 And now please welcome our speaker, Claudia. So hopefully there will be my slides up there. I see someone running, running fast. Ah, here we go. Yes, so hello everybody and welcome also from my side to one of the first talks of this year's Congress. Yeah, my name is Claudia Frick or if you know me from Twitter, my name is Fazid TV Proc. And I'm about to refresh your memories on scholarly communication and scientific publishing. But since this is my first talk at the KS Communication Congress, I'd like to start with two facts about me so that you know who is talking to you. So fact number one, I am an atmospheric scientist. So I have a PhD in meteorology. Fact number two, I am now working as a librarian in the library of a research center. The most common reaction I usually get when I say this is why. There are actually several reasons why I left science and joined the library world. And for the next 30 minutes, I'll talk about one of these reasons. And to be honest, it's the reason I'm most passionate about. Okay, so let's dive into the topic. And I'll start with a few simple questions that you can answer just for yourself. Do you think science helps us as a society to be well educated and to make rational and fact-based decisions? Do you think science helps us to live healthier, longer, and to deal with diseases? Do you think science helps us to face global challenges like climate change? If you answered at least one of these questions with yes, then you must also think that restricting the access to scientific results is not beneficial for our society. Unfortunately, that's what we are currently doing. 72% of scientific publications are locked up behind paywalls, which means that only those with money have access to science and those who don't have money are either left behind or they are forced to go illegal ways. And this is not how it should be. But how should it be instead? We should have open access to science. And open access means that everybody in the world should have access to science without any financial, technical, or legal barriers. At the end of my talk, I want you all to know what we can do to tear down the paywalls in scientific publishing and to achieve open access to science. But before we can talk about how we can change a system like scientific publishing, we have to understand how it works. So we'll start with a look on the question, what the most common way of scientific publishing currently looks like. So for all the non-scientists in this room, or those who haven't published a scientific publication so far, let me take you on the roller coaster journey of scientific publishing. Imagine yourself to be an atmospheric scientist, a brilliant atmospheric scientist. And you spent the past five years of your life in your laboratory and you made some time-consuming experiments. You ran some complex simulations and after a lot of sweat and pain and a lot of tears, you finally found it. You found the solution to climate change. Yes. And it's absolutely great that you know how to reduce greenhouse gases back to a proper level and how to stop temperatures from increasing. But the whole scientific community, everybody in the world, should know about it so that we can realize the solution and finally stop climate change. So you have to communicate your research in order for it to benefit society and that you can get the Nobel Prize that you absolutely deserve. So you write down a summary of your solution into a manuscript of, let's say, 15 pages. And what's next? How to distribute this manuscript in the community? Since I am at the Chaos Communication Congress and we are in the 21st century, I assume that most of you are currently thinking, yeah, just put it on the internet? Yeah, that's not what the most common way of scientific publishing looks like. At least not yet. What you will do instead is that you will either submit your manuscript to a scientific conference or to an academic journal, which one you will do mainly depends on your discipline. So if you are, for example, a computer scientist, you will most likely submit your manuscript to a scientific conference. If you are an atmospheric scientist, you will most likely submit your manuscript to an academic journal. But both publishing processes are nearly the same. So I will only guide you through one of them. So since you are an atmospheric scientist, you now submit your manuscript about the solution to climate change to an academic journal. And at this stage, your manuscript is called a preprint. And your manuscript fits into the scope of the journal. Therefore, in the next step, a process of quality control starts. This is called peer review. These are other scientists, like, for example, these two guys. Yeah, I know that this is scary, but these two guys will have a look at your manuscript and check whether everything you did and wrote is valid and scientifically correct. Because maybe you only think you found the solution to climate change, but in reality you made a really awful mistake already on page one. But that's not what happens to you because your brilliant and your solution is perfect. So these two guys only have some minor corrections and comments, and you integrate them into your manuscript and resubmit this new version to the journal. And now you are lucky, because the journal then says, yeah, okay, with these changes, we'll accept your manuscript for publication. And at this stage, your manuscript is called the postprint. Because the content is now the final one that will be later printed in the journal or published online since we are in the 21st century. And now in the last step, some typesetting happens. So your manuscript is brought into the layout of the journal. And then this fancy publishes version is published on the journal website, from where everybody in the world can see that you found a solution to climate change. And this is what the most common way of scientific publishing currently looks like, simplified. But