And this is the chorus
This is the chorus
It goes round and around and gets into your brain
This is the chorus
A fabulous chorus
And thirty seconds from now you’re gonna to hear it again

This is the Chorus - Morris Major and the Minors

The Association of American Publishers have launched a response to the OSTP White House Executive Order on public access to publicly funded research. In this they offer to set up a registry or system called CHORUS which they suggest can provide the same levels of access to research funded by Federal Agencies as would the widespread adoption of existing infrastructure like PubMedCentral. It is necessary to bear in mind that this substantially the same group that put together the Research Works Act, a group with a long standing, and in some cases personal, antipathy to the success of PubMedCentral. There is therefore some grounds for scepticism about the motivations of the proposal.

However here I want to dig a bit more into the details of whether the proposal can deliver. I will admit to being sceptical from the beginning but the more I think about this, the more it seems that either there is nothing there at all –  just a restatement of already announced initiatives – or alternately the publishers involved are setting themselves up for a potentially hugely expensive failure. Let’s dig a little deeper into this to see where the problems lie.

First the good bits. The proposal is to leverage FundRef to identify federally funded research papers that will be subject to the Executive Order. FundRef is a newly announced initiative from CrossRef which will include Funder grant information within the core metadata that CrossRef collects and can provide to users and will start to address the issues of data quality and completeness. To the extent that this is a commitment from a large group of publishers to support FundRef it is a very useful step forward. Based on the available funding information the publishers would then signal that these papers are accessible and this information would be used to populate a registry. Papers that are in the registry would be made available via the publisher websites in some manner.

Now the difficulties. You will note two sets of weasel words in the previous paragraph: “…the available funding information…” and “…made available via the publisher websites in some manner”. The second is really a problem for the publishers but I think a much bigger one than they realise. Simply making the version of record available without restrictions is “easy” but ensuring that access works properly in the context of a largely paywalled corpus is not as easy as people tend to think. Nature Publishing Group have spent years sorting out the fact that every time they do a system update that they remove access to the genome papers that are supposed to be freely accessible. If publishers decide they just want to make the final author manuscripts available then they will have to build up a whole parallel infrastructure to provide these – an infrastructure that will look quite a lot like PubMedCentral in fact, leading to potential duplication of effort and potential costs. This is probably less of an issue for the big publishers but for small publishers could become a real issue.

Bad for the agencies

But its the first set of weasel words that are the most problematic. The whole of CHORUS seems to be based on assumption that the FundRef information will be both accurate and complete. Anyone who has dealt with funding information inside publication workflows knows this is far from true. Comparison of funder information pulled from different sources can give nearly disjunct sets. And we know that authors are terrible at giving the correct grant codes when they can bothered including them at all. The Executive Order and FASTR put the agencies on the hook to report on success, compliance, and the re-use of published content. It is the agencies who get good information in the long term on the outputs of projects they fund – information that is often at odds with what is reported in the acknowledgement sections of papers.

Put this issue of data quality alongside the fact that the agencies will be relying on precisely those organisations that have worked to prevent, limit, and where that failed slow down the widening of public access and we have a serious problem of mismatched incentives. For the publishers there is direct incentive to fail to solve the data quality issue at the front end – it lets them make less papers available. The agencies are not in a position to force this issue at paper submission because their data isn’t complete until the grant finally reports. The NIH already has high compliance and an operating system, precisely because they couple grant reports to deposition. Other agencies will struggle to catch up using CHORUS and will deliver very poor compliance based on their own data. This is not a criticism of FundRef incidentally. FundRef is a necessary and well designed part of the effort to solve this problem in the longer term – but it is going to take years for the necessary systems changes to work their way through and there a big changes required to submission and editorial management systems to make this work well. And this brings us to the problems for publishers.

