 Good morning or afternoon, wherever today's session may find you. My name is Sarah Ruby. I'm the director for strategic partnerships of plus and I'm delighted to kick off our CNI fall membership project brief on a call to action the imperative for libraries and publishers to better share and understand the APC waiver process. Hello, panelists are Romy Beard from Eiffel and Curtis Bundy from Iowa State and will be spending the next 20 minutes or so walking you through this process sharing a bit more information about challenges and hopefully inspiring everyone to some new actions in the coming year. With that I'll hand it over to you, Romy. Thanks Sarah. So, as Sarah said, my name is Romy Beard and the Eiffel licensing program manager. For those of you that aren't familiar with Eiffel, this is a not for profit organization that works with libraries and library consortia and developing and transition economy countries. And in my talk, I'll focus really on the painfulness of the waiver process. And I'll take you through some examples of what this involves authors. So what are the issues with current waiver programs. First of all, it's an issue of lack of communication and non automatic application of waivers and authors really need to know in advance if they if waivers are available so they can claim them. And it's not always clear on publishers websites, for example, there's no title list that can be searched often it's a blanket statement that applies, for example, to publishers, fully open access journals but then if you look at the details of those journals there's maybe one or two that are excluded because they're owned by societies. So it's always very clear. Often there's no information on the individual journal websites or and or no information during the submission process so the author needs to know what they need to do rather than if they're prompted to do something. Often the terms aren't fair for some countries where there's no funding opportunities and very low salaries. The grants just aren't good enough if you own $400 a month, you've been asked to pay 50% over $2,000 apc it's not really feasible. Then we've accounted issues where the terms change suddenly countries are moved from waiver to discount categories, which again isn't fair on researchers who might be preparing to submit to a journal, expect a waiver and then suddenly they're faced with a 50% discounted apc which is still way too expensive for them. And most of these programs exclude hybrid journals which is then pushing authors to publish in closed access in those specific journals which is not making it equitable for them to publish in open access. I think there should be equal opportunities to publish in any journals. So we think those journals should be included in the waiver programs. So take you through some examples. This is an example from Wiley's website which has a big heading that says automatic waivers and then if you look just a couple of lines underneath it states corresponding author needs to request a waiver, which I think is is wrong if it's automatic it should be automatically applied and they shouldn't request and have to request anything. Then here's an example from a study we've done at Eiffel. So Eiffel traditionally used to negotiate agreements with publishers for access to paywall content. But over the last couple of years we've also been doing open access agreements with publishers. So these include waivers, discounts, but also read and publish agreements including some free read and publish agreements with some of the smaller society publishers. And we've done an analysis this year where we looked at publishing output with four publishers, Cambridge, The Greatest Sage and Taylor and Francis, where we've had agreement in place and compared 2019 with 2020 publishing output for those eligible journals. And the positive thing is that we saw that the OAI could increase as a result of our agreements, which is great, but also there were a number of issues. Firstly, there were some articles that we find that were published in closed access in the hybrid journal despite being eligible for a discount. So this really exemplifies what I mentioned earlier that in some cases, discounts just aren't enough. So if I'm faced in a hybrid journal with a choice of do I pay 50% discount or do I not pay and it goes in closed access in many cases unfortunately authors that aren't able to pay will publish in closed access. And there's also examples of articles that were published in closed access in hybrid journals despite being eligible for full waiver. It's just really, really terrible but again this was an issue of automatic recognition not being available with this particular publisher. So the author had to email the editor at a journal they had to know about this and if they didn't obviously the article remained closed access. So we can see here that this process complicates it for authors and it acts as a hurdle to open access. We've also saw examples of articles that were published in closed access despite being eligible for open access to read and publish. Mostly I think that was again a lack of communication and not being offered as the default option in this case. I've also been part of the way 2020 working group on lower middle income countries and the aim of the group was to do a study looking at the potential for an impact of transformative agreements and lower middle income countries. And we focused on four countries Ghana, Kenya, Ukraine, Ukraine and Georgia, and on the publishing output with three publishers. And as part of the study we contacted authors to ask them about their APC spent. Did you get a waiver? Did you get a discount? How much did you pay? Who paid? And there's a variety of conclusions that we've drawn that other people