 Good afternoon. I'm Leanne George, coordinator of the spec survey program at the Association of Research Libraries and I'd like to thank you for joining us for this spec survey webcast. Today we'll hear about the results of the survey on funding article processing charges and these results have been published in spec kit 353 and they are freely available on the ARL digital publications website. But before I begin the presentation I have just a few announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down on background noise so if you are part of a group today feel free to speak among yourselves. You won't disturb anyone. And we do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen and at the end of the presentation we'll answer as many questions as possible. I will read the questions allowed before the presenters answer them so that everyone can hear the questions. Last, this webcast is being recorded and we'll send all registrants the slides and the link to the recording in the next week. Now, let me introduce our presenters. Our presenters are on the faculty at Virginia Tech Libraries. Gail McMillan is Director of Scholarly Communication. Leslie O'Brien is Director of Collections and Technical Services. And Philip Young is Scholarly Communication Librarian. Use this hashtag and you see on the lower right of your screen ARL spec kit 353 to continue the conversation with us on Twitter. Now, let me turn the presentation over to Gail. Thanks, Leanne. When we began our research into open access publishing policies we decided to look at the approach that requires authors to pay article processing charges or APCs for publishing their peer-reviewed articles in open access journals. The hope was that this relatively new business model for publishing would counter the constantly increasing journal subscriptions. Now APCs don't feel like such a new model and they are making scholarly literature more accessible and more affordable impacting researchers and readers, libraries and publishers, academia and the public alike. The first topic I'll cover in this introduction to the article, the Funding APCs spec kit are the advantages to libraries. So funding APCs directly supports our university community members and expands the role of libraries. Of course, it also develops lots of goodwill towards the library. Funding APCs provides benefits to readers and to authors, that is, to all of the library's immediate community of users. These funds remove barriers and give readers access to scholarly publications. Authors gain a degree of academic freedom in choosing where to publish with less worry about the cost to read or the cost to publish. Journals funded by APCs provide a larger degree of transparency in their business operations than do subscription-based journals. Our goals for the Funding Article Processing Charges Survey were to document what ARL libraries are doing in this area. We thought it would be helpful to identify strategies that address APCs and gather policies and procedures. The spec kit would inform those in the development stage and it would help assess existing APC models. Another goal was to reveal common or best administrative practices and enhance the body of resources available on the topic of funding APCs. So we hope that you'll find the end notes in our accompanying bibliography helpful. And now for some data. 77 or 62 percent of the 124 ARL members participated in the survey that was available in July of this year. 30 percent fund APCs that is 23 ARL libraries. 81 of those reporting or answering this question started funding their APCs within the last six years. Six are funding APCs, 14 institutions previously funded APCs, and 34 or 44 percent do not have an APC fund. So we found it interesting that the majority of ARL members or 62 percent responding to the survey have discontinued funding APCs or do not plan to fund them. I'm about to turn the webinar over to my colleagues who will cover the funding and administration of APCs. Highlight some of the policies such as who are eligible authors and what are the funding limits and journal criteria to receive funding. Share some information about procedures and outreach. And lastly we'll put APCs in the context of academic libraries worldwide and then we'll respond to your questions and of course we welcome your contents. So now Leslie will discuss some of the survey findings. Thank you Gail. Our survey included 42 questions, 28 of which were about funding administration policies and procedures. In our analysis we included answers from those libraries that have discontinued their APC fund. Our survey did not inquire about APCs paid directly by authors or departments from other sources of funding. So the responses in our survey only pertain to funding happening within the library. 