Fair and Equitable Publishing Models - How to Transition to Diamond Open Access

Well uh good uh evening, morning, afternoon to all of you wherever you are. Uh my name is Olava Marau. Uh I am speaking on behalf of the ELIVE global south committee and it's my pleasure to introduce you to our today's webinar which is on fair and equitable publishing models how to transition to them and open access. uh the session is being recorded will made available on on YouTube uh in the near future. Uh so we're also we have uh we'll be speaking in English throughout the session but we do have an option for uh captions in zoom. So whether you are in the desktop or mobile you can click the captions button uh and uh uh enable that uh for your u whatever language suits you better. Uh we will be um uh we're speaking on behalf of B Life is is a journal as you all know but it is also a it it brands itself as a nonprofit to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognizes the most responsible behaviors in science that includes open science which was why we are gathered here. You may be aware that El Life currently operates within a rather innovative model in which it does peerreview on preprints. Uh once a paper does go out to review, there are no reject accept decisions. Elife has been running this model for around two years now. Uh there have been periodic updates of on how that has been going. Uh we will probably share a link to one of them in the chat so register can do that. uh we one of the things that of course it's still not a diamond open access model. It still costs money to run. Uh it still does charge uh authors. So uh one thing that Elf has established in the meantime is a committee to discuss with people from the global south who are probably the most severely affected by the uh these costs uh to discuss these and other issues related to open science. The committee has existed since 200 late 2023. uh currently has eight members across the road uh which we'll soon meet and we have decided to put together this webinar to discuss uh the question of uh equitable publishing and how to transition to diamond openx model for the same we have invited four panelists for packet from s paulo Brazil Ashley Farley from the gates foundation fernel fromo in Argentina and Shane also who will be representing you live in the webinar And I will now uh oh actually just before I pass on to Rosman Zikin who will be moderating the session uh Elf does have a code of conduct to foster a transparent constructive and collaborative environment. So we uh urge all people to be collegial and uh open-minded and and open to to listen to try to include everybody here uh and embrace diversity opinions, perspectives and beliefs. If you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome at any point during during this webinar, please send us a direct chat message or contact the life safety team at that email. We will be again we will be recording. So uh if you do not want to be recorded please do not uh turn on your camera uh this will be shared later uh and uh concerning question at the end. So each panelist will speak for around 10 minutes which leaves us around half an hour at least to of of time for Q&A in the end. You can send uh questions both by via the Q&A uh function or the chat function. uh Q&A gives us more structured list of questions. It's easier for us to manage but on chat you can talk to everybody. So I mean feel free to use whatever alternative you you think is best. We will the Q&A questions only come to us panelists. So uh we'll be taking note of the questions and passing on passing them on to to Rosen so she can mediate the discussion in the end. I think this is pretty much it. So I'll pass uh and oh and there's also a feedback form. Sorry. Uh so if you can uh share fill this feedback form at the end of the webinar uh with it's a very simple form just for feedback on the session. We'll be really glad to to hear from that. Uh this is about it for housekeeping. So I'll pass on to uh Roseman Zenini who is moderating uh today's session and uh I leave you to Roseman and the panelist. Uh thank you very much for coming. >> Thank you Oliver and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining our session today and I hope you can hear me very well. Oliver, can you hear me? All right, great. So, I am delighted to welcome um my fellow committee members uh alongside today's panelists as they all join to discuss today's topic. Um before we do so in introducing um the panelists as well as talking about today's topic I would like to provide a little bit of background on our committee um ELIFE global south committee for open science was initially formed in 2023 specifically in the month of July and the committee brings together researchers from countries and territories that share characteristics with regards to socioeconomic politics um li limited representation and policy influence on key issues regarding open science. The committee provides a dedicated space to work with E Life towards greater involvement within science communication and innovation and its pillar of guidance in improving E life's outreach and support to researchers in the global south. Our committee as you can see currently consists of eight members with our membership spanning Africa, Asia and India and Latin America. So the first person as you can see is um Olavo who welcome who introduced the session today. We have Henry, we have Shandana who is also present and Habetto who is the current chair and then myself um from Ronda and I'm also the co-chair and then we have Muhamad Karolina and Mercury from this part of the world. Moving forward, today's webinar will explore the transformative potential of diamond open access as a foundation for a fair and equitable publishing ecosystem. We will define what diamond open access mean, examine how it removes financial barriers for authors and readers, and outline practical pathways towards communityled models. We're going to draw from global we're going to draw examples um all over the world and we will highlight the structural financial and governance frameworks needed for sustainability. Clarify the roles of key stakeholders and emphasize the collaboration required to build more equitable scholarly communicable system. And now allow me to introduce our first guest speaker who is no other person than Shane Asso. So Shane is publishing development manager at El Life where he helps develop promotion and adoption of open access publishing agreements with institutions, funders and society partners. He also supports outreach and community initiatives and has helped socialize the e-ife model across the global network of researchers and institution. Shane, we invite you to share your screen and you're highly welcome. >> Thank you so much Roslin and Davo for the introduction. Uh it's a real privilege to be here today. Um I'm just going to make sure that I'm sharing the correct screens. Uh, can you see the necessary slides and do they appear correctly? [sighs and gasps] Fantastic. I'm juggling a couple of screens today. Um, so bear with me. Great. Okay. Um, yeah, it's a pleasure to be here today and a real privilege. Um, I will start with a brief sort of introduction to ELIFE. Um as Alavio mentioned uh we're sort of operating a new model of publication that's sort of centered uh within the ecosystem of PRC or publish review curate. Um but I'll get on to that in a bit more detail shortly. So Elife was established in 2012 uh as a missiondriven organization uh that was focused primarily on improving research communication and research assessment. Uh we publish reviewed preprints in the life of medical sciences and in addition to our publishing and peerreview operations we also have a technology team um that work to develop open source platforms uh primarily for the review organization and dissemination of research um in our case reviewed preprints and for initiatives or uh other organizations that seek to experiment with the principles of PRC. uh we have a sort of broad goal to disrupt research communication and assessment for the better. So over the last three years in particular, we've been working very deliberately uh to reform research assessment through the design, the launch and operation of our new publication model. Uh and this is a model that