 Hello and welcome to this joint Amelica Canadian Research Network Coalition public or open-air webinar about cooperative non-APC open access publishing models. So you can see we have a lot of excellent speakers today. Yeah, so we'll start with Ariana from Amelica and she'll talk about the Latin American approach. Then we'll have Jason and Tanya talking about Canadian Research Knowledge Network and Coalition Public and Erudite activities in this area and we'll also have Kevin from PKP who is here for Q&A. We'll also have Jean-Claude Godon and I don't need to introduce him to you and then we'll talk about open-air recommendations towards sustainable cooperative and non-APC publishing models which covers Europe and that would be me with my colleagues Johan and Jens for questions and I hope you can all see Ariana's slides sir and the way we plan this webinar so we'll have short presentations and then we'll make sure that we have enough time for discussions and for your questions please type them is in Q&A orange chat and then we'll take them in the second part. Thanks a lot and over to you Ariana. Thank you very much Irina and thank you opener and Irina for the organization of this event. I'm very honored to share this webinar with all the experts that I really admire and give me the opportunity to share our perspective from America and from Reda League in Latin America regarding a cooperative non-APC publishing model and first I would like to start by saying that America for the ones that are not familiar with it is a multi-institutional community driven initiative supported by UNESCO and led by Reda League and Klaxon. We work to provide or to preserve a cooperative sustainable protected and non-commercial infrastructure for open knowledge starting in the Latin American region with a lot of South-South cooperation but now including journals and scoring journals from other countries once they are since they are compliant with this with this approach non-commercial approach. So what is this? Well this cooperative approach is an approach of science as a common and public good. Reda League and America have developed and implemented an infrastructure to support this academia UNESCO are republishing for more than 1,000 scientific journals. This approach I have to say that it saves significant cost in journal production in favor of the non-profit publishing sustainability. We developed technology to save time and cost resources in general to in journal production. It allows to keep journal publishing in hands of the academic. This is a very important thing for us that at the academic community is to keep or continue being the owner of the publishing. I mean the non-profit sector particularly allows native open access and open data prevents journals from starting or adopting models like the APC-based one. It enables Bibliodiversity and I'm talking a little bit deeper about this a little after. It includes a artificial intelligence aided software that automates XML contents markup and journal output files generation like EpoF, HTML5, PDF etc. It is linked open data compliant and leverages data and I'm going to to show you to show you some examples about this leverages data granularity to enable novel ways of discoverability and knowledge representation. Amelika provides different services mainly for journal publishing but as well as for books for repositories it has this project aura to classify self-archived policies. It has as well one working group on responsible metrics aligned with the declaration of San Francisco vision. It has a very strong community of users and developers of the open journal system as it is a key tool to support this non-profit publishing and it provides different services in let's say different steps in the process of journal production. I mean it provides free-to-use XML markup tools, it provides intelligent viewers, mobile viewers, EpoF, PDF for articles that are published by these journals and talking about cooperation we implemented a model along with all our different universities or institutions in general, journals and individuals to cooperate in different ways. We share data, software, hardware and in the case of Revalika and Amelika we provide training, we provide journal quality criteria, we provide data quality assurance, we provide as well these services including hardware preservation and full-text storage and availability and we expect from a journal editors that are in the universities that are in them and different institutions we expect that they do their own XML markup so this is a cooperative way in the sense that we provide the technology, we provide the training and they with their teams inside institutions they do the job. So we include journals that are quality journals that follow a peer review process that doesn't include ghost for authors so non-APC journals are included. We require this XML JETS markup as a mandatory requirement to be part of this initiative and we work with a lot of our expert researchers to continue thinking about new ways of research assessment. This is our numbers, our statistics from Amelika and from Revalika which together provides services of almost well more than 1,500 journals from 23 countries including recently like India from almost 700 published institutions mainly universities but as well research centers, governments, public hospitals, we have journals from different publishers, non-proper publishers. We index around well more than a half million full-text articles in our platforms and we provide this service for around 65,000 daily users that are consuming and downloading these articles from Revalika and Amelika. So this model provides different added value services to a journal. We expect that the journal editor follows or focus on the quality of our journal, the quality of the peer review processes and we provide different services to complement the journal's capabilities. For example, we provide the quality assessment, we provide journal production tools, we provide different mechanisms for interoperability and discoverability, we provide statistics on the usage of content, we provide different home pages or landing pages at different levels for example at area, discipline, institution or country level so to give more idea of the scientific output at different granular levels and this approach is composed of six elements. The first one is that it should be academic-owned. We are very keen on that preserving all these media of scientific or scholarly communication, scholar-led and owned by academics. It is immediate open access because it is the natural way it is born. It is based on a cooperative strategy to sustain this approach. It is of course not for profit and not on APC and we really rely on technology to make it possible. So this is maybe our main innovation that we provide software to shift from a traditional article processing to an article processing inside a journal that is more efficient, that is based on XML. So many manual work is avoided or is prevented and in this case we have some measures that we have, we are providing the service and the journal saves around 90% of time and maybe money invested in the original or traditional article processing. So based on the XML we do the rest almost automatically and even the XML processing, we implemented different algorithms to make it more or less automatic. So we are providing these tools to make this process more efficient and we recently developed OJS plugin as well to upload all these outputs into the OJS installations. So the whole process is now automated once you have the peer review article until it is published in OJS. So we really believe that this is an approach that can benefit journal editors to prevent adopting models like the APC one. This is for example one screen when you download all your output files to the computer of the journal's editor and then with the plugin it is automatically uploaded into OJS. So we have invested a lot of effort in doing this. Now around 600 journals are using this technology and well I think this is a very well good results. This is for example a graphic that shows that this approach puts out cost of inside formation and the time savings and cost savings, all the ones that you see in color are the article processing, the steps in the process that are regarding to journal production that are being saved with this technology. So we think we contribute to journal editors to let them focus on peer review that this is for us the most important thing to guarantee quality and we help them in this journal production processes. Just to highlight something this is very important because this technology allows open data in a native way as well because all mathematical expressions and different XML elements like tables and data can be marked up in XML at a very granular level. So