I forgot one very important detail, and this is the paywall. You published closed access. And at this point, I'm sorry, but we have to talk about money. Because there's a lot of money changing hands in this process. And the first occasion money changes its hands has actually nothing to do at all with the paywall. Because did you know that you, the author of the manuscript or your laboratory, might have to pay money to the publisher in order for your publication to get published? Yeah, maybe your manuscript was too long and you have to pay page charges. Or you included some colorful figures and you have to pay color charges. Yes, color charges in the 21st century. And the second occasion money changes its hands is at the paywall. Because there are a lot of scientists out there that need to know the solution to climate change. And some of them are lucky, like her. And they work for an institution that has money and that has a library. And this library will pay money to the publisher to grant these scientists access to your publication. Either by paying a subscription fee so that they have access to all publications in the journal or by just purchasing your single publication. But there are a lot of scientists out there that aren't that lucky. And they won't have access to your publication. And what about all the non-scientists in this room that I'm sure also want to know the solution to climate change? They won't have access either, unless they are willing to pay. But who said that we, all together, didn't already pay for this publication? Because who funds you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist at your laboratory, who funds the two guys doing the peer review? And who funds the libraries that grant other scientists access? It's us. We all do. It's taxpayers' money. So don't you think we kind of already paid for this publication? Okay, you might now think, but hey, there will obviously be money coming back, because authors and people doing peer review will get paid for their work by the publisher? No. And that doesn't happen in science. Scientists are doing all of this work cost-free for the publisher. Okay, but then you might think, but hey, then maybe this is just the business model of academic publishers? I mean they definitely have their costs that they need to cover. So maybe they are just doing this, covering their costs, and they are not making so much more money out of it? We are currently having three major academic publishers. They are called Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. And let's have a look at the profit margins of at least Elsevier and Springer. They are 35 and 37% pure profit. These margins are even higher than the ones of Google and Apple. We are all together paying in every year 7.6 billion euros for access of publications, 7.6 billion euros per year. And this has some very weird practical consequences, because publishers are requesting so much public money to get access to mainly publicly funded publications, that even those that really do have money, like the Harvard University, can no longer afford them. And when I learned this, all of this, for the first time I only had two options left. Option number one, join the open access movement and tear down these paywalls. Option number two, become myself an academic publisher. On my bank account this morning said I chose option one. So let's talk about how we can tear down the paywalls. There are generally a lot of approaches we can take. Some of them are smaller, but persistent, and others are more massive steps. But who can do anything about the paywall? Who are the involved players in scientific publishing? Well, we have the scientists that do most of the work. They produce the content, they do the quality control of the content, and they are even the ones that later in the process mainly consume the content. Then we have the funders that provide the money. We have the libraries that grant access, and we have the publishers that publish the academic journals. Since I assume that we are not having so many funders and publishers in here, and I don't think that the number of librarians is higher than 10, I'd like to focus on what scientists can do to tear down the paywall. But I will also have a look on what we can achieve if the first three players work together. But let's start small with you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist. So you just published your solution to climate change like this, and you just realized, damn, I published behind the paywall, and a lot of scientists won't have access to my publication. And usually that's not what scientists want, because most scientists I know want their publications to be read, to be spread, to be cited, and to be discussed as widely as possible, and the paywall prevents this. So you might now wonder whether there's anything you can do about the paywall when you publish like this. Yes, you can do something about it. The first option you have is brought to you by the publisher. The publisher offers you the possibility to remove the paywall just in front of your single publication, while all other publications in the journal remain behind the paywall. This is called hybrid open access. And what does the publisher want to remove the paywall in front of your publication? It's even more money. Yeah, I do not recommend this. Isn't there anything, anything you can do about this publication without paying even more money to the publisher? I mean it's your publication. It's your work that you've done. Can't you just take it from the journal website and put it on the internet? This is called a secondary publication, and there are places for this. They are called archive, institutional repositories, or even the commercial website research gate. Can't you just upload your manuscript there and make it available via so-called green open access? The answer to this question is it depends. Because what happened when you decided to publish behind a paywall