*35C3 preroll music*
Herald angel: And now please welcome our speaker Claudia.
*Applause* Claudia Frick: Thank you. So, hopefully
there will be my slides up there. I see someone running. Running fast. *Laughter*
*Laughing* OK.
*Laughing* Ah.
Here we go. Phew.
*Applause*
Yes. So hello everybody and welcome also from my side to one of the first talks of
this congress. Yeah my name is Claudia Frick or if you know me from Twitter, my
name is FuzzyLeapfrog. And I'm about to refresh your memories on scholarly
communication and scientific publishing. But since this is my first talk at a Chaos
Communication Congress, I'd like to start with two facts about me so that you know
who is talking to you. So fact number 1. I am an atmospheric scientist so I have a
PhD in meteorology. Fact number 2. I am now working as a librarian in the library
of a research center. The most common reaction I usually get when I say this is:
Why? There are actually several reasons why I left science and joined the library
world and for the next 30 minutes I'll talk about one of these reasons. And to be
honest it's the reason I'm most passionate about. OK, so let's dive into the topic.
And I'll start with a few simple questions that you can answer just for yourself: Do
you think science helps us - as a society - to be well-educated and to make rational
and fact-based decisions? Do you think science helps us to live healthier, longer
and to deal with diseases? Do you think science helps us to face global challenges
like climate change? If you answered at least one of these questions with yes,
then you must also think that restricting the access to scientific results is not
beneficial for our society. Unfortunately, that's what we are currently doing.
72 percent of scientific publications are locked up behind paywalls. Which means
that only those with money have access to science and those who don't have money are
either left behind or they are forced to go illegal ways. And this is not how it
should be. But how should it be instead? We should have open access to science and
open access means that everybody in the world should have access to science
without any financial, technical or legal barriers. At the end of my talk, I want
you all to know what we can do to tear down the paywalls in scientific publishing
and to achieve open access to science. But before we can talk about how we can change
a system like scientific publishing, we have to understand how it works. So we'll
start with a look on the question what the most common way of scientific publishing
currently looks like. So for all the non- scientists in this room or those who
haven't published a scientific publication so far, let me take you on the roller
coaster journey of scientific publishing. Imagine yourself to be an atmospheric
scientist, a brilliant atmospheric scientist, and you spent the past 5 years
of your life in your laboratory and you made some time consuming experiments. You
ran some complex simulations and after a lot of sweat and pain and a lot of tears,
you finally found it. You found the solution to climate change. Yes. And it's
absolutely great that you know how to reduce greenhouse gases back to a proper
level and how to stop temperatures from increasing, but the whole scientific
community, everybody in the world should know about it so that we can realize the
solution and finally stop climate change. So you have to communicate your research
in order for it to benefit society and that you can get the Nobel Prize that you
absolutely deserve. So, you write down a summary of your solution into a manuscript
of let's say 15 pages. But what's next? How to distribute this manuscript in the
community? Since I am at the Chaos Communication Congress and we are in the
21st century, I assume that most of you are currently thinking: Yeah, just put it
on the internet. Yeah. That's not what the most common way of scientific publishing
looks like. At least not yet. What you will do instead is that you will either
submit your manuscript to a scientific conference or to an academic journal.
Which one you will do mainly depends on your discipline. So if you are for example
a computer scientist, you will most likely submit your manuscript to a scientific
conference. If you are an atmospheric scientist, you will most likely submit
your manuscript to an academic journal. But both publishing processes are nearly
the same, so I will only guide you through one of them. So since you are an
atmospheric scientist, you now submit your manuscript about the solution to climate
change to an academic journal. And at this stage your manuscript is called a
pre-print. And your manuscript fits into the scope of the journal, therefore in the
next step a process of quality control starts. This is called peer review. Peers
are other scientists like for example these two guys. Yeah I know that this is
scary, but these two guys will have a look at your manuscript - and check whether
everything you did and wrote is valid and scientifically correct. Because maybe you
only think you've found the solution to climate change, but in reality you made a
really awful mistake already on page one. But that's not what happens to you,
because you're brilliant and your solution is perfect. So these two guys only have
some minor corrections and comments and you integrate them into your manuscript
and resubmit this new version to the Journal. And now you are lucky. Because
the Journal then says: Yeah okay, with these changes we'll accept your manuscript
for publication. And at this stage your manuscript is called the post-print.
Because the content is now the final one that will be later printed in the Journal or
published online since we are in the 21st century. And now in the last step some
typesetting happens, so your manuscript is brought into the layout of the journal and
then this fancy publisher's version is published on the Journal website, from
where everybody in the world can see that you've found a solution to climate change.
