Written by Nancy Shin, Barbara Pralle & Liz Mengel
A common question that librarians at Johns Hopkins University get is, “Why don’t the JH libraries have OA support for all publishers?”
In the ideal library world, JH Libraries would absolutely love to always support every JHU faculty/staff/student’s research publication needs. Unfortunately, the OA models developed by many publishers are financially unsustainable for the research community, especially for research intensive universities. So, that begs the question of “How do JH Libraries decide which publishing agreements to support?”
We first look at the reputation of the publications and then consider many things like JHU usage/authorship, but the two key criteria we consider when entering any new or renewing any existing publishing vendor relationship are:
- Is the publisher’s business model financially sustainable in the long term; i.e., are the terms reasonable and predictable for whomever is funding the publishing, whether that is a researchers’ grant, the Libraries, or an individual or department.
- The publishing benefit must be equitably distributed, i.e., is publishing benefit provided uncapped to extend support as broadly as possible without creating limits such as discrimination on a first come first serve basis?
Transformative Agreements
The most common type of Open Access agreement that libraries enter is called the Transformative Agreement (TA) or the Read + Publish Agreement. How do you define TAs? At its basic core, a Transformative Agreement is a contract/agreement whose purpose is to move the contracted payment from a library or a consortium of libraries to a publisher away from subscription-based reading and in the direction of open access publishing. Ideally, TAs are temporary and transitional and act as a mechanism for transition with the purpose of moving to full open access over time. It’s important though that the academic research community try to control Open Access from being manipulated in academic publishing to create economic incentives for exploitation from the publishing industry. We must remember that the Open Access movement was originally motivated by the problems of global scholarly imbalances and access and was also created to expedite and foster innovation, progress, and global fairness in scientific communication.
Our Open Access Guide lists current OA agreements that the JH Libraries have with various publishers. You will notice that many of our OA Read + Publish agreements offer uncapped/unlimited publishing for our Hopkins authors (i.e., Cambridge University Press, ACM Journals, Company of Biologists Journals, IOP Journals, Microbiology Society Journals, and Royal Society Journals). We consider this type of OA Read + Publish agreement favorable as it satisfies our two guiding principles/criteria, that were mentioned earlier, for an equitable and sustainable publisher relationship. One may also notice that JH Libraries does not have OA agreements with many of the big commercial publishers because their Read + Publish agreements cap the publishing benefits to set numbers of articles and the APC (article processing charges) are extremely high. This creates a financially unsustainable situation over time given the limitations of budgets both at JH Libraries and across the institution.
Besides the popular OA Transformative Agreements, JH Libraries support other types of OA options. For example, with PLoS, we do not have an OA Read + Publish agreement, but we do have a community package that provides researchers uncapped/unlimited publishing with the reputable journals PLoS Global Public Health and PLoS Biology. Another example of a sustainable model is Annual Reviews’ Subscribe to Open model. With the Annual Reviews model existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. Provided there is sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use.
Green OA
Finally, JH Libraries also fully supports Green Open Access options for our faculty/staff/students. We encourage our authors that whenever Gold or Hybrid OA fees are financially unsupportable, they look to Green Open Access options. For example, you can publish in a subscription only (also sometime referred to as paywalled) journal and ask the journal for permission to deposit your version of research known as the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) (i.e., the peer reviewed manuscript that’s not formatted to publisher standards) in a reputable and trustworthy digital repository like arXiv, OSF, PubMed Central or our institutional repository JScholarship. Alternatively, you can also with permission from prospective future publishers deposit your unpublished version of research/manuscript to preprint servers like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s popular and reputable bioRxiv and medRxiv.
JH Libraries value the research that JHU researchers do. As such, we do our best to support your research through certain steps of the research cycle, whether that means providing guidance about Green Open Access options or access to OA publishing support. JH Libraries are here to help, and we greatly appreciate the work that you do for Hopkins and society at large. Feel free to reach out to us if you have questions or want to learn more. scholcomm@jhu.edu