is that you signed a so-called copyright transfer agreement, and it is what it literally says. You signed away the copyright of your work to the publisher. Yeah. So if you want to republish your manuscript somewhere else, you have to check whether this is okay for the copyright owner that is the publisher. But hey, some good news here. Most publishers will allow at least some form of republication. But this is where it gets really, really tricky because publishers are having some very specific and very restrictive conditions on this. So you cannot just publish any version of your manuscript. Maybe you can only publish the preprint that is the version of your manuscript without all the changes that came in during peer review. So it's not the content that you finally published. And they have some very specific conditions on where you can publish. Maybe you can only do it on your personal website, but not on the one of your university. And then they have some very specific ideas on when you can republish. Because you cannot just do it right away. Most of the times you have to wait an embargo period of six months, 12 months, or even four years. And four years is kind of a long time to wait for a solution to climate change. And these conditions, they do not only vary by publisher, they vary by journal. So you really have to check for each signal of your publication what you are allowed to do and what not. And I totally get it. That's not easy. That's confusing. It's time consuming. And believe me, it's absolutely no fun at all. But if you are ever struggling with this as a scientist, I have a very simple and convenient advice for you. And it is to just ask your librarian. Because that's our business. And I'm absolutely sure that even in your library there's at least one librarian that has specialized on copyright. And can do this for you. But wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just do whatever the hell you want to do with your publication? If you could just keep the copyright right away? Yes, it would be. And it's possible. So maybe the next time you publish a solution to a global challenge, publish it gold open access. This means that you will publish in a so called open access journal. These journals do not have any paywall at all. And all publications in there are published under creative commons license. So you will keep the copyright of your work. How do these journals work? Well, let's get back to closed access. What open access journals obviously do is that they remove the paywall. Which means that libraries don't have to pay money to the publisher to grant their scientists access. And what also happens is that you are no longer asked to pay color charges, but you have to pay an article processing charge or your laboratory. But since libraries are saving a lot of money by not paying for access to these journals, most German libraries, for example, will cover these costs for you. But it can be even better. Because there are a lot of open access journals out there that do not even charge an article processing charge. This is called platinum open access. And these journals do not ask for money from anyone, neither for reading nor for publishing. But how do these journals even survive? Because they are not making any profit. Well, we know that scientists are already doing most of the work in this process. And some of them decided to just do the rest of the work too. Yes, there are scientists out there running their own academic journals. Several of them joined forces with their libraries to have a powerful and experienced infrastructure in the background. And together, scientists and librarians are providing this non-for-profit service for science in the hands of scientists without any commercial interests. So this is already an example of what we can achieve if we are no longer only focusing on you, the single scientist, and your single publication, but if we look at what we can achieve if we work together and join our forces. And there are a lot of more examples out there for this. I listed a few over here. And for the rest of the talk, I'd like to focus on one of them, mainly because it's a German project and it got some recent attention. And this is Project Deal. Project Deal is commissioned by the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and is driven by scientists and librarians together. And what they want to achieve is a major step forward to open access with our three already known major academic publishers. And Project Deal wants to achieve this by implementing so-called nationwide consortium agreements. But what is a nationwide consortium agreement? And what can it do about open access? These agreements consist of two components. They are so-called publish and read deals. And the first component is the read component and it means that all participating institutions, universities will have access to all journal publications of the publisher when there is a deal. And the publish component means that all publications with a corresponding author from one of these participating institutions and universities will be published open access with this publisher. And both of these components are covered with one single and one reasonable fee. So for example, if your university would be part of such a deal with Elsevier you would have access to all Elsevier publications and all your publications would be published open access with Elsevier. This would mean that there would be up to 60,500 publications published every year open access under such a deal. And this is what Broadjack Deal wants to achieve. So these are the goals. But how is Broadjack Deal progressing? There are currently ongoing negotiations with Waile and Springer. So there are two parties, the publisher and Broadjack Deal sitting together at one table and having a major common understanding about the future of scientific publishing and about what the basic conditions of such a deal should be. And they are now discussing