Bad for the publishers

If the agencies agree to adopt CHORUS they will do so with these issues very clear in their minds. The Office of Management and Budget oversight means that agencies have to report very closely on cost-benefit analyses for new projects. This alongside the issues with incentive misalignment, and just plain lack of trust, means that the agencies will do two things: they will insist that the costs are firewalled onto the publisher side, and they will put strong requirements on compliance levels and completeness. If I were an agency negotiator I would place a compliance requirement of 60% on CHORUS in year one rising to 75% and 90% in years two and three and stipulate that that compliance will be measured against final grant reports on an ongoing basis. Where compliance didn’t meet the requirements the penalty would be for all the relevant papers from that publisher to be placed in PubMedCentral at the publisher’s expense. Even if they’re not this tough they are certainly going to demand that the registry be updated to include all the papers that got missed at the publisher’s expense necessitating an on-going manual grind of metadata update, paper corrections, index notifications. Bear in mind that if we generously assume that 50% of submitted papers have good grant metadata and the US agencies contribute to around 25% of all global publications that this means around 10% of the entire corpus will need to be updated year on year, probably through a process of semi-automated and manual reconciliation. If you’ve worked with agency data then you know its generally messy and difficult to manage – this is being worked on by building shared repositories and data systems that leverage a lot of the tooling provided by PubMed and PubMedCentral.

Alternately this could be a “triggering event” meaning that content would become available in the archives like CLOCKSS and PORTICO because access wasn’t properly provided. Putting aside the potential damage to the publisher brand if this happens, and the fact that it destroys the central aim of CHORUS – to control the dissemination path – this will also cost money. These archives are not well set up to provide differential access to triggered content, they release whole journals when a publisher goes bust. It’s likely that a partial trigger would require specialist repository sites to be set up to serve the content – again sites that would like an awful lot like PubMedCentral. The process is likely to lead to significantly more trigger events, requiring these dark repositories to function more actively as publishers, raising costs, and requiring them to build up repositories to serve content that would look an awful lot like…well you get the idea.

Finally there is the big issue – this puts the costs of improving funding data collection firmly in the hands of CHORUS publishers and means it needs to be done extremely rapidly. This work needs to be done, but it would be much better done through effective global collaboration between all funders, institutions and publishers. What CHORUS has effectively done is offer to absorb the full cost of this transition. As noted above the agencies will firewall their contributions. You can bet that institutions – for whom CHORUS will not assist and might hamper their efforts to ensure the collection of research outputs – will not pay for it through increased subscriptions. And publishers who don’t want to engage with CHORUS will be unlikely to contribute. It’s also almost certain that this development process will be rushed and ham fisted and irritate authors even more than they already are by current submission systems.

Finally of course a very large proportion of federal money moves through the NIH. The NIH has a system in place, it works, and they’re not about to adopt something new and unproven, especially given the popularity of PubMedCentral as demonstrated by the public response to the Research Works Act. So publishers will have to maintain dual systems anyway – indeed the most likely outcome of CHORUS will be to make it easier for authors to deposit works into PubMedCentral, and easier for the NIH to prod them into doing so raising the compliance rates for the NIH policy and making them look even better on the annual reports to the White House, leading ultimately to some sharp questions about why agencies didn’t adopt PMC in the first place.

Bad for the user

From the perspective of an Open Access advocate putting access into the hands of publishers who have actively worked to limit access and invested vast sums of money in systems to limit and control access seems a bad idea. But that’s a personal perspective – the publishers in questions will say they are guiding these audiences to the “right” version of papers in the best place for them to consume it. But lets look at the incentives for the different players. The agencies are on the hook to report on usage and impact of their work. They have the incentives to insure that whatever systems are in place work well and provide access well. Subscription publishers? They have a vested interest in trying to show there is a lack of public interest, in tweaking embargoes so as to only make things available after interest has waned, in providing systems that are poorly resourced so page loads are slow, and in general making the experience as poor as possible. After all if you need to show you’re adding value with your full cost version, then its really helpful to be in complete control of the free version so as to cripple it. On the plus side it would mean that these publishers would almost certainly be forced to provide detailed usage information which would be immensely valuable.

