 I think we'd like to kick off my luck's run out on holding off for a few more minutes for more people to turn up, so thank you very much for coming this afternoon. So I'm going to talk to you today about the project that we've been running for the last few years, a platform called the Open Library of Humanities, what it does in terms of cost distribution, academic social structures and what we're trying to do next with learning societies when you have a limit to growth and expansion on consortial models of funding open access. There'll be a Q&A after I've done about 40 minutes of talking or so, I hope, actually I'm just going to set a timer on that so I don't run over. I just warn I'm extremely deaf, so I'd really appreciate it if you could speak loudly and clearly for any questions and I might repeat them just to make sure I don't answer somebody else's question. I want to start by just telling you what we do at present. So the Open Library of Humanities is a series of journals that are all open access, 100%, over half of which used to be subscription titles and that have flipped to an open access model. We also run an in-house mega journal, although that term in the humanities is somewhat contestable. By that we mean a transdisciplinary journal for a humanities title, relatively high throughput. We do not at this point mean mega journal in the sense of having a technical, soundness criterion of peer review. That's quite a difficult thing to translate into humanities and we have thoughts about how you could do that but that's not what we do with our mega journal at present. We're a not-for-profit charity registered in the UK and we make our financial accounts available every year so that libraries who support us can see what we're spending the money on and we are collectively funded by approximately 240 or so academic libraries and institutions around the world. Those range from big Ivy League institutions, Cambridge in the UK, down to small liberal arts theological colleges with a banded structure of pricing across those different institutions. We've planned this since 2013 and I want to talk a little bit about the background to the project and the planning stages because it's crucial for what I'm going to say about learning societies later in this talk and what it looks like to convert a learning society model to an open access publishing setup. The first thing to say is that we took this from the very start as a social rather than technical operation. It's very easy to get bogged down in tech particularly if your background is a computer programmer as mine is. You tend to see all nails as technological things you can hit with tech hammers. What we did initially in the planning stage was to get together a group of academics from around the world, primarily from the US, the UK and Europe, I must admit. There are diversity implications the way we set that structure up but we're now thinking much more about doing censuses of our editorial composition and the advisory boards to ensure global representation. But essentially what we asked was in this context, if you want to build something like PLOS in the humanities disciplines, what would it have to look like? One of the fundamental questions we asked academics in the humanities here was what level of article processing charge could you afford? We expected the answer to come back at something like probably about $200. That was what we expected as a hypothesis but it was also intensely problematic because we knew you couldn't run a publishing operation at the volumes we were thinking of on $200 per article that unit cost is just not sustainable. They actually came back and said we couldn't afford it on any level of article processing charge. That was coming even from those of the largest institutions in the world. It seemed to us to indicate that there were two things going on. At some institutions there simply was no budget whatsoever for an article processing charge model and at other institutions where clearly there could be funding available, academics were just not accustomed to knowing which channels they could appeal to to receive that funding and they didn't know that libraries often had a budget available to them. It didn't really matter to us because the clear message we got was we do not approve of the article processing charge model. We think it not only warps what you have to do as a publisher in increasing your throughput to get to a level of sustainability but also we don't have the institutional structures in place in the humanities disciplines for disbursement of this. I'd also like to point out that we were thinking at this point also about distribution of costs and the fact that article processing charges tend to concentrate costs on specific points that are not always the points where the funding is available. A really good example of this is if you imagine there are 100 people in this room just for the sake of making the mathematics easy, if I needed $100 to do this talk and I asked you each for $1 you might say yes or you might tell me to go away anyway but if I just went to one member of the audience and demanded $100 upfront that would be completely unacceptable I'd assume unless you really liked what I was saying today. We started to think about the way in which there are research intensive institutions that do not have library budgets that can accommodate the single article processing charge at around the $2,000 mark. Those institutions bear the brunt of cost concentration. You also have an international situation. We'll talk later about plan S in Europe, Eurozone and in the UK but we also saw that basically if you're in an economy where government