Locked up science
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Frick, Claudia
Restricting access to knowledge and science is not beneficial for society. So why are scientific results still locked up behind paywalls? Even though the answer to this question is enlightening, the story is quickly told. Much more important is the knowledge on how to change this.
 And now please welcome our speaker, Claudia. So hopefully there will be my slides up there. I see someone running. Running fast. OK. OK. Ah, here we go. Yes. So hello, everybody. And welcome also from my side to one of the first talks of this year's Congress. My name is Claudia Frick. Or if you know me from Twitter, my name is Fasi Deepfrog. And I'm about to refresh your memories on scholarly communication and scientific publishing. But since this is my first talk at the KS Communication Congress, I'd like to start with two facts about me so that you know who is talking to you. So fact number one, I am an atmospheric scientist. So I have a PhD in meteorology. Fact number two, I am now working as a librarian in the Library of Research Center. The most common reaction I usually get when I say this is why. There are actually several reasons why I left science and joined the library world. And for the next 30 minutes, I'll talk about one of these reasons. And to be honest, it's the reason I'm most passionate about. OK. So let's dive into the topic. And I'll start with a few simple questions that you can answer just for yourself. Do you think science helps us as a society to be well-educated and to make rational and fact-based decisions? Do you think science helps us to live healthier, longer, and to deal with diseases? Do you think science helps us to face global challenges like climate change? If you answered at least one of these questions with yes, then you must also think that restricting the access to scientific results is not beneficial for our society. Unfortunately, that's what we are currently doing. 72% of scientific publications are locked up behind paywalls, which means that only those with money have access to science, and those who don't have money are either left behind or they are forced to go illegal ways. And this is not how it should be. But how should it be instead? We should have open access to science. And open access means that everybody in the world should have access to science without any financial, technical, or legal barriers. At the end of my talk, I want you all to know what we can do to tear down the paywalls in scientific publishing and to achieve open access to science. But before we can talk about how we can change a system like scientific publishing, we have to understand how it works. So we'll start with a look on the question what the most common way of scientific publishing currently looks like. So for all the non-scientists in this room, or those who haven't published a scientific publication so far, let me take you on the roller coaster journey of scientific publishing. Imagine yourself to be an atmospheric scientist, a brilliant atmospheric scientist. And you spent the past five years of your life in your own space. You spent the past five years of your life in your laboratory. And you made some time-consuming experiments. You ran some complex simulations. And after a lot of sweat and pain and a lot of tears, you finally found it. You found the solution to climate change. Yes. And it's absolutely great that you know how to reduce greenhouse gases to a proper level and how to stop temperatures from increasing. But the whole scientific community, everybody in the world, should know about it so that we can realize the solution and finally stop climate change. So you have to communicate your research in order for it to benefit society. And that you can get the Nobel Prize that you absolutely deserve. So you write down a summary of your solution into a manuscript of, let's say, 15 pages. But what's next? How do you distribute this manuscript in the community? Since I am at the Chaos Communication Congress and we are in the 21st century, I assume that most of you are currently thinking, yeah, just put it on the internet. Yeah, that's not what the most common way of scientific publishing looks like. At least not yet. What you will do instead is that you will either submit your manuscript to a scientific conference or to an academic journal. Which one you will do mainly depends on your discipline. So if you are, for example, a computer scientist, you will most likely submit your manuscript to a scientific conference. If you are an atmospheric scientist, you will most likely submit your manuscript to an academic journal. But both publishing processes are nearly the same. So I will only guide you through one of them. So since you are an atmospheric scientist, you now submit your manuscript about the solution to climate change to an academic journal. And at this stage, your manuscript is called a preprint. And your manuscript fits into the scope of the journal. Therefore, in the next step, a process of quality control starts. This is called peer review. Peers are other scientists, like, for example, these two guys. Yeah, I know that this is scary, but these two guys will have a look at your manuscript and check whether everything you did and wrote is valid and scientifically correct. Because maybe you only think you found the solution to climate change. But in reality, you made a really awful mistake already on page one. But that's not what happens to you, because you're brilliant and your solution is perfect. So these two guys only have some minor corrections and comments. And you integrate them into your manuscript and resubmit this new version to the journal. And now you are lucky, because the journal then says, yeah, OK, with these changes, we'll accept your manuscript for publication. And at this stage, your manuscript is called the post print. Because the content is now the final one that will be later printed in the journal or published online since we are in the 21st century. And now in the last step, some type setting happens. So your manuscript is brought into the layout of the journal. And then this fancy publishes version is published on the journal website, from where everybody in the world can see that you found a solution to climate change. And this is what the most common way of scientific publishing currently looks like, simplified. But I forgot one very important detail. And this is the paywall. You published closed access. And at this point, I'm sorry, but we have to talk about money, because there's a lot of money changing hands in this process. And the first occasion money changes with hands has actually nothing to do at all with the paywall. Because did you know that you, the author of the manuscript or your laboratory, might have to pay money to the publisher in order for your publication to get published? Yeah, maybe your manuscript was too long, and you have to pay page charges. Or you included some colorful figures, and you have to pay color charges. Yes, color charges in the 21st century. And the second occasion money changes is hands is at the paywall. Because there are a lot of scientists out there that need to know the solution to climate change. And some of them are lucky, like her. And they work for an institution that has money and that has a library. And this library will pay money to the publisher to grant these scientists access to your publication, either by paying a subscription fee, so that they have access to all publications in the journal, or by just purchasing your single publication. But there are a lot of scientists out there that aren't that lucky. And they won't have access to your publication. And what about all the