Catriona MacCallum on why it takes 30 seconds to transform science.

Email: cmaccallum@plos.org
Twitter: @catmacOA
ORCID: 0000-0001-9623-2225

Information on the Feb 2016 Australian Outreach Meeting, and the official launch in Canberra of the Australian ORCID consortium  is here

Imagine a world where researchers can reliably keep track of – and receive credit for – the myriad ways in which they contribute to science – not just articles, books, data and software but peer-review reports, preprints, grants, blog posts, video and sound recordings, and not just complete stories but individual experiments, images, methods and analyses.

A diverse group of publishers and journals, including PLOS, eLife, the Royal Society, AGU, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE and the Science Journals, have banded together to help make this a reality by supporting the adoption of ORCID iDs, a persistent digital identifier for researchers, in their publication workflows in 2016. In an Open Letter, they outline their intention to require iDs from corresponding authors of accepted articles that will ensure researchers get credit for their work while reducing the reporting burden on them. The specific date of requirement in 2016 will vary and be added to the letter subsequently.

As Natasha Simons pointed out in a previous post on this blog, ORCID iDs are already integrated in the workflows of many publishers and other scholarly platforms. Indeed, there are currently more than 200 research platforms and workflow systems that collect and connect iDs from researchers. And almost 2 million researchers have registered for an iD, not least because it helps to distinguish their contributions from those of all the other Smiths, Jones or Zhangs in their field. Funders are also signalling their interest. The Wellcome Trust requires their grantees to use ORCID iDs in grant applications and others, such as the NHMRC and ARC in Australia, look poised to follow suit.

If ORCID iDs are being embraced so widely, why is this new commitment by publishers needed?

The rationale is to speed up the adoption and use of ORCID iDs within scholarly systems. This will benefit researchers, publishers and funders who want to ensure that appropriate credit is given for an output, and also help readers or future collaborators discover the work of particular researcher more easily.

Persistent identifiers are increasingly common. Most researchers are familiar with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), which are a unique alphanumeric string attached to a digital object, most commonly an article, book or dataset. They persist because they contain stable information (metadata) about the object even if the URL to the website where the object is hosted changes or the object is hosted on multiple websites.

DOIs work because they have been adopted by 1000s of publishers and libraries as the de facto standard for identifying and locating scholarly digital objects. They are an accepted and essential part of the scholarly infrastructure – a key machine-readable connector in the global digital network, with registration organisations such as Crossref and DataCite acting as a junction box.

In many respects, an ORCID iD provides the equivalent of a DOI for researchers – enabling articles and datasets and a host of other outputs to be linked unambiguously to specific individuals – while ORCID the organisation is the junction box. To register for an iD takes about 30 seconds and is free, and it’s up to the researcher to choose which data and fields are made public in the ORCID record associated with their iD (e.g. see Jonathan Eisen’s public record as well as the privacy policy on ORCID).

In the open letter, the guidelines for publishers includes a requirement that the metadata they already send to Crossref with DOIs also include the ORCID iDs for authors. This will help reduce the reporting burden for researchers (e.g., to funders or institutions) because Crossref’s new auto-update function means that researchers can choose to have their ORCID record automatically updated with any new article, book, dataset (or other object) that already has a Crossref DOI.

An oft repeated sentiment is that the value of open access is to enable others to discover and build on work that already exists. But making something freely available on the web is just a first and somewhat limited step. Persistent identifiers, such as DOIs and ORCID iDs, are crucial to building the infrastructure for Open Science and enable discovery not just of the work itself but also of the researchers who made that contribution possible.

Moreover, if we are to reform the evaluation and credit system, then we need to be able to reliably link scientists (in the broadest sense) to all their contributions. Making these traceable and transparent will help dispel the myths that the only valid contribution to science comes in the form of a published article or book and the only measure of quality is publication in a high impact journal or established monograph press.

