 All right, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everyone to the Future Trends Forum. I'm very glad to see you all here today. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, I'm the host, I'm your chief cather for the next hour, and we're gonna be diving into a fantastically important topic today with a terrific guest. Now what I'd like to do is introduce this week's topic and this week's guest. We're looking at open access in scholarly publication. It's kind of the nerdier sibling to open education resources. It refers to giving open access to the scholarly output of higher education, such as monographs and in particular, scholarly journal articles. And this is a field that's been trucking along for, well, I would estimate 20 years now, and the amount of content and the number of projects in open access has been growing. The ecosystem has been getting very complex and the issues are very dynamic and changing rapidly. There's a lot going on. I can think of no better guide to that field than my friend Glenn Hampson. Glenn is the founder and organizer of both the Science Communication Institute and the Open Scholarship Initiative. OSI is an unusual creature because what it does is it brings together open access advocates of all kinds from around the world and also brings together proprietary publishers from around the world to put them together at the same table. It's pretty unusual. And the conversations are fascinating. It's really important work. I'm really glad that we can have its chief organizer here with us. And without any further ado, let me bring Glenn up on stage. Hello, sir. Ryan, good to see you. Good to see you. Welcome, welcome. Can you just quickly tell everybody where you're coming from today? Coming from a dark, apparently, back bedroom in my house in Seattle. So it's one of the only areas of the country that aren't hit by tornadoes or floods or fires right now. So happy to be here. Please enjoy, enjoy while you can. Right, right, right. And of course, it's dark because it's Seattle, we understand. Glenn, we have a habit here on the forum when we ask people to introduce themselves, we do it in a specific way. We ask you what you're gonna be working on for the next year. What are the big projects? What are the big ideas that are top of mind and likely take up most of your schedule? You mean other than the shed that I'm building in my backyard? Let's not talk about that yet. Okay. Well, so OSI has been, as you know, you've been there since the very beginning, Ryan. We've been going on strong since late 2014. And we divided our work into three main parts. The first part was just to figure out where we are to get our footings to do the research and figure out what the landscape looks like. The second part, which was from 2019 to last year, was to sort of lay the groundwork for our policy direction. What exactly, knowing what we know, what exactly would we try to accomplish? And then this final stage that we've embarked on is to put the rubber to the road and try to create that policy. So that's where we're at now. We're working with UNESCO on trying to create something out of all of this work that you and the other OSIRs have done and see where it takes us. So over the next couple of years, we'll engage with UNESCO and with other partners in this space to try to do exactly that. So. Well, excellent. Big dive into the policy world. Thank you very much for giving us that. The friends, the way the forum works is this is driven by your questions, your comments and your thoughts. And so I'm gonna ask Glenn a really quick question right now, just to kick things off a bit. Then it's all up to you. So again, just to click that raised hand button, if you wanna join us on stage, especially if like myself, you think that Glenn bears a terrifying resemblance to George Clooney. You just wanna be there. Or again, to click the question mark button and to type in your questions and thoughts. Just first quick question I wanna ask you, Glenn, is, I know it's early for this, but what do you see is the impact of COVID and the pandemic on open access? Did that encourage more publishers to produce more open stuff? Did that give open content a greater audience already? Or is it too soon to tell? I wanna let your audience know that Brian didn't breathe me on any of these questions ahead of time. So. Thank you for, that's a lot of questions. You said it was gonna be a simple one, anyway. So this is a simple one, not any simple one. It's one of those, is it where you stand, depends on where you sit or the other way around. It's, I think it's generated a lot of interest in the potential of open. The reality has been somewhat less than stellar, I think. The hope, of course, is that open, that making things open will enable greater collaboration between researchers, not only in COVID, but climate change and vaccines of all kinds and whatever. But what happens in reality is that there are, science has, and the very premise of science is founded on collaboration and cooperation. You can't have science without. So what we saw during the pandemic was sort of a mini-flood of what are called preprints, not journal articles but articles that went into non-pure reviewed locations. We saw a mini-flood of researchers who were collaborating at the margins to share genetic code data and so forth to try to accelerate research. What we didn't see