non-scientists in this room that I'm sure also want to know the solution to climate change? They won't have access either, unless they are willing to pay. But who said that we, all together, didn't already pay for this publication? Because who funds you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist at your laboratory, who funds the two guys doing the peer review, and who funds the libraries that grants other scientists access? It's us. We all do. It's tax-payers-money. So don't you think we kind of already paid for this publication? OK, you might now think, but hey, there will obviously be money coming back, because authors and people doing peer review will get paid for their work by the publisher? No. That doesn't happen in science. Scientists are doing all of this work cost-free for the publisher. OK, but then you might think, but hey, then maybe this is just the business model of academic publishers? I mean, they definitely have their costs that they need to cover. So maybe they are just doing this, covering their costs, and they are not making so much more money out of it? Huh. We are currently having three major academic publishers. They are called Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. And let's have a look at the profit margins of at least Elsevier and Springer. They are 35% and 37% pure profit. These margins are even higher than the ones of Google and Apple. We are all together paying in every year 7.6 billion euros for access of public publications, 7.6 billion euros per year. And this has some very weird practical consequences, because publishers are requesting so much public money to get access to mainly publicly funded publications, that even those that really do have money, like the Harvard University, can no longer afford them. And when I learned this, all of this, for the first time, I only had two options left. Option number one, join the open access movement and tear down these paywalls. Option number two, become myself an academic publisher. On my bank account this morning said I chose option one. So let's talk about how we can tear down the paywalls. There are generally a lot of approaches we can take. Some of them are smaller, but persistent, and others are more massive steps. But who can do anything about the paywall? Who are the involved players in scientific publishing? Well, we have the scientists that do most of the work. They produce the content, they do the quality control of the content, and they are even the ones that later in the process mainly consume the content. Then we have the funders that provide the money. We have the libraries that grant access, and we have the publishers that publish the academic journals. Since I assume that we are not having so many funders and publishers in here, and I don't think that the number of librarians is higher than 10, I'd like to focus on what scientists can do to tear down the paywall. But I will also have a look on what we can achieve if the first three players work together. But let's start small with you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist. So you just published your solution to climate change like this, and you just realized, damn, I published behind the paywall, and a lot of scientists won't have access to my publication. And usually that's not what scientists want, because most scientists I know want their publications to be read, to be spread, to be cited, and to be discussed as widely as possible. And the paywall prevents this. So you might now wonder whether there's anything you can do about the paywall when you publish like this. Yes, you can do something about it. The first option you have is brought to you by the publisher. The publisher offers you the possibility to remove the paywall just in front of your single publication, while all other publications in the journal remain behind the paywall. This is called hybrid open access. And what does the publisher want to remove the paywall in front of your publication? Yeah, it's even more money. Yeah, I do not recommend this. Isn't there anything, anything you can do about this publication without paying even more money to the publisher? I mean, it's your publication. It's your work that you've done. Can't you just take it from the journal website and put it on the internet? This is called a secondary publication. And there are places for this. They are called archive, institutional repositories, or even the commercial website research gate. Can't you just upload your manuscript there and make it available via so-called green open access? The answer to this question is, it depends. Because what happened when you decided to publish behind the paywall is that you signed a so-called copyright transfer agreement. And it is what it literally says. You signed away the copyright of your work to the publisher. Yeah. So if you want to republish your manuscript somewhere else, you have to check whether this is OK for the copyright owner, that is, the publisher. But hey, some good news here. Most publishers will allow at least some form of republication. But this is where it gets really, really tricky. Because publishers are having some very specific and very restrictive conditions on this. So you cannot just publish any version of your manuscript. Maybe you can only publish the pre-print, that is, the version of your manuscript without all the changes that came in during peer review. So it's not the content that you finally published. And they have some very specific conditions on where you can publish. Maybe you can only do it on your personal website, but not on the one of your university. And then they have some very specific ideas on when you can republish. Because you cannot just do it right away. Most of the times, you have to wait an embargo period of six months, 12 months, or even four years. And four years is kind of a long time to wait for a solution to climate change. And these conditions, they do not only vary by publisher. They vary by journal. So you really have to check for each single of your publication what you are allowed to do and what not. And I totally get it. That's not easy. That's confusing. It's time consuming. And believe me, it's absolutely no fun at all. But if you are ever struggling with this as a scientist, I have a very simple and convenient advice for you. And it is to just ask your librarian. Because that's our business. And I'm absolutely sure that even in your library, there's at least one librarian that has specialized on copyright and can do this for you. But wouldn't it be so much easier if you could just do whatever the hell you want to do with your publication, if you could just keep the copyright right away? Yes, it would be. And it's possible. So maybe the next time you publish a solution to a global challenge, publish it Gold Open Access. This means that you will publish in a so-called Open Access Journal. These journals do not have any paywall at all. And all publications in there are published under Creative Commons license. So you will keep the copyright of your work. How do these journals work? Well, let's get back to closed access. What open access journals obviously do is that they remove the paywall, which means that libraries don't have to pay money to the publisher to grant their scientists access. And what also happens is that you are no longer asked to pay color charges, but you have to pay an article processing charge or your laboratory. But since libraries are saving a lot of money by not paying for access to these journals, most German libraries, for example, will cover these costs for you. But it can be even better, because there are a lot of open access journals out there that do not even charge an article processing charge. This is called