have talked about. So I've just pulled out the conclusions here that relate specifically to the waiver programs. And most of them are the same as of what I've already mentioned also through the Eiffel study that published that discounts aren't good enough, that discounts changed, that policies changed and that also we find that authors make their decision to publish based on whether a waiver is available or not. So that's something else to bear in mind. And we've got a couple of author quotes here that talk about how painful a task it is to claim waivers because there's so much back and forth if it's really like making a request rather than just ticking a box. And also the last quote at the bottom there, the author that told us we didn't pay any charges, we got a waiver. If they didn't waive the charges, we would have published it elsewhere. And I think that's something publishers need to be aware of. So what can we do about this in terms of a call to action? For publishers, I'd really encourage them to, you know, have clear communication on waivers and discounts on their website, a general page, but also a download of a writer list of eligible journals to make it easier for authors. And ideally, this should be searchable by subject and also include information like impact factors, which are still very important for researchers in developing countries. Also include information on each journal's website. All publishers are working on the automatic recognition and that is happening more and more. So if they're not doing it, they really should. I would also say make it clear how long the terms you're offering for are valid for. So perhaps say this is an annual thing, it might change at the end of the year, just so it's really clear and there's no sudden changes. Suddenly researchers from Ghana expected to have a discount rather than get a full waiver. And then another important point is, instead of just following groups of already like allocated country groups, perhaps do your own research to find out what is realistic if there is funding available or not in certain countries. And by all means include hybrid journals. So it comes to library and consortia and I know Curtis will talk more about this. If you're having discussions with publishers about the equity of their waiver programs, please get them to act on these recommendations. And include that in your discussions to leverage it. That's everything for me and I'll hand over back to you Sarah. Thanks can you guys see my screen okay and hear me okay. Yep. Thank you Romeo that was such a good introduction to the similar challenges that we're seeing on our side at plus as a publisher. So just a brief reminder if you're less familiar about class. We've been doing native away gold open access since the early 2000s everything we publish is open access CCBY. We've been seven titles for a long time but recently launched five this year so a much bigger portfolio now than we've had in the past, and everything that we publish is really predicated on best practice, both around open access but also open science open research. Every title as well is funded both by individual APCs that authors or institutions can pay, as well as models that don't involve any APCs at all, and waiver mechanisms to support authors. If they don't have funding for APCs that said waivers on the publisher side are just as challenging certainly from process perspective, as they seem to be for authors, they're incredibly resource intensive to manage. I'm quite subjective I mean we we have standards around how we you know determine if needs have been evidenced to justify a waiver, but obviously a person is making that choice and to some extent. There's an arbitrary element to it over the long term it's not sustainable the demand always outpaces what we can support. It's difficult to track and manage communications with authors it's difficult to get them to respond so a lot of energy and resources spent around just the wrangling of information. And fundamentally they don't just address the systemic issue right there's a reason authors can't pay APCs, and this is just kind of a bandaid. And I think when plus started we overestimated the ability of a waiver program to address the equity issue around access to funds to publish. And so now we're really recognizing that fundamentally waivers aren't equitable so just to make sure we're clear on what we mean by equity here this is the typical image that's used to explain the difference between a quality versus equity right we tend to argue that the specific process the communications process should be equal, but fundamentally quality is not enough when there are systemic things that make it tough for the shortest person on the box to ever see over the fence. So if you wanted to use the metaphor that the baseball game or the game that they're watching is kind of any aspect of the creation of knowledge, whether it's accessibility dissemination data whatever. So I think of the fence is any barrier to participation. Generally speaking there's a community of folks for whom the fence is not an issue they're invested in it they they've never had problems with it. It works for them. And then there's just sort of everyone else and what waivers really speak to and a lot of cases are this is the cases that are popping up here on the screen whether it's your geographic location your, your research field your phase of your all of that is we're trying to address with waivers but fundamentally the problem right is systemic. So until we address that question something like a waiver programs just never going to be enough and that's what we're trying to figure out a clause. So just to give you a sense of how our Jewish it is from the author side, the author experience tends to be limited to