The STM Report
An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing

1968-2018
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of STM

Rob Johnson

Research Consulting

Anthony Watkinson
CIBER Research

Michael Mabe
The International Association of Scientific,
Technical and Medical Publishers

Fifth edition, October 2018

The STM Report, Fifth Edition

October 2018

© 2018 STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers
Fifth Edition published October 2018
Published by:International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers
Prins Willem Alexanderhof 5, The Hague, 2595BE, The Netherlands

About STM
STM is the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers. It hasover 150 members in 21 countries who each year collectively publish over 66% of all journal
articles and tens of thousands of monographs and reference works. STM members include
learned societies, university presses, private companies, new starts and established players.
Research Consulting works with publishers, research organisations, funders andpolicymakers to improve the effectiveness and impact of research and scholarly
communication. For more information see www.research-consulting.com.
CIBER Research is an international academic research group founded in 2002 at City
University London and subsequently a research arm of the University College London
Department of Information Studies. The CIBER team offer both consultancy and research.
For further information see www.ciber-research.eu.

Acknowledgements
The STM Report, now in its fifth edition after 12 years, has grown out of all proportion to its
first incarnation. This is reflected not just in the growth in the number of pages but also in
there now being three main authors, and the breadth of the issues we now cover. This rangeof content far exceeds the expertise of any one of us. We want to place on record our warm
appreciation for the input and advice of the following individuals whose insights havecontributed to the finished text:
IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Bev Acreman, Rick Anderson, Eric Archambault, Gaelle Bequet,Peter Berkery, Helen Blanchett, Cherifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Sam Burrell, Andrea
Chiarelli, Lisa Christian, Barry Clarke, Laura Cox, Tom Cullen , Jeremy Dain, Craig Van
Dyck, Michael Evans, Paul Evans, Martin Eve, Victoria Ficarra, Mattia Fosci, Elizabeth
Gadd, Richard Gedye, Wouter Haak, Glenn Hampson, James Hardcastle, Eti Herman, Iain
Hrynaszkiewicz, Michael Jubb, Rachael Lammy, Carlo Scollo Lavizzari, Adriaan Lemmen,
Matt McKay, Jo McShea, Natasha Mellins-Cohen, Ann Michael, Sheila Morrissey, Susan
Patton, Dan Penny, Ed Pentz, Theo Pillay, Stephen Pinfield, Andrew Plume, Dan Pollock,
Ian Potter, Andrew Preston, Vanessa Proudman, Charlie Rapple, Peter Richardson, Henning
Schoenenberger, Eefke Smit, Susan Spilka, Heather Staines, Adrian Stanley, Carol Tenopir,
Lennart Velten, Charles Watkinson, Kate Wittenberg, Jie Xu.
As always, any errors or misunderstandings are ours alone.
RJ, AW, MM September 2018

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Contents
Executive summary .................................................................................................... 5
1.

2.

3.

4.

Scholarly communication................................................................................... 11
1.1

The research lifecycle ................................................................................ 11

1.2

Types of scholarly communication ............................................................. 11

1.3

Changes in the scholarly communication system ....................................... 13

The journal ........................................................................................................ 14
2.1

What is a journal?....................................................................................... 14

2.2

The journals publishing cycle ..................................................................... 14

2.3

Sales channels and models ....................................................................... 18

2.4

Journal economics and market size ........................................................... 22

2.5

Journal and article numbers and trends ..................................................... 25

2.6

Global trends in scientific output................................................................. 29

2.7

Authors and readers ................................................................................... 38

2.8

Publishers .................................................................................................. 40

2.9

Peer review ................................................................................................ 47

2.10

Reading patterns ........................................................................................ 57

2.11

Disciplinary differences .............................................................................. 61

2.12

Citations and the Impact Factor.................................................................. 64

2.13

Costs of journal publishing ......................................................................... 73

2.14

Authors’ behaviour, perceptions and attitudes ........................................... 77

2.15

Publishing ethics ........................................................................................ 80

2.16

Copyright and licensing .............................................................................. 83

2.17

Long term preservation .............................................................................. 89

2.18

Researchers’ access to journals................................................................. 91

2.19

Access in developing countries .................................................................. 94

Open Access ..................................................................................................... 97
3.1

Defining openness...................................................................................... 98

3.2

Open access publishing ........................................................................... 101

3.3Open access via self-archiving ................................................................. 114

3.4

The drive for open access ........................................................................ 126

3.5

Market penetration of open access publications ...................................... 133

3.6

Transitioning to a sustainable open access market .................................. 139

Technology in Scholarly Communication......................................................... 148
4.1

Recent initiatives and organisations ......................................................... 148
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4.2

Research data .......................................................................................... 153

4.3

Standards, identifiers and conventions..................................................... 159

4.4

Technology trends .................................................................................... 163

4.5

Tools, apps and new services .................................................................. 166

4.6

Tools, apps and new services for funders and institutions ....................... 173

4.7

Social media and scholarly collaboration networks .................................. 174

4.8

Text and data mining ................................................................................ 178

4.9

Developments in preprint use and preprint servers .................................. 179

References ...................................................................................................... 184

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Executive summary
Scholarly communication and STM publishing
1. STM publishing takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication,
which includes both formal and informal elements. Scholarly communication plays
different roles at different stages of the research cycle, and (like publishing) is
undergoing technology-driven change. Categorising the modes of communication into
one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many, and then into oral and written, provides ahelpful framework for analysing the potential impacts of technology on scholarly
communication (see page 11).
2. Journals form a core part of the process of scholarly communication and are an
integral part of scientific research itself. Journals do not just disseminate information,
they also provide a mechanism for the registration of the author’s precedence;
maintain quality through peer review and provide a fixed archival version for futurereference. They also provide an important way for scientists to navigate the everincreasing volume of published material (page 14).

The STM market
3. The annual revenues generated from English-language STM journal publishing are
estimated at about $10 billion in 2017, within a broader STM information publishingmarket worth some $25.7 billion. About 41% of global STM revenues (including nonjournal STM products) come from the USA, 27% from Europe/Middle East, 26% from
Asia/Pacific and 6% from the rest of the world (page 22).
4. The industry employs an estimated 110,000 people globally, of which about 40% areemployed in the EU. In addition, an estimated 20–30,000 full time employees areindirectly supported by the STM industry globally in addition to employment in the
production supply chain (page 46).
5. Although this report focuses primarily on journals, the STM book market (worth about$3.3 billion annually) is evolving rapidly in a transition to digital publishing. Ebooks
made up about a third of the market in 2016, having grown much faster than the STM
market as a whole in recent years (page 22).
6. There are estimated to be of the order of 10,000 journal publishers globally, of whicharound 5,000 are included in the Scopus database. The main English-language tradeand professional associations for journal publishers collectively include about 650
publishers producing around 11,550 journals, that is, about 50% of the total journal
output by title. Of these, some 480 publishers (73%) and about 2,300 journals (20%)
are not-for-profit (page 40).
7. There were about 33,100 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in
mid-2018 (plus a further 9,400 non-English-language journals), collectively publishingover 3 million articles a year. The number of articles published each year and thenumber of journals have both grown steadily for over two centuries, by about 3% and3.5% per year respectively. However, growth has accelerated to 4% per year for
articles and over 5% for journals in recent years. The reason is the continued realterms growth in research and development expenditure, and the rising number of
researchers, which now stands at between 7 and 8 million, depending on definition,although only about 20% of these are repeat authors (page 25).
8. China has overtaken the US to become the pre-eminent producer of global research
papers globally, with a share of about 19%, and on current trends its research
spending will also exceed the US’s by the early 2020s. The US accounts for 18% of
global articles, while India has also seen rapid growth in recent years, and now
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produces 5% of global outputs, ahead of Germany, the UK and Japan, each on 4%(page 29).

Business models and publishing costs
9. Aggregation on both the supply and demand sides remains the norm, with journals
sold in packages to library consortia (see below for open access). Similar models havealso become established for ebook collections (page 18).
10. While the value of the “Big Deal” and similar discounted packages in widening
researchers’ access to journals and simultaneously reducing average unit costs is
recognised, the bundle model remains under pressure from librarians seeking greater
flexibility and control, more rational pricing models and indeed lower prices. Recent
years have seen some high-profile European negotiations stall, and a small minority of
institutions elect to return to title-by-title purchasing. Nevertheless, the Big Deal’s
benefits continue to appear sufficient for the model to retain its importance for sometime, though perhaps evolving in scope (e.g. the bundling or offsetting of open accesscharges) and in new pricing models (page 107).
11. Researchers’ access to scholarly content is at an historic high. Bundling of content andthe associated consortia licensing model has continued to deliver unprecedented
levels of access, with annual full-text downloads estimated at some way over 2.5
billion, and cost per download at historically low levels (well under $1 per article formany large customers). Various surveys have shown that academic researchers rate
their access to journals as good or very good, and report that their access has
improved. The same researchers, however, also identify journal articles as their first
choice for improved access. It seems that what would have been exceptional levels ofaccess in the past may no longer meet current needs, and the greater discoverabilityof content (e.g. through search engines) may also lead to frustration when noteverything findable is immediately accessible (page 91).
12. The most commonly cited barriers to access are cost barriers and pricing, but otherbarriers cited in surveys include: lack of awareness of available resources; aburdensome purchasing procedure; VAT on digital publications; format and IT
problems; lack of library membership; and conflict between the author’s or publisher’s
rights and the desired use of the content (page 92).
13. The Research4Life programmes provide free or very low-cost access to researchers indeveloping countries. They have also continued to expand, seeing increases in thevolume and range of content and in the number of registered institutions and users(page 94).
14. Average publishing costs per article vary substantially depending on a range of factors
including rejection rate (which drives peer review costs), range and type of content,levels of editorial services, and others. The average 2010 cost of publishing an article
in a subscription-based journal with print and electronic editions was estimated by
CEPA to be around £3095 (c. $4,000), excluding non-cash peer review costs. An
updated analysis by CEPA in 2018 shows that, in almost all cases, intangible costs
such as editorial activities are much higher than tangible ones, such as production,
sales and distribution, and are key drivers in per article costs (page 73).
15. The potential for technology and open access to effect cost savings has been muchdiscussed, with open access publishers such as Hindawi and PeerJ having claimed
per article costs in the low hundreds of dollars. A recent rise in PLOS’s per article
costs, to $1,500 (inferred from its financial statements), and costs of over £3,000($4,000) per article at the selective OA journal eLife call into question the scope for OA
to deliver radical cost savings. Nevertheless, with article volumes rising at 4% per

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annum, and journal revenues at only 2%, further downward pressure on per article
costs is inevitable (page 74).

Research behaviour and motivation
16. Despite a transformation in the way journals are published, researchers’ core
motivations for publishing appear largely unchanged, focused on securing funding andfurthering the author’s career (page 77).
17. The research community continues to see peer review as fundamental to scholarly
communication and appears committed to it despite some perceived shortcomings.
The typical reviewer spends 5 hours per review and reviews some 8 articles a year.
Peer review is under some pressure, however, notably from the growth in research
outputs, including the rapid growth from emerging economies. This has temporarily
unbalanced the sources of articles and reviewers, with a third of all reviews but only aquarter of articles provided by researchers in the USA (page 47).
18. There is a significant amount of innovation in peer review, with the more evolutionary
approaches gaining more support than the more radical. Some variants of open peer
review (e.g. disclosure of reviewer names either before or after publication; publicationof reviewer reports alongside the article) are gaining support from publishers andfunders, although there is evidence they can reduce reviewer acceptance rates.
Cascade review (transferring articles between journals with reviewer reports) has
gained a foothold, and the “soundness not significance” peer review criterion adopted
by open access “megajournals” like PLOS ONE is now well-established. Journalindependent (“portable”) peer review has not taken hold in earnest, and postpublication review has continued to receive limited support, as evidenced by the recent
termination of PubMed Commons.
19. Reading patterns appear to have stabilised following a decades-long increase in thenumber of articles read per researcher. Researchers are averaging 250 articles per
year, depending on discipline (more in medicine and science, fewer in humanities andsocial sciences), with early indications that the total may even be falling. The decline intime spent per article, down from 45-50 minutes in the mid-1990s to just over 30
minutes in 2012, may also be reversing. Access and navigation to articles isincreasingly driven by search rather than browsing, but researchers continue to use a
multiplicity of routes to find content. Social media has become significantly more
important in all subject areas, but in the sciences usage for this purpose appears tohave peaked. Researchers spend very little time on average on publisher web sites,“bouncing” in and out and collecting what they need for later reference (page 57).
20. The deficiencies of the Journal Impact Factor continue to be much discussed, but thegrowing range of new and alternative metrics have yet to supplant it in the eyes of theresearch community. There is however growing interest in tracking and demonstrating
the broader economic and societal impact of research, underpinned by rising
expectations in this regard from funding bodies (page 64).
21. Interest in research and publication ethics continues to be sustained, illustrated by theincreased importance of organisations like the Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE) and the development of technology solutions to address abuses such asplagiarism. The number of journal article retractions has grown substantially in the last
decade, but the consensus opinion is that this is more likely due to increased
awareness rather than to increasing misconduct (page 80).

Open access
22. Journal publishing has become more diverse, and potentially more competitive, with arange of new business models now firmly established within the marketplace. Open
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access makes original research freely accessible on the web, free of most copyrightand licensing restrictions on reuse. There are three main approaches: open accesspublishing (“Gold”, including full and hybrid OA journals), delayed free access, andself-archiving (“Green”) (page 97).
23. There are around 11,811 (9,172 published in English) fully open access journals listedon the Directory of Open Access Journals. OA titles are still somewhat less likely thanother titles to appear in selective A&I databases such as Scopus or Web of Science,
partly reflecting their more recently establishment, and are (with some notable
exceptions) smaller on average than other journals. Consequently, the proportion of
the 3 million or so articles published per year that is open access is substantially lower
than the proportion of journal titles (page 133).
24. Approximately one third of the scholarly literature was available from legal andsustainable open access sources in 2016. Recent estimates place the proportion ofarticles published in open access journals at 15-20% (while OA journals make up
about 26-29% of all journals), with a further 10-15% available via delayed access on
the publisher’s website or self-archived copies (page 134).
25. Gold open access is sometimes taken as synonymous with the article publication
charge (APC) business model, but strictly speaking simply refers to journals offering
immediate open access on publication. A substantial fraction of the Gold OA articles
indexed by Scopus, however, do not involve APCs but use other models (e.g.
institutional support or sponsorship). The APC model itself has become more
complicated, with variable APCs (e.g. based on length), discounts, prepayments andinstitutional membership schemes, offsetting and bundling arrangements for hybrid
publications, read-and-publish deals, and so on (page 97).
26. Gold open access based on APCs has a number of potential advantages, and has
found significant support in some quarters. It would scale with the growth in research
outputs, there are potential system-wide savings, and reuse is simplified. Research
funders in some jurisdictions will reimburse publication charges, but even with broad
funder support the details regarding the funding arrangements within universities andin other regions remain to be fully worked out. It is unclear where the market will set
OA publication charges: they are currently lower than the historical average cost ofarticle publication; and charges for full open access articles remain lower than hybrid,
though the gap is closing. Calls to redirect subscription expenditures to open accesshave increased, but the more research-intensive universities and countries remain
concerned about the net impact on their budgets (page 101; 139).
27. Open access publishing led to the emergence of a new type of journal, the so-calledmegajournal. Exemplified by PLOS ONE, the megajournal is characterised by three
features: full open access with a relatively low publication charge; rapid “non-selective”
peer review based on “soundness not significance” (i.e. selecting papers on the basisthat science is soundly conducted rather than more subjective criteria of impact,significance or relevance to a particularly community); and a very broad subject scope.
The number of articles published in megajournals continues to grow, but at a slower
rate than previously, while Scientific Reports has usurped PLOS ONE as the leading
example in recent years (page 111).
28. Research funders are playing an ever more important role in scholarly communication.
Their desire to measure and to improve the returns on their investments emphasises
accountability and dissemination. These factors have been behind their support of andmandates for open access (and the related, though less contentious policies on data
sharing). Recent developments indicate a growing willingness on the part of funders
and policymakers to intervene in the STM marketplace, whether by establishing theirown publication platforms, strengthening OA mandates or acting to change the
incentive structures that drive authors’ publication choices (page 113).
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29. Concerns over the impact of Green OA and the role of repositories have recededsomewhat, though not disappeared. The lack of its own independent sustainablebusiness model means Green OA depends on its not undermining that of(subscription) journals. The evidence remains mixed, with indications that Green OA
can increase downloads and citations being balanced against evidence of the longusage half-life of journal articles and its substantial variation between fields. In
practice, however, attention in many quarters has shifted to the potentially damaging
impact of Social Collaboration Networks (SCNs) and pirate websites on subscriptions(pages 114; 174).

Technology
30. Virtually all STM journals are now available online, and consequently the vast majorityof journal use takes place electronically, at least for research journals, with print
editions providing parallel access for some general journals, including society
membership journals, and in some fields (e.g. humanities and some practitioner fields).
The number of established research (i.e. non-practitioner) journals dropping their print
editions entirely has accelerated in recent years, with others switching to print-ondemand (page 28).
31. Open Science, sometimes called Open Scholarship to bring in the humanities, has
supplanted and subsumed Open Access as the overall principle behind thetransformation of scholarly communication. There is no satisfactory generally accepted
definition because there is little consensus on who the stakeholders are. OSI, funded
by UNESCO, includes publishers as stakeholders but some library-based initiatives donot. All definitions emphasise that openness throughout the research cycle is whatmakes Open Science more than OA (page 148).
32. Social networks and other social media have yet to make the impact on scholarly
communication that they have done on the wider consumer web. The main barriers togreater use have been the lack of clearly compelling benefits to outweigh the real costs(e.g. in time) of adoption. Quality and trust issues are also relevant: researchers
remain cautious about using means of scholarly communication not subject to peer
review and lacking recognised means of attribution. Despite these challenges use of
Twitter in particular is common, though for scientists in general email remains the mainmode of communication. Among Social Communication Networks (SCNs)
ResearchGate is the site of choice but researchers use it more for profiling than they
do for communication. The publishing community has had some success in persuading
ResearchGate not to make available full text when rights of general usage are notavailable, but much of its content remains illegally posted and hosted (page 174).
33. The rapid general adoption of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) has yet tochange significantly the way most researchers interact with journal content – accesses
from mobile devices still accounted for less than 10% of most STM platform’s traffic asof 2014 (though significantly higher in some fields such as clinical medicine) – but thisis changing. Uptake for professional purposes has been fastest among physicians andother healthcare professionals, typically to access synoptic secondary services,
reference works or educational materials rather than primary research journals. For the
majority of researchers, though, it seems that “real work” still gets done at the laptop or
PC. Most major publishers now make most, if not all, of their journals optimised formobile use (page 175).
34. The explosion of data-intensive research is challenging publishers to create new
solutions to link publications to research data (and vice versa), to facilitate data mining
and to manage the dataset as a potential unit of publication. Change continues to be
rapid, with leadership and coordination from the Research Data Alliance: mostresearch funders have introduced or tightened policies requiring deposit and sharing of
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data; data repositories have grown in number and type (including repositories for“orphan” data); and the Scholix initiative has been launched to establish systematicallywhat data underpins literature and what literature references data. Meanwhile
publishers have responded by working closely with many of the community-led
projects; by developing standardised data deposit and sharing policies for journals,
and introducing data citation policies; by linking or incorporating data; by launchingsome pioneering data journals and services; by the development of data discovery
services such as Clarivate Analytics’ Data Citation Index (page 153).
35. Text and data mining are continuing to emerge from niche use in the life sciencesindustry, with the potential to transform the way scientists use the literature. While
recent discussions at European-level have focused on copyright and licensing
regimes, uptake remains constrained by a range of challenges, including content
aggregation, the costs and technical skills requirements for mining and limited
incentives for researchers. A number of initiatives (e.g. CrossRef’s TDM tools,
PLSclear, and Copyright Clearance Center’s services to aggregate article content forTDM) have now emerged in terms of the licensing framework (e.g. the STM standard
licence clause) and procedures (rights clearance), content access and aggregation for
TDM, but this area remains immature (page 83; 178).
36. The growing importance to funders and institutions of research assessment andmetrics has been reflected in the growth of information services such as researchanalytics built around the analysis of metadata (usage, citations, etc.), and the growthof a new software services such as CRIS tools (Current Research Information
Systems). A range of new web-scale discovery and analytics tools have emerged inrecent years, with the potential to enhance our understanding of the relationships
between research inputs, activities and outputs (page 173).
37. The growth in the development of Artificial Intelligence and its implementation acrossindustry as a whole has impacted generally on the publishing industry, partly because
it can enable cost efficiencies. AI has subsumed much of semantic technology as a
guiding principle. Blockchain, although much talked about, has yet to prove its
usefulness in practice. While publishers have always provided services such as peer
review and copy-editing, increased competition for authors, globalisation of research,and new enabling technologies are driving an expansion of author services andgreater focus on improving the author experience. Online Collaborative Writing
remains a service which has yet to have its day, though a recent emphasis on
Annotations is showing promise (page 163).
38. Perhaps the biggest change in scholarly infrastructure has been the development ofpreprint servers and the growing use of preprints in areas such as biology andchemistry where there had hitherto been little appetite for their take up. Primaryjournals in general have now accepted that a preprint is not prior publication. There issome concern that preprints (which can be brought up to date) may become a go-to
place for the version of record, undermining publisher business models (page 179).

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1. Scholarly communication
STM1 publishing takes place within the broader system of scholarly communication, which
includes both formal elements (e.g. journal articles, books) and informal (conference
presentations, pre-prints, as well as data, software and other digital objects). The scholarly
communication supply chain has traditionally comprised two main players that serve theneeds of the scholarly community represented by academics, as authors and readers, andtheir funders and host institutions; namely, publishers (responsible for managing quality
control, production and distribution) and librarians (responsible for managing access andnavigation to the content, and for its long-term preservation, though this latter role ischanging with electronic publishing). In some markets (e.g. ebooks, healthcare, industry),
aggregators have come to play an important and probably growing role. Scholarly
communications is evolving, however, and research funders have increasingly assumed arole as one of the most important parts of the system with the growth of open science andrelated developments. Meanwhile, other players are becoming increasingly active in the
distribution and discovery of content (notably data repositories, and a growing array ofsoftware and services providers).

1.1

The research lifecycle

The different roles played by scholarly communication can be understood in the context of
the research lifecycle (with the communication role in parentheses) (see Figure 1):• Idea discovery, identification of partners (awareness, literature review, informal)• Proposal writing/approval (literature review)• Research process (awareness)• Publication (formal publication, informal dissemination)

1.2

Types of scholarly communication

Scholarly communication has traditionally encompassed activities including conference
presentations, informal seminar discussions, face-to-face or telephone conversations, formal
journal and book publications, and grey literature. Over time these forms have been
progressively supplemented by new forms of communication, such as email exchanges,
email listservs, preprints and, increasingly, social media as well as digital objects.
One way of categorising scholarly communication is in terms of whether it is public or
private, and whether it is evaluated or non-evaluated. In this report we are primarily
concerned with formal, written communication in the form of journal articles. The boundary
between formal and informal communications is blurring in some areas. For instance,
unrefereed author’s original manuscripts on the arXiv repository are increasingly cited informal publications and conference proceedings can be of high academic standing in somedisciplines, while journal articles are becoming more informal and blog-like with addition ofreader comments. Nevertheless, if anything the central role of the journal article in scholarly
communication is stronger than ever.

1“STM” is an abbreviation for scientific, technical and medical but has several different meanings. It
can be a model of publishing, in which case it includes social sciences and the arts and humanities. It
is sometimes used to describe scientific journals. It is also the name of the association of publishers(“STM”) that is the sponsor of this report. We have employed all usages in this report and trust it isclear from the context which is intended.

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Figure 1: The research cycle (Tenopir et al. 2011b)

We are also interested, however, in understanding how scholarly communication may beaffected by current and future electronic means of communication. We can identify threebasic modes for all kinds of human communication: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-tomany (see Inger & Gardner, 2013 for a more extensive treatment of these arguments). The
evolving area of information ecology enables these to be further categorised into oral andwritten communications and other dimensions, such as whether it is live or recorded,
immediate or at a distance, or allows for enhancement through technology. By considering
types of scholarly communication in this way, we can see that for the most part, theintroduction of electronic and web-based channels has created new ways to conduct old
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modes of communication (for instance with web-based publications replacing printed
publications) but has not yet offered wholly new modes. There are new tools but they are forthe same old purposes. Figure 2 shows another aspect of the digital change.
Figure 2: Characterising the future - changing models of research communication(source: Treloar 2014a)

1.3

Changes in the scholarly communication system

The scholarly communication process is subject to profound transformative pressures, driven
principally by technology and economics. At the same time, though, the underlying needs ofresearchers remain largely unchanged (see Authors’ behaviour, perceptions and attitudes).
Changes can be considered under three headings (see also Van Orsdel 2008):• Changes to the publishing market (e.g. new business models like open access; new sales

models such as consortia licensing; globalisation and the growth of emerging regions)• Changes to the way research is conducted (e.g. use of networks; growth of data-intensive

and data-driven science; globalisation of research)• Changes to public policy (e.g. research funder self-archiving and data-sharing mandates;changes to copyright)
The detail and implications of these changes will be discussed further in later sections.

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2. The journal
2.1

What is a journal?

There is a spectrum of types of publication that are loosely described as journals, fromNature to Nuclear Physics B to New Scientist, with few clear dividing lines to outsiders. In
this report, however, we are concerned predominantly with the scholarly and scientific
literature: that is, periodicals carrying accounts of research written by the investigatorsthemselves and published after due peer review, rather than journalistically basedmagazines.
This type of journal publishing, involving the peer reviewed first reports of phenomena or
ideas, is known as “primary publishing” and its outlets “primary journals”. Prior to thedevelopment of electronic databases and the internet, another type of journal flourishedwhich acted as a navigation device to the primary literature. These so-called abstracting or“secondary journals” arose early in the history of primary publishing and existed right up until
the electronic revolution, with about one secondary journal for every 300 primary ones (Price
1963). Following the growth of electronic abstracting and indexing services, the secondary
literature has transformed into the myriad indexing services, while they in their turn are
facing tough competition from generic internet-based search engines. The third strand of theevolution of the journal publishing world also began quite early with the development ofreview journals, where experts survey the literature of a field over some years, indicating
how current opinion has come to be and the differing strands of research that preceded it orstill make it up. This final area of journal publishing is called “tertiary publishing” and hasmuch in common with the monographic book.
The primary journal has traditionally been seen to embody four functions (Zuckerman andMerton 1971, Mabe 20012):• Registration: third-party establishment by date-stamping of the author’s precedence andownership of an idea.
• Dissemination: communicating the findings to its intended audience usually via the brandidentity of the journal.
• Certification: ensuring quality control through peer review and rewarding authors.
• Archival record: preserving a fixed version of the paper for future reference and citation.
To these might now be added a fifth function, that of navigation, that is, providing filters andsignposts to relevant work amid the huge volume of published material (and increasingly torelated material, such as datasets). Alternatively this can be seen as part of thedissemination function.
We take the trouble to restate these fundamentals because it will set the context for a
discussion of newer systems – like preprint servers and portable peer review services – that
perform some, but not all of these functions.
It is also worth noting that these functions can be seen as much as services for authors as
for readers. Indeed it has been suggested that when authors transfer rights in their articles tojournal publishers for no fee, they are not so much “giving away” the rights as exchanging
them for these services (and others, such as copy editing, tagging and semantic enrichment,etc.).

2.2

The journals publishing cycle

The movement of information between the different participants in the journal publishingprocess is usually called “the publishing cycle” and often represented as in Figure 3. Hereresearch information, created by an author from a particular research community, passes
through the journal editorial office of the author’s chosen journal to its journal publisher,
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subscribing institutional libraries – sometimes via a subscription agent, though consortial
licensing is reducing this role for the larger publishers – before ending up back in the handsof the readers of that research community as a published paper in a journal. In the world ofelectronic publishing, of course, readers also obtain journal articles directly from thepublisher in parallel to the library route, particularly for open access, though access forsubscription-based journals is still primarily managed by the library.
Authors publish to disseminate their results but also to establish their own personal
reputations and their priority and ownership of ideas. The third-party date-stamping
mechanism of the journal registers their paper as being received and accepted at a certain
date, while the reputation of the journal becomes associated with both the article and byextension the author.
The editor of a journal is usually an independent, leading expert in their field (mostcommonly but not universally a university academic) appointed and financially supported by
the publisher. The journal editor is there to receive articles from authors, to judge theirrelevance to the journal and to refer them to equally expert colleagues for peer review.
Peer review is a methodological check on the soundness of the arguments made by theauthor, the authorities cited in the research and the strength or originality of the conclusions.
While it cannot generally determine whether the data presented in the article is correct ornot, peer review improves the quality of most papers and is appreciated by authors. The final
decision to publish is made by the journal editor on the advice of the reviewers. Peer review
is discussed in more depth in a section below (see Peer review).

2.2.1 The role of the publisher
The role of the publisher has often been confused with that of the printer or manufacturer,
but it is much wider. Identifying new, niche markets for the launch of new journals, or the
expansion (or closure) of existing journals is a key role for the journals publisher. This
entrepreneurial aspect seeks both to meet a demand for new journals from within theacademic community – and it is noteworthy that journal publishers have been instrumental in
the birth of a number of disciplines through their early belief in them and support of newjournals for them – but also to generate a satisfactory return on investment. As well as being
an entrepreneur, the journals publisher is also required to have the following capabilities:• Manufacturer/electronic service provider – copy editing, typesetting & tagging, and (forthe time being, so long as users and the market continue to demand it) printing andbinding at least some of the journals on their lists.
• Marketeer – attracting the papers (authors), increasing readership (as important for open
access journals as for subscription-based ones) and new subscribers.
• Distributor – publishers maintain a subscription fulfilment system which guarantees that
goods are delivered on time, maintaining relationships with subscription agents, serials
librarians and the academic community.
• Electronic host – electronic journals require many additional skill sets more commonly
encountered with database vendors, website developers and computer systems moregenerally.
Another way to look at the publisher’s role is to consider where they add value. Looking at
the STM information arena broadly (i.e. including but not limited to journals), the STM
publishers’ role can be considered to add value to these processes in the following ways:• Sorting and assessment of research outputs: one of the benefits of peer review (Ware2008) is the stratification of journals by perceived quality, widely used in assessing
research outputs etc.

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• Aggregation of content: while other players (e.g. Google, PubMed) are also involved,
publishers’ aggregation services currently offer widely-used services.
• Distillation of evidence: e.g. reference works and meta-reviews.
• Creating standards and consensus seeking: a large number of publisher-led initiatives
improve the quality, findability and usability of STM content including ORCID and
Crossref services such as Crossref Similarity Check, Crossmark, and the Crossref
Funder Registry.
• Granularisation, tagging and semantic enrichment (including development of taxonomies
and ontologies), and prioritisation of content, identification, and application of rules:
adding value in these ways is likely to become increasingly important.
• Systems integration, data structure and exchange standards, content maintenance, andupdating procedure: e.g. the SUSHI, KBART standards.
• Integration of content from multiple sources: going beyond simple aggregation services,
for instance to build sophisticated evidence-based medicine services drawing on
multiple content types and sources to support doctors at the point of care.
• Creating and monitoring behaviour change: e.g. enforcing standards of disclosure ofinterest in medical journals; some journals encourage (or require) the parallel deposit ofresearch data.
• Development of workflow analytics and best practice benchmarking at the level of theindividual, department, institution, and geopolitical entity: e.g. tools to support researchassessment.

A more elaborate description of the publisher’s role was originally provided in the blog post
82 Things Publishers Do (2014 Edition) (Anderson 2014a), now updated to Focusing on
Value – 102 Things Publishers Do (2018 Update) (Anderson 2018). This is essentially amore granular breakdown of these same functions, but Anderson also emphasises the needfor a long-term sustainable model, which in turn requires the generation of a surplus (e.g. forreinvestment in new technology platforms).
Cliff Morgan and coauthors reviewed the role of the publisher in the context of open accessdevelopments and suggested a similar set of activities will continue to be required, andestimated that publishers have collectively invested of the order of $3.5 billion in online
publishing technology since 2000 (Morgan, Campbell, & Teleen, 2012).
The recent moves of larger publishers into information and data analytics is covered by
Inchcoombe (2017).

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Figure 3: The publishing cycle

2.2.2 Versions of articles
One potential issue with the widespread adoption of self-archiving (not to mention the growthof preprint servers) is that multiple versions of articles are increasingly available to readers(and others, such as repository managers). In order to help create a consistent nomenclaturefor journal articles at various stages of the publishing cycle, NISO (National Information
Standards Organization) and ALPSP collaborated on a recommended usage (NISO 2008).
The NISO recommended terms are:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

AO = Author’s Original
SMUR = Submitted Manuscript Under Review
AM = Accepted Manuscript
P = Proof
VoR = Version of Record
CVoR = Corrected Version of Record
EVoR = Enhanced Version of Record

For many purposes (such as much of this report) this represents a finer-grained structure
than is necessary for discussing journal publishing. STM in its discussions with the European
Commission and others refers instead to Stage 1 (the author’s original manuscript), Stage 2(the accepted manuscript) and Stage 3 (the final paper – any of the versions of record).
The term pre-print is also used to refer to the author’s original (and sometimes to theaccepted manuscript), and post-print to refer to the accepted manuscript. These terms areambiguous and potentially confusing (e.g. the post-print definitely does not occur post
printing), though this has not prevented their widespread continued use.
The CrossRef organisation introduced the CrossMark service in April 2012 to identify(among other things) the version of record (Meyer 2011). There is a visible kitemark that
identifies it to the human reader. There is also defined metadata for search engines etc. The
CrossMark does not just identify the article as the version of record but also provides
information about the pre-publication process (e.g. peer review) and of post-publication
events such as errata, corrections and retractions.
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A notable trend is the emergence of journals adopting a more fluid notion of the journal
article. For instance, the platformFaculty1000Research encourages authors to publish(multiple) revised versions of their article, with all versions of an article linked andindependently citable. This smearing out of the published—unpublished boundary is creating
a number of challenges. In 2018 there are calls for a revision of the convention about what
constitutes the first published version, with online papers often preceding the official issue
dates by months if not years (Keller and Prusiner 2018).

2.3

Sales channels and models

Subscription- or licence-based journals are marketed to two broad categories of purchaser,
namely libraries and individuals (see separate section below for open access journals).
Although individual subscriptions (either personal or membership-based subscriptions) canbe important for some journals (for example magazine/journal hybrids such as Nature or
Science and some (especially medical) society journals), purchase and use of individual
subscriptions has been falling for many years, and as they are in any case typically priced atvery high discounts, the large bulk of the journals market by revenue is made up of sales tolibraries.
Traditionally library sales were in the form of subscriptions to individual journals. This haslong been a declining part of the market, especially for larger publishers, with the vast
majority of journals sold as bundles of titles, either directly to libraries or to library consortia.
While print editions continue (see below), the majority of publishers offer single journal
subscriptions in three models: print only, online only, and print and online combined. Most
publishers charge less for online-only than print-only, and charge extra for online access to a
print subscription.
Individual article sales are growing in popularity (albeit from a very small base), with theproportion of publishers offering them increasing from 65% in 2003 to 83% in 2012 (Inger &Gardner, 2013), and related models such as article rental and article packs becoming morecommon. Far more important, however, are sales of licences to bundles or collections ofjournals. Sales of archives (backfiles) are also important, with many libraries keen to acquire
the physical files for local storage for a one-off price (with or without a maintenance charge),
as well as licensed access models.
Lastly, a key part of the sales model concerns “perpetual access”, namely the right of thesubscriber to access the previously subscribed-to content after termination of the current
subscription. The majority of publishers offer perpetual access, though in some cases there
are additional charges. Large publishers have tended to be more likely (91%) to offer
perpetual access than small publishers (50%) (Inger & Gardner, 2013).

2.3.1 Subscription agents
Subscription agents were an important part of the sales channel: the average library used
to place about 80% of its business via agents. Agents acted on behalf of libraries, allowing
the library to deal with one or two agents rather than having to manage relationship withlarge numbers of journal publishers, each with different order processes, terms & conditions,etc. Agents also provided a valuable service to publishers by aggregating library orders andconverting them to machine-readable data, handling routine renewals, and so on. The
Association of Subscription Agents ceased operation in July 2015. A key reason was theincreasing disintermediation of the traditional agent function brought about by the move toelectronic publishing and in particular the rise of consortia sales. The larger remaining
subscription agents (such as EBSCO and Harrassowitz) are consequently reinventing
themselves, for instance as aggregators, publishers, and providers of analytics services. It
has been argued that these changes will favour large over small publishers (and thus favour
increasing publisher consolidation), because as the former withdraw their high-volume
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October 2018business (replacing it with direct sales to consortia), agents’ costs will fall increasingly on theremaining small publishers (Aspesi 2014).

2.3.2 Content bundles and pricing
With the rise of electronic publishing, sales of individual journal subscriptions fell as aproportion of total sales in favour of bundles. A decade ago, Cox & Cox (2008) found thatnearly all (95%) of large and most (75%) of medium publishers offered bundles of content,
though this dropped (for obvious reasons) to 40% of small publishers. Publishers haveincreasingly offered bundles that include non-journal content, particularly ebooks, reference
works and datasets. Small publishers are more likely to participate in multi-publisher bundles
such as Aggregagent, BioOne or Project MUSE. A 2012 survey of its library members by the
Association of Research Libraries reported that well over 90% of libraries purchased content
from the larger publishers as bundles (Strieb & Blixrud, 2013).
This ARL survey also found that the large majority of licences were still priced on the historic
print (sometimes called “prior print”) model, similar to the findings of Cox in 2008. In thehistoric print model, the library is offered electronic access to all the titles in the bundle at a
price reflecting the library’s existing print subscriptions (which are typically retained) plus a
top-up fee for electronic-only access to the non-subscribed titles. This top-up model(especially when the bundle includes all of the publisher’s output and the sale is to a
consortium) is frequently referred to as the Big Deal. The other main pricing models include:
•

•

•
•
•

Usage-based pricing, first tried during the mid-2000s but without gaining much
momentum. The ARL survey found almost no evidence of uptake of usage-based
pricing among its members in 2012; this was echoed in (Inger & Gardner, 2013), which
reported that it was still in its infancy and very few (~10%) publishers reported having
having this model
Tiered pricing based on a classification of institutions by size; Inger & Gardner (2013)
found this was the most popular pricing mechanism after historic print, with size mostfrequently defined by number of sites. (Classification schemes such as Carnegie or
Jisc were not popular because they only cover a fraction of most publishers’ market.)Differential pricing based on customer type (e.g. hospital, academic, corporate)
Pricing based on the number of simultaneous users; this model has existed formany years for databases
An aggregate flat-rate price for all the titles in the bundle.

In practice, most large publishers continue to focus on selling some form of bundled epackage content and librarians are still closely evaluating content use, value and quality
compared to the price (EBSCO 2018). Despite the apparent stasis in pricing models,2industry discussions suggest that there will be more publishers moving away from historicpricing in the coming years. The main drag on this move has been the natural reluctance foranyone to be a loser in a transition.
A key issue for libraries is whether the publisher’s licence term for bundles allows
cancellations; Cox and Cox (2008) found that only 40% of publishers allowed cancellations,with commercial publishers interestingly being much more likely to permit cancellations than
not-for-profits (46% vs 24%).

2

It is worth noting that the historic print model has often been a pragmatic rather than a conservative
approach, since the prior print has in many cases been the last point of agreement between the libraryand the publisher over pricing principles. More advanced database models can have advantages anddisadvantages, and neither party wants the disadvantages.

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Nevertheless there has in recent years been considerable resistance to the big deal, withmany libraries deciding to cancel them in favour of a return to title by title purchase. There isno comprehensive data on such cancellations, but an informal survey of North American
libraries (Anderson, 2017) and data maintained by SPARC both point to an increase since2015.3 An additional concern for universities and libraries has been how best to support open
access, particularly in an environment where both licensing and article publication charges
for open access have occurred. See Offsetting.
This environment has also resulted in an increased desire for national deals that take theopen access payments into account. This has not been without some heat, with a standoff
on the German deal over the last few years and at time of writing issues arising in France
and Sweden, too. 4

2.3.3 Library consortia
The growth of sales of titles in bundles has been paralleled by the increasing importance ofsales of such bundles to library consortia (though it is important to recognise the twodifferent concepts – some publishers deal with consortia but do not offer bundled content).
Consortia arose in order to provide efficiencies by centralising services (e.g. shared librarymanagement systems, catalogues, ILL, resources etc.) and centralising purchasing, toincrease the purchasing power of libraries in negotiation with publishers, and increasingly totake advantage of bundled electronic content. The numbers of consortia have been growing
strongly: the Ringgold Consortia Directory Online5 lists over 500 consortia in 126 countries,
representing over 32,000 individual institutions6; of these, about 350 are responsible forlicensing content. The International Coalition of Library Consortia7 has some 200 members.
The size and nature of consortia vary considerably, from national consortia to small regional
ones, and include academic, medical, public, school and government libraries. The ARL
survey (Strieb & Blixrud, 2013) reported that the role of the consortia remained central in2012, with 61–97% (depending on publisher) of reported contracts made via a consortium.
According to the last two ALPSP Scholarly Journals Publishing Practice reports (Cox & Cox,2008; Inger & Gardner, 2013), about 90% of larger publishers actively marketed to consortia,
and about half of all publishers. Of these, about half used the same pricing model as for theirbundles, with the balance negotiating on a case-by-case basis. Consortia deals weretypically (60%) for a 3-year period, with 30% on a 1-year and 10% on a 2-year basis, withprice caps offered by only about half of publishers. Cancellation terms were as previously
covered for bundles. The early part of the current decade saw a growing focus on “authorrights” clauses (typically covering self-archiving rights for authors at the licensing institutions)and non-disclosure agreements. More recently, there has been a push for the inclusion of“text and data-mining” clauses in model agreements, and an emphasis (particularly inEurope) on linking licensing negotiations with open access and promoting transparency.8

2.3.4 Library system vendors
Library system vendors9 provide the cataloguing, enterprise resource planning and linkresolver and other access systems used by libraries. Although their business relationships
are thus primarily with libraries rather than publishers, they are an important part of the chain3

See https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/See https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sweden-cancels-elsevier-contract-open-accessdispute-spreads for situation as of May 20185
http://www.ringgold.com/cdo
6
Growth can be indicated by the earlier editions of this report, which recorded 338 active consortia in
2008, up from 164 in 2003, though with relatively small change since 20127
http://icolc.net/
8
https://libereurope.eu/blog/2017/09/07/open-access-five-principles-for-negotiations-with-publishers/9
http://www.librarytechnology.org/ for one overview and list of suppliers.
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October 2018that links readers to publishers’ content. Publishers work with systems vendors on supplychain standards such as ONIX for Serials10 and KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related
Tools).11 Uniquely identifying institutions is important for publishers: the Identify service from
Ringgold12 is the leading commercial service here, with a database of some 500,000
institutions and consortia. A free dataset, OrgRef, was launched by DataSalon in 2014, but
has been superseded by other developments, notably the Organization ID Registry
Initiative,13 and is no longer actively maintained. Formal plans for a Research Organization
Registry (ROR) were due to be announced in late 2018. Other services include Digital
Science’s GRID,14 while ISNI has recently updated its Organizations Registry to enableorganizations to change and correct their own records and allow the research community toidentify author affiliations persistently and authoritatively.15
Vendors have invested substantially in discovery tools, including so-called web-scalediscovery, of which the leading examples are EBSCO Discovery, Proquest Summon, Ex
Libris Primo (now owned by ProQuest), and OCLC WorldCat Discovery. Collectively these
services are installed in approaching 10,000 customer sites. These services provide a
simplified search interface (popular with users accustomed to the Google interface), whichallows users to discover content from the full range of library holdings (including A&I
databases) and web resources in a single search, providing fast results, with relevancy
ranking, faceted results browsing, content suggestions, full-text linking, and a variety ofsocial and research-management features. In addition, there are detailed metrics andreporting for institutional use. Tests conducted by libraries have typically shown that use of
discovery services increases patron satisfaction and increases use of subscribed-to library
content (Somerville & Conrad, 2014; Outsell 2014e; Levine-Clark, McDonald, & Price, 2014).
Three-quarters of US library directors continue to see an index-based discovery service as ahighly important priority for their library, according to a survey by Ithaka S + R. Nevertheless,there are indications that libraries are reluctant to invest additional resources in these
services, and are increasingly comfortable with scholars beginning their research process
outside of the library (Ithaka S+R, 2017).
Discovery also remains problematic, with an estimated five to 15 clicks required for mostresearchers to find and access an article.16 Recent years have seen the emergence of a new
breed of open access discovery tools, including Unpaywall, OA Button, Lazy Scholar andKopernio, all of which offer browser extensions, and free-to-use aggregators such as
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) and Core. Increasingly, OA discovery services
are being integrated into library discovery tools and link resolvers, as well as traditional A&I
databases. Kopernio was acquired by Clarivate Analytics, owner of Web of Science, in April
2018,17 and recently announced a collaboration with the California Institute of Technology(Caltech), with a view to offering one-click access to both subscription and open-access
content.18 Meanwhile, 1Science’s 1findr service aims to combine web-scale discovery andanalytics functions in a single product, and Digital Science launched Anywhere Access in
mid-2018 as a managed, cloud-based and COUNTER-compliant discovery solution.

10

http://www.editeur.org/8/ONIX/
http://www.uksg.org/kbart
12
http://www.openrfp.com/pages/identify.html
13
https://orcid.org/content/organization-identifier-working-group14
https://www.grid.ac/15
http://www.isni.org/content/isni-organizations-registry-identifying-organizations-scholarly-supplychain16
See https://www.thebookseller.com/news/new-venture-mendeley-co-founder-jan-reichelt-680621
17
See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04414-8
18https://clarivate.com/blog/news/clarivate-analytics-caltech-collaborate-offer-researchers-one-clickaccess-published-research/
11

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All these services, find themselves in competition with Google Scholar (and, to a muchlesser extent, Microsoft Academic Search), which offers integration with library holdings,
citation links via Scholar Metrics, and other features in addition to its signature searchcapabilities (Van Noorden 2014b). Indeed, to quote Somerville & Conrad (2014), “Google
Scholar Library, which enables saving articles directly from the search page in Google
Scholar, organizing them by topic, and searching full-text documents within a personal
MyLibrary space, is setting heightened expectations for workflow integration solutions”.

2.4

Journal economics and market size

2.4.1 Journal economics & market size
The total size of the global STM market in 2017 (including journals, books, technicalinformation and standards, databases and tools, and medical communications and somerelated areas) was estimated by Outsell (2018a) at $25.7 billion.19 The 2017 market can also
be divided into scientific/technical information and solutions at $13.8 billion and medical at$11.9 billion. The medical information market is predicted to grow at 4.6% annually through2021, with scientific and technical growing at a slower rate of 2.9%.
Within this overall market for STM information, Outsell estimate 2017 revenues from journals
at $9.9 billion (38.5% of the total), and from books at $3.2 billion (12%) (Outsell 2018a).20
By geographical market, Outsell estimate about 41% of global STM revenues (including nonjournal STM products) come from the USA, 27% from the EMEA region, 26% from
Asia/Pacific and 6% from the rest of the world (principally the Americas excluding USA)
(Outsell 2018a). These proportions probably overstate the importance of the US market forjournals alone. Revenues from the EMEA region have remained relatively stable as aproportion of the total in recent years, while the share of revenues from Asia/Pacific haveincreased substantially, largely at the expense of the US. This primarily reflects China’s rapid
development, overtaking the US to become the world’s largest producer of research papers(NSB 2018). Nevertheless, the very low pricing that some publishers adopted to enter the
Chinese market in the early days continues to depress revenues from that part of the world.
Market analysts Simba have estimated the scientific and technical publishing and medical
publishing markets at $9.9 billion each, equating to a total STM market of $19.8 billion. Theirdefinition of the market is slightly narrower than Outsell’s and is based on five content
delivery channels: journals, books, online content, abstracting and indexing and otheractivities (Simba 2017a and 2017b).
Meanwhile, OC&C have estimated global spending on academic and scientific content by
academic libraries alone at just over €7 billion (c.$8.1 billion) in 2016 (cited in Springer
Nature 2018). Academic libraries have traditionally been the primary source of journal
revenues, estimated at 68-75% of the total. Other revenue sources include corporate
subscriptions (15-17%), advertising (4%), membership fees and personal subscriptions (3%)
and various author side payments (3%) (RIN 2008). The proportion due to advertising has
fallen steadily since these estimates were made, with membership fees and personal
subscriptions also likely to be in decline.
Figure 4: Global spending on academic and scientific content in 2016 by region and product (in € million,of total) (Source: OC&C, cited in SpringerNature 2018)

19

This and other market size figures are at actual values for cited year, i.e. not updated to current
values.
20
Our previous report quoted a figure of $10 billion for the journals market in 2013, which now
appears to be a slight over-estimate. Outsell’s version of record for 2013 sizes the journals market at$9.1 billion, indicating that the market has grown at an average of 2.1% per year since that time.

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The open access segment of the market continues to grow much faster than the market as awhole, but remains small in revenue terms. OC&C estimated global open access revenues
at $344m in 2016 (Figure 4), up from an estimated $128 million in 2013 (Outsell 2013). Delta
Think (Carlin 2017) put a higher figure of $470m on the OA market for 2016, estimating that
OA represented 20-22% of market volume and 5-9% of market value. Most analysts expect
OA’s double-digit growth rates in recent years to continue into the future, outstripping themore modest growth rates expected for the journals market as a whole. In practice, thegrowth of offsetting arrangements and read-and-publish deals are likely to make it
increasingly difficult to separate OA and subscription revenues in the coming years (seeSection 3.2.3 Gold - Hybrid).

