 Thank you very much. I just have a couple of introductory slides. I really go very fast through them or slow down when I get further, but they're just meant to create in the context of what I'm talking about. So the important thing on this slide is actually what I'm going to say in the next half hour is about academic publications. So it's about articles, it's called the journals, and it's about monographs with scholarly publishers. And the importance of that is why we're only talking about academic publications. It changes what the authors want in this. I fully understand that when it's a musician talking, a photographer talking, a novelist about, they want to earn on the sales of their work in order to have an income. It's very different with academics. Academics earn a wage, so they're not supposed to earn money on what they publish. And it changes the system. Interior, this should mean that an academic publication can be a lot cheaper than a creative work, while actually it's the other way around. So somebody is making serious money of this. Why should we care about open access to academic publications? Basically, there are ethical reasons, there are academic reasons, and there are financial reasons. And really differs the discussion, really differs who you're talking to. Founders and governments will care about the ethical reasons. Academics obviously will mostly think about the academic reasons. And people like me working in libraries or working at administrations of universities and research institutes will think of the financial reasons to do open access. So one of the ethical reasons, the search of scholarly rehearsals should be available to the general public. I think we all agree on that. And it should be available to scholars all over the world. So it should not be able to make a difference whether you're a researcher at Harvard or at some African university. It's very unfair that the research at Harvard has access to a lot more academic publications than a researcher at an African university. Academic interest is clearly better for scholarship, it's better for the scholar. There's an increase, a proven increase in visibility and use, a positive effect on the mathematics. And actually even for academics who don't particularly care about all of that, they're going to be more and more forced to do so because otherwise they don't get any funding if they don't do open access for the publications. But then the financial reasons is obviously the cost for academic publishing. I have no way of... I could not check these figures but on the right there you see a picture of a presentation at the fall of 2017 that they're stating that one third of the total research project, the global research project, is spent on the dissemination of research results. And only one percent of the world population has access to that. If those figures are right then maybe only if they're a little bit off we have a very big problem. And the focus when we talk about the financial reasons the cost of academic publishing tends to be on subscription costs, the so-called serious crisis. Of course in the fields where the monographs are still very important too, those are probably because of the rise of subscriptions and rise there's no more money to buy any books. Just two slides to show this probably something some of you are familiar with. And then there was a presentation at the parliament to just indicate how much the expenditure on subscriptions for academic journals compares to the cost of living. Cost of living between 1986 and 2010 more or less doubled but the cost of academic journals has quadrupled in the same amount of time and it hasn't stopped in 2010. It goes on until now. And just to make clear that this is not only a problem in England and just the example of the library used to run, part of the library used to run is the blue line is the line of the budget that the Faculty of Arts gave to the library in order to buy books and journals. The red line is the cost of the subscriptions of the journals itself. And as you see 2010, 2011, 2012 it was a massive problem because so to speak you got 200,000 euros the first of January and the second of January you had to buy 200 or you had to pay 230,000 euros for the subscriptions especially for an arts faculty library where most people think it's all about the books the journals we don't really care about the journals that is a massive problem. But so how do we do it? And that's what I'm going to slow down and the rest of the presentation is basically three ways of achieving this. There's green open access, there's for profit gold open access and there's non-profit gold open access. Green open access as I will argue for me that's the old paradigm because it's a solution for some but not for all of the problems. So what this green open access is basically the auto him or herself deposits a version in the digital archive called an institutional repository. That is very rarely the only published version it's an alternative version next to the commercial and quite often the green open access version is inferior to the commercial you're only allowed to archive your pre-print so before pre-review or your post-print the pre-reviewed version but before the layout. And quite often there's an embargo meaning that for instance I can publish an article in January 2018 but my archive version is only allowed to become available to the public in January 2020. So for the adequaries to open access green open access provides a solution it's perfectly fine just to sometimes a little bit later some said a little bit less nicely looking but you have access to the research results for the general audience. Academic reasons to do open access. Green open access does not really provide a solution only plus a solution in certain fields. For instance I'm a humanities scholar I do not want people to have access to sort of a draft of what I publish I want people to have access to the finished product