centers on the peerreview and publication of preprints. So uh this is a publishing process uh known as PRC or publish review curate. Uh so one key aspect of this approach is that uh we only peerreview research that's first made available as pre-print. Uh so dissemination happens first and then peer review and curation uh then adds a really valuable evaluation and context to that particular research article. Uh another major novelty that alluded to is the fact we've eliminated the accept and reject decision after peer after peer review. um instead publishing alongside all review preprints um all of the associated reviewer materials. So the reviewer comments, the author responses if and when available, but also uh the ELIFE assessment um which is a short paragraph that's written in conjunction with the reviewer and the editor uh to assess all of our reviewed uh preprints alongside two axes which is the significance of the findings and the strength of evidence. Um, and this is an approach that we favor over the binary outcome of accept or reject post peer review. Uh, and there's a number of reasons that we do this. Um, the goal of our model is to introduce more transparency into the peerreview and publishing process. We want to uh incorporate more accountability back into that process and also maximize the utility of those re review objects. Um, so in traditional peer review, those really rich evaluations that can add to the public discourse around a particular article are typically lost and particularly if rejected after peer review. Um, and so they will typically never see the light of day. We always think that it's valuable to publish these things as a continuation of the discourse around a particular article. Um, other benefits of this model uh include the fact that uh peer review is made more visible and accountable as I've discussed. uh we produce more nuanced assessments rather than binary decisions. Um so this helps us to move away from uh flawed metrics such as uh journal level metrics such as impact factors that we know are flawed for the sakes of research assessment and towards more article level evaluation. Uh it also enables faster dissemination of research. So our current median time from submission to publication of the first reviewed version is around 95 days whereas it's around 250 in our Lexi model. uh and more widely uh we can expect to see average time to publication of around nine months. So it's drastically faster and this approach also allows the community to build on the reviewed science much more quickly. This is how it looks. So this is an example of an EIFE article. We can see the ELIFE assessment above the abstract. The terms highlighted are uh examples of our controlled vocabulary um which were drafted through sort of the distillation of around 2,000 evaluation uh comments from editors that summarize sort of the the key um sentiments around significance of findings and the strength of evidence. We can see the peerreview uh artifacts are all available on each preprint that we publish and the publication and review history is available on the right hand side and you can toggle through all previous versions and make available those peerreview um versions too. Authors uh say that they appreciate the accelerated publication times, the increased transparency, and the reduction of waste uh via um multiple rounds of sort of um typically unnecessary rounds of revisions that you can expect in traditional modes of of peer review. Since we launched the model, we've seen broad support of our PRC approach from authors, but also from funders um and from the wider community. uh we recently showed that uh more than 100 organizations have publicly declared their support uh for ELIFE and their continued uh inclusion of ELIFE articles in hiring tenure and promotion consideration. So we're not operating in in isolation. We're really part of a broader um movement working towards uh the reform of research assessment. So if uh E-Life's mission is as Lava mentioned to encourage and recognize the most responsible behaviors in uh research, how can we propagate this model and ensure scalability beyond EIFE and there's a number of ways that we can do this. Uh one strand is through awareness building and socializing the model uh through open engagement and discussion thought leadership pieces uh and uh importantly talking with cander and transparency around how the model works and how it's going. Uh we publish yearly updates. Um and we have the year three forthcoming in the coming weeks. Um uh and most importantly through community feedback. So through author surveys and the like to make sure that we can iterate uh into a way that's most beneficial to our author communities. Uh but another approach that's really important is to support the work uh with initiatives um across the entire preprint feedback ecosystem. um right from discovery tools like Europe PMC and society to preprint feedback communities like pre pre-review and pre-lights um as well as those groups that are running journal like uh communities such as um meta raw science collab and PCI or pig community in um and this also extends to those preprint servers like bioarchchive CL and archive etc and provide that foundational infrastructure uh for PRC. So if this approach to peerreview is to shift research assessment culture, it really has to become more of a broader movement um rather than trying to come from one single entity. But uh and this is where today's topic becomes really important. Reforming how research is evaluated also requires reforming how it's funded. So open access has removed readersside pay walls. Um and we see there's a growing movement to remove authorside financial barriers as well through diamondlike approaches. Uh and these are approaches defined by the likes of Coalition S as being an equitable model of scholarly communication where authors and readers are not charged fees for publishing or reading. Uh they're typically more sort of community-ledd or community owned. And so we see that reform rider requires that dual sort of approach. Um we can experiment with publishing processes that emphasize speed robust and rigorous peerreview processes that introduces um simultaneously transparency and accountability into the process um which has been our primary focus for the last three years. But in parallel, we need to develop new fair and equitable business models to help sustain those processes. So where where are we at this moment in time? Um our publishing and peerreview operations are sustained through a $3,000 APC which is collected when we invite a submission to peerreview. Uh so as a nonprofit, this is levied for sustainability rather than profitability. Um and underlies our peerreview and publishing operations. It also covers our stipens for editors. uh as well as subscriptions to thirdparty vendors for managing peerreview, production processes, archiving, staff costs, etc. as well as marketing and outreach costs. Um but it's also enabled us to grant 100% of fee waver requests uh since we launched in 2012. Uh with this said, we do really acknowledge that APCs remain inequitable um particularly for research in the global south as mentioned. So, it's not surprising that diamond models have really gained traction in those regions. And I'm really excited to hear about some initiatives um later today. We're also hearing this reflected back in our conversations with librarians and head of collections, open access services, etc. um who mentioned that library budgets are under significant pressure. Uh many institutions are left having to cancel subscriptions simply to manage their existing commitments. Uh so in this context adopting new funding agreements uh even missional aligned ones can prove difficult. Uh there might be appetite from an institution to support innovative uh models but budget flexibility doesn't always um match that particular appetite. Um so yeah the institutional capacity to redirect funding into new agreements can be limited. So in the meantime we've begun to develop new business models that are designed to reduce our reliance on author facing uh fees. uh and one of which moves completely away from the per article um charging logic. Uh we operate two types. The first one being the centralized scheme. Uh under this model, the institution makes