97 percent of respondents said that the library contributed to or administered the allocation of APC funds within the context of the library's involvement. Other partners for the APC fund included the provost, chancellor or president, research office or an academic college or department. Administration for the fund often resides with a unit or individual with scholarly communications duties or with the collections unit or is shared among these two. The median fund amount for fiscal year 17 dropped from the previous year despite at least one library reporting a significant increase in their fiscal year 17 funding. You can see that the maximum fund jumped from $263,000 to $415,000. From the survey comments we learned that most libraries struggle to determine the appropriate funding level. People reported that the funding level was arbitrary or was allocated according to the previous year's fund. The funding amounts for individual article charges varies greatly. Again all the figures here are in US dollars. The lowest reported APC was $74 and the highest was $5,200. It's important to note that the library didn't necessarily pay this total amount for the highest APC. 91% of the respondents place a cap on the APC amount that they will fund. So even though $5,200 is the highest reported cost for article, funding caps resulted in the author having to make up the difference after the library's share was paid. Using the amounts that libraries gave us we calculated the mean article cost ranging from $276 to about $2,500. 100% of the respondents told us that articles in the science disciplines were the most frequently funded. From the comments we got it appears that medicine, biology, and life sciences were the disciplines most often receiving funding. We asked for information about policies and procedures. Most of the library's responding supplied us with links to their policies and procedures on their websites and these are included in the spec kit. Questions we asked had to do with funding caps, eligible authors, and their criteria for which journals could be funded. As we mentioned previously, 91% of libraries capped the amount paid per article and this cap ranged from $1,000 to $3,000. In addition, 85% of the respondents placed a cap on either the annual dollar amount or the number of articles for individual authors that they will fund every year. This annual dollar cap on authors ranged from $1,000 to $6,000. In the comments we heard that some libraries restrict authors to one or two article awards per year regardless of the amount. We asked libraries which authors on their campus are eligible to receive APC funds. Just over 60% of the respondents indicated that funds are available to anyone affiliated with the university. So about 40% only funds certain categories of authors and most frequently excluded from this funding are undergraduate students. 84% of the respondents do not fund APCs for hybrid journals which we'll talk a little bit more about next. We received many comments on the question of APCs for hybrid journals. The most frequent reason mentioned for not funding these was the issue of double dipping. This refers to the institution paying APCs in addition to the full subscription price of the journal. One library commented that by not funding hybrid journals they want to incentivize publishing in and support for fully OA journals. But in an effort to attract more authors from non-STEM disciplines to its APC fund, one library decided to pay APCs to hybrid journals in the arts and humanities. More than two-thirds of the respondents reported denying paying APCs for journals not listed in a registry like DOAJ. Further, libraries expect the publishers that they fund to adhere to a code of conduct such as required for membership in OASPA. A continuing theme we see in the comments is that libraries are constantly tweaking their funding policies in order to stretch their allocations to benefit more authors. So we asked why libraries discontinued their APC fund or chose not to start one in the first place. As Gail mentioned earlier, 62% of the libraries responding were in this camp. The overwhelming reason for not having a fund was lack of money and or administrative support. Almost 60% of the libraries began their APC fund with a pilot project of some type, usually with financial support from outside the library. Our survey results indicate that in many cases as the project moves out of the pilot phase, the seed money from those outside sources goes away. Without this additional funding, many libraries cannot continue to fund APCs from their existing budgets. We saw the word unsustainable in many of the comments that we got. Besides lack of money, other common reasons for not supporting APCs is a lack of confidence in the funding model and uncertainty about the library's role in this process. In some cases, the library sees APC funding as being outside its mission, especially as authors often have grant funding or departmental support to cover APCs. Some libraries may want to wait for a university-wide APC policy before committing funds to new initiatives. And finally, skepticism about how APCs advanced the goal of open access was pervasive in the comments. For outreach and recognition of what's happening with their APC fund, our respondents relied on a variety of methods to make their communities aware. This slide lists the most common ways. A couple of libraries mentioned that they work with campus faculty councils to make the faculty more aware of issues about open access publishing. We received numerous comments throughout the survey responses having to do with demand for APC funds exceeding the resources. In fact, several libraries stated that the fund was a victim of its own success and had to be discontinued because funding was exhausted. There was only one library who said that they abandoned the APC fund due to lack of author interest. But the fact that most libraries don't formally promote the results of their APC fund surprised us. 21 out of 33 respondents said that they have no formal recognition