2.4.2 Books and ebooks
Outsell (2018a) estimated the market for scientific and technical books at $719m in 2017,
and for medical books at $2,486m. OC&C report that combined spending on books andeBooks fell by 1.2% in the period from 2011 to 2016 (cited in SpringerNature 2018), though
Outsell’s figures suggest there has been a return to growth since 2015. OC&C also report ashift in academic library spending from print books (which have seen a decline at -4.1% from2013 to 2016) to eBooks (CAGR of 6% from 2013 to 2016). OC&C projects this trend tocontinue, with eBooks expenditure expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.1-4.6% from 2016 to2020.
A significant difference between books and journals is that academics are far more likely topurchase the books themselves; for example, Tenopir, Volentine, & King (2012) reported
that the single most common source of scholarly readings from books was personal copies(at 39%), well ahead of supply via the library (at 26%), whereas articles were mainly
obtained from the library e-collections. However for publishers the library market remains
crucial, as it is for journals. Academic Library Book Purchasing Trends (ProQuest 2016)provides a bottom line that is not unexpected:• Most library budgets have been flat or have had small changes only.
• Monograph budgets are eroding as funds shift to finance electronic journals due toprice increases.
• Ebooks account for a growing proportion of book budgets as libraries move fromprint to electronic collections.
The business models adopted by publishers and by aggregators licensed to sell publisher
content in digital form have long been a source of frustration among the library community,
especially as publishers usually sell without digital rights management (DRM) and
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aggregators whose bundles cut across brands, and are thus more useful, are only allowed tosell with DRM. The Charlotte Initiative in its deliberations and documentation provides thearguments involved.21 One basic assumption is that ebooks are likely to become graduallymore important both for libraries and for end users. Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA), also
called Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA), is increasingly favoured, with librarians concernedto avoid another “Big Deal”, where most of the usage goes to only a small number of thetitles licensed (Unsworth 2017). However, book publishers confronted with the budgetarysituation as described above are keen to move ebook packages into the library’s“continuation” budget out of their “one off” book budgets.
There are also some movements to bring digital books and journals together. Book chapters
are now usually given a DOI and can be bought separately, though to date there is not muchevidence of significant interest. Many major publishers now routinely make their STM books
available online in subject collections, while others go further. Wiley Online covers bothbooks and journals, for example, and has subject-based offerings. Cambridge University
launched Cambridge Core in 2018, bringing book and journal content together for the firsttime in what has been described as a sophisticated, high-performance replacement for
Cambridge Journals Online and Cambridge Books Online. Its Cambridge Elements producttype goes still further, offering a book-journal hybrid intended to serve as a dynamic
reference source.22
The open access market for scholarly books has been slow to grow, but is potentiallysignificant in some fields – such as the humanities – where the monograph and other
scholarly books remain important research outputs. Key initiatives and developments are
discussed in the Section 3.2.6 Open Access Books.

2.4.3 Global market costs of the scholarly communication system
A 2008 RIN report by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates estimated the total systemcosts of conducting and communicating the research published in journals at £175 billion,
made up of £116 billion for the costs of the research itself; £25 billion for publication,
distribution and access to the articles; and £34 billion for reading them.23
The £25 billion for publication included publishing and library costs; the publishing costs total£6.4 billion: of this, £3.7 billion is fixed first copy costs, including £1.9 billion in non-cash
costs for peer review and £2.7 billion is variable and indirect costs, including publishers’
surplus. Excluding the non-cash peer review costs, publishing and distribution therefore
costs £4.9 billion, or about 3% of the total costs.
More recently, Lawson et al (2016) used a study of journal publication in the UK as the basis
for a provisional visual model for analysing financial transparency around scholarly
communication (Figure 5). The three main flows outlined are various financial flows to
institutions (orange), and then two flows from institutions to publishers: subscription
payments (blue) and APC payments (green). They also include another actor – the national
negotiating body – and note that the decisions of individual researchers are almost entirely
absent from the model; control over the flows is largely at the institutional or funder level,
undertaken on behalf of the research community.
The authors acknowledge that some elements are missing from the picture, such as
licensing revenues, page and colour charges and subscriptions from non-academic sources.
They argue that a joined-up, systemic, publicly accessible picture of global financial flows
around academic publishing would be of significant value to inform evidence-based
deliberation, policy and action to shape scholarly communication systems.
21

http://charlotteinitiative.uncc.edu/
See http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/elements
23
Values from 2008; not inflated to current values.
22

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Figure 5: Model of Financial Flows in Scholarly Publishing for the UK, 2014 (Source:
Lawson et al, 2016)(See also: Costs of journal publishing.)

2.5

Journal and article numbers and trends

There were about 33,10024 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals in
2018, collectively publishing some 3 million articles a year. Figure 6 shows the growth in thenumber of active, peer-reviewed journals recorded in Ulrich’s directory between 2000 and2013; over this period the rate of growth has increased from 3% a year in the early part ofthe century to 5-6% in the recent past.25 At the time of writing, the CrossRef databaseincludes over 97 million DOIs, of which 73 million refer to journal articles from a total ofalmost 60,000 journals. More broadly, Google Scholar was estimated to index between 100
and 160 million documents in 2014, including journal articles, books, and grey literature(Khabsa & Giles, 2014; Orduña-Malea et al., 2014), with volumes undoubtedly having risen
further since that date. Meanwhile, the Web of Science ‘Core Collection’ included about 70
million article records as of June 2018, out of a total of 150 million items across all WoS
databases.
Journals which published only original research articles comprise about 95% of journals, withthe balance consisting of the so-called hybrids, academic journals with extensive journalistic
content that effectively weld magazine and research journal characteristics together. Thesehybrids are sold to both individuals and institutions, have high circulation and significant
24

Ulrich’s Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals as at
August 2018. The count increases to 42,491 if non-English-language journals are included.
25
Indexing delays mean data from more recent years tends to be unreliable and subject to change, so
is excluded from this analysis.

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October 2018advertising revenues – which the pure research journals do not have (Mabe 2008). The
largest single subject area is biomedical, representing some 30% of journals, with arts &humanities a minority 5%.
An important subset is the 11,655 journals from over 2,500 publishers included in Clarivate
Analytics’ (2018) Journal Citation Reports (JCR): these collectively publish 2.2 million
articles, reviews, and other source items annually. This subset is important because it
contains the most cited journals, that is, (by this measure at least) the core literature.
Journals included in the Clarivate JCR are also on average substantially larger than those
not included (with an average of 161 articles for journals in the Science Citation Index
Expanded (SCIE) and 51 for the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)). A further 7,500
journals are included in Clarivate’s Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), launched in late2015.
Other abstracting and indexing services are intentionally broader in scope and include:
•

•
•
•

Elsevier’s Scopus, which covers 22,000 peer-reviewed journals from about 5,000
publishers. It contains over 69 million core records, from which are derived 1.4
billion cited references. Approximately 3 million new items are added each year.
1science’s 1findr, which lists 87,000 academic/scientific journals and 90 million
peer-reviewed articles. 26
Digital Science’s Dimensions, which indexes over 90 million scholarly documents, ofwhich about 85% are journal articles.27
Informa’s wizdom.ai, which includes 73,000 journals, and over 90 million
publications.28

The number of peer reviewed journals published annually and still active had been growing
at a steady rate of about 3.5% per year for over three centuries (see Figure 7), although thegrowth did slightly accelerate in the post-war period 1944–78. The growth rate of 5-6% seenin the last decade is therefore significantly above the long-term trend.
Taken over similar timescales, the number of articles has also been growing by an averageof about 3% per year. The reason for this growth is simple: the growth in R&D expenditures
and the number of scientific researchers in the world. This is illustrated in Figure 9, whichplots the increase in numbers of articles and journals alongside the numbers of US
researchers. Similar data is available for other OECD countries confirming this effect(source: Elsevier).
Again, current article growth appears to be higher than this long-term trend. Between 2006
and 2016, total world S&E publication output grew at an average annual compound rate of
3.9%; the total for developing countries grew more than twice as fast (about 8.6%) (NSB2018).

26

http://www.sciencemetrics.org/1findr/
https://www.digital-science.com/products/dimensions/28
See https://www.wizdom.ai/.
27

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35,0007%30,0006%

25,0005%

20,0004%

15,0003%

10,000

2%

5,000

1%

0

Compound annual growth rate

Number of journals

Figure 6: Growth in the number of active, peer-reviewed English-language journals
recorded in Ulrich's directory, 2000–2013

0%2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Count

Growth rate

Figure 7: The growth of active, peer reviewed learned journals since 1665 (Mabe 2003)

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Figure 8: Articles indexed from academic & scientific journals – 1findr, Dimensions,Core + ESCI WoS and Scopus, 1975-2018 (Courtesy of Eric Archambault)

Figure 9: Relationship between numbers of researchers, journals and articles (Mabe2004), using data from ISI and NSB)

2.5.1 Online journals
All STM journals are now available online, with just a few exceptions (e.g. very small
journals; some journals in the humanities). As far back as 2008, ALPSP’s report on scholarly
publishing practice (Cox & Cox, 2008) had already found 96% of STM and 87% of arts,
humanities and social sciences journals were accessible electronically in 2008. This
represented a steady increase compared to comparable surveys conducted in 2003 (STM
83%, AHSS 72%) and 2005 (STM 93%, AHSS 84%).
The 2013 ALPSP report (Inger & Gardner) gave similar numbers to 2008, suggesting thatthe market had reached near saturation in terms of online availability, with the large majorityof publishers having over 90% of their content available online. Online availability of backfiles
is another matter, however, with about 70% of publishers having 90%+ online, and about
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20% with less than 50% online. (Bear in mind, however, that this survey reported numbers of
publishers, not journals: since the laggards will all be smaller publishers, the proportions forjournals and articles will be significantly higher for both current and backfile content.)
By 2016-17, 98% of serials subscribed to by UK academic libraries were received inelectronic-only format, compared with 91% in 2009/10.29 Nevertheless there is continuing
demand for print from residual parts of the market, including individual and society member
copies, and institutional customers in some parts of the world. The factors sustaining thisdemand for print include its superiority for some uses (some 35% of respondents said they
preferred print for viewing content in a 2014 Outsell survey (Outsell 2014b)), concerns about
the long-term preservation of digital formats, concerns about access to digital content
following subscription cancellation or in the event of publisher demise, caution by someadvertisers in switching to digital formats, and tax disincentives in some territories. As aresult, many journals still maintain their existing print editions, although there is a growing
shift towards print on demand.
The transition to eBooks has been much slower, but there has been significant movement inrecent years. Ebooks made up only about 17% of STM book revenues in 2011, but by 2016
the proportion was closer to a third. Growth rates are expected to slow from 6% over theperiod 2013 to 2016 to an estimated 4.1-4.6% from 2016 to 2020 (OC&C, cited in
SpringerNature 2018), while textbooks may take longer to move largely to digital, although
there is a lot of innovation in this area.

2.6

Global trends in scientific output

2.6.1 R&D expenditures
As we have seen, the numbers of research articles are closely correlated with the numbersof researchers, which in turn is closely linked to the amount spent of research anddevelopment.
Global spending on R&D has generally grown faster than global GDP over the long term,rising from $522 billion in 1996 to $1.3 trillion in 2009 (NSB 2012) and an estimated $1.9
trillion in 2015 (NSB 2018, see Figure 10). The 2008/09 recession had a chilling effect on
global R&D expenditures however: the annual growth for OECD countries for 2008–2012
was just half that for 2001–2008 (OECD 2014). Recent years have seen a return to growth,and government budget allocations for R&D increased (in real terms) by 2.5% in 2016
(OECD 2018b).
The large majority of this spending (90%) takes place in the three major economic regions of
the world, North America, the EU and Asia. The USA spends the largest amount comparedto other individual countries at $497 billion (a research intensity of 2.7% of GDP, well above
the global average), with a 26% share of all global R&D. However, U.S. and European
dominance is increasingly being challenged by China, whose expenditure overtook that of
the European Union to reach $409 billion, or 21% of the global total, in 2015. The National
Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2016 and inthat time the budget has grown from the equivalent of $10 million to almost $3 billion. This
one body now funds around 10% of the world’s scientific output by number of papers.

29

https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/The_continuing_evolution_of_UK_academic_li
braries.pdf

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Governments have long seen spending on R&D as critical to innovation, growth andinternational competitiveness.30 In recent years, the focus of scientific discovery has shifted
towards problem-solving, in order to tackle pressing developmental challenges (UNESCO,2015). As part of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030)
developed and developing countries alike have pledged to substantially increase public andprivate R&D spending as well as the number of researchers by 2030.31
Across the world, the average proportion of national GDP spent on R&D was about 1.8% in2015 (up from 1.7% in 2010), although there is (unsurprisingly) a wide range in this, fromIndonesia’s 0.1%, through India’s 0.6%, Germany’s 2.9% to South Korea’s 4.2%, with theaverage for the OECD countries holding steady at 2.4%. The trend to increase relative
spending on R&D looks broadly set to continue, though some have noted a decline in public
commitment to R&D in many developed countries (Canada, UK, USA, etc), as opposed to a
growing belief in the importance of public investment in R&D for knowledge creation andtechnology adoption in emerging and lower income countries (UNESCO, 2015).
The growth in R&D spending in China has been particularly notable, tripling from 0.6% in
1996 to 1.7% of GDP in 2009, and over 2% in 2015. The latest estimates suggest China willmeet the OECD average of 2.4% by 2020. Other East and South East Asian economies
have also seen rapid growth, with the notable exception of Japan, which saw its total R&D
expenditure fall by 3.3% in 2016 (OECD, 2018b).
Although research outputs are driven primarily by the numbers of researchers, there aresubstantial variations in research productivity, with for example UK researchers generating
more articles and more citations per researcher, and more usage per articles compared to allother countries in the top five (US, China, Japan, Germany) (Elsevier 2017a).

30

Expenditure on R&D appears to be a very good investment for governments: while private returns
to R&D are estimated to average around 25–30%, social returns are typically 2–3 times larger(Department for Business, Innovation & Skills 2014)31https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

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Figure 10: Global R&D expenditures, by region: 2015 (NSB, 2018)

2.6.2 Role of industry
The majority of R&D expenditure is funded by industry: about 62% in the US, 48% in the UK,
66% in Germany and between 75% and 78% in China, South Korea and Japan. The fractionof R&D that is performed by industry is even higher, at a little over 70% in the US, forinstance. This is not reflected in publishing data, however, with more than 75% of U.S.
research papers originating from academic authors (NSB, 2018).
Most of the research included in the above expenditure figures is not basic science but more
applied R&D. China spends only about 5% of its R&D funds on basic research, compared to
17% in the United States, and 84% in experimental development, versus 64% in the U.S.
(NSB, 2018). The number of R&D centres in China has grown rapidly in recent years,
reflecting the transformation of the economy from a labour-intensive and low-cost

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manufacturer to a technologically advanced and self-sustaining consumption-led economy.
Foreign R&D centres have shot up from 24 in 1997 to an estimated 1,750 in 2018.32
In the US, perhaps surprisingly, the share of R&D devoted to basic science has doubled overthe last 50 years. Nearly all of this is performed by academia, though in the past industry andgovernment researchers did substantially more – the days of Bell Labs churning out Nobel
Prizes (13 at the last count) are gone for good. As a consequence, US industry is more
dependent on academia for the basic research underpinning innovation than in the past.

2.6.3 Numbers of researchers
There is no single comprehensive and widely accepted set of figures for researcher
numbers, partly for reasons of difficulty of defining a researcher after leaving academia, andpartly because of different approaches to recording these statistics in different countries.
The latest available OECD statistics report 7.1 million full-time equivalent researchers for2015, covering the OECD plus some key non-OECD countries (e.g. China and Russia) but
excluding some other important countries (e.g. India, Brazil). This was an increase of 2.5%
on 2014, but below the long-term average annual growth rate between 2000 and 2014 of
3.2% (OECD n.d.).
The most recently available UNESCO data reports 7.8 million full-time equivalentresearchers in 2013, up from 6.4 million in 2007 (a CAGR of 3.3%) (UNESCO 2015), while
Elsevier’s latest report for the UK government gives a lower figure, estimated at 6.66 million
for 2014 (Elsevier 2017a). (The lower figures are based on the Frascati Manual definition ofresearcher, which is more tightly defined than UNESCO’s “scientist and engineer”.) OECDestimates there are about 8.3 researchers and engineers per thousand people inemployment (8.1 in the EU, 9.1 US, 10 Japan). The World Bank, using a different measure,puts the total at 1,150 researchers in R&D per million people worldwide in 2015.33
Whichever definition is used the number of global researchers has been steadily growing
over the longer term, at about 3-4% per year (although with short-term dips during economic
recessions, most recently in 2009). The majority of this growth has been driven by emerging
countries. One consequence of this is that China overtook the US in numbers of researchers
in 2010, and is likely to pass Europe within the next year or two. Research density for China
is now close to the world’s average at 0.1% of total population: Israel is highest at about
0.8%. However, there are signs that the growth in Chinese researcher numbers is slowing,with the rate of increase dropping from over 10% per annum in the first decade of the
century to a little over 5% since 2010 (OECD, n.d.).

2.6.4 Regional changes and the rise of China
On a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis, China overtook the US and EU to become theworld’s largest economy in 2015 or thereabouts.34 Having overtaken the EU in R&D intensity
in 2013 and in raw R&D spending in 2015, on current trends its research spending will
exceed the US’s by the early 2020s (OECD, 2018b; NSB 2018). A recent restructure of
China’s science administration will see the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology(MOST) expanded and given more powers over the country’s research and innovation
drive (Sharma 2018).

32

http://www.ashmoregroup.com/sites/default/files/articledocs/EV%20May%202015%20China%20R%20and%20D_0.pdf
33
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6
34
The World Factbook puts China’s GDP on a PPP basis at $23.1 trillion in 2017, versus $20 trillion
for the EU, and $19.4 trillion for the US. See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/rankorder/2001rank.html#ch

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The consequences of the huge growth in research spending on research outputs are
predictable. In 2016 China overtook the US to publish the largest annual number of research
papers, with its share now at 18.6% according to Scopus data (NSB 2018). (Figures 11 and
12 show the trends in article outputs for 2010–2014 and 2006–2016 respectively.)
The likes of Harvard and Stanford may still produce the highest number of cited researchers,
and the UK may rank second behind the US as a country, but China is gaining ground fastwith the largest increase in 2017 – a 40% jump in the number of top cited authors. In
subjects such as materials science and engineering, China has already overtaken the US.35
The US still attracts more students from around the world, and American research istranslated into more valuable IP, although Asia is becoming the epicentre for global
innovation with the continent’s companies outranking North American companies 45 to 36 in
the top 100.36
Some broad trends can be discerned across virtually all countries, including a growing focus
on research in the field of energy and green technologies (UNESCO, 2015). Otherwise,
however, the research priorities of the major regional blocs tend to vary according to theireconomic needs and internal political pressures. In the US, for example, life sciences
continues to receive almost 60% of funding (and the lion’s share of this is for medical
research), though computer science and engineering have seen higher average annual
growth rates over the last decade (NSB, 2018). The EU is similarly focused primarily on
biological and medical sciences, while Japan’s articles are divided among biologicalsciences, medical sciences, chemistry, and physics. The research priorities of emerging
economies have been more focussed toward economic growth and infrastructuredevelopment; for example, China’s portfolio is currently dominated by chemistry, physics,
and engineering. Priority projects for its 13th five-year plan, covering the period 2016-2020,
include quantum communications and computation, brain research, cybersecurity, robotics,
genetics, big data applications and new Arctic and Antarctic research stations.
For UNESCO, these changes amount to a "structural break in the pattern of knowledge
contribution to growth at the level of the global economy". In other words, countries no longer
need to build their knowledge bases from the ground up via national R&D, but developing
countries can (also) build on the world stock of knowledge, make use of under-exploitedtechnology, and do so at less risk. Geographic boundaries are at the same time less relevant
for research and innovation and yet more important than ever before.

35
36

See https://hcr.clarivate.com/2017-researchers-list/
See http://top100innovators.clarivate.com/

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Figure 11: Share of world articles 2010-2014 (Source: Elsevier 2017a)

Figure 12: Global shares of article outputs 2006-16 (Source: NSB 2018)

2.6.5 Researcher mobility
The benefits of international collaboration for research are widely recognised (Adams, 2013),
with university league tables adopting levels of internationalisation as a key indication.37
According to Elsevier, in a global research world, the 1950s idea of a “brain drain” should be
replaced by the more nuanced concept of “brain circulation”. In this view, the skills andnetworks built by researchers while abroad accrue benefits to their home country’s researchbase when they eventually return, and often even if they do not return but remain instead asa diaspora (Albanese 2009). Elsevier’s work shows that researchers are highly mobile,
37

See, for example, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/mostinternational-universities-world-2018

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though mobility varies by country, with the UK and Canada having the lowest proportion of“sedentary” researchers (those not publishing outside their home country in the period 19962015) at 28%, compared to 62% in Japan and 78% in China (Elsevier 2017a). One trend inrecent years is that of Chinese researchers returning to China after several years abroad.
The returning ‘haigui’ (translated from Mandarin as ‘homing turtles’), reflect China’s improved
standing in global research, and a greater confidence in the country’s future.

2.6.6 Gender and diversity in research
There is a growing evidence base to suggest that diversity is a key driver of innovation(Hewlett et al, 2013), with others noting that knowledge production in the sciences isenhanced by attention to cultural diversity - specifically diversity of ideas, methods,
populations, and sites of scientific practice (Medin and Lee, 2012).
Comparable data on the diversity of the scientific workforce within different countries andregion is scarce (NSB, 2018). However, recent years have seen bodies such as UNESCO(2015) and the Global Research Council (2016) place particular emphasis on increasing theparticipation of women in the STEM fields as a means to drive innovation and achieve
excellence in research. UNESCO (2015) estimates that only 28% of researchers around theglobe are women, though an Elsevier (2017b) study found that more than 40% of
researchers were female in nine of twelve (predominantly Western) countries and regions
analysed.
The results vary substantially by field of research, with women still generally and markedly
underrepresented in the physical sciences and amongst inventors listed in patentapplications. The Elsevier study reports that women are less likely to collaborate
internationally and across the academic and corporate sectors, but their scholarly output
includes a slightly larger proportion of highly interdisciplinary research than men’s. The
findings also suggest that underrepresentation of either gender in a given field is associatedwith reduced likelihood to occupy lead author positions on a research paper in that field.

2.6.7 Collaboration and coauthorship
Collaboration is now the norm, with almost two-thirds of global articles having authors frommultiple institutions (NSB 2018). However, the proportion of international collaboration
globally has risen only slightly in recent years. In 1988, only 8% of all articles hadinternational coauthors, and this figure had risen to 23% by 2009, but had increased only to
24% by 2016 (NSB 2018). Figure 13 shows the trends in the proportions of research articles
with international coauthors. Interestingly the trend is not upwards for all countries, with India
a notable exception.

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Figure 13: Share of S&E articles internationally coauthored, by selected region,
country or economy, 2006 and 2016 (Source: NSB 2018)

There was steady growth in the average number of authors per paper during the second halfof the 20th century (Figure 14). A more recent analysis by the Economist (2016) suggests thetrend has continued into the current century, with the average number of authors per paperin Scopus growing from 3.2 in 1996 to 4.4 in 2015.
Figure 15 shows how the growth in coauthorship has varied by discipline, with the largest
numbers of coauthors and largest increases in physics and astronomy, and the smallest
coauthorship in mathematics and social sciences. A more recent trend has been theincrease in papers with more than 50 authors, and even with more than 1000 authors(“hyperauthorship”), driven largely by international high-energy physics collaborations. In
1981, the highest number of authors on a paper indexed by ISI was 118, while by 2015 a
paper in Physical Review Letters listed 5,154 authors.38 The trend has provoked debate overthe nature of authorship, with some calling for the term “contributor” to be distinguished from“author” in such cases (See Section 2.12.8 Typed citations and contributor roles).

38

https://www.nature.com/news/physics-paper-sets-record-with-more-than-5-000-authors-1.17567

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Figure 14: Coauthorship patterns 1954 to 2000 (from (Mabe & Amin, 2002), using datafrom Thomson Reuter Science Citation Index)

Figure 15: Share of world S&E articles with international collaboration, by S&E field;
2006 vs 2016 (Source: NSB 2018)

The US is a particularly important partner for international collaboration, with 39% of allinternationally collaborative papers including at least one US-based coauthor (NSB 2018).
The UK, France and Germany all have high levels of international coauthorship at around
50% of papers, and most major research-producing nations have seen an increase in levels
of international collaboration in recent years. China, however, has seen only modest growth,
while India has recorded a small decline (Elsevier 2017a).
There is a clear benefit to researchers from international collaboration in terms of increased
citations (and to a less marked extent, increased usage). The average number of citations
received per article increases with each additional collaborating country (i.e. in addition to
the lead author’s country); articles with 5 additional countries receive nearly three times as
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many citations as those with none (Royal Society 2011). For individual countries the size ofthe effect varies but tends to be especially strong for developing countries, presumably
because they are benefiting from collaborating with better established research teams indeveloped countries; for China, for example, papers with international collaborators receive
2.5 times as many citations as those with no collaborators beyond the lead institution(Elsevier 2017a).

2.6.8 Salami publishing and Least Publishable Unit
It is a widely held belief among the scholarly community (and often the publishers that servethem) that “others” (never themselves) are dividing up their results into ever smaller parcels
so that they can claim more publications. This is stated as being due to the “publish or
perish” phenomenon with tenure, grants and promotions dependent on publishing volume.
There is no evidence at the macro scale for this. If it were true we would expect to see theratio of papers published per unique author rising. It does not (Fanelli and Lariviére 2016). In
Figure 13 the productivity of authors ranges from about 1.0 in the mid 1950s to 0.75 at theturn of the millennium, a decrease! It would appear that this myth is largely a perceptual one:collaboration as we noted above is clearly increasing, as is the number of coauthors on apaper. Authors are laying claim to more papers but not actually in aggregate producing
more; it just looks as though this is the case because each can now cite their involvement inmore multiply-authored publications.

2.7

Authors and readers2.7.1 Authors
The global number of active researchers varies by definition used but is estimated to be
between 6.5 and 7.8 million (see Numbers of researchers). The number of authors differs,
however, primarily because by no means all of these will publish an article in a given year.
For example, Plume & van Weijen (2014) reported that 2.4 million articles were published in2013 by a total of 4.16 million unique authors. (Total authorships were 10 million because
each article had an average of 4.2 authors.) These figures represented steady growth from2003, when there were about 1.3 million articles published by about 2.1 million uniqueauthors. As of August 2018, the Scopus database holds about 16 million author identifiers.
Scientific journal articles are written primarily by academics. Only 19% of US scientists andengineers are employed within the education sector, but academic institutions account forthree-fourths of US S&E publication output (NSB 2018).
Work from Tenopir & King has suggested that about 15 per cent to 20 per cent of scientists
in the United States had authored a refereed article. This estimate – and the asymmetry
between authors and readers – is corroborated by work from Mabe and Amin who estimatedthat, of the 5–6 million global researchers then calculated by UNESCO, only around 1 million(circa 18 per cent) were unique repeat authors, while some 2.5 million authors published atleast once over a 5 year period (Mabe & Amin, 2002).
A more recent study looked at the most productive authors, defined as those who had
published at least once every year over the 16-year period under study (1996–2011). It
found a total of 15.2 million publishing scientists of which just 150,608 (or less than 1%)
managed to publish a paper every year. This active core, however, was responsible for 42%
of papers and 87% of the very highly cited papers. Many of these prolific scientists are likely
the heads of laboratories or research groups whose names are attached to the outputs of
their teams (Ioannidis, Boyack, & Klavans, 2014).

2.7.2 Readers
There is also a distinction to be made between the core active researcher segment and thewider journal-reading community, which is likely to be much larger. Many of these additional
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readers may be far more peripheral and infrequent readers. This category would also include
journal reading by post-graduate and undergraduate students in universities. There appears
to be no robust evidence sizing this wider journal reader community but Elsevier reports that
ScienceDirect, the world’s largest database of peer-reviewed primary scientific and medical
research, has 14m monthly unique visitors.39
Meanwhile, the scientific social network Academia.edu reports having more than 63 million
registered users, and over 20 million unique visitors a month (see Scientific social networks).
These overlapping author and reader communities can be illustrated as in Figure 16. The
degree of overlap between authors and readers will vary considerably between disciplines: ina narrow pure science field like theoretical physics there may be close to 100% overlap, but
in a practitioner field such as nursing or medicine the readers will be many times more
numerous than the authors.
It used to be believed that the average scientific paper was very little read. Thismisunderstanding arose from the flawed rescaling of pioneering work done by Garvey and
Griffith on reading of journals (King, Tenopir, & Clarke, 2006). Electronic publishing has
allowed one aspect of article use to be measured precisely, namely article downloads.
Although not every download will translate into a full reading, it is estimated that annual
downloads of full text articles from publishers’ sites are about 2.5 billion (according to an
informal STM survey) with perhaps another 400 million downloads from other sites such as
repositories.
The PEER usage study (CIBER Research 2012a) found that over a six-month period almost
every single article (99%) in the study was downloaded at least once from the relevantpublisher website, and so was a very large majority, 74%, from a PEER repository. As theauthors put it, “the scholarly literature is under heavy scrutiny”.
Incidentally, the average scientific paper takes its authors 90–100 hours to prepare (King &Tenopir, 2004). Two to three reviewers will then spend an average of 3–6 hours each on
peer review (Tenopir 2000; Ware & Monkman, 2008) - though data from Ware (2016)
suggests this may have increased somewhat in a recent years, with a median 5 hours (mean
9 hours) on each review.

39

RELX Group Annual Reports and Financial Statements 2017.
https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/relx2017annual-report.pdf

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Figure 16: overlapping author and reader communities
About 4 million authors publish each year (Plume & van Weijen, 2014), out of a global
population of approximately 8 million R&D workers (based on UNESCO figures)

2.8

Publishers

There are estimated to be of the order of 10,000 journal publishers globally: Crossref has
over 10,500 membership organisations, publishing over 60,000 journals,40 while the Scopus
database covers 22,000 journals from over 5,000 publishers. The long tail of journals notcovered by Scopus is likely to consist predominantly of publishers with just the one journal,
as well as significant non-English language content.
The membership of main English-language trade and professional associations for journal
publishers (ALPSP, SSP, OASPA and STM) include most of the larger publishers but ofcourse only a small fraction of the wider global total of publishers. According to Morris(2006), as of 2006 these collectively included 657 publishers producing around 11,550
journals, about 50% of the then total journal output by title. Of these, 477 publishers (73%)
and 2,334 journals (20%) were not-for-profit. Earlier analysis of Ulrich’s directory suggested
that about half of all journals came from not-for-profits; the apparent discrepancy may reflect
Ulrich’s broader coverage.

2.8.1 Commercial publishers
The distribution of journals by publisher is highly skewed, with a tendency towards greater
concentration over time. Analysis by Lariviére et al (2015) of the Web of Science (WoS)—
including the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index and theArts and Humanities Citation Index – indicates that the proportion of the scientific output
published in journals under the ownership of large commercial publishers has risen steadily
over the past 40 years, and even more so since the advent of the digital era – see Figures
17 and 18.

40

Crossref membership is open to any organisation that wishes to share research outputs throughmetadata and persistent identifiers. This figure therefore includes organisations such as universities,
funders and other bodies who would not necessarily self-identify as a publisher.

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Table 1: The 10 largest English-language publishers, by number of journals

Publisher

Number of journals

SpringerNature>3,000Elsevier

2,500

Taylor & Francis

2,500

Wiley

1,700

Sage

>1,000Wolters Kluwer (incl. MedKnow)c.900

Oxford University Pressc.440

Hindawi>400

Cambridge University Press390

Emerald>300

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Figure 17: Percentage of Natural and Medical Sciences (left panel) and Social
Sciences and Humanities (right panel) papers published by the top 5 publishers,
1973–2013 (source: Lariviére et al 2015)

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Figure 18: Number of journals changing from small to big publishers, and big to small
publishers per year of change in the Natural and Medical Sciences and Social
Sciences & Humanities (source: Lariviére et al 2015)

2.8.2 Learned Society Publishing
Learned societies embrace the advancement of their chosen field or discipline while at thesame time supporting the professional development of their members through training,
conferences and subsidies. The Europa World of Learning lists over 5,000 learned societies
globally,41 and a list of societies by country can be found online – albeit incomplete.42 These
organisations are often a key part of the national research environment.
Academic publications, and especially journals, often account for a significant part of therevenue generated by learned societies – though this varies across disciplines and tends tobe less common in the arts and humanities. Revenue from publishing is typically used tosubsidise other activities that further the development of the discipline and support society
members. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)43 has
an international membership of 170 not-for-profit publishers, but there are many moresocieties globally who play an active role in publishing.
For example, Johnson and Fosci (2015) identified 279 learned societies that publish journals
in the UK alone, most of which are in STM disciplines. Their publications (mostly journals)
represented just over £300m or 26% of the societies’ total revenue. Further analysis
demonstrated that 80% of this £300m came from 28 societies. The long tail is probably stillbigger in the US where the small number of larger learned societies are very large indeed.
The largest learned society publisher, and one of the largest publishers of any sort, is theAmerican Chemical Society.
Changes in the publishing environment - such as the wide availability of journals through theconsortia publishing model (the “big deal”) and the regulatory insistence on open access have caused concern among learned societies (Johnson and Fosci 2015). Despite rising41

See http://www.worldoflearning.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_learned_societies43
https://www.alpsp.org/
42

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membership numbers overall,44 societies still rely on publishing for much of their revenue
and publishing remains among the most valued functions for members. On the other hand, ajournal’s association with an established society is of only minor importance at best toauthors in choosing a journal to publish in (Nature Publishing Group 2014). In this context,
efforts are being made to ensure the economic viability of learned society publishers in acompetitive market. Recently, a group of prestigious not-for-profit scientific membershipsocieties launched the Scientific Society Publisher Alliance (SSPA),45 an initiative focused onbuilding awareness of and support for publication of scientific research by scientist-run
scientific societies. The SSPA seeks to emphasize the value of publishing vital scientificresearch in scholarly journals managed, edited and peer-reviewed by working scientists.
Although partnerships existed back in the nineteenth century in the UK and Germany, themove to electronic journals and increasing competition led to a surge in partnering among
the medium to smaller learned society journal lists. Wiley’s acquisition of the two Blackwellcompanies in 2007 has made it the world's leading learned society publisher with over 700
partnerships, while Taylor & Francis, OUP and CUP also maintain significant society
publishing programmes. It has become common for leading publishers to partner with
Chinese society publishers in launching or further developing local English language
journals.
Through partnerships, societies retain editorial input and a close relationship with theirepistemic community, while commercial publishers increase their publishing revenue throughtheir distribution channels and economies of scale. These advantages are partially mitigated
for the currently free-standing learned society publisher by the presence of a very large anddiverse third-party publishing services industry (Clarke 2015).
Alternative routes to maintaining engaged readerships and revenue are provided by digitalplatforms such as HighWire, Atypon (now owned by Wiley) and Silverchair. HighWire wasformed by Stanford University Libraries in 1995 to help learned society publishers host peerreviewed content online. The co-founder, the Stanford University Librarian, Michael Keller
made it clear that this initiative was intended to stop learned societies having to go to the bigcommercial publishers to outsource their publishing. HighWire is now HighWire Press, aplatform that hosts journals online and provides software solutions for its customers. Nonprofit aggregators are available for smaller societies that are an ill-fit for these platforms,
including Aggregant46 and the non-profit BioOne, which offers database of 207 journals from157 publishers and returns a surplus to the owners.47

2.8.3 University Press Publishing
Although Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press are members of the
Association of University Presses (AUP), formerly the Association of American University
Presses, they are generally seen as not typical. The range of smaller university presses, now
augmented by equivalents from other parts of the world, are on the whole known much more
for their monograph lists where as a group they represent a significant historical force in thebook field. That being said the AUP considers (2018) that 50% of its members do publish
journals. Note that some members are not university presses but other not-for-profits whoshare the same standards. The big players (journal numbers in parenthesis) are:•••

University of Chicago Press (73);Penn State University Press (71);Duke University Press (56);44

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17521742.2015.1013807
https://byscientistsforscience.org/
46
https://accucoms.com/publisher-services/aggregagent/47
http://www.bioone.org/
45

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•
•
•
•

October 2018

University of Toronto Press (40);
University of Illinois Press (38);
MIT Press (36);and University of California Press (32).

Only a minority of these are STM journals - Chicago has 7, MIT have 12, Penn State has nomainstream science journals, Duke has a cluster of 5 mathematical journals, Toronto has 7,
Illinois has 1, and California has 5. Outside this group is Rockefeller University Press which
publishes three established scientific journals and nothing else. There are exceptions. Thereis the Duke mathematics project Euclid bringing together books and journals. MIT present
themselves as the only US University publisher whose list is based on science andtechnology and argue for their quality and cutting-edge nature. Collabra – Psychology, theofficial journal of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, is a missiondriven Open Access (OA) journal from the University of California Press which shares avariable portion of revenue with reviewers and editors.48
Outside North America the model presented by the new UCL Press - fully open access, total
subsidy by the university and free publication for UCL faculty - has been well publicised andgained a lot of interest. They are publishing or hosting journals but not (as yet) STM journals,
though this may change with the planned launch of UCL’s own OA megajournal.49
A report commissioned by Jisc (Adema and Stone 2017) identifies a “new wave” of university
presses. Common characteristics are that they are open access (OA), digital first, librarybased, and they often offer a smaller set of services than a traditional publisher, blurring theline between publisher and platform. In tandem, a small but notable number of academics
and researchers have set up their own academic-led publishing initiatives, often
demonstrating an innovative or unique approach either in workflow, peer review, technology
or business model.

2.8.4 Library publishing
There has been an expansion of interest among academic libraries in providing publishing
services over the last 4 years or so (Jones 2014b). A 2011 ARL report highlighted thepotential but described the field as evolutionary with many of the programmes being
exploratory (Ivins & Luther, 2011). Most library publishers work with local academic
departments, but more than half provide publishing services to third-party organisations suchas learned societies and research institutes. As a generalisation, these library publishers do
not take editorial responsibility for what is essentially a service activity. Note also that Library
Publishers do not include University Presses even when the University Press reports into the
Library.
Libraries surveyed by the Library Publishing Directory (2018) published a total of 442 facultydriven (as opposed to student-driven, of which there were 214), campus-based journal titles,nearly all of which were open access. The OA journals rarely (10%) charged APCs, instead
covering the publishing costs from the library budget. The total number of library-publishedjournals reported has grown slightly since 2016 (when the figure was 436), and is likely to be
an understatement, with the data biased towards North America, although this is slowly
changing. For example, Open Journal Systems hosts many thousands of journals andbepress around 700 journals, many of which may be library-published. Faculty-driven
journals, monographs, and student-driven journals make up the bulk of libraries’ publishingoutput with the other two groups varying more year on year (Library Publishing Directory2018).

48
49

https://www.collabra.org/about/faq/
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0118/ucl-launches-open-access-megajournal

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Most library publishing combines lightweight publishing services with lightweight technicalsolutions such as Open Journal Systems, bepress, DSpace, and WordPress, with Ubiquity
Press also now competing in this space. In 2018 the most-used platform on the list, Open
Journal Systems, is used by 44% of responding programs, surpassing bepress’s proprietary
Digital Commons platform (41%). Three of the top four most-used platforms—OJS, DSpace,and WordPress—are open source. As pointed out in 2015 these are becoming moresophisticated, though, including metadata assignment (80% of library publishers), peerreview management (25%) and marketing (41%). Importantly, discoverability is not being
neglected, for instance through provision of metadata to web-scale discovery services (qv)
like Primo and Summon. There is little change year on year in the overall picture. In 2018
there was more activity in digital preservation than there had been but there may be fewer
services being offered – for example digitisation. It has to be noted that these figures areculled from answers to a question and the respondents are not identical year on year.
STM journals probably count for less than ten per cent of the output and not surprisingly
these are small and little known.

2.8.5 The STM publishing workforce
A rough estimate is that the STM publishing industry employs an about 110,000 people
globally, of which about 40% are employed in the EU. An estimated 20–30,000 full time
employees are indirectly supported by the STM industry globally (freelancers, external
editors, etc.) in addition to employment in the production supply chain (source: Elsevier
estimates). An independent survey funded by the AAP’s Professional & Scholarly Publishingdivision in 2014 estimated a total of over 38,000 employed in the USA by over 350
publishers at a payroll cost of $2.3 billion (Czujko & Chu, 2015). Meanwhile, a report for the
UK Publishers Association estimated that 2,900 people were directly employed in UK
academic journal publishing in 2015, representing 10% of the total publishing workforce of
29,000. This figure seems low. 15–18% of academic journal employees in the UK were
estimated to be non-UK EU nationals with a further 2–6% from the rest of the world (Frontier
Economics, 2017).
The issue of diversity and gender within the scholarly publishing workforce is one which has
in recent years received greater attention and investigation. This can be seen by the
Workplace Equity project’s first initiative, the Workplace Equity survey, which aimed tocollect data on the opportunities, practices and experiences felt by individuals working in thescholarly publishing industry.50 The majority of the 1,182 who respondents reported that theiremployers had stated diversity values claimed that their own experiences within theirworkspace aligned with these. Nearly 75% of men and women report that they achieve somemeasure of work-life balance and are able to work in a supportive culture with paid familyleave, flex time, emergency leave or state their diversity values. The majority of theworkforce is young with the highest percentage in the 36-30 age group at 43%, closely
followed by 34% in the 20-35 age group.
Qualitatively, the survey reports that older respondents were the least likely to consider theirwork environment inclusive. Meanwhile, 45% of women and 67% of those who identify as
black or mixed/multiple race do not feel that they have equal access to opportunities forpromotion, compared to 36% of men and 45% of those who identify as white. Women makeup 67% of the lowest pay quartile, but only 41% of the highest, leaving women making on
average, 19.8% less than male colleagues. Similar trends were seen in the 2015 Scholarly
Publishing Demographic Survey conducted by Digital Science and associates.51 The
50

https://www.workplaceequityproject.org/
https://www.digital-science.com/blog/news/scholarly-publishing-demographic-survey-reveals-majordiversity-challenges-in-scholarly-publishing-challengestm/
51

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implications of a workplace which is not ethnically diverse are highlighted in a series ofTestimonies by People of Colour in Scholarly Publishing (Scholarly Kitchen, 2018).
Recent data released by a series of UK publishers illustrates the extent of gender inequality
with regard to pay (Meadows, 2018). From the data released, it was found that at best there
was a gender pay gap of 12.6% (OUP) and at worst a pay gap of 40.4% (Elsevier). Many of
the organisations include information about what they are doing or are planning to do toaddress their gender pay gap.
According to the Workplace Equity Project, action is needed in three key areas:•••sponsorship and advocacy;
facilitating networks by partnering with industry organisations to encourage
networking for early career colleagues; andchallenging exclusion.

Schonfeld (2017) has outlined measures taking place in American scholarly publishing in theform of the University Press Diversity Fellowship Program, which aims to create a new, morediverse ‘pipeline’ of acquisitions editors.

2.8.6 STM publishing in China
China’s ascent in recent years to become the dominant producer of scientific articles has
been accompanied by increased investment in the country’s publishing infrastructure. The
Blue Book of China’s STM Journal’s Development (CAST 2017) lists 5,020 Chinese journals,of which 548 (10.9%) are English language. Roughly half of the latter are jointly published by
Chinese institutes and foreign publishers, with SpringerNature having the largest share,
followed by Elsevier and Wiley (Xu et al 2018).
The National Ministry of Finance has also implemented several targeted funding schemes inrecent years in order to increase the international competitiveness of China’s scientificjournals. However, the academic publishing industry remains fragmented, with almost 96%of these titles belonging to a publisher that publishes just a single journal title (Montgomery
and Ren 2018). Publishing is highly regulated, applying for a new licence to start a newjournal title is difficult, and the price of STM publications in the China domestic market isextremely low. As a result, the sector does not show attractive returns and has so far
attracted few private investors.

2.9

Peer review

Peer review is fundamental to scholarly communication and specifically to journals. It is theprocess of subjecting an author's manuscript to the scrutiny of others who are experts in thesame field, prior to publication in a journal. (It is also used for the evaluation of research
proposals, but that aspect of peer review is not covered here.)
The conduct and management of peer review is at the core of the business of publishingscholarly journals, and it continues to grow in scale. In 2013 the ScholarOne system washandling a total of 1.6 million original submissions per year (or 2.2 million including
resubmissions) for 4,200 journals. Its rival Editorial Manager processed a total of 2 million
manuscripts a year on behalf of 5,800 journals from over 250 publishers. By 2017 theScholarOne system was handling a total of 2 million original submissions per year (or 2.9
million including resubmissions) for 6,700 journals. At a global scale, a recent survey(Publons 2018) suggests that some 13.7 million reviews were undertaken in 2016 to support
the publication of 2.9 million articles.
The process of review varies from journal to journal but it typically involves (Jubb, 2016;
D’Andrea and O’Dwyer, 2017):

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editorial staff who make initial checks that papers fall within a journal’s scope andmeet its standards as to format, research ethics, and so on;
editors, who – with support from editorial boards and staff - select reviewers andmake the final decision on which papers are published; andreviewers, who assess the quality of papers submitted to them, and makerecommendations to the editors, usually based on a review template.

A range of studies over the last decade (Ware and Monkman 2008, Sense About Science
2009, House of Commons Science and Technology Committee 2010, Mulligan et al 2012,
Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) 2015, Taylor and Francis 2015, Publons 2018)confirm that researchers at all stages of their careers (including early career researchers)remain strongly committed to the principle of peer review. But along with publishers andeditors, they express many concerns about its practice. Hence there is growing support forchange in order to tackle some of the major concerns relating to unfairness and bias,
unwanted expense and delay, the burdens on reviewers, and the effectiveness of theprocess as a whole. The importance attached to addressing these issues is evidenced in the
lively contributions to Peer Review Week,52 which has run in September each year since
2015.
Strong support for continuity comes from a large-scale survey conducted by CIBER(Nicholas et al., 2015). This found that the key benefit of peer review was in providing the‘central pillar of trust’, although value was also attached to its role in improving the quality ofarticles. Researchers (especially younger ones) were willing to use non-peer reviewed
materials but far less likely to cite them: this was seen to be a formal activity where peerreviewed content was required. Peer review also remained important in choice of journal,
alongside the Impact Factor. Social media and open access were not seen to be important
agents for changing attitudes towards peer review: researchers had moved from a printbased system to a digital system, but it had not significantly changed the way they decided
what to trust.

2.9.1 Publisher’s role in peer review
The publisher’s role in peer review, at its most fundamental, is to create and support thejournal and appoint and support its editor and editorial office. Operationally publishers’ role
has been to organise and manage the process, and more recently to develop or provide
online tools to support it. Online submission systems are now the norm: Inger & Gardner(2013) reported that only 5% of publishers were without peer review systems (sharply downfrom 35% in a previous 2008 survey). Most publishers opted for one of the three market
leaders, Editorial Manager (Aries), eJournal Press and ScholarOne (Clarivate Analytics).
Aries was acquired by Elsevier in August 2018.
The use of online submission systems gives publishers improved visibility of editorialactivities and has reduced the overall time required for peer review. It has also reduced
some of the associated direct costs (e.g. in paper handling and postage) though in part thesehave been transformed into additional overhead costs (software, hardware and training). By
enabling a fully-electronic workflow it has also permitted some additional benefits, including:
•
•
•

52

Faster publication times: the systems can create a fully-linked version of the final peer
reviewed manuscript that can be published online immediately on acceptance.
Production efficiencies: systems can undertake automatic “pre-flight” testing, forinstance checking image resolution at the submission stage.
Support for reviewers and editors: automatic linking of references in authors’
manuscripts can help editors identify reviewers and also help reviewers. Some

https://peerreviewweek.wordpress.com/

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publishers also provide editors with access to A&I databases to help in selecting
reviewers as well as in making assessments. Newer artificial intelligence systems
based on text mining can also integrate with online submission systems .
Plagiarism detection: the Similarity Check system allows submitted articles to becompared to published articles and to articles on the web (see Publishing ethics).
Integrated e-commerce: OA article publication charges, or page or colour charges canbe managed using publishers’ own systems or third-party plug-ins such as the
RightsLink Author platform (Copyright Clearance Center).
Metadata collected at submission or acceptance can be used to create integrations
with other services; for instance, see CHORUS which depends on collection of Open
Funder Registry data.

2.9.2 Purposes of peer review
The fundamental aim of peer review is to assess the quality of the research and the paper.
But quality may be defined in a number of ways, and in practice review is used to serve atleast four distinct but related purposes:••••

To check for “soundness”: whether the research has been performed to appropriate
standards so that the findings and conclusions may be considered valid
To help authors improve the quality of their research and/or its presentation
To assess originality, significance, and broader interest
To assess the ‘fit’ between a paper and the journal

The first purpose is the key one: seeking to ensure that only good science or scholarshipgets published, and that work that does not meet acceptable standards does not enter thejournal literature. Some “mega-journals” such as PLOS One review only for ‘soundness’ inthis sense. Even for this limited purpose, however, there are some doubts (Jefferson, Rudin,
Brodney Folse, & Davidoff, 2007) as to peer review’s effectiveness. Nevertheless, the growthof “predatory journals” may have increased the need to distinguish journals and articles thatare properly peer reviewed from those masquerading as such (see Peer review certification
below).
Authors themselves attach great importance to the role of peer review in improving thequality of published papers. Over 90% of respondents to the PRC survey (2016) said thatpeer review had improved their own last published paper. Mulligan and Mabe (2011) reportsimilar findings, though this varied a little by research discipline.
But filtering is important for readers too, particularly as the volumes of published papers
continue to increase. Hence the importance that many journals attach to the third and fourth
purposes, of checking for originality and significance, and for fit with the journal and thecommunity it seeks to serve. There is strong debate about the usefulness (or the reverse) of
the perceived hierarchies of journals in different fields and the effectiveness of filteringresearch findings in this way; but it remains widely accepted by researchers andadministrators (Tenopir 2010; Ware 2011).

2.9.3 Peer review certification
Readers have no way of knowing whether an individual article has been peer reviewed, andif so, to what standard, without a good working knowledge of the journals in a field. Layreaders will typically not have this knowledge, and even expert researchers encounter
articles from outside their domain. Journals with otherwise good peer review do not always
clearly label which articles have been peer reviewed and which not. To counter this problem,
some initiatives propose certification of the peer review process at the article and/or journal
level.
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One such was PRE (Peer Review Evaluation) “a suite of services designed to support andstrengthen the peer-review process”. Its first service, PRE-val, verified for end-users that
content had gone through the peer review process and provided information relevant toassessing the quality of the process. An article-level service, preSCORE was also proposed.
In similar vein, the medical editor of BioMed Central called for a “kitemark” to identify
research papers that have been peer reviewed by people with the necessary skills (Patel
2014). To date these developments have failed to gain traction within the community, and
the PRE domain (http://pre-val.org) is no longer active.

2.9.4 Criticisms of peer review
It is commonly accepted that peer review is imperfect. Much of the criticism is focused in thebiomedical and especially the clinical research community. Key criticisms (Ware 2011, Jubb
2016) are that peer review is:
•

•

•

•

•

•

Ineffective in detecting error and/or fraud, as shown in the increasing numbers of
papers that are amended or retracted post-publication. Studies have suggested(Fang et al, 2012) that high-status journals are no better than lower status ones indetecting flawed findings.
Partial, in failing to ensure that wherever possible, published findings are
reproducible, or that appropriate attention is paid in the review process to ensuring
the soundness of underlying data and/or informatics, or of the statistical techniques
employed.
Unsuccessful in ensuring the best papers are published in the highest-status
journals. Many papers published in the top journals receive few citations, or none atall; while studies suggest that papers published elsewhere (sometimes after
rejection by the top journals) are often the most influential as measured by citation
impact (Acharya et al 2014, Siler et al 2015).
Unfair and biased, in allowing editors and reviewers to make judgements biased
against authors and papers on grounds of sex, race, nationality of field of study, or
to fail to declare conflicts of interest, or even to use confidential information for theirown purposes.
Slow and costly, leading to long delays in publication, particularly when papers are
submitted in sequence to several journals; and bringing ever-increasing costburdens for funders, institutions and authors, as well as publishers.
Distorting, in favouring the publication of papers likely to be of broad significance,
rather than those reporting negative or confirmatory findings; or on the other handsystematically disfavouring innovative or interdisciplinary work.