and and so in most fields it has not proved to be a challenge for the traditional publication model. And financial reasons for open access green open access does not provide a solution if you have to run a institutional repository that's going to cost money. You need the infrastructure, you need people to work on the repository so it costs more you're putting more money into the system. There were high hopes for this system. For the Stephen Harrod is a very known advocate for green open access he talked about the inevitable success of traditional green open access. He was dreaming of a world there was going to be no embargo green open access it's going to be universally mandated provided this will be a natural transition to fair gold open access what that means I will talk I will say in the last couple of slides and so basically he thought it's only going to be peer reviewed that the publishers still do we will have to pay for this but that's going to cost us a lot less money than our subscription costs. So it's a very clear criticism on green open access for instance by Michael Eason. He speaks about the inevitable failure of privacy to green open access. He says there's a fundamental logical flaw with this. Subscription publishers only give their blessing to green open access as long as they don't see it as a threat. The minute it starts becoming a threat for commercial publishing they're going to come down and the proof of that is that subscription publishers limit the auto self archiving much more than they used to do because it becomes much more of a problem for them. In any case whether you for against green open access it's very clear that the high hopes have not been fulfilled that it's no game-changing and that in most cases it's just an alternative next to the traditional publication. Then you have for profit the second way and my point is that the open access mandates from founders of governments risk making this the new paradigm and that it is extremely costly if it is not managed well. So what this for profit gold open access is the auto immediately publishes in open access. So the gold open access version is the final version there's absolutely no reason to distribute any inferior versions anymore and it typically works not always but it can work with APC's BPC's article processing charges, book processing charges which basically means that it's the author that pays for the production rather than the reader that pays after the fact. The reader who used to buy a book or used to buy a subscription now it's for free for the reader or can be for free for the reader but it's a person publishing that pays for the fact that something is produced and there's two ways of doing for profit gold open access. Gold hybrid is actually paying a fee the author pays a fee to make an article open access in a subscription based journal or to make a chapter open access in a commercial book and then there's gold double living because of course the publisher is twice passing at the at the time. He makes the author the producer pay and he makes the reader pay. It's very clear that a lot of studies have shown like governments have started to realize this this is not a working or viable way towards an open access work and so commercial publishers will say yeah but this is a transitional model. You cannot expect from us to one day after the other change our subscription based journals to open access journals based on APC's. You need to give us some time and in order to give us this time you need to fund the transitional model. Well I would definitely say don't believe everything they tell you and I will show in the next slide why. The other model is okay no gold hybrid is purely based on APC's and VPC's namely the author pays. So my point is that academics are driven to that by open access mandates at great cost and the prime example of this is what happened in the UK after the spectacularly bad Finch report those are not my words but the words of Gavioli Bria was there in the references. So there was a clear about this the Finch report it was worked out in 2012 in England that we said okay we need to have a changed policy we're going to go for open access or hybrid journals which need to be funded by APC's and the green open access is fine but only if the embargo period is less than six months in the stem disciplines less than 12 months in humanities arts and social sciences if not the government we or the research council of the UK will pay to have gold open access immediately sounds very good at first but of course what happened there's been reports with five years later there's more gold hybrid in the UK than anywhere else in the world 80 percent of the money put into the system goes to the gold hybrid it is not used to flip that's what the commercial publisher said we need this to be able to flip our model they're not doing it at all they're just very happy to be able to get paid both ways by the author and by the libraries of the individual users and it's very clear that publishers have adapted their policies to maximize the ability of getting more money for instance there was remember the Finch report said six months of embargo is fine if it's more we will be able to pay for this what do the big plays like else we already do they did not have embargo and they said okay now all of a sudden we introduce an embargo of seven months so you will have to pay in order to get no embargo so it's very clear they've simply managed the APC expenditure has in the two years that they had statistics for this by 555 percent so there's more than eight million pounds going per year going into the system more than it used to be and the largest number of payments are made to surprise price commercial publishers with Elsevier and Mali which are two traditional subscription based publishers taking 40 percent of the total APC spot and it's very bad for university libraries who just act as a middleman for transfer government funds