program for funded articles. The libraries who said they do recognize authors do this mainly on their website or by collecting the articles in their institutional repositories. There may be opportunities here for libraries to work with the funded authors to show the impact of their work and to demonstrate if and how they have benefited from the library's role in directly supporting their research. We were interested in knowing what types of external initiatives libraries are directly supporting beyond funding APC. We were specifically looking for things like membership, subsidies, and open educational resources. Here are some of the initiatives that libraries listed. Of the 58 responding libraries over half support memberships, journal subsidies, and open access monograph publishing. A few libraries mentioned Hathi Trust in this category, which we had not considered, but it is type of open access initiative. A smaller number, 21 libraries, indicates that they are supporting open educational resources. Now Philip will talk about some of the broader issues around APC. Thank you, Leslie. One interesting aspect of the survey is that library funds are not increasing at the same rate that the APC model is increasing in journals. Hybrid OA in particular is expanded to include more than 8,000 journals. Over half of all OA articles are published using the APC model. This suggests the degree of demand among authors is not being met by libraries. And evidence suggests that libraries with APC funds are supporting only a fraction of the APC spending on their campuses. Due to the distributed nature of APC funding, campus-wide data that might support internal decisions is lacking. In addition, the lack of open APC data from libraries means that research is largely dependent on open data from European libraries. Harvard University recently became the first North American contributor to the open APC project, and Virginia Tech plans to contribute to that project soon. Because the APC model is relatively new and still developing, there are numerous research opportunities available that would help libraries develop programs and policies. Here are some of our suggestions from the executive summary. One of the biggest questions is whether there are common strategies to incorporate APC funding into library budgets. Our survey showed that over half of the funds received some external support. But lacking this, how can libraries create budget flexibility for supporting OA? Is there a role for consortial support for APCs while avoiding non-transparent bundling? Since there seems to be relatively little cost-sharing today, how can costs be shared to reduce the strain on library APC funds? And finally, how can the APC model accommodate researchers who cannot afford to publish, such as those who are unaffiliated with an institution and or from the developing world? Currently, most OA journals that charge APCs have wavered policies, but how inclusive are those policies and how could they be implemented without raising per article APC costs? Our survey indicated that there is a deep divide among ARL libraries on supporting APCs, and APCs continue to be a hotly debated topic. We wanted to highlight some of those debates for those who may have missed them. Last month, Kansas University hosted a forum called Envisioning a World Beyond APCs and BPCs, and two hours of video from that forum are available online. The OA 2020 project seeks to flip scholarly publishing to APCs, and there have been lively exchanges on listservs and blogs on the pros and cons of the APC model. Also, last month there was a forum at the Charleston Conference on APCs that was livestreamed, and videos should be available soon. There are also two reports that may be of interest, one from the UK on APCs and subscriptions, and the University of California's Pay It Forward report, which evaluates the costs involved in shifting from subscriptions to an APC model. The Pay It Forward report is of particular interest for ARL libraries because it estimates that a flip from subscriptions to APCs may increase costs for research-intensive universities if library funds are the only source of support. If grant or other funding is included, then a flip to APCs could result in similar or lower costs than subscriptions. This is one reason why further investigation into cost sharing might be a useful research area. Thank you, Phillip, and Leslie and Gail. And participants, we do welcome your questions, so please join the conversation by typing your questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. Again, I'll read the questions aloud, and then the presenters will answer them. Patricia asks, did you look at the size of the fund relative to the number of faculty so that you could get a mean dollar per faculty? This is Gail. I'll take that question. There were lots of things you would have liked to have had time to do and asked. We did ask how the funding level was determined, and nobody suggested that it was based on the number of faculty, and I assume that you'd look, if you were going to do this, you would look at the tenure-track faculty, not all of the faculty at the university, but if you're also funding graduate students, undergraduates, staff, I think it would be really difficult to determine your funding based on who's publishing, how much they're publishing, but that would be an excellent research question. And we do know how people