Again, these criticisms come from researchers at all stages of their careers, though early
career researchers tend to attribute responsibility for these problems to over-powerfuleditors. Ways to address the problems are at the heart of current discussions about peer
review.

2.9.5 Types of peer review
The ways in which peer review is actually conducted varies considerably, in accordance withfive main issues:•

Identifying reviewers and authors, where there are three main variantso Single-blind, the most common approach in many STM areas, where authors’identities are revealed to reviewers, but reviewers’ remain anonymous. 84%
of authors in the PRC survey (2016) had experience of this kind of review.
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Double-blind, where both authors’ and reviewers’ names are concealed. Thisis common in the humanities and social sciences, and some STM journals
have introduced it, at least as an option, in recent years; but clues to authors’identities may be difficult to conceal. 44% of authors in the PRC survey had
experience of this kind of review.
o Open, where both authors’ and reviewers’ names are revealed. Surveys
suggest mixed views about this approach, with the most recent Publons
survey (2018) suggesting that revealing their identities would make 42% of
potential reviewers less likely to accept an invitation to review.
Cascading or portable reports. Many publishers, keen to reduce the redundant effort
of successive reviews of the same paper for different journals, offer the option forreports to be passed to another journal in their portfolio. It is not clear how widespreadthe practice has become, though Davis (2018) suggests that it may not work for all
publishers. The cross-publisher Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (nprc.incf.org)
provides for journals to forward reports, if authors request it, to any journal in the
consortium; but take-up is low. Members of the National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) have approved the ‘Manuscript Exchange Common Approach’(MECA) - a new initiative co-led by HighWire Founding Director John Sack. The projectwill see industry technology providers work together on a more standardized approachto the transfer of manuscripts between and among manuscript systems, such as those53
in use at publishers and preprint servers (see also section 4.3.4).
Interaction between reviewers and authors. Some newer journals such as eLife andthose published by Frontiers encourage authors to engage in online discussion withreviewers (whose names may or may not be revealed) or editors. There is evidence that
reviewers are willing to change their minds during dialogue of this kind, and many
publishers are beginning to show interest in such approaches.
Publishing reviewers’ reports. Some journals have in recent years published thereports on which editors’ decisions are based, as a service to both authors and readers.
Again, reviewers’ identities may or may not be revealed; and surveys again suggest
mixed views with 49% of respondents to the Publons survey suggesting that open
identities and reports would make them less likely to accept an invitation to review (seeInvitations for reviewers). In August 2018 two biomedical funders — the UK Wellcome
Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Maryland — and ASAPbio, a
non-profit organization that encourages innovation in life-sciences publishing, issued an
open letter calling for the open publication of reviewers' reports (Polka et al, 2018). At
the time of writing the letter had been signed by over 20 publishers, representing morethan 100 journals.54
Fully-open peer review. Some journals have adopted a controlled variant of thepractice established as a result of the use of servers such as arXiv and BioRxiv, where‘pre-prints’ are open for comment before formal publication. Journals such as PeerJ andthose published by Copernicus Publications are posted after basic quality checks, andopen for comment by named or anonymous reviewers. The papers may then be revised
before formal submission for publication. F1000Research operates a similar system,with successive versions of papers and reports openly accessible on the platform.
o

•

•

•

•

53
54

https://www.manuscriptexchange.org/
http://asapbio.org/letter

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Debates about the merits of these different approaches is likely to continue for some time.
Some suggest that concealing reviewers’ identities is the only way to ensure fully-candid
reports, while others complain that it serves to mask sloppy reviewing and bad practice; andthat the single-blind version in particular supports biased or even malicious reviewing.
Similarly, while some suggest that revealing reviewers’ names encourages more thoughtful
and constructive reviews, others suggest that junior researchers in particular may bereluctant to have their names associated with negative reviews, or to be seen to criticise
senior colleagues. PeerJ has found that only a small minority of those who submit negative
reports are willing to release their names; and there is a suggestion that this may beparticularly prevalent in medicine. And there are concerns that cascading reviews can trap
authors into the portfolios of large publishers. Finally, many researchers at all stages of theircareers express concern about the potential for reviews from people without relevant
expertise or experience that may be implied by fully-open peer review; and establishedauthors in particular may be reluctant to engage in the kind of online seminar Q and A about
their findings that open review implies. There are also concerns, again especially in
medicine, that fully-open reviewing may lead to the early ‘publication’ of flawed findings that
could do real harm.
Nevertheless, recent years have seen a growth in support for greater transparency: the PRC
survey found that 50–70% of researchers are supportive of, or prepared to accept, open
review. This fell to 35–55% if openness included publishing signed reviews alongside thepaper; and as we have noted, the most open options serve as a disincentive for many
researchers to accept invitations to review (Publons 2018). But experiments and moves
towards some form of greater transparency or openness in peer review are becoming
increasing prevalent at journals and publishers including the BMJ, Biomed Central, theEuropean Geophysical Union; Frontiers; and EMBO, which has made a strong case of thebenefits of open review (Pulverer, 2010). Elsevier ran a pilot with five journals from 20122018, and has indicated that it plans to offer an open peer review option to all of Elsevier’s
journal editors (McCook 2018). Elife has recently (Patterson and Schekman 2018)
introduced an experiment under which once an editor has invited a manuscript for full peer
review, the journal is committed to publishing the work along with the reviewer reports, thedecision letter, and the author response.

2.9.6 Post-publication peer review
Journals have long provided facilities for post-publication review through letters to the editor,
review articles, and so on; and the BMJ has secured extensive use of its rapid response ande-letter services. But developments in publishing technology have opened up new
possibilities. Some of these are related to the increasing use of pre-print servers, and also to
the services of new initiatives such as Science Open,55 which represent a radical shift fromthe ‘review then publish’ to a ‘publish then review’ model. Comments and ratings may take anumber of forms:•

55

PLoS One is the best-known example of a journal which encourages readers to
submit comments and ratings which are published alongside the article, but take-up
is low, with fewer than 10% of articles receiving any comment, perhaps because
time-pressed researchers have little incentive to devote time to such an exercise.
PLOS has recently trialled Open Evaluation, allowing users (in a private beta test) torate articles on four dimensions: interest level, the article’s significance, the qualityof the research, and the clarity of the writing. These are of course similar to thequestions posed to reviewers in conventional pre-publication review.

www.scienceopen.com

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F1000 Prime is a more formal service, with a ‘faculty’ of researchers who provide
ratings and evaluations of important articles in medicine and biology.
Scholarly collaboration networks and sharing services such as Research Gate and
Mendeley allow researchers to share bibliographies, and services such as
PeerLibrary enable researchers to share reviews of published papers. Pub Peer
allows accredited researchers to comment on papers, and contacts the authors
when such comments are posted. The NIH launched in 2013 a pilot of a similar
service allowing commenting on the 22 million articles in the PubMed database.
Commenting was restricted to authors in PubMed who could both comment and rate
the usefulness of other comments. PubMed’s central position in biomedicine gave
the approach significant credibility but, with comments submitted on only 6,000 of
the 28 million articles indexed in PubMed, the NIH concluded in February 2018 that56
the low level of participation did not warrant continued investment in the project.
Many comments are posted on blogs and other social media, which may be
influential but difficult to track.

The key problem with post-publication peer review is the relatively small number of papers
that attract any comment or rating. Busy researchers have few incentives to engage, andthere is a tendency to focus on controversial papers which attract negative comments. But
there is growing interest in aggregating multiple “signals” of an article’s impact, including thenumber of post-publication comments (both on the journal website and elsewhere on theweb), as a complement to the Impact Factor (see Article-level metrics and altmetrics).
Frontiers has developed algorithms to provide post-publication evaluations of this kind.

2.9.7 Independent peer review services
A more radical version of the cascade review discussed above is offered by a number ofpeer review services established in recent years, including Rubriq,57 editage,58 and Peerageof Science.59 It is not clear how widespread the demand for such services might be, either
from authors or publishers, and Davis (2017) has questioned the commercial prospects forsuch services.

2.9.8 Abuse of peer review
A few researchers have exploited loopholes in the peer review system to submit bogus
reviews. A 2014 Nature article detailed how some authors had set up fraudulent accounts on
online peer systems for both fictitious and actual researchers using multiple generic email
addresses (e.g. Gmail) generated for the purpose. They were then able to propose
themselves as reviewers for papers they submitted (Ferguson et al 2014). In one majorcase, a 14-month investigation by SAGE uncovered some 130 suspicious reviewer accounts
and 60 papers articles were retracted,60 while in 2015 Springer retracted 64 articles in 10
journals.61 (See also Publishing ethics.) In 2017, 400 Chinese researchers listed as authors
on some 100 now-retracted papers were reported to be facing disciplinary action for a
massive peer-review fraud (Normile, 2017).
56

https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2018/02/01/pubmed-commons-to-be-discontinued/
http://www.rubriq.com/
58 https://www.editage.com/publication-support/
59 https://www.peerageofscience.org/
60
https://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/08/sage-publications-busts-peer-review-and-citation-ring-60papers-retracted/
61
https://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/17/64-more-papers-retracted-for-fake-reviews-this-time-fromspringer-journals/
57

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As a result of such cases, some publishers have withdrawn the facility for authors tonominate reviewers, and enhanced the security of their systems.

2.9.9 Invitations to reviewers
The Publons survey shows that almost a third (32.9%) of all reviews are provided byresearchers in the USA, who are responsible for only a quarter of all published journal
articles. By contrast researchers in China provide 8.8% of reviews, while being responsible
for a substantially-higher proportion (23.8%) of published articles. In broad terms,
researchers in western Europe, North America, Australia and Japan together provide morethan two-thirds (68.1%) of all reviews. Reviewers from emerging research nations andregions in the rest of the world (other than China) provided together under a fifth (19.1%) ofreviews while being responsible for 29.3% of published articles.
Figure 19: Peer review supply and demand by region (Source: Publons 2018)

These disparities among reviewers reflect similar disparities among editors, who are ofcourse responsible for inviting reviewers. More than 96% of editors come from establishedcountries and regions (including China), with the USA by far the largest provider. The
evidence suggests that editors from those countries tend to invite reviewers they know of in
the same or similar countries; but that the rate of acceptance of invitations is higher for
researchers in the emerging research nations and regions. It also suggests that
predominantly male editors are more likely to invite male rather than female reviewers. All
these findings suggest that they may be systemic biases in the peer review system. It is also
often suggested that early career researchers are locked out of participating in peer review,though there is no robust evidence on thisBut the Publons survey also indicated, as many publishers have noticed, increasing‘reviewer fatigue’, with a rise from 1.9 to 2.4 in the number of invitations required in order to54

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get one report submitted. Reviewers are also less likely to accept invitations where a journal
operates an open peer model (Figure 20). In this context, the need to expand the pool ofreviewers, and to provide them with good incentives, support and training, becomes evermore important.

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Figure 20: The effect of journal review policies on peer review invitation acceptance rates(Source: Publons 2018)

2.9.10 Incentives for reviewers
Peer review of journal articles has traditionally been seen as an integral part of researchers’
professional obligations. Fees are almost never paid (one rare exception is Collabra, an
open access journal publishing initiative from UC Press); but there are examples of payment
in kind, such as waiving submission fees, waiving or discounting APCs, providing timelimited access to subscription-based resources, etc.
Surveys of researchers and publishers’ day-to-day experience suggest that there is very little
demand for such fees (although anti-corporate sentiment may contrast large publishers’
profits with the fact that peer review is unpaid). There does appear, however, to be demand
for greater formal recognition for the work of reviewers. At present, where blinded peer
review is employed, such recognition typically takes the form of an annual statement fromthe journal listing and thanking its reviewers. Researchers can and do list reviewing activities
on their curricula vitae.
More direct ways of rewarding review via recognition have emerged, most notably:••

Publons offers a service whereby reviewers can post their peer review history online,
and then showcase this as they choose (for instance by integrating it into their ORCID
records and their CVs). The company was founded in New Zealand in 2012 andacquired by Clarivate Analytics in July 2017. By August 2018, Publons had recorded
nearly 2.5 million reviews from 450,000 reviewers, covering over 25,000 journals. It
also offers peer review training courses and awards for researchers and (as of July2018) a reviewer search and matchmaking tool for journal.
Elsevier held an open competition for ways to improve peer review; the winning entry
proposed a "reviewer badges and rewards scheme”. Reviewers could display badges(generated via Mozilla OpenBadges) on social media pages. In a second phase a"reviewer recognition platform" (RRP) was developed, which now covers some 2,000
Elsevier journals, with around 800,000 reviewer profiles. Upon completion of a review
for one of these titles, reviewers are provided with a link to a personal page on theplatform that displays their reviewer activity. Researchers can also register theirinterest for reviewing for their journal(s) of choice and indicate their preferred subject
area(s) via the platform.

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ORCID launched peer review functionality in 2015. Organizations currently posting
peer review activity data include: American Geophysical Union (AGU), F1000, IEEE,and Publons. Uptake to date has been limited, with less than 0.5% of ORCID iDs
associated with peer review activities as of August 2018.

The need to enhance the discoverability and usability of peer review reports led Crossref toextend its services in 2017 to support the registration and retrieval of peer review content
through its public API. A new deposit schema now enables the registration of peer reviews,
referee reports, decision letters, author responses, and community comments. Metadata tocharacterize both the peer review type and stage—to accurately reflect the history of thereview—can now be deposited and searched for.62

2.9.11 Time spent on peer review
Peer review involves a series of actions that take time: identifying and inviting reviewers;
reviewers’ accepting or rejecting the invitations; identifying new reviewers in response to
rejections; producing review reports; evaluating the reports; and so on. Practice varies
between disciplines, with overall review times measured in weeks (or less) for rapidpublication journals in life science disciplines; but they can be much longer (months, ormore) in mathematics and in the humanities and some social sciences. In the PRC survey(PRC 2016) authors reported average review times of about 3 months. On average, authors
regarded review times of 30 days or less as satisfactory, but satisfaction levels dropped
sharply beyond 3 months, and fewer than 10% were satisfied with review times longer than 6months.
The commitment of the scholarly community to peer review is illustrated by the time spent byreviewers. In the PRC survey, the majority of reviews were completed by a more productive
subset of reviewers who managed nearly twice as many reviews as the average. But acrossall respondents, reviewers reported spending a median 5 hours (mean 9 hours) on eachreview, and on average reviewed about 8 papers a year. In the Publons survey, reviews
averaged 477 words in length (with a notable difference between longer reports fromestablished research countries, and shorter ones from emerging nations). The elapsed time
to submit a review report varied significantly across disciplines, but also by country andregion, with a mean time between acceptance of the invitation and submission of the reportof 19.1 days.

2.9.12 Overall costs of peer review
The notional global cost of peer review is substantial, albeit largely an estimate of academic
time devoted to it rather than actual cash: an RIN report estimated this at £1.9 billion
annually, equivalent to about £1200 per paper (RIN 2008). The Houghton report used aslightly higher figure, at £1400 per paper (Houghton et al., 2009). These figures are fullcostings, including estimates for the time spent by the academics conducting the review. The
publisher’s average cost of managing peer review (salaries and fees only, excluding
overheads, infrastructure, systems etc.) was reported by the PEER study at $250 per
submitted manuscript (Wallace 2012).

2.10 Reading patterns
The number of articles that university faculty members report reading per year had beensteadily increasing over time (Tenopir 2007; Tenopir, King, Edwards, & Wu, 2009) but may
have recently begun to decline (Figure 21). A range of sources support an estimate ofaround 250 articles per year for university academics, while non-university scientists read
only about half as many (King & Tenopir, 2004). However, there are substantial differences62

See https://www.crossref.org/news/2018-06-05-introducing-metadata-for-peer-review/

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in reading habits between disciplines and career stage, so apparent changes in overall
reading volumes over time may simply reflect changes in the mix of survey respondents (seeDisciplinary differences). A UK study by Tenopir reported an average 39 scholarly readings
per month, comprising 22 articles, seven books, and ten other publications (Tenopir et al.,2012), amounting to an estimated 448 hours per year spent reading (equivalent to 56 8-hourdays).
A 2008 international survey (Tenopir, Mays, & Wu, 2011) found that researchers in thesciences reported spending time reading scholarly content of between 12.3 hours/week(health sciences) and 15.3 hours/week (life sciences); while social science researchers said
they spent a (somewhat implausible?) 25.9 hours/week (while not reading any more articles
in total).
The average time spent reading a journal article remained at around 45–50 minutes between
1977 and the mid-1990s, before falling to just over 30 mins (Renear & Palmer, 2009). The
latest data from Tenopir et al (2018, internal report) suggests it may have begun to increaseagain, which is consistent with the apparent fall in the number of articles read noted above.
Researchers in the medical sciences, education and the humanities spend the least time per
articles, while computer scientists and engineers spend the most. There are indications thatthe thoroughness of article reading may have declined, with reading times not increasing inline with the average length of journal articles increasing substantially (from 7.4 to 12.4
pages between 1975 and 2001). Only around a third of respondents to Tenopir et al's 2018
survey stated they read all of their most recent article "with great care".
One plausible explanation is given by RIN-funded work done by the CIBER research group(Nicholas & Clark, 2012). Using analysis of publishers’ log files, they demonstrate that few
users of scholarly websites spend any significant time reading in the digital environment.
Session times are short, only 1–3 pages are viewed, and half of visitors never come back.
Researchers reported that only 40% said they had read the whole paper of the last
“important” article they had read. Users will download articles for future reading or reference,but in follow-up interviews researchers reported that at least half the articles downloaded
were never read (and this is likely to be an optimistic estimate). The CIBER authors argue
that researchers in the digital environment have moved from vertical to horizontal information
seeking and reading, that is, moving quickly over the surface from article to article(“bouncing, flicking, or skittering”) rather than reading deeply. While the authors point tofactors in the modern environment that encourage this behaviour (over-supply of articles;lack of discretionary time and more pressured workplaces; multitasking becoming the norm;social media conditioning us to accept fast information), they also suggest that researchers
may always have read selectively and in snippets, and that the idea of in-depth scholarly
reading as the norm was simply a myth.
Renear & Palmer (2009) discussed the strategies and technology innovations (“strategic
reading”) that help readers extract information from more papers while spending less time
per paper. There is considerable focus on using technology in this way, including semantic
web technologies (e.g. taxonomies and ontologies), artificial intelligence, text and data
mining, and the use of new metrics. These are discussed below (see Technology in scholarly
communication).

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Figure 21: Average number of articles that university faculty members reported
reading per year (source: Tenopir et al. 2012b and Tenopir et al 2018, internal report)

Reported articles read per
faculty member per year

300
250
200
150
100
50
0
1977

1984

1993

2005

2012

2018

2.10.1 Access and navigation to articles
The ways readers access and navigate to journal content on the web have consequences for
publishers and librarians. Academics use a wide range of methods to locate articles, as
illustrated in Figure 22. The growing importance in an online world of searching and parallel
reduced importance of browsing is evident in this data. Asking colleagues remains animportant strategy, however, albeit ranking behind browsing and searching.
Gardner and Inger’s 2018 study (updating earlier 2005, 2008, 2012 and 2015 reports)
focussed on citation searching, core journal browsing, and subject searching, and presented
these findings:
•

•

•

•

•

•

Readers are more likely to arrive within a journal web site directly at the article or
abstract level, rather than navigating from the journal homepage (let alone thepublisher’s homepage). This is of course partly driven by the growing use of searchengines, particularly Google and Google Scholar, but around 55% of the time people
found the article they needed via non-search behaviour.
Specialist bibliographic (A&I) databases are still the single most popular option forreaders searching for articles on a specific topic, with the decline in their use noted in
the 2012 and 2015 reports having partially reversed in 2018.
Use of both general web search engines and the academic search engines (Google
Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search) has remained relatively stable since 2012, and it
is only in the academic sector where journal readers use Google Scholar more thanthey do Google.
Journal alerts have lost traction as a discovery method, but social media has becomeslightly more popular. Search alerts and bookmarks are still used, but to the lowest
extent of those resources tested. There were some notable differences between disciplines: for example, researchers inhumanities and education research are much more likely to use the library web pages
for article searching than those in physics and astronomy.
Regional differences may also be significant: for example, people in Asia, Africa andSouth America think publisher websites have a similar level of importance to searchengines while people in Europe and North America think they are far less important.
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Furthermore, people in lower incomes countries use a wider range of search resources
than those in wealthier countries, who seem to settle on just a few methods.
Library discovery seems to have peaked in its importance rating, and is really only
holding a strong position in Humanities, Education and Social Sciences. Librarians
also behave quite differently to everyone else in search, preferring professional searchdatabases and library-acquired resources. This may point to a continued significant
gap between what librarians recommend, and how their patrons behave.

An interview study by Newman & Sack (2013) provides some useful qualitative backgroundto the quantitative data on reading and information discovery behaviours:“Most interviewees do not have a systematic strategy for keeping up to date. […]Interviewees rely heavily on cited references in known items, recommendations
received from colleagues, or contents of a small number of familiar journals. Only a few
get alerts from abstracting and indexing databases supplemented by alerts fromimportant journals. Several expressed frustration at their lack of skill in finding current
information.
“An interviewee in the Computer Science department stated, ‘I have constant guilt
feelings about not doing enough to keep current.’”
The Ithaka S+R/JISC 2015 survey of UK academics confirms this picture, with the leading
ways to keep up with current research being attending conferences or workshops, readingmaterials suggested by other academics, and following the work of key academics.
Electronic discovery tools (recommender systems, saved keyword alerts) were of muchlesser importance, however compared with a previous survey in 2012, there was asubstantial increase (from a low base) in perceived importance for “following otherresearchers through blogs or social media”. There were corresponding decreases for“regularly skimming new issues of key journals” and “regularly skimming table of contents
alerts of key journals (Ithaka S+R, JISC, & RLUK, 2016).
Early career researchers have been extensively studied recently by CIBER for the PRC(PRC 2017, 2018c). This has shown that Google Scholar is the first-choice way of finding
articles and libraries do not feature highly as a mechanism.
Figure 22: Starting points for discovering latest articles – trend from 2005 to 2018(source: (Gardner and Inger, 2018)60

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October 20182.11 Disciplinary differences
It is worth noting that the average characteristics described above conceal some importantdifferences between subject disciplines in their patterns of publishing, reading and using
scholarly materials.
For example, while the average journal included in the Journal Citation Reports publishes
about 130 articles per year, science and technology titles are much larger at about 160
articles and social science and humanities much smaller at 51 articles a year. 63 This is partof the explanation for why journal prices are substantially higher in the former compared to
the latter disciplines.
The UK’s Jisc 2005 report on disciplinary differences was based on a survey of UK
academics but many of its findings remain broadly applicable. They included:
•

•

•

•

Article output is significantly different in the different disciplinary groups, with the “hard”
sciences (physical and biomedical sciences and engineering) publishing the most with
about 7.5 articles per three-year period, the social sciences next (5 articles) and thearts/humanities the least (under 3).
The degree of joint authorship is also significantly different and follows similar patterns,
with biomedical authors most likely to coauthor (with 85% of respondents saying that
75% or more of their output was coauthored), followed by physical sciences andengineering, then the social sciences, with arts and humanities the least likely tocoauthor (with 76% saying that 25% or less was coauthored).
As is well known, the role played by journal articles is much more important toscholarly communication in STM areas than in the arts & humanities (where books andmonographs play a more significant role). The report suggested, however, that thisdifference might be closing, with journal articles playing a more important role in A&H.
A possible reason suggested was the emphasis research assessment places on (highimpact factor) journal publication.
The peak age of needed articles varied substantially by discipline, with the peak age inhumanities being about 20 years ago, in chemistry, engineering and medicine 10 years
ago, and computer science, life sciences and information science 5 years ago.

The possible decline in the reading (and writing) of books in favour of journal articles, assuggested in the 2005 Jisc report, was confirmed in a later RIN study showing a significant
decline in the citation of books as distinct from journal articles and other forms of output (RIN
2009a). Another study identified pressures created by assessment exercises as a factor in inthis change (Adams & Gurney, 2014); see Effects of research assessment on researcher
behaviour.
A fascinating set of case studies in information use, studying in depth how researchers in
different disciplines – life sciences, humanities, and physical sciences – discovered,accessed, analysed, managed and disseminated information (RIN 2009c; RIN 2011d; RIN
2012). The various findings are too rich and detailed to be summarised here, but the studies
repay attention and dispel any notion that there is a single “workflow” adopted byresearchers, even within the same disciplines.
The “certification” function of the journal is much less important in some disciplines thanothers, as shown by the willingness in some disciplines to accept a preprint (unrefereed
63

Strictly speaking, this refers to the number of “citable items”, that is, scholarly works including – but
not limited to – articles, reviews and proceedings papers. Data kindly supplied from the Journal
Citation Reports® a Clarivate Analytics product.

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author’s original manuscript) as a substitute for the final published version of record.
Certification appears less important in theoretical and large-scale experimental disciplines(high energy and theoretical physics, maths, computer science), where coauthorship is highand/or the small size of the field means the quality of each researcher’s work is known
personally to peers, but more important in small-to-medium experimental fields (life sciences,chemistry, geology, etc.). It should be noted that in terms of sheer numbers of researchers
these latter fields provide the vast bulk of all researchers in the world.
There are considerable differences in the reading and article-seeking behaviours between
disciplines. For instance, the number of articles read by faculty members in medicine ismuch higher than that in the humanities (see Figure 23). These numbers will reflect both therelative importance of the journal article in the fields, the nature of what constitutes a“reading”, and the complications of interpreting fields like medicine with a predominating
practitioner component. Figure 24 illustrates differences in the ways readers find articles,with marked variance for instance in the importance of browsing.
There are marked differences between the disciplines in authors’ attitudes towards peer
review. Broadly speaking, the PRC survey showed authors in the physical sciences &engineering thought peer review was more effective, and were more satisfied with its current
operation than authors in the humanities and social sciences. Double-blind peer review wasmuch more common in HSS (94% of authors had experience of it) compared to the physicalsciences & engineering (31%), and HSS authors expressed a much stronger preference fordouble-blind over single-blind review than did other authors.
There are also substantial differences between disciplines in the attitudes of researchers
towards open access. Some of these reflect funding structures (e.g. the lack of external
research funding in the humanities and mathematics), while others reflect long-standing
norms in the research communities (e.g. a preprint culture predating open access). Eger
and Scheufen (2018) surveyed over 10,000 academic scholars from all disciplines between
2012 and 2015. They found that disciplines tend to lean either towards gold open access or
green access, and distinguish three different publishing cultures:
1. The gold culture (Biology and Life Science, Health Science, Agricultural Science andEarth and Environmental Science) with high usage rates for OA journals but little useof online repositories or self-archiving platforms.
2. The green culture (Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics and Statistics and Businessand Economics) with little use of OA journals but strong use of repositories and other
online platforms.
3. A grey culture (including Social Sciences, Technology and Engineering andChemistry) with mediocre use of both gold and green open access.
The study found that publishing culture and attitude to OA is more likely to be driven by the
respondents’ field of research than by their country of residence. Similar disciplinary
differences are evidence in Ithaka S+R’s survey of UK academics (2016).
There are, however, areas where there appear to be no (or only small) differences between
disciplines:••

The Jisc study found there was little difference in the UK between the disciplines interms of access to resources and to journals in particular. A later RIN study confirmed
this for academics (RIN 2011a), though there were differences between subject areas
for industry-based researchers (see Researchers’ access to journals).
All authors of whatever discipline claim that career advancement and peer-to- peer
communication are the most important reasons for publishing.

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Figure 23: Average articles read per university faculty member per year (Source:
Tenopir et al.2018, internal report)
500

Mean articles per year

450
400
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0

Figure 24: Subject differences in starting points for research in academic literature(Source: Ithaka S&R 2016)

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October 20182.12 Citations and the Impact Factor
Citations are an important part of scientific articles, helping the author build their argumentsby reference to earlier work without having to restate that work in detail. They also help
readers enormously by pointing them to other related work (surveys show that this is one of
the most popular ways authors navigate the literature, e.g. see Gardner and Inger, 2018).
Electronic journals additionally allow “forward” reference linking, i.e. linking to later work thatcites the paper in question, a feature also supported by indexing and discovery services.

2.12.1 International trends in citation
As with article publication patterns, the regional shares of citations are changing as a resultof these globalisation pressures. From 2010 to 2014 the United States’ and, to a lesser
extent, Europe and Japan’s, shares declined, while China and other Asian countries’ shares
increased (Figure 25)64.
The growing internationalisation of research is reflected in an increasing proportion ofcitations from outside the country of authorship. Like international coauthorship (seeCollaboration and coauthorship), international citation has grown steadily over the last two
decades for all major scientific countries with the exception of China. In 2004, 42% of
citations to Chinese scientific articles came from outside China; by 2014, the proportion had
dropped to 38%, suggesting China’s expanding article output is being used mostly within
China (NSB 2018).
Figure 25: Share of world citations 2010-2014 (Source: Elsevier 2017a)

2.12.2 Citations and impact metrics
The number of citations a paper receives is often used as a measure of its impact and byextension, of its quality. However, different sources of citations data are liable to produce
quite different citation counts for a given output. A comparison of highly-cited documents
between Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus found significant gaps in coverage inthe latter two databases, particularly in the humanities and social sciences (Martín-Martín et
64

The apparent differences between these figures and the NSB data used in Table 4 are most likely
due to the different datasets used: Elsevier used the full Scopus database, with around 22,000
journals; NSB used a subset of Web of Science containing 5087 journals.

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al, 2018c). Further work in this area indicates that Google Scholar captures nearly all the
WoS (95%) and Scopus (92%) citations and is far more likely to capture citations from nonjournal sources, and in languages other than English. Nevertheless, Spearman correlations
between citation counts in Google Scholar and WoS or Scopus are high (0.78-0.99). The
results suggest that in all areas Google Scholar citation data is essentially a superset of WoSand Scopus, with substantial extra coverage (Martín-Martín et al, 2018d).
The use of citations as a proxy for impact or quality has been extended from articles tojournals with the impact factor. A journal’s Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency withwhich the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular period. (The official
definition is that the impact factor is the mean number of citations received in a given year by
papers published in a journal over the two previous years.)
The use of citations data (and in particular the journal-level impact factor) to judge the qualityof individual researchers’ and departments’ research outputs, though widespread, isincreasingly criticised. The assumption that articles published in the same journal are likely
to be of similar quality is not borne out by the data: the distribution of citations follows the
widely-found Pareto pattern, with about 80% of citations coming from about 20% of articles.
For example, Scopus data for citations to 2008 articles made in 2008–2012 showed almost
exactly this result, while 32% of papers remained uncited (Elsevier 2013). At the other end of
the scale, the proportion of papers in the most-cited 1% is used as an impact measure bycountries and institutions. Figure 26 shows that while the US remained broadly constant,
China’s share steadily increased between 2004 and 2014.
Concerns over the deficiencies of the Journal Impact Factor led to calls from abibliometrician along with several high-profile editors and publishers for the publication ofcitation distributions (Lariviére et al 2016). Clarivate Analytics has responded to theseconcerns in its 2018 Journal Citation Reports by introducing a new journal profile page which
includes the full citation distribution for the JIF calculation and geographic and institutional
contributions.65
Average impact factors show considerable variation between subject fields, with the primaryreason for variation being the average levels of coauthorship. Hence mathematics withcoauthorship of 1.25 has an average Impact Factor of 0.5, while biology has coauthorshipand Impact Factor both around 4. The fundamental and pure subject areas tend to havehigher average impact factors than specialised or applied ones. The variation is sosignificant that the top journal in one field may have an impact factor lower than the bottom
journal in another area (the Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP) is one way to
account for this; see Other bibliometric measures). Related to subject variation is thequestion of multiple authorship. The average number of authors varies by subject (seeDisciplinary differences). Given the tendency of authors to refer to their own work, thisvariation is reflected in varying citation levels.
Another problem with the use of impact factors as a quality measure is that the figure is astatistical average, which will show statistical fluctuations. These are particularly importantfor smaller journals (because smaller samples mean larger statistical fluctuation). For ajournal of average size (about 115 articles per year), a year-to-year change in the impact
factor of less than +/-22% is not significant, while for a small title (less than 35 articles p.a.)
the range is +/-40%. Similarly, an impact factor of 1.50 for a journal publishing 140 articles is
not significantly different from another journal of the same size with an impact factor of 1.24.
It is thus foolish to penalise authors for publishing in journals with impact factors below acertain value, say 2.0, given that for an average-sized journal, this could vary between 1.5
and 2.25 without being significant. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Collins &Tabak (2014).
65

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An interesting question is whether articles in open access journals, and articles self-archived
by their authors in parallel to traditional publication, receive more citations than they would
otherwise have done. This is discussed below in the section on open access (see Open
access citation advantage).
Figure 26: Share of S&E publications in the top 1% of most cited publications, byselected region, country or economy: 2004–14 (from: (NSB 2018)

2.12.3 Citation inflation
The number of citations is increasing faster than the number of publications. Figure 27
shows the trend in average citations per article from the Web of Science database for theperiod 1999–2017. The average for all countries has risen from about 10.1 in 1999 to 11.8 in2017, while China has seen a rapid increase over the same period, from 5.2 to 9.4, but
remains below the world average. Three factors in this are probably the growth of theliterature (i.e, there is simply more to cite), the growth in coauthorship, and a trend towards
longer reference lists.

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Figure 27: Citation inflation: increase in the average citations per article, for China andthe World (Jia et al. 2018)

2.12.4 Effects of research assessment on researcher behaviour
Goodhart’s Law66 says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a goodmeasure. In other word, it stops truly reflecting the original variable, but increasingly
measures the effectiveness of the organisation or individual at maximising the measure, andin doing so may also change behaviour in undesirable ways.
There is clear evidence that research assessment exercises such at the REF (UK’s
Research Excellence Framework) or ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) havechanged researcher behaviour. For instance, Adams & Gurney (2014) analysed UK data toshow that researchers submit journal articles in preference to the outputs that elsewhere
they say are central to their field, they skew their selection to high-impact journals, and theysubmit pieces [for assessment] from such journals even when they are not well cited and,sometimes, not even research papers. The authors suggest that this is because they believethat the brand of a journal known to have high average impact is a better proxy “signal” inplace of real evidence of excellence. Submission behaviour was observed to change oversuccessive RAE/REF cycles leading to a progressive concentration on journal articles. To
enable this relative growth, there was a shift out of conference proceedings in engineeringand out of scholarly monographs in the social sciences.

2.12.5 Other bibliometric measures
Given the shortcomings of the impact factor, other metrics have been proposed, either ascomplements or as alternatives. Some of the better known are as follows:66

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

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The Source Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP) uses the Scopus database tomeasure contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number ofcitations in a subject field.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)67 is a freely available journal-level metric. It is aprestige measure based on the idea that not all citations are the same, that is, citations
are weighted according to the prestige of the citing journal.
Google provides Scholar Metrics,68 a free journal-level citation impact metric basedon the h-index.
The immediacy index, which measures how soon after publication articles in a journal
are cited.
The cited half-life is a measure of how long articles in a journal continue to be cited
after publication.
The h-index is defined as: an author has an index h if h of their Np papers have atleast h citations each, and the other (Np - h) papers have at most h citations each.
This is intended to give a measure of quality and sustainability of scientific output ofindividual academics rather than for journals.
The eigenfactor uses network theory algorithms similar to the Pagerank method usedby Google to measure the influence of journals by looking at how often they are citedby other influential journals.
The ResearchGate Score is a number calculated by the platform ResearchGate
according to undisclosed parameters but is believed to relate to quantities that are
related to the interactions of the researcher on the platform. These quantities are
believed to be publications, questions, answers, and followers.69

•

•
•
•
•

•

•

In fact, there are many more possible measures. The MESUR team based at Los Alamos
compared 39 scientific impact measures (Bollen, de Sompel, Hagberg, & Chute, 2009).
Using statistical techniques to categorise the different measures on two dimensions roughly
equivalent to prestige and to popularity, they concluded that the impact factor measured aparticular aspect that “may not be at the core of the notion of ‘scientific impact’. Usage-based
metrics such as Usage Closeness centrality may in fact be better consensus measures”.
One should note, however, that usage and citation measure different things.
More recently, EC3 Metrics (2018) published a ‘Periodic Table of Scientometric Indicators’,
comprising a total 168 indicators grouped into five primary categories:
•
•
•
•
•

basic indicators;
webmetric indicators;
bibliometric indicators;
h-index based indicators; andaltmetric indicators (see below).

In practice, use of the impact factor remains so widespread that it looks unlikely to be
dropped even if there are technically better measures, particularly if those metrics arecomplex, though it would be wiser to consider a range of measures rather than relying on
any single metric.

67

http://www.scimagojr.com/
http://googlescholar.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/2014-scholar-metrics-released.html
69https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/RG+Score
68

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2.12.6 Article-level metrics and altmetrics
This is the approach of the altmetrics movement. It starts from several dissatisfactions with
the Impact Factor (or the way it is misused): the journal IF is used as a measure for thequality of an individual article, despite the criticism of this outlined above; second, thatcitations measure just one narrow aspect of impact; and third, citations (even if measured at
the article level) are a slow, lagging indicator. To counter this, the “altmetrics” movement70
proposes a range of additional metrics to complement metrics provided by citations anddownloads to build a more rounded picture of impact (Priem 2010). The altmetrics draw
heavily on social media and tools and include data from Twitter mentions, blog posts, social
bookmarking data (e.g. CiteULike, Mendeley), as well as news media and article-levelcomments, annotations and ratings.
A number of tools and services have emerged to support the tracking, reporting andvisualisation of altmetrics, including Altmetric, PlumX (acquired by EBSCO in early 2014, andthen Elsevier in 2017), PLOS Impact Explorer (based on Altmetric), PageCritic, and others.71
There are some preliminary indications that social media activity may predict citations,though the evidence is not strong (e.g. Eysenbach 2011, de Winter 2015). The main criticism
of using social media mentions, as well as of article-level comments and ratings, as ameasure of impact is that it is unclear what they are measuring beyond immediacy andpopularity. Articles with eye-catching and unusual titles (particularly if they contain sexualterms) seem likely to be as strong candidates for high-volume bouncing around the internet
echo chamber as work with genuine long-term impact.
It is also worth bearing in mind that citations and usage at the article level are usuallycharacterised as having low levels for the majority of individual articles. The numbers are so
low that trying to turn them into a meaningful discriminatory metric will be bedevilled by thecounting error: most articles will have data at the level of statistical noise and beindistinguishable from each other.
As part of its Open Science agenda, the Research and Innovation Directorate General of theEuropean Commission appointed an Expert Group to report on next generation metrics.
Their findings were published in 2017 (European Commission Expert Group on Altmetrics2017) and they make a series of recommendations urging a middle path: better use should
be made of existing metrics and transparency and accuracy are crucial.

2.12.7 The impact agenda
In the competition for funds with other governments departments and agencies, research
funders have increasingly come under pressure to demonstrate the benefits they deliver.
Recent years have therefore seen a growing emphasis on tracking and measuring thesocietal, cultural, economic and scientific impact of research.
In turn this has led to rising expectations being placed on institutions and individual
researchers to demonstrate impact. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), theStandard Evaluation Protocol in the Netherlands and Australia’s National Innovation andScience Agenda (NISA) have all introduced new mechanisms to assess the impact and/or
relevance of research over the last five years. Meanwhile, the European Commission’s next
Framework Programme, Horizon Europe, is expected to prioritise greater impact throughmission-orientation and citizen involvement.72
70

Not to be confused with the Altmetrics project and app (http://altmetric.com/), which is a tool
developed by Digital Science to collect and present altmetric data on an article’s webpage.
71
See http://altmetrics.org/tools/ for a current if incomplete list.
72
https://ec.europa.eu/info/designing-next-research-and-innovation-framework-programme/whatshapes-next-framework-programme_en69

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In the US, the STAR METRICS collaboration was established to create a repository of data
and tools that will be useful to assess the impact of federal R&D investments. Led by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), under the
auspices of Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), efforts since 2016 havefocussed on the development of Federal RePORTER, a searchable database of scientificawards from Federal agencies.73 A similar effort in the UK led to the development of the
Gateway to Research website.74
Two initiatives aimed at supporting authors in tracking their own impact are:••Kudos75 aims to help authors expand readership of their research publications andincrease citations, via a structured process that includes writing a lay summary andusing social media effectively. Launched in 2014, Kudos now has almost 250,000
researchers globally signed up to use its free tools for explaining and sharing
information about their publications across multiple platforms and networks, thentracking the relative efficacy of those channels in terms of interest, reads andultimately – citations – for their work. The free service for researchers is supported bya paid-for Kudos partner subscription service for a growing customer base of over 80
publishers and universities. A premium service is also currently under development.
ImpactStory76 lets researchers create online profiles which profile their research
outputs (papers, datasets, presentations, software), and track and show the altmetricimpacts of the same. It originally charged researchers a subscription of $60/year, but
introduced a free version in 2016.

Publishers have also recognised the need to support authors in disseminating research
results beyond the academic community, to professionals, industrial researchers, policy
formers and the general public. Examples of efforts in this regard include Springer Nature’s‘Grand Challenges’ programme77 and ‘Change the World, One Article at a Time’ campaign,78
and Emerald’s 'Real World Impact' campaign.79

2.12.8 Typed citations and contributor roles
At present a citation is a blunt instrument: it is not apparent from the fact of the citation what
the author’s intent was: agreement, disagreement, etc. To improve the value of citations
there have been proposals to “type” citations in a structured way. The benefits would be
primarily in text and data mining applications and for visualisation of research networks. One
initiative is CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology (Shotton 2010). The prospects for authors
adopting such a structured process still, however, seem remote at present. (See also Openannotation.)
In a similar vein, it is the norm for papers in most fields to have multiple authors and yet theroles of the various authors may vary significantly. Contributor roles might include study
conception, methodology, investigation, data analysis and statistics, writing, etc. The roles
may be described in the acknowledgement sections of papers (particular in medical journals)
but the data is unstructured and inconsistently applied. To address this, a group of editors,
journals and publishers are working on the development of a standard taxonomy for73

https://federalreporter.nih.gov/
https://gtr.ukri.org/
75
https://www.growkudos.com/
76
https://impactstory.org/
77
https://grandchallenges.springernature.com/
78
https://www.springernature.com/gp/researchers/campaigns/change-the-world79
https://www.emeraldpublishing.com/real-impact-awards/
74

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describing contributor roles that could be used in STM journals (Allen, Scott, Brand, Hlava, &Altman, 2014; Meadows 2014).
The CRediT taxonomy seeks to regularize these issues and is dealt with in a recent paper byBrand et al. (2015).

2.12.9 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
Dissatisfaction among researchers as well as some journals and publishers with the way
research assessment is conducted was made evident in the San Francisco Declaration on
Research Assessment (DORA) in late 2012 (American Society for Cell Biology & et al,2012). The Declaration points out that research outputs are many and varied, and rehearses
the arguments against use of the Impact Factor for research assessment. Its key
recommendation is to not use journal metrics as a surrogate for article quality for researchassessment purposes, but it also makes a number of recommendations for publishers andmetrics providers:
•
•
•
•
•
•

greatly reduce the emphasis on journal impact factor in promotion
make article-level metrics available to encourage a shift away from journal-level
metrics
remove all reuse limitations on reference lists in research articles and make them
freely available
remove or reduce the constraints on the number of references in research articles
be open and transparent by providing data and methods used to calculate all metrics
provide the data under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse, and provide
computational access to data, where possible

The declaration had been signed by over 12,000 individuals and about 550 organisations at
the time of writing.

2.12.10

Changes in citation behaviours

In addition to the trends outlined above, two papers from the Google Scholar team haveprovided evidence that shows authors are citing a higher proportion of older papers than in
the past, and that highly-cited papers are more likely to be found in non-elite journals(Acharya et al., 2014; Verstak et al., 2014). In both cases the authors speculate that online
availability and growing ease of discovery (e.g. via search engines or other discovery tools)of older and more obscure journal content has played a role.

2.12.11

Citations by patents

Citations to STM articles made within patents are sometimes used as another measure ofwider impact beyond academe. Citations are typically much older than in the scientific
literature, mainly because of the delay in granting patents; for example, the NSB analysis
looks at an 11-year window after a 5-year lag. In the US, the proportion of patents citing
academic literature increased from 12% to 23% between 2003 and 2016, with foreign
articles drawing more citations in USPTO patents (54%) than US articles (46%) (NSB 2018).
The majority of cited articles fall into a small number of fields: biological sciences (34%),
medical sciences (24%), computer sciences (12%), engineering (11%), chemistry (9%), andphysics (8%)

2.12.12

Usage and the Journal Usage Factor

Total global downloads of articles from publishers’ sites have been estimated at between 1.1
billion in 2010 (as shown in Table 2) and 2.5 billion (according to an informal STM survey),
with perhaps another 400 million from other sites such as repositories.

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Some believe that the number of downloads might give a better measure of an article’s wider
impact than do citations (as noted above, there are many more scientists who are notauthors than those who write). This would be particularly the case for clinical medical
journals, or other journals with a large practitioner readership.
The UK Serials Group commissioned work to investigate whether it might be feasible todevelop a “Usage Factor” based on download statistics. The report, issued in mid-2007,
concluded that it would be feasible to develop a meaningful journal Usage Factor and that
there was support in the library and publisher communities to do this. UKSG and COUNTER
then commissioned CIBER to conduct more detailed investigations which were published in2011 (CIBER Research Ltd 2011). Release 4 is the current Code of Practice and therequirement for COUNTER-compliance (COUNTER 2018). The effective date for compliancewith Release 5 is January 2019.
The Code defines the publication and usage period as two concurrent years: that is, theusage factor for 2019/2020 will be based on 2019/2020 usage data for articles published in
2019/2020. The Usage Factor: Journals (UFJ1) is defined as “the Median Value in a set ofordered full-text article usage data (i.e. the number of successful full text article requests) fora specified Usage Period of articles published in a journal during a specified Publication
Period.” The median is proposed rather than the mean because the data is highly skewed,
with most items having low use, and a few used many times. It is reported annually as aninteger (greater precision is deprecated because the level of variation means there is a lot ofstatistical noise). It integrates articles-in-press from the accepted manuscript stage, andincorporates usage from multiple platforms, reflecting the heterogenous sources of article
usage. Two UFJ’s may be calculated: the publisher usage factor (based on fulltext usage on
the publisher’s COUNTER-compliant platform), and the consolidated usage factor (derived
from the total usage on a group of COUNTER-compliant platforms).
Patterns of usage were found by CIBER to vary considerably between different document
types and versions. Consequently are two versions of the UFJ: one based on usage to all
paper types except editorial board lists, subscription information, and permission details, anda second based on full-text articles only.
CIBER found that there was little correlation between the proposed UFJ and citation-based
measures such as the Impact Factor. This was not surprising as they measure different
things (reflecting reader and author choices respectively). Highly cited papers do tend to behighly downloaded, but the reverse is not necessarily true, particularly in fields with highproportions of practitioners. Citations and downloads have different profiles over time: mostdownloads occur in a peak a few months wide immediately following publication, whilecitations build over a longer period of 2–3 years.
The consensus view seems to be that downloads (as a proxy for readings) is a potentially
useful complement to citation data but that it should not be seen to replace it, because theyreflect different aspects of “using” a research paper. Downloading and reading papers ismore important during the early stages of research design and of article writing, while citing
tends to occur more towards the end of the process. Journal-level usage factors will haveapplication in library acquisition settings and perhaps for authors selecting journals to submit
to, but in many cases article-level metrics will be more relevant for the same reasons as
discussed above.

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Table 2: Article downloads by country, 2010 and 2014 (source: (Elsevier 2017a)

Country

Article downloads as a Article downloads as aproportion of global total (%, proportion of global total (%,
2010)
2014)

USA

30.2

28.9

China

11.4

16.8

UK

9.8

9.9

Germany

6.9

7.0

Japan

4.8

4.2

2.13 Costs of journal publishing
An understanding of the costs of journal publishing has become important not just for
publishers but also for the wider scholarly community because of the debate over the serials
crisis and open access.
A 2008 RIN report conducted by Cambridge Economic Policy Associates looked in detail atthe costs involved in the journals publishing process (RIN 2008), including library accessprovision costs and non-cash cost incurred by scholars in conducting peer review and in
searching for and then reading articles. This report provided one of the more reliable
estimates of journal costs. CEPA subsequently updated their estimates for a later report(RIN 2011c), giving the average 2010 journal article cost of production (print + electronic) at£3095. This was made up as follows:••••

first copy costs (the costs incurred regardless of the number of copies distributed, e.g.
peer review management, copy-editing, typesetting & origination): £1261
variable costs (printing, paper, distribution): £581
indirect costs (staff and overheads): £666
surplus: £586

Note that RIN included surplus in this figure, so that the cost is that seen by the purchaser
rather than producer. Taking this into account the relative proportions are broadly similar to
the averages for Wiley-Blackwell journals given in Campbell & Wates (Campbell & Wates,2009).
The PEER project reported the average cost of managing peer review at $250 per submitted
manuscript and the average production cost at $170–400 per accepted manuscript (in eachcase the figures refer to salary and fees only, excluding overheads, infrastructure, systemsetc.) (Wallace 2012).
It is important to remember these figures are averages. First copy costs in particular show
considerable variation depending on the type of journal. The earlier RIN/EPS Baseline report(EPS 2006) quoted figures from the literature ranging from $350 to $2000, but the 2008 RIN
report quoted a narrower range. For low rejection rate journals the RIN authors gave a figureof £1670, with high rejection rate journals at £4091. RIN’s figure for popular hybrid journals

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(Science, Nature, etc.) was £4116, though other estimates have placed it at $10,000 or evenhigher.
RIN also estimated variations in indirect cost by publisher type at £705 per article forcommercial publishers against £428 for society publishers. We are not aware of any othersystematic data which would validate this.
Journal prices, as well as covering the publisher’s costs, also include in most cases anelement for profit (in the case of commercial publishers) or surplus (for not-for-profits). Profits
are a key source for reinvestment and innovation, but the profit margins reported by the
major commercial publishers have been heavily scrutinised and debated in recent years (vanNoorden, 2013; Lariviére et al, 2015).
For their part, societies frequently use surpluses from journal publishing to support otheractivities such as conferences and seminars, travel and research grants, public education,etc. (Baldwin 2004; Thorn, Morris, & Fraser, 2009). RIN estimated the average profit/surplus
in 2008 at 18% of revenues, equivalent to £517 per paper (these figures were not updated
for the 2011 report), with variations between commercial publishers (£642) and society
publishers (£315) that at least partly reflect their differing tax status as much as actual
profitability (not-for-profits do not pay corporation tax so the fairest comparisons would be
between post-tax profits and surpluses rather than pre tax).
Recent work by CEPA for the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC 2018a) sought tocreate a much more accurate model of the economics of journal publishing. Its main findings
were that intangible costs such as editorial activities were much higher than tangible ones,
such as production and sales and distribution, and were key drivers in per article costs. It isthese editorial activities that generate the most value. At a high level, economies of scale
seem to apply since the largest journals on the whole have the smaller costs per article. The
report says a number of insights were generated by the study:•••

It is important to consider the full range of activities involved in academic publishing,including those which may be less tangible (e.g. editorial relationship management).
The activities involved in publication, their associated costs, and the subsequentquality of published material, varies considerably between different journals/articles.
Therefore, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach may be insufficient, or even misleading.
In addition to the significant differences in quality between journals, demand forjournals is linked to value generated, which may not necessarily be related to costs.