you have every number and every operation in a question. It is being marked individually so it can be processed by different for example mathematical processors so to replicate the research also to find maybe if it is well done or not. So we have these XMLs at this level and this is the variety of outputs that we provide. So we believe that we can achieve organic visibility, discoverability and impact of science by having these every element tag and can be disseminated or be integrated in the knowledge graph let's say. So we believe in potential of this model because if we are basing XML and RDF data files with open data we have some samples on linked open data as well. So we are relying on technology for participatory and inclusive scholarly communications where every single piece of information could be part of this GN graph to compose a structure that expresses the inherent knowledge and to be linked to a wider and unrestricted knowledge cloud and I'm stealing some phrases from or quotes from Jean Claude I'm quoting here. And these are just some use cases linked open data and semantics. We recently for example with all this information we release, we launch a knowledge base on epidemics during this period of COVID-19. So my point is if we have all this data that it is provided by journals at this very granular level and with this quality we can quickly run algorithms in this case we run an ontological based algorithms to get for example a representation of the knowledge published in epidemics and pandemics. So we did that last month we launched it, you can see it available in America as well. We are working for example in another one for ancestral knowledge and indigenous knowledge. So we are running this the same methodology based on semantics and ontological it's an ontological approach and we are also about to publish one of our general studies. So this is just three examples that what we can do having this information with this quality and with this structuring this for example the resultant knowledge representation of epidemics published in journals indexed by Rueda Lick. The final user or the end user can have access to every article that is published in each thematic if you click on each note and it is also available as a Spark UL linked open data data point. So this is what we can do if we work in a very with the standards and with the structuring standards and with XML and with this kind of technology. Just some final thoughts. Well we have learned a lot in Rueda Lick and America from lessons learned from Latin America from lessons that Latin America has taught us. So we in Latin America we have seen that it is possible to run journal publishing on a not for profit basis. Latin America has been performing a very good comparative approach where everyone gets benefit from everyone's investment. A distribution of cost among many stakeholders universities academic institutions governments national science agencies host funders all of them are contributing to this cooperative ecosystem. So Rueda Lick and America have learned a from that journal publishing the hands of the academic sector promotes more inclusive scholarly communication. We are convinced about on this. American Rueda Lick focused their efforts on preserving this ecosystem but to extend as well this ecosystem to other regions that run similar non-profit publishing by leveraging technologies to contribute in journal sustainability to prevent the adoption of for-profit business models and by developing software and enhancing data to contribute in contents organic disability and discoverability in such a way and I have to stress this that impact and research assessment are dissociated from from the so-called mainstream databases so we are working to give scientific content the opportunity to seek organic content because technology can or is bringing us this opportunity to do that. Well thank you I'm very happy to answer any question thank you very much. Thanks a lot Arianna I don't see any questions yet just a comment from Nev Brennan from Trinity from Ireland let's all embrace the America principle and move over to the Rueda Lick model. Thanks sir. Then actually there is one question Yadronka is asking how do you define editorial quality? Well in fact in Rueda Lick in Rueda Lick and America we have selection criteria I have to say that is very rigorous we perform this evaluation inside Rueda Lick but we well we receive feedback from an advisory board so just to guarantee that for those of you the journals give evidence from that review processes and around 50 checking in the in the in this process. So then maybe you can share with us when it's done and then Ernest is asking how is the cost distributed between the stakeholders? Well in fact the costs are very embedded into an infrastructure of research and different grants I mean for example just to put an example one professor at a university takes a release journal inside the university so part of the their salaries of faculty are directed to sustain or to pay for the time that the professor is investing in running the the journal so it is kind of embedded in different in different ways it also includes for example many students labor inside journals so you have different well scholarships and different payments to students to to do that job but as well from our national science funders and and different governmental grants that are given to research and and these grants that are directed to research are invested back in publishing so this is a very complex system of distribution of costs and this is maybe why the APC model is more successful in in terms of the adoption by funders because it is because it is an easy concept it is an easy fee to pay but these kind of systems that are cooperative are involves a lot of public money coming from governments to universities for example and and the universities through salaries and through different grants for research and are providing this or are covering supporting this journal publishing but but in a more a little bit more complex system thanks and I see over a dozen other questions so maybe let's let's let's let's answer them in the second part sir so let's let's finish with all the presentations sir and maybe also if you if you have time ariana maybe you can type some of the answers in q&a danya and jason will be presenting thanks a lot and thank you for all your questions we'll make sure that we'll answer all of them and over to you danya and jason thank you irina hello everybody very pleased to hear be here with these colleagues and experts around us and very happy to hear about these initiatives very exciting so i'm here with jason Friedman from the canadian research knowledge network and also with my colleague kevin strannach from the public knowledge project as we only have 15 20 minutes we split just the presentation between jason and me but kevin is here to ask any questions and to add and feel free to to step in kevin if i by miss anything um so i'm sharing my screen i try is it there yes okay so in canada we are in a very large country publishing practices differ from one discipline to another but also a lot from a country international context to another um so our um strategy is on implementation of open access oops sorry so i go back um very large country population of about 37 million canadian so there are large um stretches of canada which are not occupied on this map you see here we work together very closely in coalition public with colleagues across canada but this means really that we are in different time zones and that we are like millions of kilometers far away so erudy is hosted in montreal at university of montreal the public knowledge project is hosted at simon fraser university in vancouver and we collaborate a lot with all these blue spots which are academic libraries that are also involved in scholarly publishing and that are hosting journals and mainly use the open journal system software for that and then we are also together in this landscape with our colleagues from the canadian research knowledge network which is crkn which is the consortium which negotiates with different publishers agreements for access okay um so we have a situation in canada i'm sorry do you see this where we uh we are lucky because we have access to public infrastructure we are in the same situation here in canada as ariana highlighted we would like to keep a big part of it in public hands by managed by the community so we have our universities who decided to invest in open infrastructure and we also have funders who who work with us to support this infrastructure it's not an ideal situation of course because as ariana highlighted also that it's a very complicated situation of funding when you are in an environment where you would be in non-commercial tools and infrastructure which