responded, so we could do that independently, but it was not a question in our survey. Yeah, it wasn't a question. Can you say some more about the libraries that discontinued their funds? What were their reasons? Well, the overwhelming reason was because they ran out of funding. They thought of it as a pilot project, and when the pilot ran out, some libraries, if they didn't get additional funding to their base allocations, then they discontinued it. That was the major reason why. Did any of the questions or comments from respondents indicate that they'd converted library acquisition funds to APC funds? No, I don't believe so. There is an interesting article and webinar from MIT libraries where they have merged their scholarly communications and collections departments and are looking at their budget in that way that might result in moving money from collections or licensed collections to APCs, but I don't believe that we saw that in our survey. You indicate there's some fairly large amounts or paid for APCs, and those are still unsustainable for libraries or publishers? I don't know that we found that APCs are unsustainable, but some of the survey responses were that actually the fund was too popular, and they weren't able to fund all of the requests that they received. Can you tell us anything more about Harvard's open APC project? Sure. Actually, it's not Harvard's project, but they are the first North American library to contribute to it. It's actually a project out of Germany. And the website is intact-project.org. You can also search open APC. They also have extensive documentation on GitHub, so if you go to GitHub and search open APC, you should find their site. So what they're doing is they're aggregating the open APC data from many European libraries, German libraries, Austria, UK, and that's serving as a source of research. So, for example, two of the articles that came out on APCs earlier this year in PeerJay were both based on research from that database. And so this is something that we're working on as well. The presentation of the data in spreadsheets is actually fairly simple. They only require the name of the institution, the year, the amount spent on the APC, converted to Euros, and the DOI. So they're using an innovative process that sends the DOI to cross-reference and returns all the article metadata. So we are working on this. We hadn't been recording the DOIs of the articles that we had funded, so I'm doing that now and we hope to send that data to the open APC project so it can be included in that database. There's a question about APCs slash BPCs. Does that B stand for books? Yes. Stephanie comments that many labs produce numerous articles with multiple authors, often rearranging the author name so that each can be a primary author. How would libraries possibly incorporate this model into funding APCs equitably across campus? I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that the way the articles are listed helps determine the funding that they receive? How are funds allocated when they're multiple authors? Well, what we do at Virginia Tech is prorated among the Virginia Tech authors. If there are five authors and three of them are at Virginia Tech and two are at another university, then those three authors would garner the funds for the article. So we allocate up to $1,500 an article. So each of those three authors from Virginia Tech would in essence have $500 debit from their account. And we split it equally. There are some institutions that responded to the survey that treated as if just the lead author is the one that's getting funded. A few institutions don't fund articles that have non-host university co-authors. There isn't just one model out there for funding APC authors. Yeah, this is question 26 in the survey on page 27 of the report. And it looks like about two-thirds of respondents did not do any prorating. And some only do it among the authors at their institution. So that's the way we do it here too. Do you have any data on what the growth rate in open access publishing is and where that growth is occurring? It's been pretty tremendous from what I can remember. I mentioned vast expansion in hybrid, but even ignoring hybrid, the expansion of OA articles published on the APC model has been pretty tremendous. I think some data on that is in the selected resources. If you look at the Solomon and Bjork article that was published this year in peer J, they referenced some articles there on that. But I believe it roughly doubled between 2010 and 2012. And I don't know if there's more recent data on that. And I think that Walt Crawford also did some research on that. His was the research that indicated that a little over half of all OA articles are now APC based. Claudia asked, for the APC fund, is this a, I'm sorry, let me start again. Was the APC fund popularity a direct result of funding for hybrid journal APCs and or non-compliance with requirements that authors not request support when they can build this cost into their grant proposals? I'm not sure. On the first part of that we have, we did see some evidence and now I'm not remembering whether it came from the survey or from the literature, but I know that there have been some funds that in order to control costs have dropped hybrid funding from their APC policies. In terms of not building into their grant proposals, I know that's a cope stipulation as well as not funding hybrid. And