2.13.1 Open access and possible cost savings
The potential for open access to effect cost savings has been much discussed (e.g. see
Open access). However the emergence of pure-play open access journal publishers allows
some evidence of average article costs to be inferred from their financial statements:••

PLOS’s annual report for 2016 shows total costs (including overheads) of $39 million
for about 26,000 articles published, giving an average of $1,500 per article (comparedwith only $1088 per article in 2014). This combines the low-cost PLOS ONE with thehigher-cost selective journals, suggesting that the average for PLOS ONE would havebeen lower (PLOS 2016)
eLife’s financial statements for its first full year of operation showed total costs of£2644k, equating to an average cost per article of £8370 (or about $14,000 at£/$=1.67; 316 articles were published in 2013). These costs fell significantly as article
volumes increased, with the 2017 cost per article estimated at £3,085 (Patterson and
McLennan 2016). Of those costs, £1,287 represented the fixed costs, with marginal74

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costs of £1,798 are incurred for every published article. eLife introduced a publication
fee of $2,500 in January 2017, intended to cover the marginal costs of £1,798 and also
contribute a small amount towards its fixed costs, which are predominantly funded byits sponsors, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and theWellcome Trust.
At the other end of the cost scale, Hindawi was reported in Nature as publishing
22,000 articles in 2012 at an average cost of $290 per article (Van Noorden 2013).
Hindawi uses a low-cost publishing model and is situated in a relatively low-wage partof the world (Egypt).

The same Nature article quoted other publishers’ stated costs, albeit not supported bypublished accounts:•••

the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated their average cost at$3700 per published article;
Nature’s Editor-in-Chief was quoted as estimating its internal costs as £20–30,000 per
paper; andPeerJ said their average costs were in the “low hundreds of dollars” per article

Much lower figures than these have been quoted elsewhere. Brembs (2015) estimated thatthe per article costs of publication by SCieLo are between $70 and $600 per OA article,
depending on the services provided. Meanwhile Bogich and Ballesteros (2016) found thatthe services required for scholarly communication were available for a price ranging between$69 and $318 per article. Furthermore, they postulate that access to software solutions could
reduce the marginal cost of scholarly communication to as little as $1.36 to $1.61 per article.
Neylon (2015) offers a critique of these figures, noting that hosting, discovery, labour anddevelopment costs are excluded from the calculation. He estimates the base level cost of amodern platform for a journal publishing 50-500 articles a year providing submission throughpublication in JATS XML, where the selection (and risk of mistakes) are loaded heavily on
the academic community, at around $450-550.
On the other hand, substantial savings at large existing publishers may not be that easy tofind: the financial analyst firm Bernstein Research estimated that a full transition to open
access would save a subscription publisher only around 10–12% of its cost base (Aspesi2012).

2.13.2 Journal pricing
Journal pricing has been the source of much debate and controversy, and perceived highprices and high price increases have been one of the factors driving the open accessagenda. It is true that journal prices have outpaced inflation; for instance, the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) have published statistics which show that the annualised increase
in serials expenditures between 1986 and 2011 was 6.7%, while the US Consumer Prices
Index rose by an annualised 2.9% over the same period (ARL 2011). Rates of increase haveslowed in recent years, with OC&C estimating a compound annual growth rate for academic
journals of 2.2% between 2011 and 2016. Nevertheless, journals have outperformed theoverall growth in library expenditure over the same period, with the latter growing at only
1.7% per annum (cited in Springer Nature 2018).
The reasons for historic journal price increases have been varied and include (adapted from(King & Alvarado-Albertorio, 2008): growth in article output leading to increased numbers ofarticles per journal, which with a parallel increase in average article length led to larger
journals; reduction in page and colour charges; the “new journal” effect (growth ofscholarship leads to the burgeoning of new fields, which in turn leads to new journals; onaverage new journals will tend to be in niche areas with low circulations (at least initially) andwill tend to be relatively inefficient economically, and hence will tend to have higher
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subscription prices); increased special requirements and features; conversion of back issues
to electronic format; publishers increasing prices to compensate for falling subscription
numbers and currency effects; and, of course, cost inflation (especially salary and paper
costs), which has annualised at about 3% per annum for the last twenty or more years.
In summary then, the observed annual average journal price inflation during the 1990s and2000s has a number of components, of which organic growth in the literature (3%) and cost
inflation (3%) were the most important, followed by electronic delivery and conversion costs,
new journal specialisation and attrition (price spiral) and currency fluctuation effects (~1%).
The serials crisis arose not just because of these pressures on prices, but also because
growth in research budgets (which translates into increased article output) has consistently
outpaced growth in library budgets. For instance, between 2004 and 2008, total UK
university spending rose in real terms by 22% while library spending on “information content”
rose by 15% (RIN 2011b). In the US, the proportion of university funds devoted to libraries
fell from a high of 3.7% in 1984 to just 1.8% in 2011.80 Nor have funding levels improved inrecent years, with libraries in both North America and Europe facing budget cuts in 2017
(Publishers Communication Group 2017). This is partly attributable to efficiency gains (e.g.
bundled and consortium-based purchasing, other shared services, outsourcing of
cataloguing and reference services, and staff reductions) but also reflects the failure oflibraries to make their case for sustaining their share of a growing total budget.

2.13.3 Effect of bundling and consortia licensing on prices
Statistics using publishing subscription prices have become increasingly misleading,however, because these figures do not represent what libraries have actually paid, due tothe efficiencies of electronic delivery and the growth of multi-journal licences. (ARL and LISU
have both stopped recording the number of subscriptions in their annual statistics partly forthis reason.)
One increasingly used measure of journal pricing is the cost per download. Partly because
scholars are becoming more used to using electronic content and partly because the “BigDeal” and similar consortia licences provide access to a lot of additional content at relatively
low additional cost, the average price paid per downloaded article has fallen substantially.
LISU (Loughborough University’s Library and Information Statistics Unit) noted in their 2005
annual report that such deals were partly responsible for lowering the average cost per titleof current UK serial subscriptions by 23% over the 5-year period to 2003/04 (Creaser,
Maynard, & White, 2006), p.133). This fall has continued, with an average price per
download in UK academic institutions falling in real terms from £1.19 in 2004 to £0.70 in
2008, a reduction of 41% (RIN 2011b). Data for more recent years was not available at thetime of writing.
This was also illustrated in a 2012 report (Gantz 2012); see also (Gantz 2013) whichchallenged the common interpretation of the ARL statistics cited above. The report argued
that while library serial expenditures had indeed increased three-fold between 1990 and2010, the ARL libraries’ collections had tripled in size through new acquisitions and throughexpanded content in existing holdings. Average cost per journal was therefore the same as
in 1990. The apparent 6-fold increase in journal prices reported by ARL was not incorrect assuch, but was based on the list price for print, whereas libraries were now purchasing
bundles of electronic content. This was illustrated by the increase in average cost per journalacquired between 1990 and 2000, followed by its decline to 1990 levels by 2010.

80

See http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/EG_2.pdf

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October 20182.14 Authors’ behaviour, perceptions and attitudes
There have now been numerous studies of author behaviour, perception and attitudes. Two
pioneering pieces of work stand out for their large (at the time) international scale (4000–
6000+ respondents) and rigorous methodology and design: the two surveys conducted by
CIBER (part of University College London) and published in 2004 and 2005 (Rowlands,
Nicholas, & Huntingdon, 2004; Rowlands & Nicholas, 2005), and a survey commissioned by
Elsevier in collaboration with CIBER and NOP in 2005 (Mabe 2006; Mabe & Mulligan, 2011).
Later studies by RIN and Harley have largely extended and amplified the CIBER findings(RIN 2009a; Harley & et al, 2010); while more recent work has documented authors’ evolving
attitudes toward open access (Taylor & Francis 2014; Nature Publishing Group 2014; Eger
and Scheufen 2018).
In New journal publishing models: an international survey of senior researchers Rowlands &Nicholas (2005) report on the second CIBER survey, which received responses from 5513
senior journal authors. Their findings in respect of open access have to some extent now
been overtaken by events (for instance, a majority of authors believed that mass migration to
open access would undermine scholarly publishing, yet this is now government policy in the
UK at least – see Open access), but some points remain current:••

The crucial importance of peer review was re-emphasised.
Senior authors and researchers believed downloads to be a more credible measure of
the usefulness of research than traditional citations.

The Elsevier/CIBER/NOP 2005 survey used a similar methodology to the CIBER surveys –online questionnaires with 6344 responses – but supplemented this with 70 follow-up depth
telephone interviews. Among its key findings that remain current were:
•

•

•
•
•
•

Although the superficially most important reason given for publishing was todisseminate the results, the underlying drivers were funding and furthering the author’s
career. This pattern was similar to an earlier study (Coles 1993) conducted in 1993
except that “establishing precedence” and “recognition” had increased in importance.
The transition to electronic publishing between 1993 and 2005 had thus created hardly
any differences in author motivations.
Researchers were ambivalent towards funding bodies: 63% thought they had too
much power over what research is conducted. But despite concerns about thepressure to publish in high impact journals, funding bodies did not dictate the choice ofjournal. [This survey was conducted before funding body mandates about article
deposit were introduced and hence was unable to explore researchers’ views on this
topic.]
Authors were divided when it comes to deciding whether to publish in a prestigious orniche journal.
The importance of peer review was again underlined. (See also Peer review.)
A majority – 60% – believed that the publisher added value – but 17% did not, withmore thinking so in Computer Science (26%) and Mathematics (22%).
There was high demand for articles published more than 10 years earlier [that is, prior
to the introduction of electronic journals].

2.14.1 Motivations for publishing
The fundamental needs of researchers with regard to scholarly communication have beenstudied over the last 20 years or so, and vary depending on their role, that is whether acting
as an author or a reader. The core needs of authors are to be seen to report an idea first; tofeel secure in communicating that idea; [for empirical subjects] to persuade readers that their
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results are general and arise from enactment of a canonical (scientific) method; to have theirclaim accepted by peers; to report their idea to the right audience; to get recognition for theiridea; and to have a permanent public record of their work (Mabe 2012).
Looking at the specific motivations for publishing, the most important motivation reported in a2005 survey was “dissemination” (73%), with “furthering my career” and “future funding” thekey secondary motivations. Comparing these results to a similar study in 1993 showed littlechange in these three motivations or their rank order, but the secondary motivations,“recognition” and “establishing precedent” had clearly increased, especially the latter(Mulligan & Mabe, 2011).
It should however be noted that in some countries, most notably China, researchers are
rewarded for publishing more directly than by just tenure and impact. Cash rewards ranging
from $30 to as much as $165,000 per paper have contributed to China’s rapid increase in
output over the last couple of decades and a shift in publishing from internal journals tointernational ones (Quan et al 2017). One consequence has been the development of a‘paper-broker’ industry which has been well-reported: hundreds of papers have been
retracted from the journals of several leading publishers.

2.14.2 Choice of journal
Multiple surveys has shown that the main factors affecting author choice of journal are thejournal’s quality, its relevance, and speed of publication (in that order). These attitudes haveremained very stable over time. For example, an analysis of 10 years’ worth of data from
Elsevier’s Author Feedback Programme (Mabe & Mulligan, 2011) allowed comparison ofdata for 2002 and 2009 (incorporating responses from nearly 100,000 researchers) andshowed that quality, the relevance and speed of publication remained the most importantfactors, and ranked in identical order. This overall picture was confirmed in a 2015 survey of
UK academics (Ithaka S+R et al., 2016), and in a 2014 Nature Publishing Group survey,
which reported the top five factors to be journal reputation, relevance, quality of peer review,
Impact Factor, and speed to first decision (Nature Publishing Group 2014).

2.14.3 Author perceptions of, and attitudes towards open access
There is interest in whether the open access status affects authors’ choice of journals.
Recent surveys suggest that the three main factors remain pre-eminent for most authors, butthat OA status is emerging as important secondary factor. For example, an NPG survey
found that a minority (37%) of science researchers cited immediate open access as a very orquite important factor in journal selection compared to 90–96% citing relevance or quality
factors (Nature Publishing Group 2014). For those that chose OA journals, the mostfrequently given reason was that the journal only offered open access; that is, they had
chosen the journal for other reasons. The second most frequently given reason for selecting
an OA journal, however, was that they believed research should be openly available
immediately after publication. Interestingly, funder and institutional mandates were
unimportant reasons for choosing OA publication, with the most important stated reasons
being the belief that research should be freely available, followed by the belief that OA
publications were more widely read.
Open access status may also be a negative factor for journal choice, at least insofar as it
involves publication charges: the Ithaka/Jisc/RLUK 2015 survey of UK academics found thefourth most important factor in journal choice to be “The journal permits academics to publish
articles for free, without paying page or article charges”, in this case ahead of speed of
publication (Ithaka S+R et al., 2016).
•

Several large-scale surveys have explored the attitudes of authors towards open
access, including NPG’s Author Insights surveys, and Taylor & Francis’s Open Access
Surveys. These both ran annually in 2013 and 2014, allowing some estimation ofchanges in attitudes (Nature Publishing Group 2014; Taylor & Francis 2014). These
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•

•
•

•

•
•
•
•
•

October 2018

surveys are complementary, with the NPG being stronger on the sciences and the T&F
on the humanities and social sciences. Work by Eger and Scheufen (2018)
demonstrates the significant relationship between field of research and attitudes toopen access (see section 2.11 Disciplinary Differences), meaning generalisations
across all fields should be treated with care. Nevertheless, some highlights include thefollowing:that there are benefits of open access seems generally accepted: only 11% said OA
had no fundamental benefits
a good majority of researchers believe that open access offers wider circulation (81%)
and higher visibility (75%) for their work, and these beliefs strengthened between 2013
and 2014
about half of researchers think OA publication is faster than in subscription journals[although it is unclear whether this is actually the case]researchers are divided on whether OA journals are more heavily cited: 29% agreed
but 31% disagreed, while 39% were neutral. However, more agreed and fewer
disagreed in 2014 compared to 2013
CC-BY licences are unattractive to a significant fraction of authors: 65% of T&F
respondents did not find it acceptable for their work to be used without their priorconsent for commercial gain. When asked to state preferences for different open
access licences, the most popular choice was CC-BY-NC-ND, ahead of CC-BY-NC
and CC-BY-ND, and well ahead of CC-BY which was easily the least preferred option.
CC-BY was the most or second most preferred open licence for only 11% of
respondents compared to 53% for CC-BY-NC-ND. (T&F respondents were, however,biased towards the humanities and social sciences.)
support for PLOS ONE-style “soundness not significance” peer review may be ebbing,with levels of support dropping between 2013 and 2014
the main reasons for depositing articles in repositories were a personal responsibility
to make work freely available, and requests for the article from other researchers
conversely, the main reasons for not depositing articles in repositories were lack ofunderstanding about publisher policy, and lack of available time
rigorous (but rapid) peer review was the most important of the services author expect
in return for a publication charge, closely followed by rapid publication
looking forward, authors believe journals will remain as the principal publication outlet,
demarcating quality research, but a significant proportion of research papers will be
published only in subject or institutional repositories that will coexist with journals

A recent author survey of authors published in Gold and APC and Gold Hybrid journals,
conducted for the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC 2018b), shows that academics
continue to have mixed attitudes towards OA publishing. On the one hand, publishing GoldOA is perceived as giving wider exposure to academic articles and more than half of those
who published in a Hybrid OA journal via payment of an APC would have selected anotherjournal were no OA option available. On the other hand, OA plays a minor role in theselection process, and there is great resistance among authors to the use of discretionary
budgets for APC payments. Interestingly, offsetting deals appear to have a stimulating effecton OA publication: for some authors they raised awareness of OA, while for others they
increased their appetite for Gold OA publishing in the future (PRC 2018b).

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2.14.4 Attitudes to peer review
Researchers consistently express support for peer review in the surveys listed above, as
well as in surveys dedicated to exploring peer review (see Peer review for more detail).
Mabe’s longitudinal data showed that attitudes towards peer review did not significantly varyduring the period 2002–2009 (Mabe & Mulligan, 2011).

2.14.5 Attitudes towards social media and Open Science
This same sense of continuity and preference for existing approaches and tools was
illustrated in a RIN study into researchers’ use of and attitudes towards Web 2.0 and social
media (RIN 2010).
A major UC Berkeley study (Harley & et al, 2010) similarly found researchers remaining
focussed on conventional formal publication, and very cautious about new models of webbased scholarly communication. Researchers used a range of communication methods at
different stages of the research cycle, and these varied from discipline to discipline withbiology standing out as having the narrowest range of types of outlet (i.e. primarily research
journals). They found “no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students,
postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors were bucking traditional publishing practices”
and that “once initiated into the profession, newer scholars—be they graduate students,
postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors—adopt[ed] the behaviors, norms, andrecommendations of their mentors in order to advance their careers”. In fact it wasestablished researchers that could afford to be more experimental. (An earlier Californianstudy reported similar findings, with senior faculty more open to innovation than younger,
more willing and experiment and to participate in new initiatives, and also found more
appetite for change in arts and humanities than in other disciplines (University of California
2007).) The Harley study was based on a relatively small, local sample of researchers, but
did identify topics where attention was required, including: re-examination of the methods
and timing of peer review; new models of publication able to accommodate varied lengths,
rich media and embedded data links; and support for managing and preserving new digital
research methods and outputs (e.g. components of natural language processing,visualisation, complex distributed databases, and GIS, etc.).
In the past few years, however, numbers of registered users of scientific social networks
including Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley have rapidly grown, suggesting
researchers may be becoming more willing to use some kinds of social media or networks
for professional purposes. (See Scientific Social Networks for more details.)
See also Social media.

2.15 Publishing ethics
There has been a growing awareness of the need for higher (or at least more transparent)
ethical standards in journal publishing to deal with issues such as conflict of interest, ghostwriting, guest authorship, citation rings, peer review rigging, authorship disputes, falsificationand fabrication of data, scientific fraud, unethical experimentation and plagiarism. Much of
the criticism has been addressed at the intersection of the biomedical journals andpharmaceutical industry but the issues are by no means unique to this sector.
The adoption of online submission systems has made it easier for journals systematically tocollect information such as declarations on competing interests, ethical consents, etc. It is
increasingly the norm for journals in relevant fields to publish such declarations alongside thepaper.
There has been concern in recent years at the fast-growing number of retractions, whichhave increased from about 30 a year in the early 2000s to more than 400 in 2011, despite arise of only 44% in papers over the period (Van Noorden 2011). Even so, it only represents
perhaps 0.02% of papers, though in surveys, around 1–2% of scientists admit to having
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fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once. It seems probable that theincrease in published retractions is positive, coming from an increased awareness of theissues and better means of detection rather than an increase in misconduct itself. One
problem with retractions is the tendency for authors to continue citing the withdrawn paper;
adoption of the CrossMark initiative should help curb this, or at any rate alert readers who
follow the citations.

2.15.1 Committee on Publication Ethics
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)81 was established in 1997 and provides aforum for publishers and editors of scientific journals to discuss issues relating to the integrityof the work submitted to or published in their journals. It has over 9000 members, mostly
editors of scientific journals. It holds quarterly meetings and provides its members with anauditing tool for their journals to measure compliance with its best practice guidelines. All
COPE members are expected to follow its Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for
Journal Editors, and Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers which have recently been
merged into a single document called “core practices” to be found on their website.

2.15.2 Other organisations with an interest in publishing ethics
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)82 provides detailed
guidance on ethical matters relating to medical publishing (many of which are equallyapplicable to other areas), including authorship and contributorship, sharing of research data(including clinical trials data), editorship, peer review, conflicts of interest, privacy andconfidentiality, and protection of human subjects and animals in research. The ICMJE
Recommendations (previously known as the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts
Submitted to Biomedical Journals) amount to an ad hoc standard that is widely adhered to(ICMJE 2013).
The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)83 also addresses ethical issues, and has
published a policy statement on conflict of interest in peer-reviewed medical journals (WAME2009).
The Retraction Watch blog writes regularly on article retractions and the issues raised. Its
authors have proposed journals adopt a Transparency Index which would specify things likethe journals peer review policy, whether it used plagiarism detection software, its mechanism
for dealing with allegations of errors or misconduct, and whether its corrections andretractions conformed to ICMJE and COPE guidelines (Marcus & Oransky, 2012).

2.15.3 Similarity Check and other automated detection tools
Similarity Check84 is a plagiarism detection tool set up by the CrossRef organisation
specifically for the scholarly journal sector. Although software is widely available that cancompare a text to documents on the web, such services are not useful for checking ascientific manuscript because the scientific literature databases are not accessible to suchservices. Similarity Check remedies this by creating a collaborative database of STM content(contributed by participating publishers) allied to commercial plagiarism detection software(currently iThenticate). Users of the service can compare submitted manuscripts to the
published literature. The software provides an automated report on the degree of matching
between documents but the final decision on whether this represents plagiarism, repeat
publication or some other more benign cause remains a matter for human judgement.
81

http://publicationethics.org/
http://www.icmje.org/
83
http://www.wame.org/
84
https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/
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Other tools for detecting misconduct include screening with image-editing software for photoor image manipulation, and data review (digit preference analysis can detect fabricateddata).
The arXiv repository has its own dedicated software for screening submission for potential
plagiarism. A 2014 study looked at patterns of potential plagiarism within arXiv across thewhole corpus of 757,000 articles from mid-1991 to mid-2012. Text reuse was fairly common:
after filtering out review articles and legitimate quoting, about one in 16 arXiv authors wasfound to have copied long phrases and sentences from their own previously published work.
About one out of every 1000 of the submitting authors copied the equivalent of a paragraph's
worth of text from other people's papers without citing them. Perhaps the most interestingfinding was that the more a paper reuses already published work, the less frequently that
paper tends to be cited (Citron & Ginsparg, 2014).

2.15.4 Predatory Journals, Beall’s List and Think, Check, Submit!
One of the biggest concerns of recent years has been the growth in the number of so-called
predatory journals. These often promote themselves to potential authors through bulk,
sometimes SPAM emails, frequently have fictitious editorial boards and in many cases use
the Gold Open Access model to get money upfront before an author can detect whether theirarticle has been subjected to any peer review whatsoever. Shen and Bjork (2015) estimatedthat there were 8,000 such journals in 2014, generating some $75 million in revenues, while
Cabells’ Blacklist included 9,179 journals verified as predatory as of August 2018.85 Perhaps
still more concerning is the threat these journals pose to the integrity of scholarly
communication, and the tendency for legitimate open access journals to be tarnished bythese practices.
Surveys of researchers indicate that perceived quality remains a reason for a substantial
minority for not choosing open access journals to submit to (NPG 2014; Frass, Cross, &Gardner, 2014). Another issue that has received less coverage than predatory publishers isthat of “highjacked” journals, where a website is fraudulently created to mimic a legitimate
journal’s site in order to attract submissions and APC fees (Jalalian & Mahboobi, 2014).
One of the first approaches to tackling the emergence of predatory publishers was thecreation of a blacklist of titles by the University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall (Beall’sList)86. While this approach drew attention to the issues it was flawed by a somewhat
inconsistent review policy for correcting the listing of otherwise acceptable journals as“predatory” and the potential legal issues to which Beall and his institution could have been
subjected. Beall’s list was discontinued in early 2017, and Cabells, publisher ofa longstanding journal directory, has sought to fill the gap, introducing new journal blacklist
and whitelist products later that same year.87 The Chinese Ministry of Science andTechnology (MOST) has also signalled its intention to establish a blacklist of ‘poor quality’scientific journals, including domestic and interntional titles (Cyranoski 2018).
The response of the legitimate publishing industry has been two-fold: firstly the key
associations of journal publishers strengthened their codes of conduct and grounds foradmission of members; secondly they grouped together with other interested parties toaddress the problem in a different way to a blacklist. Think!Check! Submit! was created as aresource for scholars to allow them to ask pertinent questions of any publication so as toascertain whether it observed the best practices or not.88

https://www2.cabells.com/blacklist
https://beallslist.weebly.com/
87
https://www2.cabells.com/
88
https://thinkchecksubmit.org
85

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The Directory of Open Access Journals also responded by cleaning its database of journals
and publishers that did not meet criteria similar to those of the Open Access Scholarly
Publishers’ Association (OASPA), after discovering that at least 900 suspect journals were
included (Anderson 2014b).
Further information on the history of predatory publishing, the publishing industry’s response,
and recent journalistic investigations into the scale of the problem can be found in Crotty’s(2018) retrospective on the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.

2.16 Copyright and licensing
A robust copyright (or more generally, intellectual property) regime that is, and is seen as
equitable by the large majority of players in the system is a precondition for commercial
content and media industries, and journal publishing (open access included) is no exception.
In the case of subscription-access journals, authors either transfer the complete copyright tothe publisher (while retaining certain defined rights) or grant the publisher the sole andexclusive licence to exploit a set of defined rights (about two-thirds of large publishers now
prefer this grant of exclusive licence option (Inger & Gardner, 2013)); in either case theoutcome is much the same, to allow the publisher to exploit commercially the rights in returnfor services provided to the authors (peer review, copy-editing, kudos etc.). In the case ofopen access books and journals, authors typically retain copyright, but grant the publisher
the sole and exclusive licence to publish and release their scientific works or articles under aCreative Commons licence or similar (see below) which allows use and reuse but imposesconditions, such as attribution of the authors, which depend on copyright. Thus, OA is
entirely consistent with the traditional copyright regime and in principle was always possible
depending on market demand.
Copyright and other IP law (such as patent law) seeks to establish a balance in law between
granting monopoly rights to the creator/innovator (in order to encourage creativity andinnovation) and the interests of wider society in having unrestricted access to content. Thisbalance may need to be kept under review, for example to stay abreast of developments intechnology. The digital transition has presented many challenges to the traditional copyright
regime based on control of copies and integrity of documents – a single digital document canserve the world and it is essentially never entirely unalterable.

2.16.1 Copyright reforms
The most recent reviews of copyright in a pre-Brexit UK and the EU (the changes adopted
and implemented by the UK Government subsequent to the Hargreaves report,89 and theEU’s Digital Single Market Strategy90) cover the topics raised by the digital environment thatare relevant under any regime:
89

For the UK, see the IPO’s information last updated on 18 November 2014:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-copyright-law. How the UK will be impacted
by Brexit in terms of which EU laws will still require to be implemented in the UK, remains an open
question. Publishers are well advised in any case to treat the UK as a separate territory as of March
2019 for licensing purposes, while the Republic of Ireland would be expected to remain a territory
licensable as part of the EU after that date.
90

On 14 June 2017 the EU adopted a regulation on cross-border portability of online content services,which aims at ensuring that consumers who buy or subscribe to films, sport broadcasts, music, ebooks/journals and games can access them when they travel in other EU countries. By end 2018, theEU is expected to adopt a second and more comprehensive set of rules in a directive modernising
copyright. The said directive will focus on wider online availability of content across the EU, adapting
exceptions and limitations to the digital world, and achieving a well-functioning copyright market place

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Copyright exceptions are provided where it is judged in the public interest to allow special
cases that are exempt from some normal copyright limitations. They are governed underinternational treaty by the Berne Convention’s 3-step test: exemptions must be confined to a
special case; they must not interfere with the normal exploitation of the work; and may notunreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights-holders
Exceptions currently under review include: portability of purchases access across borders,
exceptions for education, research, text and data mining, access of cultural heritage and theinclusion of disabled persons.

2.16.2 UK pre-Brexit copyright changes and changes in the making in the Republicof Ireland
In the UK, a number of the key recommendations made by Hargreaves that were relevant topublishers have now been implemented (Hargreaves 2011; Intellectual Property Office (IPO)
2014). The UK IPO commendably has released easy-to read guidelines for copyrightowners, licensors, as well as for users and consumers. For STM the following exceptions
stand out:•••a copyright exception to allow text and data mining (TDM) has now been implemented,
despite this being an active area of development in STM (the Select Committee
preferred to see publishers developing usable and affordable licensing schemes). Thispermits users to “make copies of works ‘for text and data analysis’”, provided this is for
non-commercial research, and that copies are accompanied by “sufficientacknowledgement” (where practicable). (See also below, Text and data mining)a very limited copyright exception for format-shifting came into effect on 1 October 2014
despite objections from a variety of rights-holders and a concomitant judicial review.
The exception was meant to cover personal copying, but was struck down as overreaching and for want of sufficient consultation by the High Court.
A notable trend in both EU and UK copyright legislation is to provide that exceptions
cannot be altered or more closely defined by way of binding contracts, even where
online uses are concerned. This could in practice hamper the development of a “Single”
Digital Market, as exceptions continue to differ from EU territory to EU territory and will
require great attention when devising online licensing agreements spanning multiple
countries or cross-border.

The Republic of Ireland announced the publication of the Copyright and Other Intellectual
Property Law Provisions Bill 2018 on the 13th March 2018. The Bill, explanatory
memorandum and impact assessment91 suggest far-reaching changes to Irish law. The Bill is
expected to progress through the Houses of the Oireachtas in the coming months, and canbe followed on their website.92

between technology platforms and copyright holders, as well as allowing authors and publishers tocontinue benefiting jointly from copyright, unhindered by a 2013 EU Court of Justice judgment. On 13
September 2017 a Directive and a Regulation implementing the Marrakech Treaty in the EU wereadopted benefitting people who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled increasing
print material in accessible formats, including adapted audio books and e-books, from across theEuropean Union and the rest of the world.
91
https://dbei.gov.ie/en/Legislation/Copyright-and-Other-Intellectual-Property-Law-Provisions-Bill2018.html
92https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2018/31/

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2.16.3 US and other territories
In the US too there is an active debate on the need for copyright reform and theCongressional record is slowly but steadily building up to a significant reform. Maria
Pallante’s words qua the US Register of Copyrights (as she then was) correctly summarized
as follows the aims of an eventual US reform: “clarifying the scope of exclusive rights,
revising exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives, addressing orphan works,
accommodating persons who have print disabilities, providing guidance to educational
institutions, exempting incidental copies in appropriate instances, updating enforcement
provisions, providing guidance on statutory damages, reviewing the efficacy of the DMCA,
assisting with small copyright claims, reforming the music marketplace, updating theframework for cable and satellite transmissions, encouraging new licensing regimes, andimproving the systems of copyright registration and recordation.”In the absence of law-making through Congress, US courts – like the Court of Justice of theEU, shape copyright law and deal with striking the balance between technology and content,
encouraging science and new knowledge vs wide access to state of the art and existingknowledge.93

2.16.4 Perceptions and understanding of copyright
It is worth noting that much of the debate about copyright in STM sector takes place within acontext of widespread ignorance and misunderstanding of copyright and the rights available
under the current regime. For example, a PRC paper published in 2009 looked at authors’perceptions of the rights they retained in their articles following publication and comparedthis to what publishers actually permit (Morris 2009). The study found that authors
underestimate what they could do with pre-publication versions (e.g. self-archiving, use incourse packs, provide copies to colleagues) while overestimating what publishers’ policies
allowed them to do with the published version. In particular, many authors believed they
could self-archive the published version, which very few publishers permit. The study
concludes that publishers had failed to communicate their copyright policies effectively.
This picture, of copyright and associated use and reuse rights being little- or mis-understood,
recurs in other studies of academics, and even with librarians. For example, a RIN study onaccess gaps identified confusion about licensing and particularly walk-in rights, especially fore-resources (RIN 2011a), and lack of knowledge about copyright has been cited as one of
the reasons for author hesitancy in depositing in archives. More recent surveys of authors
confirm that confusion about copyright and their retained rights persist (e.g. Taylor & Francis2014). A 2017 author survey conducted by Kudos, in partnership with 10 publishers, foundthat 83% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that publisher / journal copyright andsharing policies should be respected, but 60% agreed or strongly agreed that they should beallowed to upload articles regardless of publisher / journal policies.94 Gadd (2017) attributes
this ‘cognitive dissonance’ in authors’ behaviour to a tension between ‘copyright culture’(adhering to copyright policies) and ‘scholarly culture’ (sharing papers with their peers).
Authors perceive greater overlap between the two than is necessarily the case, and are
liable to side with the latter where the two are in conflict.

93

See for instance US Federal Court for the Federal Circuit, Oracle America Inc., vs Google Inc., 50
F.3d 1381, 750 F.3d 1376, Google’s use of the Java API packages was not fair as a matter of law; thedistrict court's decision was reversed, and the case remanded to the district court for damages.
94
https://blog.growkudos.com/2017/04/04/author-sharing-survey/

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In one sense the challenge for a sound copyright law has not changed over time (from the
beginnings of enlightenment in 1709 to the present day and the dawn of perhaps artificial
intelligence): how to provide a system sufficiently flexible to encourage innovation and newactors, yet also strong enough to protect the works of authorship so central to the purpose of
progress and to what makes science science. However, the interpretation of that protection
in a digital age continues to prove challenging for authors, publishers and legislators alike.

2.16.5 Model licences
Model and sample licences have been developed by a number of organisations including
publisher organisations, intermediaries, and purchasing bodies. Use of such licences isdesirable for two main reasons: it simplifies transactions and the operation of the market,
and because the licences typically represent “best practice” following substantial consultationand negotiation among interested parties. Examples include:
•

•

•

•

•
•

•

IFLA Licensing Principles: these are in fact not a model licence but a set of principles
governing contracts between libraries and publishers. Originally drafted in 2001, mostrecently updated May 2014. http://www.ifla.org/publications/ifla-licensing-principles-2001
LicensingModels: a set of licences for electronic resources originally developed in 1999
in collaboration with the major subscription agents and subsequently extended by John
Cox Associates (the site is now maintained by Ringgold, who offer their own list of model
licences here: https://support.ringgold.com/cdo-useful-info/). Licences included academic
libraries, academic consortia, corporate library, public library, ebooks, and 30/60-day freetrials. http://www.licensingmodels.org
P-D-R Model Licence was developed by ALPSP, STM and the Pharma Documentation
Ring covering licence terms between publisher and pharmaceutical companies. The
2012 update included a new clause with guidance on rights for text and data mining.
http://www.p-d-r.com/content/publications/
Text and data mining (TDM): STM has developed sample licences covering TDM ofsubscribed content, and for TDM of previously un-subscribed content. http://www.stmassoc.org/text-and-data-mining-stm-statement-sample-licence/
STM open access licences: see Open access licences below
Jisc Model Licences apply of course only to Jisc agreements, with sublicences forarchives, databases, and SHEDL. The licences underwent a major review in 2017, withchanges to the definition of an ‘Authorised User’, strengthened wording on postcancellation access’, expansion of permitted uses, and new schedules on: industry
standards; service levels; and obligations on the Publisher for agreements that include
an OA publishing element. http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/model_licenceIn the US there is no equivalent national procurement, but model licences include the
LIBLICENSE model licences, last revised in November 2014, as well as those created byvarious large consortia. http://liblicense.crl.edu/licensing-information/model-license/

2.16.6 SERUSERU (Shared Electronic Resource Understanding) Recommended Practice is a NISO Best
Practice. It provides an alternative to a licence agreement where library and publisher agree,
primarily designed for (and utilised in) the North American market. The SERU statement
expresses commonly shared understandings of the content provider, the subscribing
institution and authorised users; the nature of the content; use of materials and inappropriate
uses; privacy and confidentiality; online performance and service provision; and archiving

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and perpetual access. The benefit is to simplify procurement of electronic resources by
avoiding the need for a bilateral licence.
Originally adopted in 2008 for e-journals, it was updated to its current version in 2012 which
covers a wider range of content including ebooks. Publishers, libraries and consortia that are
willing to use SERU join the registry (available at its website), though this does not commit
them to using it for future orders (NISO SERU Standing Committee 2012).

2.16.7 Open access licences
For open access journals, the article is released under a licence that allows users to access,copy and reuse the content under specified circumstances. From the author’s perspective,
the typical arrangement is for them to retain the copyright but to sign a sole and exclusive
licence agreement with the publisher allowing the latter to issue the work to the generalpublic under the specified open access licence chosen by the authors. The publisher also
receives the right by way of grant to licence in parallel and/or subsequently the work inquestion by way of any other licence that may subsequently be demanded in themarketplace or find favour with commercial or non-commercial users, although otherarrangements are possible.
The licences most frequently used for gold open access journals are those offered as part of
the Creative Commons licensing structure. The latest versions (v4.0) were launched in
November 2013; the main area of development compared to v3.0 was further
internationalisation; improved interoperability with other licences; anticipation of future
developments to make them longer lasting; and specific requirements for data, science andeducation.
Creative Commons are sometimes described as “some rights reserved” (in contrast to the “allrights reserved” copyright statement); the principle is quite different from placing material in
the public domain (i.e. waiving rights). The licences come in multiple flavours:• CC-BY allows users maximum freedom in re-using content: essentially all copying andreuse is permitted provided the author (copyright holder) is acknowledged, including
the creative of derivative works, and reuse for commercial purposes. This is thelicence preferred by most open access advocates including the Open Access
Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
• CC-BY-NC is the same as CC-BY except the reuse for commercial purposes is notallowed (without first obtaining permission, as with standard copyright). Many open
access advocates prefer the CC-BY licence, arguing that commercial use is a fuzzyterm, and that allowing commercial exploitation of publicly funded research is in the
public interest.
• CC-BY-NC-ND additionally exclude the creation of derivative works. OASPA does not
permit its use by its members because it sees derived use as fundamental to the way
in which scholarly research builds on what has gone before.
• CC-BY-SA: the “share-alike” rider requires those creating derivative works to attach thesame share-alike licence. This is (perhaps surprisingly) deprecated by most open
access advocates; for example, OASPA does not permit its use by its members
because material distributed within a share-alike article could only be combined andredistributed with other share-alike content.

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New open access model licences were released by STM in August 2014.95 These wereintended to be complementary to Creative Commons licences. They were designed to coverrecent developments such as multi-language access, text mining, and also the specificinstance of commercial use to cover paid advertising being associated with open access
content.
The licences were not well received by open access advocates and campaigners; a coalition(including funders, institutions, publishers, curators and the users of public resources) issued
a statement calling on STM to withdraw them (Global Coalition of Access to Research,
Science and Education Organizations Calls on STM to Withdraw New Model Licenses
2014). STM’s statement in response (STM 2014) noted that there were multiple views on theissue, including among its own members: some preferred the efficiency of standardising on asingle licence, while others preferred to offer choices and options to authors that may reflect
particular concerns.

2.16.8 Text and data mining rights
Text and data mining (TDM) has been identified as an important and growing way of using
STM content as well as other content, including structured data associated with STM
content. It is discussed in more detail under Technology in scholarly communication but
deserves an entry within this Copyright section because the rights issues remain underactive debate and in flux, particularly within Europe, where the potential role of a copyrightexception for TDM has been much-discussed.
At the time of writing, it was still relatively uncommon for STM journal licences to permit TDM
without further consent of the publisher, and most publishers (other than open accesspublishers) did not have publicly available policies, but dealt with each request on a case-bycase basis (Smit & van der Graaf, 2011; Inger & Gardner, 2013). The requirement to contact
each publisher individually would create an onerous burden for a researcher that wanted tomine a substantial fraction of the literature.96
An alternative way forward for this more general case could be a comprehensive licensing
process, covering multiple publishers. A small but important step was taken in 2012 with themodel licence terms to cover TDM agreed by STM, ALPSP and P-D-R (Pharmaceutical
Documentation Ring).97
Publishers have since issued and progressively updated statements of commitment tofacilitating TDM for non-commercial use (STM 2017a and b). In this regard STM hasdeveloped model licence terms that could be added to existing publisher-library licences tosupport TDM under defined terms (STM 2012).
A number of more ambitious cross-industry collaborative initiatives have emerged, notably
those led by CrossRef, CCC and PLS, which are discussed below in the section on Text anddata mining.

2.16.9 Machine readable and embedded licences
One potential solution to the problems of orphan works and of misunderstandings over whatrights were available to users of digital content could be to embed the licence in a machine95

http://www.stm-assoc.org/open-access-licensing/
There are, for example, over 600 publishers with more than 1000 papers published in PubMedsince 2000, clearly an infeasible number for most people to negotiate with.
97
http://is.gd/UXnRMl
96

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readable format within the resource itself. This already occurs to some extent with certain
types of media file, notably music and videos for online sale. In these arenas it is often
associated with digital rights management (DRM) arrangements, but this is not necessary:the licences can simply assert ownership and specify allowed downstream uses andlicensing requirements. STM also developed orphan and out-of-commerce safe harbour
statements to which many members have signed up. Under these “safe harbours”
researchers, libraries and their patrons are benefitting from a shield of limited fully exempt
liability as long as they have carried out a diligent search to ascertain the orphan work or“out-of-commerce” work status of a work.

2.17 Long term preservation
In the print world, long term preservation was the clear responsibility of the library community(rather than publishers). Preservation was ensured by the proven durability of (acid-free)paper, the multiple dispersed collections and the enduring nature of the host institutions.
Journals were archived and preserved by National Libraries in most countries and usually
through the legal deposit of publications even in the Netherlands where it was notcompulsory.
Before the turn of the century it became clear that electronic journals were going to become
the normative form of journal content and there was a lot of research on methods ofpreservation (Watkinson 2003). The fundamental issue is that the problems of long-term
digital preservation are not yet fully resolved: although storing the binary data seems feasible(by regularly transferring to new storage media as the old ones become obsolete), theproblem is that the data may not be interpretable in the future, for example if the relevant
hardware and/or operating systems are not available.
A less fundamental, but still important, practical issue is the fact that most electronic journals
are accessed from the publisher’s server; the library itself does not possess a copy topreserve but cannot rely on the publisher necessarily to be in existence at an arbitrary datein the future. LOCKSS and CLOCKSS have to a large extent dealt with this problem (seebelow). The literature on this topic is difficult to understand if it is not appreciated that outside
the US National Libraries are almost always assumed to be the place of preservation for
print or digital. Inside the US the discussion revolves around the concept of trusted
repositories.
The main solutions currently in use are as follows:
Portico is a not-for-profit preservation service for scholarly content, initially as a JSTOR
project before spinning out as an independent organisation. It offers a permanent managed
archive of journal (and eBook, and other digital) collections, with libraries benefiting fromprotection against loss of access caused by defined trigger events (e.g. the titles being nolonger available from the publisher or other source). It also offers a facility for postcancellation access. Portico currently has 1014 participating libraries, 553 publishers, andpreserves more than 200,000 e-journals, 1,245,000 e-books, and 200 digital collections.
Senior leaders from Portico shared their perspective on the digital preservation landscape ina recently published paper for UKSG Insights (Wittenberg et al. 2018).
The e-Depot at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek was one of the earliest and best-known
players. Its digital archiving services are available to publishers worldwide and are used bymany major publishers including Elsevier, Springer, Wiley Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, OUP,
and Sage. The KB is planning an upgraded e-Depot system with even faster processing andlarger capacity functionalities in the coming policy period. The KB assumes that national
libraries can take joint responsibility for preservation of the worldwide published heritage,
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Depot/KB system contains approximately 27 million articles of e-journals (largely STM) at
this moment.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). As the name suggests, it works on theprinciple of redundancy, similar to the way that multiple print journal holdings provide
security. The Global LOCKSS Network, based at Stanford, allows libraries to collect andstore local copies of subscribed content under a special licence (more than 500 publishers
have given permission for their content to be preserved in the LOCKSS system). The
software allows each library server continually to compare its content with others and thus
identify and repair any damage.
CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a sustainable, collaborative, non-profit organisation ofsome 250 scholarly publishers and 300 research libraries, using the LOCKSS technology.
CLOCKSS is governed by a Board comprised of 12 leading academic libraries and 12
leading scholarly publishers. As of mid-2018, the CLOCKSS Archive included the electronic
versions of 30 million journal articles and over 20,000 journal titles, 75,000 books, and many
types of supplementary material.
The British Library (BL) is charged through the Legal Deposit Act with collecting thecultural and intellectual outputs of the UK for posterity. The Legal Deposit Libraries (NonPrint Works) Regulations 2013 has since come into force, extending legal deposit to include
electronic publications, whether offline or online (Akeroyd et al. 2018). The BL’s non-print
legal deposit work has seen the major UK STM publishers transition journal deposit toelectronic over recent years. 30 publishers accounting for c.7500 titles are involved, withsome depositing directly with the BL , others via Portico.
According to an ALPSP report (Inger & Gardner, 2013), Portico, followed by
LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, was the most popular option for both large and medium publishers. Allof the large publishers in the survey had some kind of archival arrangements, but nearly afifth (18%) of small publishers did not. For these smaller publishers see below - the numbersin this category are almost certainly an underestimate.
The Keepers Registry,98 based at the University of Edinburgh, reports on the holdings of 13
preservation archives, including CLOCKSS, the Global LOCKSS Network, Portico, eDepot,
and others. Finding out where a journal is preserved is seen as very important, though theemphasis is usually on the small number of journals which are abandoned by their
publishers in some way
Lynch (2016), the Executive Director of the Center for Network Information (CNI) gave apresentation in 2016 which is much quoted99 and in it he picked out two ongoing failures.
These were the long tail of smaller journals, particularly smaller journals owned and run bysmaller journal societies, and also the large number of new open access journals especiallyoriginating from outside publishing experience. A collaborative project among CRL, Portico,and CLOCKSS to jointly target the preservation of more “long-tail” journals100 , has not beensustained. However a recent grant from the Mellon Foundation to the Internet Archive looks
a more promising approach101. Moreover there are signs that Portico are still making relevantplans.102

98

https://thekeepers.org/
https://www.cni.org/about-cni/staff/clifford-a-lynch/talks-interviews
100
https://www.crl.edu/events/webinar-pursuing-long-tail-elusive-publishers
101
https://www.librarytechnology.org/pr/23277
102
https://www.librarytechnology.org/pr/23277
99

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Larger Open Access publishers like, for example, BMC make their archiving andpresentation policies open103 but in general in the Open Access wider world the word“archiving” tends to mean the “self-archiving” of Green Open Access in repositories whichrarely have plans for long term preservation. A contrary example is the journal Internet
Archaeology104 which works with the UK Archaeology Data Service.
However, a much bigger issue is the archiving and preservation of publications, especiallyjournals, which exist in forms other than text. The taxonomy in the Kenny report thatpreceded the Act of 2003 specifically mentions multimedia journals.105 They existed fromearlier in the 1990s but they were not mainstream. Indeed the SuperJournal project(Pullinger and Baldwin 2002) from 1995 which sought to explore use multimedia articles injournals found no takers among the author community.
Now however the picture is different. For example, many journals offer facilities for inclusionof video, as well as other supplementary materials. At one time there was a distinction
between additional and essential materials but this no longer seems to be relevant to authors
and readers. One very large publisher deposits with Portico its digital journals along with the
supplementary material they hold. It appears that this additional material is not currently
being ingested though it is passed on to client libraries.
The challenge seems to be that there are two lots of players in the preservation world -services focused on digital content collections (e.g., Academic Preservation Trust,
MetaArchive, Digital Preservation Trust -- DPN) and services focus on "publications," mainly
textual (e.g., Portico, CLOCKSS). This means that journals or books that combine narrativeand data fall between the stools, or only one aspect of their output is properly preserved andconnections get broken between the components.

2.18 Researchers’ access to journals
The development of online versions of scientific journals has greatly increased access to thescientific literature while greatly reducing cost per use. This has been largely because thevery low marginal costs of electronic distribution have allowed publishers to offer access tosets of journals (up to and including the complete output of the publisher) for relatively small
additional licence fees compared to the previous total print subscriptions at the institution. On
the demand side, libraries have formed consortia to enhance their buying power innegotiating electronic licences with publishers, also resulting in access to more journals fortheir readers.
Statistics show that the number of journals acquired per library has increased dramaticallysince the advent of electronic journals in the late 1990s, and the cost paid per journal has
fallen. For example, the ARL statistics (ARL 2011) show that the number of serials
purchased per ARL library declined during the 1990s, reaching a low point of 13,682 in 2001,
but has subsequently dramatically increased to 68,375 in 2011 (not all these will be peerreviewed journals), while at the same time the unit cost of serials fell steadily from a peak inin 2000. Similarly, the number of current serials subscriptions per higher education institution
in the UK more than doubled in the 10 years to 2004/05, from 2,900 to 7,200 (Creaser et al.,2006). SCONUL figures show continued growth in UK access over the last decade, with anaverage of 3.1 serial titles purchased per full-time equivalent (FTE) user in 2016-17, with103

https://www.biomedcentral.com/getpublished/indexing-archiving-and-access-to-data/journalarchiving104
http://intarch.ac.uk/about/index.html
105
http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/legaldep/report/index.html #Appendix A (iv)

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98% of these received in electronic-only format - compared to an average of 1.1 serial titles
purchased per FTE user in 2009-10, of which 91% were received in electronic-only format.106

2.18.1 Current levels of access
Assessing the current level of access to scholarly journals is a key question for governments
and other policy makers, and yet the studies on this tend to suffer from methodologicalweaknesses to a greater or lesser extent (Meadows, Campbell, & Webster, 2012).
These methodological differences and weaknesses thus make different surveys difficult tocompare and interpret. A survey conducted by CIBER in late 2011 on behalf of RIN (RIN
2011a) analysed 2645 responses to 20,000 invitations (13.2%). The survey confirmed again
the central importance of journal articles (and to a lesser extent, conference papers). In
universities and colleges, 93% said research papers were easy or fairly easy to access, and
72% said that access had improved over the last five years. This finding was in line withearlier surveys using similar methodology and appears to suggests on the face of it little
problem in the way of access.
Similarly, a survey conducted by Outsell for the Australian Go8 Library group (Group of Eight& Outsell, 2010) analysed 1,175 responses (8.5%) from a population of 13,807 Australian
researchers. It found 91% of respondents said that access to information resources met theirneeds very well or adequately.
And yet when respondents in the CIBER survey were asked for which of a range ofresources they would most like to see access improved, a large proportion (39% in the caseof universities and colleges) identified journal articles as their first choice.
How to reconcile these positions? To start with, the RIN authors observe that “easy” accessto most of the literature is not enough for many researchers. Although levels of access inuniversities were typically good overall, there were areas where access was less easy,
notably in industry and for other groups such as independent professionals without access toacademic libraries (Ware 2009).
More generally, what would have been exceptional in the past may no longer meet current
needs. Meadows speculates that because researchers know that almost all journal articles
are digitally available, they are frustrated and express dissatisfaction when they are unable
to access particular resources. Another factor may be the increased visibility and ease offinding of research articles through search engines, and the increased use of these to findscholarly content.
As the Finch Report noted (Finch Working Group 2012), most researchers in academia andin large research-intensive companies have access to a larger number of journals than everbefore, but they want more:“online access free at the point of use to all the nearly two million articles that are
produced each year, as well as the publications produced in the past; and the ability
to use the latest tools and services to analyse, organise and manipulate the content
they find, so that they can work more effectively in their search for new knowledge.”