mandates are accelerating open access but you still find that most of your purchasing of subscriptions is going abroad to say decentralized systems like the US model where you still have to buy subscriptions because there's no top-down pressure you've got a real problem because that budget can't be offset easily against your open access expenditure. Plus the fact that obviously the biggest science publisher in the world refuses to sign off-assessing agreements with national level consortial bodies. Nonetheless, what we were doing at this stage was thinking about the challenges in the humanities and they seemed like massive problems. We were very fortunate to receive support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on two attempts. The first was a planning grant that was at the University of Lincoln in the UK and then a grant scaled this up to a full platform. What we did in the planning grant was to approach as many libraries as we possibly could. I'd not recommend giving three talks a week at diverse geographical locations around the world for a year-long period but we did manage it and we got a sizable number of sign-ups in the first year to support a platform on an ongoing basis that would house open access journals in the humanities without any author-facing charges. I'll talk a little bit about what we did around that. One of the other problems that we encountered when we were starting this project was the prestige trap with which I'm sure many people in this room are familiar and I'm going to briefly recount anyway, which is that researchers operate within a very strange symbolic economy that at once gives them a type of freedom in their choice of research object while at the same time tying them in to specific economic conditions of production that are usually unremarked upon. These researchers, researchers not bathroom signs here but the only logo that's available for researchers, are free from the market pressure to pursue populist projects by which I mean that most researchers do not have to sell enough copies of their articles and books to make their living entirely. Academia operates on one of the last patronage systems in operation in the world except for perhaps arts grants where we give autonomy over their research choice so that we can investigate minute but nonetheless important epistemological questions. Most institutions in the UK and in the US as well have a clause in their IP agreement that grants back the copyright on research that is produced to researchers themselves. Especially if you produce any work under an employment contract it is owned by your employer but almost every university has a direct IP clause that says we grant that back to researchers. So researchers are free to hand their work to the publisher that they believe will do the best job with it for a variety of reasons. But what I contend is perhaps the core driver of publication choice and I'm sure most of you know is the set of assessment paradigms to which researchers are subjected. This works on a scarcity correlation between labour time available and the prestige of the venue. So when we appoint a junior lecturer which is an assistant professor in my English department we usually have about 200 to 250 applicants all with PhD in hand usually with a first book as well. UK employment law is much harsher than US law in terms of a search committee being able to take its time over this type of matter. So we essentially find ourselves with two weeks to winnow down 250 applicants with 250 books to a pool of five we can interview and then appoint within a one day process after that. Do we read 250 books? Of course we do not. We start to look for a correlation between that 250 to one ratio and perhaps a press that also has a 250 to one acceptance ratio on its titles. It's a very flawed system. Everyone can name a top university press that has nonetheless published a terrible book. And every academic because of the academic autonomy that's given to them could publish their book in a brand new press that nobody has ever heard of. But nonetheless it's that shortage of labour a shortage of evaluative labour that causes us huge problems and that leads to this poor judgemental quality and leads people to continue to try and invest their symbolic capital of their work as a brand function will serve as a proxy for that shortage of our evaluative labour time. But the key thing is of course as an academic you translate that back into a salary if you're successful in those evaluation processes through grants, through appointments, through tenure through whatever process you like. And so when I see outraged articles about the Chinese system where often researchers are paid a direct lump cash sum if they can publish in a top English language journal and everyone goes, that's appalling. I say well actually we have exactly the same system we've just managed to mask it through this circular blinding system that makes it look as though you're behaving free from economic motivations where really that does drive behaviour nonetheless. So our question was what do you do about this? How do you get round this prestige trap? And there are two options. You can either just ignore it we're going to start our own new radical press that's just going to be from scratch it's going to be open access, it's going to adhere to all the principles that we believe are sound for scholarly communications in the 21st century or you can try and convert existing entities that carry that cultural cache into an open access form. Of course we're also trying to address a set of economic problems that are the mirror of that symbolic capital dilemma that I just outlined. So