 The title of my talk is Open Is Not Enough, Sustainability, Innovation, and Equality in Scholarly Communication. And I think what's underlying that is that we as a community have been too narrowly focused on moving from subscription-based access to open access. And because of that, we're missing some of the very important other values that we need to ensure are included in the system. So I'm going to do a little rant at the beginning of my talk, which basically provides the rationale as to why I don't think our system is right now sustainable, innovative, or equal. And then I'm going to talk about a project that CORE has been working on to try to create a knowledge common similar to what Stuart was talking about based on repositories. And one of the keys, the features of this knowledge commons is that collectively we all need to participate in that. So I won't go through this, but just briefly to mention CORE. We are an international organization, as David said, and we're working with repositories and other organizations that support repository initiatives around the world. We have, as our members, we have governments from Latin America, which are pushing repositories very strongly, but also institutions and not-for-profit organizations. Okay, so there's been a lot of talk about the sustainable development goals. And I recently did some work for IFLA, providing the rationale for why access to information and open access and open science is critical for sustainable development. And it's actually cross-cutting. It's critical for almost all, achieving almost all of these sustainable development goals. But I think equally important is that the system that we use for sharing and disseminating knowledge must also be sustainable. And sustainability is not one issue. It's not economic sustainability. Sustainability is a holistic issue. We need to take into account multiple dimensions. The ecology, the society, people, how it impacts people and economics, all in the meantime considering the long-term prosperity of things. So may we take the sustainability lens for a moment and look at the scholarly publishing system? Well, first of all, this is not news for anybody in this room. The ridiculous price for scholarly journals. This is from the Library Journal's study of average price per titles. And you can see here, again, I'm sure this is not a surprise for any of you, but some of the titles, journal titles, go up to over $4,000 per title. Of course, most of us don't buy journals title by title anymore. We buy them in the big deals. And the big deals are now something that we are completely locked into. This is a really interesting study that was done at the University of Montreal looking at what real usage are we getting from the big deals that we subscribe to from our researchers. And it was a kind of a multi-pronged study, one, they looked at the usage statistics of journals, I think, of titles over five years. And they also did a survey of their researchers asking them to identify what are the main titles that are important to them. And ultimately, the conclusion was that out of the 50,000 journals that they are receiving through the big deals, only about 3,000 were considered critical for the research being done by their university researchers. So that's unbelievable that we're paying all this money for all these journals that are actually not being used or are not of interest to the researchers on campus. Of course, when you go and approach the publishers and you say, well, actually we only want these 3,000 journals, they'll give you a great offer of paying 80% of what you're already paying now. So despite asking for 15% of the journals, the publishers will offer you an 80% of the price. So as we move to open access and start shifting towards paying article processing charges, again, the costs of that are significant. This is from 2016 and the average cost for the APC, according to a GISC survey here in the UK, was 1,700 pounds or so. I asked them for updated figures for this presentation, but they won't have any updated figures until May. So apparently in May we're going to find out whether that price has gone up or whether it has gone down or is the same. So I think there's a lot of talk in the community and I think especially on the continent. I don't know about here in the UK, but the Max Planck proposal OA 2020 to work towards flipping from subscription-based to open access. And I'm very skeptical about this. First of all, I don't think the publishers want this to happen. And second of all, even if it does happen, I don't think it will reduce the cost of journals. So we've seen recently the Finnish group try to stick their heels in around negotiating towards more open access and I don't think they made a lot of headway in their negotiations and they finally reached a deal with Elsevier. The South Koreans also have reached a deal with Elsevier without really making any headway along towards greater open access and without really getting any significant discounts. And we've been watching closely the Germans with the deal project and so we'll see what happens with that. They're still in negotiations and we'll see if the Germans can hold out for, again, either lower prices but also more options around open access. One of the things that's very concerning in this direction for core because we're an international organization is that many of our members are not able to pay article processing charges. Actually some of our member countries, I was just in Nepal for example, their library budget is equivalent to one APC. So it's just not an option. It's not an option that we can present as an option that can scale globally. And to add to that, they don't want to be charity cases. They want to participate fully in the system. So moving from the sustainability lens to the innovation lens, innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs and existing market needs. And so how innovative have we been with the scholarly journal publishing system? Not very much. Kind of looks the same. It's color. It's in digital form and it has a picture but really essentially the journal article has not changed very much over the last 350 years. And this is a quote from your speaker on Wednesday, I believe, Catherine Stiller. And she was talking about copyright, why things were not moving in a copyright discussion but I think it fits perfectly when we talk about scholarly publishing as well. The profit motive of the commercial publishers perpetuates these problems. This is about keeping profit from models that are outdated. And then if we look at equality, well according to the University of Edinburgh, equality is ensuring that individuals or groups are not treated differently or less favorably based on protected characteristics including race, gender, disability, religion and so on. So how equal is the scholarly publishing system right now? Well it's extremely unbalanced and I want to give you some examples from my recent travels. This is unfortunately it's from 2011 but it's a kind of visualization of the research output of different countries around the world. And you can see there's a couple of very bloated areas including the United States, North America in general and Western Europe. I think it has changed because China now is becoming one of the biggest research producers in the world. So if we looked at this map today it would still be very small in the south but China I think would be much larger. So here are some examples I wanted to give you about just to demonstrate how unequal the system is. This is, chagas disease is a disease that has been around for hundreds of years mainly in southern South America, Brazil, Argentina. But it was interesting, a recent PLOS article was talking about the ten year history of chagas disease. And why is PLOS talking about a ten year history of chagas disease because chagas finally made its way up to the United States and Europe about ten years ago. So there's very little published in the international journals about chagas disease until finally somebody in the United States contracted it. This is from my recent trip to Nepal and this was an analysis of the publication output of Nepalese scholars. And the two circles that you see are specific issues that are important to Nepal. So they have some infectious diseases that are in Nepal and the Himalayas that are unique to that country. And if you look at the other circle on the right they have something called mountain sickness that's very important there and is related to the high altitude. So the problem is that it's very challenging for them to publish information about these diseases in the international journals because it's not of interest to other scholars in general. It's very problems that are very specific to their country. Yet as with Chile the Nepalese scholars feel incredible pressure to publish in high impact prestige journals. So the credit that they receive for their research and for their contributions are measured by publishing in high impact journals in the international journals yet the problems that are important to them are local problems. You may have heard of Latin America and how strong they are around scholarly publishing. They have a whole journal system called C.L.O. Which publishes local journals in many of the Latin American countries. It started in Brazil but has gone to a lot of other countries in South America. But I was in Havana last week speaking with some Chilean scholars who said oh yeah we have C.L.O. But when I go to my promotion and tenure committee I only get six points if I publish in a C.L.O. Journal but I get ten points if I publish in an international journal. So despite having their own system a very vibrant and trusted system for publishing journals it's still weighted less than if they publish in the international journals. So this is a publication I think you Stuart might have referenced this research project which is being led was led by Leslie Chan at the University of Toronto and funded through the International Development Research Council in Canada. And they went around and did basically an analysis of open access in developing countries. And they found really that open access was not helping make things equal in those countries. So I'll just read quickly here starting with when researchers gain access to the international scientific journals they're not gaining access to a repository of knowledge that represents the plurality and diversity of knowledge and science produced around the world. Rather they're dealt with articles that do not include global south perspectives giving more visibility and thus legitimacy to knowledge in the global north. So it's a key and recognized problem in the global south for sure. But I don't think it's only a problem in the global south. One of the most critical issues in Canada right now, I mean aside from living beside Donald Trump, is our Aboriginal community, our Indigenous community and how they can be better integrated into our society. And so there's the research that we do around Indigenous support, Indigenous needs in Canada of course does not get published in the international journals but is published in the local Canadian journals but in Canada we're in the same position. Our journals, our local journals that might publish content that's really valuable for our society are not treated at the same level by the assessment, the people who are assessing research outputs. So this is Leslie Chan who I mentioned before and he talks about how openness is not simply about gaining access to knowledge but about the right to participate in the knowledge production process driven by issues of local relevance rather than research agendas set elsewhere from the top. This