2.18.2 Barriers to access
Barriers to access are an important issue: the RIN survey findings suggested “thatinformation barriers can lead to significant non-productive activity and lost opportunities on
the part of researchers and knowledge workers”. Similarly the Finch Report saw improved
access as promoting enhanced transparency, openness and accountability, and public
106

https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/The_continuing_evolution_of_UK_academic_li
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engagement; closer linkages between research and innovation; economic growth; improved
efficiency in the research process; and increased returns on the investments made in
research.
The most commonly cited barriers to access in all the surveys and consultations discussed
above were cost barriers and pricing: the high price of journal subscriptions and shrinking
library budgets were cited by 85% or more of respondents in both the EC and OSTP
consultations. The RIN survey also found that the most common barrier was when
researchers had to pay to access content: the majority of respondents for whom access tojournals was important felt they did not have enough access through existing arrangements.
As well as high subscription prices, the RIN respondents also felt that prices charged forindividual articles were too high.
While cost barriers were the most important, they were not the only one identified in these(and earlier) surveys. Other barriers cited include: lack of awareness of available resources;a burdensome purchasing procedure; VAT on digital publications; format and IT problems(including digital rights management issues); lack of membership of a library with access tocontent; and conflict between the author’s or publisher’s rights and the desired use of thecontent.
In 2016 STM started the RA21 (Resource Access for the 21st Century)107 project with theactive support of some of its larger members, both commercial and not-for-profit. Publishers,
libraries, and consumers have all come to the understanding that authorising access tocontent based on IP address no longer works in today’s distributed world. The RA21 project
hopes to resolve some of the fundamental issues that create barriers to moving to federated
identity in place of IP address authentication, by looking at some of the products andservices available in the identity discovery space today, and determining best practice for
future implementations going forward. In scope is the creation of a set of recommended bestpractices around identity discovery and authentication, and engaging publishers, librarians,
and other interested parties in the implementation of those best practices. RA21 is now ajoint STM/NISO initiative with the governance of all stakeholders established.
RA21 has also brought out a RA21 Position Statement on Access Brokers.108 The RA21
position is that Access Broker tools are workarounds to solve a fundamental access problem
that has plagued users of scholarly information resources for many years, whereas RA21 isworking on a long-term, structural solution to the core problem using industry standards andleveraging years of investment from the academic sector in federated identity management
infrastructure.
Lack of clarity in writing is a barrier, erected by authors, and has not always been actively
discouraged by publishers according to Anderson (2017). As he states, there are no easyanswers: “[For] some disciplines and with some kinds of studies, it may be wise to change
the way in which studies are written up; in others, it may be wise to leave the writing alone,
but add a layer of explanation or summary. And some kinds of studies may resist effective or
accurate simplification at all.”Finally, there is a growing concern about the problems of accessing scholarly publications for
those potential readers with physical, learning, or cognitive challenges. It is generally agreed
that in this sense “accessibility” is not a priority for most publishers in spite of legal
obligations in most jurisdictions (Conrad 2018a). For Conrad making contact “accessible” isintrinsically part of the mission of publishers. The position of STM has been clear for many
years at least in relation to some specific groups of users (STM 2010). A recent issue of thejournal Learned Publishing brings the practical opportunities up to date (Conrad 2018b).

107
108

https://ra21.org/
https://ra21.org/index.php/what-is-ra21/ra21-position-statement-on-access-brokers/

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2.18.3 SMEs
Public policy interest in access to the scientific literature by small and medium-sizedenterprises (SMEs) has grown. SMEs have been seen as a source of innovation and job
creation, but have not been part of the core market for journal publishers as they do not
generally purchase subscriptions, but have typically accessed the literature through library,database and document supply services. A survey for the Publishing Research Consortium(Ware 2009) found that people in UK high-tech SMEs valued information more highly, andread more journal articles, than those in larger companies. Of those that consideredinformation important, 71% felt they had good access, and 60% that it was better than 5
years ago. The report found, however, that more than half sometimes had difficulty
accessing an article, and outlined a number of possible steps that could be taken to improveaccess: pay-per view access could be made simpler, with a more appropriate payment
mechanism for companies, and lower prices; higher education journal licences could include
online as well as walk-in access for local businesses; and a comprehensive, centrally
administered national licence could be explored. Some of these approaches were pursued
by the Finch Group, although it also noted that the fraction of SMEs that undertake R&D isvery small.
There has been relatively little further research on this issue since the 2009 survey
mentioned above. Houghton, Swan, & Brown (2011) investigated access by SMEs in
Denmark, looking at levels of access and use, whether there were any barriers to access,access difficulties or gaps, and the costs and benefits involved in accessing researchfindings. Access to academic research was found to bring substantial benefits. Twentyseven per cent of the products and 19% of the processes developed or introduced during thelast three years would have been delayed or abandoned without access to academic
research, with these new products contributing an average 46% of annual sales. About halfof respondents rated research articles as very or extremely important, and a similar
proportion (55%) reported difficulties accessing research articles. The most widely usedmeans of access to non-open access materials were personal subscriptions and in-house
library or information services. Public libraries, inter-library loans and pay-per-view (PPV)
were little used.
In the past few years new services have launched offering users who lack institutional
subscriptions the ability to rent or purchase journal articles at prices lower than the full “payper download” price on the publisher site. Providers include DeepDyve, Proquest Udini,
ReadCube Access, and RightFind (Copyright Clearance Center). The access is limited either
by time (article rental) or by features (e.g. disabling printing and local saving), with businessmodels including one-off charges, or monthly or annual plans, and plans for groups orcompanies. In a similar vein, Reprints Desk’s Article Galaxy Widget allows users to search
for articles and then find the lowest cost access option available. To date, uptake of these
services appears limited.

2.19 Access in developing countries
The Research4Life programmes109 are collaborations between UN agencies, STM
publishers, universities and university libraries, philanthropic foundations and technology
partners. The partnership’s original goal was to help attain six of the UN’s eight Millennium
Development Goals by 2015, reducing the scientific knowledge gap between industrialised
countries and the developing world. There are currently six programmes that collectively
provide some 8,500 institutions in 118 developing world countries with free or low cost
access to some 20,000 journals, 69,000 books and 120 other information resources fromsome 180 publishers:
109

http://www.research4life.org

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•

•

•

•

•

•

October 2018

HINARI, launched in January 2002 in conjunction with the World HealthOrganisation, offers free or low-cost online access to major journals, full-text
databases and other resources in biomedical and related social sciences to local,
not-for-profit institutions in developing countries.
AGORA, set up in October 2003 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the
UN and major publishers, enables access to a digital library collection of some
10,000 journals from 60 publishers in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental
science and related social sciences.
OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment), launched in late 2006 in
partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, offers access to theenvironmental literature with some 11,500 journals. Subjects include
environmental chemistry, economics, law, botany, conservation biology, ecology
and zoology.
ARDI (Access to Research for Development and Innovation) was launched inpartnership with the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2009 and joined
Research4Life in 2011, and is aimed at promoting the integration of developing
and least developed countries into the global knowledge economy.
GOALI (Global Online Access to Legal Information) was launched in March 2018
in partnership with the International Labour Organization and gives users accessto a wide range of essential legal information for their research, scholarship,teaching, studies, advocacy, and work. The programme seeks to enhance legal
scholarship and practice, and strengthen legal frameworks and institutions.
DAR (Digital Access to Research) is a collaboration between Research4Life andthe new UN Technology Bank, which was formally inaugurated on 4 June 2018.
DAR is the Bank’s first in-country effort which, over the next 10 years, plans todevelop a tailored outreach and training programme to promote use of
Research4Life in each of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs).

Based on a matrix of development indicators including GNI per capita, the UNDP’s Human
Development Index, and the WHO’s Healthy Life Expectancy Data, the programmes offer
free access to the poorest countries and very low cost access ( $1500 per institution for thecomplete package) to other developing world countries.
Other schemes include:
•

•
•

110

HighWire Press offers free access for developing countries to a list110 of about 140
high-quality journals, based simply on software that recognises from where theuser is accessing the site.
Some publishers offer similar schemes independently, e.g. the Royal Society ofChemistry, the National Academies Press.
INASP’s SRKS scheme ended in 2018 and its replacement programme, SERKS(strong and equitable research and knowledge systems), will embrace their
AuthorAID and local Journals Online (JOLS) activity, but will significantly
downsize the licensing and access component which was the cornerstone of theprevious PERII and SRKS five year programmes.

http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/devecon.dtl

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EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries)111 partners with libraries and libraryconsortia to build capacity, advocate for access to knowledge, encourageknowledge sharing and initiate pilot schemes for innovative library services

The problems of accessing and using literature in developing countries are not limited toaffordability. Research4Life, INASP and EIFL all recognise the broader issues and variously
provide training, outreach and support, advocacy, and schemes to support bandwidth
improvement. Support is also provided for authors, for instance through INASP’s AuthorAid
programme.112
There are also some concerns that providing free access to Western journals (orequivalently, offering waivers of open access fees) may have unintended consequences inundermining nascent indigenous publishing (e.g. Dickson 2012). Many of these programmesmonitor this effect carefully, and the Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) wasestablished – and is managed - by African Journals Online (AJOL) and INASP to provide
detailed assessment criteria for the quality of publishing practices of Global Southjournals.113

111

http://www.eifl.net
http://www.authoraid.info/113
https://www.journalquality.info/en/112

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3. Open Access
Open access refers to the making available of published scholarly content (such as journal
research articles, monographs and conference proceedings) in online digital copies, free ofcharge at point of use, free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, and free of technicalor other barriers to access (such as digital rights management or requirements to register toaccess).
Its definition in these terms can be traced to the 2002 declaration of the Budapest Open
Access Initiative, which is increasingly regarded as canonical within the open access
community.114 Nevertheless, it remains a contested term (Anderson, 2018), though as Peter
Suber observes: ‘all of the major public definitions of OA agree that merely removing pricebarriers, or limiting permissible uses to "fair use" ("fair dealing" in the UK), is not enough’.115
The removal of price barriers alone is referred to as “gratis OA”,116 while in cases where atleast some permission barriers are removed as well the term “libre OA” is used (Suber,2012).
Strictly speaking, open access is a property of the written outputs of a specific research
project, rather than the publication that hosts such outputs. In other words, it is a property ofan article rather than a journal, or of an individual monograph rather than a book series. Thissection will largely discuss open access to journal articles, which has attracted the greatest
interest from policymakers, and accounts for the lion’s share of OA market revenues.
Monographs, conference proceedings and other research outputs will be discussed
separately but share many of the same challenges as journal articles, as well as others
unique to the format in question.
The different approaches to open access can be considered in terms of what is made open,
when it is made open and where it is made open. Taking a peer-reviewed journal article as areference, three “what” stages may be distinguished:• Stage 1 - Author’s original: this is the author’s un-refereed draft manuscript forconsideration by a journal, also called a preprint.117 Authors usually retain copyrightover this version of the manuscript.
• Stage 2 - Accepted manuscript: this is the author’s final refereed manuscript
accepted for publication by a journal, sharing in its imprimatur and containing allchanges required as a result of peer review – from this stage, copyright is typicallyassigned to the publisher, or an exclusive licence is granted.
• Stage 3 - Version of record: this is the final published, citable article available fromthe journal’s website.

In terms of timing (the “when”) there are also three options: prior to (formal) publication,
immediately on publication, and at some period after publication (an “embargo” period).
Although articles can be made available on several different platforms (the “where”), it isagain useful to distinguish between three main options:114

http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
116“Gratis OA” is functionally equivalent to “public access”, as used in the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy’s memo Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded
Research:https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2
013.pdf
117
For definitions of common terminology on journal article versions, see the NISO typology:
http://groups.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf
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• Publisher’s platform: the version of record is branded and published on thejournal’s website or any other publisher-owned platform. When this happens
immediately on publication, this is referred to as ‘Gold OA’, where it occurs at alater date it is termed ‘delayed OA’.
• Open access repository: a version of a manuscript can be deposited in a repository
and made publicly available either prior to or immediately on publication, or after
an embargo period. Where the accepted manuscript or version of record is madeavailable in this way, it is commonly referred to as ‘Green OA’ or ‘self-archiving’.
Repositories may be institutional, subject-specific, national, or international.
• Other online postings: Versions of articles may be posted online in a variety of otherlocations, including author’s personal websites, academic social networks andfilesharing sites. These postings fall outside the traditional definitions of ‘gold’ and‘green OA’, and in many cases contravene article licensing terms and copyrightlaw. Nevertheless, they are widespread, and often prove easier for readers to
discover than deposits of the same articles in OA repositories (UUK, 2017).

3.1

Defining openness

The combination of what version of the article is published open access, when it is publishedand where it is published has created over the years a complex and contested typology ofopen access models. For the purposes of this report, we adopt a typology of access that
distinguishes between two main types of open access (‘gold’ and ‘green’), based on where
the publication is made available, and further differentiates between the business models
used for gold OA (‘APC’, ‘no-APC’ and ‘hybrid’, which are discussed further below).
Nevertheless, it is helpful to acknowledge that the dividing line between ‘open’ and ‘closed’
access is not always clear. The DART Framework for Open Access evaluates openness
based on four dimensions: discoverability, accessibility, reusability, and transparency(Anderson et al 2016). It posits that openness can be conceptualized as a spectrum, with theminimum attributes for a research output to be considered “open” being that it is
discoverable and freely accessible at the point of use. Beyond this baseline, degrees of
openness (i.e. scale of less open to more open) occur based on more or less nuanced
attributes.
Table 3 - The DART Framework for Open Access

Dimension

Attributes include

Description

Discoverable● Indexed by search engines● Sufficient, good quality discovery

This may be the mostfundamental baseline conditionof open (meaning that if an
object is not discoverable, it is
not open). However, there is awide range here, including
open with bad metadata orlinks and no or faulty identifiers.
Generally drives whether wecurrently consider something to
be open, although many
variations exist (taking into
account embargoes and otherconditions).
Openness is advanced byhaving fewer restrictions on

metadata● Links● Persistent unique identifiers● Explicit rights statements● Open and widely used standards (forall of the above attributes)
Accessible● Free (in terms of cost) to all users at

point of use, in perpetuity● Downloadable (binary)● Machine-readable (binary)● Timeliness of availability (spectrum)

Reusable● Usable and reusable (includingcommercial uses)

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Transparent● Able to be further disseminated● Modifiable● Peer review● Impact metrics● Transparency in the research

process (based on the Center forOpen Science TOP Guidelines),118
including data transparency(metadata and level of availability),and software (including version andoperating system/hardware)● Research design and analyticalmethods (plus software andversions), including citation
standards, pre-registration of studies
and of analysis, and replication● Author transparency (funding source,
affiliations, roles, other disclosures
such as conflict of interest)

October 2018

reuse, dissemination andmodification.
Serves the research lifecycle,
given that outputs of research
become inputs. Some of thefactors that affect transparency
include the software used,
inclusion of data, thetransparency of the peer review
process and analyticalmethods, and more.

Martín-Martín et al (2018a) have proposed a conceptual model of open access rooted in theconcepts of legality and sustainability expressed in van Leeuwen et al (2017). It features six
dimensions of open access: authoritativeness, user rights, stability, immediacy, peer-review
and cost (Figure 28). Yet another model is used by the Open Access Spectrum Evaluation
tool to quantitatively score journals’ degrees of openness.119
Figure 28: A conceptual model of open access (Source: Martín-Martín et al, 2018a)

118
119

https://cos.io/our-services/top-guidelines/
See http://www.oaspectrum.org/

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3.1.1 Open access licensing
As seen above, reusability is one of the key attributes of open access. While gratis OA
grants access rights to all, the question of what reuse rights are included in libre OA is more
complex. A growing number of research funders and organisations now require not just thatsome version of funded research articles are made freely available, but that they arelicensed using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence to facilitate redistribution
and reuse with the fewest restrictions (e.g. RCUK, 2012).
However, publishers take a widely varying approach to what reuse rights they allow uponmaking articles open access. Many publishers switched from the CC-BY-NC to the CC-BY
licence as their default for open access articles to align with funder and institutional OA
requirements. By dropping the “non-commercial” restriction, publishers forego revenues fromcommercial reuse of their publications (such as reprints for pharmaceutical companies andother rights income, which are an important source of income for medical journals); tocompensate for lost revenue, some publishers have responded by charging more for CC-BY
licensing than for CC-BY-NC.
UUK (2017) found that all the major publishers of fully-OA journals allow or require thepublication of articles under a CC BY licence, meaning the version of record can be freely
shared on other sites and platforms. The balance between those making this a requirement
versus those merely allowing CC BY is almost evenly split. By contrast, 90% of hybrid
journals allow the use of a CC BY licence (sometimes depending on the payment of anadditional fee) while only 10% require it. CC BY is not a requirement for any of the fully-OA
and hybrid titles popular with UK authors in the arts, humanities and social sciences; but it isa requirement for OA articles in half or more of such journals in science, technology,
engineering and medicine (STEM) subjects.
Figure 29

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3.2

October 2018

Open access publishingThis section considers the various business models employed to publish scholarly articles
free of access restrictions on publishers’ platforms, as summarised in Figure 30 below.
Figure 30 - Overview of open access business models

3.2.1 Gold APC and author fees
A growing number of journals make their entire contents freely available immediately on
publication (full open access journals) using supply-side payments. Generally, thesepayments take the form of an article publication charge (APC) levied by journals at the pointof publication, and it is up to authors (or frequently their research funder or institution) tomake the payment. System-wide efficient systems for payment and tracking of APCs remain
a work-in-progress (Pinhasi et al, 2018), but a number of publishers have developed
dedicated systems for this purpose, such as Wiley’s Open Access Dashboard.120 Meanwhileothers have adopted third-party solutions such as the Copyright Clearance Center’s
RightsLink OA Agreement Manager.121
Increasingly, these systems seek not only tosimplify payment mechanisms, but also to standardise and streamline the collection of
associated metadata to enable monitoring and compliance. Publishers have also introduced
alternative APC payment systems to reduce the high volume of low-value transactions
associated with the APC model. These include institutional memberships, which entitle
institution’s authors to publish for free or at a reduced rate, and prepayments, which allow for
discounted advance purchase of a defined number of APCs. Moreover, some journals vary
APC prices by differentiating between basic publishing service and additional paid-for
services (such as rich media, longer mss and so forth).
Publishers also use a range of other author-based charges, summarised in Table 4. Gold
APC and other supply-side publishing models provide immediate universal access toscholarly content using a business model where revenue scales in line with increases in
research output. However, arriving at a level of APC pricing which is considered sustainable
120

https://authorservices.wiley.com/open-science/open-access/for-institutions-and-funders/accountdashboard.html
121 http://www.copyright.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/OA-Agreement-Manager-Product-Sheet1.pdf

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for both research organisations and publishers, as well as being responsive to market forces,
is hard, and has been an obstacle to even wider adoption. Further challenges arise from thefact that a shift from subscriptions to APCs would result in a redistribution of costs from alarge number of research consumers to a smaller number of research producers, as the Pay
It Forward project has demonstrated (University of California Libraries, 2016). Waivers or
discounts are also needed to ensure authors in low-income countries are not excluded fromthe publication process through their inability to meet the cost of APCs. These issues are
considered further in section 3.6 Transitioning to a sustainable open access market.

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Table 4 – Author-based payment models

Model

Description

ExamplesArticle publication charge(APC)

Fee levied on acceptance tocover costs of publication
and related services. Various
discounts and waivers arecommonWidespread

Page & other publication
charges

Additional charges levied on
top of basic APC, e.g. formss longer than specified
limits, inclusion of colour/richmedia, etc

Science Advances (AAAS);
PhysRevX; Some hybrid
journals where colour
charges are standard

Prepayments

Block purchase of APCs in
return for discounts

Taylor & Francis

Institutional memberships

A package of other relevant
models such as institutionalbased discounts,
prepayment, bundling,
offsetting, etc.

BMC; PLOS

Individual membership

Individuals purchasememberships for one-off fees(tiered); all coauthors must
be members (up to maximum
number); members required
to participate (e.g. via peer
review) to remain in goodstanding
Often intended as transitional
supportratherthanapermanent model
Discounted (or zero) APCs

PeerJ

APCs supported by thirdparty

Submission fees

Supported by societies,
institutions, foundations, etc.
Non-refundable fee payableon submission regardless ofoutcome of peer review,
typically low value (e.g. USD
20-90 per article)
A potentially viable model forhigh-rejection rate journals

Some BMC transfers-in;
MedKnow; Versita (DeGruyter Open); eLife (atpresent)

Cultural Anthropology;
Hereditas; JMIR (submission
fees are notably morecommon in subscriptionbased journals than gold OA
journals)

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Flipped journals
Converting a journal from subscriptions to open access is known as “flipping” the businessmodel. Following the example set by Nucleic Acids Research in 2005,122 the Open AccessDirectory123 now lists 280 examples of journals that flipped their business model. Meanwhile,a review of Elsevier journals suggested that there were 432 immediate OA titles out of 2,642
journals (16.4%), but that only 42 journals flipped to an OA business model between 2013
and 2017.124
A recent study (Solomon et al 2016) indicates that flipping is a long process that requires
careful planning and preparation. The low number of flipped journals can be explained by anumber of factors. First of all, the business case for flipping the journal is not always clear.
Conditions that can push journals to consider flipping include: a modest subscription
revenue; expected longer term growth in authorship than in subscriptions; higher rejection
rates; attractiveness to authors; available funding for OA in the discipline; the volume ofexisting hybrid articles; and the ratio of current revenues to published articles (Jones 2014a).
Secondly, publishers must consider the consequences of flipping for their authors andreaders. For instance, flipping to a Gold APC business model would likely reduce thenumber of submissions from authors, for instance, because they had not budgeted for APC
costs in their research grants. In the short term the shortfall in supply may even decrease
article views and citations, and therefore the journal impact factor (Solomon et al 2016).
Engaging with the community to understand how authors and funders will react to journal
flipping, and what readership can be gained, is therefore a prerequisite to making a decision
to flip a journal.
Finally, a number of additional variables affect individual decisions on whether or not to flip ascholarly journal (adapted from Solomon et al, 2016):
•
•
•
•
•

The type of organization that owns and controls the journal
The transition mode (direct or via some intermediate stage)
The publishing platform (in-house or outsourced)
The way in which the funding of the converted journal is envisaged.
Pressure from research funders, institutions and authors.

3.2.2 Gold - no APC
Another common OA publishing model is so called ‘Gold no-APC’ (also referred to as‘Platinum’125 and ‘Diamond OA’126): open access journals that do not use publication
charges. Over 70% of the full OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals do
not use publication charges, and although the number of articles published in gold no-APC
journals is likely to be lower (e.g. Dallmeier-Tiessen et al 2010), the scale of this publishingmodel is nevertheless significant. It is particularly popular in China, where 91% of OA
journals published by Chinese learned societies did not charge APCs in 2013 (Montgomery
and Ren 2018), and in the humanities and social sciences, where research funding is much
lower than in the experimental sciences (Edwards 2014) and academics are resistant to the
APC model (Mandler 2014).

122

https://academic.oup.com/nar/pages/Open_Access_Initiative
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journals_that_converted_from_TA_to_OA
124
https://figshare.com/articles/Elsevier_embargo_periods_2013_2015/1554748/11
125
https://www.martineve.com/2012/08/31/open-access-needs-terminology-to-distinguish-betweenfunding-models-platinum-oagold-non-apc/
126
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/06/01/diamond-open-access-societies-mission/
123

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No-APC journals most commonly rely on sponsorships from institutions (research performing
organisations, research funders, libraries, learned societies, museums, hospitals, for-profit or
non-profit organisations, foundations, government agencies and so forth). The subsidies
provided by an institution can be financial or in-kind (facilities, equipment, or personnel).
They cover a substantial part of the journal’s publishing costs and may be provided on a
one-off or continuing basis. As Anderson (2018) has observed, the downside of this model isthe opportunity cost to the sponsor of allocating scarce resources to publishing, inpreference to other activities.
An important variation of the sponsorship model is consortia funding (also known as librarypartnership funding). This involves the creation of ad hoc library consortia for the collective
funding of open access publishing. For instance, the journal Paleontologia Electronica is an
open access publication owned by a non-profit organization (Coquina Press) which is funded
by a consortium of learned societies and IT support from several research organisations.127
Other consortia take on much more ambitious projects with the aim of publishing open
access research from a wide range of journals, generally within a discipline or field of
research.
For example, the Open Library of the Humanities (OLH) uses the library partnership subsidy
model to fund its PLOS-inspired humanities megajournal platform. OLH is outspoken about
its objective of making research in the humanities (which is generally unfunded) more
affordable by providing an alternative to both subscriptions and APCs. Annual charges are
between $600 and $2500 per library, depending on size and geographic region. Assuming
200 participating libraries and more than 250 articles are published per year, the cost per
published article per institution is around $3.70.128
Another notable example is SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishingin Particle Physics)129, a consortium led by CERN that supports the conversion of the leading
titles in high-energy physics from subscriptions to open access. SCOAP3 centrally pays
publishers from a common fund at CERN, to which libraries, library consortia, research
institutions and funding agencies jointly contribute. All articles funded by SCOAP3 appear in
the SCOAP3 repository upon publication, alongside the publishers’ own platforms. To control
costs, SCOAP3 and the publishers agree a fixed maximum yearly payment for the entirety ofarticles published in each journal, commensurate with an estimated number of articles.130
The initiative has been largely successful as most leading titles have been converted,following a process of soliciting library pledges and a subsequent tender. However, after the
first phase (2014-2017), prolonged negotiations with publishers for a second phase (20172019) saw two journals drop out and three new ones join. These complications, for a
consortium involving just a handful of journals, make it hard to see how such a model could
easily be scaled up. SCOAP3 now involves 11 journals from six publishers and has
published 19,116 OA articles since its inception in 2014. Articles funded by SCOAP3 will beavailable open access in perpetuity, under a CC-BY licence, while publishers will reduce
their subscription fees accordingly.

127

http://palaeo-electronica.org/owner.htm
https://about.openlibhums.org/wp-content/uploads/LPS.pdf
129
http://scoap3.org/
130
https://scoap3.org/phase2-journals/
128

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Table 5Model / strategy

Description

Examples131

Sponsorship (no-APC models)Sponsors cover costs with nointention to adopt APCs

The Journal of Electronic
Publishing (JEP)
The Berkeley Planning Journal
Electronic Transactions on
Numerical Analysis (ETNA)
Clinical Phytoscience (Springer)
Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies(Wiley)Consortia funding

Creation of new funding
consortia for the collective
funding of open accesspublishing

Open Library of the Humanities
SCOAP3OpenEdition
Knowledge Unlatched(monographs)

The sustainability question for no-APC journals and platforms
Gold no-APC journals and platforms’ reliance on sponsorships, subsidies, volunteer labourand other kinds of external support makes it difficult to scale their operations, as higher
submissions result in increased costs that are not necessarily matched by increased
revenues. Individual publications therefore often rely on digital platforms that either host Goldno-APC journals or publish OA articles directly, whose economies of scale and stable
funding streams provide greater financial stability (Johnson et al 2017).
Many gold no-APC journals and platforms struggle to develop a sustainable and scalable
business model. One of the unresolved issues with this model is the “free-rider” problem, thefact that libraries have access to a research publication irrespective of their contribution.
Many libraries are keen to support open access initiatives, but without some restraining
features (e.g. multi-year contracts), such contributions are at risk of falling prey to budgetary
constraints, especially where the alternative is to cut subscriptions to other, equally valuable,
content.
Aside from grants and subsidies, no-APC journals and platforms have deployed a variety ofrevenue sources, including advertising, commercial reprints, subscriptions to print editions,
crowdfunding and premium services. Among them, the sale of additional services under afreemium model has demonstrated some scalability. The OECD (Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development) uses freemium open access to publish its research results(books, working papers, datasets and journal articles), while OpenEdition has adopted thesame model for access to electronic resources in the humanities and social science. The
basic service makes content available in a read-only version and includes discovery, citation,
sharing and embedding tools. Subscription to premium services gives access to copy-paste,
download, local printing, and file download in various formats (PDF, Excel, ePub). Premium
subscribers may also benefit from downloadable MARC records, usage reports, customer
support and on-site training. To date the freemium model has not any gained traction
amongst STM journals, however.

131

For a longer list of examples see http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_journal_business_models

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3.2.3 Gold – Hybrid
The Gold - Hybrid model combines supply-side payments at article level (in the form of APCslevied on authors, institutions or funders) with demand-side payments at journal level (paidfor by libraries). From the perspective of publishers, the model provides a relatively low-riskway for established subscription journals to make at least some of their content open accesswithout jeopardising existing revenue models. Gold – Hybrid allows the market (i.e. authors,or their funders) to decide what value they place on open access, but is often overlooked insurveys of the landscape, which tend to focus on journal level data.132
Nearly all the major journal publishers, both commercial and not-for-profit, now offer hybrid
schemes. A recent UUK analysis shows that 45% of the journals listed in Scopus now use aGold - Hybrid business model (UUK 2017). Bjork (2017) estimates that, between 2009 and2016, the number of journals offering the hybrid option increased from around 2,000 toalmost 10,000 and the number of hybrid articles grew from 8,000 to 45,000. Nevertheless,shifting from a subscription to a hybrid business model has not generally resulted inwidespread uptake of the OA option by authors, perhaps reflecting the relatively low level ofauthor interest in OA (see section 2.14.3 Author perceptions of, and attitudes towards open
access). Piwowar et al (2018) found that only 4.3% of articles indexed in Web of Sciencefrom hybrid journals are made open access.
Figure 31 – The evolution of hybrid articles (Bjork 2017)

Older studies reveal that uptake of hybrid articles differs substantially across disciplines. Bird
(2010) showed that while overall uptake was 6%, this ranged from 2% in the humanities andsocial sciences, through 4% in medicine, 6% in mathematics, to 10% in the life sciences.
Individual journals, however, had much higher percentages (for instance, Nature
Communications had 40% uptake of hybrid articles, which no doubt was a major
consideration behind the subsequent decision to make the title fully open access).

132

See for example the European Commission’s Open Science Monitor:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/open-science/open-science-monitor/trends-open-access-publications_en,
which at the time of writing does not fully reflect the level of hybrid OA, and Walt Crawford’s (2018)
definition of ‘serious OA’ as limited to those titles included in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

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Journals employ a variety of revenue sources. For instance, The BMJ makes its research
articles immediately available through APC payment (around £3000/$4800 per article) but
requires a subscription to access other “value added” content such as commissioned review
articles, editorials etc. Moreover, in 2016 The BMJ Journal generated £2.77 million revenue
from product advertising, reprint sales and commercial sponsorship (12% of total revenues).

Offsetting deals
A common objection to the hybrid APC model is what has been termed ‘double dipping’ - theperception that publishing a hybrid journal means getting paid twice, once by the author in
return for the publishing service, and then again by the subscriber in return for access to thearticle (Anderson, R., 2018). Publishers have long refuted this, with many issuing formal
policies or statements outlining their approaches,133 while Kent Anderson (2017) has argued
that the multiple revenue streams involved in hybrid publishing can act to spread costs anddecrease the burden on any single payer. In practice, while publishers have globally
discounted the subscription rates of journals which also benefit from APC revenues for anumber of years, uneven take up of hybrid to date has seen some countries and institutions
experience increased costs (UUK 2017). Meanwhile the corresponding savings on global
subscriptions are widely distributed and may be obscured by price changes arising frominflationary pressures, increasing article volumes and a range of other factors.
In response, several publishers have entered into local offset agreements designed toreduce the overall cost faced by research organisations or consortia. Under an offset
agreement, open access publication costs are offset by lower subscription costs. There aredifferent approaches to achieving this. Some offset agreements reduce the cost of APCs andsome reduce the amount an institution pays for a subscription in proportion to the amount it
pays for APCs. Some publishers offer credits against future APCs when subscriptions aretaken out; others offer credits against future subscription payments when APCs are paid; athird approach bundles subscriptions with future APCs for modest additional payments.
These approaches to offsetting have been monitored in the UK through a review of offsetting
deals between six major publishers (Wiley, Taylor & Frances, Springer, SAGE, Institute ofPhysics and Royal Society of Chemistry) and a consortium of 38 UK universities. Lawson(2015, 2016)134 found that all deals focused on the total combined expenditure and estimatedthe total value of offsetting for the UK higher education sector at £8 million in 2016 (anaverage of 13.8% of the total publication costs). However, the combined costs ofsubscriptions and APCs rose by an average 11% per annum between 2013 and 2016 (UUK2017) - suggesting that the value of offsetting for participating institutions should at best be
considered cost avoidance rather than costs saving.
The Jisc analysis (Lawson 2016) also showed that deals providing offset credits for APC
spend claimed against subscription costs (such as the Wiley deal) benefit research-intensive
institutions more, whereas offset deals that provide both a discount on APCs and access to alarge collection of journals (such as the Springer deal) are beneficial for less researchintensive institutions as well.

133

See for example those of Elsevier: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing#Dipping, Oxford
University Press: https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/oxford_open_faqs#elevenand Sage: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/subscription-pricing-for-hybrid-journals
134
The data collection exercise, managed by Jisc, aimed to identify the “Total cost of ownership” ofscholarly communication

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Table 6 UK offsetting deals and discounts on publication (adapted from Lawson,2016).

Total cost of
publication

Offset against total
cost of publication

Publisher

Deal

Wiley

25% discount on £13,486,424
APCs plus ‘offset
credits’ on total APC
spend

4.2%

Taylor & Frances

75% discountAPCs

on £7,728,645

5.3%

Springer

APC waiver when £6,712,913
publishing on 1,600
Springer journals andaccessto2,500
journals

36%

SAGE

APC
reduced£200 per article

3.5%

IOP

90%
of
APC £1,417,690
expenditure is offset

9%

RSC

APC waiver on all £1,085,259
RSC journals30%

to £3,982,992

Approaches to collective negotiations have been tried elsewhere, with mixed success.
Notably, the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany commissioned an initiative toconclude nationwide licensing agreements for the entire portfolio of electronic journals frommajor academic publishers from the 2017 licence year. The initiative, known as Projekt
DEAL,135 is now supported by a large consortium of German Universities and aims to relieve
the financial burden on individual institutions through collective negotiation. Its approachmarks a decisive change in academia-publisher subscription negotiations.
Although Projekt DEAL has reached an impasse in the negotiations with Elsevier at the timeof writing, as has a similar initiative in Sweden,136 it has inspired other European countries to
explore similar approaches. In December 2017, the French Ministry of Higher Education,
Research and Innovation, EDP Sciences and Couperin.org the national consortium foracademics in France, signed a 5-year open access deal. The deal allows authors from
French institutions participating in the agreement to publish their articles under an open
access CC-BY license in a large selection of EDP Sciences journals regardless of whether
their institution has a current subscription to the publisher.137 In January 2018, the Finnish
university consortium FinELib signed a three-year agreement with Elsevier for nationwide
subscription access and open access. The deal applies to 13 Finnish universities, 11
research institutions and 11 universities of applied sciences, and has a total value of around135

https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/german-and-swedish-libraries-shrug-elseviershutdown
137
http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hub_feeds/119/feed_items/2335383
136

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€27 million. The deal grants subscription access to around 1,850 journals and a 50%
discount on APC cost.138
Offsetting has yet to gain significant momentum in North America, where the decentralised
nature of higher education results in no common policy or incentive structure to govern suchdevelopments (Schonfeld, 2018). Nevertheless, a read-and-publish agreement was signed in2018 between MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the University of California
Libraries (2018) have established an Offsetting Task Force to pursue offsetting agreements,
including with “big deal” publishers like Wiley, SpringerNature, and Elsevier.139

3.2.4 Delayed (open) access
Under this approach, the journal makes its contents freely available after a period, typically
6–12, or in some cases 24, months. A growing number of journals (particularly in the life
science and biomedical areas) have adopted delayed access policies, though for many OA
advocates the delay, and the ability of the publisher to revoke access at any time, means thisapproach cannot be considered 'true' OA. The best known proponents of delayed accesswere the DC Principles Group of society publishers using the HighWire system, primarily inthe life sciences. Although the group’s free access articles are no longer shown separately,
the HighWire platform currently hosts over 2.4 million full-text articles that are open access,of which the majority are from delayed access journals.140
The delayed OA business model depends on the embargo period being long enough not tocompromise subscription sales, so is typically adopted in rapidly developing and competitive
fields. A 2013 study by Laakso and Björk identified 492 journals using this model, publishinga combined total of 111,312 articles in 2011. About 78% of these articles were made open
access within 12 months from publication, with 85% becoming available within 24 months.
Delayed OA journals have average citation rates that are twice as high as closed
subscription journals, reflecting the fact that many were leading society journals in theirfields. The authors concluded that delayed OA journals constituted an important segment of
the openly available scholarly journal literature, both by their sheer article volume as well as
by including a substantial proportion of high impact journals (Laakso & Björk, 2013).
A more recent study by Piwowar et al (2018) reaffirms the significance of delayed OA but
notes that such articles are frequently made free-to-read, but without an open licence. They
refer to this content as ‘bronze open access’, and report that in 2016 bronze articles
accounted for more than 40% of all research articles. Because access can also be timelimited or restricted to a certain version of the article (such as pre-print or accepted
manuscript), it is questionable whether these articles represent a sustainable source of open
access literature.
The viability of the delayed open access business model rests on the willingness of libraries
to continue to subscribe to journals even though the bulk of their (historic) content is freely
available. The arguments on these points are essentially the same as those applied to selfarchiving, with the caveat that delayed access to the version of record seems more likely tolead to cancelled subscriptions than access to authors' accepted manuscripts.

3.2.5 Open access publishing platforms
As well as categorising business models, it may also be helpful to describe the main types of
OA publishing models. Most open access articles are published in ‘standard’ topical research
journals using an OA or hybrid business model. OA business models are increasingly the138

http://finelib.fi/finelib-and-elsevier-agreement-access-to-scholarly-journals-and-50-percentdiscount-of-article-processing-charges/
139
https://libraries.mit.edu/news/royal-society-chemistry-3/27769/
140
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl

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norm for new topical journals. Older and more established titles tend to use the hybridbusiness model, whilst ‘flipped’ journals are still relatively uncommon.
However, the spread of open access has also been boosted by the development ofalternative publishing platforms. This section will discuss two examples of such platforms:
megajournals and funders’ platforms.

Megajournals
A growing part of the open access market is the “megajournal” sector. This publishing model,
pioneered by PLoS One, has proved highly successful and arguably represents one of few
innovations to the scholarly journal model to have had significant widespread impact.
Wakeling et al (2017a) identify some common characteristics of megajournals.
First, megajournals have a broad subject scope, encompassing either multiple disciplines ora single large discipline such as medicine or physics (the authors note the emergence of‘mini megajournals’ that have a narrower disciplinary scope). Secondly, they use a rapid“non-selective” peer review based on “soundness not significance”, i.e. selecting papers on
the basis that science is soundly conducted rather than more subjective criteria of impact,significance or relevance to a particularly community. Megajournals typically have a policy of
keeping review straightforward, for instance avoiding where possible requests to conduct
additional experiments and resubmit. In addition, the model has been associated with the‘cascade’ peer review model, with the resubmission of articles rejected by selective journals
to the same publisher's megajournal. Wakeling et al (2017a) noted a clear consensus thatthe selling point of the cascade model for authors was the efficiency of the submission
process.
Third, they note that a large article output is often perceived as a key trait of megajournals,
but is in fact secondary as not all megajournals are ‘big’. In 2017, the combined outputs of 11
prominent mega-journals totaled 56,152 articles (see fig 32 below). However, while PLoS
and Scientific reports publish several thousand articles each year, most other mega journals
only publish a few hundred articles (Spezi et al 2016).
Fourth, megajournals are open access and charge relatively low APCs (reflecting a ‘lighter’peer review process and a business model based on quantity). Spezi et al (2016) note thatmega-journals’ average APC fee of US$1,300 is more than the average APC for fully OA
journals but substantially less than that of top ranking fully OA journals (ranging from
US$2,500 to US$5,000) or hybrid journals (US$3,000).
There are examples of megajournals adopting alternative revenue models, such as PeerJ’s$99 pay-once-publish-for-life membership plan. However, PeerJ has recently pivoted
towards a more typical traditional APC and institutional-support business model, in
conjunction with an editorial-driven publishing model (Davis, 2018).

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Figure 32 Open access megajournal output 2006-2017 (Updated from Spezi et al, 2016,using Scopus data)

The success of the megajournal model has led to widespread emulation by other publishers.
Figure 32 shows a rapid growth in article outputs across a sample of 14 megajournals,
although there are signs the rate of increase is now slackening. Furthermore, the growthrate of individual titles differ, with Scientific Reports marking the most rapid growth while
PLOS One has seen a sharp decline in overall output, partly explained by a lower
acceptance rate.141 Evidence to date suggests the megajournal is unlikely to become thedominant form some commentators predicted in the early part of this decade.142 Bjork (2015)
has observed that a lack of motivated, unpaid reviewers , and a lack of branding for authors,
are likely to constrain further growth of the megajournal format. Nevertheless, the constantincrease in research output around the world suggests that we will see a continued increasein the number of megajournals over time (Anderson, 2018).

Open access publishing platforms
A recent development in the open access landscape is that of open access, open peerreview scientific publishing platforms. These platforms allow for articles to be published firstand peer reviewed after publication by invited referees, and make the peer reviewer's names
and comments visible on the site. As part of an open science model, the data behind eacharticle are also published and are downloadable. OA platforms are intended to accelerate thepublication of open access articles and open data.

141

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/06/scientific-reports-overtakes-plos-one-as-largestmegajournal/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitc
hen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29
142Peter Binfield, then publisher of PLOS One, predicted in 2011 that ‘in 2016, almost 50% of the
STM literature could be published in approximately 100 mega journal’, see
https://www.slideshare.net/PBinfield/ssp-presentation4112

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The primary example is F1000Research, an organisation that created a platform for life
scientists, offering immediate publication of articles and other research outputs without
editorial bias. The organisation then expanded its offering creating F1000Prime, which
publishes article recommendations in biology and medicine from around 6,000 scientists andclinical researchers and over 5,000 junior researchers. Author uptake to date has been
limited, with the platform publishing less than 700 articles in the 2016 and 2017 years,
according to Scopus data. Nevertheless, F1000Research has attracted high levels ofinterest, particularly from research funders (see below). Emerald became the first publisher
to partner with F1000, announcing in July 2018 that it would develop its own open research
publishing platform – Emerald Open Research – using the technology, infrastructure andeditorial services provided by F1000.

Funder publishing initiatives
A quite different approach is represented by the launch (in late 2012) of the journal eLife143
by three research funders, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society
and the Wellcome Trust. Explicitly setting out to create an open access competitor to theleading general science journals (Cell, Nature, Science), the eLife journal is described by its
founders as the first step in a programme to catalyse innovation in research communication(see also 2.13.1 Open access and possible cost savings).
Building on the technology of open access platforms such as F1000 Research, research
funders such as the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust have also started creating
proprietary publishing platforms as a way of disseminating their own research. Wellcome
Open Research144 aims to publish articles within a week after submission following a basic
check by an editorial team. The article is then available for immediate viewing and citation.
At the same time an open peer review system and user commenting ensure the quality of
the research. Reviews are published alongside the article, which can then be revised by theauthor for further review. Currently the platform hosts 238 articles from Wellcome-funded
researchers, also accepting methods, software tools systematic reviews and data notes.
In recent months, other funders such as the Irish Health Research Board have adopted theF1000 platform, while the European Commission has issued an invitation to tender for a
publishing platform for scientific articles as a service for Horizon 2020 beneficiaries. Suchplatforms offer the potential to increase OA uptake, control costs of OA, lower administrative
burden on researchers, and demonstrate funders’ commitment to fostering open practices.
However, their long-term success will depend on funders resolving concerns over potential
conflicts of interest, difficulties of scale, potential lock-in and issues of the branding ofresearch (Ross-Hellauer et al, 2018).

3.2.6 Open Access Books
The penetration of open access in the academic book market is considerably slower
compared to scholarly journals for two interconnected reasons. On one hand is a supply-side
problem: digitisation in this market is an incomplete revolution, with many academic books
and monographs still not available in a digital form. On the other hand is a demand problem,with university libraries and academics still largely relying on print versions. Nevertheless,changes in reading technology and (such as enhanced eBooks) and the digitisation ofresearch workflows is changing the market. Increase book digitisation has spearheaded a
gradual move towards an acceptance of open access among authors (Watkinson 2016).
Springer has created a portfolio of over 200 peer-reviewed, fully open access journals andover 500 open access books covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, thehumanities and social sciences, called SpringerOpen. A report commissioned by the143
144

http://www.elifesciences.org/
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/

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publisher showed a correlation between open access and as much as seven times more
downloads (Springer Nature 2017).
Despite strong year-on-year growth, the OA book market is still less than 1% of all scholarly
and professional e-book publishing: according to some estimates there were only around
10,000 titles in 2016, with humanities and social sciences (HSS) accounting for almost threequarters of all OA books published. In the US, support for humanities publishers from the
Mellon Foundation has greatly advanced open access among humanities book publishers.
Among the more successful OA book publishers are The University of California Press145
and the University College London Press (UCL Press), launched as an open-access onlypress and now offering services to other presses with the same aims.146 Among commercial
publishers, Ubiquity Press has an important role in supporting university and society-based
publishing and driving growth in the sector. Ubiquity also works outside English-speaking
countries where growth in open access publishing among not-for-profits is slower.
Commercial publishers also produce open access books. Pioneers like Bloomsbury
Academic originally built their business models on the idea that sales of print books would be
increased by offering a digital open access equivalent.147 However, the dominant businessmodel became charging Book Publishing Charges (BPC). A typical BPC is currently around£10,000. Palgrave, which is the humanities and social sciences imprint of Springer Nature,
have a similar arrangement: their BPC is £11,000. Springer, Taylor & Francis/ Routledge
also have OA book options.
These charges and the current lack of funding at this level for book authors is hampering the
spread of open access in the academic book market. In the UK, renewed attention has been
paid on the subject since the Research Excellence Framework has confirmed thatmonographs submitted for assessment must be open access. The British Academy (2018)has explored this problem at length without any clear conclusion. The solution that iscurrently viewed as most attractive is by pooling library resources to provide alternative
publishing paths for OA books. Started by Knowledge Unlatched in 2012, this model relies
on libraries paying to make a book open access on a dedicated publishing platform.148 A
number of publishing platforms for open access books have since emerged in the market,
each with its own distinct business model. Among them, the French platform OpenEdition
has acquired a leading position with a catalogue of over 6,000 e-books in the humanities andsocial sciences, most of which are open access. It sustains its operation through a freemium
model, whereby books are made freely available online but libraries can choose to pay forpremium services such as downloadable file formats. Other platforms in the sector havesmaller catalogues, ranging from a few hundred to just over 2,000, but the platform sector issteadily growing its catalogue and readership.

3.3

Open access via self-archiving

The “Green” route to open access is by self-archiving the accepted manuscript of the article,
and making it publicly accessible, either immediately upon publication or at the end of anembargo period set by the publisher. Self-archiving has no independent business model, andit relies on the assumption that making accepted manuscripts freely available will notcompromise the sales of versions of record.
Self-archiving simply consists of depositing the full text of the accepted manuscript in an
open repository or other open archive. Where the full text is not deposited, the metadata of
the article is deposited alongside a link to the full text (e.g. as hosted on another repository145

https://www.luminosoa.org
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press
147
https://creativecommons.org/2008/10/20/an-interview-with-frances-pinter-of-bloomsbury-academic/148
http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org
146

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October 2018or on the journal’s website). Self-archiving is traditionally done by the author but isincreasingly undertaken by others on their behalf, such as publishers, librarians or researchsupport staff.
Typically, repositories are run by research institutions to preserve and present their own
research (institutional repository), or they aggregate and present relevant research in a given
discipline (subject repository). Additionally, repositories can be created by research funders
and government agencies for the purpose of aggregating and presenting the research they
have funding. Other online postings by authors in academic social networks, on theirpersonal websites and on third-party websites are not typically considered as ‘OA selfarchiving’, but have become an increasingly important means of authors sharing content inrecent years.

3.3.1 Global uptake of Green OA
OpenDOAR estimates that a total of 3,520 repositories are currently active and curated.149 It
also found that this number has significantly increased over the past four years, continuing a
trend that had already been observed in the years prior to 2014. Growth was recorded ineach of the following categories (data as of April 2018):• Institutional repositories: 85.9% (3,023 repositories, up from 2,257 in 2014)• Disciplinary or subject-based repositories: 8.6% (304 repositories up from 296 in2014)• Aggregating: 3.1% (108 up from 98 in 2014)• Governmental: 2.4% (85 up from 77 in 2014)

In absolute terms, growth was lowest among disciplinary repositories and highest among
institutional ones, with as many as 766 new repositories added to the database since
December 2014.
Repositories contain a wide variety of content types, including: journal articles, theses, bookchapters, working papers, conference papers, monographs and data. However, while most
repositories listed in OpenDOAR (2,505) accept journal articles, only half this number
contain non-peer reviewed publications (books, conference papers, working papers etc).

