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Catch up with: "Crisis in higher education and the future of Diamond open access"

In this post we provide recordings and slides from our hybrid event on 19 September 2024, offer a summary of the presentations, and answer some audience questions

Published onOct 22, 2024
Catch up with: "Crisis in higher education and the future of Diamond open access"
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On 19 September 2024, the Copim community, in collaboration with LSE Library and LSE Press, hosted a hybrid event entitled: “Crisis in higher education and the future of Diamond open access”. Our thanks go to LSE for hosting the event, Monika Krause for chairing, our panel for speaking so eloquently and passionately, and to everyone who attended, whether in person or online.

If you missed the event, or just want to catch up, you’ll find links to the speakers’ slides and recordings of their presentations below. Scroll further down to find a written summary of the evening’s presentations and answers to some of our audience’s questions.

Speakers’ slides and recordings

1. Niamh Tumelty

2. Joe Deville

3. Hannah Crago

4. Caroline Edwards (Executive Director, Open Library of Humanities / Birkbeck, University of London) 

[For those who attended, you might have noticed that the connection to Caroline in Lisbon let us down at times.... However, she has very kindly re-recorded the start of her presentation!]

5. Q & A with panel: Monika Krause (Chair), Hannah Crago, Joe Deville, Caroline Edwards and Niamh Tumelty 

  • Recording on YouTube (will also be made available on Internet Archive)

A written summary of the evening’s presentations

On the evening of the 19th September 2024, Copim and LSE Press jointly convened a hybrid event bringing together librarians, scholarly publishing practitioners, and academics. The focus was on jointly discussing what the implications of the current higher education funding crisis being experienced in the UK and elsewhere are for Diamond open access publishing, and to collaboratively explore answers to questions such as: 

  • What lessons do emerging changes in library funding decisions hold for higher education more widely? 

  • Is it unrealistic to expect an expansion of Diamond open access models given the funding crisis in higher education? 

  • Could it be that the current crisis makes it even more necessary to clearly and confidently argue for the benefits of Diamond open access?

  • How can libraries be supported as they reconfigure their priorities and budgets towards Diamond open access? 

The event generated considerable interest, with over 150 colleagues attending, perhaps indicating how important the topic is at this present moment. In this short report we provide an overview of the arguments advanced by the event’s four speakers.

Niamh Tumelty

The evening opened with Niamh Tumelty (Director of LSE Library and Managing Director of LSE Press) describing her own dual perspective on the UK’s funding crisis: a librarian with a background in academic liaison and open research management, Niamh is also the Managing Director of a university press. Niamh discussed how, after years of confronting some of the problems in academic publishing as a librarian, she now finds herself also holding a role within the industry itself.   

In her introductory presentation, Niamh set the scene by outlining some of the unsustainable financial pressures faced by libraries in UK higher education, including rising costs of journals, data providers asking for annual price increases and toxic transitional agreements. Niamh also empathised with the challenges facing academics, many of whom struggle to engage with debates about OA publishing given the burden of growing workloads and job insecurity. For Gold & Diamond OA publishers challenges also abound, as presses work hard to strengthen their reputation, build author trust and secure a foothold in distribution networks (both online and in print).

Nevertheless, Niamh remains an optimist. From her vantage point she can see conversations moving in a positive direction. An increasing number of scholars are asking for their monographs to be published open access. Meanwhile, books from new OA presses are winning awards and increasing the reputation and prestige of this mode of publishing. For example, David Luke’s How Africa Trades (published by LSE press) won BCA African Business Book of the Year in 2024. Additionally, policy developments and funder mandates will continue to motivate progress. Even the recent decision to delay the implementation of an OA requirement for monographs for REF until the next assessment exercise need not be viewed as a blow. Indeed, Niamh argued that this postponement helpfully confirms a clear start date that the sector can now work towards together. Niamh concluded by referencing some of the exciting Diamond OA initiatives available for libraries to support, before handing over to Joe Deville to learn more. 

Photo by Catriona Gray

Joe Deville

The evening continued with Professor Joe Deville from Lancaster University briefly introducing the range of work being done within Copim, before providing updates on the progress of the two Diamond open access funding models the team have developed: Opening the Future and the Open Book Collective, the latter of which Joe is involved with as Managing Director. Joe reported that the Opening the Future revenue model has, to date, succeeded in generating 163 memberships from 84 supporting libraries, for the two university presses using it, raising over £150,000 in new funding. The Open Book Collective (OBC) has 79 libraries variously providing support to the 12 current publisher and service provider members, generating over £750,000 in revenue commitments. 