Platinum Open Access. And these journals do not ask for money from anyone, neither for reading nor for publishing. But how do these journals even survive? Because they are not making any profit. Well, we know that scientists are already doing most of the work in this process. And some of them decided to just do the rest of the work, too. Yes, there are scientists out there running their own academic journals. Several of them joined forces with their libraries to have a powerful and experienced infrastructure in the background. And together, scientists and librarians are providing this non-for-profit service for science in the hands of scientists without any commercial interests. So this is already an example of what we can achieve if we are no longer only focusing on you, the single scientist, and your single publication. But if we look at what we can achieve, if we work together and join our forces. And there are a lot of more examples out there for this. I listed a few over here. And for the rest of the talk, I'd like to focus on one of them, mainly because it's a German project and it got some recent attention. And this is Project Deal. Project Deal is commissioned by the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and is driven by scientists and librarians together. And what they want to achieve is a major step forward to open access with our three already known major academic publishers. And Project Deal wants to achieve this by implementing so-called nationwide consortium agreements. But what is a nationwide consortium agreement? And what can it do about open access? These agreements consist of two components. They are so-called publish and read deals. And the first component is the read component. And it means that all participating institutions, universities, will have access to all journal publications of the publisher when there is a deal. And the publish component means that all publications with a corresponding author from one of these participating institutions and universities will be published open access with this publisher. And both of these components are covered with one single and one reasonable fee. So for example, if your university would be part of such a deal with Elsevier, you would have access to all Elsevier publications. And all your publications would be published open access with Elsevier. This would mean that there would be up to 60,500 publications published every year open access under such a deal. And this is what Project Deal wants to achieve. So these are the goals. But how is Project Deal progressing? There are currently ongoing negotiations with Wiley and Springer. So there are two parties, the publisher and Project Deal, sitting together at one table and having a major common understanding about the future of scientific publishing and about what the basic conditions of such a deal should be. And they are now discussing the details. The picture becomes quite different if we look at Elsevier because there seem to be right away a major disagreement about the basic conditions of such a deal should have and on what a reasonable fee is. So after a long time, years of negotiating and no real progress, what happened is that Project Deal, so scientists and librarians, currently suspended the negotiations with Elsevier. And this is something new. And it's definitely something big. And I can tell you that the world is watching Project Deal in Germany. And this is where the power of joining forces really shows up because scientists and librarians are really emphasizing the need for such a deal to Elsevier. For example, scientists stop to offer their cost-free work to Elsevier. So they are no longer publishing with Elsevier or doing the peer review. If you are one of them or will be one of them after this talk, please let your library know because we collect this information and make sure that Elsevier knows. And libraries, well, they just cancel their subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Yes, there are currently 200 German institutions without subscription access to Elsevier publications. And there will be even more next year. The Max Planck Society canceled the contract to the end of this year. So there are a lot of scientists without access to Elsevier publications. And it's a lot of saved money. And what happened after we got cut off from Elsevier publications six months ago? Well, the world of science didn't break down. Neither did the world of libraries. What happens is that scientists use alternative ways to get access. And libraries support these alternative ways. I listed a few of the legal alternatives up here. But speaking of legal, some of you might now wonder or wonder through the entire talk, why should we even care about subscriptions? Why should we pay for access to publishers or use alternative ways that are legal? Because Syhub. Syhub is basically the pirate bay of science. So you can get nearly any scientific publication there. And I'd like to forward the question on why we should pay for access if we have Syhub directly to the publishers. But I think that they already know the answer, because they do what industries do that face piracy. They took legal action and filed a lawsuit. They requested internet service providers to block Syhub. But you know, don't mess with the internet. So dear publishers, let me put it this way. As long as you publishers hold on to paywalls, there will be piracy no matter what. And even worse, as long as you hold on to paywalls, there will be people, scientists, and librarians building alternative ways of scientific publishing without you. And the only way to stop this is to tear down the paywalls. And to you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist and all the other brilliant scientists in this room, please provide open access to your publications and support open access in any way that you like or that you can. And if you have any questions or concerns or any ideas, I can only encourage you to talk to your librarian. Because if we work together, if we join our forces, I think that we can finally unlock science. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for this amazing talk. OK, everybody, you know the rules. If you have questions, please line up at the microphones. There's five of them, two there, two there, and one there in the corner. And if you are on the stream, just somehow ask the question. I'm not really aware how it works. And then we have someone here to read the questions out to be our human interface device. So please, microphone number one. Thank you for your talk. We did not really know what access was, but I think the publishers have a major advantage over the scientists in the librarian here, which we did not address yet, and I want to ask you this question. The publishers, they have the brands we as scientists need. What I mean with that is, a part of the quality assurance, scientists did, we ranked the journals, we gave the impact factors and all the things. The journal itself has a quality number. So for a young scientist, at least for me, it was very difficult to publish in a way that gives me the academic reputation I need without having access to the highly ranked journals of the closed source publishers. So is there a way we can get out of this stat log where we need to publish these journals that we do not want to publish? Yeah, we can talk about the impact factor. I love it. It's really hard. It's absolutely difficult because this is a self-enforcing system dealing with reputation. And if you think about it, if all scientists would immediately stop to publish with Alivier or the reputable journal and would move to another one that has no impact factor at all, after five or six years, this journal would have