are in a high competition with with commercial infrastructure that is there just beside this non-commercial infrastructure so we have in canada access to the irid.org platform which is a platform that hosts journals and it's very similar to what ariana was talking about in terms of redalika redalik and america so i didn't focus in this presentation about all the features that we offer around it but we focus a little bit more on how to work with the journals and how to how to transition these journals to open access because on this platform which is not for profit highly public funded and so on we still have journals that work with the moving wall it's we transition these journals more and more to full open access model but there are still around 90 journals using the moving wall in order to generate revenues and we have a lot of journals that are in a distributed system and what we try to do is to harmonize actually the access to high quality services to provide an environment where everybody has access equal access to to infrastructure that provides them with you know persistent identifiers xml with harmonized metadata and curated metadata to enhance really visibility impact and discover discoverability as in the same way as ariana talked about it just before so this is why we we are calling this now coalition publica because there was like this big country and different ways to do things in canada we had the the french language journals from kebek and the french language community of canada on the arid platform mainly and we had a lot of journals distributed across the country on ogs instances where we collaborate very very closely with the academic libraries and the situation was that we would wanted to think about a single access point to this canadian content and humanities and social sciences and to contribute also to have an archive of the national scholarly record around these content and to avoid to build something stable like in stable environment to avoid that there is an exodus of all these canadian content which could easily migrate to other systems around the world but the idea was really to have a national context where we can still continue to talk about national topics and i invite you just to have a look at this opinion paper from vincent la rivière it's kind of outdated now it's from 14 or 15 already but i think it's still really the the the theme that motivates what we do here in canada it is about the fact that we would like to have our humanities and social sciences journals still to talk about canadian topics to talk about the society the canadian society history and linguistic aspects and so on so there is this motivation also from funders to help us to provide this environment where we can continue to work with these journals instead of outsourcing everything to international journals so we are in a situation where we get public funding through the social sciences and humanities research council from canada and these are the journals individual journals that we see that are can apply for grants with this council three year grants to support their editorial activities it's about 22 000 per year and we also have funders like the canadian foundation of innovation that support research infrastructure similar to what ariana just talked about research infrastructure though not necessarily publishing infrastructure so we are really in a funding situation where we try to articulate that the publication is a structuring part of the research life cycle which is i must admit not always easy because sometimes when you talk about publishing and open access you really forget about these research life cycle and the way how it is how it is funded and we also know about our journals that it's very small entities these are really academics running these journals on the top of other activities that they do they are working in departments they are sometimes the journals are sometimes supported by presses not always the revenues vary from 30 000 dollars to 80 000 approximately and some of them are we now also running just with five or 10 k and it's really depending a lot on the personal investment of the researcher who is the responsible editor for the journal if at what state the journal is and this is in this context a very poor fit for for apc's so we do not have any journals that use apc's we have very less very few requests of journals that asked to use apc's the journals that are mainly funded through the social sciences humanities research council are not there is there is no incentive actually mainly to use apc's and we are working very strongly with our colleagues in the canadian libraries and with the partnership for open access model that jason is going to talk on to avoid actually the use of apc's and we are in this publicly funded situation where we also are have an open access policy in canada but an open access policy with us journals to be compliant with a 12 month embargo or moving wall so this is where it's kind of a market element that we have that is that we are surrounded by with an infrastructure which is very highly funded and this is something that we work a lot on and that we also struggle on and which prevents us from getting actually more easily to complete open access although on the arid platform we have 95 percent open access content we still have five percent that is behind this moving wall and what we are working on is really looking at how to transition this content now to a full open access model which can provide sustainability of course for these small journals that we are talking about talking about so some years ago when we were looking at this open access policy that canada wanted to put in place we said to our self how are we going to to work with this what we did is we wanted to reduce an old moving wall which was 24 months already to 12 months and we decided to do this in collaboration with the canadian libraries academic libraries and by working with the consortium where they are working together so the canadian research knowledge network and we changed our former relationship which was kind of a vendor relationship that we had like our buyer and vendor relationship that we had with the CRKM vendors as any other provider or publisher at the same time as the American Chemical Society or Taylor and Francis so we were just beside them and it was kind of not logic because of the not-for-profit non-commercial mission that we have so we talked to the canadian libraries and told we would like to change this in a partnership this relationship go back from a vendor relationship and go into a partner relationship in support for canadian open access publishing and this was well received actually and Jason is going to talk more in detail about this how we did that in Canada this change of relationship with this truly changing what we do and how we are we going to work together in the next years even more thanks Tanya as Tanya was mentioning you know I wouldn't quite equate them with Taylor and Francis or ACS but we did have a traditionally you know a consortium publisher relationship where libraries subscribed basically we negotiated access to subscription journals the journals had a 24-month embargo and no money went to the OA journals because we were paying for access again a very traditional sort of conventional subscription relationship but as Tanya mentioned in 2014 we turned that model on its head really with a partnership model which meant libraries would now support the whole collection the initial partnership was for three years 2014 and 2016 we then had a one-year extension in 2017 and now we're currently in year three of a five-year partnership agreement which is really an exception for CRKN that demonstrates our commitment to this partnership so one of the main or achievements was that the embargo got cut in half to 12 months and now most critically open access journals not just the subscription only ones received funds turning to the CRKN strategic plan thank you Tanya even though our relationship with ARUD predates our current strategic plan it embodies our three main strategic goals and this strategic plan came in came as a result of an extensive amount of consultation not just with members but with stakeholders and it was approved just recently at our seems recent not too long ago at our access to knowledge conference in October of last year so three main strategic goals transforming scholarly communications developing and fostering partnerships and collaborative advocacy and this partnership model really represents in fact part of that transformative scholarly communications that we talk about likewise ARUD was one of our first formal partnerships and we're looking to build and develop more ARUD is kind of serving as a model or template for for how we can transform a previous relationship to a