up front a payment into a uh into an account and publication charges for eligible authors are deducted from that fund um as the articles are invited to peer review. Uh this continues on a uh uh on a rolling basis until or unless terminated by either party and the institution uh prepays to fund an account for eligible authors. Uh the initial amount is based on recent publication history uh between the institution and ELIFE and covers at least one quarter. We monitor this payment on a monthly basis. uh we request top-ups if necessary and then if we've overestimated the number of publications that come out on any given year, we'll then go through a reconciliation process at the end uh to make sure the institutions only ever pay for the exact number of articles that have actually published. We have ongoing uh agreements with uh those in the US and Europe including HHMI and the Bibam Consortium and this been in operation for about two years now. Um, our most recent publishing model is the uncapped scheme, which has been in operation for just over a year. Um, and this is a two-year agreement term. The fees for year one and two are preset based on publication history between ELIFE and a given institution. And again, the funer of the institution will pay the fees and the corresponding authors uh, including authors affiliated with any any child organizations um, as defended by RAW can publish any number of publications during that agreement term. So even if they publish far greater publications than we estimated, they're still covered under that initial agreement. Enrollment into the scheme also offers protection for institutions against any eventual increase in APCs or publishing costs. So it provides more predictable budgeting um and is followed by negotiation process at the end end of an agreement term as to whether or not to extend. Uh this contributes to a more equitable and sustainable system. uh no individual author fee or financial barriers for authors who want to publish in e life independent of their ability to pay and also simplifies the the logistics too. Uh we have this agreement uh uh in place for around a year just over a year and in 2025 um the MIT libraries Imperial College uh London Francis Gre Institute and the University of Sheffield all entered into this agreement with us. So as I mentioned um uh as well as the benefits that our model affords offers uh we can provide all of these benefits through an agreement with be life um as well as compliance with OA mandates which is really important. Um we know that this is not yet diamond but it's important work that we're doing to reduce our dependence on the APC um and in the uncapped scheme helps us move away from the fee per article paradigm. So what's next? Um, as I mentioned, we don't see our current models as the end point, rather the start point of our shift towards uh business models that will help reduce our reliance upon APCs to help sustain our peerreview and publishing operations. Uh, we're speaking with national consortia to harmonize logistics across various institutions. Um, beginning to explore sort of collective funding mechanisms. Um, but we recognize that this transition will likely involve mixed or a hybrid of models for some time before we can realize a fully diamonded future. Uh in the same way that open access has removed barriers for readers, we recognize that the next challenge is reducing and ultimately removing those financial barriers for authors wishing to pay uh wishing to publish in e- life. Um so much like open access was and continues to be a direction of travel for many in the OA community, so too is uh sort of diamond open access increasingly becoming a direction of travel. And that's where we find ourselves today. So, uh, my colleague speaking next will be able to help us imagine what a fully diamond OA future could look like and how we collectively can move into that direction. Um, I'll leave it there and welcome any questions at the end of the session. Thank you. >> I'm going to take this time now to introduce the next speaker. And once again, thank you Shane for opening the floor with the very powerful presentation on what El Life is currently doing in terms of diamond open access publication. Our next panelist is Ashley Fley. Welcome Ashley. Ashley is a senior officer of knowledge and research services at the Gates Foundation. In this capacity, she leads the foundation open access policy implementation and associated initiatives. She complements her masters in library and information science through the University of Washington information school. She has a deep passion for open access, believing that freely accessible knowledge has the power to improve and save lives. Welcome once again, Ashley. Over. >> Thank you. Just confirming everyone can see and hear my SL. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Rosalyn. Great. I'm very excited to be here today to share some of my thoughts and work around diamond open access. So, first I thought I would start with why does the Gates Foundation care about open access? And I think there's kind of three uh pillars that are important to us um especially as as a funding organization. um working in I think topics globally um increasing speed and accessibility of research dissemination continues to be something um that's incredibly important um not just publications but also data sharing that helps us make informed and quick decisions as we're trying to solve really tough problems uh and then the second pillar is promoting equity and knowledge sharing. So this is something that we really want to improve um uh in the ecosystem and we see kind of the current inequities that are continually persisted in in the traditional publishing system. Uh and then the third one you know kind of covers both but we want to reduce the influence I think of commercial publishing which I think uh helps perpetrate the inequities and knowledge sharing and kind of the outdated metrics. So that ties in with the you know needing to assess uh researchers and and have different incentive system uh uh to promote a better outcome of knowledge sharing in general. So those are kind of the three main pillars that why Gates Foundation is cares about open access and and changing in the publishing ecosystem overall. Here's kind of the vision that we've set. Uh I think it's a very very bold vision. I will say that I don't necessarily think that the current iteration of our open access policy is the end all beall of open access policy but I think an important pivot to try um and and change the current system. So overall my main theme for my talk today and and how can we transition to a diamond open access model is that I think we all uh know what isn't currently working in the system. So I think stopping that and then being able to pivot and test and experiment with other models uh is incredibly important. So here's our overall you know vision is that we want to foster a publishing ecosystem that is truly equitable and inclusive. And I think a key piece of this is um being able to inspire cultural shift away from prestige and privilege in publishing to one that champions equity and access above all. And I think that kind of keeps us locked into our our current uh system. So last year may have known that we've changed our our open access policy. We've had an open access policy for over a decade now and it's had a couple different iterations uh as we you know see the external ecosystem change as we see what's been successful in achieving our impact in open access publishing and and what are the the the things that we're trying to continually change and strive for. uh as well as you know how much we've been spending on open access um uh and how you know how that impacts the broader um uh publishing and research community and as well as uh how much you know authors are able to retain their rights and be able to publish and share the information in the way that they want to. So we have you know over a decade of of learning um in the open access policy space and so we have changed our our policy beginning uh last year in 2025. Uh we moved kind of the requirement of of what we're requiring to be made open access to to the pre-print. So we no longer require the journal version of record be made open access which is quite a big bold shift