is a Nobel Prize winner. Now I've forgotten where he's based but he might be based here in the UK. And he has said his whole lab, his whole team are boycotting publishing and luxury journals because it encourages researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science. And so I think we can see that by all the measures of sustainability, innovation and equality our current publishing system is really failing us. And I think really the crux of the issue is the incentive system that we have, how we assess research outputs, how we assess the value of research and how that system is based on the journal system. So Timothy Gowers at the last open repositories meeting, I'm sure you all know Timothy, he's at Cambridge, he's a math professor, very well known, talked about how these are just that researchers are living with these perverse incentives that force them to publish in venues in order to get to be recognized. So it's a vicious cycle. You think about, geez I need promotion and tenure, what can I do my research on where I can get published in one of these big journals, then I publish, I have fame and fortune and everybody recognizes me, I have more money and I think of another research problem again that will allow me to continue to publish in those areas. And just to show you an example, I mean I've heard of researchers who have told me, ah well in my promotion and tenure committee I just count the impact factor of the journals of every person coming in. So and this is one of the international rankings of universities, 40% of the ranking of the university is based on publications and where the researchers are publishing. So 20% is just on whether they've published in nature or science. So Timothy Gowers calls it perverse incentives and this is my, my illustration of what I think our system looks like and these are actually real goats, they're Moroccan tree goats and their handlers teach them when there's a drought to go up and eat food, climb up the tree and eat the leaves off the tree but you know of course those ones are the ones that represent the researchers that have been able to you know figure out how to work the system and then the other goats around the ground are the ones who are starving and who are kind of falling outside of the system. So many of you have probably read this Guardian article, I think it came out last year sometime and it asked, the title asked, is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science and overwhelmingly the conclusion was in this article, yes and for the reasons that I have basically just mentioned. So the journals control where researchers publish because they control impact factor and prestige and then they can make a lot of profit off that but I think even more worrisome is what's happening with the entire life cycle of research. So over the last ten years or so we've seen the journals, the large international publishers buy up more and more journals kind of owning the horizontal layer of journal publishings where we have about five big publishers that own the majority of the journal titles but what we're seeing now is they're also buying up, they're also buying up vertically all of the other services that feed into the entire life cycle of research, of scholarly communication. So this, of course recently you've heard of the B-Press Acquisition by Elsevier but they own Mendele and they own Scopus and you can see what their strategy is to really own both at the horizontal level as many journal titles as they can and at the vertical level as many other services so they can integrate them together. A pure is another example. So this is the situation that we're in and I'm not convinced that whether we move towards greater open access or stay in a subscription-based model that things are going to get a lot better. Some of you may have seen this tweet a couple days ago. I tried to read the article but it was blocked but Elsevier's profits swell to more than 900 million pounds and then underneath it says but the risks of open access and a shift away from subscriptions could halt growth but I don't believe it for a second. So that's kind of my rant and I'd like to spend the second half of my talk presenting to you an alternative vision and that is to take back control of the scholarly communication system by strengthening and expanding the institutional role in managing scholarly output and from the core perspective we see the repository network as a network to start being able to do this but of course the elephant in the room is that repositories really just collect content that's already published elsewhere. So how can we change the system when we are I won't say parasites but we are reliant on the international journals system. So these are a little bit out of order. I think I'd like to just mention and it was it was mentioned earlier Lorcan's idea of the inside out library and this really aligns with what we're talking about at core. Instead of bringing content in for our users we're starting we need to change our model and how we work in libraries and begin to which we're already doing provide the content that's created by our communities out to the to the broader user community and this was also the vision that was presented in a report published by MIT last year called the future of libraries. And so I would encourage you to go read that report it's it's it's very challenging and very interesting in terms of how we think about what the future of libraries are. So the one issue or the important point about this if we move towards an inside-out approach to the role of libraries we need to make sure that libraries are networked. There's limitations to an inside-out approach for just the content that we're creating at our institution. No researcher is going to want to go just to our institution to think that they're finding a comprehensive collection