partnership and part of that partnership is working together to advocate on shared issues so ARUD and CRKN both see the importance of supporting research and dissemination and social sciences and humanities and the importance of open access which facilitates that so I'll talk just briefly about what the partnership model is and what it's not so it's collaborative we work together I assure you we do not normally present with vendors it's rather because we have a partnership that we work together and these voluntary contributions which I think are fairly unique we first launched the partnership in 2014 some members who participated wanted to contribute more and some members who couldn't afford full participation still wanted to contribute because they believed in the partnership and they believe in open access and so we created a category of voluntary contributions for either those who kind of wanted to go above and beyond or those who couldn't make it work at the regular participation level but still wanted to contribute in a certain way and it's really a shared responsibility this isn't a transactional relationship CRKN is representation on IRD and coalition public as government structure and we really work together and we think we have a sense of stewardship I think it's fair to say over this relationship over this partnership and just briefly what it's not this is not a read and publish agreement as Tanya articulated there are no APCs there's no read fee there's no publish fee it's not subscribed to open and it's not preprints this is really quite unique and these are the final versions of articles and the full published journals so how do we measure success of the partnership on this slide is from a research project conducted by Vincenzo LaRiviere the A4 mentioned Vincenzo LaRiviere a researcher at University de Montréal it was completed in 2018 28 CRKN members participated from across the country all those blue dots on the on the second slide and it included usage data citations and faculty surveys to determine priority journals priority journals excuse me were defined as those journals that were in the top 20% of usage citations or survey results and as you can see from the slide IRD had the second highest percentage we were really pleased when we saw the results of this and this shows that our partnership with IRD supports journals that are important to researchers which is really critical for us and just some other numbers here to talk about the success consultations have increased royalties to journals have increased and journals continue to join the platform in fact 20 were added this year so we're really pleased not just with how researchers value it but also sort of that it's continuing to grow and expand and so with that I'll pass back to Tanya for some concluding remarks yes what we would like to add this year you know we only have 20 minutes but we would have so much topics to talk about but this because this is really like a struggle which is complex it's about funding funding of not-for-profit non-commercial infrastructure it's about trans transitioning to OA and it's about creating an environment where our researchers in the future can publish and where it's really owned by the academy and still in the hands of of of our researchers so always not enough we need open shared infrastructure and we need all these tools and we need to have access you know to expertise and to provide these environment where we can be competitive actually and where we can think about the needs of the community and to respond to it as well so it's very complex and the way we tackle it currently is really through a collaborative approach we really think this is the only way to go through we are in this big Canadian country here from coast to coast with a lot of different approaches and languages so we created kind of a governance structure around the public knowledge project and where we would like to bring stakeholders more closely together we have created a steering committee an advisory committee and an international advisory committee in order to see conversation and exchange and to have you know to make it better actually than we do currently everybody on our own but because just hearing Arianna talk about all the XML work it's it's very cost intensive and labor intensive and expertise intensive knowledge that we need to build commonly there and that we I think we need to share better amounts non-commercial infrastructures in the future so we we try to build this common platform of exchange here in Canada but very connected to other international initiatives in order to build on these yeah expertise and nice projects that are out there and to make it stronger together actually thank you thanks a lot Tanya and Jason I don't see any questions yet so maybe let's hand it over to Jean Claude and in the meantime if you have any questions please type them in the Q&A or in the chat and we'll answer them later and I think you have to unmute yourself Jean Claude or let me unmute you thank you very much I've just been unmuted by Irina which is very nice thank you and thank you for the first two presentations which are really very rich and important in their own ways first each one is a bit different from the other and also in the possibilities of thinking of better links between such projects such platforms such objectives so I have a lot to say about all of this let me let me start with something that some people may have heard about I think it's called COVID-19 it's been mentioned by a few people recently I don't know exactly why but let me go to a little article in the New Yorker that appeared last week or two weeks ago in which people said you know it's quite surprising because when we had the SARS epidemic a lot of work began on the coronavirus family of viruses but then after that it sort of died off and people went on to other problems despite the fact that a number of scientists had warned that this kind of event would repeat and despite the fact excuse me despite the fact that we had not seen the worst kind of epidemic yet much worse might come and in fact with the present pandemic we know now what would happen if we had something that were both extremely lethal and extremely contagious it would be the complete panic over the planet and we're not prepared for it now the question we might ask ourselves is why did people keep on studying SARS and the coronavirus while the epidemic was going on and why did they go away from it afterwards what are the forces in effect that are at work which prevent people from building it building in a sort of coherent and continuous fashion problems which are are of obvious importance both for science both for the theory of science but also for society at large and this kind of question can be repeated domain after domain field after field problem after problem all over the planet the answer I'm going to give is that and it may surprise some of you is that this the the entity we call a journal has become such that it actually forces people to follow some sort of other logic than the obvious kind of curiosity driven impulse or the need driven research that society requests of researchers what we have instead is something that happened to journals at some point in the recent history which has changed its meaning the meaning of these journals and which has led to many of the problems we are facing today to go extremely fast because I don't have the time to develop this here and in in line with the theme of this particular webinar I would characterize that big transformation of journals into the following in the 1970s 1980s journals became intensely commercialized now you're going to say to me this is crazy journals have been sold and bought for centuries there have been sent subscriptions to journals for centuries everything was commercial right of the bat yes and no yes and no and I won't go into that today but do know that for a very long time journals were being subsidized by the dues of scientists belonging to societies and journals were being bartered between societies so that one society creating one journal with a few hundred copies could through bartering build a library of several hundred titles of journals for the price of just one journal so we had then our model which was existing with some some continuity from the late 18th century to the second world war more or less with some commercial developments around it but not many and why were they not really a commercial development around those journals well the reason was very simple journals are not profitable they they were journals that were very specialized very few people could read them and the the the result was that a publisher who evolved or developed some journals did it for ulterior reasons not to make money he did it that publisher or she did it generator's a