Open Voices interview with Stephen Eglen
"A more ethical publishing infrastructure" - Open Voices interview with Stephen Eglen
For this Open Voices interview, we talk to Stephen J. Eglen, Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Cambridge University.
Hardy: Stephen, you are Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Cambridge University but today we are talking to you as a vocal advocate for Open Access. Many will have seen your posts on Twitter for example. Where does your interest in and passion for Open Access come from?
Stephen: I guess there are all the moral reasons about why publications should be Open Access to which I fully subscribe to, for the good of everyone to make things freely available. But my starting point was actually more historical. When I was doing my PhD in the 1990s, I was in a department where there was an ethos of sharing of computer programs. We were writing a lot of code and the ethos was very much “you share what you can”, making your research open well before it became a trend. There was the notion that you should be sharing these research objects. That was ingrained in our PhD work.
One of the other things was that my department, like many others, had a small library that would produce tech reports. These tech reports were what you would nowadays call preprints. You would write your work up as a tech report and then it would be shared amongst this community of libraries well before the Web was a thing. And as soon as the Web took off in the mid-90s, our tech reports were one of the first things of significance to go online. It was just entirely natural. For me it was always the view that you would write up a tech report and then turn it into a paper. So those dual things of open research and then the tech report culture meant it was really odd when hitting all the barriers of closed journals.
Hardy: At that time, did you already collide with the commercial publishing world?
Stephen: No, in fact, I remember my first paper that I published, which resulted from my thesis work, was with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, so it was a very learned journal. I thought the process was actually very collegial. I think, still today, the Royal Society is probably one of the few journals that puts a lot of care into that into the publishing process. They touched up my figures, so that it fits the house style, they changed the language of the article slightly so that it flowed better. So there was a real sense of value added from the Royal Society. For my first paper, I was like yes, this is good, and then I guess from then on it went downhill [laughs].
Hardy: If we fast forward to the present day, we in the library world have been working hard on getting affordable Read & Publish deals, where we are bundling Open Access charges into our agreements with publishers. UK libraries have been negotiating such deals as well, for example through Jisc. What is your view on Read & Publish deals, such as the proposed one with Elsevier?
Stephen: I'm not a fan, to put it very succinctly. I believe that they are an invention that publishers have primarily come up with. I may be wrong, and it would be interesting to see the origins of this but I certainly don't think it was an academic that said: this is the system that we want. I think it evolved as a way to meet compliance with various funders’ Open Access policies.
In one sense, it is good, because we are trying to make more publications Open Access as a result of these deals. But it is still a lock-in. I could spend a long time talking about Elsevier but I will just use it as the example here because it is the one that I know best. They are the single biggest publisher that most libraries subscribe to, in the case of Cambridge I think it is about 40% of our budget per year[1]. That is effectively top sliced every year. You can't pay the Elsevier bill at the end of the day when everything else has been paid, you have to pay it first because it is 40% of your budget! All of your budgeting decisions will revolve around paying the big guys first, and that means that all of the new innovative schemes get pushed to the side because there is no money left.
I don't like the fact that it is a lock-in. I will be very surprised if the UK does anything other than take the take the Elsevier deal at this stage. I think it is attractive and will be accepted because it seems a bit more financially affordable. So if you use that to evaluate your decisions it is a Yes. But I and many other colleagues believe that there are lots of other implications beyond the financial ones. We can afford it in Cambridge and probably most other UK universities, but what about other universities and other countries which just can't afford these Read & Publish deals? They are squeezed out, and the publishers don't have systematic waiver plans, there aren't any real agreements in place to make sure that this is sustainable or ethical. I don't like the fact that it doesn't even mention anything about Rights Retention.
We actually put this letter together. We came up with 15 reasons against the Elsevier deal. In its favour, and I think what will win the day, it is affordable, but I think it just locks us into an old system that I just don't think it is ethical or sustainable.
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| Stephen Eglen, Cambridge University |
Hardy: Earlier this month in Ireland, there was IReL agreement announced with PLOS and that is the first transformative agreement we have with a fully Open Access publisher. Would you see this deal differently, or is it still the same ecosystem we are buying into?
Stephen: Well, I think that the fundamental difference about PLOS is that from its birth it was an Open Access publisher. So I do think they are different. I do think probably the sums involved are much smaller. In terms of budgeting, it won't be the biggest deal that you have to worry about. I imagine that PLOS have more of a waiver structure to handle the cases where people don't have transformative agreements. I think the devil is always in the in the details with these agreements.
You are buying a block of tickets for your authors to then publish. To me, that still feels like a lock-in. Some people are worried about whether deals are capped or not and what happens if you publish more than your allowed number of journal articles [The PLOS agreement is uncapped, others do indeed have an annual maximum number]. I think there are still a lot of headaches around this. You know, transformative agreements get rid of one headache, which is working out how to pay each individual bill, but it does introduce other headaches. I'm not really convinced that those kinds of transformative agreements are the best way forward.
Hardy: In your view, what are alternatives or better ways to run the publishing ecosystem?
Stephen: I go back to the notion of the tech report culture. In my department, I was in the Artificial Intelligence Department in Sussex in the 90s, we had a tech reports librarian. There was one in Edinburgh, one in Stanford, MIT, all of the big AI places, and we just shared these reports routinely. People would say they are not peer reviewed, and that is absolutely true. Peer review is an important part of the process, but I think in recent years we've seen a number of alternative structural approaches which, I think, have a lot more going for it.