we have again a circular diagram here because I think most of these systems are circular and that's why different actors can't see what's going on within their systems. So researchers give their work to publishers and they also give evaluative labour time. So a decade ago now the research information network estimated that about two billion UK pounds worth of labour time was given in peer review processes to publishers and again the blinding system there is that researchers believe they're doing it for other researchers when obviously capital can appropriate that labour and recuperate it for its own functions. We then have a range of publishers of different types who perform a range of different services. So I'm not going to get into publisher bashing because I am one but I will note that publishers range from small not-for-profit mission oriented university presses who are sometimes one lawsuit away from bankruptcy right up to the big five publishers with whom we're all familiar and who make profit margins double the size of big pharma. The kind of functions that I think we want in the system are typesetting, copy editing, proofreading, digital preservation, platform maintenance, legal protection, copyright advice, running a stable organisation. So one of the battling things that people often say to me about new publishers is what happens if that publisher goes bust and what they mean is what happens if a symbolic investment in that publisher having given them my work if they go bust and that brand is no longer recognised. Now it should make no difference whatsoever if it went through a certification process and was sound at the time and it's still available but there is still that anxiety. But what I want to point out there is there are a range of things that we need to do that all have costs attached, that researchers value and continue to claim that they want and that need to be paid for somehow in this system. We know though that due to the mass expansion of higher education since 1986 or so we've seen a 300% rise in serial's expenditure, necessary serial's expenditure according to ARL statistics over that period. That of course leads to an access gap worldwide and that is one of the economic challenges that the open access world has said it is trying to address. But there are also different stances on that within the open access movement. There are some who say open access is costing us more and that is unacceptable because the idea was to reduce costs in the first place. There are others who believe that that's a goal in its end and that the additional cost is being born at the moment through library budgets and article processing charges is a price worth paying for open access. So I think it's dangerous to homogenise what people want from the economics of open access. What we wanted from the economics was a way of achieving OA in the humanities disciplines without APCs at a cost that is affordable to a range of libraries at a scale that is medium. And the final thing to note just in this blinding circle that I've got up here is that it is researchers who instruct libraries obviously where to spend their money for their courses, their research needs and so on. And I say instructs because I'm afraid that is usually how the relationship is framed in quite a problematic way. A good game to play with researchers though is to ask them how much does it cost to subscribe to the journal in which you just published. Most of them have no idea whatsoever very little interest whatsoever but this is the kind of situation that's perpetuated. OK, so we looked at the subscription system as it exists at the moment where you have many many libraries all paying relatively large sums to a small number of players for the most part over half of the expenditure of libraries goes to five publishers in order to have a rivalrous economic system that consists of exclusion. So the idea in rivalrous economic systems or classical economic systems is that you don't pay for something unless other people also pay. I'm not usually willing to pay for drinks for everyone in the room unless their future offer around will come back to me. I might be feeling generous on one day. We wondered what would happen if you took a model like that set up by Archive at Cornell like that set up by Knowledge Unlatched or even like that of the Scope 3 Purchasing Consortium and simply made this a non-classical economic model. So a situation where you had a fair number of libraries paying relatively small sums to pay the ongoing infrastructural cost of a publishing platform. So the other problem with article processing charges is that they divide up the cost to a publisher into unit costs as opposed to ongoing infrastructural costs. And the strange thing is that running a publisher is actually mostly about paying people. It's not just an automated process of put the PDF in and get the output for instance. And so when you divide things up into unit costs like a cost per article you're relying on a certain volume to fund your ongoing costs. And this isn't very helpful because most article processing charges come from some kind of grant funding that if you're in the sustainability session you've just heard is not ongoing open-ended funding. It's very much time limited and constrained to one project but that's not going to sustain infrastructure forever. So we wondered what would happen if you got several hundred libraries to pay these relatively small sums and it's just open on the internet. Would they pay anyway and what level of stretch would you get to before that model started to break? If you went in asking them all for $20,000 for three journals, they'd probably