from the last decade of us saying that it has to be the journal version of record. But I think this is a really important shift as we we you know think about what needs to change in the system. I appreciate you know Shane mentioned you know that we need to change the way that we publish to also change the the business models and I think that's really key here. And so the preprint is is like in my opinion kind of the last vestage of uh what researchers have full rights over and control to share in the way that they want. Um and so that's what we're requiring. Um and that fulfills our open access policy. And then that gave us the ability to be able to shift how we think about spending for open access. And we discontinued support for individual article processing charges. And then that then shifts us into our third pillar where that gives us the opportunity to then reinvest in in different business models and and infrastructure. So how is it looking so far? So uh you know we've only had a year of of this policy, but we've already seen and learned some I think very interesting um things. We know publishing can take a while. So, you know, we still covered um APCs for all the submissions in 2024 prior to the policy change. Um uh but yeah, we're we're still kind of tracking where our grantees are are publishing. The open access even at the version of record is still happening. Um uh however, we still see that there's a strong, you know, evidence the current state of the academic career incentive and prestige driven publishing of course hasn't been solved in that year. um uh and still continues to be a barrier, but we've seen the pre-print landscape grow. Um we've seen kind of better integration with systems. We've seen uh improvement in the use of creative common open licensing, which is uh important for us. So, we want those preprints to be openly licensed, the CC by license for reuse. And so, we're working more closely with uh preprint servers to make those improvements. And then uh we've also seen of course with the rise of of AI um uh you know both you know servers publishers and and and everyone kind of um unpublishing uh dealing with the impacts of of you know increased submissions and increased quality control and then the reinvestment. So um you know now we are able to kind of rethink what are those alternative sustainable equitable business models and how do we how do we start supporting those um uh how do we scale them and I think there's there's still a a lot of unknowns in this space but we're we're starting at least small and and learning a lot and and then scaling from there. So here's a a quick look um at at some of the highlights of of what we are seeing just in the first year of of the open access policy. So we've seen a small dip in like overall journal article publications but nothing that was really outside of the the normal trends. I think we are seeing a recovery of our these are all of our grantee publications. So anything that cites a Gates Foundation grant um I think we're seeing some recovery from kind of the uptick during COVID. Uh um but now we're you know leveling out and there's a lot of um variables that go into this as far as like how large the grants are, the grants where they are in their project cycle, things like that. But typically um 3500 to 4,000 articles is what we see per year. But we've seen a huge uptick in in the pre-prints. So we went from encouraging preprints to requiring it. We saw a 39% increase. Uh which is great to see just in the first year. We've been working a lot with our grantees talking them through uh you know what pre-printing options are, what it looks like, kind of dispelling a lot of the myths that still persist around um preprinting. I will say that we had a very low um preprint input to begin with. So we know that from a policy compliance perspective that our preprint numbers would begin at a low rate and we we would need to work hard to get that number to increase and that's exactly um what we're doing. Um, and then we're able to see kind of the the divestment from APCs. So, we spent almost half of our our typically it's around a $6 million budget for for APCs. Um, about half of that uh was recouped in the first year and then reinvested. So, what does that that look like? So, this is what we've started just kind of in the first year. Uh so we knew, you know, stopping APCs uh across the board um also then had the potential to to hurt nonprofit publishing players that we've been p publishers that we've been good partners with over the years. Um so we do have an agreement with PLAS to to explore alternative uh APC models for them and to cover our granties publications as well as also including waiverss for plus global health. So, it's really important to me that not only our grantees um continue to benefit in the open access publishing space, but really want to be able to make sure that we're investing in in systems and models that benefit all researchers. And that's been I think a hard shift. Um and I will also say that, you know, I don't think waiverss are the most equitable solution, but they're kind of what we have now to leverage. Um uh so that's been successful in the first year and then we still support um you like to mention of of e life as an kind of an alternative publishing model and then we also have our our gates open research platform. Uh we've started some small funding support for groups of European diamond capacity hub. Um I'm a big fan of the subscribed open model. I think it's open for discussion whether this would be considered a diamond model or not. But I think it's been one really great to be working with a group of of publishers that really get it and really want to take action. Um uh so they've been really working hard and taking risks to make change in in this business models. I think we've seen some really exciting early successes in the subscribe to open model. Also uh as a li you know the library um librarian it I love seeing the library community come together and really choose what they want to support. Uh so I think there's there's um a lot of potential there and it also leverages the current um infrastructure for kind of those journals and it makes it a more cost-effective flip uh to open. Um, of course there are caveats. Of course there's a lot left to be seen, but um, I think that's exciting. And we also kicked off a funding landscape that's happening this year uh, with lyricists, the Big 10 academic alliance and then, uh, California digital libraries um, to kind of see the status of open access journals here in the US and also supporting the growing community for diamond open access. So uh, earlier in February we had the third diamond open access in Bangaloo which was incredible. Uh it's an amazing community that's been growing over the last three four years. Um and I I think the theme in all of this is the really the community support and the community drivers in and taking back control of of uh publishing. So my overall theme is is you know action is what really changes things. Uh I I linked to uh a recent article by Bjorn Brems and and this sentence really uh struck me and stood out to me. So as as long as debate substitutes for action, dependency deepens and then each year consolidates corporate dominance and narrows the window of opportunity for self-determination. I think um especially this year, this is truer than ever. And and so encouraging uh individual stakeholders to take action, of course, easier said than done. Um, I know we we're still entrenched in a lot of inequities and a lot of systemic issues and being able to change the the publishing system. Um, but I I do think now is definitely the time to really push for change and I think there's a lot more momentum and support than we had when I first started this journey a decade ago. So I list out some actions that uh you know funders, authors or or libraries can take and kind of what we've seen kind of be successful. I think we know that there isn't more money in the system to invest in new things or to experiment with. So I I think I we have to kind of stop putting the money where where we know it's not benefiting us and then uh reinvest that in in the models. We definitely need to start to reward and highlight funded research that's published in in different venues. So a lot of what