to commercial publishers we do that in subscription model too but nowadays we spend we even transfer more money than we used to do and it comes at a lot bigger administration costs than we have before with the subscription model so any deal that hybrid that stimulates hybrid gold open access is I think no good and I think most people now realize that so maybe what we should do is just offset APC subscription costs so basically that is what you pay the institution pays of your searches affiliated to that institute pay for the publishing is then subtracted from what that institution pays in subscriptions those can be good but only if and those are big if it's transition if it's transformative if it does not come at as if it comes at the same cost a cheaper than a subscription deal if it does not come at the expense of disciplines where the big publishers currently have a very limited market share and if it does not come at the expense of non-profit gold open access initiatives and in order to get a deal like that it's extremely difficult to get a deal like that you can only get a deal like that if you enter negotiations with the big publishers completely prepared meaning you need to have an extensive and detailed analysis of fabrication and usage data and failure so having no deal with those publishers must be an option if you start a negotiation and say well look I at the end of the day I will need to make a deal with you you are lost don't start negotiations you need to be able to say I can walk out of the room without a deal and so remember offsetting deals are complex and even and difficult to manage don't believe me it's Danny Kingsley who said that who has a couple of years of experience having these deals and they hold the risk of strengthening the oligopoly in the fields where there already is one and threatens to introduce one where there's none what I mean by that is imagine that you have a deal with Elsevier which means that for researcher at your university is for free to publish with Elsevier but you don't have that deal with another smaller publisher which means that that person still would have to pay to publish with that other person what will the researcher do he will of course go to Elsevier because for him it's for free to go to Elsevier and he will still have to pay to go with another publisher who maybe is ethically much more better and it's extremely difficult to get a good deal like that so you only stand a chance if you let your best and brightest spend a lot of time on this and that is something that I really struggle with do we really want to have the best and brightest in the university like these to spend all of their time and energy on doing that maybe we should let them build on the alternatives rather than trying to make the best of a bad system and every victory risks being a short term victory imagine you have a fantastic deal with Elsevier in 2018 what will Elsevier say in 2020 when you enter negotiations again they will say look you had a fantastic deal in 2018 you will not be able to do the same again now you will have to start paying the same there's a big fear too in the library community if they they're now negotiating in Germany that if they manage to get a good deal in Germany what will Elsevier do okay let's then try to make up for what we lost in Germany by making a better deal with Belgium with the Netherlands with France with so it's very difficult to get a good deal with this the essence basically is do not believe that a for-profit market for academic publishing if it is funded by APC's VPC's would be any better on the financial side than a for-profit market funded by subscription costs and we have reason to like the open access publishers with an APC the average APC grew by about five percent a year over the last two years so it's exactly the same with our subscriptions so ethical reasons for open access yes for profit gold open access provides a solution possibly at a great cost academic reasons for open access yes for profit gold open access provides a solution but again possibly at a very great cost financial reasons for open access unregulated for-profit gold open access will not provide a solution and quite the opposite and so the conclusion so far I don't know probably people will say well that's why that's why my presentation was titled like that the traditional publication model despite the rising costs seems just better than non-regulated for-profit gold open access and you can add green open access but it needs to remain unthreatening unless you have a very strong international open access mandate for non-andbound green open access so for-profit gold open access is full gold open access if you're not careful and it's a terrible idea if it's not done right so no more that's what I I'm actually very happy that in Belgium it's not yet forced upon our researchers I don't believe in open access mandates if there's no embargo green open access and provisions and then there's extra funding for for-profit APC and BBC for luckily I don't have to start there stop there there is an alternative there is non-profit gold open access and my idea is my hope is that we can make this a new paradigm because it works cost-effective and basically you have three possibilities in this first one is the illegal just illegal distribution of scholarly applications a lot of you have heard of PsiHUB which is the first private website in the world to provide mass and public influence to tens of millions of research groups and it's willful copyright infringement and it just provides access to scholarly literature to over 90 percent sometimes and some of the disciplines over 90 percent of coverage there are examples of researchers at good universities which have access to a lot of journals a lot of monographs who still use PsiHUB because it's a lot easier to use and they have more coverage than the 70 percent private institution they have 90 percent in PsiHUB so they use just the