tell you to go away pretty quickly. But what if you started under the $1,000 mark which is the point at which most library directors have authority just to authorise on their own back strategic initiatives? And what happened if you gave them a governance stake in the expansion of the platform? So the idea here was, is there a way that you can make libraries into partners of scalability? And so what we came up with was an idea that actually we call this a subsidy because that's what it is. It's a way that libraries can support us to subsidise our ongoing costs of running on a not-for-profit basis. But we will also ask them every time new journals want to join the platform, do you want this? It will cost you this much more per year to potentially see this saving if you can cancel it and it's not part of a big deal. So there should be offsetting built in. And through that process we figured that we are one involving libraries in that decision making process but we're also mitigating our own risk of expansion. Because the real challenge of expanding a model like this is that you just grow and grow and grow and we receive probably five times more applications for journals to join than we can actually support at the moment. But asking libraries do you want it is the way in which we stop cancellations year on year and rate of cancellations at our age. The main reason for cancellation is obviously budget constraint and the main type of institution for which that comes are small, liberal or theological colleges. It has mixed success the voting mechanism is nothing I want to say in complete honesty. The challenge is that those managing open access funds at institutions are pushed for time and they get emails in their inbox every day to which they're required to respond. We produce fairly detailed reports on the journals that we want to put forward to our board because we want them to have good information about it. The challenge is I'm sure that well-intentioned budgetary managers look at a 15 page report and think I don't really want to read that right now. I'll do it next week and then the voting period has expired. So we have actually had people come back saying how come we've got a 5% increase this year? We only budgeted for 3% and we say because you all voted for it and 90% of people who voted said yes to all of them and 60% of institutions voted but that means you've got 40% who theoretically know nothing about this increase. The other challenge we've faced in the scalability and governance of the platform has been to do with percentage rises being the metric by which libraries evaluate their year on year expenditure. Now that makes a lot of sense when you're dealing with Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor and Francis' size deals where a slight percentage increase is triggering multi-thousand dollar rises in your pricing. When your initial price is under $1,000 and you've got a 5% rise as opposed to a 3% rise the actual absolute figure you're talking about for that rise is incredibly small compared to the total budget but that's still the metric by which we're appraised and we didn't quite appreciate that, I think, at the beginning of this undertaking. We've now got a way of handling this which is to make sure we do much more direct contact with our institutions which is obviously more work but actually makes a lot more sense involving people in this governance project. So as I said, we're now at about the 240-250 library mark and some of the smaller names are up on that slide there but we welcome contributions from institutions of any size. We've also had some interesting responses from funders and I do want to talk about funders because of the plan S declaration that I'm sure some of you have heard of. So The Welcome Trust, for instance, publishes work in the medical humanities and social sciences. They supported us for three years as a general ongoing member without any articles that they funded appearing in the title. We do now have some Welcome Trust funded articles but that was by chance rather than because they steered anyone to it. I thought that was an interesting twist on a funder supporting an infrastructure rather than going down the usual cost and recognising the challenges in this space. We also have the National I cannot remember I can't pronounce their name is the problem they're a Swedish funder with way too many consonants next to each other in their name for me to be able to say properly. Again, none of their directly funded work has appeared in our titles but they want to affect a more general shift in attitude towards open access publishing among the humanists they fund. I suspect they'll get fed up at some point if nobody ever publishes anything with us but again this is an interesting signal from specific funders that are starting to think about ongoing infrastructure concerns. So we now have 27 journals on the platform. So we're bigger than a small diversity press. In the first year we had 909 articles there were quite a lot of back content included within that. As I said over 50% of these journals used to be subscription titles that we have flipped away from that model. There are two ways that we do that that I'll come on to talk about shortly. But that cost distribution mechanism turns out to work quite well although it is a slight of hand with the statistics. So the cost per institution in that first year worked out about $1.10 because you distribute it among several hundred libraries. Now of course that's not the same as an article posting charge where you're bearing the same brunt of it but it's nonetheless quite a nice way of framing it. We also started to demonstrate