ORCID iDs provide the digital glue to facilitate this. The hope is that the publisher’s Open Letter and joint commitment will accelerate the incorporation of ORDID iDs in every scholarly system.  There are many different ways that funders, research organisations and content providers can support ORCID (available on their website). If you are a publisher, make the commitment and sign the open letter. If you are a researcher take 30 seconds to help transform research – register for an ORCID iD and use it wherever you use your name.

See also the post about the initiative by Laurel Haak, Executive Director of ORCID.

Competing interests: Catriona MacCallum is a paid employee of PLOS, one of the organisers and original signatories of the Open Letter supporting ORCID. PLOS is also an unfunded partner in the EU THOR project, whose aim is to establish seamless integration between articles, data, and researchers across the research lifecycle.

 About the author: Catriona is currently the Acting Advocacy Director for PLOS

In a sequel to his Oct 9 blog, Anton Angelo writes on what happened next in their investigation of APCs at the University of Canterbury.

“Pain” LL Twistiti CC BY-NC

Let’s face it, Article Processing Charges (APCs) are a pain to understand and manage.  APCs devolve the costs of scholarly publication away from from the library, where subscriptions can be neatly reported on, monitored and centralised, to being the responsibility of individual researchers where payments are currently almost entirely untraceable.

We last left gentle readers with our efforts to understand how much the University of Canterbury was paying in APCs (Follow the money: tracking Article Processing Charges at the University of Canterbury).  Our next step was to launch a pilot where we had some central funds to pay APCs, and asked for applications.  This is the story of that pilot, and how it proved useful far beyond simply providing needed cash for researchers to make their work Open Access (OA).

The initial idea for the pilot came as a recommendation after we had analysed the data of our survey on APCs.  There were a number of threads we recognised needed to be addressed:

• The order of magnitude of the problem was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (and probably higher), an amount of spending by the university that could not be ignored.
• If the institution was supporting Open Access, then we needed to support that practically, whatever our thoughts were about Gold v. Green (or the horrid hybrid). Researchers should publish in the best possible place for their work, and when that was in an OA journal that required APCs, then it is incumbent on us as an institution to help with that.
• Libraries are constantly concerned about maintaining their relevance and launching an initiative kept the library in centre of the scholarly publications process.

The fund itself was set up quickly – $NZ10,000, and a six week application period at the end of 2015.  We knocked up a few web forms, sent out emails to Heads of Departments and advertised in the internal bulletin.  Criteria included; that local scholars were the lead author, journals and publishers were ‘reputable’ and early career researchers would be preferred if the fund was oversubscribed.  A crack committee of interested academics was assembled to assess the applications, chaired by me, as a facilitator.

The first application came in within an hour of the web form going live.

In all, six applications were received, from all parts of the University, totalling a request of $NZ11,000.  We found another thousand dollars so we didn’t have to reject any applications because of money, and went through them one by one.

The applications could not have represented the current state of Gold OA better.  Three of them accounted for 90% of the money, with APCs of $2,500, $3,000 and $4,500 apiece.  The most expensive was a hybrid journal, with a publisher that had no concrete reporting on how APC payments affected our journal subscription rates.

Two of the applicants were for PeerJ author memberships for one article.  The committee exercised itself over these, as the cost was for the submission of the article, not for its publication after it was accepted, as is the PeerJ way.  Though we decided to fund the membership only if the article had been accepted (and let the poor researchers suffer a financial loss as well as the indignity of rejection) the idea of sponsoring researchers to publish – and thereby sponsoring the model and publisher itself, was found to be Very Interesting Indeed.

The last application was the hardest.  From junior faculty, it was a request to publish with a “suspected predatory publisher” according to Jeffrey Beall.  We had included Beall’s list in our criteria of ‘reputability’ as well as h-index, inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and impact factors.  I had argued against formally including Beall’s list, as I have an issue with black lists being problematic. White lists and selection criteria are harder to manage, but fairer and less liable to bias, but Beall’s list has captured the academic imagination, so it was in.