man but let's be fair they they did it because they were trying to keep links with the authors and creating the possibility of generating new books which by contrast could be profitable so you have a you have journals they are bought and sold to some extent they're about it to some extent there is no markets for journals they're not thought in terms of of markets you have people doing things with journals that are really trying to access knowledge trying to manage knowledge try to develop and grow knowledge it went so far as for example when the chemists like Mendeleev in China in Russia sorry about that Mendeleev in Russia developed his very important work on the periodic table it was published in Russian in Russian journals but Russian was not exactly the language of every scientist in the North Atlantic at the time and the Germans realized the importance of that work and then without any any question picked up the better articles from from Mendeleev translated them into German and and published them and you know what the Russians did to that did you think they sued the Germans not at all they were delighted their articles are being translated at cost by the the Germans and they were being disseminated disseminated for nothing in in in in the North Atlantic area of of the world at the time where most of what we call science was being practiced I'm talking the 19th century right now so what we have to to think about is what happened after let's say 1970 1980 and what happened is that journals were internationalized Maxwell did a lot to do that they were organized around a common currency which was an evaluation tool that developed in the same period which became the impact factor and the journals were ranked and at that point you had all the elements to create a market that's only then that's something like a market of journals really emerged so let's not think that markets and scientific journals are a necessity they just happened to be the construction of a a commercial system which developed in the 70s and 80s all that was aided and abetted by particular historical circumstances which I could quickly hypothesize about such as the fact that you had one very important country that wanted to create control of scientific research as much as it could all over the world this was the united states and hence the role of English that became one of the important elements of Garfield's work in at the Institute for Scientific Information and one was to isolate Soviet science from the rest of the world by precisely bringing the the whole thing under English but these are side issues that I will not deal with today I just mentioned them to show that there were other factors aiding and abetting the creation of a market in the 70s and 80s and the the the whole world has evolved with the marketing of journals increasingly with in fact this creation that Jason mentioned as a an obstacle the relationship between libraries and vendors you know the the whole term of vendor is very very amusing I remember that when I was part of CRKN as the chair of the advisory board the the the director of the of the of CRKN at the time had a kind of mantra coming back which was maintaining good relationships with the vendors this was the this was the whole thing you had to be nice to Elsevier because Elsevier might be nasty to you if you weren't nice to them so you have this kind of situation in which libraries found themselves fighting high prices of journals which were made possible by the creation of a market and doing it by creating consortia and thereby reinforcing the whole notion of journals as they were as they were being redefined in that market but the problem with the journals being redefined in that journal is that journals now are competing and they're competing according to a scale which is really a scale of visibility of prestige and visibility and prestige in effect you have you have the journals of science beginning to organize themselves in exactly the same way as the organization of the top 10 tunes on radio and in the record industry at the same time or the nilson ratings of television everything was being organized around visibility prestige authority to some extent but in a way that led to what I would call the succession of intellectual bubbles you know in the sense of an economic bubble suddenly everybody goes someplace because that's where the action is that's where the fun is that's where the the visibility is going to appear that's where you may have a chance to make a name for yourself and you have science then being driven through the the impact of their work in those terms that's what impact became to be understood as on this you understand that now science is not that does not have an impact because it impacts society society science has an impact because it is being visible because it is being you might say a popular in a sense you know popular in that particular crowd of course so when the coronavirus studies of SARS began to lose their interest because after all the pandemic had been had been in effect contained why stay there there's something more important happening perhaps in that other area of genetics or that area of bio biochemical research and everybody rushed there it it's this kind of force that leads researchers to keep on running after the topics where they have the best chance to get the greatest possible visibility in order to acquire the very precious citations in order to be promoted to have a job and to get grants and perhaps even prizes so you see how the whole thing in effect creates these bubbles which are elements of you might say monovercity you have no diversity you have just successive forms of monovercities developing in every discipline every field according to the whims and and and you might say the interest of some leading labs and some leading journals and that's how the that's how our science is being steered right now and this of course creates a problem for science policy at national levels and it creates problems for science policy at regional levels and it creates problems when crisis emerge I think again the coronavirus crisis right now is a wonderful if I may say so wonderful illustration of this of the principles I'm trying to bring about which means that if we want to really think about the future and that's where I think erudy and america redalec are really helping us to think forward we have to rethink about what journals should be doing and the answer actually is quite simple in my opinion in a sense let me be for once play the role of a narch conservative journal should go back to where they were in the 19th century what do I mean by this I mean by this that journals rather than being commodities that claim to be international and and that respond to market forces let journals go back to being the reflection the conduit the the vehicle of the expression of existing living really really living scientific research communities journals should reflect that but to do that we have to perhaps take also advantage of the fact that in the meanwhile in the in the 90s and even more in the new millennium we have had digitization and that is important because digitization has allowed something else to appear which is playing a very very important role that very important thing that has happened it took the form first of all of what was called at the beginning remember muse at its beginnings remember erudy which followed the muse model at the very beginning it was the portal model you just put journals on the kind of virtual electronic shelf and you you essentially let people browse through the the electronic shelf but quickly people understood that journals could also be related to each other in various ways with these new digital tools and the notion of platform verge and that notion of platform is still emerging we don't have a a stable final definitive vision of what the platform ultimately will be but what it means is that the journal inside the platform is subservient to the platform not the reverse the platform is not a neutral sort of milieu like the water of a chemical reaction for example no it is something that informs and shapes the journals and meanwhile the journals themselves should rethink themselves differently now if inside a platform you have you have communities developing particular journals and that's where the the the Latin American model really really interesting because the the journals they still reflect university or research center communities then you can see for example well let's start with that and this is what america and red alec are doing but instead of speaking in terms of journals owning controlling etc a set a fixed set of of articles let's redefine journals as ways to aggregate together problems that interest a certain community during the life of that community should that community