usage of humanities titles in a crude metrified way but that nonetheless is quite persuasive to humanists who have to justify themselves on the basis of numbers anyway. So 120,000 or so unique readers we count a unique reader as somebody who visits a page and stays on it for 30 seconds and then the revisit period is according to counter specifications for how frequently they can revisit before we count it as another unique view. We don't use Google analytics or anything like that because we call ourselves a library and we don't really believe in tracking people across the internet and giving away the data on what they read. We have a number of articles about at the moment anti-Muslim hate crime for instance that we don't really want leaking out who's reading that and that being available to third parties. So this was an average of about 131 readers per article which compares extremely favourably with closed access alternatives. It doesn't of course actually mean anything on its own that someone's visited a page for 30 seconds doesn't imply that they were changed using impact in that way of meaningful measurable behavioural changes and outcome but it's none the less quite a persuasive metric when you also consider that's 0.008 dollars per institution per article, per reader. So I mentioned that we've been flipping journals and this has become increasingly important to get around that prestige trap. We can't actually just start new titles all the time or support journals that are already open access. This is one of the heart breaking things is that a huge number of requests we get are from existing open access journals that simply are not sustainable saying can you divert your funding stream from libraries into funding our titles. I'd love to be able to say yes because these are the people who took the bold decision to do something right in the first place although they didn't have an economic model in place to sustain it. And we have to say no to them at the moment because every time we ask libraries to fund a journal that's already open access they come back to us and say yes but that's just an additional cost there's no offsetting involved in that whatsoever we haven't saved any budget. Perhaps the most successful of our flipping operations though has been the move of the editorial board of Elsevier's journal Lingua to a new title Glossa and this for us was an exercise in legal diplomacy and stealth basically. The challenge was that the name of the title was owned by Elsevier so we could not move the journal itself in its wholly existing form to an open access platform without working with Elsevier. As a not-for-profit organisation we don't really approve Elsevier's business models on what they do. We will work with university presses who are not for profit so we fund two Liverpool university press journals to be open access but in the case of Elsevier we felt we couldn't enter a partnership there and we couldn't afford it anyway. So the entire editorial board decided collectively to step down and start a new journal with a new title Lingua and Glossa are the Latinate and Greek versions of tongue so it's got a similar name and it's clear what's being signalled there and they were going to start this from scratch. Except we didn't actually have to start it entirely from scratch because we spent a long time socially engineering the situation. So the key thing we did was to write to linguistics faculty around the world saying this is exactly what's happening. The quality control mechanisms at this new journal are going to remain the same as they were at the previous title. The editorial board is going to be the same. You are not going to be charged an article processing charge. We are going to copy edit, type set, proof read, digitally preserve your article. There will be no change as far as you are concerned. The response to this was that we had about 30 or so open letters from linguistics faculty around the world including a letter signed by Noam Chomsky saying that they recognised this title as having the same status as the previous one and pledged to publish in that venue instead. For legal reasons I'm just going to state for the tape it's not the same journal. It's a very different title but with the same editorial board as had previously managed the journal at Elspeth. So this was for us a clear signal that the social context in which you get people to move is what makes it work. It's not about just changing if the board had done what they had done set up a new title and we had done no outreach at all, no marketing this would not have worked but the marketing is really really hard work. If I were to go back to our funder and start again on this I would double the budget for marketing in what we needed. Build it and they will come is absolute nonsense. Build it, go and talk to people for two years before you even start and get them to pledge their support with collective action things built in so if a hundred other libraries say yes would you say yes is a really good technique for getting over the chicken and egg problem at the beginning of a project then they might come but it's still speculative. In other cases as I said we've had university press journals and we don't really want to steal journals away from university presses I like that we have a diverse ecology of publishers and in those cases we've negotiated with them to pay them the article processing charge they would have received instead on a fixed volume of articles. That's the other thing I'll say about consortium models is that they rely on some kind of capping mechanism so that you can plan your budget for the next year. When a journal comes to us we