was a giant breaking of the paywalls where researchers from pharma companies shared their IP openly and freely with the rest of the world in a kumbaya moment to let's all work on this together. So I think a lot has been made of the fact that there was a lot of interest and a lot of sharing via preprints. But as the WHO chief said, it also created a bit of an infodemic where we got a lot of bad information coming out there, a lot of unvetted information where the press was picking up on a lot of this research that whether it was in hydroxychloroquine or whatever that really didn't deserve to get that kind of attention. So we're still trying to figure it out as the short answer to your question, Brian. Hopefully we can figure out what worked and what didn't and what we can build on and what we can hopefully not build on. No, that's a really good answer. Thank you, thank you. And you know, when I was asking people to ask questions, like trying to encourage it, four questions just popped up. Oh, sorry. Let me bring these on stage because you folks are awesome. So to begin with, let me get Alex. Let's say, oops, excuse me. This is, click the right button for this. Hang on one second, friends. My browser just had a hiccup. There we go. Oh, this is from Alex and Curly, who asks, how might we leverage open access to support open education? Good question. That's a huge question. I, you know, so I wish I had a graphic. I should have brought a poster with me, Brian, that describes open access. Really fundamentally, there is no description, an accurate one size fits all description for what open access is. So let me start my answer with that. For some people, it just means the ability to read for free an article. For others, it means that that article has to be properly licensed. So it can be shared, reused, redistributed at will. For others, still it means those conditions plus this material has to be immediately available. So it can't be embargoed for a year or whatever until the author is willing to let it go. So depending on how you define open access, in OSI, the participants that came up with a very clever description of it, it open really has five main traits and they call them darts, how discoverable it is, how accessible it is, how reusable, transparent and sustainable it is. So along those five dimensions, you see a wide variety of different open outcomes. You see, you may be familiar with the different color coding and open. There's gold and green and bronze and hybrids and all kinds of different very confusing descriptions of what various kinds of open are. Those all fall along this dart spectrum. So to your question, how can we use open access to further open education? Really, there's many different ways of making information open. It doesn't all have to be the same kind of open and it's just any and all efforts are welcome to whether it's you're changing the licensing, whether you're making things more discoverable, whether you're just manually making things, connecting the dots and bringing researchers together to share information, whether you're creating networks of researchers who can share proprietary data, not with the public, but just with each other. There's a thousand different ways to do this, but open is at the center of the conversation really. And again, I wish I had graphics behind me to go into some of this in more detail, but to answer your question, how can we use it? We can use it in a thousand different ways and we should use it. The devil is in the details there. I wish I could describe it more clearly. And we're gonna bring up some devils, I think in a little while. Thank you. That's a terrific answer. And Alexandra, that was a great question. In the chat and also on the screen, I throw out a link to Glenn's really excellent slideshow introducing this data play and open access. I think you guys have seen that before, but that gives you a lot and some great graphics for there. But that's a great example. And friends, if you're new to the forum, that's how easy it is to get a question on the screen. Now, speaking of on the screen, let me show you a video question. This is our longtime friend from the Houston area, Tom Hames, and he won't ask a question about open systems of knowledge. Let me let him play it to you because he's better at asking this than I am. Hello, Tom. Hi. I don't know if I'm better at asking things than you are, but we'll see. So my question is what kind of systemic barriers do you see as the primary limiter on open systems of knowledge? I mean, I put in the chat sort of tongue in cheek is legitimacy based on scarcity as well. And that's, all of those things feeding together, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated doing research only to run into a roadblock of a paywall that my institution doesn't want to pay for. And so, you know, and that's completely antithetical to my goal of finding out the information and synthesizing it with other information, which I'm sure you've heard a hundred times. So I was just wondering though, what do you see as the primary systemic challenges? Why do people still feel like they have to lock things down in the first place? Brian, these are, thank you for inviting me to this forum. He says very regretfully. No, no, you see, what has been so wonderful about OSI is that we get questions like this occasionally and it just sends me back to my rabbit hole