disappear should that journal disappear does not matter the articles would remain on the platform and moreover because no journal would own any article those articles could be re-aggregated in the kind of knowledge cloud that ariana described so beautifully in her presentation could be re-aggregated differently with different communities re-emerging inside the platform so the platform as you can see is going to control the destiny and the fate of the journal in the decades to come and we should think of journals within that context and not as an absolute which is you know we have a journal it has an impact factor it has a reputation etc etc etc etc a journal was not created on the eighth day of creation and it's not going to live for eternity and let's let's be sure about that the platform neither by the way but the platform may have a chance of living a bit longer than than the whole thing maybe journal should be like individuals but while platform should be likened to a species and we know that evolution working through population selection works at the level of a species not at the level of individuals that are casually as we know and unhappily perhaps are being casually sacrificed by the selection process so we we should go we should go through this notion of journals being part of a platform and being reflecting communities they don't they do not own articles but by existing as communities they exist also as way as ways to navigate knowledge when you go to a community you expect to get certain kinds of information about certain kinds of problems at least certain perspectives or certain theories or certain tools or certain concepts and you play with that and you move from community to community to create your own synthesis which will allow you to join perhaps yet another community so you get this sort of thing that can be managed through through a platform there is something else to be done about that and I'm going back to Jason's notion of partnership which I think is essential absolutely essential between the journal creation and the the what you call is the the articles management that we have nowadays the the the communities that we have are in of course generally universities or research centers national labs whatever perhaps even in some cases god forbid let me make a joke of it in private labs I mean after all these people published to her in some in some cases and the important thing is in this period of coronavirus crisis let's think about what libraries are nowadays they're empty they're working online do you need a library nowadays well you might say if you digitize the whole library let's let's repurpose the building for something else maybe do some gymnastics or something like that whatever whatever so the libraries are in the in the period of their existence in which they have to really rethink what they're going to to be doing in the future and they really have to think about that very seriously because in my opinion some those who know me know that my my significant other used to be the head of libraries at McGill so I have a very very intimate knowledge of what libraries are like and the libraries are really in a sort of existential nexus right now of their existence in history I would say to go give a very quick answer to this existential problem I would say let's latch on to the notion that Larkin Dempsey at OCLC brought about some time back in which I find so compelling let's think of the library not as a place where you acquire stuff from the outside and then put it at the disposal of people inside the institution which is what librarians generally do they they acquire preserve and organize but let's say that they are the harvesters of the knowledge in their community who else can do it better than people who are right on the spot and they can generate they can generate a library which actually collects everything that's worthwhile in their community they can certainly register what they have received they certainly can expose what they have received and they could even they could even and they can also preserve all that that they have received and in passing you know if you look at the functions of publishing which are certification registration certification preservation and dissemination the libraries in this inside out situation already own three of the four functions now the libraries can do the certification and they can't even let's do what comes after certification but do it as which is evaluation but they can already do the three first functions certification can be done not by libraries not by the institution where those things are harvested but by networks of life of institutions which can trust trust each other as to their interest or quality and then certification can be done if certification is done the way plus one does it in other words we're not trying to see whether it's of interest or if it's primary primary importance whatever we just want to know if it's serious science if it's solid science so we do this kind of basic certification thing then we have with this this network of institutions and the libraries in their inside out position the possibility to develop at that point a a a publishing system which is based on platforms these platforms of course must intercommunicate with each other interoperable but they also must cooperate let me give a perhaps a difficult example for ariana i really like their tool to create xml it's free to use but it's not free software and i understand i get it i understand why it is free so it's not free software there are people who might want to do very bad things to america if it were but if and and there is a notion of control but it does not prevent america for example to speak to ad design ad as a trusted partner and say under certain conditions that we can both agree on you have full access to the code and everything else and big and you become co-developers of this of this software and on and on and on you see the point that i'm using here with people here and in passing i haven't i haven't tested that hypothesis with either of them before so maybe they're going to react very violently to me but i'll i'll i'll welcome the violence if it comes and i'll i'll deal with it um but i don't think this will be the case anyway there's two ladies are very nice uh the uh the the the point is that the not only are the inside out libraries leading to the the question of um network network institutions to do the certification on top of the three other uh publishing functions but it leads to a cooperation at the infrastructure level to create the tools that will be eventually the best tool for everybody and i think if that thing starts developing that way the power that led linux to take over most of computing now the only part of computing that's not linux based nowadays is the desktop which is you know the tail of the of the dog and it's not going to wag the dog it's the dog that wags the tail um if if this starts developing that way you can see the inherent power of doing something like that on a first regional continental and even eventually worldwide basis and in this regard i think there is a very important partnership that's emerging which is that is the partnership with open air why do i like the open air partnership well the way i see open air i cannot say open air is exactly the way i wish it were but it is pretty it's it's doing a very good job on the whole open air is a network of repositories now repositories are the right place to harvest the local production of knowledge open air already offers a network which is completely pan european it's tied with with uh la referencia in latin america which ties another set of repositories those repositories are ready now to work with the big platforms like erudy like like amelie like redalic and klaxo and so on so you see how the thing is starting to emerge to create a very powerful alliance where libraries will find also their role as the providers of the repositories the harvesters of knowledge and the feeders of the information that then the platforms can move to tow it and in passing i would say since i believe there are some people from doj attending this webinar i would say that one important role doj could start playing um in the future is looking at how to put together a set of platforms that have the right qualities to be potential partners of each other which at the same time would be a quick way to justify the existence of all the journals of those platforms instead of going by journal by journal and at the same time of course it would put the right hierarchy between platform and journals and lead us into a world in which uh journals would continue to exist but would create a different a different um uh relationship to knowledge now if you do that remain there remains one question i haven't dealt with which is also