the details. The picture becomes quite different if we look at Elsevier. Because there seem to be right away a major disagreement about the basic conditions of of such a deal should have and on what a reasonable fee is. So after a long time years of negotiating and no real progress what happened is that Broadjack Deal, so scientists and librarians currently suspended the negotiations with Elsevier. And this is something new and it's definitely something big and I can tell you that the world is watching Broadjack Deal in Germany and this is where the power of joining forces really shows up. Because scientists and librarians are really emphasizing the need for such a deal to Elsevier. For example, scientists stop to offer their cost-free work to Elsevier. So they are no longer publishing with Elsevier or doing the peer review. If you are one of them or will be one of them after this talk please let your library know because we collect this information and make sure that Elsevier knows. And libraries, well they just cancelled their subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Yes, there are currently 200 German institutions without subscription access to Elsevier publications. And there will be even more next year. The Max Planck Society cancelled the contract to the end of this year. So these are a lot of scientists without access to Elsevier publications and it's a lot of saved money. And what happened after we got cut off from Elsevier publications six months ago? Well, the world of science didn't break down. Neither did the world of libraries. What happens is that scientists use alternative ways to get access and libraries support these alternative ways. I listed a few of the legal alternatives up here. But speaking of legal, some of you might now wonder or wonder through the entire talk why should we even care about subscriptions? Why should we pay for access to publishers or use alternative ways that are legal because Psyhub? Psyhub is basically the pirate bay of science. So you can get nearly any scientific publication there. And I'd like to forward the question on why we should pay for access if we have Psyhub directly to the publishers. But I think that they already know the answer because they do what industries do that face piracy. They took legal action and filed a lawsuit. They requested internet service providers to block Psyhub. But you know, don't mess with the internet. So dear publishers, let me put it this way. As long as you publishers hold on to paywalls, there will be piracy no matter what. And even worse, as long as you hold on to paywalls, there will be people, scientists, and librarians building alternative ways of scientific publishing without you. And the only way to stop this is to tear down the paywalls. And to you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist and all the other brilliant scientists in this room, please provide open access to your publications and support open access in any way that you like or that you can. And if you have any questions or concerns or any ideas, I can only encourage you to talk to your librarian because if we work together, if we join our forces, I think that we can finally unlock science. Thank you. Thanks for this amazing talk. Okay, everybody, you know the rules. If you have questions, please line up at the microphones. There's five of them, two there, two there, and one there in the corner. And if you are on the stream, just somehow ask the question. I'm not really aware how it works. And then we have someone here to read the questions out to be our human interface device. So please, microphone number one. Thank you for being here with your publishers and one major advantage over the scientists in the librarian here, which we did not address yet. And I want to ask you this question. The publishers, they have the brands we as scientists need. What I mean with that is a part of the quality assurance scientists did, we ranked the journals, we gave the impact factors and all the things. So the journal itself has a quality number. So for a young scientist, at least for me, it was very difficult to publish in a way that gives me the academic reputation I need without having access to the highly ranked journals of the closed source publishers. So is there a way we can get out of this stand-lock where we need to publish in these journals that we do not want to publish it? Yeah, we can talk about the impact factor. I love it. It's absolutely difficult because this is a self-enforcing system dealing with reputation. And if you think about it, if all scientists would immediately stop to publish with Alibir or the reputable journal and would move to another one that has no impact factor at all, after five or six years, this journal would have the high impact factor. But it's true that it's not that easy to just do it because you want to come forward with your career and it's a problem. But there's no real solution so far for this. So Brojack Deal is kind of addressing this idea by remaining with the major publishers. So this would be the easiest way out for this problem. Do we have an internet question? Yes? Yes. Can someone turn on the mic for the signal, Angel, please? What influence do the university have on the publishing process of their scientists? Can a university force their scientists to publish in a certain way or with a specific publisher? No, it's not that easy. There are policies, that state that you have to publish open access, but most of them do not define how you can do it. So you can do green or gold or hybrid, whatever you want, but they just state that you have to publish open access. Microphone number two, please. Hello. The internet has given everybody access to their own streaming platform. How do we avoid the public sharing of science to be tainted with all the bad science out there? With what? Bad science, there's a lot of... If you look at the newspapers, there's a lot of fake news. You should absolutely not remove