I was trepidatious to tell the researcher that we had rejected their application and why.  In fact, the conversation went really well, and a teaching moment on the dark side of scholarly publication was not missed.  A new journal was targeted, and if the APC for that is applied for in a new round, it will be about NZD$3,000, rather than the predatory publisher’s $150.

Dealing with hybrid, predatory, ‘straight’ OA, and PeerJ’s memberships, virtually all the OA business models were covered.  A really strong set of examples mean that the pilot APC fund not only met our objectives above, but also let us work in practice with the implications of supporting OA.  We grew a supportive team in our assessment committee, who can take the message back to their communities, and we have successfully placed the library at the heart of the matter, practical, effective and principled.

The recommendation from this exercise is a strong one to continue funding OA APCs from a central source, if it hasn’t been allowed for as a specific line item in a grant application.  As more funders demand public access to research outputs as a result of their philanthropy, it will move from the policy of the university, to a practical necessity to have mechanisms in place to pay APCs.

We will never be in the position where all of the money that goes towards scholarly publication will neatly lie in one budget for journal and book purchases ever again.  This collaborative, but library led, approach was really successful as one of many ways we are going to need to rethink how we pay the costs for new knowledge to be disseminated.  APCs are a real pain, but fronting up and asking for support from your community can ease that, and even help with the communication about OA and changes in scholarly publication in general.

Postscript.

Once all the dust had settled, we asked for invoices so we could pay for the APCs we had funded. There was a little urgency, as we wanted to spend the fund within a particular budgeting period.  Of course, none of the authors were at the stage where they needed to pay for their APC charges.  Publishing is a notoriously slow and involved process, so we should have expected that this part of the process would be delayed. Discussions with colleagues who had run similar programs revealed they had suffered from the same problem. When this process scales up to cover more of our research output there will be a considerable administrative workload as the Library shifts from paying for entire databases worth of articles in one hit, to paying to publish each article from your institution.  Though most publishers offer institutional deals for covering APCs, they are not worthwhile to us from a purely financial perspective.  When we have a larger volume of publications APCs are due for, and once we account for the time of handling each invoice and payment, it may make more sense to do some kind of bulk deal with the bigger players.

 Anton Angelo is Research Data Co-ordinator, University of Canterbury.

Contact: @antlion

The Australasian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)  and Creative Commons Australia welcome the new initiatives in the government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda .

In a modern world both  publications and the data underlying them are equally important parts of research and their value and potential to contribute to innovation  are maximized when the publications and data are made openly available.

We therefore very much welcome the recognition of the importance of open data, as reflected in the creation of Data61. We also support the idea that new and additional ways of recognizing the impact of universities is needed – beyond traditional publications.

The Review of Research Policy and Funding Arrangements, which was announced on Friday, acknowledged the importance of open access to research results.

This is a pivotal moment and there is an  opportunity now to ensure that as part of, and in order to drive, innovation, open access to all parts of the research lifecycle – publications and data – is supported.

Hence, what will be important is the implementation of such recommendations and also how “open” is defined. The Open Access policy of the Higher Education Funding Council for England is a good model for driving open access to the research literature, with its emphasis on deposition of research results published in journal articles into an open access repository within 3 months of acceptance and made openly available at 12 or 24 months at the latest, with credits given to outputs that can be text mined – that is  with a license that allows reuse.

Open access to research data is now also increasingly being recognized as being a critical part of ensuring that research is reproducible. Publishers and universities, along with agencies such as ANDS,  are developing the necessary policies and processes.

We look forward to working on the consultation for, and implementation of, the new initiatives and would specifically highlight the need for:

• Adequate investment in the infrastructure to support open access to publications and data, including physical infrastructure such as repositories and in the skills needed to manage these policies and processes
• Appropriate consideration of licensing arrangements (such as through Creative Commons licenses) associated with all research outputs so that they can not only be accessed but also reused in the way that will maximize their impact.