going to conclude with my the relation with the relationship to the main theme of this um of this little talk as i was asked to to deliver it i was supposed to talk about um the biblio diversity well if you start doing this kind of of organization that i've been really just adumbrating here quite clearly the tension between the commercial logic of profit seeking and market share conquering versus developing the right fields of research the priorities of research the importance of research for the for the human species essentially that tension can disappear and it means that we can develop at that point a system of communication of science a system of publishing of science which will be which will be really in tune in line aligned with the the the work of the scientists their interest their curiosity their social engagement their local commitments their philosophical science their perspectives and so on and so forth we are we are going to have a system like that only if the evaluation of research is not done through the proxy of journals and as long as we are stuck with this impact factor ranking of journals to create a unified market which actually has no other function but to advantage the use of one language and to advantage the use of some journals which are considered to be the elite journals of the excellent seeking uh institutions uh then we we we are going to be we have to move beyond that we have to create a a different kind of system and we and have essentially adumbrated all of that um last point you're gonna say who's going to finance all this i think it has been said by others before um we have a very strange system right now we have a lot of research being funded by public money but somehow those who fund public money have sort of danced around the the financing of the publishing part of the research even though everybody agrees that research without publication means nothing it's it's like uh some it's like a process that has never come to its fruition to its conclusion so one would say that if the funding agencies all the sources of research were to bring about the cost of supporting the network of platforms the cooperation of platforms and the the the development of all the tools we need to make these platforms work together well um we could we we we would have a commercial free completely academically controlled and well organized system of scientific communication and it would not cost all that much more than it does now in fact it probably would cost less because adding the cost of publication the real cost of publication is far less than the price of the present journals in the competitive market driven system don't forget we often confuse price and cost costs are quite often invisible price prices are driven by market what we want is costs which are costs without a market influence i think i've said enough i think i've touched about everything i wanted to say i will conclude with just one formula i think journals when they exist should help manage the great conversation of research and science and nothing else thank you very much thanks a lot john claude i'll wrap up with open air perspective and what we've been discussing in europe and we published the reports and you can see who we are it's a list of people in open area who worked on it sir towards sustainable cooperative and non-apc open access publishing models sir and uh it's available in order since january this year and we walked sir over the past year with a number of non-apc open access publishers in europe to come up with those recommendations and i think this report and also what we've already discussed today answer the questions that some of you posted when you registered for this webinar with the recommendations and guidelines as already good practices are convincing universities that they should pay for non-apc open access publishing initiatives sir what are the funding models and how do they work how the costs are organized and who is actually paying and then of course all this COVID-19 related questions sir that of course create additional challenges for us but i think we're used to challenges so what our report already covers of course it was pre COVID-19 so it doesn't include that part but it provides an overview of collaborative non-apc publishing models sir in europe and we structured them in five types five sections so some of them are library publishing programs sir and you can see examples of that sir then institutional support and sort of party funding national collaborative funding and publishing and jadrunka from crazier and also biliana from Serbia with us today if you have more specific questions about that sir then of course there are international collaborative funding and publishing initiative listed here and another type we suggest it's collaborative publishing support services sir for example open journal system network in germany and also center for digital system at the Frey Universität Berlin that offer technical services our report also addresses questions like what do we consider sustainability what are the current issues that researchers new emerging open access publishing initiatives institutions funders and policymakers are facing and which suggestions we have to address those issues and challenges and suggestions were collected during the workshop that our colleagues at billifield university hosted last year and now some of the recommendations which have already been addressed a little bit today so first we believe that funders should really acknowledge and endorse collaborative non-apc open access publishing not as an additional route not that's an alternative route but equivalent road to open access and I think we can see that shift already happening with plan s discussions around diamond open access and I would like to see more discussions around the monk funders and then it was already mentioned today that sir if we really want to be efficient and innovative it's really important that publication system remains in the hands of scientific community and is supported by loan societies and libraries and it also brings opportunities sir more transparency discussions around the coasts and you saw Arianna showed what is a coast baratical for amelicom and also our colleagues felt like there is a need for trusted bodies to evaluate existing in new publishing initiatives and we already have director of open access journals that sir is doing this role and maybe there might be some others sir if you want to make sure that publishing in new journals would be considered a valid publication route so there might we may need some more involvement from research performing institutions and national funders who are evaluating performance of researchers and research research institutions and John Claude talked a lot about this today. We also believe that medium and long term funding is needed to support these initiatives it can't be just project based and we need trusted bodies to consider these non-open access journals are equivalent to maybe more recognized journals and of course opportunities have already been discussed collaborations partnerships community ownership and governance and shared infrastructure and services from simple shared financial marketing legal services to collaborations on the level of platforms and opportunity for leveraging free and open source software creating innovations like Arianna showed providing joint technical supports are ensuring compatibility and interoperability with other systems and collective advocacy to policy and decision makers and they need a space or a need for space or platform to discuss current best practices ideas expertise within collaborative non-APC publishing community and I hope this webinar is already a starting point for this discussions across continents because like I said we've been only looking into European landscape I'm really grateful for Arianna, Tanya, Jason, Kevin, John Claude bringing Canadian perspective and let's maybe brainstorm how we can do this more efficiently together to answer Nikola's question yes we'll post presentations online and apologies for running longer than we expected with this webinar if you could stay with us for maybe five more minutes to answer some remaining questions and then in case five more minutes won't be enough then we'll try to answer those questions in writing and share with you and I don't even know where to start so let's let's start with Q&A questions so quick question to Erudy can a journal which is in the in a director of open access journals be included in Erudy which is the process yes thank you Erina of course it's an open platform we have quality criteria we apply actually the same criteria as the social census humanities research council of Canada for this grant program so it needs to be peer reviewed and active publication and we look at the