…which is bad for the publishers…

The more I think about this, the less it seems to have been thought through in detail. Is it just a commitment to use FundRef? This would be a great step but it goes nowhere near even beginning to satisfy the White House requirements. If its more than that what is it? A registry? But that requires a crucial piece of metadata, which appears as “Licence Reference” in the diagram, that is needed to assert things are available. This hasn’t been agreed yet (I should know, I’ve been involved in drafting the description). And even when it is no piece of metadata can make sure access actually happens. Is it a repository that would guarantee access? No – that’s what the CHORUS members hate above all other things. Is it a firm contractual commitment to making those articles with agency grant numbers attached available? Not that I’ve seen, but even it were it wouldn’t address the requirements of either the Executive Order or FASTR. As noted above, the mandate applies to all agency funded research, not just those where the authors remembered to put in all the correct grant numbers.

Is it a commitment to ensuring the global collection of comprehensive grant information at manuscript submission? With the funding to make it happen – and the funding to ensure the papers become available - and real penalties if it doesn’t happen? With provision of comprehensive usage data for both subscription and freely available content? This is the only level at which the agencies will bite. And this is a horrendous and expensive can of worms.

In the UK we have a Victorian infrastructure for delivering water. It just about works but a huge proportion of the total just leaks out of the pipes – its not like we have a shortage of rain but when we have a “drought” we quickly run into serious problems. The cost of fixing the pipes? Vastly more than we can afford. What I think happened with CHORUS is what happens with a lot industry wide tech projects. Someone had a bright idea, and went to each player asking them whether they could deliver their part of the pipeline. Each player has slightly overplayed the ease of delivery, and slightly underplayed the leakage and problems. A few percent here and a few percent there isn’t a problem for each step in isolation – but along the whole pipeline it adds up to the point where the whole system simply can’t deliver. And delivering means replacing the whole set of pipes.

Related articles

• Publishers Offer CHORUS as Solution to Federal Open Access Requirements(lj.libraryjournal.com)

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• Publishers Propose Public-Private Partnership to Support Access to Research(chronicle.com)

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• Scientific Publishers Aim To Get Ahead Of Agency Repositories(pascophronesis.wordpress.com)

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• Scientific Publishers Offer Solution to White House’s Public Access Mandate(news.sciencemag.org)

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• All joined with a single voice to praise CHORUS, thus: “meh.”(svpow.com)

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• A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their ‘solution’ to public access(blogs.berkeley.edu)

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• Publishers, universities both prep open access plans(insidehighered.com)

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• Joining a CHORUS, Publishers Offer the OSTP a Proactive, Modern, and Cost-Saving Public Access Solution(scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

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Both focus on how the value of libraries and the value of those who defend the needs of all to access information are impossible to completely measure. Both offer a prescription of action and courage, in Dorothea Salo’s case the twin messages that librarians “aim to misbehave” and that “we’ve got each others back”, in Chris Bourg’s text quoting Henry Rollins also speaking to librarians “What you do is the definition of good. It’s very noble and you are very brave.”

What struck me was the question of how well we are helping these people. We seek to make scientific information free, for it flow easily to those who need it. What can we do to create a world where we need to rely less on the bravery of librarians and therefore benefit so much more from it?

Dollar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There have been a lot of electrons spilled over the Elsevier Acquisition of Mendeley. I don’t intend to add too much to that discussion but it has provoked for me an interesting train of thought which seems worth thinking through. For what its worth my views of the acquisition are not too dissimilar to those of Jason Hoyt and John Wilbanks, and I recommend their posts. I have no doubt that the Mendeley team remain focussed on their vision and I hope they do well with it. And even with the cash reserves of Elsevier you don’t spend somewhere in the vicinity of $100M on something you intend to break.

But the question is not the intentions of individuals, or even the intentions of the two organisations, but whether the culture and promise of Mendeley can survive, or perhaps even thrive within the culture and organisation of Elsevier. No-one can know whether that will work, we will simply have to wait and see. But that raises a broader question for me. A for-profit startup, particularly one funded by VCs, has a limited number of exit strategies; IPO, sale, or more rarely a gradual move to a revenue positive independent company. This means startups behave in certain ways, and it means that interacting with them, particularly depending on them, has certain risks, primarily that a big competitor could buy your important partner out from under you. It’s not just the community who are wondering what Elsevier will do with the data and community that Mendeley will bring them, its also the other big publishers who were seeing valuable traffic and data coming to them from Mendeley, it’s the whole ecology of organisations that came to rely on the API.