have to ask them what do you think the maximum number of articles you will publish every year will be and of course most of them say well I've no idea. On the other hand I had a meeting last week with a group of English professors in an association in the UK who told me that in the hybrid model their publisher had received article processing charges from a funder which doesn't happen very often in my discipline and as a result the publisher had told them to find more articles to publish because they just extended the budget they had for that issue so you can see the kind of perverse incentives that it encourages in that mode. So we have a agreement with university presses where we fund their journals we will fund x number of articles no more if they don't use up that allocation then they can roll it across to the next year the budget so that they don't have to think we've got to use it up, we've got to publish more material because we want them to be in the habit of thinking that every time they publish there's a cost to them so that they can assure that they're doing everything they can to get high quality material just volume. Now I have lots of problems with the peer review process as a way of ensuring that quality I think it's highly flawed it nonetheless remains the thing that humanists value at present and if you want the prestige system to accumulate to your titles you need to make sure you have a process they trust in place at that point. Actually before I talk about open source publishing technology I'm just going to talk now about plan S which I mentioned so for those of you who haven't heard of this news the commission in the last couple of months announced a pan funder initiative called Plan S operated by Coalition S which is 13 national funders from 12 countries around Europe who have agreed to a set of principles that ban hybrid open access and funding titles in hybrid open access journals and we've just had the implementation details of this last week so zero embargo green open access is now allowed under this scheme as long as it has a CC by license but it looks likely that a large proportion of European funded research and probably all UK research all UK research not just funding research will be included within this there have been delegations from the European Commission to the White House to talk to national funders over here China has signalled its support for these principles this really does look like a tipping point on which the open access movement I think can capitalise if it moves at the right point because learned societies are now turning around and saying well hang on a minute what happens to our revenue streams and isn't this a bit quick 2020 is the deadline for implementation of Plan S my response to them on the is it too quick point is not really because we've been asking you to do this for two decades but if you've only just heard about it in the last five minutes then yes it does seem very quick but I want to talk to you about what we're trying to do next with respect to learned societies and their sustainability under that model so before I do that just quickly we've also been building some open source publishing technology I can't resist talking about it a little bit even though I said most of the problems are social not technological we've built an automated JATS XML type setter JATS XML and you're doing a library publishing operation get in touch with me and I'll show you what we've built in that respect it takes Microsoft Word input and produces relatively good structured JATS XML output that can be cleaned up in editor like texture we've built a CSS regions PDF generator so once you've got that XML we have a way to convert that into automated PDFs which is pretty handy although it still requires manual checking as I said there are people involved and we've also built a translation layer so that people who want to leverage the power of open licenses for cross community cross lingual communications can do their own translations that others can rate, can modify and can edit in the browser and that's called Anatran and these are all openly available and I can talk more about them in the Q&A if you like but here's what we're trying to do with learned societies so at the moment there's a huge problem with learned societies funding models their journal titles and open access and the problem is that learned societies are valued by communities my discipline funds postdocs, it funds junior positions it funds a range of travel scholarships it funds obviously its own publication programs and it's general governmental lobbying activities I don't mean that in the sense of lobbying as in giving them bribes I mean just the sense of advocating for the humanities for instance out of the profits it makes on its journal which I shared 50-50 with its very large publisher now the questions that arise then are why should library budgets be the way that we fund the activities of disciplinary activities these are budgets that run a huge stress surely this is a matter for those in the discipline to decide on their institutional allocation of funding now that's the logical approach but that doesn't sit very well with learned societies when you're threatening to wreck their business model as a result so what I've been trying to do is to come up with a model where we can take our experiences of getting OAH off the ground to a medium size to other societies, other types of not-for-profit publisher and get them to adopt this model as well I do not believe that a single centralized organisation like OAH, like Knowledge Unlatched or like Scope 3 Purchasing Consortium can do everything for everyone I think what we