Institutional Repositories: A Publishers Perspective

1
Institutional RepositoriesA Publishers
Perspective

• Martin Richardson
• Managing Director
• Oxford Journals

2
IRs What do authors want?
Ciber Report, 2004
3
Some concerns about IRs

• A policy of mandated self-archiving of research
  articles in freely accessible repositories, when
  combined with the ready retrievability of those
  article through search engines (such as Google
  Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by
  standards such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the
  move to a disastrous scenario. Librarians will
  increasingly find that good enough versions of
  a significant proportion of articles in journals
  are freely available in a situation where they
  lack the funds to purchase all the content their
  users want, it is inconceivable that they would
  not seek to save money by cancelling
  subscriptions to those journals. As a result,
  those journals will die.

ALPSP Response to RCUK proposals
4
Some concerns about IRs

• Repositories will largely duplicate the content
  of existing high-quality journals, thus
  duplicating costs without providing equivalent
  functionality or any guarantee of the quality or
  authenticity of the deposited version.
• The Repository model is parasitic upon the peer
  review process as carried out by existing
  journals of reputation, yet threatens their
  existence by allowing readers to bypass them,
  thus threatening their sales income.

Biosciences Federation response to RCUK proposals
5
Some concerns about IRs

• The Institute of Physics Publishing is concerned
  to see that downloads from its site are
  significantly lower for those journals whose
  content is substantially replicated in the ArXiV
  repository than those which are not.
• Both the Institute of Physics and the London
  Mathematical Society are troubled to note an
  increasing tendency for authors to cite only the
  repository version of an article, without
  mentioning the journal in which it was later
  published.

Evidence cited by ALPSP in response to RCUK
proposals
6
Some concerns about IRs

• Oxford University Press made the contents of
  Nucleic Acids Research freely available online
  six months after publication subscription loss
  was much greater than in related journals where
  the content was free after a year. The journal
  became fully Open Access this year, but offered a
  substantial reduction in the publication charge
  to those whose libraries maintained a print
  subscription however, the drop in subscriptions
  has been far more marked than was anticipated.
• The BMJ Publishing Group has noted a similar
  effect the journals that have been made freely
  available online on publication have suffered
  greatly increased subscription attrition, and
  access controls have had to be imposed to ensure
  the survival of these titles.

Evidence cited by ALPSP in response to RCUK
proposals
7
Self archiving of post-prints in IRs

• May confuse readers about which version of an
  article is the authoritative version
• May increase total publication costs
• May threaten financial viability of journals

8
Oxford Journals Policy

• Post-print general/default policy is that
  authors retain the right to make the post-print
  of their article available, via self-archiving,
  in institutional and/or centrally organised
  repositories such as PubMed Central providing
  this is done 12-24 months after publication of
  the article in the journal
• Open Access Authors who wish to make their
  article freely available immediately on
  publication may do so, subject to payment of a
  fee of 800 or 1500, depending on whether the
  authors institution maintains a current online
  subscription

9
An alternative model?

• Toll-free link
• Author is free to distribute free link to
  interested colleagues
• Link resides in IR rather than final PDF
• Allows continued and consistent collection and
  analysis of usage and citation data
• It is clear to a casual reader which version of
  an article is the final and authoritative one
• Less likely to cause subscription cancellation
  and undermine the revenue streams that fund the
  publication process, including peer-review

10
Case Study SHERPA Project

• partnership with Oxford University Library
  Services, (OULS) in support of the national
  SHERPA project.
• online access for OULS to 350 articles by Oxford
  University-based authors published in many of the
  Oxford Journals from 2002-2004
• searchable via the OULS pilot institutional
  repository and available free of charge to
  researchers across the globe

11
The OUP/Sherpa Project
Metadata toOxford Eprints
Link to OUP for PDF full text delivery
OAI harvesters crawl and index OAI-compliant
websites
(Self-archiving)
Oxford University Eprints I.R.
12
Case Study SHERPA Project
13
Case Study Free archives

• NAR (Nucleic Acids Research) articles deposited
  in PubMed Central with 6 month delay during 2004.
• NAR articles made freely available immediately
  following publication from January 2005, when
  whole journal began to be published Open Access.

14
Case Study Free archives
Nucleic Acids Research/PubMed Central online usage
Full-text downloads
No delay
6 months delay
Source PubMed Central
15
Case Study Free Archives

• Average subscription circulation trend for 8
  journals with free back issue archives

16
In Summary

• Needs careful experimentation, particularly
  around the models of including original research
  articles in repositories
• Initial evidence suggests that free access to
  research articles via IRs may lead to cancelled
  journal subscriptions
• A distributed system for IRs to provide access
  to finally-published articles would be preferable
  to self-archiving of postprints
• Need clarity on version of articles (pre-print,
  post-print or authoritative publisher version)
  deposited in IR
• Further research is needed to establish whether
  dissemination via Institutional Repositories is
  cost effective

17
For further information, please contact
Martin Richardson Managing Director Tel 44 (0)
1865 353380 Fax [phone]