the high impact factor. But it's true that it's not that easy to just do it because you want to come forward with your career. And it's a problem. But there's no real solution so far for this. So Project Deal is kind of addressing this idea by remaining with the major publishers. So this would be the easiest way out for this problem. Do we have an internet question? Yes? Yes. Can someone turn on the mic for the signal, Angel, please? What influence do the university have on the publishing process of their scientists? Can a university force their scientists to publish in a certain way or with a specific publisher? No, it's not that easy. There are policies at state that you have to publish open access. But most of them do not define how you can do it. So you can do green or gold or hybrid, whatever you want. But they just state that you have to publish open access. Microphone number two, please. Hello. Ninton has given everybody access to their own streaming platform. How do we avoid the public sharing of science to be tainted with all the bad signs out there? With what? Bad signs. There's a lot of them. If you look at the newspapers, there's a lot of fake news. You should absolutely not remove the peer review process at the moment out of this scientific publishing process. So there should be some quality control. But there are some ideas to change the way peer review is done. But if you remove it, then you have a problem at the moment. Mic number three, please. Hello. Do you have any statistics about how many open access publications there are compared to, I would say, classical Elsevier and stuff? Or if their movement is advancing, if it's getting traction? Yeah, I stated the source of the 72% closed access publications. And there's a detailed analysis on how many articles are closed, hybrid, gold, green. I published the slides already. I will tweet them later. OK. Thank you. And the signal angel, please. What do you think about the Plan S initiative? Plan S, for those who don't know, it's a coalition of research funders in Europe, not the Deutsche Forschungs-Mädchenhaft, but all others. And they want to have open access immediately. So they say when you work for us, if you're funded by us, you have to publish open access. And I think that this is a good approach. Can we get Mike, too, please? Hi. Could journals printed by various universities solve that issue which was raised here about having a well-known brand behind the publications? For example, if you have a university which is very famous, it can release their own journal and solve that brand issue. If they release their own journal, I hope it's open access. But I think that it's, in general, an illusion to think that the name of the journal or the publisher has anything to do with the quality of a single paper in there. So this linked idea, I think, is very important. This linked idea, I think, is kind of broken. Mike, number one, please. I was wondering why the publishers move against SiHUB, but leave archive.org alone for all these years. I essentially get the same thing from both. I know there are differences in the details, but if I want to... Yeah, it's restricted to a specific community. And so it's not for all publications. And it's still about prints and postprints, so not the final publisher version. But I think that they didn't because it's a powerful tool and it's a powerful community. Yeah. Could we get the internet again, please? Somebody at the internet has heard that scientists sued the editors asking for a share of the profit of their work. Did you get any feedback? How did this end it? No, but that sounds interesting. No, sorry. Number four, please. Historically, journals provide free aspects for scientists. They provided logistics, like delivery of papers to whoever wanted to read them. They provided editors, which is not a review, but the editors, which are hired by journals, and they provide reputational engines. Obviously, putting PDF online is a solid problem, so logistics is not the longer a problem for the fully decentralized alternative to the journals. Can we decentralize other two? I actually didn't hear the question properly. I'm sorry. Try again. Journals are providing free services. They provide delivery... Free services? Number three. They provide delivery to whoever wants to read them. They provide a reputation engine, and they provide editors, not peer reviewers, but real editors on sale. We can decentralize with internet, we can decentralize delivery. Can we decentralize editors? Can we decentralize reputations? Is there going to be a question at any point? Yeah, I got the question, I think. But did you know that editors are also scientists? So they are already scientists doing this work, so I really question the high value that publishers provide to science. I think there is some value, but it's not that high as we all thought. Number two, please. Does Project DL include any incentives for the scientists to publish a gold open access instead of hybrid? So if you publish with a publisher that has a deal with your university, it will be open access, no matter what. Does it include the scientists who publish in journals that are only open access instead of mixed open and closed access applications? No, not so far. Okay, just a quick interjection. Please remember when you leave, please leave after the talk, but when you leave, please use the front exit and not the entrance in the back. Thank you. Could we get another internet question? Okay, the internet is out of questions. That's excellent. Number one, please. Yeah, J. L. L. A few things about the advantage to close access journals. Maybe it would be a good idea to rethink the format of the publishing. I don't want to advertise it, but I think it's a good example. There's distill.pap, which is a journal for artificial intelligence at the moment mostly, but they publish it in HTML because it's the current year and you have interactive stuff. So you can play around with it and it's really nice. I think it would be better if we wouldn't have only PDFs published from the journal articles. There should be other formats, definitely. Machine readable. Micah number two, please, for the last question. I'm also, like you said, your opinion is that at least questionable what publishers provide to science and to society that's worth something or worth what we think. I also think this way, and if I have a manuscript now that I don't want to publish in this way in the system, do you have any recommendation, maybe any program, a project or something where I could maybe say, here's my manuscript and then especially have a solution for the peer review process that is now facilitated by the publisher, but the publisher doesn't do anything. It's just facilitating. So how could I solve this and go around the publisher in this way? So I'm not sure whether I get the question because if you have open access journals, there's also peer review. Yes, there are publishers, but if you have platinum open access, this peer review process is organized with the library or scientists that are running the journal. So this is already organized, the peer review process for other sorts of journals that do not have a paywall. So could these platinum open access journals cover all fields of science? Could I come with my paper? There are a lot of there. There are a lot out of there. I can tell you how you can find them. There is a directory of open access journals where you can filter through any subjects and filter for how much do they cost. And now please thank our speaker again. Thank you.