I hear from grantees is sure there might be a couple diamond mo journals that they could publish in, but those don't have the highest impact factor, the strongest standing. But if authors start publishing in those journals and supporting those journals, um editing and reviewing for those journals, that will start to really strengthen their standing and and make them more um appealing to to authors. Um, also for funders, you know, I've been doing a lot of work with Creative Commons and ASAP Bio, and we have a pre-print funders policy framework um that uh we've been socializing with funders because I think having a pre-print uh open access policy is one of the um easiest, most co cost-effective, most equitable open access policies to have at this point. And then for for um libraries, you know, uh I think there's been some incredible work around cancelling big deals, using vendor values, alignment frameworks um to choose who to work with. And I love seeing that work scale. And then we are seeing a lot of shifts in investment to open nonprofit infrastructure, alternative business models. And I also linked in here to a recent paper that I think is fantastic that really succinctly outlines the current drain of scientific publishing and also has a lot of um uh actions uh that anyone can take any at any point in their career. It's it's really well outlined as far as you know if you're early career researcher we know that there are a lot more risks there and taking certain actions but there are actions that that you can take to start to shift. I really do believe that these small changes and and movements and kind of you know taking um back control of of research um by the academic community will have a huge impact over the next couple of years and I will stop there. Thank you. >> Uh Fernanda is a sociologist. She holds a PhD in political social sciences uh and currently serves as a superior researcher at Konet at Argentina and uh she's the chair of the she has been the chair of the graduate committee for open science at UNESCO. She uh and the chair of the Argentinian national committee for open science uh and a winner of the Bernandovell prize in 2003. So uh Fernanda is a very uh knowledgeable scholar on open science open access and we take this program and we'll be very glad to hear from you. So I'll just stop sharing and you can share your own screen. [clears throat] >> Thank you very much. I will ask you just to confirm everybody's able to see what I'm sharing. Thank you. Thank you very much and thanks a lot Ashley because you you allowed me to start with one point that was made in our uh our article called the drain in which it not only means that publishing has a problem of marketization and the problem of of this incredible high costs that publish has achieved. but also the fact that we need to think about quality journals and to recommunalize which is one of the proposals in this paper that we call the drain. So [clears throat] in this case what I'm going to do today is in these 10 minutes to try to present all that we've been doing in terms of defining what a diamond journal is which is not so easy as it looks like and first of all to present to you this project which is the current project that we could say it's a synthesis of all that we've been doing in our research center from Mendoza Argentina and in collaboration with many people and many organ organizations in Latin America and even in Europe. And I think that first the first and most important problem that we face when we when we want to demarize all this scholarly publishing industry that has intervened so much in in scholarly publishing is that we really have a context in which the journals are believed to uh to to be a vehicle for high impact type publishing. And the idea of high impact, the idea of excellence has been for many decades built related to a certain type of indexation, a certain type of factor. So the main problem we have is the culture of publishing that we find and the culture of research evaluation that is pushing always towards this idea of excellence that is not precisely. So this project intends to fun the researchers to change the choice which is something that I think I we agree with Ashley. How do we change the choice? It's only a matter of trying to push people to publish in these journals and reviewers and high recognized researchers to be a part of committee etc or endorse like here in life. But the thing is that we have a ctography that this project has prepared of the diamond journals in the world that if you look at the diamond journals by country you will see that we have journals that are highly qualified type of journals and for all disciplines. Su as I will explain this later means a very important collection but for some reason in the diamond journal landscape world sciences copus has very very few journals and this it brings us a problem because it's not easy to find even the APC information we all know the lack of transparency spaces but the truth is that if you look at the diamond jas in the world you will find well we found that we had like about 18,000 journals and these journals are in the majority indexed in curated lists that are as you can see in the list not precisely websites focus where covers that commercial publishers have a very broad so I just want to check that we have two problems one is the the fact that in science scope we have the idea or the belief in Exodus but the fact that the diamond journals are not precise ly those indexing systems and that most of these journals diamond journals that are in world science or scopus do not have an identified country that means a lot that not necessarily means that we are in an international society or anything it could mean that they don't have a real institution or academic anchor so how do we define diamond journals today taking into account that we not only have to face the economic problem, the [clears throat] commercial side of the problem, but also that that we have to guarantee as a researcher that he or she's going to publish in equality journal in an academic journal. Autonomous with what we call autonomous editorship, which means that the community is really leading this job. It's not just a matter of money. uh that's why in this training uh paper we said well we have a problem of money but we also have a problem of control and so the definitions in general that I took here the most important ones agree that it's not only a thing about fees but it's all also a thing about the communitydriven type of scholarly publishing how can we go ahead in trying to foster da publishing taking into account that it's not only a matter of fee but also a matter of academ quality and this means that there are many non-dimemer journals that are community-led that are high quality journals that we have to help them to diamondalize let's say right so that's the difference of the focus that I can try to to argue here how can we solve in a matter of relatively small amount of time the problem of changing the culture and boosting the decision of the researchers to publish in diamond journals, academically quality journals that could shift to a diamond type of business model. And I think that the most important thing is to take into account how we can guarantee the quality of the tournament. So we have a lot of national indexes classification systems in the national scale. You could see them in the bottom of this slide. Christine well research information systems that do an evaluation of the journals. But the thing is that those national classifications have particularly certain features that could be nationally anchored. In the top of the slide, you can see that we have indexing systems that evaluate the quality of the journal and those are really regional or international kind of curated list of journals. I can uh obviously talk about the four Latin American index systems latex and I can assure that they have all these many many criteria that evaluate first of all the anchorage of these journals in an academic institution and in in second place all the the features that have to do with the academic autonomy of these journals. So if you have a journal that is indexed, it's multi-indexed in two or three of these indexed lists, I think we really have a quality journal and we're not uh working you