149

http://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/

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Figure 33: repository content by type (source: OpenDOAR)

3.3.2 Institutional repositories
An institutional repository (IR) is an online database for collecting and preserving – in digitalform – the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. For auniversity, this would include materials such as research journal articles (i.e. author’s original
and accepted manuscripts), and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also
include other digital assets generated in the course of normal academic life, such asadministrative documents, course notes, or learning objects. IR software enables the article
metadata to be harvested by dedicated search engines such as OAIster or Google Scholar.
This distributed search allows users to find articles of interest regardless of which
institutional repository hosts them.
The three main objectives for having an institutional repository are:
To increase the visibility of institutional research output;
To store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished orotherwise easily lost ("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports).
To help researchers comply with research funder open access mandates.
The spread of institutional repositories dates back to the early 2000s, with the developmentof Eprints software at Southampton and the launch of DSpace at MIT. As seen above, thetotal number of IRs has grown rapidly since then and so have the number of article deposits
and downloads (UUK 2017). However, article downloads from institutional repositories arestill very low relative to levels of traffic on publisher platforms and academic social networks.
Whereas a few years ago researchers had no or little knowledge of, or experience with,institutional repositories and were unfamiliar with self-archiving opportunities (Singeh 2013,
Wallace 2012), more recent studies showed that academics are becoming familiar with theconcept but remain disengaged from the post-publication process (Odell et al 2017). Harnad(2015) argues that IRs are created more in reaction to downward pressure from research
funders or institutional management than upward pressure from authors, and the adoption of
institutional mandates is necessary to achieve higher deposit rates.
For researchers, IRs are arguably less attractive than subject repositories and social
networking sites, which are often used as discovery tools bringing clear visibility benefits
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within their epistemic community. By contrast, IRs are rarely used in research and they areoften not optimised for discoverability. Author incentives to archive their research in suchrepositories are therefore limited. The future of IRs is unclear, with a continuing debate
between those who see them primarily as part of the digital infrastructure of the university,
perhaps playing an important role in managing grey literature, research data and otherinstitutional content, and those who see their role in terms of scholarly communication andpublishing (Albanese 2009, Poynder 2016).

3.3.3 Subject repositories
Subject repositories have been around for much longer than institutional repositories. Björk
reviewed the status of subject repositories in 2013, concluding that they catered to a strong
market demand when they first emerged but the development of Internet search engines andthe tightening up of journal publisher OA policies seems to be slowing their growth (Björk
2014). The leading subject repositories do appear to be in rude health, however, attracting
growing numbers of citations both within and beyond the core disciplines they serve (Li et al,2015).
This section summarises three examples of subject repositories with wide variations in
scope, function and cost - arXiv, RePEc, and PubMed Central. arXiv contains mainly
authors’ accepted manuscripts; RePEc is essentially an indexing service over some 1,600
repositories; PMC is a highly centralised database, an ‘electronic library’ that converts
various input formats into structured XML and clear PDF for digital preservation.

arXiv
One of the earliest subject repositories was arXiv, 150 established in 1991 at Los Alamos byPaul Ginsparg and now hosted by the Cornell Computing and Information Science, following
its move from the Cornell University Library in September 2018. arXiv (which pre-dates theworld wide web) was designed to make efficient and effective the existing practice of sharing
article pre-prints in high-energy physics. Perhaps because it built on this existing “pre-print
culture” and because high-energy physicists were early adopters of electronic networks, it
was enthusiastically adopted by this community, so much so that virtually all articles in thefield are self-archived as at least the author’s original manuscript. arXiv has now expanded
its coverage to some other areas such as mathematics, computer science, quantitative
biology, statistics or economics albeit with less comprehensive coverage. It currently holds
over 1.3 million preprints, receiving around 10,000 submissions per month.
As the arXiv has grown (Figure 34) its host organisation (now Cornell, originally LANL) has
struggled to sustain the funding requirements. In January 2013 arXiv therefore introduced a
new funding model151 consisting of three sources of revenue: cash and in-kind support byCornell Library; grant funding from the Simons Foundation; and collective funding from themember institutions, i.e. institutions in high energy physics that have voluntarily agreed tomake contributions toward the costs for a five-year period. The membership costs arematched with $300,000 per year by the Simons Foundation to keep membership fees low.
arXiv currently counts over 210 institutions as its members. Beginning in 2018, arXiv added
a fourth source of revenue in the form of grant funds from foundations and agencies to assist
with special projects.152

150

http://www.arxiv.org/
See http://arxiv.org/help/support
152
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/arxivpub/20182022%3A+Sustainability+Plan+for+Classic+arXiv
151

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Figure 34: Growth in arXiv; physics and maths remain the most important subjects(Source: arxiv.org, accessed 17th April 2018)153

RePEc
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)154 was another early repository, again building on
the pre-existing culture in economics of sharing pre-publication articles known as working
papers. RePEc now holds 2.3 million research pieces from 2,800 journals and 4,500 working
paper series. It differs from arXiv in several ways: first, it is a decentralised (and volunteerbased) bibliographic database rather than a centralised repository, integrating content fromsome 1,900 archives; second, it does not contain full-text articles, that is, the journal article
records are for abstracts and bibliographic information only, although many have links to fulltext versions including to the publisher’s site for the full version. It is also different in thatpublishers collaborate with RePEc to deposit bibliographic records of their journal articles. In
many ways RePEc is thus more like a free bibliographic database than a repository, andfacilitates a variety of specialised services built using its data.

PubMed Central
A subject repository of great current interest to publishers is PubMed Central (PMC),
currently the largest single subject repository. The number of articles available on PubMed
Central rose by 56% from 2.8 million in 2012 to 4.4 million in 2016. But the number ofdownloads rose even faster by 157%, as shown in Figure 35. As a result, the average
number of downloads per article rose from 127 to 209.

153
154

https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index
http://repec.org/

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Fig. 35 - Article downloads and downloads per articles on PubMed Central (UUK,
2017)

Rather than originating in volunteer efforts from the community itself, PMC is a project of the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH). It builds on PubMed, the earlier bibliographic
database that includes Medline, by adding full text. PMC is the designated repository for
researchers funded by the NIH and other biomedical research funders. PMC has been
supported by many publishers who have voluntarily deposited on behalf of their authors
either the author’s manuscript version or in some cases the full text, which can be madeavailable immediately (for full open access journals) or after an embargo period (for delayed
open access journals). PMC has also worked with publishers to digitise back content, whichmust then be made freely available. Since 2004, PMC has taken accepted manuscripts from
authors for archiving in support of the NIH funding policy discussed below (see 3.4.1
Funders’ policies on open access).
At the time of writing there were 4.8 million research articles hosted on PMC, of which 1.94
million were in the open access subset (the others are freely available but not open accessin the sense used by PMC - released under a Creative Commons licence permitting
redistribution and reuse). Europe PubMed Central,155 formerly UK PubMed Central, is basedon PubMed Central with some additional services and functionality (McEntyre et al., 2011).
PubMed Central Canada was launched in October 2009, and provided a location for
Canadian Institutions of Health Research (CIHR)-funded researchers to deposit peerreviewed articles. It was permanently taken offline on February 2018, on the basis that only
4% of author manuscripts arising from CIHR research had been deposited since its creation,and the time and resources needed to upgrade the system to meet Government of Canada
web and security standards were prohibitive. All manuscripts were copied the National
Research Council’s digital repository.156

3.3.4 Aggregators and indexing services
CHORUSCHORUS – Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States – is an aggregator(meta-repository) that collects the metadata of documents resulting from federally funded
research. It provides an access layer on top of existing publishing platforms that links tofreely accessible journal articles. It was formed by a group of publishers and service
providers, as a non-profit public-private partnership to develop a service that would enablefunding agencies to meet the OSTP requirements.157

155

http://europepmc.org/
http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/50728.html
157
The OSTP requires federal agencies in the U.S. with more than $100M in research expenditures todevelop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public
within one year of publication. http://guides.libraries.psu.edu/c.php?g=431943&p=2949762
156

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CHORUS provides five core functions: identification, discovery, access, preservation, andcompliance with policy requirements. The service depends on the Crossref Open Funder
Registry, a standard way to report funding sources for published scholarly. When adopted bypublishers, it allows papers funded by federal agencies to be identified via CHORUS and to
be made freely accessible to the public on the publishers’ sites. Publishers considering
participating in CHORUS will have to decide whether to make available the final version ofrecord or the accepted manuscript (Cochran 2014) and if they want to choose to impose anembargo period of up to twelve months on the publication. CHORUS also allows agencies tocreate discovery portals to their content and offers “dashboards” to enable all stakeholders tomonitor public-access compliance. In addition, CHORUS partners with Portico, CLOCKSS
and other services to ensure the long-term preservation and public access to federallyfunded papers.
At the time of writing, eight US Departments and agencies, plus the Japan Science andTechnology Agency, have signed agreements with CHORUS, with pilots underway withothers.158 The largest US agency, NIH is committed to its own platform, PubMed Central.
Critics of CHORUS point to the greater functionality of PubMed Central (including full text
search and sophisticated interface and discovery tools) and see it as a way of preserving thevalue and primacy of the publisher’s platform (e.g. Eisen 2013).

SHARE
An alternative approach is offered by SHARE159 (Shared Access Research Ecosystem), a
collaborative initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association ofAmerican Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities(APLU). SHARE addresses the need for preservation and reuse of, and access to, research
outputs. In contrast to CHORUS, which assumes that OA content will remain under thefunctional control of publishers, it rests on the idea that the content will be under the control
of institutional repositories.
The service architecture consists of four layers: a notification service; registry; discovery; andmining and reuse. The first layer, “SHARE Notify”, distributes notifications about researchrelease events, in the form of a concise set of metadata to stakeholders such as funding
agencies, sponsored research offices, institutional repositories, and disciplinary repositories.
It also enables users to set up a feed to receive notifications upon the release of research
matching specified criteria based on searches of SHARE's data set. Like CHORUS, SHARE
does not store copies of research outputs but will maintain a registry of content that willsubsequently support a discovery layer, including OSF Preprints: The Open Preprint
Repository Network, launched in 2016.

RCAAP
The RCAAP (Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal) portal aims to collect,aggregate and index Open Access scientific contents from Portuguese institutional
repositories.160 It currently indexes 150,000 documents from 129 resources. The FCT(Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) - the Portuguese public agency that supports
science, technology and innovation – currently requires all research funded by them to bemade available in one of the open access repositories hosted within RCAAP. Embargo
periods are possible, but articles should be made immediately available on RCAAP. In cases
where the publisher does not allow self-archiving of the published version, the author may
deposit his final version (Accepted Manuscript). 161158

https://www.chorusaccess.org/resources/chorus-funder-participants/
http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/shared-access-research-ecosystem-share160
https://www.rcaap.pt/about.jsp
161
https://www.fct.pt/acessoaberto/
159

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RCAAP also provides support for the setting up of institutional repositories and a hosting
service for institutional repositories (SARI). For research affiliated institutions in the national
scientific system who do not have their own repository, RCAAP offers the Common
Repository to archive their results. In addition a repository validator ensures that all
repositories listed comply with RCAAP standards.162

CAS IR Grid
The CAS IR Grid (Chinese Academy of Sciences Institutional Repository Grid) is an
integrated platform linking some 100 existing institutional repositories operated by CAS
research institutes, providing author self-archiving for high-quality publishing papers. Set up
to improve visibility, discoverability and ease-of-use of the OA resources archived byindividual institutional repositories, the Grid also assists CAS in monitoring OA compliance.
English-language journal articles account for one third of the full text items (Montgomery andRen 2018) and at the time of writing, the CAS IR grid contained almost 1.2 million resources.

OpenAIRE
The EC-funded OpenAIRE project has led a number of initiatives to create a connected open
access infrastructure in Europe. In 2009, the first OpenAIRE project was funded to enable
researchers to deposit their FP7 and ERA funded research publications into Open Accessrepositories. After a three-year pilot, the project was expanded in 2011 to attract data
providers from domain-specific scientific areas. The updated platform, branded
OpenAIREplus, created a heavy-duty and collaborative service for the cross-linking of peerreviewed publications and associated datasets. The project also created a set of guidelines
for the creation of national repositories and stimulated the development of OpenAIREcompliant open access infrastructure in several European countries.
The fourth phase of the OpenAIRE project – OpenAIRE-Advance – is currently underway,
aiming to consolidate and optimize existing services, to support citizen-science and to work
together with the EOSC-hub project. OpenAIRE also developed, documented and publishedopen APIs163 allowing developers to access the metadata information space of OpenAIRE
programmatically. Moreover, OpenAIRE is running the open source infrastructure framework
D-NET Software Toolkit which assists developers in the construction and maintenance of
aggregative data infrastructures (i.e. repository aggregators) through services for thecollection, processing and provision of metadata and files.

COAR
COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) is an international association with over
100 members and partners from around the world, aiming to bring together repository
networks and the repository community.164 Inter alia, COAR intends to raise the level ofinteroperability between repositories to ensure an open science infrastructure. Initiated in
2009, the COAR Interoperability Project led a number of initiatives including controlled
vocabularies for bibliographic metadata, open metrics (to measure the impact of scholarly
publications) and the alignment of repository networks to create one seamless global
repository network, culminating in the COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository
Interoperability.165 More recently, the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group
has sought to identify the core functionalities needed to position repositories as thefoundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication. Its

162

http://projecto.rcaap.pt/index.php/lang-en/sobre-o-rcaap/enquadramento
api.openaire.eu
164
https://www.coar-repositories.org/about/coar-ev/
165
https://www.coar-repositories.org/activities/repository-interoperability/
163

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October 2018conclusions are outlined in the report Next Generation Repositories: Behaviours andTechnical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group.166

SciELOSciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is not a conventional repository but abibliographic database and a digital library of open access journals. SciELO's model is used
for cooperative electronic publishing in developing countries. Launched in 1997 originally in
Brazil, it currently operates in 12 countries with three more “in development”. As of mid-2014,it hosted 1161 open access journals containing nearly 0.5 million articles. SciELO
announced in 2013 an agreement with Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) for the
integration of the SciELO Citation Index into Web of Science.

Redalyc
Redalyc167 (Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal)
is a bibliographic database and collection of open access journals, specialising in thescientific outputs and interests of Latin America. Launched in 2002, it now covers some 930
journals and 365,000 articles. Its services include bibliometric indicators, socio-scientificnetworks, journal collections, and usage metrics.

Other tools, aggregators and indexing services
A number of services have been developed to improve discovery and use of specifically
open access content. This can be done by making metadata available in an aggregator(directory for articles or repositories) so the articles are easily accessible. While aggregators
let users browse through their indexed entries, other services will present the user with anotification if an article they are looking for is available via open access. Tables 7-9 give an
overview of the services available.
Table 7: Aggregators and databases with searching and browsing functions

Supportingorganization typeand location

Service andlaunch date

Description

OAIster(2002)

Union catalog of millions of records that Nonprofit,
represent open access resources
Global> 50m
records

BASE(2004)

Search engine
resources> 131mdocuments

CORE(2010)

Aggregator of OA content across different Academic
systems such as repositories and OA institution, UK
journals

ScienceOpen(2013)

Search and discovery platform that puts
research in context by leveraging smart
filters, topical collections and input fromthe academic community

Scilit(2013)

Database of scholarly works, including Private
workflows and services for publishers and organization,
data providers
Switzerland

166
167

for

academic

web Academic
institution,
Germany

Records>134m OA
articlesPrivate>44m article
organization,
records
Germany
and
USA
>111m
articles(19.6m OA
articles)

https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/NGR-Final-Formatted-Report-cc.pdf
http://www.redalyc.org/

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Service andlaunch date

Description

Paperity(2014)

Multidisciplinary aggregator
journals and papers

Dissemin(2017)
1findr(2018)

October 2018

Supportingorganization typeand location
ofRecords

OA Privateorganization,
PolandService detecting papers behind paywalls Nonprofit,
and inviting their authors to upload them France
to an open repository> 1,7m OA
articlesDiscovery platform including search Private
functions, OA content, custom metrics organization,and library integration services, also Canada
covering library subscriptions>90m
records(>27m OA
articles)>89m OA
articlesTable 8: Browser extensions that enable access to paywalled literature

Service andlaunch dateOpen AccessButton(2013)
Lazy Scholar(2014)
Google Scholar
Button(2015)
Kopernio(2017)
Unpaywall(2017)

Description

Supportingorganization typeand location

Records

Browser extension to discover OA copies
of paywalled academic literature

Nonprofit, UK

Notapplicable

Browser extension to discover freecopies of paywalled academic literature,also covering library subscriptions

Personal
project, USA

Not available

Browser extension to access Google
Scholar from any web page and find fulltexts on the web, also covering library
subscriptions

Privateorganization,USA

Not available

Browser extension to discover OA copies
of paywalled academic literature, also
covering library subscriptions

PrivateNot available
organization, UK

Browser extension to discover OA copies
of paywalled academic literature,including library integration services

Nonprofit, USA>19.6m OA
articles123

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Table 9: Online directories for OA

Service andlaunch date

Description

Supportingorganization typeand location

Records

DOAJ(2003)

Online directory indexing and providing Nonprofit,
access to OA journals and articles
Sweden>3.2m
articlesDirectory of academic open access Nonprofit, UK
repositories>3,700repositories

Directory of academic open access Nonprofit,
books
Netherlands>12,000
peerreviewed
books andchapters

OpenDOAR(2005)
DOAB(2013)

3.3.5 Other repositories
Over the past few years, new types of repositories have emerged. In this section, we discuss
the Social Science Research Network and two examples of funder repositories: a funderbacked repository accepting research from all sources (Zenodo); and a national repository
where all national researchers are expected to archive their research (Digital.CSIC).

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)SSRN can be classified as a subject repository, but its partnerships with a large fraction of
publishers in its field enable it to provide an indexing service in addition to its repository
capabilities (somewhat similar to the respective roles of PubMed and PubMedCentral.
Founded in 1992, the platform today hosts over 800,000 research papers across 30
disciplines, though it has its roots in the long-standing preprint culture in economics. Authors
can upload their papers to SSRN as green OA, but publishers and institutions are allowed tocharge fees for downloading their SSRN papers, hence SSRN is only partially OA, and uses
a different model to other subject repositories (Li 2015). SSRN was acquired by Elsevier in
May 2016, and since then has pursued a deeper integration with Elsevier’s other research
products, particularly Mendeley.

ZenodoZenodo - launched in 2013 - is a general purpose open access repository, supported by theEuropean Commission but available to all. Developed by CERN and the EC’s OpenAIRE
project, Zenodo aims to capture every step taken by researchers to ensure connectivity inthe scientific community. Therefore, it accepts not only publications but also images, data,
software, videos and every other digital artifact in connection with the research process,imposing no requirements on format, size or licence.168 As at April 2018 the repository
hosted 370,000 artifacts,of which 140,000 were publications, across over 1,800
communities. 94% of all items are publicly available without restrictions or embargoes.
Restrictions can be imposed on various objects during the review process to ensure safe
168

http://about.zenodo.org/

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communication between researchers and reviewers. Zenodo makes research results citable(citation information is also passed onto scholarly aggregators) and integrates them through
OpenAIRE into existing reporting lines to funding agencies.

Digital.CSIC
Digital.CSIC is the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC),
Spain’s largest institution dedicated to research. It aims to preserve and provide access to
CSIC research outputs. Founded in 2008, it contains 155,000 records from around 150
institutions and 1,300 collections. 62% of all records are open access as of 2018.
Digital.CSIC is the result of the signing of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities of CSIC in 2006 and allows all CSIC researchers
to self-archive their work in the repository.169

3.3.6 Other factors affecting self-archiving
Two factors potentially affecting the spread of self-archiving are costs and uncertainty overthe version of articles to be deposited, as well as other forms of outputs.

Costs of repositories
Swan (2016) identified two kinds of repository costs: the costs of building and runningrepositories (dissemination costs) and the costs of storing content and associated content
migration and other technical procedures involved in long-term archiving (storage andarchiving costs).
Houghton used an estimate of £100,000 for the annual costs of higher education institutional
repositories (including an element for senior management’s time in policy and advocacy
activities) (Houghton et al., 2009), although the validity of these estimates has been heavily
criticised in some quarters. There is no doubt, however, that large disciplinary repositories
are substantially more expensive than institutional ones. For instance, the UK Data Archive
cost around £3.43 million in 2010-2011 alone while the National Institutes of Health has
estimated the cost of administering its self-archiving policy via PubMedCentral at around $4
million.170 But economies of scale may permit lower per-article costs in larger repositories.
For example, Cornell University Library estimated the 2014 annual running costs for the(highly automated) arXiv at $886,000, less than $10 per new article deposited. Meanwhile,
the Croatian portal Hrcak (which hosts almost 185,000 full text articles) was developed andrun for several years as a voluntary project by the University of Zagreb’s Computing Centre
and supported with just a €20,000 grant.
No updated studies on the cost of repositories have been forthcoming in recent years. The
PEER project found it very difficult to obtain data on the set-up and running cost of
institutional repositories, with investments in platform set-up, software upgrades andrepository maintenance treated as sunk costs and not accounted for separately, andexpenditures divided between multiple departments. From available estimates, however, it isclear that the largest cost item for repositories is staff (around 71% for the UK Data Archiveand 82% for arXiv), while storage and computing infrastructure accounts for a small
percentage of total costs (5% in the case of arXiv).

Article versions, data and other files
Another potential issue with the widespread adoption of self-archiving is that multiple
versions of articles will be available to readers (and others, such as repository managers).
As seen above, authors can self-archive either the author’s original or the accepted
manuscript, or in some cases both, whereas few publishers permit archiving of the version ofrecord, unless the article is published under an open access licence. Most funder and169170

http://digital.csic.es/dc/faqs/#faq3
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/Collins_reply_to_Pitts121611.pdf

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institutional mandates require deposit of at least the accepted manuscript. It is possible that
an author may self-archive different versions in more than one repository (e.g. an institutional
and a central repository), thus creating further confusion. The larger repositories (bothinstitutional and subject) are working with publishers to provide links from the archived
version to the version of record. The CrossMark service is valuable here in distinguishing theversion of record from other versions (see Versions of articles above).

3.4

The drive for open access3.4.1 Funders’ policies on open access
Uptake of open access has been driven significantly in recent years by interventions fromand policies of research funders. Pressure from the top, combined with the growth andmaturity of digital publishing technology, has spurred the development of credible open
access publishing options for authors. Policy development has continued over the past few
years with no sign of slowing down.
Open access policies have been adopted by a growing number of research funders andresearch organisations. The SHERPA/Juliet website171 listed (as of July 2018) 147 research
funders with an open access policy, including the UK Research Councils, the Wellcome
Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the European
Research Council, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the DFG and the Fraunhofer inGermany, and the Australian Research Council. The website is likely to underestimate theglobal number of funder policies, with UK and European funders over-represented in thedataset. Of the funder policies included, 122 had self-archiving provisions (varying fromrequiring to just encouraging open access archiving) and 104 had open access policies.172
In addition to research funders, many research organisations have also adopted their own
policies. The Eprints/ROARMAP website173 recorded 716 full institutional and 75 subinstitutional mandates in July 2018. High-profile institutions adopting mandates include
Harvard, MIT, UCL, ETH Zurich, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, and the University of California.

European Union
In many respects, European countries and the European Union have been at the forefront ofopen access and open data policy development globally. The Amsterdam Call for Action on
Open Science, the result of a conference on open science hosted by the Netherlands’ EU
Presidency in April 2016, contained several ambitious proposals to remove barriers to open
science (including by changing the way research is evaluated and increasing transparency of
publishing costs) and to further develop open access policies in Europe. It set a target ofachieving 100% open access in Europe by 2020 and called on research funders to develop
open access plans and create monitoring infrastructures and services.
In May 2016, the European Union Competitiveness Council endorsed the call for full open
access to scientific publications in Europe by 2020.174 The ambitious goal was reiterated insubsequent EC policy documents,175 and complemented by a European Commission
decision to make open access an obligation for its Horizon 2020 grantees. This was
reinforced by the appointment of a special envoy on open access, tasked with making
concrete policy recommendations to achieve full and immediate open access to scientific171

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/
172 It should be noted however, that some US funders classified as “requir(ing) open accessarchiving” in SHERPA/Juliet do not require the granting of reuse licences, and thus these policies
might be better described as ‘public access’ rather than ‘open access’ policies.
173
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
174
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/22779/st09357en16.pdf
175
http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9526-2016-INIT/en/pdf

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publications by 2020, a goal that is unlikely to be met.176 Additionally, the Commission has
issued a tender for the creation of an Open Research Publishing Platform that would offer
the opportunity to Horizon 2020 beneficiaries to make their scientific publication immediately
open access.177 Under the leadership of the European Commission, and with support from
pan-European initiatives such as OpenAIRE and others, many national research funders in
Europe have been developing and implementing open access policies over the past decade.
In September 2018, 11 national research funding organisation, with the support of theEuropean Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of
cOAlition S,178 an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications
a reality. It is built around Plan S, which consists of 10 principles based on the key principle
that:“After 1 January 2020 scientific publications on the results from research funded by publicgrants provided by national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be
published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.”
The plan includes a number of measures that are more radical than those seen in previous
OA policies, including authors’ retention of copyright over publications, and a statement thatthe hybrid model of publishing is not compliant with the stated principles. The plan covers all
scholarly outputs, but recognises that the transition to OA for monograph will be achieved
over a longer timeframe. At the time of writing, the application of some of the principles
remains open to interpretation, and it remains too early to assess its long-term impact.

United Kingdom
Following the publication of the Finch report (Finch Working Group 2012), the United
Kingdom has been one of the most active European countries in the development of open
access policy. The two arms of its dual support research funding system, now combined
under the umbrella of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have however taken somewhat
different approaches. The Research Councils UK policy179 was developed during 2012 andcame into effect in April 2013. Unlike most other funder policies, it included a statedpreference for Gold over Green open access, all else being equal and funds available. In
order to cover the cost of article publication charges a block grant was provided touniversities and eligible research organisations. A 2014 review of compliance with the policyin the first 18 months from its entry into force revealed that 94% of reporting institutions had
exceeded the 45% open access target set by RCUK for the first year of implementation.
By contrast, the open access policy developed by HEFCE/Research England (and its
equivalent funding bodies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) as part of the UK’s
Research Excellence Framework (REF) requires author to self-archive their research, albeit
with an exception for those adopting immediate publication via the gold route. The 2021 REF
OA policy requires all research outputs to be deposited as soon after the point of acceptanceas possible, and no later than three months after this date. Concerns over institutions’ ability
to implement this requirement in practice led to an exception being introduced which allows
outputs unable to meet this deposit timescale to remain compliant if they are deposited up to
three months after the date of publication.
UKRI has recently launched a review of both the RCUK and REF open access policies, torun in parallel with a similar review by the Wellcome Trust. Although the reviews remain
underway, there are indications that one area for consideration will be the increasing cost of176

https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/open-access-scientific-publications-must-become-reality-2020robert-jan-smits_en.html
177
http://ted.europa.eu/TED/notice/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:141558-2018:TEXT:EN:HTML
178
https://www.scienceeurope.org/coalition-s/179
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/

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open access, particularly with respect to hybrid journals.180 As a signatory to Plan S (seeabove), it appears that UKRI will seek to phase out its support for hybrid OA over the coming
years, with Wellcome highly likely to follow suit.

Other European countries
Across Europe, the vast majority of national research funders either have a dedicated open
access policy in place or are aligned to an overarching national open access policy. A deskbased review of 40 European funders undertaken by the authors on behalf of SPARC
Europe (internal report) found that 26 include a mandatory requirement to either immediately
publish or self-archive the publication, while the remaining funders encourage doing so. Of
those requiring or encouraging self-archiving, the vast majority accept an embargo period ofeither 6 or 12 months, with the largest group accepting 6 months for STM disciplines and 12
months for arts, humanities and social sciences. Twenty-nine funders allow for both delayed
open access through self-archiving and immediate open access through the payment ofAPCs, whilst the remaining 11 funders only support self-archiving.

United States
The US has seen a number of developments in national legislation and policy designed toincrease access to research. However, US support for OA publishing using the Gold OA
model has been limited, and funder policies tend to require 'public access' as distinct from'open access'. This means compliant outputs are made free-to-read, often after an embargo
period, but are not free of copyright and licensing restrictions. Public access therefore
accords greater freedom to authors (and their publishers) to choose how and in what ways

their work will be reused.
The US was the first country to adopt a national access mandate with the Consolidated
Appropriations Act 2008, the legislative basis for the public access policy of the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) - the largest biomedical research agency in the world.181 In
February 2013, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued apolicy memorandum (the OSTP Directive on Public Access) directing all federal agencies
with R&D expenditures of over US$100 million to develop a plan to support increased publicaccess to the results of research funded by the Federal Government.182 More than twenty
U.S. Federal Agencies have since developed public access plans.183 Agencies had theoption of building their own dedicated repositories, using, cloning or extending the NIH’s
PubMed Central repository; using SHARE; or using CHORUS.
While the OSTP memorandum remains in force, advocates of open access remain
concerned that, as an executive order, it could be rescinded at any point. Longstanding
efforts to enshrine public access requirements in law have therefore continued by means of
two key bills, the Public Access to Public Science Act (PAPS) and the Fair Access to
Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR).
In particular, the FASTR bill184 incorporates the requirement for Federal agencies to develop‘public access’ policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or fromfunds administered by that agency. FASTR reiterates that all agencies with research budgets
greater than $100 million are required to make research outputs – specifically, “any results
published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications that are based on research that directly
180

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-research-funders-target-hybrid-open-accesscharges - survey-answer
181
For further details see NIH Public Access Policy Details.
182
United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). (2013). Memorandum for theheads of Executive Departments and Agencies.
183
For an updated list, see: https://www.science.gov/publicAccess.html
184
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3427

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arises from Federal funds” – freely available with a maximum delay of 12 months following
publication. The bill does not specify how this is to be achieved but required agencies todevelop plans to meet these requirements.
Moreover, research institutions in the US typically enjoying a higher degree of autonomy andmarket-orientation than in Europe (Labaree 2007). There is no centralised higher education
authority and US public research universities may receive as little as 10% of their revenues
from the public purse.185 As a consequence, the ability of government policymakers to exert
influence over institutional policy is limited. Purchasing power is also more distributed in
North America, with large numbers of independent library consortia conducting separate
licensing negotiations with publishers.186 The concept of a national open access strategy,
such as those adopted by a number of European countries in the recent past, thus has little
currency in the US. Widespread take-up of immediate OA publishing is likely to requirebottom-up adoption by US academic libraries, but to date the appetite for this appears low.187
However, many thought leaders in the open access movement are based in the US, andthere are substantial advocacy initiatives in support of immediate open access led byorganisations such as SPARC and PLOS. There is also significant support for immediate
open access amongst charitable bodies such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford
Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. For example, the latter's open
access policy,188 which came into effect for all new funding agreements as of January 2015,
has one of the strictest mandates. The policy requires immediate open access to bothresearch outputs and the underlying data resulting from research funded by the Foundation,
which no longer accepts embargoes and mandates the use of a CC-BY 4.0 licence orequivalent.

China
Over the past few years, there have been notable developments on open access in China. In
2014, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSBC) and the Chinese Academyof Sciences (CAS) introduced a mandate for all researchers to deposit their papers into
online repositories and make them publicly accessible within 12 months of publication. In
May 2015 NFSC launched an open access repository to support implementation of its policy
statement. The Chinese Academy of Sciences developed two open access portals: theInstitutional Repository Grid of Chinese Academy of Sciences, with content from 102
repositories, and the China Open Access Journal Portal with content from hundreds ofjournals.189 Other research funders are also supporting open access. The National Scienceand Technology Report Service has created an OA digital collection while the national
Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) is developing its own open-access policy.
The focus on self-archiving of current OA policy in China aligns it with the US. However,recent statements by Chinese representatives have indicated support for the OA 2020
movement, and for experimentation with subscription agreements that would also cover OA
papers authored by an institutions’ researchers. In this respect, China’s goals appear to be
similar to those of the EU when it comes to the dominant English-language publishers, with ashared desire to improve market competitiveness, reduce costs, and enable affordable
185

Ibid.
The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICLC) lists more than 100 library consortia from
North America, compared with only 44 in Europe.
187
An analysis of ‘redirectable library expenditures’ for 13 North American institutions in the 2013 yearby the Pay It Forward project found that OA memberships and APC payments represented less than
1% of total expenditure, with the balance relating to subscription costs for in-scope materials. See
University of California Libraries (2016), Pay It Forward, p.59.
188
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Open-Access-Policy
189
www.oaj.cas.cn
186

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participation by all (Zhang 2016). However, as Montgomery and Ren (2018) observe, thedrivers for open access in China are very different to those in the Western world. With its
largely state-controlled publishing sector, China has faced no equivalent of the ‘serials crisis’and Chinese-language scholarly content is already readily accessible for most Chinese
scholars. Open access policy developments are thus framed primarily by a desire toincrease quality and transparency, and to strengthen the country's knowledge infrastructure.

3.4.2 Open access’ social and economic impacts
The policy drive behind open access is built on the assumption that the free circulation ofscientific research outputs is likely to contribute to economic competitiveness, innovation andsuccess. The rationale for open access relies in part on the characterisation of scientificknowledge as a global public good, which should be disseminated freely for the wider benefit
of society.190 Yet understanding what specifically these benefits are, and how significant they
are, has proven complicated.
Over the years, there have been many attempts to study the impacts of open access,including the system-wide effects for scholarly communication and (more controversially) the
wider economic impacts. These studies have often been criticized due to the methodologicalconstraints that limit the accuracy of their findings. Criticisms have focused on the inclusionof non-cash items (such as estimates of researchers’ time saved by improved access or theincrease in productivity resulting from open access), which are notoriously difficult to proveand adequately measure. The uncertainty affecting the estimates has also been associatedwith accusations of implicit bias which could result in an overestimation of the positive
impacts of open access (Anderson 2014c). Despite doubts about their accuracy, the studies
have nevertheless had the merit of highlighting some of the mechanisms by which open
access could contribute to social and economic development.
Tennant et al (2016) undertook a comprehensive review of the literature on the academic,
social and economic impacts of open access. They concluded that the evidence points to:•••a favourable impact of OA on the scholarly literature through increased
dissemination and re-use;
substantial benefits to research- and development-intensive businesses
the potential for OA to foster the development of stable research ecosystems.

One of the main benefits, as Tennant et al note, is cost-savings for taxpayer-funded
universities. A 2008 report (RIN 2008) estimated that under a system in which 90% ofarticles were published using author fees, savings across the system would be about £560m,
split almost equally between publishers and universities. However, costs and benefits would
fall unequally across institutions - with research-intensive institutions paying more in
publication fees than they currently do for library subscriptions, while the reverse would betrue in other institutions. The savings also exclude any additional administrative costs
required to manage author-side payments at publishers, funders and institutions. A Jisc
report (Houghton et al., 2009) published the following year estimated system-wide savings
accruing to open access publishing in the UK alone at £212m, less the author-side fees of£172m, giving a net saving of £41m. The study also estimated increased economic returns
to UK public-sector R&D arising from increased access might be worth around £170m,
although this rests on hard-to-test assumptions about the levels of current access and themarginal rate of return to any increased access.
In the US, the Pay it Forward project (University of California Libraries, 2016) echoed thefindings of the 2008 RIN report, concluding that institutional research publishing productivity
190

Stiglitz, J. (1999). Knowledge as a public good, in Kaul, I., Grunberg, I., & Stern, M.A. (1999).
st
Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21 Century. OUP, New York.

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will determine whether the library journal budget can cover publication fees. Less researchintensive institutions could entirely fund their authors’ publishing costs from the library’s
budget, while more research-intensive institutions would likely have a significant funding gap.

3.4.3 Open access impacts on use
There is now a substantial body of studies of the impact of open (or free) access on usage
behaviour, including downloads and citations, going back at least 18 years191.

Impact on usage (downloads)
In the era of digital publishing, the usage of research has changed substantially.
Researchers operate in a context of widely available and generally unrestricted information,and they have access to more published research than ever before. Researchers’ behaviour
has therefore changed, with a substantial reduction in the time a researcher dedicates toeach publication. Research patterns have changed and rely increasingly on discoverabilityof, and convenient access to, research outputs.
In this context, there is evidence that open access leads to increase downloads. A 2011
randomized controlled trial found that OA articles were downloaded significantly more often
than paywalled articles, with HTML downloads roughly doubling and PDF downloads
increasing by 62% (Davis 2011; Davis & Walters, 2011). In 2015, Wang and colleagues
found that the increased usage of open access articles is more observable over time:
whereas non-OA papers “only have a short period of attention” open access articles areused for a much longer timeframe (Wang et al. 2015). Although the trend in the extended
usage of open access articles is clear, however, the evidence that higher downloads are
resulting in more active usage and impact (e.g. citations and media presence) is less strong.

Open access citation advantage (OACA)
Many studies conducted to date have found that there is at least some increase in citationsof open access papers over paywalled ones, though the observational nature of the findings
means they remain open to question. A recent meta-analysis (McKiernan et al. 2016) of 70
studies registered in the SPARC Europe database of citation studies found that 46 (66%)
had an OA citation advantage, 17 (24%) had no advantage, and 7 (10%) were inconclusive.
The study also suggests that the open citation advantage seems to vary substantially acrossdisciplines, with the highest OA citation advantage found in applied and physical science.
The relatively few large-scale studies available suggest that OA gives a citation advantage,
but provide very different estimates. An analysis of over 200,000 articles from multiple
disciplines found a 40% citation advantage for open access papers (Archambault et al.
2014). A study by Mikki (2017) looking at the total publication output of Norway (as indexedin Cristin) showed that open access articles receive on average, twice as many citations as
paywalled ones on Google Scholar. By contrast, Piwowar et al (2018) suggest that open
articles receive 18% more citations than otherwise expected. They draw their finding from avery large sample of 200,000 open access and 100,000 paywalled articles considered to be
representative of the literature as a whole. A study from Science-Metrix (2018) shows that,while a citation advantage is apparent for all types of open access, self-archived papers
appear to have significantly more citations than papers published using gold OA. Impact
analyses in the report are based on the average of relative citations (ARC).

191

For example, the Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA) by SPARC (continued until2015) is a large source of papers in this area.

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Fig 36: Scholarly impact by OA type, for papers published between 2006 and 2013, as
measured in Q3 2016 (Source: Science-Metrix 2018)

The same study also shows that OACA is especially strong for Arts and Humanities (62%increase), and very significant for social sciences (33% increase) whilst still being significant
for health, natural and applied sciences (16% to 19% increase).
Fig 37: Impact of open access publications by OA type, at the level of scientificdomains (2010) (Source: Science-Metrix 2018)

While many studies thus appear to show advantages in citations for open access articles,
the findings have been subject to intense criticisms. One criticism focuses on selection bias,
or the theory that authors select their best work for open access publication, and therefore
that it is the quality of the work which leads to citations (Craig et al., 2007). At the same time,
Berg (2010) argues that well-funded studies – which can afford to pay for APCs - are more
likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. At the heart of these issues is thefact that the vast majority of studies constitute observational research, making it nigh on
impossible to eliminate the effect of other variables (Crotty, 2018). These criticisms havebeen contested (Gargouri et al. 2010) but question marks remain, with some older studies,most notably a randomised, controlled trial undertaken by Davis (2011), finding evidence ofincreased downloads and a wider audience, but no clear citation advantage.
In summary, while a link between open access and citations is apparent, some uncertainty
remains over whether there is a causal relationship, and the extent of any advantage arising.
Nevertheless, recent analysis by Pollock and Michael (2018b) shows that an increasing
number of fully OA publications are attaining higher impact factors at faster rates than theirsubscription and hybrid counterparts. Whether this is due to a citation advantage, or issimply evidence of fully OA journals maturing, remains open to debate.
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In practice, the methodological limitations discussed above are frequently overlooked inpress releases and headlines derived from studies in this field. OA advocates, academic
scholarly networks and publishers alike have all found it beneficial to highlight findings thatpoint to an OA citation advantage.192 It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that a significant
and growing proportion of authors believe that OA journals are more highly cited thansubscription journals (Taylor & Francis, 2014).

Broader impact of open access publications
While citations are still the top-ranking measurement for the success of an article, alternative
metrics have been developed. The extended use of social media and knowledge exchange
platforms like Wikipedia led to new ways of interacting with research outputs. Projects suchas Altmetric or ImpactStory have developed analytics systems to capture non-traditional
metrics, some of which have subsequently been acquired by publishers. For instance,
Elsevier acquired Plum Analytics and now provides PlumX Metrics score to their readers.
PlumX Metrics measures usage, capture, social media mentions and citations with different
subcategories to calculate an overall outreach score for each article.
There is an argument that open access has a positive effect on the broader societal impactof research, as papers can be more easily shared on social networks and picked up by the
traditional media. A 2014 internal review of Altmetic.com found that open access articles
published in Nature Communications generated significantly more tweets – including tweets
from people who tweet research semi-regularly – and attracted more Mendeley readers thanpaywalled articles from the same publication (Adie 2014). As noted by Tennant et al. (2016),
42 of the top 100 articles of 2015 as listed on Altmetric.com were open access.193 This is ahigher proportion than the total number of open access articles published in the same year,
therefore suggesting a correlation between open access and higher non-traditional metrics.
Despite these initial indications, however, more data is needed before concluding that open
access has a significant effect on the societal impact of research. It is still unclear how muchof the actual traffic around a research paper altmetrics are picking up, since the data usedvaries from metric to metric. Moreover, many researchers communicate interesting finds orshare links via email – so called ‘dark social’ traffic (Madrigal 2012) that is notoriously hard tomeasure.

3.5

Market penetration of open access publications

Björk (2011) identified three phases in the development of the open access publishingindustry: first, a phase of voluntary open access (often led by an individual scholar) in the
1990s, followed by a period in which long-established journals started publishing open
access electronic versions of their article alongside the printed version, and a third phasethat saw the introduction of OA as a business model from 2002. Over the past decade, wehave arguably entered a fourth phase in the expansion of open access, which has seen mosttraditional scholarly publishers adopting (to a greater or lesser extent) open accesspublishing practices, and new open access journals becoming well-established within theirdisciplines. This expansion is reflected in the growing number of OA journals and articles.

192

See, for example, SPARC Europe, https://sparceurope.org/open-data-citation-advantage/,
Academia.edu, https://medium.com/academia/academia-edu-citations-and-open-science-in-action4a24a6376573, and SpringerNature https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/pressreleases/report-shows-value-of-hybrid-journals-to-research-community/15894508.
193
https://www.altmetric.com/top100/2015/

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3.5.1 Open access journal numbers
The number of open access journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals194 was
11,811 as of July 2018 (of which 9,172 were published in English); this represents anincrease of 1,720 over the 3 years or so since the last STM Report. Not all journals in DOAJ
are fully peer-reviewed (though all exercise some form of quality control through an editor,
editorial board or peer review).195 70% of journals in the DOAJ do not charge author-side
fees (Crawford, 2018). Ulrich’s Directory lists 12,618 peer reviewed OA journals at the timeof writing, of which 7,817 are English-language.
The proportion of OA journals included in the major A&I databases is a little lower than the
Ulrich’s figure, which is not surprising given the higher barrier to inclusion and the lower
average age of OA journals. Scopus covers some 22,500 peer-reviewed journals, of which
3,600 or 16% are open access. A further breakdown of Scopus journals by publishing modelin 2012 and 2016 is shown in Figure 38.
Figure 38: Proportion of journals in the Scopus database y publishing model (Source:
UUK 2017)

The Web of Science includes some 963 OA journals in its Science Citation Index Expanded(12% of the total) and 166 in its Social Science Citation Index (7%), and 84 in the Arts andHumanities Citation Index (6%). The greater prevalence of OA journals amongst newer
publications is reflected in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, which lists 2,095 OA
journals, representing 28% of the total.

3.5.2 Open access article numbers
Counting the number of open access journals has its challenges (such as filtering out
predatory journals), but because journal size varies wildly (e.g. from a small quarterly
publishing 20 articles a year up to Scientific Reports, which published over 24,000 articles in2017), a better measure of the uptake of open access by the research community is thenumber of articles, in absolute terms and as a proportion of total articles.
Counting open access articles is, however, complicated by issues of definition, and bymethodological and measurement challenges. Different researchers use different definitions
for categories of OA articles, sometimes for ideological reasons, which makes comparisons194

http://www.doaj.org/
DOAJ moved to a new host, IS4OA (Infrastructure Services for Open Access) in 2012, and theplatform was relaunched in 2014. Following the relaunch, new tighter selection criteria wereintroduced and journals required to complete an application form to demonstrate adherence, whichslowed growth in the number of OA journals listed substantially (Marchitelli et al 2017).
195

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October 2018of their different estimates hard or impossible. Broadly speaking the four categories ofarticles counted are:
•
•

•
•

•

Gold: articles in pure OA journals (whether or not an article publication charge waspaid); some studies include hybrid in this category;Hybrid: articles in subscription journals made openly available immediately on
publication, usually as the result of the payment of an Article Publication Charge(APC);
Delayed: articles in subscription journals made openly available after an embargo
period;Green: copies of article versions available in institutional or other repositories; often
embargoed for a period following the publication date; may exist in multiple archived
versions and in multiple copies on different repositories; andOther: strictly speaking these are not open access but freely available articles, some
legitimate (e.g. promotional availability), some illegitimate (i.e. versions posted inbreach of copyright). Automated tools or bots for searching for OA articles may
unintentionally (or in a few cases, intentionally) count these.

The challenges are greatest for green OA: as well as the challenges of definition anddeduplication, the results are not fixed in time because articles can be added retrospectively
at any time.
Methodologically, article counts can be made either by querying well-curated indexes likeWeb of Science or Scopus, by reference to the new breed of discovery and analytics tools
such as 1Findr and Dimensions, or by using specialised search engines and bots. Figure 39
illustrates the range of results available from four of the most common indexes and analytics
tools, although the upward trend is consistent across all sources.
Figure 39 – OA articles indexed from academic & scientific journals, 1975-2018(Courtesy of Eric Archambault)

3.5.3 Estimating the percentage of open access articles
Estimates of the percentage of content that is open access vary for the reasons outlined
above. Newer content is more likely to be OA, with 30-45% of articles identified as open

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access by the Web of Science, Dimensions and 1findr databases in 2015, as shown in
Figure 40.196
Figure 40 – Percentage of OA articles in academic and scientific journals: 1findr,
Dimensions, Core +ESCI WoS and Scopus, 1975-2018 (Courtesy of Eric Archambault)

Several dedicated studies looking at levels of OA in the years 2014-2016 have also returned
figures for OA content in the region of 30%, while others report substantially higher figures,in excess of 50% in some cases (see Table 10). Allowing for the fact that the EC’s OpenScience Monitor does not include hybrid OA, the consensus view suggests that roughly 1520% of new articles were immediate (gold or hybrid) OA by 2016, compared with less than
5% in 2006, and 12% in 2011 (Van Noorden 2012a). In addition to gold OA, most studies
include a combination of green, delayed/bronze (free-to-read but unlicensed) and other
online postings in order to arrive at an overall percentage figure.
The use of these terms is somewhat inconsistent between studies, and all indices and tools
are liable to underestimate the total OA article numbers due to the difficulty of correctly
identifying and categorising openly available articles.197 Researchers attempt to get roundthis by manually verifying as large a sample as their time and resources permit in order toestimate the reliability of the automated findings, and the proportion of OA content that may
be missed. Where results are adjusted accordingly, this tends to result in much higher
figures being quoted, as reflected in the ‘recall-adjusted’ figure for 1finder shown in Figure
40, above, and the Science-Metrix figure of 55% OA content in Table 10. Piwowar et al(2018) also estimate that their figures are likely to undercount OA by approximately 30%.

196

At the time of writing, Scopus content is not reliably tagged as OA, though this is expected tochange with the planned integration of Impactstory’s Unpaywall database, see
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/elsevier-impactstory-agreement-will-make-open-access-articleseasier-to-find-on-scopus
197
Automated measurement systems are usually assessed for both precision and recall. The precision
rate shows how much of the information captured by the measurement system is relevant in thereference system. The recall rate shows how much of the relevant information in the reference system
is captured by the measurement system.

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Table 10: Open access article shares reported by selected studies (see text for details
and qualifications)

EC OpenScience
Monitor198

Bosmanand Universities
Kramer (2017) UK (2017)+ Web of Science Scopus
Primary data Scopus+ Unpaywall
Google
DOAJ,
ROAD,
source(s)Piwowar et Scienceal (2018)
Metrix(2018)

MartínMartín etal (2018b)+ Web
of Webof Web of
Science + Science + Science
Unpaywall 1Findr+ Google
Scholar

CrossRef,
PubMedCentral,
OpenAIRE
2016

2016

2016

2015

2014

2014

14.4%
14.4%
-

-

19%
15%
4%

16.7%
11.2%
5.5%

23%
-

11.6%
10.1%
1.5%

Delayed OA Bronze OA 13.9%
Green OA
“Other OA” (total)

-

3%
11%

10.8%
10.4%
-

31%

1.1%
12.6%
10.5%
20%

29%

33%

37.8%

55%

55.8%

Publication
year
consideredGold (total)
Gold OA
Hybrid OAAll OA

28.3%

Several authors note the importance of both sustainability and legality when considering
whether free-to-read content should be included in estimates of open access levels (vanLeeuwen et al 2017; Martín-Martín 2018b). While more than 50% of content may beavailable to read on the web for free, and discoverable via search engines such as Google,
there is often no guarantee that it will remain so in the future, nor that it has been sharedlegitimately. On the basis that such content does not meet the traditional definition of open
access, a balanced assessment is that roughly one third of the scholarly literature wasavailable OA in 2016.
Science-Metrix (2018) also report the percentage of OA across disciplines for publication
year 2014, per OA type (as measured in late 2016). This shows the overall increased
prevalence of green OA over gold OA, except for Health Sciences where gold OA is morewidespread.199 A very low percentage of articles in the Arts & Humanities are made open
access through either self-archiving or OA publishing.
Table 11. Percentage of OA across scientific domains for publication year 2014, per
OA type, as measured in Q3 2016 (source: Science-Metrix 2018)198

https://ec.europa.eu/info/open-science/open-science-monitor/trends-open-accesspublications_en#open-access-to-publications. Accessed August 2018.
199
The true proportion of green content is often obscured by the fact that many studies and OA
discovery tools report content that is available in both gold and green OA forms as gold.

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The European Commission’s Open Science Monitor uses a limited range of data sources,
and thus presents a conservative picture of the proportion of OA content. However, it
effectively demonstrates the wide variations in levels of OA at country level. Countries suchas Switzerland and Croatia achieve more than twice the levels of OA seen in China and theRussian Federation (Figure 41).

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Figure 41: Percentage of open access publications (gold and green) by country(Source: EC Open Science Monitor, reference date April 30th 2018)
Switzerland
Croatia
Estonia
Belgium
Luxembourg
United Kingdom
United States
Netherlands
Slovenia
IrelandDenmark
SwedenSpain
Portugal
Austria
Bulgaria
NorwayFrancePolandLatviaHungary
Czech Republic
Germany
Slovakia
Finland
Italy
CyprusRomania
Lithuania
Malta
Japan
India
CanadaGreeceChina
Russian Federation
0%

10%

20%

30%
Green OA

3.6

40%

50%

Gold OA

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Not OA

Transitioning to a sustainable open access market

The actions of policy makers and the publishing market make it clear that the open access
debate has now moved on to how to make it sustainable and how to manage the transition.
Sustainability implies a price equilibrium that leads to optimal continued access to highquality scientific research. A sustainable market therefore balances the interests of the
suppliers of publishing services (publishers and learned societies) with those of beneficiaries(researchers, research organisations, research funders and the public at large). Key
sustainability questions include:

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•

•
•
•
•

•

October 2018

What will be the impact on economics of publishing: will economic returns be
sufficient to continue to attract current publishers, or alternatively what might be theimpacts of restructuring?
Will the same models for open access work in all fields, or for all types of journal (the“one size fits all” problem)?
How will funding be managed during a transition, and (in the case of a flipped model),how will funding increases be determined?
How will funding mechanisms be arranged as open access scales up, and what
impacts will these have on scholars and institutions, as well as on publishers?
What will be the impact of heterogeneous uptake, with different governments, funding
bodies and institutions adopting different policies, and different cultural norms acrossdisciplines?
What will be the geopolitical impacts: how will the changes affect researchers inemerging economies and those in less developed economies?