some extent by the submission process. In our case we need to know this information at submission so there's quite a lengthy section on any of our pages around how you can get support for an APC so as you can see already a lot of text that authors have to read. On top of that, they have to decide which waiver program they want to participate in fee assistance, or our global participation initiative. So we have to follow all of these steps. If they choose the global participation initiative it's relatively easy. If they choose the root of publication funding assistance, there are a lot more steps that we ask them to to make there's a lot more we ask them to read. We ask them many, many times you know are you sure you have no other way to pay for funding, because this is essentially us paying for their paper, if we choose to cover their fees for them and in most cases, we can't cover the entire fee we do some combination of reduced fees to spread the money as much as we can which again is frustrating for everyone because if you some cases, it doesn't matter if the fee is $2,000 or $200. If there's no money there's no money in other cases a discount is is good but it's, it's, it's not enough. So we make the author do all of that and then on our side. We're just dealing with the challenges of engaging with authors to get the information we need it's a means tested program in the case of our publication funding assistance program. We need to see the evidence. So that process is hard to make wholly positive when you're constantly constantly chasing the author for for information or questions you have about their application. The internal systems we have are not yet super well connected. So, you know, an author may be applying for a waiver when they're already eligible through an institutional agreement. So we're actually giving a waiver when an author was already covered through an agreement that doesn't happen a lot but from time to time so there's a lot of to Romy's point, automation that could bring real could dramatically improve this experience that we we haven't effectively we're working to build now but isn't in place. And then of course you have a lot of folks who have no issue with the APC when they apply but by the time their paper is accepted that their funding is gone. And so you have a difficult situation where post acceptance a waiver is needed. And in many cases because the author has no mechanism to get that funding we just end up taking that on as bad debt when an author just doesn't pay for a paper so there's a lot of things that can be improved we're working on them but but the overall experience isn't great on either side which really makes the case for moving away from them. So, in terms of an overall picture of our waiver outcomes in the last four or five years, the vast majority are approved, as I said, largely through discounts and the elimination of the fee, if they're denied. It's usually because they either haven't ever gotten back to us with the evidence that we've requested, or they realize they do have funds, and just, we've realized they've had funds and they weren't aware of it. So the vast majority we do try to accept, but it's never at the amounts that that folks want. So that said, if we are treating waivers which we are right now as a kind of intermediary solution to a final destination that we hope moves away from this model entirely. The numbers are going in the right direction. So if you're looking at our fee assistance over time by region, we've done we're dramatically reducing the amount of assistance that we can do in sort of global North countries and really increasing you know research for life, South and Central America, and Africa, the African continent and the least. This is not to say that there is not need in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific there is and again researchers at early career researchers in field with no funding researchers that aren't institutions. But if we have to make a call with limited resources our inclination is to shift towards geographies that are underrepresented at plus. Slide. So fee assistance by dollar amount is reflecting the same thing so the money that we're spending for those underrepresented communities is going up. It's diminishing in global North countries. So moving in the right direction but overall the amount of money available obviously is going down, which which brings us back to the same challenge. And then if you look at distribution over the subject area, one of the things that is notable about this in 2020 is you could ask yourself well why are the 2020 number of waivers reduced and what what I'm what we think happened we're still kind of unpacking this is because it's such a strange year. We actually granted fewer waivers but higher dollar amounts where possible because discounts weren't going to move the needle for a lot of authors so we didn't grant as many individual waivers but each represented a deeper discount off of the, the actual fee. And so the call to action that we would bring to this conversation both to libraries and vendors and other publishers is there's really more stakeholders in the community and involved in this process than authors and publishers and so solutions really need to reflect that funders need to be active stakeholders institutions need to be stakeholders there's a lot of other folks that could could help with this and that's what pluses new business models are trying to to synthesize. Similarly solutions that help whole regions, whole organizations and not just one author are going to shift the systems more equitably than sort of individual, you get a waiver you get a waiver you get a waiver if we really want to see systemic change broader, broader solutions for groups are going to be important. When you make things means tested or means based. It's, it's a really challenging thing to do it in a way that feels objective and fair. And ideally, the amount of friction that we generate for authors should be less than what the waiver process currently brings which, as I showed you is quite quite labor intensive so happy to hand it over now to to to Curtis to to reinforce some of the things libraries can do to help us with this. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much, Sarah and thanks from me I think that that was a great overview of the problem that we're facing and what what I'm going to do with with my time is focus in on you know what is the role of the academic library in all of this and I think that the libraries have kind of been on the sideline in the development of waiver programs I don't think it's until we really started making open access agreements that this became something that we're paying more attention to. So, just real quick I want to talk just a little bit about Iowa State because I think the approach that we're taking could be a model for other libraries to take and how they're thinking about this. We're a library that is committed to transitioning our subscription spend to open access where public land grant university our mission is to not just create and apply knowledge but to share it to make Iowa in the world better places. And what you're looking at here is a in this bar chart is the amount of open access articles that are being centrally covered by the library and just in three years you can see the growth trend here. And we really are at a point in time right now with the number of publishers that are adopting open models where over the span of one renewal season a library can make a significant shift in their their spending from subscriptions to these open access models but these open access models do include the apc based models so the reading published that Cambridge is doing the reading published the Wiley is doing if a library wants to support the native pure away publishers like Iowa State is doing we pay for example to cover our authors publishing and plus one we pay for them to publish in frontiers. And these waiver programs are an actual huge issue because we are committed to inequitable and sustainable transition to open and I think all of the problems that that Romy and Sarah pointed out with these waiver programs are a problem and it's a pressing and it's an urgent problem that we need to address. So, I'm going to talk just briefly about some things that I think that the that the libraries can do and one of these is working toward having in a waiver program expectation clause and what you have here if you don't try to read this this has nothing to do with waiver programs is actually an accessibility clause but you can see that we can get quite detailed in what we asked publishers to include around things that we care about and and for Iowa State waiver programs are now one of those things that we want to talk about during our conversation during our negotiation we were just on the phone with with Wiley this week and we talked probably for 20% of the time about their waiver program and how they can improve their waiver program and we're going to be doing more of that, but I think to really inform what a clause like this might look like. We actually have to convene a community conversation I think that Romy shared out, you know a bunch of concrete things that publishers can do. We've taken that a step forward this idea of convening a conversation. It's an inclusive conversation with authors who are actually having to request these and use these programs. You know with not just northern libraries driving the conversation but pulling in our colleagues from, you know, low and middle income countries for example to have this conversation I think out of that I think we can actually pin down. What are the best practices what are the standards for these and then pulling it back to our negotiations and getting this embedded in our contract that we're going to hold publishers to actually doing this. And I fully agree with what Sarah said that, you know, when we're doing waiver programs on the back end to address equity problems because on the front end we haven't implemented a model that is equitable from the start. That's an issue and I subscribed to open. I think what plots is doing with their cap model I think what lyricist is doing with the OACIP Open Library of Humanities with a cooperative models we do have models now that have equity baked in and don't require a bandaid fix on the back end but the reality is APCs are going to be here with us for some time. Read and publish style agreements are going to be with us for some time. So it is pressing it is urgent that we figure out how to make these programs the best that they can be for all of the reasons that Sarah and Romy have talked about. So, again, libraries I think now that we are making open access agreements we are part of this conversation I think we can push this forward. So, Sarah and I in Romy are talking about this all over I think that what we're trying to do is stimulate a conversation. I think you will see perhaps opportunities for participation and in conversations on how we improve these programs next year. So keep an eye out for that. And thank you very much for your time and attention. Great, fantastic. We will close with sharing our information again I guess I can pop the slide up that has our contact information actually I don't have it so I will circulate our information for anyone who wants to get in touch with us. After this session we are looking forward to questions and feedback and wishing everyone a great rest of this DNI virtual and in person conference. Thanks Romy, thanks Curtis. Bye.