of content. We need to ensure that our libraries are networked across the whole system and the challenge that core has been looking at in the last couple of years is the repositories that we use to provide this inside-out content are super old and have outdated technologies and so we can't really build those really exciting services on top of repositories right now because the technology just isn't up to to up to it. So about a year and a half ago we launched a working group of kind of technology experts I'd say to provide some thinking to do some thinking around what we need to do to repositories to improve their functionality and in November 2017 we finally published our report with recommendations and the report talks about 11 new behaviors for repositories and also provides the technologies that we need to implement in repositories to be able to support those behaviors. So really the vision underlying this is that we want to reposition repositories as the foundation for a distributed globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication on top of which layers of value-added services will be deployed thereby transforming the system making it more research-centric open to and supportive of innovation and collectively managed by the scholarly community. So Peter Knoth who runs Core CORE which is an aggregation service at the Open University funded through JISC mainly I think. He was on our working group and he provided us with this this excellent illustration of what the differences between our repositories now on the left-hand side was essential which are essentially our closed systems and the only way we network our repositories is really through aggregating metadata and building very lightweight services on top of the metadata. So the idea is that we very much open the repository so that the content is open and we can build a whole bunch of different layers of value-added services on top and you can see some of the services listed there and I just want to mention three of them that I think are particularly important for transforming the system. So in my in my view in my vision is that we begin to build peer review on top of the content in repositories so essentially incrementally moving repositories from post publication collections to collections that will eventually start collecting prepublications with value-added peer review layers on top. The second area is really social networking so recommender systems like oh you're reading this article well there's another article over here that you may be interested in the kind of thing we're used to when we go on Amazon or or Facebook or or any of these other networks we want to build that into the repository network and the third is trying to look at building some standardized usage metrics on top of repository resources as well so again to try to offer an alternative to what the journals are doing we need to build both peer review quality assessment and usage impact assessment into the system so of course this is where we talk about working together and the collective because no country can do this alone if we're going to change the system we really have to work together across at the international level to do this and that means institutions and repositories adopting this common set of behaviors because we can't build the we can't build those layers on top unless we have common behaviors in the repository systems this vision also relies it's not appear to it's not appear to peer system it relies on hubs so if you can imagine a notification system would not be kind of going peer to peer from one repository to another those those user activity would be aggregated into a hub analyzed and then pushed back in into the repositories and so we imagine hubs but we don't imagine one central hub because we don't want to centralize the system too much so we imagine regional and national hubs participating in this and they also have to be kind of have common behaviors and common functionality if they're going to exchange information with each other and so I think also another thing that's critical to our vision I've really been talking a lot about journals but very very critical to our vision is that we're starting to we want to expand the contributions to research by including other types of content I mean we already do collect other types of content in our repositories but we'd like to have that into include that into a more formalized system where it is more recognized and valued by the community and so just briefly the characteristics this is these are the characteristics I see of the system that we would like well global for one so we want it needs to be global and it needs to be trusted and I think this is one of going to be one of the real challenges for us is how do we build trust into the system especially in the you know these days where we're talking about fake news predatory journals we really need to do a lot of thinking about how we engage with the research community to ensure that the peer review and the comments are trusted and that the participation in the system is is trusted by everybody I think I see it as being publicly managed not managed by private industry as I said before it has to be interoperable across repositories and countries and across the national hubs and we also want to make sure that we have open api so that we can build not just the horizontal layer but the vertical layers in terms of those service layers on top and so again I just like to make the case for why a distributed system is really important it's really easy the easy answer is to try to to adopt centralized systems it's much easier to do that but I think looking at some of the imbalances and problems that we have in the current system you can see that one of the things that would be important to be built in an alternative system is that it better reflects the local