know with this in impact factor or journal rankings as we said. wish you can go to the next level. What I did here and I won't have time because of these technical problems to talk much about this table but this table only is looking for a comparison and to show you of all the DOA or diamond open access standards that are in discussion currently in the DOA mass industry projects that we have. Well, what we have here is uh several features that have to do with quality and these all if you see are mainly included in these first um four index and systems. I I see now your in the chat your message level. Thank you very much. So maybe two just two or three minutes more. And so in these first four indexing systems, the first four rows that you see in the left systems, it's interesting that the multilingualism or gender kind of features are not explicitly evaluated because most of these journals are published in Portuguese, Spanish, and of course they are mostly not in English. But if you look at the scopus or web science grows at the end for example scopus or web science the problem we have is cannot assure not even the legal ownership most of the times funding most of the times open science either because we have all these hybrid and different roots. So I think that we can and we should go for a project that intends to to boost what we call this multi-indexation quality indexation to try to show the importance of the diamond journals that are included in this curated list. So the the [music] next slide please. The diamond uh the diamond future project intends to create a website. This is in preparation. We have already this architecture prepared prepared in which what we will offer are several resources and links to different projects of course but especially to a search engine that is already prepared by nationality plat which is called I will put in the chat the link for you to start looking at the exploration with and this tool is for evaluators and for researchers and this gives a report on the different indexation indexations that these diamond journals have working of course on our ctography that is showing. So I think that I can stop now to respect the time of following speakers. Thank you very much for all. >> Thank you Fernandanda for covering this. Now please let's welcome our final panelists for today Albert Parker. Thank you very much for inviting me uh to participate in this webinar. Congratulation to life and and and all the the committee uh very very very important initiative. We have been dreaming with the E life model for many years already. But uh of course uh there are tremendous uh difficulties or resistance to such a innovative model. I will uh share with you uh two graphics and one table that are very much related to uh the development of the CL model. uh uh and uh which uh the main problem is really a question of equity. So I let's see if if this work. Okay, this is very fast. This is three lines. the the the evolution of the number of of articles in uh uh Scopus in the last 20 years. And we have the articles that are published in journals of the same country of of the authors. No. And if you we take the percentage of of the evolution, we can see that the growth of of the percentage of articles that are published in foreign journals. Of course, these forign journals are commercial publishers. No. And those that p are published in the journals edit no published in the same country of the authors. No the trend uh if it continues it will reach at least in the corpus collection it will reach in the next two or three years uh 15%. No. And and when Ashley said of drain, this of course is is draining. No, what is not published in nationalally edited journals are going to uh be published with of course paying uh payment of the ABC. Uh in Latin America situation is is is terrible. No because we reached in the case of Brazil we had in in in 2009 33% of the uh articles published in in national editing journals and by that time it was when Brazil had the highest normalized impact internationally. So the idea that that if you publish it outside or in the what we call here I call in the prestigos that will increase the impact of the country that didn't happen in Brazil in this year probably will happen in in in the future and here I took a percentage of articles uh from open Alex uh that is published in in in journals or open access be gold diamond or hybrid no and we can see that worldwide the growth is is annual growth uh is 14% no and I took the comparison between United Kingdom and Brazil and we can see that even when Brazil is still remain as as as as a high percentage of the open access the growth is decreasing. No, and and and and if we look uh at the corpus no this the growth is less. So we have a situation where the number of articles published in nationalally edited journals is decreasing and the the articles that are published in commercial journals are increasing uh the rate of uh open access is is is the situation that we we are facing in this strategy to develop CL. So let's talk very first about the way we see no the equity in the development of cell we we focus we center the the the issue of equity in is thetomy mainstream and regional Germans no and we depart from this because I work many years in the health science and and we work very much with uh access of information to lessening health inequity. But the health inequity uh the world health definition says is systematic. Okay. So it's not random. It's not casual. It's systematic. It's structural. It's unfair in just avoidable difference in health outcome. No. and and and they say that health inequity comes from social determinance of health which is where you born, where you live, where you work and and and and etc that determines your health condition. So social determinant of inequities in research communication considering the dichotomy between mainstream and regional which which is a concept that has been disseminated by publishers and incorporated by national uh uh research systems and the national evaluation system. So uh that is a a a very established inequity that we need to work uh in many dimension to overcome it. you know so it's systematic no is geographic linguistic as as as I said here before and in terms of geographic we consider also not only the commercial gen but many of the open access jun like plus and even el life but they are much more centered know let's say in in strategy of research communication that is linked to the concept of the mainstream. No, mainstream means top quality, regional means second quality. No, and and and and that is a problem that is structural. No, incorporated by research community and so unfair. Fernando already told so we have indexes bias. Uh we publish very critical research in journals edited nationally in in in the CL network which are undervalued by this uh uh uh dichotomy and avoidable of course. You know research evaluation policies is it needed to be and and and can be uh changed and the system funding system valuation point and the pro central problem to overcome no is this the structural systematic confer and avoid is investment. No say so what Brazil what Chile what the other country invest in the mainstream journals and what they invest in uh local national the difference is uh sometimes 10 times no so for example today the the the transformative agreement in Brazil uh there is an average that of um uh $2,000 per APC in these hybrid journals, no to be publishing. And the cost of uh an article uh top quality article in Cello is around $300. So it's 15% no less or or of the total invest. So that that is the main problem we we uh uh consider. No. So how to overcome uh uh uh towards no we we um have this yellow model that we defined as open science no models oper five years already we are moving journals to the idea of uh open science model which tremendous resistance and we have this broad concept of impact as as a criteria diversity equity inclusion and accessibility. We are dev in all these dimension. So we have a concept know that the programs yellow which defines what should be. We have there the principles no open access uh knowledge is a global uh global public uh good uh objectives and so on. So these are the concept you know very much based in the uh uh online publication. Of course the yellow publishing