It can be tempting to think that the world would be a better place if this kind of innovation was done by non-profits rather than startups. Non-profits have their strengths, a statutory requirement to focus on mission, the assurance that the promise of a big buy-out won’t change management behaviour. But non-profits have their weaknesses as well. That focus on mission can prevent the pivot that can make a startup.  It can be much harder to raise capital. Where a non-profit is governed by a board made up of a diverse community then conflicts of interest can make decision making glacial.

The third model is that of academic projects, and many useful tools have come from this route, but again there are problems. The peculiar nature of academic projects means that the financial imperatives that characterise the early stages of both for-profits and not-for-profits never really seem to bite. This can lead in turn to a lack of focus on user requirements and from there to a lack of adoption that condemns new tools to the category of interesting, even exciting, but not viable.

Of course all weaknesses are strengths in a different context. The freedom to explore in an academic context can enable exceptional leaps that would never be possible when you are focussed on finding next months rent. The promise of equity can bring in people whose salary you could never afford. The requirement for consensus can be painful but it means that where it can be found it is so much more powerful.

Geoff Bilder at the Rigour and Openness meeting in Oxford last week commented that the board of Crossref was made up of serious commercial competitors who could struggle to reach agreement because of their different interests. The process of building ORCID was painfully and frustratingly slow for many of us because of the different and sometimes conflicting needs of the various stakeholder groups. But when agreement is reached it is so much more powerful because it is clear that there is strong shared need. And agreement is the sign that something really needs to be done.

What has struck me in the conversation of the last week or so is how the interests of a very diverse range of stakeholders; researchers, altmetrics advocates, publishers, both radical and traditional, seem to be coming into alignment. At least on some issues. We need a way to build up shared infrastructure that can be utilised by all of us. Community run not-for-profits seem a good model for that, yet the innovation that builds new elements of infrastructure often comes from commercial startups. A for-profit can raise development capital to support a new tool but this may engender a lack of trust that an academic project might enjoy with a potential userbase.

What our sector lacks, and this might well be a more general problem, is a deep understanding of how these different development and governance models can be combined and applied in different places. We need incubators for non-profits but we also need models where a community non-profit might be setup to buy out a startup. Various publishers have labs groups, and technology will continue to be a key point of competition, but is there a space to do what pharmaceutical companies are increasingly doing and taking some parts of the drug development process pre-competitive so that everyone benefits from a shared infrastructure?

I don’t have any answers, nor do I have experience of running either for-profit or non-profit startups. But it feels like we are at a moment in time where we are starting to see shared infrastructure needs for the whole sector. It isn’t in anyone’s long term interest for us to have to build it more than once – and that means we need to find the right way to both support innovative developments but also ensure that they end up in hands that everyone feels they can trust.

Related articles

• Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts(techcrunch.com)

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• Elsevier acquires Mendeley + all the data about what you read, share, and highlight(hyperorg.com)

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• The Empire acquires the rebel alliance: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover [GigaOM](paidcontent.org)

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• Elsevier buys Mendeley: your reaction(guardian.co.uk)

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Thesis: The problem of money

The core of the issue is money. H&SS are chronically underfunded for the number of scholars in the UK. It’s easy to say that H&SS are cheap but they are also labour intensive and people are the most expensive academic resource of them all. This means there is very little spare cash around and when looks to be another demand on a non-existent budget people are going to get upset. And reasonably so. But of course there is money in the system, being used to purchase journal subscriptions and monographs. In the UK this money comes down a different budget line, largely through grant overheads and direct funding from HEFCE with some coming from teaching budgets (or rather, these days, the fees that students are paying or will be paying back in the future). So there is money in the system but its not accessible to scholars, and if it were, they might quite like to spend it on something else (a whiteboard, a new computer, a functioning filing cabinet).