 And now please welcome our speaker, Claudia.  So hopefully there will be my slides up there.  I see someone running.  Running fast.  OK.  OK.  Ah, here we go.  Yes.  So hello, everybody.  And welcome also from my side to one of the first talks  of this year's Congress.  My name is Claudia Frick.  Or if you know me from Twitter, my name is Fasi Deepfrog.  And I'm about to refresh your memories  on scholarly communication and scientific publishing.  But since this is my first talk at the KS Communication  Congress, I'd like to start with two facts about me  so that you know who is talking to you.  So fact number one, I am an atmospheric scientist.  So I have a PhD in meteorology.  Fact number two, I am now working as a librarian  in the Library of Research Center.  The most common reaction I usually get when I say this  is why.  There are actually several reasons  why I left science and joined the library world.  And for the next 30 minutes, I'll  talk about one of these reasons.  And to be honest, it's the reason I'm most passionate about.  OK.  So let's dive into the topic.  And I'll start with a few simple questions  that you can answer just for yourself.  Do you think science helps us as a society  to be well-educated and to make rational and fact-based  decisions?  Do you think science helps us to live healthier, longer,  and to deal with diseases?  Do you think science helps us to face global challenges  like climate change?  If you answered at least one of these questions with yes,  then you must also think that restricting the access  to scientific results is not beneficial for our society.  Unfortunately, that's what we are currently doing.  72% of scientific publications are locked up behind paywalls,  which means that only those with money have access to science,  and those who don't have money are either left behind  or they are forced to go illegal ways.  And this is not how it should be.  But how should it be instead?  We should have open access to science.  And open access means that everybody in the world  should have access to science without any financial,  technical, or legal barriers.  At the end of my talk, I want you all to know what we can do  to tear down the paywalls in scientific publishing  and to achieve open access to science.  But before we can talk about how we can change a system  like scientific publishing, we have to understand how it works.  So we'll start with a look on the question  what the most common way of scientific publishing  currently looks like.  So for all the non-scientists in this room,  or those who haven't published a scientific publication so far,  let me take you on the roller coaster journey  of scientific publishing.  Imagine yourself to be an atmospheric scientist,  a brilliant atmospheric scientist.  And you spent the past five years of your life  in your own space.  You spent the past five years of your life in your laboratory.  And you made some time-consuming experiments.  You ran some complex simulations.  And after a lot of sweat and pain and a lot of tears,  you finally found it.  You found the solution to climate change.  Yes.  And it's absolutely great that you know how to reduce greenhouse gases  to a proper level and how to stop temperatures from increasing.  But the whole scientific community, everybody in the world,  should know about it so that we can realize the solution  and finally stop climate change.  So you have to communicate your research in order for it  to benefit society.  And that you can get the Nobel Prize that you absolutely deserve.  So you write down a summary of your solution  into a manuscript of, let's say, 15 pages.  But what's next?  How do you distribute this manuscript in the community?  Since I am at the Chaos Communication Congress  and we are in the 21st century, I assume  that most of you are currently thinking, yeah,  just put it on the internet.  Yeah, that's not what the most common way of scientific publishing  looks like.  At least not yet.  What you will do instead is that you will either submit  your manuscript to a scientific conference  or to an academic journal.  Which one you will do mainly depends on your discipline.  So if you are, for example, a computer scientist,  you will most likely submit your manuscript  to a scientific conference.  If you are an atmospheric scientist,  you will most likely submit your manuscript  to an academic journal.  But both publishing processes are nearly the same.  So I will only guide you through one of them.  So since you are an atmospheric scientist,  you now submit your manuscript about the solution  to climate change to an academic journal.  And at this stage, your manuscript is called a preprint.  And your manuscript fits into the scope of the journal.  Therefore, in the next step, a process of quality control  starts.  This is called peer review.  Peers are other scientists, like, for example, these two guys.  Yeah, I know that this is scary, but these two guys  will have a look at your manuscript  and check whether everything you did and wrote is valid  and scientifically correct.  Because maybe you only think you found the solution  to climate change.  But in reality, you made a really awful mistake already  on page one.  But that's not what happens to you,  because you're brilliant and your solution is perfect.  So these two guys only have some minor corrections and comments.  And you integrate them into your manuscript  and resubmit this new version to the journal.  And now you are lucky, because the journal then says, yeah,  OK, with these changes, we'll accept your manuscript  for publication.  And at this stage, your manuscript is called the post print.  Because the content is now the final one that will be later  printed in the journal or published online  since we are in the 21st century.  And now in the last step, some type setting happens.  So your manuscript is brought into the layout of the journal.  And then this fancy publishes version  is published on the journal website,  from where everybody in the world  can see that you found a solution to climate change.  And this is what the most common way of scientific publishing  currently looks like, simplified.  But I forgot one very important detail.  And this is the paywall.  You published closed access.  And at this point, I'm sorry, but we  have to talk about money, because there's  a lot of money changing hands in this process.  And the first occasion money changes  with hands has actually nothing to do at all with the paywall.  Because did you know that you, the author of the manuscript  or your laboratory, might have to pay money to the publisher  in order for your publication to get published?  Yeah, maybe your manuscript was too long,  and you have to pay page charges.  Or you included some colorful figures,  and you have to pay color charges.  Yes, color charges in the 21st century.  And the second occasion money changes is hands is at the paywall.  Because there are a lot of scientists out there  that need to know the solution to climate change.  And some of them are lucky, like her.  And they work for an institution that has money  and that has a library.  And this library will pay money to the publisher  to grant these scientists access to your publication,  either by paying a subscription fee,  so that they have access to all publications in the journal,  or by just purchasing your single publication.  But there are a lot of scientists out there  that aren't that lucky.  And they won't have access to your publication.  And what about all the non-scientists in this room  that I'm sure also want to know the solution to climate change?  They won't have access either, unless they are willing to pay.  But who said that we, all together,  didn't already pay for this publication?  Because who funds you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist  at your laboratory, who funds the two guys doing the peer review,  and who funds the libraries that grants other scientists access?  