module is actually how you implement if you want to start a collection in a new country. Okay, that is you follow the uh CL publishing model and in 6 months 8 months you have a collection uh working with all complexity that involves the CL methodology and the CO network is the adoption no appropriation of the model at national level network is is is very very difficult to implement very difficult to operate But the the gains are incredible know in terms of course division of labor, interchange of experience, division of funding and also the management of asymmetries. No uh uh in in different topics. No. Uh which is centralized system simply cannot do. No, the the the management of of of asymmetries. So I I listed here for those that are interested for documents that set the foundations of the model. So final notes I just needed to remember that CL is the oldest open access model. It has shown to be sustainable based on the concept of the decentralization. Okay. Decentralization in terms of uh development of national capacities and national infrastructure. No. Uh s network work in 20 this this month operating in 18 countries. We hope to reach 20 countries by the end of the year. uh uh is very complex of course adopted the the yellow methodology uh uh but the gains are very very open science model we continuous evolving know the idea is that all the publishing started know the flow in Seattle preprints but that is is is very difficult because it is not recognized ized by national research system is not recognized by national evaluation system and for example in Brazil if you finish a master degree for example you need to publish an article for example so and and the article is expected to publish in a journal no and they need to do that in a hurry and a high percentage of his articles are publishing in predatory journals or Nike predatory journal which is terrible. They should be published in a preprint no and and so on. So we have yellow data w which follows Harvard [clears throat] data versse technology. Uh the idea is at each journal we have uh a repository no link we have also books which is now uh decentralized by country and promoting transparent evol evaluation as much as possible. So the progress um uh the idea that that we uh focus politically and and programmatically and in terms of methodology in technology is overcoming the mainstream regional context that embody embeds the main inequities in research communication. So we are looking always for equitable funding. No. And and and we are not uh deep far from that I think and the consolidation of the open science operation. So a strength in the national time. So we have to stop. >> Okay. The last the last phrase is changing the national sovereign through national capacity and infrastructure. Thank you. >> We have we're now up for the Q&A. You can leave questions both at the chat and at the Q&A box. Uh so uh feel free to there there are some questions of Q&A ready. I mean Ashley has been answering them very very helpfully. But if I can make if I can start with one of those which I think is more general uh I mean people uh I think it was uh sorry Pavitan uh asked whether transformative agreements would blunt the impact that the gates foundation is trying to create in the community. I think more than one person mentioned the idea that I mean the burden may fall upon institutions or upon uh countries perhaps to to to do this do do this transformative agreements where you pay APCs up front. Uh Brazil has made a big investment in this as as Abel uh has mentioned. So I would like to hear your thoughts on that whether that is a welcome development in terms of allowing open access or whether that may actually make the market even less transparent and more bundled. I mean we talked about bundles I mean naturally talked about bundles uh bundling uh access to papers and uh access to to publishing and in the end that also comes up to be a big bundle. So, I'd like to hear your thoughts on on how do you see this trans transformative agreements impacting for better or worse the current landscape and I think everybody can come. >> Do you want do you want me to just start with with that one? Uh I I can I can talk out kind of the answers that I put in in the chat. Um historically I have not been a proponent of transformative agreements. I do think that yes they have served a purpose and they have had uh success in making a large volume of uh articles open access but there was one uh I believe it was a UKG study uh don't quote me on that I should look it up but there was the one study that showed that if we were on this continued trajectory of transformative agreements as they are progressing now it would take 70 years to flip to a more normative open access landscape. Um, and I I hope we have more urgency than that. I would um in in transforming the system. I also think that they're often uh not cost-effective, not transparent. It's it's really hard to tell which journals are included, what um we've seen issues with meeting caps and and so I just think they're they're they're not to the benefit of the institution. I think there's a benefit to the publisher who holds them and then definitely a benefit to the researchers which is good. Uh it makes it very easy for them to to have their articles covered but um I think that that also kind of causes the issue where we continue to have those costs hidden so that authors and researchers aren't thinking about that. And we do know it does cost to to sustain publishing. Um, I would say, you know, it doesn't cost $12,000 to make an article open access as as we see and we see that often the large commercials have a very healthy profit margin, but it is cost and and and labor should be supported. So, you know, how do we find that that middle middle ground and um I think TA's just lock us into the the current uh uh uh status quo of of publishing and and would like to see that that change. And I'm excited to hear others thoughts on that. Yeah. Uh uh I I I will uh to uh uh make two consideration based in what is happening in Brazil. Okay. So the idea of increasing the open access of the Brazilian scientific production the only way they found is through the transformative agreement. Okay. So that that that has this. So uh as I showed in uh uh the table you if you go to to to Netherlands for example they have 85 90% of of the articles in open yaks Germany and so uh the transformative agreement h is increasing uh the percentage of open access. So Brazil think okay we need to uh uh increase the open access of scientific production. So the way defined is the transformative agreement considering also uh that as you are paying for read why you don't pay also for uh for for for publishing. The second uh uh aspect that we are trying to mobilize from CL is that the transformative explicit. No, it it splited the high cost that is being invested in uh publishing and it embeds a tremendous inequity because if you are paying 2,000 no by article from let's say why you still are insist in a system that spended 2002 250 $300 per article in insurance uh uh of high quality. No. So uh uh this is a dimension that uh we are trying to exploit no whenever possible. uh and uh we seen uh the government policy and also uh uh we seen the the the the research community because the research community uh needed to be informed that not necessarily publishing in prestigious journal will increase the impact of the research but in the past what matter is where you publish it. No, the the the journal we publish that that was the the the because today as we change it to really even if it is obsolate metrics even if you go to measure the impact of research uh individually not where it is published there is a big change in in in this in this aspect. So that's >> so we have 15 more minutes if Fernando and Shane want to make quick remarks otherwise we can move to the next question. >> Happy to move to the next question. I see that Fernando's keen to answer that one so we can get straight into it. >> Okay. So Fis Mr. Hopus asks says the funders are often emphasized as a key stakeholders for driving the shift toward communitywide nonprofit publishing. But from his own experience and or her actually uh and understanding of the landscape, I would argue that national policies could play a much bigger