For example, the Open Library of Humanities, founded by Martin Paul Eve. That's a great model where libraries pay a Partnership Subsidy to the Open Library of Humanities as a way to keep the system going, and they try to run the project within the community. That extends within the humanities also to monographs which I think is important. We have got Subscribe to Open, which I think is a valuable approach. I was very impressed to see the Annual Reviews series trying to take that model on board, where libraries commit to funding it. Diamond journals, I think, have a lot going for it. It allows local libraries to have more say in the publishing process.
And I’m never convinced of the argument that publishers do so much, and a lot of it is unseen. That may well be true, but whether we need it or not is unclear. I think a lot more of this could be done within the universities, where we have more control over the publishing process, and then it is Open Access by default. That to me just feels like a much richer system that lowers the entry barriers for everyone and it just keeps the scholarly information where it where it belongs.
Hardy: Do you think your academic colleagues would buy into that? I’m getting a lot of enquiries about publishing in high impact journals. The ecosystem as it is feels like very difficult to change.
Stephen: That's a great question and I don't have any answers beyond saying that things are a lot more progressive than I anticipated. I wrote the Elsevier letter a few weeks ago partly in frustration of the fact that, probably, Jisc in the UK will sign up to the proposed deal. I sent the letter to a couple of people, and within an hour or so somebody said: This is great, can I sign it? I thought, okay, why not and within less than a week we had over 100 signatures.
And it was very impressive to see the diversity of people who signed. A lot of the time it is painted as it is just the mathematicians or physicists who engage, because they can afford to do this because they have arXiv. They don't have this Publish or Perish culture where they have to get into Cell or Science or Nature. Actually, that is not the case. We have got lots of colleagues signing up from the life sciences, where traditionally that has been the approach.
My argument is always that the funding councils now have signed up to DORA, universities are signing up to DORA. DORA, in my view, is all about what you publish not where you publish. If we are to believe that, then we do need to get over this attitude about why it is so important to publish in these top tier journals.
I myself still feel there is something fundamentally different about the peer review process at Nature. I think the expectations are that as a reviewer you could ask for anything. Right, you can say I want these five extra control experiments done. And the author, instead of arguing back, which is what they would do at a normal journal, they'll say, wow, I have got a chance to publish in Nature here! I better do these extra five control experiments. I do believe that going through the peer review process in a high impact journal is still different today. I think reviewers are a lot more emboldened about what they can ask, and authors are a lot more compliant in what they do to keep the reviewers and the editor happy.
That to me is probably still the thing that I haven't resolved in my head about whether we can just get rid of all of these journals and just have a “flat” structure of journals. I think the flat structure of journals is still a long, long way off.
Hardy: Do you have any kind of advice for us in the library world where we face multiple pressures, user expectations who want access to all content, Open Access agreements with as many publishers as possible, and the need to be compliant with funder requirements?
Stephen: You know, I blame most of the problems about today's publishing system on academics. I don't blame it on the publishers. I really don't! I think they're quite canny, but I don't I don't blame them. Likewise, I don't really blame the funders. They are trying to push us in the right direction. The problem is the academics and their views over what counts as a good journal.
As long as academics always feel, I need the library to do this, I need them to pay that APC, I think you in libraries are always going to be fighting an uphill battle. You need to engage with academics to try and encourage them to use Rights Retention. I don't think Rights Retention Strategy is a silver bullet, but I do think it is a very useful tool for all scholars to learn about and to effectively engage in their rights.
It is just crazy that if we publish a journal article, we then have to go back to the journal, in many cases, begging to reuse our figures if we want to reuse them in for example a book chapter. This just seems archaic. Rights Retention should help with that and the support of libraries of the Rights Retention Strategy has been heartening to see.
Hardy: Agreed! My final question is to ask you to do some crystal ball gazing. Where are we with regards to Open Access publishing in five or even 10 years?
Stephen: I would like to think in five years’ time we have a solid return to institutional repositories taking a more active role in in curating authors’ research from their institutions. That's what I'd like to see, and I think that is achievable.
I think in five years’ time, publishers will still be around. They will have evolved, just as they've been doing for the last 20 years to try and cut out a niche. That is fine, as long as there's more choice and a more ethical publishing infrastructure, then I will be happy. I think that's what I’m going to try and spend my energies on in the next few years, just pushing the routes to Open Research that are sustainable and ethical.
Hardy: That is a great note to end on. Thank you very much, Stephen, for your time and your thoughts!
Stephen J Eglen is a Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and member of the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute CCBI. Stephen has a long-standing interest in Open Science and reproducible research. He co-leads the CODECHECK project for reproducibility of computations in scientific publications. He is an associate editor for BiorXiv and is on advisory boards for F1000 Research and Gigabyte.
You can follow Stephen on Twitter @StephenEglen. Stephen’s academic work can be seen at his ORCiD.
[1] In 2021 Cambridge University paid “£1.3 million for the current subscription deal with Elsevier, enabling University members and users of our libraries to access Elsevier journals online”. https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/AR20-21#group-section-Elsevier-NvAjjZPkQu