needs of different countries I think but this would also you know safeguard against failure and we wouldn't be at risk of Elsevier offering us a pot of money to buy to buy us out and it also I think hopefully would place the institution and the university library at the center of the system and so just a few words about the current status of developments so I said the report was published in November 2017 so about three or four months ago there's already been a really a lot of interest in the recommendations so again the two pieces are the development of the repository software and the second piece is the the services the hub services and we we've already got open air in Europe the National Institute for Informatics in Japan a group in in the US and a Canadian group who are already looking at how they can help with the repository development and I actually think that's the easiest piece of the puzzle so there's quite a bit of interest there and I think we're coalescing around and we're working with the platform developers to to help them implement those kind of the the new functionalities one of the challenges with that is that not every institution has the resources to upgrade their software so there will be a lot of work and core is committed to trying to help especially in the developing countries try to get to the highest level of software functionality and then in terms of hubs again open air has been very interested in in this and we'll be doing some pilot projects around building commenting and peer review into the open air system core the UK aggregator has already started building notification and social social media kind of functionalities into their aggregator and I mentioned before the National Institute of Informatics in Japan is also working on it and in order to kind of spread this beyond you know the UK Europe and Japan we're having a technical meeting with repository networks in Hamburg in May 14th and 15th so that the aim of that is to kind of spread share information and spread the knowledge from the more developed networks to the to the smaller ones and this is being done kind of under the auspices of an accord that we signed last year to and this was basically at the sort of at the level of we're agreeing to work together so there this was signed by these different organizations in different regions and it's sort of a framework for us to work together and now we're trying to really do that at the practical level and so I think this is all great but we won't be able to really achieve our vision unless we do some other things as well and we publish this five prerequisites for a sustainable knowledge commons a couple of months ago and and it kind of outlines the other things that I think we need to do the first two are what I was talking about so improving our repositories and our local based systems connecting those services across the world I think we need to start thinking about how we can redistribute our funds that are all caught up in the big deal towards other open services and I understand that's so challenging because we we can't even get a reduction in price from any of these publishers the price just keeps going up and up and up taking more and more of our budgets but there is a discussion I know Vanessa from Spark Europe has started a group called S-Cos looking at how how we can identify appropriate services that could be funded and there's a discussion in the United States now that was started it's called the 2.5 initiative and so what they're trying to do is get the institutions in the United States and Canada to to to sign up to say well we will we will move 2.5 of our budget towards open access services but we you know in Canada we did an analysis we're already doing more than 2.5 we're already paying more than 2.5 so perhaps it should be 10% not 2.5 the fourth issue I think is critical how can we change the way research contributions are assessed right now it's very much based on citations and journal-based metrics and so if that is the if those are going to be the main measures for assessing research output it will be very difficult for us to create an alternative system this is a very difficult challenge at Carl we recently produced a briefing paper that was aimed at the vice provosts I guess or the provost or talking about how our reliance on journal-based assessment measures are are having an unhealthy impact on scholarly communication but I think Susan can attest it didn't go over very well this is a very difficult conversation to have with people in the administration so we need to we need to have the conversation but we need to tread carefully and I think the last one here oh is is maybe we should start thinking at the at the level of the broader community about what what are our principles around the infrastructure and services that we that we use and adopt in our own local contexts and this kind of came out of the B press acquisition for me where I thought maybe our institutions could use a little bit of advice or a framework for helping them decide what services they'll use and which ones they'll say no maybe I'll go here instead and so I hope there will be work some work done on that sometime soon in 2018 and I've talked to Spark and Spark Europe and I've talked to David and and Susan about maybe Iarla also participating and developing some common principles that we might share with the community and so hopefully that work will be coming out soon and you know just to to put a plug in for the whole theme of this conference we need to work together if we want we're going to change anything we need to work together we we have a tendency to be competitive and that's the way the system is set up to attract better researchers to attract more students to our institution but we need to put that aside if we really want to change the system and with that I say thank you very much