I think in most funds, I know there's research done here in the Southeastern Research Libraries that said most funds were funds of last resort. In other words, if you have grant funding, then we expect you to use that grant funding rather than use library fund. Kind of a related question from Europe. You didn't mention offsetting deals or membership deals in relation to APC funds. Do they exist in the US as well? Not on a large scale that I'm aware of them. In Europe, I know that they're been negotiated at the country level. And so, and of course here in the USA, we don't have an equivalent agency to negotiate those funds, but certainly that's something that we look at. We're among the minority who fund hybrid away here at Virginia Tech, and certainly that's a requirement that we have for funding hybrid, is that the publisher have some sort of offsetting policy. Did you gather any data on the subject domains that were getting most of the funding? In a very broad context, and it was mainly in the sciences, 100% of the people responding to this question said it was the sciences. Some of those were biology, faculty of health, faculty of medicine, the sciences dominate funding requests. So it's pretty much of a landslide for the sciences. That just is for most of the funding. We didn't drill down any deeper to find out in more detail. Of course we do fund articles in the social sciences and humanities as well, but this was a very general question. We really didn't want to get into defining what a department is or what a discipline is when we set up for survey. We have a comment from one participant that authors should build publication charges into their grants like they do for direct and indirect costs. And it seems like NIH and SF, other funding agencies, should push for this kind of funding to become part of the regular grant process, particularly since they demand that the funded research should be made publicly available within a certain time frame. Any reactions? I think we all strongly agree. When I've talked about our subvention fund to the faculty at Virginia Tech, one of the comments that I usually get is, well, they'd rather use the money to fund a graduate student or they've already spent the funding on lab equipment. So even when the agencies like NIH and NSF and now the USDA allow grant funds to be used for article processing charges, they're still looking for other monies to do it if they can. And isn't there a problem of lag time for the grant is spent out before, and the article's not ready to publish until after the grant funding has expired? Yeah, that's our procedures, our guidelines require that they not have other sources of funding. So when I get a request for APC charges, I look at the Office of Sponsored Programs database to see if they have current grants from agencies that would allow them to use their funds. And oftentimes I'm finding that, well, they had funds that were spent a year or two ago. And so the article is just now coming out about that research, which is fine. I think that's a legitimate request for funding. But then when we deposit the article in the repository or it gets published, it often will say it was supported both by the grant which supported the research and the library that supported the publication. So that's kind of a mixed message there. There's a question, do you have a sense of publisher responses either to your survey findings or to any of the other reports that you mentioned? Not that we know of, but one thing that was mentioned in our executive summary in terms of looking at how many institutional APC funds are out there is that many journal sites are now listing these. So that might be, if your library does have an APC fund, you might want to check the websites of the larger publishers like PLAWS and Springer Nature because to make sure that you're listed there and that the link works, because authors I think are probably more likely to check there than they are with their own institution. So journals are saying, you know, be sure to check our list to see if you have funding through your institution. So we mentioned in the report that I think on the Springer Nature site said there are about 70 institutions in North America that currently have APC funds associated with them, but in terms of reactions to this report from publishers we're not aware of any. Lucy asked if you tracked which journals the articles were published in and were those journals verifiably scholarly? We didn't ask that in the survey, but that's definitely something we look at when we get a request for funding. And most libraries respond that one of the requirements for funding is that the journal has to be peer reviewed. We had a question in the funding criteria about do your guidelines require that journals be listed in the DOAJ? Publishers are members of OASPA and then peer reviewed and 23 libraries or 70% responded that the journals had to be peer reviewed in order to receive funding for APCs. And some libraries used other criteria to do the review, but we didn't really get much consistency there in that response. There's a comment here that there is evidence that those managing OAP funds do not check that authors can in fact build those costs into their grant proposals and that this is an educational piece we can use when talking to APC requesters and potentially you could put our own funds out of business if we do that. And also that it's uncomfortable