged to create a more sustainable and innovative 
system for sharing and building on the results of research. Collectively, 
repositories can provide a comprehensive view of the research of the whole 
world, while also enabling each scholar and institution to participate in the 
global network of scientific and scholarly enquiry. Building additional 
services such as standardized usage metrics, peer review and social networking 
on top of a trusted global network of repositories has the potential to offer a 
viable alternative.

The vision underlying the work of Next Generation Repositories is,

To position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally 
networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of 
value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making 
it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also 
collectively managed by the scholarly community.

An important component of this vision is that repositories will provide access 
to a wide variety of research outputs, creating the conditions whereby a 
greater diversity of contributions to the scholarly record will be accessible, 
and also formally recognized in research assessment processes.

Our vision is aligned with others, such as MIT’s Future of Libraries Report 
 and Lorcan Dempsey’s notion of the 
“inside-out” library 
, that are defining 
a new role of libraries in the 21st century. This future involves a shift away 
from libraries purchasing content for their local users, towards libraries 
curating and sharing with the rest of the world the research outputs produced 
at their institution. COAR’s mission is to ensure that, as libraries and 
research organizations invest in and enhance their local services, they adopt 
common standards and functionalities that will allow them to participate in the 
global network. We very much hope that the recommendations provided in this 
report will contribute to the transition towards this new role for repositories 
and libraries.

This was a truly collaborative effort. We would like to sincerely thank the 
members of the Next Generation Repositories Working Group 

 for their generous contributions and significant efforts towards this 
undertaking. They have brought a breadth and depth of expertise, without which 
we would not have been able to accomplish this work. We are very grateful!

Eloy Rodrigues, COAR Chairman and Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director


Kathleen Shearer
Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
m.kathleen.shea...@gmail.com  - +1 514 992 
9068
Skype: kathleen.shearer2 - twitter: @KathleeShearer
www.coar-repositories.org





___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

Re: [GOAL] Hybrid OA - Confused authors

[Dirk Pieper]

Dear 
all,https://twitter.com/oa_intact/status/857208992220819456https://twitter.com/oa_intact/status/857208992220819456


I also think, the main point for a successful and broad OA 
transformation is, that libraries switch their acquisition budgets step 
by step to gold OA.  This year, Ted Bergstrom suggested at the Science 
Europe Conference, that libraries should reduce their funding of 
subscriptions by a fixed percentage per year and move these funds to OA:


https://twitter.com/oa_intact/status/857208992220819456

https://twitter.com/oa_intact/status/857208992220819456

As OA2020 points out (https://oa2020.org/take-action/), libraries can 
invest their acquisition budgets not only into APC models, but also into 
cooperative publishing models, membership models, they can support 
discipline archives or institutional and regional OA publishing 
initiatives.


When it comes to hybrid OA, the offsetting dataset of OpenAPC clearly 
shows for Springer Compact, that there is only one journal, that can 
collect at least more than 1%  out of  about 12,000 articles:


https://treemaps.intact-project.org/apcdata/offsetting/#journal/period=&is_hybrid=TRUE

Aside from confusing authors, it seems, that hybrid OA is inefficient 
(for publishers and for libraries) and too expensive. On the other hand, 
memberhsip publishing models produce too little articles per year to 
have a huge effect on OA growth rates yet.


My suggestion is, that if publishers don´t transform their journals into 
pure OA now, the best strategy for libraries to give incentives for a 
large scale OA transition is, to move their acquisition budgets step by 
step to finance their researchers publications in pure OA journals (via 
APCs) and to support the other models OA2020 is suggesting as well. 
Especially a cooperative model like SCOAP3 has a big effect on OA growth 
rates and should be considered to be established in other disciplines as 
well.


Best,
Dirk








Am 27.11.2017 um 22:44 schrieb Christian Gutknecht:

Hi Heather

I think it’s a fair point to discuss the issue of good will regarding 
mistakes during the APC-payment. However I think this is especially a 
problem of hybrid.


And I agree, it’s better to own the issue. And therefore I suggest to 
eventually move forward with the large scale transition. In fact, the 
longer we wait hybrid will become a real problem. For a long time most 
funders and institutions have successfully denied funding for hybrid 
OA because of the double dip issue. The hybrid share was laughable 
low. Then there was the push for hybrid in UK and many publishers 
promoted their hybrid program more offensively on their website and in 
their workflows. Now this promotion reaches academics with little 
knowledge about OA. These academic sense that OA is important, but 
they don’t understand the details and especially not the problem of 
hybrid.


In a survey at the ETH Zurich 23% of the researchers have replied that 
they have published in hybrid journals in the last 12 months 
(http://www.library.ethz.ch/en/Media/Files/Open-Access-Survey-at-ETH-Zurich-Summary-Report2 , 
p.13), despite the library and the national funder have a clear 
No-Hybrid-Policy since years. An investigation of a librarian 
(https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/2017H3S67-87) it showed, that it’s 
extremely difficult to identify these articles and who had paid for 
them. Neither the university nor the publishers had good data to 
provide this information. However it was estimated that that in 2015 
about 300’000 USD were spent just for hybrid OA by ETHZ. And this 
number is clearly on the raise.


So the longer we postpone the transition to Gold OA, the more money we 
will loose on the way, and the more no so well informed authors are 
confused with hybrid options or complex self-archiving policies. Those 
who pay subscriptions today have the power to make that change in 
their hand.


Best regards

Christian


Am 27.11.2017 um 13:58 schrieb Heather Morrison 
mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>>:


Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Frédéric.

Assuming your information is correct, this is the kind of behaviour 
that has resulted in publishers being labelled predatory. Perhaps 
someone from Springer would like to clarify their business practice here.


This illustrates one of the drawbacks of the APC model (all models 
have drawbacks). Authors must submit work to journals (hybrid or full 
OA), and journals must accept articles for peer review, when neither 
party knows if the article will be accepted, and in many cases it 
will not be clear who would pay an APC and how.


In this circumstance it is difficult to see how standard business 
practices such as up-front credit card or e-transfer payment for 
products or services to be delivered later, with acceptance of terms, 
could work. I believe that some publishers have experience with 
old-fashioned print-based page charges that is relevant here.


The situation Frédéric describes is