for a month just researching that. What the heck? I don't know. And then there's a lot of research behind finding out a proper answer to those sorts of questions. So in my experience anyway, reading and listening to the OSI folks and looking at the surveys that have been done in this field and so forth, probably the primary barrier to adoption is in the research field anyway, are the researchers themselves. There is a tremendous reluctance on the part of researchers to participate for a number of reasons. One is it's not altogether clear all the time what it is they need to do to participate. Publishing the paper and open access can involve speaking to your library and then signing away certain things and it's not a push button enterprise for most researchers. Another important factor in all this is that the researchers are concerned about misuse of their information, whether that's having their discoveries scooped because they published openly and then somebody else came along and discovered something with their data before they were ready to let go of it or because they just don't altogether trust what's gonna happen to their information in the wild, not necessarily scooped, but misused, misinterpreted and so forth. In survey after survey and Taylor and Francis has done several of these over the years and a number of other surveys have taken place, researchers first and foremost want their research to make a difference. They want it to have an impact. They want it to be read by the right people. They want it to have an impact on their career and what kind of, what career stage they're at will oftentimes drive what choices that publishing choices they'll make. So early career researchers will opt for the, trying to go for the high impact journals and then later stage researchers will be a little bit more flexible about where to publish and so forth. So it's really researcher centric and that's one of the reasons that OSI has sort of come to the conclusion that any solutions to the future of open and trying to wring out all the benefits that open has to offer need to be researcher centric. We need to work first with the researchers, figure out what researchers want and need what their concerns are, what their perspectives are. And build systems that accommodate those and they vary from one field to another. Physics and astronomy have been wide open for long before an open access came along. Chemistry has been very locked down conversely, funded largely by industry so. So there are other tangents to that but I think that the locus that you're looking for is we need to get researchers on board, we need to find out how to work with them more effectively and from there, build solutions that work for them. And I think, this is what I've written into the most recent papers, I think that once researchers themselves are convinced and they see the benefits of being open, then you don't have to have a marketing campaign behind it, then it's obvious, then you're doing it out of self interest. Is open access still seen as somehow less legitimate in close? It is, yeah. And again, it varies from field to field, it varies from career stage. Younger researchers tend to think less that way than the older researchers. Researchers in some institutions think don't think that way necessarily. Institutions like Harvard that have been in the center of open access for a long time and their institutions have gotten strongly behind it, tend not to feel as much that way. But it does very much, there's a prevalent sense that open is not as prestigious. And that's another thing that we've been working on in OSI is that you can't just attack open as this separate entity. There's all kinds of tendrils connected to it like impact factors and peer review and embargoes and so forth. And you have to look at this big picture because even if you do say tomorrow that all researchers are henceforth required to publish an open access, they're all gonna try to figure out what the highest impact open access journal is because impact is what's driving their tenure considerations and so forth. So we need to look at that big picture, but yeah. Right, reach is impact too though. I'll leave it there. Yeah, no, I agree, I agree. But again, we need more data on that because even though open access theoretically gets you more reach, you're getting more readership with the subscription journals that are high impact. So we need some, and again, that goes back to the need for more data on this to figure out exactly what researchers want and need and how to get there from here. We need more poor scholars who can't afford to pay for the journals. That'll hold the problem. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, there's problems everywhere you slice it, no easy answers. Right, but there is definitely a good question. Tom, thank you very much. Thank you. And Glenn, this is the Future Transform community. People ask terrific questions. And thankfully we have great guests like you who have terrific answers. I don't. