"Access to science has to be open, because access to knowledge is a human right"

04/12/2019

The UAB recently held the international conference of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) 2019, in which specialists from all over the world debated extensively on the financing of the process of publication of scientific articles. This is one of the main challenges to ensure that scientific research, conducted mainly in public centres, is readily accessible to all people.

Currently, more than 70% of the research carried out is published in closed access journals. These publications are in the hands of big publishing groups that charge for subscription to institutions such as universities, in order for their technical and research staff to have access to the journals. However, PKP has already achieved to make more than 10,000 publications of free access. There is nevertheless still a long way ahead on the road to open science (OA). John Willinsky, however, is convinced that it will one day become a reality.

- What does the PKP do and what is its main goal?
- PKP is a research and development project of the Simon Fraser University and our goal is to develop and build software to help scholarly publishing. We build open source free software that others can use to publish journals and books online. We have 10,000 journals around the world that use our software, which is freely distributed and locally installed. The result is peer-reviewed journals, open and free to readers. Our goal is for all research and scholarship in the world to be freely available to the public and scholars everywhere.  

- You have been working on this project for twenty-one years. What have you achieved in this time? 
- Part of our achievement has been the over 10,000 journals I mentioned before. The majority of those journals are in the global South, so we are helping to create a more equitable distribution of knowledge, a global knowledge exchange, and we are helping voices, research and scholarship that have not normally been circulated widely, to be circulated globally. We are also part of a larger movement to create open access to all of the research in the world, and to date about 30% of that research is freely available. So, part of our accomplishment in twenty-one years has been to help facilitate the degree that is open to the public, to teachers, doctors and governments and others.

- What are the main challenges now faced by open access academic publications?
- The major challenge is that even though 30% of the research is freely available, 70% is locked up in the hands of largely major corporations that control and own this content. So, we are faced with the challenge of how do we move work that has proved very valuable. There is a very high profit margin made by these journals. So, moving from a highly profitable business to an open environment where the research is shared is a big challenge. Many of us have tried - not just the PKP - many experiments on different ways of making this work freely available. Because it is not freely produced, but we need some way of sponsoring and supporting the publication of very high quality research, and we need a way of distributing it that is free, even if it requires money to publish it. Of the many models that have been tried, we do not have one silver bullet. We do not have one way that is guaranteed to work or has proven itself to work and we are trying to find, through experiments and pilots, a way of moving all of the content, 100% of research and scholarship, to open access.

- How do you propose to overcome this challenge, what ideas do you have?
- We have two promising ideas. One is called “Subscribe to Open” and is asking libraries to pay what they paid for the closed subscription, to have them pay the same amount to make the journal open. The journal gets the same money and the libraries pay the same amount, but the big difference is that it is open to everyone. It should cost the same to produce, the same quality.  “Subscribe to open” is being tested by Berghahn Books, it’s got thirteen journals and annual reviews, and five journals that they are testing. Ad so far the libraries are saying “yes”, we are ok with that. This would be on model, although it only takes into account journals that already have a group of subscribers, and we have many journals that still need funding and that are already open.

The second project we have right now is to change “copyright”. Right now, copyright enables you to charge money to obtain the content seventy years after the death of the author. Copyright is very good for closing access; it is not good at all for opening access. I am personally working on a project to describe how we can change copyright law so that there is a part that supports open access. 

- One copyright law for OA?
First, it is necessary, obviously, to say that research is different than the music of Taylor Swift. She makes a living by selling her music and researchers and scholars do not make a living by selling their research. If copyright said “research is different than music and it needs to be immediately open and free, but it needs to be funded”, there could be a copyright law that sets research apart and that requires those principal users, like libraries and research institutes, to pay for it. Because they are getting this value of it. 

Actually, Taylor Swift has that kind of agreement, she has what is called a “compulsory license” - every musician does - where anyone can stream her music, but they have to pay her in order to do that. What we want is a compulsory license that means anyone can publish research, but it has to be made free and has to be supported by libraries that use it. If libraries do not use the research, do not think it is valuable research, they do not pay. But if they use it, they agree to pay to make it open.
 