Antithesis: The challenge of “impact” for H&SS

It is a hobby of a certain kind of mass media outlet to pick up and ridicule H&SS projects. Let’s be honest its also a hobby of some quantitative (and not so quantitative) scientists as well. At the same time there is much hand wringing from within the H&SS community that their work is not appreciated by the public, or by government for the wider impact that it has. There is a seeming paradox here. The ridicule arises from the apparent ease of understanding of the topic at hand; the hand wringing from a view that the wider public doesn’t understand. There is of course no paradox, only a communication failure. On one side the intricacies and context are lost and on the other the context and importance.

I believe that research in the humanities and social sciences makes a huge contribution to our culture and our society. In many disciplines the societal importance, whether to policy development, or through cultural enrichment is of far greater value than anything I have done as a scientist. In my current job I’m an amateur social scientist. I (try to) read sociology, history, anthropology and even the odd bit of literary theory to guide me. I can’t of course read most of it, I don’t have access. And I wonder how many other people could benefit from access to history, literary criticism, economics, sociology don’t have access. How many are interested amateurs, and how many policy makers, entrepreneurs, or creatives? And how many are voters?

Synthesis: A great future in an accessible world, but who will pay?

It seems to me that the opportunity for H&SS to reach much wider audiences who appreciate the value of their work generally, and to reach those specific people who will make important use of it is enormous. But most of this work is locked up in books with print runs in the hundreds and journals with similar numbers of subscribers. The existing system is covering its first copy costs – or at least not losing too much money – so further distribution isn’t a problem as long as its cheap, and electronic distribution fits that bill.

So lets start with the minimal approach. Change nothing of the process, simply make electronic copies freely available, retain the charges for print. In the short term libraries are unlikely to cancel subscriptions because frankly the amounts of money are pretty small and libraries do have an interest in supporting scholarly communications. Monographs are still worth buying in book form so charge for that but make the electronic version freely available. I’ll bet the first publisher willing to try a beer that sales go up. In the longer term there would need to be consortium agreements put in place to support the ongoing costs of the journals but that’s probably do-able because the current subscription lists are small and charges are relatively low. A model for making this work on a much larger scale already exists in particle physics in the form of SCOAP3. If even this is too scarey, look at the repository-route. The evidence from particle physics suggests that decades of access through repositories makes no difference to journal viability.

A more daring solution is to go for scale. What happens if the level of interest in a journal or monograph goes up by an order of magnitude? Or two? What does that mean about costs? Are there economies of scale that aren’t currently accessible? Given that H&SS do seem to like print there are possibilities here. Grow the print customer base from a few hundred to several thousand, use the e-version to drive sales, give people a premium experience that means enough of them want that upgrade. One argument that is not going to go down well is “our publishing is really expensive so we have to keep it exclusive”. It’s just not going to wash – that means consolidation and finding efficiencies is going to be necessary anyway, so getting more readers while finding those efficiences is a win-win. If you don’t find those efficiencies someone else will.

Clearly though that approach will work better for some people and for some disciplines than others. More imaginative approaches will involve finding ways to utilise the characteristics of the H&SS communities and the technologies that might support them. Some have argued that a PLOS ONE approach (scale up, keep costs down, simple base criteria for publication) can’t work because there is no simple criteria for “publication-worthy” in H&SS. I’m not convinced this is true  - STEM folks said it wouldn’t work for PLOS ONE either – but lets take it at face value. This means thinking the other way, what are the benefits of small and community based scale for publication infrastructures?

One benefit is that small communities tend to know each other, and therefore are willing to contribute effort to a common pool. In fact I bet that H&SS journals are largely run by small editorial boards of unpaid academics who mostly know the authors submitting and mostly know the referees they are approaching. These are ideal conditions for a community to take over control of the means of production and then take a ruthless capitalistic approach to reducing the costs outside of what they value – the review process itself. The technology isn’t quite there yet for a journal system to be run easily by non-technical people, but its not far off, and could built if the community as a whole demanded it. Some communities have done this, and some very prestigious journals are run for practically no money at all.

There are many more potential routes that H&SS could take to engage effectively with an open access future while also engaging with the communities of interest that would appreciate and use their work. It’s not really my place to tell the community what to do, but as a (potential) consumer of this scholarship I’m keen to see something happen.