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question. You see how easy it is. Now let me, so if you'd like to join us on stage, please feel free. But in the meantime, we have more questions coming up. So let me just put one up here. This is from our friend, Matthew Plurin, who says, what will happen to publishers if academics start publishing on their own for real? We know parasites need a host to survive after all, smiley face. You want me to put that back up again or did you get that? No, I got the parasites part, yeah. It's, you know, more power to them. I mean, there's plenty of spinoff publishers, plenty of small publishers are trying to make a difference like that and plenty of university presses that are trying to make a difference like that. The reality is publishing is a marketplace. It always has been. And I think the question before us is, will it always be? And the efforts that the open community are trying to make, some of those efforts are explicitly directed toward taking down the big publishers of the world. Elsevier, who needs them? And others are, again, going back to the needs of the researchers, many researchers feel that the publishing, big publishers are serving their needs just fine, thank you, please don't destroy them. There isn't this uniform sense that publishers are parasites, so, but there is a sense out there, especially among the activist community that their profit margins need to be trimmed and so forth. It's a fascinating conversation, but the answer, as with anything in life, is more complicated than what you might suspect. Well, it's a great question, Mathieu, and I appreciate the punch in your phrasing, and it is a very deep question. And Glenn, I just want to make sure everyone heard that note that publishing has been a marketplace for about a century now. Well, unless you consider, since the Royal Society, basically. No, that was kind of like nonprofit circulation, but I'm thinking- But from that point, little newsletters started to spin off and so forth. There's always been a middleman between science and the public. That's true. It has not been an enterprise generally where the scientists reach directly to the public. Right, that's true. The middleman is a good putting it. Thank you for the question, Mathieu. We have more coming in, a whole flood of these, so let me just give you a chance to take a whack at these, and here's one about UNESCO. Any OSI involvement in the first draft of the UNESCO recommendation on open science? Yes, yes, we were there. We consulted on it. We sat on a panel. I sat on a panel for the North America, Europe feedback panel or whatever, sounding board panel. And then OSI drafted a comment on the first draft, which was largely critical, actually. I think UNESCO's heart is in the right place on that, but it's, and this is just speaking for me and not for OSI, but it's a bit too idealistic and it needed to be a bit more realistic, but I wish them well in their endeavors. Consideration has been tabled for now. We don't know exactly why. It was going to be presented in November to the General Assembly for approval, but we received a note last week that that won't be happening right now. So I don't know what the politics is there. We're all sort of curious. Sort of off the record, UNESCO was not a one mind about this. Open Science Policy was produced by the Natural Sciences Division of UNESCO. The sector that we've been working with since 2014 is the Communication and Information sector, and they are the ones who have been studying open access since the early days and have a wealth of information. But I'm told that they collaborated on this and so forth, but the reality is that there, I think there are different opinions within UNESCO about exactly what open should look like. So we're continuing to work with the CI sector on what we call the open solutions approach to the future, which is more than just open science, but it's an approach that combines open access, open data, open science, open government, OER, open solutions. The idea being that all of these efforts have in common similar goals. Their methodology is different, their focus points are different, but the goals are the same. So if we can unite together on common goals, then we can, from that effort, start developing best practices and techniques that combine all these things and come up with something that's more applicable in real world situations than just open access or open data. And the reason I say real world is that, any researcher in a setting isn't concerned just about whether their journal article is properly licensed. They're also concerned about whether their data is properly formatted and available to other researchers, whether they're getting the media exposure that they need and so forth and whether they have any, whether that research can then make a policy impact, whether that research can be used in educational materials. It's a web of technique and understanding. And so we're hoping that we can sort of push that vision forward as opposed to just, here's how you do open access, here's how you do open data, here's how you do open science. Open solutions. Yes, right. Well, thank you for the question. And I appreciate the breakdown. I don't envy you. The elaborate political enterprise you have to do to work with, it's a lot of work. We have a question coming in from, by the way, the chat box is on fire with people offering links and ideas. What are you doing about academia.edu and a few other things. So those of you in the chat box, if you'd like to lift anything out from there and put it as a question, please do join us, we'd be glad to. This is a question about open to watching. Franny Gade, I believe, asks, can you reflect on open to watching? I've been