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Transparency in Scholarly Publishing – Stakeholder Perspectives

Transparency in Scholarly Publishing – Stakeholder Perspectives

September 13, 2024

Scholarly Publishing is changing, it is more important than ever that stakeholders work together to create a future where trust and transparency are at the forefront. Understanding the challenges and needs of different stakeholder groups will enable us to build sustainable solutions that provide benefits for all. We have been speaking to representatives from different stakeholder groups to ask what Transparency in Scholarly Publishing means to them and how we can work together to achieve a shared goal. For this series we are focusing on transparency around publisher price and service levels.

Publisher Perspective

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Kathryn Sharples, Group VP, Publishing Strategy and Policy, Wiley

What does transparency mean to you? (Transparency here refers to visibility of price and service levels of publishers.) 

Transparency means being able to make visible the services that we provide in a way that is meaningful and useful to our customers. One of the reasons we wanted to publish this blog post was to start a conversation about what that means, providing transparency in a meaningful way is important to us but doing so in a way that is not helpful to our customers doesn’t fulfil that brief. 

Why is it important to you that there is more transparency in scholarly publishing? 

Transparency is key to ensuring our customers know what to expect from us and it is also incredibly important in building trust. Helping customers fully understand what they are getting for their money is extremely useful for decision making particularly when budgets are tight. This means that customers need to be able to compare data on price and service levels between different publishers which is another reason why it is so important to get it right. 

The Journal Comparison Service (JCS) from cOAlition S is one example of how stakeholders are working together improve transparency in scholarly publishing. What are the benefits/challenges of these sorts of projects?  

We had chosen to sign up to the JCS because we are committed to finding ways to be more transparent and it is a great way to work collaboratively with other stakeholders. There are of course challenges with any new venture, one challenge with the JCS has been not really understanding if the data we were providing is useful to the end user. Also being a large society publisher can also present challenges, things are not always simple, we have lots of different submission systems and there is still some inconsistency in the data. These are all things that we are trying to solve by learning more about the needs of our customers, it is an iterative process and the fact that it is also a collaborative one is crucial. 

What is your ideal vision for achieving transparency in scholarly publishing in the future?  What would be different to today? 

All stakeholders would work together to agree on a practicable and achievable set of expectations. It would be easier for publishers to compile the necessary data as we move towards more streamlined and efficient processes. OA business models will have evolved to a point where we could start agreeing on some standards to help customers compare data.

Institutional Library Perspective

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Helen Dobson, Licensing Portfolio Specialist: Research, Jisc

What does transparency mean to you? (Transparency here refers to visibility of price and service levels of publishers.) 

Transparency is crucial to delivering value for money, cutting waste and inefficiency, and ensuring money is spent effectively.

  • Transparency means that vendors share financial information including fees waivers or other contributions openly 
  • The rationale for the calculation of the fee/contribution and any subsequent increases or changes is transparent and comprehensible.  For example, information on the breakdown of services provided and the prices charged are shared through services such as the cOAlition S’s Journal Comparison Service (or equivalent).

We provided several exemplars of good practice in our Review of Transitional Agreements.

Why is it important to you that there is more transparency in scholarly publishing? 

Greater transparency is needed:

  • To increase trust between vendors and subscribing institutions
  • So that subscribers can determine the value derived from the agreements they join
  • To support the sector goal of fair, transparent, affordable and sustainable pricing for publishing services
  • To help institutions differentiate between suppliers when choosing how to spend their shrinking budgets

Concern about the current low levels of transparency in scholarly publishing are regularly reported in consultations as part of negotiations and were shared by the case study institutions in our Review of Transitional agreements.

The Journal Comparison Service (JCS) from cOAlition S is one example of how stakeholders are working together to improve transparency in scholarly publishing. What are the benefits/challenges of these sorts of projects?  

  • Challenge: Getting buy in from commercial vendors 
  • Challenge: Achieving consensus on a single approach 
  • Benefit: Positive vendor engagement with global initiatives signals commitment, can differentiate suppliers from their competitors and can build/reinforce trust with customers
  • Benefit: Projects such as the JCS can inform the development of international standards 

What is your ideal vision for achieving transparency in scholarly publishing in the future?  What would be different to today? 

Since September 2023 Jisc have co-led a multi-stakeholder working group focussed on a shift away from article-based models and increasing equitable participation in research. The model developed by the group was presented at the OASPA conference in September 2024. The Model indicates best practice in price transparency, for example: 

  • All vendors share fees or contributions charged (including fee waivers) publicly 
  • The rationale for the calculation of the fee/contribution and any subsequent increases or changes is transparent and comprehensible. For example, information on the breakdown of services provided and the prices charged are shared through services such as the cOAlition S Journal Comparison Service (or equivalent).

Research Funder Perspective

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Sara Ball, Strategy Lead, Open Research, UK Research and Innovation

What does transparency mean to you? (Transparency here refers to visibility of price and service levels of publishers.)

Information about publishing services and prices that is openly available in a way that is insightful. Ideally in a way that is commonly understood. 

Why is it important to you that there is more transparency in scholarly publishing?

We need transparency and assurance regarding public value for money of UKRI’s investments. We announced the new UKRI open access policy in August 2021, which aims to make the outputs of UKRI funded research more accessible and reusable – for the benefit of research, society and the economy. Affordability to the research sector was a key consideration in developing the policy, with the aim of providing sustainable support for open access and better value for money. More transparency in scholarly publishing will facilitate conversations and comparisons, build confidence amongst research organisations and authors, as customers, that prices are fair and reasonable and provide a better understanding of publication services. 

The Journal Comparison Service (JCS) from cOAlition S is one example of how stakeholders are working together to improve transparency in scholarly publishing. What are the benefits/challenges of these sorts of projects?

These projects aim to provide access to information about publishing services and prices in a central and standardised way. It allows publishers to communicate this information in a way that is transparent, practical to implement and insightful, and makes it easier for the research organisations and authors as customers to make comparisons. There will be challenges in implementing these types of projects, since it will require changes in practices, stakeholders aligning and working together, and supporting infrastructure. There will need to be a proper plan for testing, development, release, review and refinement. An iterative approach to implementation is likely to be needed.

What is your ideal vision for achieving transparency in scholarly publishing in the future?  What would be different to today?

A fully open scholarly communication system, where publishers are committed to open business models and business cultures that enables research to be communicated and used by all users so helping to deliver for society and the economy.

 

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