the peer review process at the moment out of this scientific publishing process. So there should be some quality control, but there are some ideas to change the way peer review is done. But if you remove it there, then you have a problem at the moment. Mic number three, please. Hello. Do you have any statistics about how many open access publications there are compared to, I would say, classical Elsevier and stuff, or if their movement is advancing, if it's getting traction? Yeah, I stated the source of the 72% closed access publications, and there's a detailed analysis on how many articles are closed, hybrid, gold, green. I published the slides already, I will tweet them later. And the signal angel, please. What do you think about the Plan S initiative? Plan S, for those who don't know, it's a coalition of research funders in Europe, not the Deutsche Forschung, but all others, and they want to have open access immediately. They say when you work for us, if you're funded by us, you have to publish open access, and I think that this is a good approach. Can we get mic two, please? Hi. Could the journals printed by various universities solve that issue, which was raised here, about having a well-known brand behind the publications? For example, if you have a university which is very famous, it can release their own journal and solve that brand issue. If they release their own journal, I hope it's open access. But I think that it is, in general, an illusion to think that the name of the journal or the publisher has anything to do with the quality of a single paper in there. So this linked idea, I think it's kind of broken. Mic number one, please. It's restricted to a specific community, and so it's not for all publications, and it's still about prints and post prints, so not the final publisher version, but I think that they didn't because it's a powerful tool and it's a powerful community. Yeah. Could we get the internet again, please? Somebody at the internet has heard that scientists sued the editors asking for a share of the profit of their work. Did you get any feedback? How this ended? No, but that sounds interesting. No, sorry. Number four, please. Historically, journals provide free aspects for scientists. They provided logistics, like delivery of papers to whoever wanted to read them. They provided editors, which is not peer-reviewed, but the editors which are hired by journals, and they provide reputational engines. Obviously, putting PDF online is a solid problem, so logistics is not longer a problem for the fully decentralized alternative to the journals. Can we decentralize other two? I actually didn't hear the question properly. I'm sorry. Try again. So journals are providing free services. They provide delivery. Free services? Like number three. They provide delivery to whoever wants to read them. They provide reputation engine, and they provide editors, like not peer-reviewers, but real editors on sale. We can't decentralize with internet. We can't decentralize delivery. Can we decentralize editors? Can we decentralize reputations? Is there going to be a question at any point? Yeah, I got the question, I think. But did you know that editors are also scientists? So they are already scientists doing this work. So I really question the high value that publishers provide to science. I think there is some value, but it's not that high as we all thought. Number two, please. Okay. Does Project DEAL include any incentives for the scientists to publish gold open access instead of hybrid? So if you publish with a publisher that has a deal with your university, that it will be open access, no matter what. Does it include incentives to publish in journals that are only open access, instead of mixed open and closed access publications? No, not so far. Okay, just a quick interjection. Please remember when you leave, please leave after the talk, but when you leave, please use the front exit and not the entrance in the back. Thank you. Could we get another internet question? Okay, the internet is out of questions. That's excellent. Number one, please. To close access journals, maybe it would be a good idea to rethink the format of the publishing. I don't want to advertise it, but I think it's a good example. There's distil.pub, which is a journal for artificial intelligence at the moment mostly, and they publish it in HTML because it's the current year, and you have interactive stuff, so you can play around with it. Yeah, I think it would be better if we wouldn't have only PDFs published from the journal articles. There should be other formats, definitely. Machine readable. Micra number two, please, for the last question. I'm also, like you said, your opinion is that at least questionable what publishers provide to science and to society that's worth something or worth what we think. I also think this way, and if I have a manuscript now that I don't want to publish in this way in the system, do you have any recommendation, maybe any project or something where I could maybe say here's my manuscript and then especially have a solution for the peer review process that is now facilitated by the publisher, but the publisher doesn't do anything. It's just facilitating. So how could I solve this and go around the publisher in this way? So I'm not sure whether I get the question because if you have open access journals, there's also peer review. Yes, there are publishers, but if you have platinum open access, this peer review process is organized with the library or scientists that are running the journal. So this is already organized, the peer review process for other sorts of journals that do not have a paywall. Do these platinum open access journals cover all fields of science? There are a lot out of there. I can tell you how you can find them. There is a directory of open access journals where you can filter through any subjects and filter for how much do they cost. And now please thank our speaker again. Thank you.