saying no to authors when we know they can build us into their grants, but if we don't follow our own requirements and we're aren't being fair to those authors who truly do not have that kind of support. Yeah, that's true. It's a difficult issue, but there are, I think there are both plenty of authors that do not have funding for their research from federal agencies. And like we mentioned before, often the articles don't get written until after that funding has been, the funding period has ended. It's not like the NSF will let you hold on to $1,500 for a couple of years while you publish the article. So it is kind of the authors, I think in a sense, do get caught between a rock and a hard place. We do have time for a few more questions. Please do enter them in the chat box. Do you think everyone's fairly familiar with the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity? Is that well known? Yeah, the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity is at OAcompact.org. And there are numerous signatories to that. We mentioned some of the stipulations for being a signatory to that Compact earlier, such as not funding hybrid articles, not funding researchers who can fund the APC through a grant. We are, as I mentioned earlier, among the minority who do allow for hybrid publishing. So that's one reason why Virginia Tech is not a signatory to the Compact. But it really is, I think, the only place where some of the policies are standardized. You know, we see when we're looking at the policies of the institutions that have APC funds, they're really all over the place. There's no sort of standardization of policies. And this Compact is maybe the only place I can think of where some of the policy guidelines are suggested or required for signatories to the Compact. Also, from Europe, you stated that the majority of the libraries that responded to the survey don't have APC funds at the moment. What would you suggest to them? Well, I think what many libraries are doing is using some of their collection funds in order to fund this. And I think it doesn't have to be a very large fund. Like I mentioned at the beginning, it gives the library a lot of really good press. Faculty and graduate students are thankful for any kind of support they can get for having their articles published. So it's really a high-profile kind of thing that the library can do that benefits the mission of the institution in many cases, and that is to disseminate the new knowledge that's being created here. Yeah, and I think this goes back to sort of the market conditions as well. As I mentioned, APC publishing and open access is really taking off. And so the question is whether libraries want to be a part of that and be relevant in that arena or not. And as Gail mentioned, I think certainly in the slides earlier, some of the advantages of APCs for open access, there's certainly disadvantages, but certainly make yourself more relevant in the institution. You create a strong connection to the faculty. And then you can have these recognition events. We've drawn in recipients to our open access week events. So there are a lot of different advantages that can be had. And I thought one of the interesting things in the selected resources is the research done at Southern Illinois University where they surveyed their faculty and found that faculty were actually discovering their repository through the APC fund. Because just as we do, we suggest that faculty deposit the work. Well, a lot of times that's how they discover that there is a repository. And subsequently, they deposit other articles that weren't associated with the APC fund. So there are some advantages to having an APC fund, but certainly the big struggle now is figuring out how to create that fund when there's a growth in scholarly publishing every year of about 3%. More articles, more journals are being published. How do we create those funds and continue those four subscriptions at the same time? We have one last question here before we have to say goodbye. This was about waivers for charges. They say that some publishers are tightening up the process for requesting waivers. Do you have any indication from this survey or from your research that funds are asking authors to try and get waivers from publishers that still offer them? Or are they authors just not successful getting waivers? We really didn't look at waivers very much at all. I know there's a really good article by Stuart Lawson on waivers and OA journals, and I would refer people to that. I believe that was in the journal publications. But we didn't really inquire very much about waivers. I suspect that most researchers in the U.S. would not be able to get one because many times publishers rely on country categories from the United Nations or UNESCO to develop the list of countries that are eligible for these funds or for waivers. So we really didn't look at that. It's interesting though that some APC funds do require that of journals that authors want to publish in. So I believe Harvard and MIT have policies along those lines that the journals that they're approving have waiver policies. That's not a policy that we have, and we didn't ask it in this survey. Thank you, Phillip. And thank all of you for joining us today to discuss the results of the Funding Article Processing Charges Spec Survey. Again, you will receive slides and a link to the recording in the next week. Thank you.