And this is what the most common way of scientific publishing currently looks
like. Simplified. But I forgot one very important detail and this is the paywall.
You published closed access. And at this point I'm sorry, but we have to talk about
money. Because there's a lot of money changing hands in this process. And the
first occasion money changes its hands has actually nothing to do at all with the
paywall. Because did you know that you - the author of the manuscript or your
laboratory - might have to pay money to the publisher in order for your
publication to get published? Yeah. Maybe your manuscript was too long and you have
to pay page charges or you included some colorful figures and you have to pay color
charges. Yes, color charges in the 21st century. And the second occasion money
changes its hands is at the paywall. Because there are a lot of scientists out
there that need to know the solution to climate change and some of them are lucky
- like her - and they work for an institution that has money and that has a
library. And this library will pay money to the publisher to grant the scientists
access to your publication. Either by paying a subscription fee so that they
have access to all publications in the journal or by just purchasing your single
publication. But there are a lot of scientists out there that aren't that
lucky. And they won't have access to your publication. And what about all the non-
scientists in this room that I'm sure also want to know the solution to climate
change? They won't have access either unless they are willing to pay. But who
said that we all together didn't already pay for this publication? Because who
funds you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist at your laboratory? Who funds
the two guys doing the peer review and who funds the library that grants other
scientists access? It's us. We all do. It's tax payers' money. So don't you think
we kind of already paid for this publication? OK, you might now think: But
hey, there will obviously be money coming back because authors and people doing peer
review will get paid for their work by the publisher. No. That doesn't happen in
science. Scientists are doing all of this work cost-free. For the publisher. OK, but
then you might think: But hey, then they maybe this is just the business model of
academic publishers. I mean they definitely have their costs that they need
to cover. So maybe they are just doing this: Covering their costs and they are
not making so much more money out of it. Huh. We are currently having three major
academic publishers. They are called Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. And let's
have a look at the profit margins of at least Elsevier and Springer. They are 35
and 37 percent. Pure profit. These margins are even higher than the ones of Google
and Apple. We are all together paying in every year 7.6 billion euros
for access of popular publications. Seven point six billion euros per year. And this
has some very weird practical consequences. Because publishers are
requesting so much public money to get access to mainly publicly funded
publications, that even those that really do have money like the Harvard University
can no longer afford them. And when I learned this, all of this, for the first
time, I only had two options left. Option number 1. Join the open access movement
and tear down these paywalls. Option number 2. Become myself an academic
publisher. Yeah my bank account this morning said I chose option 1. So let's
talk about how we can tear down the paywalls. There are generally a lot of
approaches we can take. Some of them are smaller, but persistent, and others are
more massive steps. But who can do anything about the paywall? Who are the
involved players in scientific publishing? Well we have the scientists that do most
of the work: they produce the content, they do the quality control of the content
and they are even the ones that later in the process mainly consume the content.
Then we have the funders that provide the money, we have the libraries that grant
access and we have the publishers that publish the academic journals. Since I
assume that we are not having so many funders and publishers in here and I don't
think that the number of librarians is higher than - 10, I'd like to focus on
what scientists can do to tear down the paywall. But I will also have a look on
what we can achieve if the first three players work together. But, let's start
small, with you - the brilliant atmospheric scientist. So you just
published your solution to climate change like this. And you just realized: Damn. I
published behind the paywall. And a lot of scientists won't have access to my
publication. And usually that's not what scientists want. Because most scientists I
know want their publications to be read, to be spread, to be cited and to be
discussed as widely as possible. And the paywall prevents this. So you might now
wonder whether there's anything you can do about the paywall when you publish like
this. Yes, you can do something about it. The first option you have is brought to
you by the publisher. The publisher offers you the possibility to remove the paywall
just in front of your single publication while all other publications in the
journal remain behind the paywall. This is called hybrid open access. And what does
the publisher want to remove the paywall in front of your publication?
Audience: Money! Claudia: Yeah, it's even more money.
Yeah, I do not recommend this. Is there
anything - anything - you can do about this publication without paying even more
money to the publisher? I mean: it's your publication; it's your work that you've
done. Can't you just take it from the journal website and put it on the
internet? This is called a secondary publication and there are places for this.
They are called arXiv, institutional repositories, or even the commercial web
site ResearchGate. Can't you just upload your manuscript there and make it
available via so-called green open access? The answer to this question is:
it depends. Because what happened when you decided to publish behind the paywall is
that you signed a so-called copyright transfer agreement and it is what it
literally says: you signed away the copyright of your work to the publisher.