reading some discourse about open access being a hijacked by scholarly publishing conglomerates. Yeah, I haven't heard that term before. That's interesting. The open spaces is, how would you describe it, Ryan? It's a, it can be very combative, I guess. Yes. There's some very hard and opinions on both sides or on all sides. In generally, I know these communities don't speak with each other, which is one of the reasons why we've developed OSI and why I think it's been so valuable. There are people who think that publishers don't belong in this conversation. In fact, we've heard from some funders who said, you know, we like what you're doing, but we're not gonna give you any money because you have publishers sitting at the table. It's important to listen to everybody and to learn from everybody. As far as publishers hijacking the process, I mean, they're, no, I mean, ultimately they're the ones publishing the materials and so the community has asked the publishers to develop solutions. And these solutions, I mean, the ideal was at one point, well, if we have a bunch of open access publishers come along, then they will supplant Elsevier and Taylor and Francis and so forth because they're doing it for cheaper and they're doing it, you know, more efficiently and everybody wants open access and so who needs Elsevier at that point? But the reality is it hasn't worked that way. Not everybody wants open access and it takes a lot of money to publish stuff. And the researchers, as I mentioned, they still wanna publish in the highest impact journals so they're not gonna necessarily publish with the, hey, I just started this journal yesterday project. So the publishers have responded to the need of the community for open access and their request of the community. Unfortunately, predictably, I think it's, they've continued to make money doing so. We've known for the last five years at least that the cost of APCs, article processing charges, author processing charges, however you define it has increased way faster than inflation. Can I pause you for a second? Yeah, please, go ahead. No, not a comment, but so an APC, an author processing charge. This is the charge that an author or authors have to pay in order for their article to be published through some open frameworks. Yeah, it's what plan S is all about and maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that too, but generally you had, in the past, you had paywalls, right? Subscription charges that prevented the world from accessing materials. And then along came efforts like OA 2020, the global flip plan and others, which said, you know what, why don't we transform these subscription journals into a format where the authors pay to publish in them and then the outputs can be free and open to the rest of the world. Which sounded great and people did the math and they said, there's enough money in the world for that to happen, so let's do it. Not very many journals flipped, not very many people, again, were interested in that, but it pushed forward anyway. And then plan S came along with, I think 13, well, at least 11 national funders in Europe and then the Gates Foundation, welcome. And started to mandate that and said that by, roughly by now, that journals would need to be open or else they wouldn't be, the researchers wouldn't be funded. So it's sort of the mandate to end all mandates. And publishers started responding to that by transforming journals, coming into these transformative agreements, which is, again, is another aside there, but so I've lost track of your original, where were we, Brian, originally? The original question was about open to watching. So the publishers then have responded to this by transforming to APCs, but because these APCs have increased faster than the rate of inflation, they're astronomical now. You may have heard the cost to publish an article in Nature Now is somewhere around $13,000 or whatever. It used to be just a couple of years ago, the average APC charge was about $2,500 and that would be for PLOS. And there were other journals that could offer an APC charge of $200 at the lower end journals. But now if APCs start to become the de facto way of publishing, and we also know from other research that researchers aren't priced, they're not connected to this price. They're not generally outpaying it out of their research budgets. The libraries are paying it or their grant agencies are paying it. So there's no cost controls. They're not comparison shopping for the best price. So these APC prices have started to go up and the publishers have said, well, you know, that worked out well. We're providing APCs and open access and we're making more money than we were before, which wasn't the original intent of all this. So are publishers price washing? Yeah, I mean, they're making money from it, but it's what the open community wanted. The outcome is different than the experiment. Thank you for wending your way through the elements of that. No, don't apologize. I meant very sincerely. Franny Gaidi, thank you again for your really, really good question. And you can see that we have even more people who are interested in this in different ways. There's some back and forth about what this means in the chat and some more questions coming up. And we don't have enough acronyms. So I want to bring in one more. And this is from the excellent, excellent Janet Zlatnick who asks, what is the impact if Andy of institutions signing into Dora or similar declarations that challenge how research is evaluated? So I think I think you'd probably have to tell people what Dora is just to get us going. Yeah, the declaration of research assessment. It's a San Francisco declaration of research. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the A part. But the intent there of Dora and there are other similar. There's the Leiden Manifesto and there are some other things that people have signed. It's a statement of belief in research transparency, making data open, making data interoperable and transparent and accessible. And there is no impact. It's other than raising awareness of the need to do this and creating a sort of a sense of solidarity that there's communities that support this. But there aren't any teeth to Dora. It's not like, I do actually believe that, I mean, a number of funding agencies have subscribed to this obviously. But there's no checklist after that that says, do you comply with Dora? And it's 11, whatever, you know. So other similar acronyms, there's FAIR, which I think probably has received a little bit more traction and emphasis, especially on the data community, that's gofair.com. It's the making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. But yeah, that's, has that had any impact? Again, no, but it has raised awareness. It's an important mechanism for the community to be able to sort of say that we're behind this, but it doesn't actually result in things being more open or more transparent. That comes from within science itself. And researchers. And researchers, yeah. Thank you, I just found that people have been throwing things in the chat, including links, but you gave us a really, really solid answer to that great question. Janet, thank you. Thank you. We have more work to do, it sounds like. We had a question that came in from the library community, from someone who can't make it here today. And they wanted to ask a simple provocative question. Isn't green open access good enough? I wonder when that passed you. You may have to tell people, green away is when institutions or individuals, self-host or self-archive the content rather than going through intermediary. Well, why isn't that enough? Or is it? You need like a 12-hour program to go through some of this stuff. It's deep. So green is what the US uses. It's the, the US has a public access program, which was negotiated by a couple of OSIRs. And just back in 2008, I think, between publishers and NIH and so on. But green is, yeah, it could be archiving in an institutional repository. It could be archiving in PubMed Central. It could be putting it on, you know, your own blog. It basically, it's, yeah, it's just out there. And it could be copyrighted. It could be CCBY, it could be whatever. It's just the common denominator is it's just accessible. It's free to read. You don't have to pay for it. But it can be embargoed. It covers all kinds of stuff. So most open, and I said early on that there is no single definition for open. Most open is green. Only somewhere 25%, actually less than that, probably 13%. I could put a link to send a link to you, Brian, for some actual figures on this, but less of it is gold. There's more hybrid than gold. But it goes kind of green, hybrid gold. And gold is the, what you hear from Plan S. That's the gold standard of open. Or actually platinum is the gold standard. But gold is where it's immediate, it's CCBY licensed. And it's archived in a proper location that's sustainable and so on. Diamond is where the author doesn't have to pay anything for it. But the funder is paying for it. So it's, so is green good enough? I mean, no, I mean, it's not good enough for some people. It's good enough for, it's been good enough for PubBand Central, but it's not where a lot of people want the future to go, right? The point is that open exists on a spectrum. And there are many different kinds of outcomes. And I think in OSI, we've sort of believed that we need to embrace that spectrum, support all different efforts toward open and not just say that it has to be this or it doesn't count because there's different needs and different perspectives on it and so forth. So anyway, short answer is green good enough. Depends, probably not. Thank you, thank you. It's a great question. In the chat, Ryan, who I'm gonna bring another one of his questions that he observes, the problem with green is that you cannot often find it if it's not discoverable. So that's, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's not necessarily. It's the problem with green is that it doesn't have a set definition. We don't know what green is. I mean, it's really, everything is green if it's readable for free. But we do need to have better indexing of information. And Brian, as you know, one of my... I have to throw this in before time runs out, but one of the things I pushed for a long time has been sort of an all scholarship repository, a central location where we can warehouse all information and then from there, sort of create a global effort to coalesce data that makes, you know, that fits together to create new standards for data deposits from there to allow everybody to access this central repository so it's findable, it's usable format, it's got the proper provenance and it's sustainable and journals can journal, all journals become overlay