illegal alternative if anything it's a sign that the subscription model is not working anymore things like this are so successful second option is completely legal but actually a lot more radical is just to abandon academic publishing as we know why do we still try to do this share publications work with journals work with books this is not 21st century scholarship anymore why don't we abandon this bad not working system at all and just think of some completely different why don't we all use ficture there instead of the public publishing the way we use to that we know it and actually there's a very interesting talk of Herbert von der Sommel who's just on youtube i think it was the same just shortly before christmas last year his ideas research reports which is contributed to center instead of documents and he can explain a lot that i can do but it's a very interesting idea but it basically means abandoning publishing as we know it not less radical but also legal is to go for fair gold open access which is basically the same as what i said for the gold open access author immediately publishing open access it is the final version no reason to distribute inferior versions but it works with cost effective apc's bpcs or there's a third party who pays for the cost of publishing the real cost of publishing and so just a set of strict conditions prevent the commercial exploitation of the publication of a search results basically means that title needs to be owned by the author editorial board about the learned society cc by license applies all articles with books need to be published in front of an access so clearly no consumer consumer costs no subscriptions no double dipping and at the publication cost publishing costs need to be low transparent in proportion to the value added by the publisher so basically it works like that on the left is the traditional model on the right affair open access model it just moves copyright and journal ownership no longer with the publishers but with the researchers and norby's duty editorial assistants the workflow of the help the storage no longer have subscription no longer pay subscription costs but basically pay either apc's are paid for the cost of the infrastructure and it just like a reducing publishers to basically service providers the idea behind this why would all pre-green gold open access be fools gold open access why would we wait for the commercial publishers who would of course be fools if i would work for a commercial publisher i would not do this i would of course not collaborate with this i would defend my system so why wait for them let's just do something else i may i see see a very strong role in this for university presses and even academic libraries academic libraries who have always been in charge of sort of bringing what happened in the research that happened all over the world to bring it on campus why should they not play a central role in doing the other way around collecting the research that is done on campus and bringing it to the world and why would it actually be cheaper that's a very valid question why would it be cheaper to produce a fair open access publication because you have exactly the same attention to quality control same efforts in doing peer review same efforts in having professional layout professional archiving professional distribution but the intention is not to make profit as much as possible but just to work us effectively and you can save money on subscription management digital rights management legal fees for licensing marketing you can get rid of all of that so ethical reasons for open access non-profit code access provides a solution academic reasons non-profit code access provides a solution financial reasons non-profit code access provides a solution and just to make clear that this is not just words we truly try to practice what we preach and at the University of Leuven officially until 2018 there was an investment in green open access so both through the infrastructure there was an institutional repository and staff working on the repository there was a very very very very moderate support for fair code access we just did the open library of humanities which is fifteen hundred fifty five dollars a year so that is nothing and there was no support officially no support for for profit code access in reality there was a yearly spent outside of the library system estimated between three hundred seventy five thousand euros and five hundred thousand euros which is on top of the collection budget of the library which is eight million and on top of other costs for academic publishing which we have no idea about how much we actually are spending these are just researchers using money of their research groups or of their departments to publish and we don't know about so what we decided to do starting in 2018 is trying to support fair code open access by not the system that use apc and bpc but that works without apc bpcs so we continue our support for open library of humanities we have expanded to also do language science press we do scope three for instance too and we have a fund for fair open access since march 2018 so it's very new which pays for bpcs for fair code open access monographs published by our university press which pays for apcs for articles of fair code open access journals regardless of the publishers the bpc is about six thousand five hundred representing the real cost of publishing and so the scientific value is guaranteed for both fields it was very important to the the support for open access with valuing the academic value so the assessment for open access supports completely separate from the pre-reviews assessment of the manuscript that is actually not only open to people affiliated with the university if you have a university affiliation with kyle liven you're supposed to pay one third out of your own means and two thirds you get funded if you have no affiliation with kyle liven you still can apply for