A wide range of interventions have been proposed to accelerate the transition, as shown in
Figure 42. Offsetting, strengthened consortia and changes to author behavior and incentives
have received the most support in recent years, particularly in Europe, but there remains nointernational consensus on the best way forward.

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Fig. 42 - Meta-analysis of recommendations across 20 studies on the transition to
open access (Johnson et al, 2017)

3.6.1 OA2020
Offsetting lies at the heart of the OA2020 initiative established at the 12th Berlin Open
Access conference in 2015. The transformation envisioned by OA2020 is founded on a
White Paper, published by the Max Planck Digital Library in April 2015, arguing that there isalready enough money within journal publishing to allow for a transition to open access thatwill be – at a minimum – cost-neutral. The initiative endorses various ways of implementing
open access, but asserts that a ‘smooth, swift and scholarly oriented transition’ relies on
converting resources currently spent on journal subscriptions into funds to support
sustainable OA business models. What is less clear is how long the exponents of OA2020
expect “resources currently spent” to remain sufficient, how future rates of increase might bedetermined, and how costs, and cost increases, are to be distributed.
At the time of writing, the OA2020 expression of interest had been signed by 109 scholarlyorganisations, but these are primarily from Europe, with only nine signatories in the US.200
200

https://oa2020.org/mission/ - eois

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STM publishers have given the plan a cautious welcome, noting that the proposed
redirection of financial flows will be a complex endeavour, with both winners and losers, andthat a mixed economy of different models is likely.201

3.6.2 APCs and sustainability
A major bone of contention for open access publishing is the cost of APCs. The question ofwhat constitutes an appropriate price level for APCs encapsulates many of the tensions that
underpin debates around sustainability.
A 2014 study of over one hundred thousand articles published in 1,370 journals (Björk andSolomon 2014) found that fully OA journals charged an average of $1,400 per APC, while
hybrid journals for the six biggest publishers had APCs in excess of $2,700. Delta Think’s
Open Access Data & Analytics Tool, which holds information on pricing trends for over
14,000 journals, suggests the average APC list price for fully OA journals in 2018 is now
just under $1,600 USD (median around $1,500), and for hybrids just under $2,900 (median$3,000).202
A recent study commissioned by Universities UK (UUK, 2017) also found that fully-OA
journals are substantially cheaper than hybrid journals. The study looked at APCs levied in arange of open access journals from 32 publishers. Almost half of the journals either do notlevy an APC or charge less than £500 ($630). Around 90% of journals have APCs of lessthan £1500 ($1,900), and in almost 99% of journals APCs cost less than £2000 ($2,550). By
contrast, over 70% of hybrid journals charge between £1,500 ($1,900) and £2,000 ($2,550).
The study also showed that APC median prices rose substantially between 2015 and 2017,
although there was variation between disciplines, 203 and the tracking of charges is complex
due to exchange rate fluctuations variations, with APCs frequently charged and reported indifferent currencies.
Fig. 43 - APC price bands in sterling for full-OA journals from 32 publishers (from UUK
2017)

201

https://www.stmassoc.org/2017_06_13_2017_03_STM_Presentation_13_Berlin_OA_conference.pdf
202
http://deltathink.com/open-access/oa-data-analytics-tool/203
The rise was the most substantial in arts and humanities (around £220/$280), followed by social
science journals (around £180/$230 increase), physical sciences and engineering (around£150/$190), medicine and life sciences (showing a mere £20/$25 increase).

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Fig 44 - APC price bands in sterling for hybrid OA journals from 32 publishers (fromUUK 2017)

Concerns have been raised about not just the high cost of APCs, but also their distribution. A
2016 study found that the top 10 publishers, responsible for publishing most high-profile
hybrid journals, make up 77% of APCs paid by UK institutions with the remaining 98% of
publishers sharing the rest (Shamash 2016). A number of 'born-OA' publishers have also
been acquired by subscription publishers in recent years, with examples including:
•
•
•
•
•
•

2008 - acquisition of BioMedCentral by Springer in 2008.
2011 - Medknow PVT Ltd. acquired by Wolters Kluwer.
2012 - Versita aquired by De Gruyter.
2013 - Nature Publishing Group acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers.
2016 - purchase of the journal portfolio of Liberatas Academics by Sage in 2016.
2016/17 - acquisition of Dove Medical Press and Coaction Publishing by Taylor andFrancis/Informa.

Independent OA publishers often lack the relationships and access to library budgets
available to subscription publishers, and so risk being excluded from the moves to negotiate
new 'big deals' that include OA.
At the same time, Siler et al (2018) identified a correlation between institutional rank andpublication in APC-based journals, suggesting that the cost of APCs, especially among themost prestigious hybrid journals, may be pushing authors working at lower-ranked
institutions to publish in closed/paywalled outlets. By contrast, academics from higher-ranked(and better resourced) institutions were found to pay relatively higher fees for gold andhybrid OA publications. The authors concluded that this is leading to “new professional
hierarchies” as open-access models become more popular, though the link remains
unproven.
APCs are especially unaffordable for researchers working in low-income countries.
Incentives to publish in prestigious international journals are equally strong in developing
countries, where a single APC of $2,000 is equivalent to many months of a researcher’ssalary. A number of initiatives are trying to tackle this unbalance (see also 2.19 Access indeveloping countries). Most full open access journals grant researchers based in developing
countries fee waivers or discounts that are, at least in part, ‘priced into’ the subscriptions and
APCs paid by research organisations in developed countries, and partly supported bygovernmental actors. However, practical difficulties in obtaining waivers can make theprocess impracticable for researchers, therefore making open access publishing an unevenplaying field for developing country researchers.
Many open access advocates maintain that APCs are far too high and point to the ability ofsome journals to be financially sustainable at low APC rates. However, journals havesubstantially different cost bases – with a strong, though imperfect, correlation between a
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journal’s prestige, the proportion of submissions it accepts for publication and its publishingcost base. On the assumption that the market dynamic will be to lower prices, the concern ofsome industry commentators is that pressure to lower costs could lead to corners being cut
and quality reduced (Anderson 2012). For some types of publishing, a low-cost no-frills
option appears to be what the market wants – witness the growth of PLOS One – but theapproach does not fit the more highly selective journals carrying significant amounts ofadditional, non-research article content, nor the increasing demands for novel tools to
become standard. At the same time, pressures on revenues and thin margins could increasepressures on editors or publishers to reduce scientific standards to accept more articles.
Consideration of APC prices tends to overlook the not insignificant costs of scholarly
infrastructure provided by publishers, which remains largely underwritten by subscription
revenues. The financial obstacles are further exacerbated by the potential loss of thesignificant revenues that publishers earn from channels other than library subscriptions in an
OA world – including licensing revenues and corporate subscriptions.204
As a recent SpringerNature whitepaper has observed, a rapid shift to a fully OA model would
entail significant cost, time, risk and disruption for the whole research ecosystem, and thus
incumbent publishers continue to favour an ‘orderly evolution’ (Mithu et al, 2018). Analysis by
Pollock and Michael (2018a) indicates that the most radical changes could come fromwholesale moves to offset big deals (Figure 45). However, even if these happened at scale
over a short period of time (an unlikely scenario), they estimate that the worst-case effects
would be to slow overall market growth to just below zero in the long term. This reflects thefact that revenue per article is already declining under the subscription model, and is likely to
be roughly in line with APCs of €2,500 ($2,800) in 10 years’ time.

Figure 45: Effects of OA scenarios on annual growth in the scholarly journals market
over time (Pollock and Michael 2018a)

204

For example, the BMJ recently disclosed that it earns 8.7% of its income (£6.76m; €7.6m; $9m)
from product advertising, commercial sponsorship, and the sale of article reprints. See
https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j4930

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3.6.3 Effect of self-archiving on journals
There have been longstanding concerns that the self-archiving of articles could, in time, leadto widespread cancellation of subscriptions. Most publishers allow authors to archive
versions of their articles on the web, although many of these policies were originallyintroduced on the understanding that the archiving would not be systematic. The STM
Association has stated that Green OA can be consistent with fostering a viable system for
funding publication of authoritative communications about research, but has emphasised theneed for flexible and appropriate embargo policies.205
In response to more systematic deposit and discovery tools, policies are increasingly
distinguishing between archiving on personal websites (with more liberal policies),
institutional repositories, and subject repositories (with tighter requirements, reflecting theperceived greater threat posted to subscription revenues). Policies will also vary to reflectspecific funders’ requirements; for instance very few publishers will not allow deposit to
PubMed Central. There is evidence that publishers’ OA policies are influenced by thenational OA policy environment within which the publisher operates, notwithstanding the
global nature of the journals market (Gadd et al, 2018). For example, some UK-based
publishers, including Emerald and the Microbiology Society, have adopted more liberal green
open access policies following introduction of a deposit mandate under the Research
Excellence Framework (REF).
A recent study by Universities UK (2017) found that, overall, ResearchGate has by far thelargest proportion of posted articles, higher than all other sources combined.206 Among
accepted manuscripts, subject repositories have the largest number of articles, followed by
ResearchGate and other sources (such as author’s websites). By contrast, institutional
repositories – whose number has been increasing more rapidly than any other repository have a very small proportion of articles at just 4% of the duplicated total (Figure 46).207
Figure 46: Proportion of subscription articles posted online globally, by document
version and location

Publishers continue to have concerns about the possible impact of widespread self-archivingof journal articles. The common-sense hypothesis is that if compulsory mandates lead tovery high levels of deposit, libraries (whose budgets are likely to remain under pressure
205

https://www.stm-assoc.org/2017_05_01_STM_Position_Green_OA.pdf
It should be noted that Sci-Hub was not included in scope of the study.
207
Since postings may occur in different versions and at different locations, the study’s figures arepresented as proportions of the duplicated totals and so add to 100%
206

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October 2018indefinitely) will increasingly choose to rely on the self-archived version rather than subscribe
to the publisher’s version.
A review of the impact of short embargoes on publishers by the UK Publishers Associations
provides some support for this hypothesis, citing a small number of cases where journals
subscriptions were cancelled following a reduction in embargo periods.208 A now-dated study
by SIS for the Publishing Research Consortium (Beckett & Inger, 2006) surveyed thepurchasing preferences of librarians and concluded that librarians were disposed to
substitute OA for subscribed materials, provided the materials were peer reviewed (as is thecase with all funder/institutional mandates) and provided the materials were not embargoed
for too long. The last point was critical: librarians were far less likely to favour OA versions
over subscriptions where the OA version was embargoed for 12 or 24 months, but anembargo of 6 months or less had little impact on their preference. This was, however, asurvey of librarians; a number of studies, including the PEER project and a report by the
British Academy (Darley et al 2014), have demonstrated the preference of researchers forthe version of record, at least for some stages of the research publishing cycle.

3.6.4 Sci-HubConcerns about copyright infringement are perhaps best exemplified by the great popularityof Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub is a website with around 60 million academic papers and which serves
over 400,000 requests per day (Himmelstein et al, 2018). Founded by a Kazakhstanigraduate student, but obscurely funded, the site bypasses publisher paywalls to download
copies of scholarly articles through educational institution proxies onto its own server andmakes those copies freely available to the public. A recent study found that Sci-Hub’s
repository contained 69% of all scholarly articles with DOIs, while average coverage of themost cited journals exceeded 90% (ibid.). Sci-Hub is thus in persistent and large-scale
infringement of copyright and has been declared illegal by several courts. Despite that, anddespite routinely having its domain taken down, the site still experiences high levels of usage
among researchers from developing and developed countries alike. There are indications
that researchers use Sci-Hub out of convenience, even where they have legitimate access tocontent (Bohannon, 2016). Not dissimilarly to illegal file-sharing sites for music and videos,Sci-hub illustrates the challenge of protecting copyright for digital publications. Its successhas prompted calls for publishers to support legal open access to prevent the growth ofillegal file-sharing.

3.6.5 Scholarly Communications Licence
In 2008, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy that purported
not only to require scholars to deposit their works in open access repositories, but also to
grant the university nonexclusive copyright licences to archive and publicly distribute all
faculty-produced scholarly articles.209 Over 70 other universities, predominantly but not solely
in the US, have since adopted similar policies.210 These policies typically include provision
for institutions to waive application of the licence for a particular article or delay access for a
specified period of time upon request from the author. As Priest (2012) has noted, theHarvard-style “permission mandate” has the potential to be more disruptive than its “deposit
mandate” cousin, turning exclusive rights to copy, distribute or re-use of another’s work on
their head by automatically granting broad permissions absent the author’s written objection.
However, in practice authors often default to the most restrictive stated practice, even in theface of institutional OA policies (University of California Libraries, 2018).
208

See https://www.publishers.org.uk/_resources/assets/attachment/full/0/24490.pdf
See https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/fas/210
See
http://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Additional_resources#Policies_of_the_kind_recommended_in_the_guid
e
209

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The debate over the potential impact of such licences on publishers has been reignited in the
recent past by proposals for a UK Scholarly Communications Licence, an iteration of theHarvard licence adapted for UK law.211 Advocates of the licence argue that it would allow
authors and institutions more control over the research publications which they produce, andoffers the potential for ‘one-step’ compliance with the various funder policies to which UK
academic authors are subject (Baldwin and Pinfield, 2018). However, it was been criticizedas monolithic and inflexible in some quarters (Wulf and Newman, 2017), with the UK
Publishers Association raising concerns over the potential administrative burden arising fromwaiver requests; the way the SCL seeks immediate non-commercial re-use rights for all UK
research outputs; and the limit it could place on the choice of researchers over where to
publish.212
These debates look set to continue over the coming years, particularly with the recent
announcement of the Plan S principles, which seek to ensure that authors retain copyright of
their publication with no restrictions (see Section 3.4.1 Funders’ policies on open access).

See http://ukscl.ac.uk/
See https://www.publishers.org.uk/policy-research/copyright-and-ip/scholarly-communicationslicence/
211
212

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4. Technology in Scholarly Communication
Technology is driving profound changes in the ways research is conducted andcommunicated, both of which are likely to have impacts on journal publishing. Given theaccelerating rate of change, covering trends in technology presents some challenges. This
chapter discusses trends that are important to scholarly publishing at the moment of writing.
For updated reviews of new technology trends and their impact on the STM publishingindustry, readers can follow the reports of the STM Future Lab Committee on 'Technology
Trends'.213
Recent topics covered by the reports cover a broad range of subjects.214 Among others, thereport “Entering the AI Era” (2018) highlights the impacts and opportunities that artificial
intelligence has for the worlds of scholarly communication in general and STM journal
publishing in particular.215 The topic has also been explored in other work, and an in-depth
summary is available on the STM website.216 Other trends include the increasing pressure toleverage big data and user analytics to improve user workflows and commercialisation, “desiloing” products in order to use all available data sources, and adopting “platform services”
for journal articles and other scholarly content. Another authoritative source of information onthese topics comes from Outsell, whose reports are especially useful for STM platform
providers (see Outsell 2017).

4.1

Recent initiatives and organisations

4.1.1 Open Science
The Outsell (2017) report observed that there is an increasing need to decide how to deal
with “Open Science”. This is now an even more important driver of change, and potentiallytransformation of the current system of scholarly communication.
The EU’s FOSTER portal defines Open Science as “the practice of science in such a waythat others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and otherresearch processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution andreproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods”.217 Open Science isbroader than open access because it is concerned with openness throughout the research
cycle and not just open access for the publication produced at the end of research. STM(2016) have adopted a similarly broad view of Open Science as including:
•
•
•
•
•

Open access to scholarly publications.
Open Data, intended as the ability of researchers to make their research data FAIR
(Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable).
Research metrics that measure the research endeavour and underpin assessmentand evaluation.
Citizen science, co-developed by researchers and the wider community.
Research integrity, especially in the peer review process.

The various components of Open Science are discussed throughout this report: open
access, is discussed at length in section 3; Open Data is discussed in section 4.2; research
metrics are discussed in sections 2.12.2-6 and 4.8.
213

https://www.stm-assoc.org/standards-technology/future-lab-committee/

214

See for a summary: https://www.stm-assoc.org/standards-technology/tech-trends-2021/

215

https://stm-assoc.org/standards-technology/tech-trends-2022216

https://www.stm-assoc.org/2018_04_20_2018_STM_Tech_Trends_Philadelphia_Conference.pdf
https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/foster-taxonomy/open-science-definition

217

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4.1.2 Open Scholarship Initiative
OSI218 is a United Nations-backed partnership between research universities, publishers,
government agencies, and 15 other key stakeholder groups in scholarly communication fromaround the world. Over 380 senior leaders from 24 countries and 250 institutions are
currently part of this effort.
The OSI summit group recognises that until a global system is created that puts the needs
and concerns of researchers front and centre, the research community will look upon open
mandates with disdain, resignation and confusion. Accordingly, they are working to makefind a way to make Open benefit research and be enthusiastically embraced by researchers.
In 2018 OSI will begin issuing a series of issue briefs, derived from its work andconversations to date, offering guidance to the global scholarly communication community
on issues of importance. These briefs will be endorsed by UNESCO and circulated as global
guidance. The first brief will be on defining the meaning of open---OSI endorses an “openspectrum” that includes a wide variety of approaches to and states of open, not just a static“open access” endpoint (see Section 3.1 Defining openness). Their hope is that these briefs
will serve as important tools for bringing together the global stakeholder community incommon action, and moving progress forward (hopefully rapidly) on a number of key issues.

4.1.3 Force 11
FORCE 11219 is an older organisation dating from 2011. It describes itself as a community ofscholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically tohelp facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing.
FORCE11 has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movementwith clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding
mechanisms and business models. It organises a well-regarded conference and three usefulcalendars covering digital events, STM events and scholarly communication events. Its
2011 manifesto, now available in an updated form, remains a realistic analysis of the newopportunities and challenges.220 It focuses its attention on the need for tools for researchers
as producers of STM outputs, enhanced products for researchers as consumers, and tools
and services for reputation management. FORCE 11 has been closely involved in a numberof the specific issues discussed elsewhere through groups on Data and Software Citation,
Reports Ideas and Projects (RIAP), Resource Identification, and Scholarly Commons.221

4.1.4 Center for Open Science
COS222 is a rather different type of organisation, with a mission to enable open andreproducible research practices worldwide. Its Executive Director and Co-Founder, Brian
Nosek, is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia.
Reproducibility is a special problem in the behavioural sciences and it is thus not surprisingthat COS concentrates their wide range of services in these disciplines. At the same time
their preprint servers collect preprints across a much wider range, and the Open Science
Framework (OSF), operated by COS, is a free and open source project management
repository that supports researchers across their entire project lifecycle.

218

http://osiglobal.org/
https://www.force11.org/
220
https://www.force11.org/about/manifesto
221
https://www.force11.org/groups
222
https://cos.io/
219

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4.1.5 Joint Roadmap for Open Science/Scholarly Tools
The JROST community, formed in early 2018, comprises a group of individuals andorganisations building nonprofit, open-source tools for scholarship and publication.223 These
groups are actively building and delivering solutions, and thus have product roadmaps thatthey can speak authoritatively to. It is also critical that researchers participate because theirneeds and perspective drives the demand for what is being done.

4.1.6 Government and national initiatives on Open Science
Many countries have governmental initiatives under the banner of Open Scholarship/ OpenScience and there are some which are relevant in this context. Not all initiatives are covered
but where they are of wider scope they may be discussed elsewhere in the Report. At aninternational level part of the declared policy of the G20, under the heading “Breaking a New
Path for Growth”, visualises the promotion of open science and the facilitation of appropriate
access to publicly funded research results on findable, accessible, interoperable andreusable (FAIR) principles as part of the drive towards innovation-driven growth and thecreation of innovative ecosystems.224 In 2017 the G7 Expert Group on Open Science
articulated their ambition to:225• Foster a research environment in which career advancement takes into accountOpen Science activities, through incentives and rewards for researchers, andvaluing the skills and capabilities of the Open Science workforce• Enable all researchers are able to deposit, access and analyze scientific data
across disciplines and on international scales. [That] Research data management
adheres to the FAIR principles whereby data is findable, accessible, interoperable,
and reusable.

4.1.6.1 Open Science policies in the European Union
At a policy level the EU has taken an active interest in Open Science for some years. Under
Carlos Moedas, the current Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, theemphasis is on the three “O”s - Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World. OpenScience is closely linked to innovation and Europe’s competitiveness in the World [European
Commission 2017] Another initiative is the EC Open Science Policy Platform which is formed
to provide advice on open science policy and which meets regularly. The EC maintain a sitewhich provides news, events, publications related to Open Science226.
As discussed in section 3.4.1, the European Commission and the European ResearchCouncil (ERC) recently spearheaded the launch of Plan S, a set of principles on open
access endorsed by 11 national research funding organisation. These principles are likely tohave a profound effect on open science across Europe and beyond - especially with regards
to scholarly outputs.

4.1.6.2 Implementation of EU policies on Open Science at a European and Nationallevel
The EU has a number of programmes and projects intended to bring together member
countries to take an active view of Open Science. A useful source of information is the
OpenAire blog227. Particularly relevant is the emphasis on using repositories as central to the223

https://jrost.org/
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-16-2967_en.htm
225
www.g7italy.it/sites/default/files/documents/G7%20Science%20Communiqué.pdf
226
https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm
227
https://blogs.openaire.eu
224

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progress of Open Science. OpenAire is aimed to support the implementation of the EC andERC Open Access policies and has considerable influence among member countries.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is at the centre of another area of infrastructuraldevelopment: a roadmap is in position. EOSC is a cloud for research data in Europe.
Background, policy information, events and publications related to the EOSC is provided via
this link which provides the latest picture in 2018228.
Another example is the ‘Science with and for Society’ programme229 will be instrumental in
addressing the European societal challenges tackled by the broadly based Horizon 2020
initiative and it is intended to build capacities and develop innovative ways of connecting
science to society. It will make science more attractive (notably to young people), increasesociety's appetite for innovation, and open up further research and innovation activities.
A typical smaller enterprise is an Open Software introductory course for early career
researchers. This is part of a general “Foster” project reaching out to this audience230.
Member countries have varied in the extent to which they work with the EU on these projects
and to what extent they have their own attitudes to Open Science. The UK has been closely
involved with the development of Open Access as we have seen elsewhere. The Jisc, which
provides digital services and solutions for the higher and further education and skills sector
set out their programme in 2015231. However on the whole the UK government hasconcentrated on the development of the Finch process as explained elsewhere in this report
Germany too has concentrated on Open Access232.
Very recently Open Science, which in France seems to comprise the humanities too, hasbeen taken out of the hands of the National Library and handed to new national committee
Comité pour la Science Ouverte (COSO) under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher
Education and Research. It is intended that researcher involvement should be greater thanhas currently been the case.

4.1.6.3 Open Science policies and implementation outside the EU
As a generalisation the US differs from most other countries in not having a central bodywhich can explore and provide policies under an Open Science banner. They have also
been much concerned with Federal policies regarding public access. However, a new reportfrom the US National Academies seeks to provide a national roadmap (National Academiesof Science Engineering and Medicine 2018). The report is aimed at overcoming barriers andmoving toward open science as the default approach across the research enterprise. It
explores specific examples of open science and discusses a range of challenges, focusing
on stakeholder perspectives. It is intended to provide guidance to the research enterpriseand its stakeholders as they build strategies for achieving open science and take the next
steps
The government of Japan set out its approach to open science in the document Promoting
Open Science in Japan 2015 (Cabinet Office Government of Japan Expert Panel on OpenScience 2015). The document places an emphasis on open knowledge as a tool to promote

228

https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloudhttps://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/science-and-society
230
https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/open-source-software-andworkflows/#/id/5abf67d9dd1827131b90e6bd
231
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/open-science-many-hands-make-light-work-17-aug-2015232
https://innovationpolicyplatform.org/content/germany-open-science-country-note
229

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innovation, and covers both research publications and research data. It advocates for a topdown approach with centralised mechanisms for open science.233

4.1.7 Reproducibility and integrity
The lack of reproducibility of scientific research published in journals is increasingly
perceived as a serious problem (sometimes called the “reproducibility crisis”). Because thechallenges to reproducible science are systemic and cultural (A Manifesto for Reproducible
Science), the literature has tended to focus on theoretical solutions to what is still an illdefined challenge (Casadeevall 2010).
The NIH has taken a lead to develop policies to address the issue (Collins & Tabak, 2014),
including better training for investigators; more systematic evaluation of grant applications;
greater transparency of research data including a proposed new Data Discovery Index as
well as more rigorous enforcement of its data sharing requirements; and for a short while thelaunch of Pubmed Commons to support open discussion on published articles –discontinued in early 2018. A more recent initiative is the Transparency and Openness
Promotion (TOP) guidelines234 which spring from an article in 2015 (Nosek 2015). These
guidelines include eight modular standards, each with three levels of increasing stringency.
Journals select which of the eight transparency standards they wish to adopt for their journal,
and select a level of implementation for each standard. These features provide flexibility for
adoption depending on disciplinary variation, but simultaneously establish community
standards.
Reproducibility is a complex, multi-dimensional problem with roots deep in the research
process. However, it is also affected by some aspects of publishing such as: incentives andpressures for early publication; selective publication of positive findings; and weak challengeof statistical analysis in peer review. Even the language in which the concept is expressed
causes difficulties because many associated terms are not standardised. Johnson notes thatlack of reproducibility may have more to do with inadequate study designs than bad science
per se or scientific misconduct,235 while other commentators warned against overemphasising reproducibility problems.236
Publishers and individual journals have responded in a number of ways, including the
introduction or enforcement of policies on the registration of trials; introduction of policies ondata deposit and sharing (see Section 4.2 Research Data); encouraging or requiring thesharing of computer code as well as research data; and strengthening peer review, forinstance by adoption of reviewer checklists and by making greater use of statistical experts
during review. Other publisher approaches might include publication of negative findings;
extension of the prior registration model from clinical trials to other types of study; andsemantic mark-up of entities like reagents and antibodies to ensure unique identification.
A survey of early career researchers conducted as part of the Harbingers project (PRC
2017) indicated that one of the key priorities in ensuring reproducibility is the ability to repeata research experiment and test the results. In this light, most respondents suggested thefollowing:a) making dataset and supplementary materials available online and easily/openly
accessible;233

http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2016/04/15/reflections-sdjpn16/
https://cos.io/our-services/top-guidelines/
235
Valen E. Johnson Revised standards for statistical evidence PNAS November 26, 2013. 110 (48)19313-19317; http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19313.full
236
Daniele Fanelli -Opinion: Is science really facing a reproducibility crisis, and do we need it to?
PNAS March 13, 2018. 115 (11) 2628-2631; http://www.pnas.org/content/115/11/2628
234

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October 2018b) making articles (and especially the methods section) more detailed and extended;c) using videos to explain methodology; andd) being transparent and engaged in answering methodological questions from peers.

4.2

Research data

4.2.1 Data as an enabler of scientific discovery
A wide range of bodies, including publishers, funding agencies, individual researchorganisations and groups of researchers have been actively promoting and supporting
developments in the domain of research data. STM publishers have been committed to theprinciple of sharing raw data along with publications since 2007, date of the Brussels
Declaration.237 This was complemented by a 2012 joint statement between DataCite andSTM publishers, which included best-practice recommendations to “make research data
easier to find, link to, reuse and cite”.238

4.2.2 Barriers to data sharing
For the most part, the cultural changes necessary to enable widespread dissemination ofresearch data have been slow to occur, although a few disciplines, such as genomics andastronomy, have well-established sharing practices. To be usable, information must be
documented, sorted, curated, shared and preserved (Corti et al. 2014), which places aburden on researchers but also on publishers and infrastructure providers. The former needto provide information in a suitable format, while the latter must provide technologicalsolutions to enable research efforts.
The challenges of organising data and uncertainty over copyright and licensing of data
appear to be the greatest barriers to data sharing, but lack of time, funding and knowledge ofavailable solutions are also significant factors (Figure 47). Fears that data may be misused,or that researchers will find themselves scooped are also commonly cited in the literature,
though appear to be of secondary importance to the practical challenges of data sharing(Stuart et al 2018).

237
238

https://www.stm-assoc.org/public-affairs/resources/brussels-declaration/
http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_06_14_STM_DataCite_Joint_Statement.pdf

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Figure 47: Barriers to sharing datasets in different subject areas (Source: Stuart et al 2018)

4.2.3 Infrastructural challenges
The availability of unprecedented quantities of data offers new opportunities but also poses
infrastructural challenges, as follows:•••

Data users, including researchers, are increasingly interested in machine-readable
information. This has immediate implications for data discoverability but also forpractical applications such as text and data mining (see section 4.8).
Every year, new outlets to deposit data are created, including online repositories
and data journals. At the time of writing, the re3data registry239 holds details ofalmost 2,150 data repositories, and the number continues to increase. The wide
range of options complicates the need for interoperable infrastructure, e.g. to allow
the creation of robust metrics or links between datasets and the scientific outputs
they underpin.
Researchers’ ability to analyse large-scale datasets may be dependent on access tohigh performance computing facilities. Individual researchers or research groups
can work with small or medium datasets, but beyond a certain threshold, advanced
computational approaches are required. This is frequently the case in fields such as
high-energy physics, astronomy and biology.

To improve the provision of data-related services, STM publishers may collaborate withexisting infrastructure providers (Inchcoombe 2017). This relieves them from the burden ofdeveloping ad-hoc and, possibly, duplicated services and is proving an effective way to split
239

https://www.re3data.org/search

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efforts during the article publication process. While, in several cases, infrastructure providers
are private organisations, in others public actors are involved. A recent example is theEuropean Open Science Cloud (EOSC),240 which is expected to provide EU researchers withan environment including free, open services for data storage, management, analysis andre-use across disciplines.

4.2.4 Depositing data
Data deposit by academic researchers takes widely different forms, with requirements
ranging from depositing a custom-made dataset with a detailed explanation to sharing
figures, tables, materials and methods which are not required to enable an understanding of
their research outputs but can offer further insights to readers (Mooney 2016). Options
include:•••Online repositories do not require peer-review and assign DOIs in minutes: this routeto data deposit is the most flexible and need not involve the publication of an article.
Key sources to identify suitable online repositories are re3data241 and FAIRsharing.242
The choice between publicly-funded (e.g. Zenodo)243 or private initiatives (e.g.
figshare)244 contributes to an already-complex environment.
Depositing data along with a publication is possible with a wide range of journals.
These may partner with existing infrastructure providers (e.g. Springer Nature’s
collaboration with figshare, (Inchcoombe 2017)) or use in-house services (e.g.
Elsevier’s Mendeley Data, which is embedded in the article submission workflow).245
Publishing in a data journal (see examples in Table BBB) is the preferred pathway
when authors need to explain in detail how data has been created or processed.
Datasets may be either deposited in the same journal or in a dedicated datarepository. Where data journals link to external datasets there are often minimum
requirements for the third-party hosting (e.g. Geoscience Data Journal specifies therepository must be able to mint a DOI).246

Nature’s Scientific Data247 maintains a list of recommended repositories with high standards
in terms of data access, preservation and stability. These are split by subject and link to
re3data and FAIRsharing entries.
It should be noted that depositing research data is becoming increasingly important, as
major search engines such as Google are entering this market (Castelvecchi 2018). The
release of Google Dataset Search,248 for instance, is expected to contribute to the success ofthe open data movement by making research data more discoverable to all players in thelandscape. Notably, the release of this tool also prompted some organisations holding data
(e.g. repositories) to standardise their metadata and align it to the search engine’s
requirements.

240

https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloudhttps://www.re3data.org/
242
https://fairsharing.org
243
https://zenodo.org
244
https://figshare.com
245
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/author-services/research-data/mendeley-data-for-journals
246
http://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2049-6060/about/authorguidelines.html#dataset_submission
247
https://www.nature.com/sdata/policies/repositories
248
https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch
241

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Table 12: Data journals (examples)249

JournalPublisher

Biodiversity Data Journal
Dataset Papers in Science
Earth System Science Data
Ecological Archives – Data Papers
F1000 Research
Genomics Data – Data in Brief papers
Geoscience Data Journal
GigaScience
International Journal of Robotics Research
Journal of Open Archaeology Data (JOAD)
Scientific Data
Data in Brief
Chemical Data Collections

Pensoft
HindawiCopernicus
Ecological Society of America
Science Navigation GroupElsevier
Wiley
BGI/Oxford University Press
SAGE
Ubiquity Press
Springer Nature
Elsevier
Elsevier

4.2.5 Data citation
Data citation and re-use are inevitably correlated: citing data makes it more discoverable, but
a range of other motivations exist in the research data landscape. These include data
attribution, data connection, impact, sharing and reproducibility (Silvello 2018).
In 2014, a working group reflecting the multi-stakeholder nature of the data landscape
prepared the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.250 The declaration set out eight
principles for the purpose, function and attributes of citations. Citing datasets in journal
articles is in some respects relatively straightforward, since it simply extends existing citation
practices. However, the process of linking data to articles is not as simple. Callaghan (2014)
recommended an investigation into a metadata brokerage service that could simplify theprocess of passing information between data repositories and journals. Today, Crossref251
and Datacite252 fill this gap and provide automated workflows that track and link data andpublications, along with initiatives such as Scholix that aim to facilitate the sharing of
information about the links between data and literature.253 The use of ORCID is also
simplifying the process of linking datasets (and, of course, research outputs more broadly) totheir creators.
Overall, it appears that researchers are increasingly citing datasets. Digital Science et al.
(2016) found that nearly 70% of researchers value a data citation as much as an article
citation, with a further 10% valuing a data citation more than an article citation. Follow-up
work by Digital Science (2017) confirmed these figures and added that citations to nontraditional research outputs are increasing every year.
Nevertheless, Silvello (2018) identifies a number of unresolved issues in the field of data
citation, including:249

For an extensive list, see
https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Sources+of+dataset+peer+review
250
https://www.force11.org/datacitationprinciples
251
https://www.crossref.org/blog/linking-publications-to-data-and-software/252
https://www.datacite.org
253
http://www.scholix.org/about

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The identification problem – How can “a single resource, a subset of resources, andan aggregation of resources” be easily identified?
The completeness problem – How can appropriate and informative citations becreated when data is extracted from a complex and evolving database?
The fixity problem – How can infrastructure providers guarantee that cited data will
be accessible in their cited form?

4.2.6 Software citation
As interest in the sharing and citation of research data has grown, there is increasing
recognition of the critical role of software in modern research. This is reflected in a growing
number of citations of code or software, which traditional publishing systems have struggled
to serve in the past (Digital Science et al. 2017). Building on the FORCE11 working groupfocused on data citation, the FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group issued a set of six
software citation principles. The group’s work focussed on making software a citable entity inthe scholarly ecosystem (e.g. by uploading software to a suitable data repository) andidentified a range of use cases that assume the existence of a citable software object,
typically created by the authors/ developers of the software. The FORCE11 Software
Citation Implementation Working Group254 continues to work with relevant stakeholders(publishers, librarians, archivists, funders, repository developers, other community forums
with related working groups, etc.) to:
1.
2.
3.
4.

endorse the principles
develop sets of guidelines for implementing the principles
help implement the principles
test specific implementations of the principles.

A significant initiative in the area of software is Code Ocean,255 a cloud-based computational
reproducibility platform. Code Ocean has partnered with Taylor & Francis256 and Cambridge
University Press257 in order to incorporate its services into publishing workflows. This is
expected to improve how readers and end users can understand, visualize and reuse thecode, but also to enable better software citation via the inclusion of the metadata of linked
articles.

4.2.7 FAIR data principles
The FAIR principles258 for scientific data management and stewardship aim to make data:•••

Findable, by leveraging metadata and persistent identifiers;
Accessible, through free and open communications protocols;259
Interoperable, by using controlled vocabularies, implementing machine-readability
and including references where appropriate;254

https://www.force11.org/group/software-citation-implementation-working-grouphttps://codeocean.com
256
https://codeocean.com/press-release/taking-the-journal-article-to-the-next-level-taylor-francispartner-with-code-ocean257
https://codeocean.com/press-release/cambridge-university-press-and-code-ocean-announcepartnership258
https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples
259
It should be noted that accessibility does not necessarily equate to openness: access to data mayneed to be constrained due to legitimate concerns around privacy, national security, or commercial
interests.
255

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Reusable, by highlighting clear licence statements that enable the greatest possible
reusability.

The principles are increasingly used as a basis for policy development in countries acrossthe world, and have an important relationship to questions of reproducibility. A recent report(Bruce R 2018) takes stock of how far FAIR principles are supporting open science in the UK
and how they are understood and adopted by the research community.

4.2.8 Data sharing and journal policies
As with open access to journal articles, research funders are playing an important role inmandating the open sharing of research data. Funders have introduced policies (or tightened
existing ones) to require the deposit and sharing of research data. For instance, Cancer
Research UK recognises that the value of data is often dependent on its timeliness and,
therefore, requires data to be released no later than the acceptance for publication of themain findings from the final dataset.260 Recipients of Horizon 2020 are not only bound toshare their data but are also required to ensure it is FAIR (see above).261
As the prevalence of research data policies from research organisations funders increases,
publishers and editors are also paying more attention to standardisation and the wider
adoption of data sharing policies. Work to establish a requirement for data accessstatements to accompany journal articles has had an impact in some areas (Murphy et al.
2017); but their use remains far from comprehensive. Meanwhile, several major publishers
have moved to adopt a standardised research data policy framework, and the Research
Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation isdefining a common set of journal data policy requirements.262 Data-level metrics analogous
to article-level metrics have also emerged over the past few years, including altmetrics andthe Data Citation Index.263 These serve to provide feedback on data usage, views andimpact (Lin 2014).

4.2.9 Initiatives in the area of research data
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) was started in 2013 by the European Commission, theAmerican National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology,
and the Australian Department of Innovation. The remit of the organisation in the researchdata landscape is broad (Treloar 2014b): they aim to improve the sharing of data acrossbarriers (e.g. national, disciplinary, producer/consumer) by the means of working groups andinterest groups involving experts from all over the world. The RDA works at the infrastructurelevel, including hardware, software, content and format standards and human actors.
The following groups are of particular relevance to STM publishers:•••

Publishing Data interest group264
Publishing Data Services working group265
Publishing Data Bibliometrics working group266

260

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/funding-for-researchers/applying-for-funding/policies-that-affectyour-grant/submission-of-a-data-sharing-and-preservation-strategy/data-sharing-guidelines
261
http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/docs/h2020-funding-guide/cross-cutting-issues/openaccess-data-management/data-management_en.htm andhttp://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/docs/h2020-funding-guide/cross-cutting-issues/open-accessdata-management/open-access_en.htm
262
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/data-policy-standardisation-and-implementation263
http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/multidisciplinary/dci/264
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-publishing-data-ig.html
265
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-publishing-data-services-wg.html

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Publishing Data Workflows working group.267

Other significant initiatives in the area are supported by CODATA,268 Science Europe,269 theOpen Research Funders Group270 and the International Science Council.271

4.3Standards, identifiers and conventions

The technical infrastructure that is crucial to the smooth functioning of the scholarly
communication ecosystem is made possible by observance of a range of standards andconvention. STM (the Association) has been very active in the development andmaintenance of major parts of this infrastructure.

4.3.1 Crossref
Crossref272 makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess. They are a not-forprofit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better.
Crossref is one of the most successful examples of co-operation across the publishingcommunity. It is run by the Publishers International Linking Association Inc. (PILA) and waslaunched in early 2000, following a decision at the previous Frankfurt Book Fair, as acooperative effort among publishers to enable persistent cross-publisher citation linking in
online academic journals. There are now 2,000 voting member publishers who represent
4,300 societies and publishers, including both commercial and not-for-profit organizations.
Crossref interlinks millions of items from a variety of content types, including journals, books,
conference proceedings, working papers, technical reports, and data sets. Linked content
includes materials from Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) and Social Sciences andHumanities (SSH) disciplines. When members register their content with Crossref it collects
both bibliographic and non-bibliographic metadata, which is processed so that connections
can be made between publications, people, organizations, and other associated outputs.
The metadata is preserved for the scholarly record. It is also made available across a range
of interfaces and formats so that the community can use it and build tools with it, with theexpense paid for by Crossref member publishers.
Most services provided by Crossref, or into which Crossref has a major input, are based on
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The DOI is not managed by Crossref but by a separate
body, the International DOI Foundation (IDF). This not-for-profit membership organisation is
the governance and management body for the federation of Registration Agencies providing
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) services and registration, and is the registration authority for
the ISO standard (ISO 26324) for the DOI system. Other organisation also use DOIs for theirwork, most notably DataCite.
Crossref offers a wide array of services to ensure that scholarly research metadata isregistered, linked, and distributed. Significant services offered by Crossref which has been
undergoing significant changes in the provision of new services and changes in the names ofothers:•The Funder Registry is discussed separately [see below]266

https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-publishing-data-bibliometrics-wg.html
https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/rdawds-publishing-data-workflows-wg.html
268
http://www.codata.org/
269
http://www.scienceeurope.org/
270
http://www.orfg.org/
271
https://council.science/272
https://www.crossref.org/
267

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•
•

•

October 2018

Bringing new content types into the more formal system of citation and linking –Examples are Preprints and Peer Review Reports which are both becoming more
important in scholarly communication
Becoming an independent source of citation data as recommended by the Initiative
for Open Citations273
Offering CrossRef’s text and data mining tools (originally Prospect) which supplies
metadata API and services that can provide automated linking for TDM tools to the
publisher full text, plus a mechanism for storing licence information in the metadata,and optionally, a rate-limiting mechanism to prevent TDM tools overwhelming
publisher websites.
Providing Crosscheck now called Crossref Similarity Check is a service for editors
who want an extra check. The service helps members to actively engage in efforts
to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism by providing their editorial teams
with access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool, iThenticate

Crossref has recently announce that all its metadata is to be preserved in the CLOCKSS.
Moreover the ongoing thinking within Crossref reaches out into a number of new areas
through the work of Crossref Labs,274 and it is a lead on Metadata 2020 (Section 4.3.7).

4.3.2 Funder Registry
The Open Funder Registry (formerly FundRef) is a taxonomy of grant-giving organisations
worldwide. This is provided in the form of a freely-downloadable file with a CC-0 licence,
which includes funders and their unique identifiers (i.e. DOIs). Donated by Elsevier, theRegistry of some 18,000 funders is updated monthly.
The Funder Registry is used to enable “clear, transparent and measurable information on
who funded research and where it has been published”. It can be used:••••by publishers to analyse the sources of funding supporting their authors and toensure compliance with funder policies;
by research funders to track the published results of their grants;by research organisations to monitor the publications by their staff;
by the general public to understand how R&D funding is used.

Publishers play a major role in maintaining funder information: this can be gathered throughjournal submission systems and acknowledgements sections in articles, and thenstandardised by matching it against the Funder Registry. This allows publishers to add
metadata fields describing funder name, funder id and grant number to their Crossref
deposits.275
At the time of writing, over 2.8 million unique DOIs include funder data, which represents asignificant increase over the figure of 386,000 noted in the 2015 STM report.

4.3.3 National Information Standards Organization (NISO)NISO is a US standards organisation with an international role which extends well beyond“standards” as usually defined. Its Recommended Practices play a major role in journal273

https://i4oc.org/
https://www.crossref.org/labs/
275
See https://www.crossref.org/blog/global-persistent-identifiers-for-grants-awards-and-facilities/.
274

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publishing. It is recognised as a secure place to hold and develop codes of practice whichhave been initiated elsewhere. Important standing committees for journal publishers andjournal users include:••

the Standardized Markup for Journal Articles;276 andthe Tracking Link Origins Working Group, which will develop a NISO Recommended
Practice to allow libraries, publishers and other content providers to accurately track
the sites/platforms from which incoming links originate when they pass through alink resolver.

NISO also works closely with ICEDIS (EDItEUR) on the ONIX standard as it applies tojournals.

4.3.4 Manuscript Exchange
MECA is a new initiative in the field of manuscript exchange – the process of taking anarticle which has been submitted to one journal and transferring it for submission to anotherjournal. MECA stands for Manuscript Exchange Common Approach and was launched in2017.277 This is not the first experiment with review transfer across publishers; theNeuroscience Peer Review Consortium was launched in 2008 as a framework for sharing ofreviews between publishers, and the progress / fate of portable peer review initiatives suchas Axios, Rubriq and Peerage of Science have been widely covered (see also section 2.10).
A new NISO working group will continue the work of MECA.278

4.3.5 Transfer Code of Practice
The UKSG Transfer Code of Practice is a voluntary statement of best practice for thetransfer of journals between publishers. It is designed to minimise the potential disruption tolibrarians and end-users. It specifies roles and responsibilities for the transferring andreceiving publishers and covers matters like perpetual access to previously subscribed
content, transfer of the digital content and subscription lists, communication with interested
parties, and transfer of the journal URL and DOIs. The establishment of this code of practiceand its general acceptance among larger publishers was a result of cross-sector interactions
under the aegis of the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG) who handed it over to be
managed by NISO.279 Phillpotts and colleagues provide more background on the evolution of
the Code (Phillpotts, Devenport, & Mitchell, 2015). In late 2018 an enhanced transfer alerting
service is due to be hosted by the ISSN International Centre.280

4.3.6 ICEDISICEDIS (the International Committee on EDI for Serials) is a special interest group for
subscriptions, serials and library supply. It was at one time a separate organisation but isnow part of EDItEUR, an international standards body particularly concerned with supply
chains across publications in general. ICEDIS is responsible for the governance of thosestandards within its area of competence, which fall into two main groups: descriptive formats
to communicate key items of metadata about subscription resources and transactional
formats to support trading activities. All of the metadata formats currently supported utilize276

https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/jats
www.manuscriptexchange.org
278
https://www.niso.org/press-releases/2018/05/niso-launches-new-project-facilitate-manuscriptexchange-across-systems
279
https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/transfer
280
https://journaltransfer.issn.org
277

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the ONIX XML approach. Transactional messaging standards that EDItEUR supports spanseveral different formats.281

4.3.7 Metadata 2020
Metadata 2020282 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open
metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit ofsociety. This is an advocacy organisation not a standards organisation which brings together
publishers, funders, researchers and librarians. It advocates that richer metadata fuels
discovery and innovation; that connected metadata bridges the gaps between systems andcommunities; and that reusable, open metadata eliminates duplication of effort.283.
4.3.8

Identity and Disambiguation

Unambiguously identifying the author(s) of a given publication has always been a challenge.
Common headaches in the publishing sector include authors with identical names, different
arrangements or transliterations of the same name and authors changing names (e.g. upon
marriage). Digital author identifiers – unique numbers or alphanumeric codes assigned toindividuals as a form of authority control – are a way to support publishers and researchers
alike. The most common digital author identifiers are:•••

ORCID: arguably the most widespread initiative in terms of author identification,
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor iD) is a non-profit collaboration involving
participants from across the research and scholarly communication worlds (846organisations, including research organisations, publishers, funders, professional
associations and other stakeholders in the research ecosystem). ORCID is aplatform-agnostic initiative whose mission is to connect researchers, theircontributions and their affiliations. ORCID iDs can be obtained by registering online
and include information on education, employment, funding and published works. In
addition, ORCID includes an API for system-to-system communication.
ResearcherID: the ResearcherID system has been developed by Thomson Reuters
and is connected to the Web of Science database. ResearcherIDs can be obtainedby registering online and provide citation statistics including the h-index.
Scopus Author ID: unlike the previous two, the Scopus author ID does not need to becreated manually. Every author with articles indexed in the Scopus database will be
automatically assigned a Scopus Author ID, which includes citation information andthe h-index similarly to ResearcherIDs.

At the time of writing, ORCID has issued over 5 million IDs. While comparable figures are notavailable for ResearcherID and Scopus Author ID, both can be connected to an author’s
ORCID iD, if desired.
Since 2015, an increasing number of journals and publishers (for a total of over 3,000
journals to date) have started requiring ORCID iDs in their publication workflows.
Increasingly, this enables authors to submit papers, and then see their ORCID record
automatically updated as their work is published, registered with Crossref, and enters theglobal citation network. ORCID offers significant benefits in terms of reduced reporting
burdens for researchers and enhanced discovery processes, and lays the foundation fortrust in a digital research environment.
281

https://www.editeur.org/59/ICEDIS/
http://www.metadata2020.org
283
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/09/06/much-ado-metadata-2020/
282

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4.3.9 International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit serial number used touniquely identify a serial publication. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between
serials with the same title. ISSN are used in ordering, cataloguing, interlibrary loans, andother practices in connection with serial literature. Other systems are based on ISSNs and itis crucial for publishers to obtain one. The ISSN identifies the publication as such, inreference to its title and its medium. However, it should be noted however that ISSNs can be
granted for any content that is ongoing and it is given in some countries not only to series ofmonographs and magazines but such as outputs as scientific blogs. The ISSN International
Centre is in Paris and (uniquely perhaps) the whole structure is based on an initial treaty
between UNESCO (also in Paris) and the French government – a treaty which has
subsequently been accessed by many governments who usually delegate powers under its
terms to their national library. The ISSN International Centre thus assigns ISSN to
publications issued by international organizations and by publishers located in countries withno ISSN National Centre. Since January 2018, the ISSN International Centre has charged a
fee for ISSN assignment.
The new ISSN portal284 offers an access interface tailored to various ISSN users. A“freemium” model has recently been adopted, combining free data on the one hand andmore complete fee-based data on the other. Non-registered users can browse the free
portal, with access to a subset of ISSN data –including ISSN, key title, title proper, country of
publication, and medium– which has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-SA (Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) licence.
The ISSN International Centre has partnered with NISO to offer a new Transfer Alerting
Service interface to publishers, who shall state their title transfer by means of the ISSN portal
beginning in September 2018. The TAS website has been revamped and shall shortly
replace the existing one while retaining the same free services.

4.4

Technology trends

Fashions in technology trends change – semantic enrichment was central, now AI andBlockchain are the latest focus.

4.4.1 Data, analytics and artificial Intelligence
AI in the form of Machine Learning is behind a number of innovations in the last few years,
both developed directly by publishers and in tools which will be considered below. Viewed interms of the Gartner hype cycle,285 it appears that say that AI has emerged from the troughof disillusionment phase and now has reached the area of realistic expectations and realapplications. This is helped by three things:•••

Large bodies of data are now available, as well as huge bodies of digital content for
text mining;
Much more computer power at low price; andBetter software and self-learning algorithms.