journals where they go in and they see what's getting read the most and what's getting the most traction. And from there, they publish that information or they fine tune it or and so on. But yeah, I've read that in science fiction before. Yes, it's still, but for now we have, we actually have many different silos, right? We have the European science cloud, we have different clouds that don't speak to each other except their metadata. So that's not working either. Thank you, thank you. That's a good direction to take this in. Ryan has a question that he asked, I wanna bring this up, which is, could you speak to the models of OA including read and publish, for example, and the viability of APCs for authors, in particular those in early career or at less well funded institutions? I think you started talking about this a bit, but if you can build on that a little. Yeah, so read and publish agreements, there's actually different, they're part of the transformative agreement universe that some universities are now engaging in the University of California recently entered into a transformative agreement with Elsevier. They're also known as publish and read agreements. Kind of the same thing, but not really. And there's offsetting agreements, but all of these agreements that general focus is to try to make journals more affordable to universities and to try to increase the amount of open access publishing that authors at those universities are allowed to do. So in the University of California's recent agreement with Elsevier, for example, instead of the university paying each time an author wants to publish in an Elsevier journal, they pay a set fee and then they get access to the universe of Elsevier journals except for I think the sell of the Lancet, but they get one price access to all Elsevier journals and in return they get to publish for free in those journals and those journals get published in open access format. So there's offsetting costs. It gives universities more predictability with regard to their budgets. So they're not worried about a constant increase of it led to a cereals crisis of not so long ago. And it also pushes forward the ability of those universities to publish more open and in theory be able to share their research more easily with the rest of the world. Downsides, not all universities are in a position to do that. If you're the University of California system, that's great, you have market power. Elsevier is not likely to show up to an Archie Valley College and do the same sort of agreement with them. So there is a fear that there's some cost shifting that's going to occur in this setup where publishers are losing money with or they're not making as much money with the University of California system. So guess who's gonna pay those additional costs? The universities that are less able to pay. And as far as APCs go, there's also an equity, big equity concern there. It's easy for somebody at Harvard on a good grant to publish in nature because school can pay for it or their funders can pick up the tab. But generally, scholars in Africa are just crying bloody murder about this right now. It's the APC charge is three times that their annual salary and our school doesn't have the resources to cover this. So in the past, we had paywalls that were limiting access and we were working to get around those. And now we have what they're calling playwalls where if you don't have enough money, you can't even publish your science. And you're forced to turn to fly by night journals, in some case outright predatory journals who aren't really journals, but they're just, give me your money and we'll put your article up and we'll peer review it. And who knows how long that will stay online. So there's concern amongst many in this field that this whole APC direction is not the right way to go. And that these read and publish, publish and read agreements are helpful in the short term, but in the long term, they may be sort of calcifying our reliance on this APC model which may make the access situation and the equity situation worse in the developing world and not better. Are we likely to see any nationalization of Starley publishing just to any company? Thank you for that question. Yeah, China is gonna do exactly that. China is not enamored with, and China as you know is the world's biggest publisher right now of science journal articles. They passed the US last year. They don't think they're being treated fairly by the West and they're going to start their own series of journals with their focus on impact. And so on. And they're going to require their academics to publish a certain amount in those homegrown journals. So we see that India announced a plan last year, I believe that's not aligned with Europe's plan but instead they wanna have a national subscription plan. And instead of flipping to APCs and whatever, they'll just pay one fee and get a bundle, subscription bundle, that's their approach. It hasn't been finalized yet but that's what they've been talking about. In the US there's been rumblings that maybe and I'm also tired of getting squeezed in this vice of publishing versus open access wars. They're just gonna start their own brand of journals. So to be determined, it's very fascinating really. The question comes down to, and it's a rich question which everybody here has a different perspective on but what is publishing? What