It's us.  We all do.  It's tax-payers-money.  So don't you think we kind of already paid for this publication?  OK, you might now think, but hey, there will obviously  be money coming back, because authors and people doing peer  review will get paid for their work by the publisher?  No.  That doesn't happen in science.  Scientists are doing all of this work cost-free for the publisher.  OK, but then you might think, but hey, then maybe this is just  the business model of academic publishers?  I mean, they definitely have their costs that they need to cover.  So maybe they are just doing this, covering their costs,  and they are not making so much more money out of it?  Huh.  We are currently having three major academic publishers.  They are called Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley.  And let's have a look at the profit margins of at least  Elsevier and Springer.  They are 35% and 37% pure profit.  These margins are even higher than the ones of Google and Apple.  We are all together paying in every year 7.6 billion euros  for access of public publications, 7.6 billion euros per year.  And this has some very weird practical consequences,  because publishers are requesting so much public money to get access  to mainly publicly funded publications,  that even those that really do have money,  like the Harvard University, can no longer afford them.  And when I learned this, all of this, for the first time,  I only had two options left.  Option number one, join the open access movement  and tear down these paywalls.  Option number two, become myself an academic publisher.  On my bank account this morning said I chose option one.  So let's talk about how we can tear down the paywalls.  There are generally a lot of approaches we can take.  Some of them are smaller, but persistent,  and others are more massive steps.  But who can do anything about the paywall?  Who are the involved players in scientific publishing?  Well, we have the scientists that do most of the work.  They produce the content, they do the quality control  of the content, and they are even the ones that later in the process  mainly consume the content.  Then we have the funders that provide the money.  We have the libraries that grant access,  and we have the publishers that publish the academic journals.  Since I assume that we are not having so many funders  and publishers in here, and I don't  think that the number of librarians is higher than 10,  I'd like to focus on what scientists can do to tear down  the paywall.  But I will also have a look on what we can achieve  if the first three players work together.  But let's start small with you, the brilliant atmospheric  scientist.  So you just published your solution to climate change  like this, and you just realized, damn,  I published behind the paywall, and a lot of scientists  won't have access to my publication.  And usually that's not what scientists want,  because most scientists I know want their publications  to be read, to be spread, to be cited,  and to be discussed as widely as possible.  And the paywall prevents this.  So you might now wonder whether there's anything  you can do about the paywall when you publish like this.  Yes, you can do something about it.  The first option you have is brought to you by the publisher.  The publisher offers you the possibility  to remove the paywall just in front of your single publication,  while all other publications in the journal  remain behind the paywall.  This is called hybrid open access.  And what does the publisher want to remove the paywall  in front of your publication?  Yeah, it's even more money.  Yeah, I do not recommend this.  Isn't there anything, anything you  can do about this publication without paying even more money  to the publisher?  I mean, it's your publication.  It's your work that you've done.  Can't you just take it from the journal website  and put it on the internet?  This is called a secondary publication.  And there are places for this.  They are called archive, institutional repositories,  or even the commercial website research gate.  Can't you just upload your manuscript there  and make it available via so-called green open access?  The answer to this question is, it depends.  Because what happened when you decided  to publish behind the paywall is that you  signed a so-called copyright transfer agreement.  And it is what it literally says.  You signed away the copyright of your work to the publisher.  Yeah.  So if you want to republish your manuscript somewhere else,  you have to check whether this is OK for the copyright owner,  that is, the publisher.  But hey, some good news here.  Most publishers will allow at least some form of republication.  But this is where it gets really, really tricky.  Because publishers are having some very specific and very  restrictive conditions on this.  So you cannot just publish any version of your manuscript.  Maybe you can only publish the pre-print,  that is, the version of your manuscript  without all the changes that came in during peer review.  So it's not the content that you finally published.  And they have some very specific conditions  on where you can publish.  Maybe you can only do it on your personal website,  but not on the one of your university.  And then they have some very specific ideas  on when you can republish.  Because you cannot just do it right away.  Most of the times, you have to wait  an embargo period of six months, 12 months, or even four years.  And four years is kind of a long time  to wait for a solution to climate change.  And these conditions, they do not only vary by publisher.  They vary by journal.  So you really have to check for each single of your publication  what you are allowed to do and what not.  And I totally get it.  That's not easy.  That's confusing.  It's time consuming.  And believe me, it's absolutely no fun at all.  But if you are ever struggling with this as a scientist,  I have a very simple and convenient advice for you.  And it is to just ask your librarian.  Because that's our business.  And I'm absolutely sure that even in your library,  there's at least one librarian that has specialized on copyright  and can do this for you.  But wouldn't it be so much easier  if you could just do whatever the hell you want to do  with your publication, if you could just  keep the copyright right away?  Yes, it would be.  And it's possible.  So maybe the next time you publish a solution  to a global challenge, publish it Gold Open Access.  This means that you will publish in a so-called Open Access  Journal.  These journals do not have any paywall at all.  And all publications in there are  published under Creative Commons license.  So you will keep the copyright of your work.  How do these journals work?  Well, let's get back to closed access.  What open access journals obviously do  is that they remove the paywall, which  means that libraries don't have to pay money to the publisher  to grant their scientists access.  And what also happens is that you are no longer  asked to pay color charges, but you  have to pay an article processing charge or your laboratory.  But since libraries are saving a lot of money  by not paying for access to these journals,  most German libraries, for example,  will cover these costs for you.  But it can be even better, because there  are a lot of open access journals out there that do not even  charge an article processing charge.  This is called Platinum Open Access.  And these journals do not ask for money from anyone,  neither for reading nor for publishing.  But how do these journals even survive?  Because they are not making any profit.  