need is this model to be distributed and seen as the way that we move from subscriptions to open access in disciplines where project-specific APC funding is just not forthcoming it's taken me a while to think that because you get attached to your own projects and you think they are the solution to everything they're really not is bad because it also puts all the responsibility on one organisation and we're an experimental project to start with I think we're a secure platform now but there was no guarantee that what we did wouldn't have gone under at some point I hope it won't now, it looks like it won't but if you have a distributed system and if libraries could commit to the idea that they want to spend subscriptions across many organisations perhaps they could spread open access costs across many organisations you'd have a far more solid principle and so the plan that we're now pitching to learn societies and that we're looking for test cases to start to work on is as follows so learn societies are in a different position to us when we started when we started we didn't have any titles we had titles that would move to us if we started but we didn't have titles with subscribers societies are different in some cases some societies have full lists of their subscribers and do not use intermediate agents to manage this they're managing their own subscription basis or they're managing it with a publisher but they have access to all the institutions that subscribe to their titles at present this puts them in a uniquely powerful position and it's not all societies who can do this because in many instances publishers control that data and will not give access to it to societies themselves but the offer is as follows society could move to a gold open access model and give subscribers a 3% discount on what they paid last year if libraries continue to pay that subscription anyway so this does imply a 3% cut to the budget of societies but for those who want to do open access and we're seeing a 40 to 50% cut if they move to an article posted on a large model that 3% cut is actually palatable in our early research stage the offer would only be valid though if 90% of existing subscribers agreed to the model in advance so again there is an awful lot of preliminary spade work involved here you have to do marketing outreach to all of your subscribers and get them to collectively agree that if enough of the body pledge they will move to this model the cunning part though is that you say the offer is for a fixed term period so after that period you threaten that you're going to roll back to a subscription model unless the library body as a whole continues to subscribe and in this way you introduce the threat of material becoming pay walled and inaccessible as an incentive to continue to track the subscription base I appreciate I'm arguing this to an audience for the librarians when usually it's societies I'm trying to persuade but this actually works out a persuasive argument for societies because if 90% of subscribers don't agree the OA rate the alternative is just to continue the inflationary rise in subscription costs and to keep it pay walled and this gets around the end prisoners dilemma of library subscriptions open access and social funding because it basically says you've got a guaranteed portion of your subscription base coming back and the problem is you can have a 3% reduction and will be open access or you can refuse or stay subscription and the prices go up instead and that makes it a no brainer for libraries who want to support the title and who are already subscribing the fixed term period that you choose will obviously then limit your income and potential for growth over that period but I think in my conversation with societies I've spoken to relatively small humanities societies a 3-year period of knowing that there was a subscription was quite an appealing offer libraries I've spoken to like it because the prices they're paying for these titles are enough that they often fall within their mop-up budget at the end of the year anyway and they can actually front the 3-year cost at the start now when you put a plan like this together and pitch it it sounds it sounds like you're naive and that you don't understand the work involved and that it's just going to happen and that's not what we're proposing I think OAH is going to grow to about 30 journals by next year and beyond that I'm not sure we want it to continue to grow in terms of title numbers because quite frankly that's the point where you start to stretch the budget capacity it looks like you're paying a lot for the open library of humanities it also becomes a lot of work to manage and you're not sure if you lose any control over any of these titles or if you do something wrong ethically you've scuppered a reputation of the whole thing and so we're going to I think start to freeze our own expansion and start to offer our marketing and experiences to learn at societies to get some case studies together for what it looks like to convert their models to an open access model the prices they will be able to offer will not be as good as the prices that we can do at OAH because we don't fund postdocs we don't fund those disciplinary activities but they will be better than the prices they were charging for their subscription journals and they will be open access and that's where I'm going to stop talking I hope that was interesting and gave you a sense of our project and what we're trying to do at this moment I can talk to you about books as well if people want to know what we're thinking about in that space but thank you very much for your time I'd like to open it to questions