Although both models are relatively new, Joe’s view was that these figures do provide some genuine cause for optimism about the future potential of Diamond open access publishing. However, they sit in the context of a university sector in the midst of a major financial crisis. This includes, as Joe highlighted, dozens of UK universities which have initiated restructuring programmes, including many with voluntary or enforced redundancy programmes. How then, he asked, should we understand the apparent contradiction between the optimism around Diamond, at least in some parts of the sector, and the concern being felt amongst, and harm being done to, many colleagues?

Joe sought guidance in the work of fellow sociologist Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall suggested – or at least is reported to have suggested – that “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing”.1 Joe drew on this to suggest both that further work is required to critically examine not just the marketisation of higher education, or violence being done to intellectual work, but also the threat to higher education by dominant systems of scholarly publishing. This includes highlighting the extent to which universities’ resources are being drained by large, commercial publishers – citing as examples Elsevier’s recently reported £3billion annual profit, and the estimated $9billion paid to the six largest publishers in article processing charges between 2019 and 2023. 

But Joe also pointed out that some of this work is already being done, even if it is rarely recognised: by librarians. Librarians, argued Joe, have – often unseen and unappreciated by their academic colleagues – begun pushing back against the status quo, by incorporating analyses of how different models promote or undermine equity in the scholarly system, by developing principles-based purchasing strategies, and by aligning their budgets to include delineated and expanding support for Diamond OA. It is here, he suggested, that part of uncertain futures of higher education are playing out and that critique is being done. But added that for these promising developments to scale, librarians and scholarly libraries need more support from academics, from senior managers, and from funders.

Joe Deville lectures to room of attendees

Photo by Catriona Gray

Hannah Crago

Hannah Crago, Open Research Development Librarian at the University of Essex, spoke to some of the challenges and issues that libraries are facing when it comes to supporting Diamond open access initiatives. In response to the extant financial crises in UK higher education, many libraries are currently finding their resources budget being cut, requiring wholesale budget reviews. This economic plight is forcing libraries to reprioritise their investments in terms of both subscriptions and support. In spite of saving relatively little, support for Diamond OA schemes are often some of the easiest for libraries to cease investment in unless they are invested in as part of an overhauled budget. In part, this is because at Essex, like many other institutions, the library and the wider research organisation may not always recognise the value of such investment in the absence of tangible benefits. This has led to Essex ceasing support for one of their two Diamond schemes.

Essex has, however, had a broader financial investment in open access, including 19 read and publish/transitional agreements and a new fund for BPCs and APCs. This fund was £242k last year, and has almost doubled this year. Unfortunately, Hannah noted, the underspend from the first year was not eligible for use in supporting Diamond initiatives. This is why Hannah is currently taking a broad look at what Essex are trying to achieve with their budgets, what they currently support, and what they would like to support. The results of this analysis necessitate a culture shift at Essex where open is the default, and that this default is budgeted for. Hannah recognises that this will mean that Essex need to be brave and make changes -- to  cancel legacy access subscriptions and to proportionately redirect those funds towards Diamond initiatives. This may be controversial, but Hannah argued that libraries need to be brave enough to do this. One of Hannah’s key arguments was that the processing charges associated with the Gold model are not sustainable, and the value and values of Diamond offer a viable alternative for open access publishing as a community endeavour. 

However, supporting Diamond open access faces several bureaucratic barriers for libraries that initiatives should be mindful of: there is confusion about whether it is a subscription and Diamond invoices need to be explicit that they are not as this can create undue friction within institutions. And getting suppliers set up on university procurement systems can be time consuming. This is, in part, why Opening the Future and the Open Book Collective are now accessible on approved platforms, wherever possible, as we appreciate that this can make things more efficient for libraries.  

Hannah Crago lectures to room full of attendees

Photo by Catriona Gray

Caroline Edwards

The final speaker, Dr Caroline Edwards, began by outlining the many financial and existential difficulties facing Arts and Humanities in UK HEIs, before showcasing the work of Open Library of the Humanities (OLH) in mitigating some aspects of the crisis. OLH is a non-profit, academic-led Diamond OA journal publisher, co-founded in 2013 with fellow colleague at Birkbeck, University of London, Professor Martin Eve. 

Caroline highlighted several strands of OLH’s work: firstly, the collective library membership funding model, which removes the financial burden on authors, who are not charged expensive APCs, and readers, who do not need to pay for access. Instead, for a modest fee of c. £2,000 p.a., a library pays to support the entire 33-journal portfolio at OLH. She estimates that, so far, OLH has saved libraries c. £33.9 million in APCs and Transitional Agreements. Secondly, the Press’s support of academics who wish to leave financially-motivated, large commercial publishers, through its journal flipping, allowing editors to set up new journals at OLH with greater academic freedom, citing the recent example of Political Philosophy. Finally, she outlined Janeway, an open-source, end-to-end publishing platform OLH developed to support open access with open infrastructure, that cannot be commercialised in the future due to its licencing. 