Yeah. *Laughter* So if you want to re- publish your manuscript somewhere else,
you have to check whether this is okay for the copyright owner; that is, the
publisher. But hey, some good news here. Most publishers will allow at least some
form of re-publication. But this is where it gets really really tricky, because
publishers are having some very specific and very restrictive conditions on this.
So, you cannot just publish any version of your manuscript. Maybe you can only
publish the pre-print. That is the version of your manuscript without all the changes
that came in during peer review. So it's not the content that you finally
published. And they have some very specific conditions on where you can
publish. Maybe you can only do it on your personal website, but not on the one of
your university. And then they have some very specific ideas on when you can
re-publish, because you cannot just do it right away most of the times. You have to
wait an embargo period of 6 months, 12 months or even 4 years and 4 years is kind
of a long time to wait for a solution to climate change. And these conditions. They
do not only vary by publisher, they vary by journal, so you really have to check
for each single of your publication what you are allowed to do and what not. And I
totally get it - that's not easy. That's confusing. It's time-consuming and believe
me, it's absolutely no fun at all. But if you are ever struggling with this as a
scientist, I have a very simple and convenient advice for you and it is to
just ask your librarian. Because that's our business and I'm absolutely sure that
even in your library there's at least one librarian that has specialized on
copyright and can do this for you. But wouldn't it be so much easier if you could
just do whatever the hell you want to do with your publication? If you could just
keep the copyright right away? Yes, it would be. And it's possible. So maybe the
next time you publish a solution to a global challenge, publish it gold open
access. This means that you will publish in a so-called open access journal. These
journals do not have any paywall at all and all publications in there are
published under a Creative Commons license, so you will keep the copyright of
your work. How do these journals work? Well let's get back to closed access. What
open access journals obviously do is that they remove the paywall, which means that
libraries don't have to pay money to the publisher to grant their scientists
access. And what also happens is that you are no longer asked to pay color charges,
but you have to pay an article processing charge, or your laboratory. But since
libraries are saving a lot of money by not paying for access to these journals, most
German libraries for example will cover these costs for you. But it can be even
better. Because there are a lot of open access journals out there that do not even
charge an article processing charge. This is called platinum open access. And these
journals do not ask for money from anyone; neither for reading nor for publishing.
But how do these journals even survive, because they are not making any profit?
Well we know that scientists are already doing most of the work in this process.
And some of them decided to just do the rest of the work, too. Yes, there are
scientists out there running their own academic journals. Several of them joined
forces with their libraries to have a powerful and experienced infrastructure in
the background and together scientists and librarians are providing this non-for-
profit service for science in the hands of scientists, without any commercial
interests. So this is already an example of what we can achieve. If we are no
longer only focusing on you, the single scientist and your single publication, but
if we look at what we can achieve if we work together and join our forces. And
there are a lot of more examples out there for this. I listed a few over here. And
for the rest of the talk I'd like to focus on one of them. Mainly because it's a
German project and it got some recent attention. And this is Project DEAL.
Project DEAL is commissioned by the Alliance of Science Organizations in
Germany and is driven by scientists and librarians together. And what they want to
achieve is a major step forward to open access with our three already known major
academic publishers. And project DEAL wants to achieve this by implementing so-
called nationwide consortium agreements. But what is a nationwide consortium
agreement and what can it do about open access? These agreements consist of two
components. They are so-called publish and read deals. And the first component is the
Read component. And it means that all participating institutions, universities
will have access to all journal publications of the publisher, when
there's a deal. And the publish component means that all publications with a
corresponding author from one of these participating institutions and
universities, will be published Open Access with this publisher. And both of
these components are covered with one single and one reasonable fee. So for
example if your university would be part of such a deal with Elsevier you would
have access to all Elsevier publications and all your publications would be
published Open Access with Elsevier. This would mean that there would be up to 16500
publications published every year Open Access under such a deal. And this is what
project DEAL wants to achieve. So these are the goals. But how is Project DEAL
progressing? There are currently ongoing negotiations with Wiley and Springer. So
there are two parties the publisher and Project DEAL sitting together at one table
and having a major common understanding about the future of scientific publishing
and about what the basic conditions of such a deal should be and they are now
discussing the details. The picture becomes quite different if we look at
Elsevier. Because there seem to be right away a major disagreement about the basic
conditions of such a deal should have and on what a reasonable fee is. So after a
long time, years of negotiating and no real progress, what happened is that
Project DEAL, so scientists and librarians, currently suspended the negotiations with
Elsevier. And this is something new. And it's definitely something big. And I can
tell you that the world is watching Project DEAL and Germany. And this is
where the power of joining forces really shows up. Because scientists and
librarians are really emphasizing the need for such a deal to Elsevier. For example,
scientists stop to offer their cost-free work to Elsevier. So they are no longer
publishing with Elsevier or doing the peer review. If you are one of them or will be
one of them after this talk please let your library know, because we collect this
information to make sure that Elsevier knows. And libraries, well they just
cancel their subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Yes. There are currently 200
German institutions without subscription access to Elsevier publications and there
will be even more next year. The Max Planck Society canceled the contract to
the end of this year. So these are a lot of scientists without access to Elsevier
publications. And it's a lot of saved money. And what happened after we got cut
off from Elsevier publications six month ago? Well, the world of science didn't
break down, neither did the world of libraries. What happens is that scientists
use alternative ways to get access. And libraries support these alternative ways.