Well, we know that scientists are already doing most  of the work in this process.  And some of them decided to just do the rest of the work, too.  Yes, there are scientists out there running  their own academic journals.  Several of them joined forces with their libraries  to have a powerful and experienced infrastructure  in the background.  And together, scientists and librarians  are providing this non-for-profit service for science  in the hands of scientists without any commercial interests.  So this is already an example of what we can achieve  if we are no longer only focusing on you, the single scientist,  and your single publication.  But if we look at what we can achieve,  if we work together and join our forces.  And there are a lot of more examples out there for this.  I listed a few over here.  And for the rest of the talk, I'd  like to focus on one of them, mainly because it's a German  project and it got some recent attention.  And this is Project Deal.  Project Deal is commissioned by the Alliance of Science  Organizations in Germany and is driven by scientists  and librarians together.  And what they want to achieve is a major step forward  to open access with our three already known  major academic publishers.  And Project Deal wants to achieve this  by implementing so-called nationwide consortium  agreements.  But what is a nationwide consortium agreement?  And what can it do about open access?  These agreements consist of two components.  They are so-called publish and read deals.  And the first component is the read component.  And it means that all participating institutions,  universities, will have access to all journal  publications of the publisher when there is a deal.  And the publish component means that all publications  with a corresponding author from one of these participating  institutions and universities will be published open access  with this publisher.  And both of these components are covered with one single  and one reasonable fee.  So for example, if your university would  be part of such a deal with Elsevier,  you would have access to all Elsevier publications.  And all your publications would be published open access  with Elsevier.  This would mean that there would be up to 60,500  publications published every year open access  under such a deal.  And this is what Project Deal wants to achieve.  So these are the goals.  But how is Project Deal progressing?  There are currently ongoing negotiations  with Wiley and Springer.  So there are two parties, the publisher and Project Deal,  sitting together at one table and having a major common  understanding about the future of scientific publishing  and about what the basic conditions of such a deal  should be.  And they are now discussing the details.  The picture becomes quite different if we look at Elsevier  because there seem to be right away a major disagreement  about the basic conditions of such a deal should have  and on what a reasonable fee is.  So after a long time, years of negotiating  and no real progress, what happened  is that Project Deal, so scientists and librarians,  currently suspended the negotiations with Elsevier.  And this is something new.  And it's definitely something big.  And I can tell you that the world is watching Project  Deal in Germany.  And this is where the power of joining forces  really shows up because scientists and librarians  are really emphasizing the need for such a deal to Elsevier.  For example, scientists stop to offer their cost-free work  to Elsevier.  So they are no longer publishing with Elsevier  or doing the peer review.  If you are one of them or will be one of them after this talk,  please let your library know because we collect this information  and make sure that Elsevier knows.  And libraries, well, they just cancel their subscriptions  to Elsevier journals.  Yes, there are currently 200 German institutions  without subscription access to Elsevier publications.  And there will be even more next year.  The Max Planck Society canceled the contract  to the end of this year.  So there are a lot of scientists without access  to Elsevier publications.  And it's a lot of saved money.  And what happened after we got cut off from Elsevier  publications six months ago?  Well, the world of science didn't break down.  Neither did the world of libraries.  What happens is that scientists use alternative ways  to get access.  And libraries support these alternative ways.  I listed a few of the legal alternatives up here.  But speaking of legal, some of you  might now wonder or wonder through the entire talk,  why should we even care about subscriptions?  Why should we pay for access to publishers  or use alternative ways that are legal?  Because Syhub.  Syhub is basically the pirate bay of science.  So you can get nearly any scientific publication there.  And I'd like to forward the question on why  we should pay for access if we have Syhub directly  to the publishers.  But I think that they already know the answer,  because they do what industries do that face piracy.  They took legal action and filed a lawsuit.  They requested internet service providers to block Syhub.  But you know, don't mess with the internet.  So dear publishers, let me put it this way.  As long as you publishers hold on to paywalls,  there will be piracy no matter what.  And even worse, as long as you hold on to paywalls,  there will be people, scientists, and librarians  building alternative ways of scientific publishing  without you.  And the only way to stop this is to tear down the paywalls.  And to you, the brilliant atmospheric scientist  and all the other brilliant scientists in this room,  please provide open access to your publications  and support open access in any way that you like or that you can.  And if you have any questions or concerns or any ideas,  I can only encourage you to talk to your librarian.  Because if we work together, if we join our forces,  I think that we can finally unlock science.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thanks for this amazing talk.  OK, everybody, you know the rules.  If you have questions, please line up at the microphones.  There's five of them, two there, two there,  and one there in the corner.  And if you are on the stream, just somehow ask the question.  I'm not really aware how it works.  And then we have someone here to read the questions out  to be our human interface device.  So please, microphone number one.  Thank you for your talk.  We did not really know what access was, but I think the publishers  have a major advantage over the scientists in the librarian here,  which we did not address yet, and I want to ask you this question.  The publishers, they have the brands we as scientists need.  What I mean with that is, a part of the quality assurance,  scientists did, we ranked the journals,  we gave the impact factors and all the things.  The journal itself has a quality number.  So for a young scientist, at least for me,  it was very difficult to publish in a way that  gives me the academic reputation I need without having access  to the highly ranked journals of the closed source publishers.  So is there a way we can get out of this stat log  where we need to publish these journals that we do not  want to publish?  Yeah, we can talk about the impact factor.  I love it.  It's really hard.  It's absolutely difficult because this is a self-enforcing system  dealing with reputation.  And if you think about it, if all scientists would immediately  stop to publish with Alivier or the reputable journal  and would move to another one that has no impact factor at all,  after five or six years, this journal would have the high impact  factor.  