The copyright law is important because with Taylor Swift the judges decide how much she gets, so they have copyright judges and we need that in research because the price being charged is not fair. So part of the reason I want to bring in a copyright law is to get judges to decide what is a fair price, just as they do for Taylor Swift’s music. 

- How can institutions such as the university work together in these proposals?
- We definitely need the universities to work together on this, and they need to participate in these experiments, in these pilots, to give us help. They need to see that it is a very important goal for the future of the university and that they cannot continue to pay far too high a price. 

- Is there any successful initiative you can tell us about?
- The copyright idea is brand new. “Subscribe to Open” has a level of success. We have two publishers who are trying it out for 2020, so libraries right now are deciding if they will participate and so far a good number of libraries have said “yes”. They are willing to pay what is typically a subscription fee, but they are subscribing to making the journal open. It is November now, and so, by the end of the year we will know for sure. 

There are other ways, the article processing charge has been successful. That is having authors pay. It has been very successful in the biomedical and some of the sciences, but only in those fields. That is a successful model. It has been very successful in terms of creating open access at quite high levels, such as the PLOS journals, they are doing very well by charging, but that is based on grants other fields do not have. So, it is not a universal model. Just for a field that has high grant levels, the authors can easily pay the article processing charges to make the article free. 

On the other side, we have very successful volunteers and scholars who come together to publish their own journals. More than 10,000 journals use OJS from PKP. Most of those journals are scholars or university departments or libraries working together. University libraries have been very successful in hosting and sponsoring journals. 

So, we have two ends, the very expensive biomedical field, and the cooperative model of scholars, but we have much more in the middle that we need to address. That is the challenge. 

- How are the publishers reacting to this increase of open scientific journals?
- In the last couple of years, they have all come on board. All the publishers today support open access, all the funders support open access. Most researchers support open access, all the librarians. So, we have a consensus of support that open access is better for science and scholarship than closed access, which seems quite obvious. But it took us a long time to get to that. What we do not agree on is how to pay for that, how to finance it. Everything I described until now has been an effort to address this economic issue: publishing for free is not sustainable and yet publishing in a closed way is hurting science. 

- What are private publishers doing to compete in OA?
- Today, they support open access. They did fight it, but not now. They recognize it is better for science. They are trying to keep their revenue very high. So they are proposing new models, where subscription money contributes to open access, which is a bit like my model, only they are doing it in a way that keeps the subscription, while cross-subsidising open access and creating a very complicated national scheme. Germany, Sweden and Holland have agreed to contracts with big companies, in which their subscription money, millions of dollars to these major publishers, will enable authors in their country to publish in open access. So, in the coming years there will be many Dutch and German authors whose articles are free. To me this is strange. You would open a journal and you can read freely Dutch authors, but Belgian authors you cannot. But for the publisher it is very good, because they are negotiating in every country with their own price and their own terms and they are in control of that process, and that is their position. There are too many countries in the world and I do not think it is workable.

- What is the reaction of researchers regarding the publishing of their work openly?
- 85% agree that open is important, but they have careers and they need to publish in very good journals and we have all of these traditions of success. While the vast majority supports and believes it is good for science, they do not have a choice, because not every journal is open, and they do not have the time and energy to focus on this issue on the way that I do. This is my research. We have their support, but we cannot yet offer what they need, which is every journal open.

- What would you say to the researchers who think the open access publication of their research is not positive for their work or prestige?
- The New England Journal of Medicine is open after six months, the most prestigious journal in the world in terms of number of citations; the top journal in biology is open completely. So, prestige is no longer a question. We have many examples, Nature Communications, The Royal Society. All the prestigious publishers have open access. You can get prestige with open access, but you have to pay. We are not arguing anymore about if open access is a good thing, no. We agree. But in how expensive it is, we do not agree. What is the best model, we do not agree. As you can imagine, we are all working toward open access, but in very different ways.

- Do you think one day scientific knowledge generated thanks to public funding will be available freely and for everyone?
- Yes, absolutely. More than that. It is not just publicly funding research; we do not believe research should be free just because the public paid for it. We believe it should be free because it is research. Because it is knowledge and we believe in the human right that people have to know.