I listed a few of the legal alternatives up here. But speaking of legal, some of
you might now wonder or wonder through the entire talk: Why should we even care about
subscriptions? Why should we pay for access to publishers or use alternative
ways that are legal because Sci-Hub. Sci- Hub is basically ThePirateBay of
science, so you can get nearly any scientific publication there. And I would
like to forward the question on why we should pay for access if we have Sci-Hub
directly to the publishers. But I think that they already know the answer. Because
they do what industries do that face piracy. They took legal action and filed a
lawsuit. They requested that Internet service providers to block Sci-Hub, but
you know Don't mess with the Internet. *Laughing*
*Applause*
So dear Publishers, let me put it this way:
as long as you publishers hold on to paywalls there will be piracy, no matter
what. And even worse as long as you hold on to paywalls there will be people,
scientists and librarians, building alternative ways of scientific publishing
without you. And the only way to stop this is to tear down the paywalls. And to you,
the brilliant atmospheric scientist and all the other brilliant scientists in this
room, please provide open access to your publications and support open access in
any way that you like or that you can. And if you have any questions or concerns or
any ideas I can only encourage you to talk to your librarian. Because, if we work
together, if we join our forces, I think that we can finally unlock science.
Thank you. *Applause*
H: Thanks for this amazing talk. OK everybody you know the rules if you have
questions please line up at the microphones. There's five of them,
two there, two there and one there in the corner. And if you are on the stream just
somehow asked the question I'm not really aware how it works and then we have
someone here to read the questions out to be our human interface device. So
please,... microphone number one. Microphone 1: Thank you for your talk.
I completely agree with your professional opinion, but
I think the publishers have one major advantage over the scientists and the
librarian here, which we did not address yet and I want to ask you this
question.The publishers, they have the brands, we as scientists need. What I mean
with that is, apart of the quality assurance scientists did is, we ranked the
journals. We gave them impact factors and other things. So the journal itself has a
quality number, so for a young scientist, at least for me, it was really difficult
to publish in a way that gives me the scientific reputation that I need, without
having access to the highly ranked journals of the closed source publishers.
So is there a way we can get out of this deadlock, where we need to publish in these
journals, we do not want to publish in? C: Yeah we can talk about the impact
factor. I love it. It's real love. It's absolutely difficult because this is a
self-enforcing system dealing with reputation. And if you think about it if
all scientists immediately stop to publish with Elsevier or the reputable journals
and would move to another one that has no impact factor at all after five or six
years this Journal would have a high impact factor. But it's true that it's not
that easy to just do it because you want to come forward with your career and it's
a problem but there's no real solution so far for this. So Project DEAL is kind of
addressing this idea by remaining with the major publishers, so this will be the
easiest way out for this problem. Yeah. H: Do we have an Internet question? Yes?
Can someone turn on the microphone for the signal angel, please.
Signal Angel: What influence do the university have on the publishing process
of their scientists? Can a university force their scientists to publish in a
certain way or with a specific publisher? C: No it's not that easy. There are
policies that state that you have to publish open access but most of them do
not define how you can do it, so you can do green or gold or hybrid whatever you
want but they just say that you have to publish open access.
H: Microphone number two please. Microphone 2: Hello. The internet has given
everybody access to their own screaming platform, how do we avoid the public
sharing of science to be tainted with all the bad science out there?
C: With what I didn't hear... M2: Bad science, there's a lot, if you
look at the newspaper, there's a lot of fake news in them.
C: You should absolutely not remove the peer review process at the moment out of
this scientific publishing process. So there should be some quality control but
there are some ideas to change the way peer review is done. But if you remove it,
yeah, then you have a problem at the moment.