It comes down to brass tacks

This will however cost money, and the community will argue that its money they don’t have. And this is really the key point and why the whole current strategy is wrong-headed. The British Academy, Institutes for Historical Research[correction: Statement is on the IHR site, not from the IHR itself, but from a collection of journal editors], and others seem to believe that the right route is to make a stand, presumably in the hope that this will tone down the HEFCE requirements for REF2020 (the RCUK policy is a given and won’t shift). What the community is failing to grasp is that this is the biggest opportunity in 20 years to re-assess the funding base for H&SS in the UK. HEFCE and RCUK are serious about the move to open access, and serious about doing it in a way that maximises the overall return on investment. They’re prepared, indeed demanding, to fund that process.

UK funding for H&SS research is structurally different than that for STEM subjects. The government, and its funding agencies, have taken to heart the concept that the costs of dissemination are part of the costs of research. The H&SS community needs to be developing a coherent plan for how those costs could be effectively funded and the mechanisms that will be put in place to make sure they’re constrained. Go to HEFCE and RCUK with a plan, that speaks to their agenda, that is well-informed about the core issues and you have an opportunity to rejuvenate H&SS in the UK.

The alternative, to be blunt, is oblivion. On one side you will have STEM researchers, most of them less inclined than me to keep subsidising your communications costs through “our” overheads, teaching budgets, and QR income. On the other will be government asking blunt questions about why your research isn’t being used and spread, while they don’t use it to inform policy development or cultural programs because they don’t even know it exists (pro-tip Google some terms around your area of expertise; any of your work visible?). And in the middle will be funders, increasingly losing their patience with your intransigence, while trying to defend the value of and special characteristics of H&SS, to increasingly unimpressed researchers, institutions, and government, while other subjects areas streak ahead and take advantage of new opportunities. At best this approach will allow a managed decline.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The more I look at, the more I think H&SS and in particular UK H&SS are amongst the best placed to take advantage of both the technological possibilities and the policy landscape. Get informed and look at and discuss the options to find the right approach for your discipline and domain. Once you get over the fact that the status-quo isn’t an option you will see a whole range of new possibilities. This is a generational opportunity to reset the thinking, and critically the funding mechanisms, for humanities and social sciences in this country. Use it or lose it.

Note: For any irritated philosophers amongst the readers I am aware that I’ve mangled the “Hegelian” dialectic that I used as a structure. Think of it as illustrating the choice you have. If I know enough to be dangerous/intriguing but not enough of your methodology to contribute effectively are you better off ignoring me, or engaging with me as both a potential ally and someone who might even contribute back to your thinking? Bear in mind that there are a lot of us out here.

Cemetery Society (Photo credit: Aunt Owwee)

With major governments signalling a shift to Open Access it seems like a good time to be asking which organisations in the scholarly communications space will survive the transition. It is likely that the major current publishers will survive, although relative market share and focus is likely to change. But the biggest challenges are faced by small to medium scholarly societies that depend on journal income for their current viability. What changes are necessary for them to navigate this transition and can they survive?

The fate of scholarly societies is one of the most contentious and even emotional in the open access landscape. Many researchers have strong emotional ties to their disciplinary societies and these societies often play a crucial role in supporting meetings, providing travel stipends to young researchers, awarding prizes, and representing the community. At the same time they face a peculiar bind. The money that supports these efforts often comes from journal subscriptions. Researchers are very attached to the benefits but seem disinclined to countenance membership fees that would support them. This problem is seen across many parts of the research enterprise – where researchers, or at least their institutions, are paying for services through subscriptions but unwilling to pay for them directly.

What options do societies have? Those with a large publication program could do worse in the short term than look very closely at the announcement from the UK Royal Society of Chemistry last week. The RSC is offering an institutional mechanism where by those institutions that have a particular level of subscription will receive an equivalent amount of publication services, set at the price of £1600 per paper. This is very clever for the RSC, it allows it to help institutions prepare effectively for changes in UK policy, it costs them nothing, and lets them experiment with a route to transition to full open access at relatively low risk. Because the contribution of UK institutions with this particular subscription plan is relatively small it is unlikely to reduce subscriptions significantly in the short term, but if and when it does it positions the RSC to offer package deals on publication services with very similar terms. Tactically by moving early it also allows the RSC to hold a higher price point than later movers will – and will help to increase its market share in the UK over that of the ACS.