But it's true that it's not that easy to just do it  because you want to come forward with your career.  And it's a problem.  But there's no real solution so far for this.  So Project Deal is kind of addressing this idea  by remaining with the major publishers.  So this would be the easiest way out for this problem.  Do we have an internet question?  Yes?  Yes.  Can someone turn on the mic for the signal, Angel, please?  What influence do the university have on the publishing  process of their scientists?  Can a university force their scientists  to publish in a certain way or with a specific publisher?  No, it's not that easy.  There are policies at state that you  have to publish open access.  But most of them do not define how you can do it.  So you can do green or gold or hybrid, whatever you want.  But they just state that you have to publish open access.  Microphone number two, please.  Hello.  Ninton has given everybody access  to their own streaming platform.  How do we avoid the public sharing of science  to be tainted with all the bad signs out there?  With what?  Bad signs.  There's a lot of them.  If you look at the newspapers, there's a lot of fake news.  You should absolutely not remove the peer review process  at the moment out of this scientific publishing process.  So there should be some quality control.  But there are some ideas to change the way peer review is done.  But if you remove it, then you have a problem at the moment.  Mic number three, please.  Hello.  Do you have any statistics about how many open access  publications there are compared to, I would say,  classical Elsevier and stuff?  Or if their movement is advancing,  if it's getting traction?  Yeah, I stated the source of the 72% closed access publications.  And there's a detailed analysis on how many articles are closed,  hybrid, gold, green.  I published the slides already.  I will tweet them later.  OK.  Thank you.  And the signal angel, please.  What do you think about the Plan S initiative?  Plan S, for those who don't know,  it's a coalition of research funders in Europe,  not the Deutsche Forschungs-Mädchenhaft, but all others.  And they want to have open access immediately.  So they say when you work for us, if you're funded by us,  you have to publish open access.  And I think that this is a good approach.  Can we get Mike, too, please?  Hi.  Could journals printed by various universities  solve that issue which was raised here about having  a well-known brand behind the publications?  For example, if you have a university which is very famous,  it can release their own journal and solve that brand issue.  If they release their own journal, I hope it's open access.  But I think that it's, in general, an illusion to think that  the name of the journal or the publisher has anything to do  with the quality of a single paper in there.  So this linked idea, I think, is very important.  This linked idea, I think, is kind of broken.  Mike, number one, please.  I was wondering why the publishers move against SiHUB,  but leave archive.org alone for all these years.  I essentially get the same thing from both.  I know there are differences in the details, but if I want to...  Yeah, it's restricted to a specific community.  And so it's not for all publications.  And it's still about prints and postprints,  so not the final publisher version.  But I think that they didn't because it's a powerful tool  and it's a powerful community.  Yeah.  Could we get the internet again, please?  Somebody at the internet has heard that scientists  sued the editors asking for a share of the profit of their work.  Did you get any feedback? How did this end it?  No, but that sounds interesting.  No, sorry.  Number four, please.  Historically, journals provide free aspects for scientists.  They provided logistics, like delivery of papers to whoever wanted to read them.  They provided editors, which is not a review,  but the editors, which are hired by journals,  and they provide reputational engines.  Obviously, putting PDF online is a solid problem,  so logistics is not the longer a problem  for the fully decentralized alternative to the journals.  Can we decentralize other two?  I actually didn't hear the question properly.  I'm sorry.  Try again.  Journals are providing free services.  They provide delivery...  Free services?  Number three.  They provide delivery to whoever wants to read them.  They provide a reputation engine,  and they provide editors,  not peer reviewers, but real editors on sale.  We can decentralize with internet,  we can decentralize delivery.  Can we decentralize editors?  Can we decentralize reputations?  Is there going to be a question at any point?  Yeah, I got the question, I think.  But did you know that editors are also scientists?  So they are already scientists doing this work,  so I really question the high value that publishers provide to science.  I think there is some value, but it's not that high as we all thought.  Number two, please.  Does Project DL include any incentives for the scientists  to publish a gold open access instead of hybrid?  So if you publish with a publisher that has a deal with your university,  it will be open access, no matter what.  Does it include the scientists who publish in journals  that are only open access instead of mixed open and closed access applications?  No, not so far.  Okay, just a quick interjection.  Please remember when you leave, please leave after the talk,  but when you leave, please use the front exit and not the entrance in the back.  Thank you.  Could we get another internet question?  Okay, the internet is out of questions.  That's excellent.  Number one, please.  Yeah, J. L. L.  A few things about the advantage to close access journals.  Maybe it would be a good idea to rethink the format of the publishing.  I don't want to advertise it, but I think it's a good example.  There's distill.pap, which is a journal for artificial intelligence at the moment mostly,  but they publish it in HTML because it's the current year and you have interactive stuff.  So you can play around with it and it's really nice.  I think it would be better if we wouldn't have only PDFs published from the journal articles.  There should be other formats, definitely.  Machine readable.  Micah number two, please, for the last question.  I'm also, like you said, your opinion is that at least questionable what publishers provide to science  and to society that's worth something or worth what we think.  I also think this way, and if I have a manuscript now that I don't want to publish in this way in the system,  do you have any recommendation, maybe any program, a project or something where I could maybe say,  here's my manuscript and then especially have a solution for the peer review process  that is now facilitated by the publisher, but the publisher doesn't do anything.  It's just facilitating.  So how could I solve this and go around the publisher in this way?  So I'm not sure whether I get the question because if you have open access journals, there's also peer review.  Yes, there are publishers, but if you have platinum open access,  this peer review process is organized with the library or scientists that are running the journal.  So this is already organized, the peer review process for other sorts of journals that do not have a paywall.  So could these platinum open access journals cover all fields of science?  Could I come with my paper?  There are a lot of there.  There are a lot out of there.  I can tell you how you can find them.  There is a directory of open access journals where you can filter through any subjects and filter for how much do they cost.  And now please thank our speaker again.  Thank you.
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