support from the fund which is one third and two thirds you need to pay out of your own means apcs also needs to be based on view public publishing costs typically they should be less than a thousand europe's publication in full open access is of course a prerequisite copyright should remain with the author and again the scientific value needs to be guaranteed to you work with a combination of the director of open access journals with either rep of science or the vrb so that we also have the humanities and social sciences that unfortunately is only open for authors from the university from kyle liven and that was this so if there's any question don't hesitate to ask them now won't you just make thank you thank you that is a deep dive into open access any questions how do you review the work the the fact that um sometimes we get a stamp of like publishing my thing with journal and that has to be reviewed that has its value um well the thing that indeed we that was something that we thought about because of course we now have researchers at liven who say fantastic all of a sudden there's now support to me for me to publish uh in journals and we have to say yeah but only these kind of journals only or white list publishers um so it's it's not a solution for them it's it's to try and steer them to its fair open access it's not a solution for because but then we always have this discussion then to explain to them yeah but if we would do that we would end up in the rigid system uh if we just pay whatever just because it's a good uh be reviewed journal with with high impact factor then we will not pay five that we have to pay five thousand euros per APC we will not do that so it's only part of it just trying our way of trying to stimulate that side of the market it is not a complete solution for the problem of the cost of academic publishing and it's also I hope there's a lot more humanities people here than stamp people here it's also our way of making sure I actually strongly believe I've come to the conclusion that in the stamp markets where indeed the commercial publishers have basically all the important journals all the journals with high impact factors is going to be extremely difficult to change the market there I see a lot more and the only solution as I see it is abandon academic publishing as we know it uh while in the humanities where the these big commercial publishers do only have a limited share of the market aren't actually be let's drive them outside the market and it's mostly working for that it's more this by the way it goes for blocks too like yeah quite often they feel like a process a bit more than a thousand but it can be argued why it's a bit more than that we will fund uh past publications too uh but indeed with the commercial publishers with high impact factors it's not a solution the only solution there I don't think the solution lies within libraries socialize with committees judging over promotion committees and stuff like that they need to abandon the journal impact factor in their decision about receptors and you'll not be able to solve this from the larger question then you know that European Commission is looking at a platform of publishing platform so that projects funded by European Commission can publish their publication in such a platform now of course we know the it's not the same as publishing in a high end and high impact factor journal but what do you think about this I think it's if it's don't want if they then don't go for like a commercial partner to build up life and everything like that I think it's perfectly okay I I don't have exactly the same problem I think it will not offer the same prestige as some researchers are looking for and then there will be a limited update and we have to be really care that's I'm a sectionated for the open library of humanities we are actually extremely I'm probably a lot more than a commercial publishers aware of it needs to be quality that we allow because it's very hard to get rid of the like yeah this is only good for second-rate research and I do I like actually think I'm correct in saying this our preview is a lot more rigorous than what we see in any commercial journal because we really want to make sure that we do not get a bad reputation they go strong the first couple of years but I do think that Glosser is the example of being at the show so you had commercial journal leaving Elsevier going to the open library or going to a book at repress for the first two three years they need to take that hit of losing their imperfector but it's like yeah it takes them two three years to again become the and I made such a public display about it that it's very clear now we're dealing with people who publish for prestige it's bad for your prestige to publish with Lingard the old Elsevier journal it's good for your prestige to publish with a good Glosser one with a brick we need to do that invest in that a lot more and give basically journals with the big publishers a bad name that's the only way it's going to work I think too you need to abandon the high impact factors and we need to work on it needs to be editorial birds of researchers who are willing to leave that the quality of an academic journal does not depend on a publisher it depends on the editorial board of the editorial board completely leaves that's when the value of the journal leaves to and I think we should do more from lobbies to to make you show that researchers understand this again that's why I'm a little bit pessimistic about when we talk about medicine or stuff like that because the publishers indeed are then very good in and making sure that they try to research to themselves I've never earned any money writing a review of being in an at home court being in the humanities so for me it's not a problem to leave my commercial publishers I never earned extra money doing it anyway so I can as well do it in an electrical way final short question okay thank you very much