Another route is for societies to explore the “indy band model”. Similar to bands that are trying to break through by giving away their recorded material but charging for live gigs, societies could focus on raising money through meetings rather than publications. Some societies already do this – having historically focussed on running large scale international or national meetings. The “in person” experience is something that cannot yet be done cheaply over the internet and “must attend” meetings offer significant income and sponsorship opportunities. There are challenges to be navigated here – ensuring commercial contributions don’t damage the brand or reduce the quality of meetings being a big one – but expect conference fees to rise as subscription incomes drop. Societies that currently run lavish meetings off the back of journal income will face a particular struggle over the next two to five years.

But even meetings are unlikely to offer a long term solution. It’s some way off yet but rising costs of travel and increasing quality of videoconferencing will start to eat into this market as well. If all the big speakers are dialling it in, is it still worth attending the meeting? So what are the real value offerings that societies can provide? What are the things that are unique to that community collection of expertise that no-one else can provide?

Peer review (pre-, post-, or peri-publication) is one of them. Publication services are not. Publication, in the narrow sense of “making public”, will be commoditised, if it hasn’t already. With new players like PeerJ and F1000 Research alongside the now fairly familiar landscape of the wide-ranging megajournal the space for publication services to make fat profits is narrowing rapidly. This will, sooner or later, be a low margin business with a range of options to choose from when someone, whether a society or a single researcher, is looking for a platform to publish their work. While the rest of us may argue whether this will happen next year or in a decade, for societies it is the long term that matters, and in the long term commoditisation will happen.

The unique offering that a society brings is the aggregation and organisation of expert attention. In a given space a scholarly society has a unique capacity to coordinate and organise assessment by domain experts. I can certainly imagine a society offering peer review as a core member service, independent of whether the thing being reviewed is already “published”. This might be a particular case where there are real benefits to operating a small scale – both because of the peer pressure for each member of the community to pull their weight and because the scale of the community lends itself to being understood and managed as a small set of partly connected small world networks. The question is really whether the sums add up. Will members pay $100 or $500 per year for peer review services? Would that provide enough income? What about younger members without grants? And perhaps crucially, how cheap would a separated publication platform have to be to make the sums look good?

Societies are all about community. Arguably most completely missed the boat on the potential of the social web when they could have built community hubs of real value – and those that didn’t miss it entirely largely created badly built and ill thought through community forums well after the first flush of failed generic “Facebook for Science” clones had faded. But another chance is coming. As the ratchet moves on funder and government open access policies, society journals stuck in a subscription model will become increasingly unattractive options for publication. The slow rate of progress and disciplinary differences will allow some to hold on past the point of no return and these societies will wither and die. Some societies will investigate transitional pricing models. I commend the example of the RSC to small societies as something to look at closely. Some may choose to move to publishing collections in larger journals where they retain editorial control. My bet is that those that survive will be the ones that find a way to make the combined expertise of the community pay – and I think the place to look for that will be those societies that find ways to decouple the value they offer through peer review from the costs of publication services.

This post was inspired by a twitter conversation with Alan Cann and builds on many conversations I’ve had with people including Heather Joseph, Richard Kidd, David Smith, and others. Full Disclosure: I’m interested, in my role as Advocacy Director for PLOS, in the question of how scholarly societies can manage a transition to an open access world. However, this post is entirely my own reflections on these issues.

Related articles

• Open Access: Royal Society of Chemistry Launches £1 Million “Gold for Gold” Initiative(infodocket.com)

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• MLA embraces “open access” writer agreements for journals(insidehighered.com)

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• What should society journals do about open access?(svpow.com)

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• Added Value: I do not think those words mean what you think they mean(cameronneylon.net)

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• You: Free access to British scientific research to be available within two years(guardian.co.uk)

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