editorial board and so on but it's a it's more a question of what is this journal that you are talking about looking for is it about full text hosting are you looking for an indexation and an additional discoverability point so it's kind of it depends on what is the aim of this of this journal what is it seeking for from our side actually we seek to bring more French language and small journals into DOAJ currently we're working together with DOAJ on that so this is like we see proc ways that we need to create an enhance but I would be happy to discuss if you have my email just email me and we can talk about it thanks then there is a comment from Garrett trajectory of a you open access policy appears to be a tilting toward the transitional APC model as the only game in town do the panel think that this prioritizes the need of traditional big publishing over those of the global research community I don't know if someone wants to take this one I can try to answer very quickly actually it's what we were talking about we need to advocate better actually we need to come together and advocate for this not-for-profit infrastructure that work with non-apc models I think there we are missing a common voice currently we have talked about this on our international advisory committee together with the colleagues from open edition and operas in Europe and with Amelika Dominique Mabini so we were thinking and looking at ways to create a more louder common voice of our of the impact of this of the possible impact for this and I think one question is because you know when you are in these specific platforms or more local systems it's also often a linguistic context that is behind that and you know the English language is still the lingua franca which is really very strong index the impact factor and so on so it's a complex question which has no easy answer but I think what we really need to do as groups is what we do here to advocate for a more common voice towards a change of the system and to make to to sensibilize actually the funders on these issues as well and not only on the big issues of other big publishers thanks a lot then the reason comments from Yadran come but we offered some hope there is a question from Robert how can you explain community-owned platforms are not taken off more rapidly and widely and then maybe a little bit related comment from Rema what do you think about European Commission selection of F1000 as publishing platform of EU funded research would have not been better to use any other existing cooperative public platform do you think could be an alternative to Plan S do you think Plan S is a novelty model just a model to keep the status quo and then a comment from Wendy that's regarding a need for community of for non-commercial journals to share experience and exchange information we have recently funded the free journal network we'll also manage a forum on GitLab if anyone is interested to join us feel free to email and then Wendy's email and that could be one of the voices anyone wants to answer any of that I think Jean-Claude wants to say something but I think you are muted Jean-Claude yeah no no you can speak thank you I wanted to address this notion of the relationship platforms to communities obviously a platform is several communities and that makes it a bit more difficult for communities to take hold of platforms there is a governance problem that has to be solved there and models of governance would be really very welcome with regard to Plan S there is I think a negative and a positive side to it Plan S as Dominique has pointed out over and over again has been designed in a european centric vision which at first and even now has not paid enough attention to the rest of the world but there is one and it is completely journal-centered and it's completely biased in favor of APC models which is obviously maintenance of a certain status quo which favors the big commercial publishers but there is one silver lining in Plan S in my opinion it's that it allows for the first time a forum for a bunch of funders to really get together and discuss what do we do as funders with regard to research rather than just how do we fund our national or our thematic area of activity and I think it's starting to give some minor small slow yet I think interesting developments the fact for example that finally at Plan S they managed to include possibility of integrating funders that would want to support platforms such as Redaric rather than simply support the payment of APCs I think was a an interesting step forward and we what we have to do with Plan S especially with Johann Rohrich who is the the so-called champion is to keep on working on him to push them to say look your system right now is not coherent your system right now is just maintaining maintaining the present commercial system with a different business model that's all you're doing we want something better and deeper than that and I think you can do better than that and I think we we should work in that direction to go back to the notion of platforms I think it's time to really look at what platforms exist also for example in Indonesia in India in China in order to start really widening the the the budding the emerging network of platforms working together and there again some sort of world forum of and the governance system should be invoked there and the model there it seems to me is the internet you need inside this platform some things like the equivalent of the IETF in order to get the right kinds of standards the right kind of protocols and the right kinds of forums also to discuss all that on the world scale if if the this movement is a lot is capable of doing that it will move forward very very well. I just want to briefly add that exactly as Jean-Claude said funders have a great responsibility in directing institutional decisions to the right way and this is why in Latin America we are concerned about the incursion of planets in our system because planets has to be or has to bring a broader vision when it when he entered two regions like Latin America because our governments and our different stakeholders they are already supporting this so we have witnessed our system is degrading because he is our system is adapting different another business models coming from the commercial sector so we have seen in Latin America a very worrying landscape of shifting from non-publishing non-profit publishing models to the commercial ones so we have to be very careful in how we are going to operate in these well among regions and among different stakeholders globally and yes I don't agree with Tanya we we we need to unify our voices we we have to work together more closely to to speak up on on the importance of of preserving and reinforcing what we in Latin America what journal editors are doing well instead of degrading the system so we have to be very careful in the future I agree I pretty agree thanks a lot sir and Bianca's comments should all non-apc publishing models be collaborative and I think yes and the question from Dmitry how to ensure non-profit publishers is not becoming profit and getting acquired and I think you can ensure that by uh it's a legal status sir so there is a way to register in a way not to be bought and sold and also community governance and Jean-Claude please yeah I would I would like to what you say is correct but these are the tools to prevent yourself from being being acquired but when you do when you follow certain ways of developing your platform you open yourself up to being essentially co-opted if not bought out and so on I think the recent evolution of Cielo for example including Abel Packers working on working with the people from the open science business institute or whatever it's called is very worrisome because in effect by having pushed as hard as he has the notion of impact factors for his own journals he's opened up the whole the whole set of journals to being preyed upon by the commercial system he seems to have said I can use the currency without being bought up and of course he's going to have a hell of a fight on his hands if he tries to hold back with this kind of strategy so legal means are very important but they're not sufficient thanks a lot again apologies for going over time with this webinar but I think these are important and timely conversations and I hope we'll continue them in in a bigger group with participants from Asia and Africa as well so thanks a million for joining us today and thank you to all presenters and thank you to all attending and sending your questions I hope we addressed all of them um I'll send the link to slides and recording and I'll also send out Q&A here thanks a lot Ariana for typing all the answers thanks again have a nice day evening have a good week and stay well and safe thank you thank you everyone thank you