A good way to consider this whole area is to think about what the drivers are and whatpublishers are hoping to achieve. The current underlying driver is about becoming moredata-driven, and many publishers are investing in the development of data warehouses,284

https://portal.issn.org

285

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle

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dedicated analytics teams, and business intelligence (BI) tools. In layman’s terms,
organisations with AI capabilities are able to build on these data resources to support
strategy development and to provide end users with an improved service. Use cases for AI in
STM publishing are still emerging, but the ambition is that it will:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

increase efficiencies in production;
support better editorial decisions (e.g. commissioning);
improve the effectiveness of marketing and sales activities;
deliver better search and discovery of content;
support personalisation;
improve the value of content assets; andhelp publishers better understand their users.

Both semantic enrichment (getting more data) and AI (getting more data and using it more
effectively) support this agenda. The bottom line is that publishers should not invest in AI but
invest in a business problem.
Companies and other initiatives that are actively exploring the use of AI within scholarly
publishing include UNSILO,286 Ictect,287 Iris.ai288 Semantic Scholar289 and Meta,290 while thenew breed of web-scale discovery and analytics tools are also making growing use of AI
technologies (see Section 4.7 Tools, apps and new services for funders and institutions).

4.4.2 Semantic web and semantic enrichment
It could be argued that semantic enrichment in the traditional sense is being superseded bymachine learning in combination with human editorial insight. There are probably few
publishers who have seen a return on investment in semantic enrichment, other than those
who have sold or licensed their taxonomies
It is convenient to distinguish between the semantic web, and the use of semantic
technologies and semantic enrichment of content. Semantic technologies should now beseen within the content of AI. Semantic enrichment is focused on enriching content withdata, the end result being a content set with associated extra data. This is typically achievedby analysing the content to understand more about what it contains e.g. identifying drugs /people / locations. That data is then typically used by a different process to deliver an
outcome e.g. relatedness. AI is a much broader term, but in many cases in publishing it
starts with a similar first step of identifying data in content. The AI algorithm then uses thatdata to deliver an output, this can be as simple as a subject category or it can be something
more complicated like a prediction of the impact of a journal article. In many cases AI is
supported by human input to train the machine i.e. machine learning, but in addition to thehuman training data the computer needs a large quantity of additional data to feed thealgorithm. This additional data typically comes, in publishing, from automated analysis of thecontent.
What has moved on is the assumption that a taxonomy is required in these processes. The
more recent content analysis approaches (in semantic enrichment and AI) use morestatistical and grammatical analysis, rather than analysis against a taxonomy or ontology.
This makes them more flexible and potentially more fine-grained in their output. It also286

https://site.unsilo.com/site/
http://www.ictect.com/288
https://iris.ai/
289
https://www.semanticscholar.org/
290
https://meta.org/
287

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removes the need for the upkeep of such taxonomies and ontologies. There are cases
where the use of a taxonomy or ontology are still appropriate, but this should no longer be
the assumed starting point.
We are seeing a significant increase in automated content enrichment by the majority of
publishers, with these technologies used as specific solutions for distinct tasks e.g.
extracting entities like locations to deliver faceted search. They are being talked about less
now as they become mainstream technologies in the publishers toolbox (e.g. natural
language processing).
Publishers have for many years manually enriched content e.g. keywords, but they are now
using technologies to augment or replace some of these manual processes. Today the
discussion is more about business benefits, whilst semantic enrichment talks more aboutdata extraction (but may be one of the tools to achieve the business benefit).

4.4.3 Blockchain
The situation with Blockchain (a technology almost entirely associated with Bitcoin until
recently) is different. Exactly what Blockchain is and does is not altogether clear to many.
One carefully reasoned explanation helps (van Rossum 2017)
However a commentator on the blog Scholarly Kitchen is extremely dubious about what hecalls “The hype over blockchain — a new technology that has generated what one observer
has called a “mind virus” — (Anderson 2018).
The presentation on STM Tech Trends 2022 cited above examines the use of Blockchain to
aid the big problem of loss of trust in science. The question is whether Blockchain is going to
be robust and fast enough to solve trust issues and ensure authenticity
There are signs of more enthusiasm. Blockchain in Healthcare Today is a new (2018) journal
and the initial articles give potential use cases.291
Some major publishers have joined an initiative, announced in March 2018, which focuseson the problems of research reproducibility, recognition of reviewers and the rising burden of
the peer-review process. The project will develop a protocol where information about peer
review activities (submitted by publishers) is stored on a blockchain. This will allow thereview process to be independently validated, and data to be fed to relevant vehicles toensure recognition and validation for reviewers.292 This project is organised by Digital
Science.293
An ambitious project (http://artifacts.ai/) which has a strapline “building the ledger of record
for research” is devoted to the needs of the research community.
It would seem that these technologies may well need to succeed, if they are to succeed, inother sectors first before there is the investment needed for the academic publishing niche tobecome available.

291

https://blockchainhealthcaretoday.com/index.php/journal
https://www.digital-science.com/blog/news/taylor-francis-and-cambridge-university-press-joinblockchain-for-peer-review-project-blockchainforpeerreview/293
https://www.blockchainpeerreview.org/about-the-project/
292

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October 2018

Tools, apps and new services

4.5.1 Publishing platforms and APIs
The functionality of publishing platforms is a recurring theme of this report. For many years
after journals went online the emphasis was on hosting, an appropriately passive term, which
implied that the platform for online journals was the equivalent of a warehouse/distribution
centre – mostly concerned with taking orders and sending out issues. Over the last few
years most publishers of any size have gradually tied together the various work flows from
submission to post publication curation and discovery
It is well known that the large majority of searches do not start on the publisher’s site (e.g. up
to 60% of web referrals come from search engines). Given this, what is the role of the
publisher platform in the researcher’s workflow? If researchers are journal- and publisheragnostic, and want to get in and out of the publisher’s site as quickly as possible having
found and downloaded the PDF (CIBER 2008), should publishers design sites to be (smart)
repositories of (smart) content with maximum open web discoverability and open APIs, finetuned for fastest possible delivery of content through whatever service the end-user chooses
to access? Alternatively, should publishers invest in semantic enrichment, increased
engagement, adding or integrating workflow tools to create a rich, productive environment?
In practice, publishers support both behaviours, whether a power browser bouncing in andout of the site, or a researcher in a more exploratory phase seeking a more immersive orinteractive experience.
A key technology feature for the STM platform is the open API (here “open” means that the
specification is freely available, not the content). The strategic reason is that much of thevalue of the platform will increasingly lie in its interoperability (e.g. ability to integrate content
from multiple sources, to integrate and share data, to add functionality, and to allow users toaccess their content from within their chosen starting point or workflow tool). More tactically,
deployment of modern APIs will allow publishers to develop new products and services
faster, to develop internal workflow process and manage them more easily, and to support
multiple devices more easily. In 2018 some analysts consider that whereas API's arevaluable for interoperability and product development (and effective API's could mean that apublisher isn't held hostage by one platform), the growing value of API's will be enabling
access for text and data mining (TDM). A concrete example is the new Text and Data Mining
Site294 launched by Springer Nature in 2018 with a number of open APIs at its core.295

4.5.2 Mobile access and apps
Professionals of all types are under increasing pressures to perform more complex tasks at
an accelerating pace in an environment greater regulation and accountability and overloaded
by ever-increasing amounts of data. It is not surprising, in these circumstances, that mobile
access to information, tools and services has the potential to create huge benefit.
For a broadly-based publisher typically usage is estimated at 65-75 % desktop vs. 25-35%
mobile. Nevertheless, it is standard for platforms to be optimised for mobile. Research on
use by laboratory researchers of mobile phones in the UK and the US demonstrates a lot ofuse but only when away from the desktop, and not by preference because many of thejournals they read are not optimized for mobile (or so they report) (PRC 2018c). By contrast,
for a leading medical publisher with a large clinical readership mobile usage has become
culturally and institutionally embedded within everyone's DNA.

294
295

https://www.springernature.com/text-and-data-mining
https://dev.springernature.com/

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The latest Meeker report296 shows that the rate of increase in mobile (and internet)
penetration is falling after internet penetration hit 50% of the global population – but theinteresting thing about mobile is that it just is and must be part of the publisher strategy – it is
no longer optional.
The cost/benefit equation is clearer for busy professionals than for most academic
researchers, but mobile device use is rising in this group too, with growth mostly comingfrom increased tablet uptake. Mobile traffic at the leading STM platforms was still onlyaround 10% in 2014, albeit growing year-on-year. Gardner and Inger (2018)’s survey shows
an overwhelming preference for accessing online articles on a desktop or laptop PC overtablet or phone; mobile device use was higher in medical compared to academic sectors,
and in low income compared to high income counties, but still very much a minority activity.
Use cases for mobile are still emerging and developing. The first generation of apps tended
to simply provide access to information (that is, they show something), rather than allowing
the user to achieve something within their workflow (i.e. do something). So STM publishers
initially addressed the core needs of “looking up and keeping up”, i.e. searching for facts andsmall pieces of information, and keeping abreast of developments via RSS or eToC feeds orsimilar. Clinical calculators are a little more interactive but play a similar role.
Although most of the current interest is generated by the rapidly expanding tablet market,
there seem likely to be applications that remain well-suited to smartphones despite thegrowth of tablet uptake – e.g. point-of-care drug information is ideally delivered through adevice that is always in the pocket.
On the tablet, additional uses include long-form reading, more immersive self-study andother education applications, and active engagement with research content (which can
include annotation and highlighting, adding papers to bibliographic systems, and tagging,through to perhaps creating presentations or other new content). In the future there will beever-increasing integration of mobile apps with workflow and enterprise systems (e.g.
medical records and e-prescribing systems, and similar).
There is one more important difference between mobile app-based access and PC webbased access to journals. Mobile devices are personal, rarely shared, thus tying usage data
to the individual rather than the institution as happens with web access (where access
control is typically by IP range). The app environment allows much richer data to be collected(with appropriate consents) about the user’s interaction with the app/content. And the app
ecosystem (i.e. device plus cloud plus App Store etc.) encourages purchases via a single
click (including from within the app itself), tied to the individual’s credit card (via the App
Store) rather than the library budget.
Business models are, like use cases, still developing. For research journal publishers, thedefault option has simply been to provide mobile access as a (necessary) additional service.
Mobile subscriptions are increasing, however, offering a new opportunity for individual andmember subscriptions. Reports suggest much higher engagement with advertising in tablet
versions of medical journals than with web version, and hence higher prices and advertising
renewals (Edgecliffe-Johnson 2012), suggesting that tablet editions may offer a route into
fully digital versions for journals with advertising content (and a potential route for societies todrop their membership print editions). In the general public mobile app market, in-app
purchases dwarf revenues from app purchases or subscriptions, and this model may havepotential in STM (e.g. for individual issues, additional chapters of text or reference works,etc.).

296

https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/internet-trends-report-2018

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There are important technology choices to be made for publishers in addressing theoverlapping issues of mobile access and apps, that go beyond the scope of this report. At
the time of writing, most larger STM journals and platforms offered a mobile-optimised
interface (e.g. using responsive or adaptive design). For app development, publishers haveto choose between native apps (written in the development language for each individual
device), webapps (written using open standards especially HTML5), or hybrid apps
(combining native code with web content).

4.5.3 Publishers as workflow providers
It has been one of the axioms of the internet that players should partner with other(specialists) for maximum efficiency and penetration and this is what publishers have done.
They have tended not to build but rather use the software of other smaller players.
There has been a change in the last few years in that some big players have concentrated
on building, with a complete set of workflow offerings potentially being established by a“duopoly” of Elsevier and Digital Science (Schonfeld 2017b). Some of Schonfeld’s key points
include:•••Content is giving way to workflow.
Should the research university outsource more core scholarly infrastructure? And if
so to whom, and under what terms?
The largest publishers are becoming workflow providers. What strategies areavailable for those left behind?

According to Schonfeld, for Elsevier, “integration” is key. It is building scientific workflow
services on individual products and platforms like Mendeley, hivebench, SSRN, Digital
Commons, Scopus, and SciVal. To his list can be added bepress, acquired in 2018, together
Elsevier’s existing Pure, ScienceDirect (for a long time), and Plum Analytics products.
For Digital Science (not a publisher, though owned in part by Holzbrink Publishing Group)
there is a different philosophy. These are a portfolio of autonomous companies related to thecentral company in various ways though benefitting from a productive environment. Eachcompany from Altmetrics, through Dimensions, Figshare, Overleaf, ReadCube andSymplectic have been sold as a suite to universities but mostly do individual deals withpublishers and with researchers themselves. Schonfeld admits there is no end-to-end
solution here – yet. Most if not all of the Digital Science are mentioned elsewhere in the textof this Report
Schonfeld offers a strategy for those publishers “left behind”on the basis that now the“competitive environment is qualitatively different” (Schonfeld 2017c). There are no silver
bullets but a range of common sense suggestions including various types of partnerships
such as a not-for–profit alliance usually involving a central provider or maybe a decentralised
collection of lightweight tools.

4.5.4 New article formats and features
Publishers and others continue to innovate and investigate potential new ways to explore,
present, format and share research articles and related content on the web. Somedevelopments mentioned in the last report have continued to exert an influence on
subsequent initiatives. This is only a selection of what publishers have offered their authors
or users and misses out in particular specialized tools for specific disciplines. It also
assumes the standard journal article reporting primary research and is not concerned withthe review article. The basic model can be stretched a lot – for example the ongoingchanges of the construct from F1000Resarch.

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Registered Reports: are a form of empirical article in which the methods and proposed
analyses are preregistered and reviewed prior to research being conducted. This format isdesigned to minimise bias in deductive science, while also allowing complete flexibility to
conduct exploratory (unregistered) analyses and report serendipitous findings. Thisdefinition is taken from the author guidance prepared for the journal Cortex297 which was thefirst example of an idea which has been taken up by other publishers. For the origin in 2013see an explanation by the editor.298
Enhanced HTML-based formats: example include Elsevier’s Article of the Future, Wiley’s
Anywhere Article, and eLife’s Lens formats, as well as similar initiatives from otherpublishers. These have been based on research into how researchers use online articles,
and primarily aim at improving and streamlining the user experience, for instance dividing thescreen into regions so that the text can be viewed alongside images or references. Anotheradvantage of redesigning the online layout using HTML5 is that it can natively support
mobile-friendly views. The Article of the Future was rather more than just an enhanced
HTML format from the start (Aalperberg 2012). Its bigger impact was its innovative anduseful introduction of elements that are separately mentioned later, such as dynamic figuresand data visualizations (interactive tables, interactive maps, and 3D visualizations). In manyof these cases, Elsevier was actually the first to offer these features beyond“experimentation” and into a fully operation process and workflow and both within andoutwith Elsevier there are continuing developments. Some of these features are part of
and/or central to the article whereas others are additional to the article.
Visual Abstracts and videos of figures are being used more in spite of the costs, which
include a fair amount of hands on production/editorial work. Figure 360 for Cell Press
journals is one of these developments flowing from the Article of the Future, enabling better
discovery, understanding and outreach of some main points. These are Author-narrated
videos of select figures.299 Visual (or 'graphical') abstracts ("VAs") have been used in somejournals for many years, in a number of disciplines and with a wide range of production
quality. Such experiments are not confined to major commercial companies. The American
Journal of Nephrology for example asks authors to submit a schematized version of theirabstracts.
Enhanced PDFs: recognising that researchers will often prefer to use the PDF (particularly
for local storage, annotation, etc.), new more feature-rich and web-connected versions of the
PDF format have been developed, of which the best known is ReadCube. In 2014 the factthat it was based on the PDF was seen as surprising but now needs no defence. ReadCube
is part of the Digital Science portfolio of companies. Depending on how its offering is looked
at it is not only a reference manager, but also a sharing and discovery mechanism. In 2018 itclaims over 40 million users and partners with many major publishers including Taylor &Francis and Springer Nature.300 If seen as a reference manager, Mendeley is perceived as
the main competition.
Article viewing and sharing: ReadCube’s Content Sharing Initiative allows users to sharesubscribed content with non-subscribers via a special link. Since the last edition Wiley andSage have also taken up this technology as well as Springer Nature. The Wiley approach is
explained here.301 The pilot initiated in 2017 enables sharing to non-subscribers. Meanwhile,297

https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/PROMIS%20pub_idt_CORTEX%20Guidelines_RR_29_04_2013.pdf
298
https://www.elsevier.com/editors-update/story/peer-review/cortexs-registered-reports
299
https://www.cell.com/figure360
300
https://www.readcube.com/press
301
https://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-130882.html

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the publisher-optional Kudos Shareable PDF is intended to support comparative, copyrightcompliant sharing across multiple Scholarly Communication Networks. 302
3D PDF: Publishers in fields heavily reliant on 3D information – earth sciences, geophysical,
geospatial, engineering, medical scanning, etc. – are starting to adopt the 3D PDF format.
Again Adobe Acrobat, now in their 25th year, seems to have been able to offer enhancement
via PDF based services after so many prophecies that their offering would soon besuperseded.303
Article versions. The taxonomy of article versions has already been discussed (Section
2.2.2) and mention has been made there of platform developments that allow articles to be
updated or expanded, while rigorously preserving the original version(s) and its publication
record. As mentioned there, F1000Research have worked closely with Crossref in how tohandle a more fluid concept of the journal. eLife’s Research Advance article type performs a
related function by allowing researchers to publish significant “additions” to original research
papers, so that they can report (substantial) progress in their research programmes rapidly
and efficiently without need to write a full new paper. It has been clear for some time thatpublishers need to be more serious about their stewardship of the article and especiallychanges after the version of record. How this is to be handled is a work in progress
The hub and spokes mode. This is the concept behind another new format, combining anarticle with its peer review reports. Many initiatives can be found on some form of Open Peer
Review.304
Dynamic (“live”) figures: rather than publishing figures as flat images, which makes reuse of
the underlying data either difficult or impossible, figures could be presented as dynamicallygenerated images from data stored with the article. F1000Research has taken this idea astage further by allowing the user to interact with the code that generates the figure, so that,for example, parameters could be varied and the different results explored. The use of
streaming media is discussed in 4.5.4.
Data visualisation: there is a very large number of file formats used to store experimental
research data. The usefulness of including such datasets in the article supplementary data
can be much enhanced by providing visualisation tools. Some publishers (e.g. Taylor &Francis, Springer Nature, PLOS) use a service offered by Figshare for storage andvisualisation of such datasets.305 Figshare visualizes (2018) over 1000 different file formats
in its supplementary data Viewer, lowering the barrier at submission stage to what file types
can be received as supplementary data. The recent work by CIBER with early career
researchers (PRC 2018) demonstrates that ECRs in the UK and the US have a high level ofrecognition of Figshare and also a preference for depositing data as supplementary data.
Microarticles: this is Elsevier’s name for a new short article format designed to let authors
publish useful data, method descriptions or other valuable research results (includingintermediate and null/negative results), that might otherwise remain unpublished. This
service is now re-branded as Research Elements.306

302

https://blog.growkudos.com/2018/05/22/s-pdf-doubles-sharing/https://theblog.adobe.com/evolution-digital-document-celebrating-adobe-acrobats-25thanniversary/
304
See for example https://www.elsevier.com/reviewers-update/story/innovation-in-publishing/is-openpeer-review-the-way-forward305
An example of the use of Figshare for this purpose, but directed at researchers, is to be found here:
https://research.unimelb.edu.au/infrastructure/doing-data-better/figshare/features-roadmap
306
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/author-services/research-elements
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Geotagging: much research in a wide variety of fields from archaeology and epidemiology toenvironmental and earth sciences includes location-specific information. Until recently the
only way to locate research relevant to a particular location or region was to use keyword
searching, which is imprecise and haphazard. Search based on geotagging allows precise
searching, map-based interfaces (as in Google Maps) and other advantages. Examples
include JournalMap, a scientific literature search engine that finds research based on
location and biophysical attributes combined with traditional keyword searches; andElsevier’s Geofacets, which provides peer-reviewed maps including context from theirsource publications aimed at geoscientists.

4.5.5 Streaming MediaIn a previous section the problems of long term preservation of “dynamic” scholarly content
is raised as one not yet attended to by libraries (Section 2.17). This section provides theevidence for the need. It is based mainly on a survey by Renew Consultants (2018) whointerviewed organizations involved in scholarly communication to explore their use of video
and audio. The key conclusions arising were:••

engaging with video and audio is critical to future success, as it may bridge the gap
between the activities we undertake now and the way that future generations arelikely to choose how to consume their information; andvideo and audio is not new; it is just that the STM publishing industry has only juststarted to really grapple with how it might fit within the landscape – or, perhaps, how
it might fit within the video and audio landscape.

Among the case studies were a number of STM journals publishers who broadly speaking
were either encouraging or allowing authors to submit video summaries, admitting video as
supplementary materials, or (most interestingly) including video as central to the article.

4.5.6 Open Annotation
Open annotation, a new open specification for web-based annotation, offers the potential for
richer types of commentary and discourse to be supported in a layer sitting over journal (andother academic) content (Carpenter 2013). Approval of open annotation by the W3C as a
web standard in February 2017 changed everything by establishing a foundation upon whichinteroperable systems could be built. Naydenov and Staines (2018) explain the advantagesof annotations over comments
Open annotation shares some features with simpler forms of annotation (e.g. social
bookmarking services) but supports multiple annotation types, including bookmarking,highlighting, tagging and commenting. Annotation does not require either the permission
from the content annotated website or that it installations of any new software on its part.
Publishers may, however, choose to run their own open annotation services which could
allow for instance richer features to be offered to subscribers or registered users.
Annotations can be linked not just to web documents but to specific locations within pages,
right down to the sentence or word level, permitting more meaningful and interactive
commentary. Additionally, annotation and linking is not limited to text: the standard supports
annotation of non-textual materials such as images, maps and videos. Open annotations arealso citable and can be preserved as part of the scholarly record.
A leading provider of open annotation services is the not-for-profit Hypothes.is, which alsoorganises an annual conference (I Annotate). Other organisations developing tools andservices within the scholarly sphere include Annotator (Open Knowledge Foundation),
Domeo (Mass. General Hospital), and PubPeer. General-purpose web annotation tools thatmight be co-opted for scholarly purposes include Genius and Diigo.
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Enhanced PDF readers aimed at STM audiences offer alternative (non-standards based)
ways of sharing annotation, for example ReadCube, Utopia Docs, Colwiz, Mendeley, etc.

4.5.7 Author services and tools
Publishers have of course always provided services such as peer review and copy-editing toauthors, but increased competition for authors, globalisation of research (hence a greater
proportion of authors with weaker English language skills), and new enabling technologies
are driving an expansion of author services. This is an outline description of a range ofservices offered both by publishers and alternative platforms such as HighWire but it iscertainly not exhaustive:
Presubmission services: These include journal selection tools (e.g. Research Square’s
JournalGuide, CoFactor, and Edanz Journal Selector; a customised version of the latter isavailable as part of the Springer Author Academy site); language and translation services(most publishers outsource, though some (e.g. OUP) do it themselves); presubmissionenquiries and screening; journal information pages (these are becoming increasingly open
about sharing current data on their author-related performance such as peer review times,
production times, etc.) Peerwith307 provides a peer-2-peer marketplace enabling academics
to access a wide range of experts and services.
Production: Manual services such as redrawing or relabelling figures are now rare, but havebeen replaced by automated services such as reformatting of reference lists (and removal of
unnecessary styling requirements for submitted manuscripts generally), and e-proofing tools.
There are still a big range of tools sometimes concentrated in an offer which links an online
editorial system with a production one. An example is Aries Systems.
Information and alerts: Tracking and status reporting during production; citation alerts
following publication. These functions are often combined.
Marketing and promotion: Given authors’ growing need to maximise the visibility and impactof their work, there is plenty of scope here: article-level metrics and usage statistics; advice
and tools/services for authors to promote their own papers, and integration of services like
Kudos, Publiscize or ImpactStory; toll-free shareable links for subscription content orshareable versions (e.g. ReadCube). Then there is Impact Vizor™ - visual analytics forcontent value and its companion Usage Vizor™ gives publishers immediate insight into
article-level, institutional, and turnaway usage so that they can make more informed, timely,and evidence-based editorial and business decisions about their content.

4.5.8 Collaborative writing and sharing tools
Although there has been discussion for some time of the potential benefits of offeringcollaborative writing tools aimed specifically at scientific authors, the dominance of Microsoft
Word has limited the demand (Perkel 2014). Google Docs is freely available and has createdawareness of the benefits of online writing tools, but lacks many features required inscientific writing.
Overleaf (originally WriteLaTeX) now part of Digital Science, offers such a service, which in2014 claimed to have over 150,000 users at more than 1000 institutions and over 2 million
documents created. In mid-2018 2 million users are claimed to be “enjoying the easiest way
to create, collaborate and publish online”.
Other academic online writing tools include Authorea (which was acquired by Atypon/Wileyin mid-2018), Fidus Writer and shareLaTeX. The Authorea platform offers publishing307

https://www.peerwith.com/

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October 2018services in addition to writing. Another service, Annotum, offers a writing, peer review andpublishing platform based on WordPress with extensions to support scholarly content. The
Plot.ly website allows the collaborative creation of graphs on a cloud-based platform; graphs
can be shared either on the platform or by using code to embed, allowing users access tothe underlying data. These are all slightly different offerings with none having the impact ofOverleaf to date.
At present all these services are used by a tiny minority of scientists. This may change withpublisher endorsement and integration. For instance, there is an offer to publishers of a web
service to provide “one-click” submission from Overleaf to the publisher’s system. The
typesetter River Valley has developed a somewhat similar service, RVPublisher, marketedprimarily at publishers. Some publishers are also actively exploring this area: Elsevier hasreported working on the creation of authoring tools to support semantic mark-up, and Wiley
is similarly researching options for capturing more structured information from authors.

4.6

Tools, apps and new services for funders and institutions

There is a growing market for services built on STM publishing information in the form of
research analytics: research information management systems linked to analytics tools.
According to OC&C (cited in Springer Nature 2018), approximately 14% of thematerials/content budget of academic libraries is currently allocated for abstracting andindexing databases and platforms, and the academic spend market for these databases andplatforms is expected to continue to show robust growth over the coming years.
The idea behind such services is to provide insight for academic institutions and theirresearch managers, research funders, and governments into the quality and impact of
research programmes. The analytic tools use bibliographic data including citations, building
on previous cruder approaches (such as using the Journal Impact Factor), to assess qualityof output with more sophisticated data analysis, and integration with current research
information systems (CRIS; also called Research Information Management, or RIM) within
institutions.308 CRIS systems integrate information on an institution’s researchers' andresearch groups' activities and outputs, pulling in information from internal systems, includingHR, finance, grant tracking systems, and research project progress reports, as well as
external data, in particular bibliographic datasets, and other external proprietary and public
datasets (e.g. patents or funding).
The three main companies who have traditionally been active in this market are Elsevier,whose SciVal suite of analytic tools (supported by the Scopus database) werecomplemented by the 2012 acquisition of the Danish CRIS vendor Atira and its PURE
service; Clarivate Analytics, whose CRIS Converis (previously AVEDAS, acquired byThomson Reuters and integrated with its Research in View service), and InCites
Benchmarking and Analytics suite draw on Web of Science data; and Digital Science, which
has long had a presence in the market through its ownership of Symplectic. The main
services provided are subscription-based tools and services (e.g. to analyse relativecompetitive strengths of research programmes, identify collaborators, measureindividual/team research performance, etc.); custom research and analytics309; and data
licensing for internal analysis. There are also some non-commercial national-level initiatives
such as METIS (Netherlands) and CRIStin (Norway). In North America, there has historically
308 euroCRIS, the European Organisation for International Research Information, hosts an annual
conference and manages the CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) standard:
http://www.eurocris.org
309 An interesting example is the series of reports Elsevier have prepared for the UK Department of
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the international competitiveness of the UK researchbase (e.g. Elsevier 2016)

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been a greater focus on Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR) Systems than CRIS systems, butinterest in the latter is now growing.310
New entrants to the analytics market in recent years include:• 1Science, a sister company to Science-Metrix, offers a suite of products based on a
curated collection of 90 million articles. The company claims to offer significantly
improved coverage of journals outside the West, thereby providing a morecomprehensive discovery and analytics solution than Scopus or Web of Science.
• Dimensions brings together data from six of Digital Science’s portfolio companies
ReadCube, Altmetric, Figshare, Symplectic, Digital Science Consultancy andÜberResearch, aiming to offer a unified view of research from input to output toimpact. The current product, which was relaunched in early 2018, combines a citation
database, a research analytics suite, and modern article discovery and accessfunctionality. The methodology of construction of the Dimensions dataset and userinterface is outlined in Hook et al (2018).
• wizdom.ai offers research intelligence for researchers, institutions, funders andpublishers through interactive dashboards and visualisations for decision making.
Using AI to interconnect publications, funding, patents and clinical trials, it aims toprovide holistic view of global research activity. Owned by Informa, wizdom.ai is asister company to Taylor & Francis, and was developed by the team behind thecolwiz reference manager (now wizdom.ai research assistant).

This new generation of analytics tools reflect a growing tendency to see research data as acommodity, with value being generated instead from the algorithms used to enrich, interpretand surface that data to meet a range of user needs.
There is a separate market for corporate research analytics services, for example in thepharmaceutical and high-tech engineering sectors but these services are outside the scopeof this report.

4.7

Social media and scholarly collaboration networks

This section is concerned with social media and scientific collaboration networks. They
provide a function that is as important if different from conventional channels of scholarly
communication such as e-mails.

4.7.1 Social Media
During the last decade a number of studies have looked at researchers’ use of social media.
RIN’s report If you build it, will they come? found low take-up, with under 15% using regularly(RIN 2010). Only a small group, around 5%, used social media to publish the outputs andwork in progress. The main barrier to greater use that RIN identified was the lack of clarity
over potential benefits: the costs of adoption were not trivial, and without clear and quick
benefits researchers preferred to stick with the services they already knew and trusted. The
rapid development and proliferation of services meant it was hard to keep track of them, orassess their potential benefits, and their proliferation tended to mean that each lacked thecritical mass users needed. There were also a second set of barriers around quality andtrust: researchers were discouraged from using new forms of scholarly communication that
310

Popular FAR systems in the U.S. include Digital Measures and Academic Analytics, see
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/188632/Bakker%20McBurney%20Poster%20AL
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were not subject to peer review or lacked recognised means of attribution. And contrary to
the stereotype, there were only small differences in use by demographic factors including
age. RIN’s overall conclusions was that there was little evidence to suggest that web 2.0
would prompt in the short or medium term the kinds of radical changes in scholarly
communications advocated by the open research community.
Other studies have found similar results (Ithaka S+R 2010; Procter et al., 2010; RIN 2009a).
More anecdotally, David Crotty has written thoughtful accounts of a crop of Web tools forbiologists and why they were not more successful, seeing the main reasons for lack ofadoption as being lack of time; lack of incentive; lack of attribution; lack of critical mass;inertia; and inappropriate tools that do not fit the culture of science (Crotty 2008; Crotty2010).
In addition to this relatively low active use of social media (i.e. posting content), researchers
also make little passive use of social media as a a source of information and awareness. For
example, Ithaka found that very few respondents saw blogs and social media as important totheir research, and specifically, following other researchers through their blogs or social
media was by far the least important way for researchers to keep up with their fields (Ithaka
S+R 2013). Interestingly, a significantly higher percentage of scientists (albeit still low, ataround 15%) said they shared the findings of their research via social media than usedsocial media to keep up with new research (around 5%); perhaps they saw social media as away to extend impact beyond the academy rather than a way to communicate with peers.
The most recent authoritative review on scholarly use of social media and altmetrics is by
Cassidy Fujimoto and colleagues (Sugimoto 2017) There is a lot of literature reviewed andfrom particular studies mentions of use of specific social media are recorded rather than theextent of the use by (for our purposes) researchers in science disciplines
It was the view expressed in the last edition of the STM Report that trends in social media
use in the general population are so strong that many believe that they will become a more
substantial part of scholarly communication over time. Scientific social networks have grownvery rapidly (see below). And closer integration of social features into services (as with
Mendeley), rather than trivial inclusion of a “Like” button can build social behaviours morenaturally. Overall, therefore, there a case for believing social media will play a part in content
discovery and sharing.
In the last few years however there is some evidence that use of social media byresearchers in general has not increased as much as might have been anticipated. The
reasons for this lack of change probably in part reflect the comments made in the last
decade by Crotty (see above). Donelan (2016) based on research done in 2014
summarised: “Social media are not currently viewed by all STEM academics as an essential,
or in fact necessary, tool for carrying out their daily tasks”.
A recent survey on discovery (Gardner and Inger 2018) finds that Social Media (which forthis purpose included Mendeley and Research Gate as well) have become significantly more
important in all subject areas since 2012 but in the sciences usage for this purpose has now
peaked.
Social media is a broad term and different use cases need to be analysed separately. Hereis one definition from Donelan: in her research, the term ‘social media tool’ includes blogs,
Twitter, social networking sites (such as Facebook and professional based sites such as
LinkedIn), media sharing sites (such as YouTube, Flickr and SlideShare) and social
bookmarking sites (such as Delicious) (Donelan 2016). For our purposes in this sub-section
we are concerned primarily with Twitter and with Facebook while other social networking
sites are considered below

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What about media sharing sites and social bookmarking sites? There is no doubt that journal
authors use the three media sharing sites mentioned and many routinely put up
presentations on YouTube and SlideShare. As far as we know social bookmarking is not apractice of the majority of STM researchers.
Recent Ciber work has shown that Twitter is used by researchers in much the way that it isused by other groups. As of 2016, Twitter had more than 319 million monthly active users.
Researchers within the general embrace of Twitter are part of their own communities andwhether or not such communities are active in use of the medium for professional purposes
will to a large extent depend on use by individuals. Twitter provides information about newwork in a specific field and enables publicity for one’s own work. There is evidence that someearly career researchers drop in and out of engagement with Twitter depending on how busy
they are and whatever demands in their research they have at any particular time (PRC
2018).
Many researchers come across Twitter at conferences where its use is sometimes
encouraged but perhaps less so than it once was (Sugimoto et al 2017). Studies listed
certainly concur in confirming that only a small minority of those attending a conference use
Twitter in this way.
There is some indications that Twitter may be able to play a role in predicting highly cited
papers (Eysenbach 2011). The growing adoption of article-level metrics may also create
more awareness of the use of Twitter or blogs to discuss or promote journal articles, andhence perhaps a positive feedback effect.
When Chinese researchers are asked whether or not they communicate with their researchcolleagues using social media they routinely say that they do not but when WeChat is
mentioned they admit to using for that purpose this Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social
media and mobile payment app. It is quite different in its scope from anything developed
outside China. In 2018 WeChat has hit one billion monthly users for the first time, the ownerof the Chinese messaging app has revealed. The vast majority of its users are based in
China, where it's known as Weixin, and where the recent Lunar New Year boosted it past thebillion milestone311. In 2017 a major university312 suggested that posts on social media andother un-peer-reviewed activity might be taken into account in promotion or similar decisions
There is no evidence in 2018 that any other institutions followed this lead.
A recent survey by Springer Nature described in a blog313 is primarily concerned with social
media as a source of information as well as a way of communicating. In the Nature survey
conducted in 2014, the most-selected activity on both ResearchGate and Academia.edu was
simply maintaining a profile in case someone wanted to get in touch (68%). This year’s
survey revealed also that over three quarters of respondents stated that they use social
media and SCNs for discovering and/or reading scientific content (Nature’s 2014 study33%). This is not the conclusions of the recent ongoing study of ECRs by CIBER where their
behaviour at least in the UK and the USA is currently more aligned to the 2014 results (PRC
2018).
Another result of the Springer Nature survey is that “50% of professional users said they
accessed Facebook on a daily basis”. It is not clear whether access is concerned withpersonal or professional matters. The CIBER results suggest that many ECRs avoid using311

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43283690
https://www.nature.com/news/top-chinese-university-to-consider-social-media-posts-in-researcherevaluations-1.22822
313
http://blogs.nature.com/ofschemesandmemes/2017/06/15/how-do-researchers-use-social-mediaand-scholarly-collaboration-networks-scns
312

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Facebook for professional purposes but they do engage with local or professional groups on
Facebook. Sugimoto quotes evidence for significantly less professional than personal use:
indeed when Facebook use for professional purposes is investigated specifically only aquarter use this medium.
Sugimoto surveys a range of articles that have looked at the use of blogs by researchers
both as producers and as consumers. What she has found seems to confirm the relatively
small number of bloggers compared with those who consume them, particular in medicine(Sugimoto 2017). It is not surprising that ECRs in the Harbingers project (PRC 2017) areless likely to blog during the three years of the project. They claim lack of time. They
associate blogs with outreach and would like to do more blogging in the future. There is no
doubt that blogging is perceived as something legitimate to do. Researchers may (and do)make use of other social media for a variety of purposes sometimes with encouragement of
their publishers and/or as part of the programme proposed by services like Kudos.

4.7.2 Social Collaboration Networks (SCN)
One of the most significant developments in the STM landscape is the rapid rise of SCNs in
the academic environment, most notably ResearchGate and Academia.edu. SCNs areplatforms aimed at connecting researchers with common interests. Users create profiles andare encouraged to list their publications and other scholarly activities, upload copies ofmanuscripts they have authored, and build connections with scholars they work or co-author
with. By 2014, awareness of the networks was already high, especially for ResearchGate in
STM fields and Academia.edu in social sciences and humanities (Van Noorden 2014c).
Within the last few years ResearchGate has become by far the most important for
researchers in the sciences. It is a ‘pure’ social networking site whose mission is to “connect
researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, andexpertise." Launched in 2013, ResearchGate has over 15 million users (as of April 2018) andstores tens of millions of articles. It needs to be mentioned that other outputs are uploaded
by researchers such as presentations at conferences. As seen in Section 3.1, a free-to-readversion of an article is more likely to be found on ResearchGate than in all open accessrepositories combined. Much of this content is posted without permission and contrary to the
STM Principles (STM 2016). Recent research has shown that, at least among early career
researchers, at least 80% in the sciences are likely to have a presence (PRC 2017) but thisdoes not necessarily mean active engagement.
Academia.edu is also meant as a platform to share research papers, and the company's
mission is to “accelerate the world's research." The website was launched in 2008 andreportedly has 36 million users, but fewer articles than ResearchGate. Academia is probably
still used more by social sciences and researchers in the humanities but in general it is aless welcoming site and there is pressure to pay for a premium service that is off-putting tomany researchers.
It is worth pointing out research already mentioned rather surprisingly unveils a significant
usage of LinkedIn by many early career researchers. They consider that a profile on thisprofessional site is worth having not just by those considering a career in industry or ingovernment
In response to the for-profit nature of Academia.edu and ResearchGate, some academics
have created ScholarlyHub, a non-profit open access repository that gives access toacademic papers, research projects and researchers. The platform aims to become amember-run and owned SCN that aggregates research, teaching and other professional
resources. The membership of the advisory board is slanted towards the humanities andsocial sciences and as yet there is no evidence of any serious take-up

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Moreover, other services are exploring the potential of social networks as a vehicle to gather
and disseminate research. Mendeley is a popular reference manager software produced by
Elsevier that allows sharing research papers and online collaboration among over eight
million researchers. Another network, colwiz (collective wizdom), launched in 2011 andprovided interactive digital collaboration and free reference management services forresearchers in academia, industry and government globally. They also developed the ACS
Chemwork platform for the American Chemical Society. In 2013, Taylor & Francis
incorporated colwiz's interactive PDF reader into their journals platform and in 2017 its
parent, Informa, acquired the whole company. In 2016, the company also developed the
wizdom.ai research intelligence product (see section 4.7 Tools, apps and new services forfunders and institutions). At the time of writing, colwiz functionality was being merged into
wizdom.ai to develop an intelligent research assistant under the wizdom.ai brand.
Bibliography management software (such as Endnote (Thomson Reuters), Flow (Proquest),
Pages (Springer), Zotero, etc.) also allows users to share their research libraries with otherusers but typically the sharing is inherently one-to-one or one-to-few, or restrictions on thenumbers of users with whom content may be shared are explicitly enforced
The popularity of SCNs is perhaps an indication of the way in which authors prefer to share
their articles. However - unlike open access repositories - academic social networks do not
routinely check for copyright compliance, and therefore much of their content isillegally posted and hosted (Jamali, 2017).
Uncertainty over the copyright status of academic papers hosted on social networking
sites raises concerns over the persistence of such content (Chawla, 2017) and the ethics of
ASN services themselves (Fortney & Gonder, 2015). It seems likely that ECRs at any
rate are less likely to make their research publications available for immediate downloads
rather than invite an invitation to share.

4.8

Text and data mining

Text and data mining (TDM) has the potential to transform the way scientists use
the literature (Nature 2012). It is expected to grow in importance, driven by greater
availability of digital corpuses, increasing computer capabilities and easier-to-use
software, and wider access to content. The Publishing Research Consortium report Text
Mining and Scholarly Publishing (Clark 2013) gives a good introduction to TDM (see also
Johnson, Fernholz and Fosci, 2016; Clark, Jensen, & Campbell, 2014; and Smit & van derGraaf, 2011).
TDM draws on natural language processing and information extraction to identify
patterns and find new knowledge from collections of textual content. Semanticenrichment and tagging of content are likely to enhance TDM capabilities. At present TDM
is most common in life sciences research, in particular within pharmaceutical companies,
but relatively little used elsewhere.
The main challenges for more widespread adoption are legal uncertainties as to what
is permitted, and the lack of an efficient licensing regime (see 2.16.8 Text and data
mining rights); technical issues such as standard content formats including basic
common ontologies; the need for content aggregation to permit mining cross-publisher
corpuses; the costs and technical skills requirements for mining; limited incentives forresearchers to use the technique and a lack of understanding on the part of publishers.
This last point was illustrated in an ALPSP report: “a large number of the publishers
surveyed have little or no understanding of text mining, and many suggest in theircomments that they have never been approached by a client about text mining” (Inger &Gardner, 2013). A 2016 study of the use of TDM for public research in the UK and France
suggested relatively little had changed
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in the intervening years, despite the introduction of a copyright exception for TDM in the UK
in 2014 (Johnson, Fernholz and Fosci 2016).
The challenges associated with TDM are being addressed via a number of initiatives:•

STM publishers issued a statement in November 2013 committing its signatories toimplementing the STM sample licence clause, or otherwise to permit noncommercial TDM of subscribed-to content at no additional cost; to develop the mineability of content; and to develop platforms to allow integration of holdings acrossinstitutions for TDM purposes. The statement has been subsequently updated, withmost recent version dating from 2017 (STM 2017a).
CrossRef’s text and data mining tools (originally Prospect): this offers a metadata
API and services that can provide automated linking for TDM tools to the publisher
full text, plus a mechanism for storing licence information in the metadata, andoptionally, a rate-limiting mechanism to prevent TDM tools overwhelming publisher
websites.
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) offers a service targeted at life science
companies. RightFind XML for Mining provides access to approximately 10 million
articles in XML content from more than 60 STM publishers with normalised
metadata, and consistent licensing terms for mining the content for internal
research. The system reduces the necessity for one-off licensing negotiations, alongwith the associated administration costs, while providing additional royalties to••rightsholders when their content is used for textmining.

4.9

Developments in preprint use and preprint servers

Preprints are commonly defined as the original manuscripts that an author has not yet
submitted for peer-review; however, dozens of potentially conflicting and overlapping
definitions are currently in use (Tennant et al, 2018).
When a preprint is posted, authors maintain full copyright and there is an underlying
expectation that the work will be submitted as a peer-reviewed articles in the future. This,
however, is not always the case, and it is estimated that about 20% of preprints posted inarXiv314 (a preprint server) are not published in journals.315
Preprint servers represent the online platforms or infrastructure designed to host preprints.
They may include a combination of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed content, from avariety of sources and in a range of formats. Sharing and using preprints has been common
among researchers since before the internet era, when CERN managed a repository for
manuscripts in the physical sciences. This idea was first adapted online by arXiv, which alsofunctions as a repository (see Section 3.3.3). An overview of some significant players in the
preprints landscape is provided in Table 13.
Table 13: Overview of significant platforms in the preprints landscape.

Platformfounded)(year

arXiv (1991)

314
315

Description

Type and URL

ArXiv is a preprint server in the fields of Preprint servermathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical https://arxiv.org

https://arxiv.org
https://blog.scielo.org/en/2017/02/22/scielo-preprints-on-the-way/#.W5omK8CZ2Hs

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biology, statistics and quantitative finance.
In some fields, such as mathematics andphysics, almost all articles are posted onarXiv.
SSRN (1994)

Started as a social science network, SSRN Preprint server
now also covers biology, chemistry and https://ssrn.com/en/even medicine. Owned by Elsevier, it isalso integrated into a larger workflow
offering
includingMendeleyandincorporates Sneak Peak from Cell
Press.316

bioRxiv (2013)

BioRxiv, a preprint repository specializing Preprint serverin life sciences, doubled the number of https://www.biorxiv.org
preprints listed over the last year andreceived funding in 2017 from the Chan
Zuckerberg Initiative to expand the preprint
server and add more software tools.

PeerJ Preprints PeerJ is an OA peer-reviewed journal in Preprint server(2013)
thefieldsofbiologicalsciences, https://peerj.com/preprints/
environmental sciences, medical sciences
and health sciences. The platform now
includes an option to post preprints on their
dedicated PeerJ Preprints page. It is
possible to submit bioRxiv preprints forpeer review at PeerJ.
OSF Preprints The Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprint indexing service(2016)
Preprint search engine hosted by the https://osf.io/preprints/
Center for Open Science (COS), listed a
total of 30 preprint service providers, withover 2.2 million searchable preprints as at
13 September 2018.
Preprints.org(2016)

Preprints is a non-profit platform supported Preprint server
and funded by MDPI. It is a https://www.preprints.org
multidisciplinary platform, covering all
subjects from arts and humanities tomathematics and computer science.

ChemRxiv(2017)

ChemRxiv,whichisco-owned,and Preprint servercollaboratively managed by the American https://chemrxiv.org
ChemicalSociety(ACS),
GermanChemical Society (GDCh) and the Royal
Society of Chemistry. The chemicalcommunity has long been hostile topreprints (Carà et al 2017), so the initiative
represents a litmus test for the adoption of
preprints across a wider range science316

https://www.elsevier.com/en-gb/solutions/ssrn

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disciplines.
Overall, there are a number of indicators of significant growth in the area of preprints. For
example, the Crossref database shows an increasing take up from an admittedly low start in2016, when DOIs were first offered for preprints.317 Meanwhile the Prepubmed service
shows a very rapid increase in uploads over recent years, most notably for bioRxiv (Figure
48).
Figure 48: Preprint uploads per month forwww.prepubmed.org, accessed 4 September 2018)selectedservers(source:

With the numbers of preprints rising, tools and service have emerged to address the need ofenhanced discoverability. In addition to servers, other platforms and services have started
hosting and using preprints – two are particularly worthy of consideration:• Open research platforms: while most manuscripts uploaded to preprint servers arelater published in a journal, open research platforms such as F1000 offer the option
to publish both preprint and version of record on the same platform. Preprints are
immediately published on the platforms, and then reviewed by peers using an open
peer review process. The final peer-reviewed article and the reviewer’s comments
are then published alongside the preprint.
• Overlay journals: these are online journals that do not do not host manuscripts.318
Overlay journals provide links to preprints hosted in a repository/server and provide
peer review services ranging from an editorial introduction to a full report. Overlay
journal provide most of the services of a regular journal (peer review, audience
curation, discoverability) except for preservation. Many overlay journals are free ofcharge for both the author and the reader, because their running costs are muchsmaller compared to regular journals. – with the overall cost per submitted paper as
low as $15. Today, overlay journals (long ago proposed) have in most cases yet to

317
318

https://www.crossref.org/blog/preprints-growth-rate-ten-times-higher-than-journal-articles/
For an introduction to Overlay Journals see http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/19081/1/19081.pdf

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make any mark, though an exception in terms of quality if not quantity of articles
may be Discrete Analysis founded by the Fields medallist Timothy Gowers.319
There are other examples of new developments which are relevant though not central. The
open access database, library and OA publisher SciELO, which currently hosts 74,000 OA
articles, is planning to launch a preprint server in mid-2018. Funding bodies like the NIH,
Cancer Research UK and BBSRC are also actively encouraging their authors to share theirpreprints before publication, with the NIH explicitly allowing “interim research products” (i.e.
preprints) to be cited anywhere other research products are cited.
Other than supporting the open science culture, the posting of preprints is seen as beneficial
for a range of reasons, including:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

the scope to receive early feedback from the community;
rapid dissemination;
an increased pace of discovery and reuse;a reduced risk of “scooping”;
easier text and data mining;
the exposure to a wider audience; andthe opportunity to reduce predatory publishing.

At the same time, concerns exist when it comes to preprints, particularly around the risk of
reduced rigour and reproducibility. This appears to be important in cases where preprints are
picked up by media outlets and articles or blog posts are published based on non-peerreviewed content. Critics of preprints feel that this approach to publishing may lead toconfusion and distortion of the public’s understanding of science, and even pose a risk topublic health. However, the debate is lively, and many supporters notes that sciencejournalists are used to consulting with experts before publishing stories and preprints would
make little difference to current practices.
Another issue with preprints is the so-called ‘Ingelfinger Rule’, which originally stipulated
that The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) would not publish findings that had been
published elsewhere, in other media or in other journal. Once widely adopted, today a wide
range of journals will now consider preprints for publication.320 Nevertheless, many authors
remain concerned that the posting of a preprint may preclude acceptance by their journal of
choice.
Furthermore, some publishers fear that the updated version of a preprint, which is somewhat
similar to a peer-reviewed article, may be a business threat to their practices.321 Whether
such a risk will materialise remains to be seen, but the abovementioned rise of overlay
platforms that peer-review preprints (e.g. biOverlay)322 offers a view on what the landscapemight look like if traditional journals were to be bypassed. Concerns have also been raisedover the loss of citations from journals to preprints servers, with well over 8,000 citations tobioRxiv reported on Web of Science.
Further growth in preprints and preprint servers seems likely but will need to beaccompanied by clarification of the relationship between preprints and peer-review, and thedevelopment of new community norms for licensing and citation of preprints. How the role ofpreprints impacts on the role of journal articles has yet to be established and, as we haveseen, all sorts of models are proposed, some of which may not prove to be sustainable.
319

http://discreteanalysisjournal.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy
321 https://www.highwirepress.com/sites/default/files/documents/London2018/13%20%20Preprints%20and%20the%20Journal%20Ecosystem%20-%20Katherine%20Brown.pdf
322 https://www.bioverlay.org/post/welcome/
320

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