 And ladies and gentlemen, our next guest would have been Johan Rorik. But unfortunately, he had to go to China for the open access week. And we were very lucky, and give a warm welcome as well, that Saskia de Vries was willing to replace him. Hi, welcome. Is this the correct telling of what happened with Johan? Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you may know, he's the open access champion. He followed up Robert John Smith, and he's gone to China for planning. And he went to China to try to get the Chinese on board, which he found a little more important than being here. Well, and also to say, before he accepted the invitation, he told Dan that there was a chance that he had to go to China, and if he had a chance, he would get on the plane. Why? Maybe some people don't know that. Why was he called the champion? Do you not know? Well, he doesn't like the word champion. I mean, in English it's less... In Dutch, it's really horrible word. Compute. But it's called champion because he's the sort of the advocate for planets. And his task is to get on board more funders. I'm not sure how much you are aware of planets, but it's a funder movement, and it's trying to move academia towards open science and open access. And does that also mean, for example, the question you have from that gentleman, like, are there formats, are there things I can use? Is that also one of the goals, one of the aims of this platform? Well, it's money. It's about money, as everything is for open access. And what they have said is that if you have research done, paid for by one of the funders in planets, then you will get money to publish that research on an open access platform or in a journal. So that's the idea behind it. And the more funders there will be, the bigger this movement will have an impact, obviously. And now again, thanks for you coming here, making time, and for everyone here in the audience, who are you? I'm actually a publisher, don't shoot me. Ooh, from the old world. Well, no, and I used to be a university press publisher, so I was the director of Amsterdam University Press until seven years ago. And I got involved into the open access movement there very early, with books mainly, and when I left, I started advising academia, libraries, funders, on how to move towards open access, with preferably losing the bad sides of publishers who make too much profits. And because with Johan I was going to talk about his experience with flipping the Elsevier journal, Linkwa, to an open access glossar, but that's only one of the examples, because you have experienced six or seven? Well, we are a group of librarians and academics who think open access should be fair open access. You can see what the fair open access principles are behind me. So there are, it's maybe good to say it has to be a transparent ownership structure. Authors of articles in the journals retain copyright, which we find very important. The articles are under a CCB license. You don't pay as an author in our view. So it's the funder or your university who takes up the costs of the article. And any fees paid on behalf of the journal should be transparent. So we're also working on that. If Johan always says, if I go to my garage with my car and I want them to fix it, if they would say to me that costs you 2,000 euros, but I'm not going to tell you what I'll do. I'm not going to tell you if I'm going to take Johan out or give you new wheels. That would be ridiculous. And this is actually the fact for open access publishing right now. The publisher tells you to pay somewhere between 500 and 5,000 euros. And they don't specify what they do for this. So that's one of the things we are working on also within planets. And Johan was one of the first I spoke to when I was actually working for the Royal Library to see how we could move towards open access six years ago. And he was very unhappy with the Elsevier. He didn't like the way, as an editor, he was the editor-in-chief of Renoir. He was treated. He didn't like the way they didn't give any information on how many subscriptions there were. So what we did was we went to Elsevier and we asked them to apply to these principles. They, of course, said no. And then he already had his whole editorial board ready to... Did they all say why they didn't answer or why it wasn't no? Well, they were mostly concerned about the ownership. So they didn't want to give the ownership of that journal to the editorial board, which is basically because they want to be able to sell it or to change it or whatever. If you own the journal's title, then you have a much better position. So the whole editorial board moved away together on the same day and they started a new journal at Ubiquiti Press, which is a small open access publisher, where you only pay 300 pounds for an article processing fee, and they gave them all these criteria. So the problem was, in the beginning, of course, this has been mentioned before, that it's the impact factor which Lin Gua had didn't move with the editorial board, which is ridiculous, because I mean it's the editorial board who is the basis for the impact factor, because that's where the peer review is done. But they now have applied the Web of Science and they will have their, this is three, three and a half years later, they will have an impact factor soon as well. And one of the, because you are, I think you are mostly academics. Can you raise your hand if you're not an academic? Okay, and are you librarians then? Yeah, okay. So what we saw was that you really want the academics to move towards these new principles. Because if you're an editor, how many editors of journals do we have in there? Yeah, as an editor, you've got power as well. You can choose which publisher you want to go to. And you can also ask your authors to push for things. So this is why it's very much bottom up, it's very much bottom up. But also Johan, in his email to Dan, he wrote well about Saskia, without her flipping Lingua to Glossa, it would not have been possible. That's a nice compliment, but it also tells us something. It's not just something you can do on your own. No, it's a lot of work. Actually, when I spoke to Johan the first time, he was really not happy with Elsevier, but he didn't know very much about open access. This was six years ago. I mean, a lot of academics weren't aware of what it was. And because I'm a publisher, I know how publishers think. And you know what they don't like, what they do like. But we had some librarians with us as well. And once he had his whole editorial board behind him, because that was very important for him, of course, if he would be the only one to flip, it wouldn't have happened. Because then the other editors would have stayed with the Elsevier journal, Lingua, and they could just go on. So I really think that this going off to open access should be done by librarians, by academics, by funders, and by universities all together. And how typical a publisher are you? If you compare yourself, you talk to other publishers, and you are like sort of a pro flipper? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I'm a university press publisher. And university presses don't make profits, or most of them don't. They are there for academia. I mean, they very usually, 90% of what they publish is not commercially interesting for anyone else. So the real university press publishers see ourselves as part of academia. Normally we are part of universities, no? Yeah. So in other words, if we're dealing with commercial driven publishers, it's a whole different story. No, not totally. Because I do think that a publisher can make profits. I mean, it's a business. I'm not against profits. But the problem is that the big ones who have all the power, they make a profit of 40, 45%, which is ridiculous. And it's all community money. I mean, it's taxpayers' money. So I think that shouldn't be that high. And if you run a business, you need to have a little surplus to be able to innovate or to put into projects or whatever. But 40% is too much. In the beginning, I also asked people how to change. Because most people said, yes, we do want it to be the default, but it's still hard from where we're standing now. What, in your opinion, would be the best device? Everyone should find the Saskia? Or is there a different type? No, no, no. Now, I think with the help of each other, and that's your librarian, for example, library people know a lot about this, you can find ways to find good open access journals which don't charge too much money. One of the big problems it has been mentioned already is, of course, the fact that as an academic, you push to publish in high-impact journals. This should change. I mean, with Dora there, it will change, but who can help? Yeah, sure. I promise you something. Yeah, I don't want to interrupt too much, but even if you publish in a non-open access journal, you can still do open science. I just want to add that. And it doesn't need to hold you back. In fact, I think it will make your case much easier. It can do both, and maybe at the same time. Yeah, that's true. It's much wider indeed. Question over here? Can you explain a little bit more? How would that work? How would it work to do both? I'm sorry, I'm still in your thunder now. I think if you do open science, this could also mean something like pre-registering your hypothesis before you run an experiment. And then in your paper referencing to the place where you published your hypotheses in your paper, you can refer to the place where you store your data if you do so openly. You can refer to the place where you make your materials available. You can refer to the place where you show your analysis scripts. There are many ways that you could make your work open without relying on an open access journal. You can basically sneakily, kind of through the back door, introduce open science into a traditional journal as well. Thanks for that. Thanks for clarifying. Yes? I will open one. Oh, yeah, sorry. That's not open access. Maybe also something to talk about is pre-prints and how that can also play into kind of kind of going more and more open science or open access in your work, but you know, it's still in the end publishing in a closed journal. What do you like to call that? So make someone else who have more to say about it. Yeah? Yeah, do you want to say something about it? There are disciplines where it's totally normal to first publish a pre-print. And these are also basically, this is physics, maths, life sciences sometimes. And these are disciplines where open access publishing has become the default already, I think. Also because they have more money than humanities and social sciences, so they don't mind if they have to pay 3,000 euros, where that's for the humanities, social science, not possible. And to use Rima's words to go back to your thunder, we were still in the advice, and your first part of your advice was work together, look for your librarians, you can already do it, but do we also need to go to The Hague and change the law? Do we have to do other stuff, or is this the biggest step we have to take? Well, changing the law has been discussed. I mean, Sommer Dekker came up five years ago with a letter to the government saying that he wanted open access articles within six years, which didn't happen. But really changing the law is difficult, because you still have this problem with money. So in England, the Finch reports said everybody should publish in open access, and then the publisher said, well, great, come up with the money. And so it worked, it was country-productive. So this is where Plan S is very much looking into how they can move it forward. And one of their criteria is that in order, as a publisher, to be able to collect money for your article, if it's within Plan S research, the publisher should make the price of the APC transference. And that's where we're working on as well. Any other questions for Soske or remarks or things you want to know with the ad? Very interesting. But so far it's very much an academic, literally a conversation. It's about academics, libraries, publishers, librarians. I myself am a self-employed research consultant. I'm trying to keep publishing. And, of course, article process and fees for others, for me, are a big problem. Also, you have things like citizen science. There's a whole new realm of publishing outside of academia. Can you say something about that and how to incorporate that? Yeah. Good question and good perspective. Actually, you should also mention development countries. We don't have money to pay for it. But what's happening is that most publishers have something which is called a waiver. So if you can prove, or if you're on a list of countries where you cannot be expected to pay, then you don't have to pay. And what they do is they ask a little more money from the other people. So rich research institutions, et cetera. And they use that money to be able to give a waiver. And in some cases, for example, at Frontiers, the waiver ratio is 25%. So 25% of the articles which are published in Frontiers journals is not paid for. And this does sort of solve the problem. I kind of paid not for it. Not for you, but we know. Because I'm already investing a lot of my time, not sponsored in actual writing, and I have to pay a thousand euros or pounds on top of that. Even for me not being from a developing country, that's a lot of money. So I think... Yeah, but it is still also, not even in developing countries, but also here in the Netherlands, might be still a problem. Actually, the strange thing is that in the States, you would think that the very rich research universities like Harvard would have a lot of money for their individual authors to pay open access with, and they don't. So even people from Harvard sometimes get a waiver. And I do think you would have to explain this more than if you were on one of these lists. But the problem, of course, is that there is money involved. Whatever you do, you do need money. And if, for example, citizens would start publishing more than academics, then the price gets up. So I don't know how to solve that. But one, also for you, have you said everything you wanted to say so far? I mean, you can also participate in it. What's the most important thing you haven't said in terms of for everyone in the audience? Yeah, the most important thing, I said it, but not loudly enough. If you are an editor, be against the publisher if you don't like it. And start working your editorial board. Because this is where this with Johan started as well. And we saw it with the other seven journals we flipped. It's the editors who really stuck out their neck. Are you then asking those editors to be a donkey shot? Because that's maybe how they feel. But this might be damaging my career. I think mostly once you're... I'm talking about the editor-in-chief. These people are very often a little older and already very reputed. So I think they can take a chance. And the other thing, which is interesting, because Johan was very afraid that he wouldn't get the young academics at Glossa, because there wasn't an impact factor. It's the other way around. The young academics love it, and they don't give a shit about it. So that might also be some good hope for the future. If we wait long enough, it will all change. Thank you very much.