H: Microphone number three, please. Microphone 3: Hello, do you have any
statistics about how many Open Access publications there are compared to I would
say classical Elsevier and stuff or if the movement is advancing, if it's getting
traction. C: Yeah I stated the source of the 72% are
closed access publications and there's a detailed analysis on how many articles are
closed, hybrid, gold, green. I published the slides already I will tweet them
later. M3: Thank you.
H: And the signal angel, please. S: What do you think about the Plan S
initiative? C: Plan S, for those who don't know: It's
a coalition of research funders in Europe not the Deutsche Forschungsgemeindschaft,
but all others and they want to have Open Access immediately so they say when you
work for us, if you're funded by us you have to publish Open Access and I think
that this is a good approach. H: Can we get microphone 2 please.
M2: Hi, Could the journals printed by various universities like solve that issue
which was raised here about having a well- known brand behind the publications. For
example if you have a university, which is very famous it can release their own
journal and solve that brand issue. C: If they release their own journal I
hope it's open access. But I think that it's in general an illusion to think that
the name of the journal or the publisher has anything to do with the quality of a
single paper in there. So this linked idea I think it's kind of broken.
H: Microphone number one, please. Microphone 1: I was wondering, why the
publishers move against Sci-Hub, but leave arXiv.org alone for all these years,
you essentially get the same thing from both. I know that there are differences in
the details... C: it's restricted to a specific community
and so it's not for all publications and it's still about prints and postprints so
it's not the final publisher version but I think that they didn't because it's a
powerful tool and it's a powerful community.
H: Could we get the Internet again, please.
S: Someone in the Internet has heard that scientists sued the editors asking for a
share of the profit of their work. Did you get any feedback how this ended?
C: No but that sounds interesting. No, sorry.
H: Number four, please. Microphone 4: Historically, journals
provided three aspects for scientists. They provided logistics like delivery of papers
to whoever wanted to read them, they provided editors which is like not peer
review, but the editors which are hired by journals and they provide reputational
engines. Obviously putting PDF online solves a problem, so logistics is no
longer a problem for a fully decentralized alternative to the journals. Can we
decentralize others too? C: I actually didn't hear the question
properly, I'm sorry! H: Try again.
M4: So journals are providing three services, they provide..
C: Free services? M4: Three like number three. They provide
delivery to whoever wants to read them. They provide reputation engine and they
provide editors - like not peer reviewers but real editors on salary. We can
decentralize with internet, we can decentralize delivery. Can we decentralize
editors, can we decentralize reputations? H: Is there going to be a question at any
point? C: Yeah I got the question I think. But
did you know that editors are also scientists? So they are already scientists
doing this work. So I really question the high value that publishers provide to
science. I think there is some value but it's not that high as we all thought.
H: Number 2 please. Microphone 2: Does project DEAL include
any incentives for the scientists to publish gold open access instead of
hybrid? C: So if you publish with a publisher that
has a deal with your university that it will be open access no matter what.
M2: Does it include incentives to publish in journals that are ONLY open access
instead of mixed open and closed access? C: No, no, not so far I know.
H: OK, just a quick interjection: Please remember when you leave, please leave
after the talk. But when you leave please use the front exit and not the entrance in
the back. Thank you. Could we get another internet question? OK the internet is out
of questions. That's excellent. Number one please.
Microphone 1: *inaudible* limited advantage to close access journals maybe
it would be a good idea to rethink the format of the publishing. I don't want to
advertise it, but I think it's a good example: There is distill.pub, which is a
journal for artificial intelligence at the moment mostly and they publish it in HTML
because it's the current year and you have interactive stuff so you can play around
with it and it's really nice. C: Yeah. I think it would be better if we
wouldn't have only PDFs published from the journal articles. There should be a other
formats definitely - machine readable. H: Mic number 2 please for the last
question. Microphone 2: Like you said your opinion
is at least questionable if what publishers provide to science and to
society that's worth something or worth what we think.
I also think this way and if I have a
manuscript now that I don't want to publish in this way the system. Do you
have any recommendations, maybe any project or something where I could maybe say
here's my manuscript and then especially have a solution for the peer review
process that is now facilitated by the publisher, but the publisher doesn't do
anything he's just facilitating. So how could I solve this and go around the
publisher in this way? C: So. I'm not sure whether I get the
question because if you have open access journals that's also peer review. Yes
there are publishers but if you have platinum open access this peer review
process organized with the library or scientists that are running the journal.
So this is already organized. The peer review process for other sorts of journals
that do not have a paywall. M2: But could these platinum open access
journals cover all fields of science. Could i come with my..
H: There are a lot of there. There are a lot out of there. I can tell you how you
can find them. There is a directory of open access journals where you can filter
through any subjects and filter for how much do they cost.
H: And now please thank our speak again!
*Applause*
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