role because they are what creates a level playing field among competing institutions. So the question is should we really be pinning our hopes on funders or should we be looking more critically at the systemic conditions closer to academic institutions policies, incentives and regulatory frameworks? Fernando was keen to answer that one. >> Thank you very much. If my voice goes away because of Wi-Fi, I'll take out my camera. What I would like to say is that indeed and this drain publishing article goes in both directions. We really see that funders have a role and they are related to the whole reform that we need in research assessment. That's something that is relevant. It's very relevant and in terms of the regional policies and funding, I I don't say this is not relevant. But what I do see is that we also have certain in certain countries these national classification systems that I show if a or people from Brazil agree with me I hope you can agree with me the national qualis evaluation system has a very relevant role it's for Brazilian researchers it's really the thing they look it's the list that they look when they publish also so I think that national policies and particularly these national classification systems in terms of journals but also in Latin America or in Spain also the national accreditation that researchers face and the value that the journals are given there and this is the national scale are also of an critical role in this change of culture that we're looking for and finally I wanted to say that when I work with the international association of universities or the regional association universities. I've always told them that there is like a kind of local um change actor change gaming. Oh, my English is awful today. Change gaming actor that we we have in hand which is the university. Just having one recctor, one president of a university checking of the of the university journals that they publish and checking the situation they have if they have support can make a change, a very relevant change. I've seen institutions, universities in France with very recognized institutes that used to publish a very prestigious journal and they've been h not hijacked but bought by the commercial publishers. Well, can we can we reconquer all these journals for the universities? How the funders can help? But you know through the universities I I think we have a medium range kind of actions to take. >> Anyone else wants to pitch on this one? >> I mean, I'll just say it's it's an excellent question that I just say yes. uh uh but I think it's uh it's more complicated and and especially for my context here in the US like we've seen some strong policy movement at the national level for the National Institutes of Health and and they've pushed for immediate open access. They're uh trying to do something about APCs, but it's yet to be seen what that looks like. But I think it's um it's it's quite slow to get them engaged and I think especially uh academic institutions in the US we've we've had um you know DORA and we have Helios which is um um a group who's been working with institutions for change and there's growing growing interest is just I think um very slow to get get these systems to change but I I I do think that there's an overemphasis sometimes on funders But like we're lucky here at least from a private foundation standpoint at the Gates Foundation like we can change policy and practice fairly fairly quickly. Um and then hope that others follow. >> Uh well there are no open questions at the moment so maybe I can introduce another one. uh I think everybody here has been quite sympathetic about preprints in terms of uh making the very basic service that publishing provides which is putting an article online as open access a a very healthy alternative I think that goes that's the the center of what the gates foundation policy I think Elive reviews preprints for their reason as well has opened their own preprint uh server one thing I was ask is is is the sustainability model of our current preprint repositories I mean it is quite patchy I mean traditional uh repositories, archive, bio archive of matter have been sustained by a mix of institutions, philanthropy coming from different sources. Uh is this the ideal model? I mean how could we make this more robust in terms of of of of how this very very basic core of scientific publishing is funded? Okay. Uh uh preprinted servers cost money. Uh so you need to have funding, right? What we uh are doing in SEU is conceiving the public funding of of of journals to be extended. No. Uh to fund also the preprint because the idea is that we never presented preprint as something against the journal but something that is very much connected no uh to to journal. So uh we think that in the case of the yellow mod preprint is sustainable. What we have as problem in yellow preprint in yellow and I would say in your global south it's lack of state of art infrastructure. Okay. The infrastructure that we work mainly based in PKP which is fantastic is 10 year obsolate compared with the what the publishers are providing. So if we want to advance, open a open science, the international community like uh gates foundations and what need to invest in infrastructure that could be implemented easily in poor environments like we do with yellow. But this yellow is also an obsolute we have a state of art discourse prep and so but when you go step we we have obsolate uh uh uh interface. So the for me I am claiming that for years already PKP or another solution needed to receive millions and millions of dollars okay to make open access and open science sustainable and competitive because we cannot we we cannot make the equivalence of diamond insurance or open access to poverty. No, we think that open access and diamond need to be competitive with the stage of the art in in publishing. No, that that is what we think. >> Anyone else wants to pitch on that one? Yeah, I say one one thing I think you know it's a it's an important question and something you know keeping an an eye on I think Abel's right about the the technology is really important infrastructure and historically funders aren't great at sustaining just infrastructure support usually funding is very project based and so that's that's that's something that's been discussed a lot but what's been interesting to me is is yeah just how overburdened some of the investment supports are in the system. So when we think about you know funding preprint servers take libraries for example there are libraries that support preprint servers and then they support you know the journal publication either through subscriptions or then also open access fees for one one article that is published at their institute. they could pay for it almost three times from kind of supporting the pre-print to supporting the journal publication and supporting access to to that publication. And I don't think that's a sustainable uh system, especially as we we see budget cuts. Um, I don't know the solution yet, but I I know that it's it's I think it's important to to track and we talk about financial flows and you know, now that that Gates isn't paying for individual APCs, we do know others are are picking up the bill. More privileged labs institutions, it's less of a strain. That's not true for everyone. Uh, but I think it at least is is really highlighting and honing in on where all the money flows are are going and and with that knowledge, I think we can make better decisions hopefully moving forward. >> If you want to stay updated on further events or other uh other developments in the same sphere, you can visit the life's community page, join the community newsletter and follow ELife community on on social media. uh we again we have a feedback form which I alluded to in the beginning of the slide and this uh webinar should be shared on YouTube uh over the next uh weeks uh and hopefully it will make a bigger impact and be available to everyone then uh in the name of the global south committee committee I'd like to uh thank everybody for for participating for bringing different perspectives hopefully this has been uh useful for everyone uh that is here and Uh I mean have a very good uh end of the day, afternoon, night, wherever you are and uh keep in touch. We'll hope we see each other in future.