role does it play? And every country, every discipline really has its own perspective on that. So. Yeah. Longer though, because we're almost out of time I'm gonna take an opportunity to ask a really basic question which is what are the odds that we see a flip to majority of scholarship in open access by say 2025? Well, it's already happening. Most, over 50% of all journal articles now being published are in an open format. Uh-huh. Yeah. So that's big but it again depends on how you define open. They're not being published in a gold format which is no embargo, CCBY license and so on but they're published in some sort of an open format. A hybrid format which is open but it's sitting on the publisher's website which means you have to register for whatever or it's coming off of embargo and it's sitting on the public central site so you can get to over 50% of all materials today that are newly published but the historical record is around 72% of all materials are dark still and the remainder are accessible in some format. So there's a lot of work to be done undarking those materials but also figuring out a way to do more with open rather than just seeing open as a goal as a terminal goal, let's make something open. You know, great. Why? What are we gonna do with it then? Instead of seeing it as this goal into itself we can as a community get together and figure out why we went open what we're going to do with that information once we make it open. And my hope is that maybe we can coalesce around something like climate change for example or specific subsets of the to do tasks in climate change and work to make things open in that particular venue the data, the research, the educational materials the policy materials, government materials and just do open, right? Don't say it has to be like this or don't say it's in this category or in that bucket or whatever but just collaborate and make things as open as possible in this very discreet field and build a snowball. And you can show the rest of the research community at that point, look at what we did here. This really works, look what we've accomplished with it look at the practices that have spun out of this but more importantly look what we've done we've solved pressing a real world needs with this collaboration and these ideas and that can grow and spread and create what I would call an open renaissance we can enter an age where open becomes the de facto way of doing business it's not because it's an activist position it's not because it's some university said that we had to do this through a mandate it's because it makes sense and because we're achieving things with it and we're solving pressing problems with it. So that's where I hope we end up in five years Brian not still arguing over what color of open is best or who's in charge of open but our researcher centric focus that is solving real world problems with our determination. What a vision and open renaissance and maybe doing this around climate change. I hate to say this Glenn, but we're out of time. You've been so generous with us you have given us such so much insight so much background, so much detailed analysis I'm really grateful. What's the best way for people to keep up with your work? Is it through the OSI site? Go to OSIglobal.org There's the open solutions papers published there. I would love it if this audience can take a look at it and just email me directly if you have any ideas. Again, we're working directly with UNESCO on this right now, that's the vision that we're hoping to roll out. The open renaissance approach is central to this. I would love to get some feedback from your audience on that. Well, great. Thank you again. This has been terrific and good luck. Keep up the great work with OSI and we'll circle back and try and bring you back maybe in a year or two to see how things are going. Okay, yeah. Well, meantime, take care, have a good afternoon and good luck with the shed. Thank you. Thank you everyone. But don't go everybody, let me just let you know what's happening over the next few weeks and let me just echo our guests, thanks to you for fantastic questions. I really, really appreciate them. I mean, I think our guest was quite right to be in all of the depth and power of your questions. Looking ahead a bit, we have sessions coming up on STEM and equity, rethinking learning, rethinking the university, eco-media literacy. If you wanna see more, just go to forum that future of education, that US. If you'd like to keep talking about all of these issues, everything from research one universities, APCs, different colors, in the chat, we just got the most gothic answer, which was the color of bone. Just please tweet at us, use the hashtag FTTE. You can tweet at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events and we write about this on my blog too, so we'd be glad to hear from you. If you'd like to dive back into the past, including our first ever meeting with the OA 2020 leader, just go to tinyoral.com slash FTF archive and you can find them there. In the meantime, we are in September, which means that a lot of people are heading into a really unsettled and unnormative semester. I hope all of you take care to stay safe. In some countries like the US, Delta is raging like mad. I'm really glad to see all of you. I hope you all stay healthy and secure and we'll see you next time online. Take care, bye-bye.