Caroline finished with a reminder that collective funding can create large financial savings for libraries by undercutting expensive Transitional Agreements and traditional subscriptions, which could be significant in the current crisis. She ended with the note that collective funding isn’t a handout - it’s an evidence-based investment by the library in the academic community. 

Panel sit at table with microphones: Monika Krause, Joe Deville, Hannah Crago, Niamh Tumelty

Photo by Catriona Gray

Questions from the audience

We wish we had allowed more time for all the questions that came in for the panel (note to self: add that to the ‘lessons learnt’ document). We couldn’t answer them all on the night, but we have gathered these responses from our panel…

Q1: OA and learned societies

Q: I work a lot with learned societies who have not been publishing with the Elseviers, Springers etc but who have been used to using their publishing royalty income to plough back into their charitable purposes, including grant giving for humanities research and even supporting research libraries. It seems an inevitable consequence of this movement that such basic support for humanities research will wither away, though you'd make me very happy if you thought that was not the case. In any case, it would be great for this to be acknowledged in this kind of conversation because I feel as if the impact on such organisations and their work is always elided in these discussions. Question is: is it just inevitable collateral damage? And can it be acknowledged? And can it be mitigated?

A: Thanks very much for this question. I think it’s really important to think about these kinds of issues. I guess there’s a lot to unpack in the question – including the open access movement, in general, and the more specific work that we are doing to develop new funding models to support small and medium sized open access publishers. Many commercial publishers, of different scales, have shown themselves very capable of responding to the challenge posed by open access. I pointed to some of the larger ones in my talk, for whom revenues continue to increase. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of your question, which is about learned societies specifically, who don’t publish with the largest publishers. My sense here is that there are all kinds of opportunities for the open access movement to collaborate with learned societies and their specific publishing work further in thinking through the challenges any changes to the status quo might pose, as well as in thinking through what new opportunities open access might pose. One of the things we do a lot is work with publishers to think through their approaches to publishing and where there are opportunities to do things differently, in ways that don’t ultimately inhibit their work. I recently presented on some similar topics at a panel at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers annual conference, which was titled ‘The value of open access books’. It will be absolutely key to keep these kinds of conversations going. 

Q2: Library budgets and diamond OA

Q: Who made the decision at Essex *not* to use the leftover money on diamond OA? 

A: There are two answers to this. With regard to the OA fund that comes from our QR allowance, it was our PVC Research who did not want to use the money for diamond OA. Or more accurately, only wanted it to be used for APCs and BPCs. With the Library’s collection budget, our Library Leadership Team did commit to spending some of the leftover money on diamond OA, however we ended up not being able to because of administrative issues with the Finance team, and the short deadlines that we had to spend the money. 

Q3: Invoicing for Diamond OA

Q: Does the Jisc Diamond OA publisher wording suggest that libraries are paying a subscription? Did I hear right?

A: It varies between packages, but there were certainly some packages available via Jisc that we were keen to support but couldn’t because of the way the Jisc invoices were presented. It may have been an interpretation from our Finance team that is unique to Essex I’m not sure, but I’d recommend Library teams look carefully at the way this information is presented because for us it was deemed to be a subscription, and therefore would have needed to be pushed into the next financial year’s spending.

Q4: Usage data

Q: One issue that comes up with libraries is about usage data. Clearly, a Diamond OA book/journal can be accessed from anywhere, without logging in to the library’s network so if the library needs stats to support the ‘tangible’ imperative, COUNTER doesn’t capture the usage? [How do you provide usage data to libraries?]

A: Yes, we are fully aware of how important it is to provide librarians with the data they need to justify their spending decisions, and that includes usage. And yes, indeed, open access usage will inevitably sometimes be hard to tie to a particular institution because of the issues you point to. I think here there are two things: first, we need to continue to help librarians by providing data in addition to usage to help in their work. This could be, for example, around the improved citation rates for your author’s OA publishers, or being able to more clearly show which of your institution’s authors have published where. But also, second, we can help open access publishers themselves be better at collecting usage information. Within Copim, it is Thoth Open Metadata that are leading that work – working on some collaborative projects that in time could make it far more easy for even the smallest publisher to collect and report high quality usage data. That is the most immediate priority for me at the moment – as many publishers are not yet at that baseline. But we also, certainly, need to also address the question of how best to tie that data to a specific institution. 

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