Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

The title of this post refers to the site <http://howopenisit.org/> 
which is in effect a license scraper for journal articles. In the past
2-3 years in the UK, we have been able to make use of grants to our
university to pay publishers to convert our publications into Open
Access (also called GOLD). I thought I might check out a few of my
recent publications to see what <http://howopenisit.org/> makes of them.

This was catalysed by
an[ article](https://www.researchprofessional.com/0/rr/news/uk/open-access/2015/2/22-universities-spent--9m-on-open-access-in-2014--reveals-Jisc-data.html){target="_blank"} which
revealed that UK universities spent £9M in 2014 on the purchase of such
openness. One of the "challenges" identified is the difficulty in
converting such payment into an article that actually is open.
Apparently, publishers make not a few mistakes in their quality controls
in ensuring it is so, relying on irate authors informing them of such
mistakes. This can be quite tedious to do, and so a tool that largely
automates this checking is most useful. So here we go.

1.  doi: 10.1039/C3SC53416B\[cite\]10.1039/C3SC53416B\[/cite\] This is a
    good start. The output looks like thus. Green is GOLD so to speak.
    Well done the Royal Society of Chemistry.  
    [![10.1039:C3SC53416B](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B.jpg){.aligncenter
    .size-full .wp-image-13388 decoding="async" width="440"
    srcset="https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B.jpg 1228w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B-300x83.jpg 300w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B-1024x284.jpg 1024w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B-900x249.jpg 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 1228px) 100vw, 1228px"}](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1039C3SC53416B.jpg)
2.  doi: 10.1021/ci500302p\[cite\]10.1021/ci500302p\[/cite\] from the
    ACS this time. Pink, but at least *free to read*. Quite what that
    means is less certain. There is an adage, "[the right to read means
    the right to min](http://www.contentmine.org){target="_blank"}e"
    presumably means this article is OK to mine, but then why does it
    not say
    so?[![10.1021:ci500302p](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p.jpg){.aligncenter
    .size-full .wp-image-13389 decoding="async" width="440"
    srcset="https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p.jpg 1133w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p-300x65.jpg 300w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p-1024x222.jpg 1024w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p-900x195.jpg 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 1133px) 100vw, 1133px"}](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1021ci500302p.jpg)
3.  doi: 10.1002/anie.201405238\[cite\]10.1002/anie.201405238\[/cite\].
    Pink again, but the colour now simply means no information about the
    license could be obtained from the publisher (Wiley).
    [![10.1002:anie.201405238](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238.jpg){.aligncenter
    .size-full .wp-image-13390 decoding="async" width="440"
    srcset="https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238.jpg 1149w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238-300x39.jpg 300w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238-1024x133.jpg 1024w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238-900x117.jpg 900w"
    sizes="(max-width: 1149px) 100vw, 1149px"}](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/10.1002anie.201405238.jpg)

I ran a few more and sadly the third of the above, "no information" was
the most common response. And the legal response is invariably that if
no information can be obtained, the answer is NO, it is not free to
read. In other words, not providing a license is just as bad as saying
it's not free to read.

Article aggregators such as Symplectic do not yet perform the service
above (which to be fair is still in beta), and so I cannot yet check how
many GOLD articles there are to my name. I think it should be about 8,
and I might add that the time I have to spend in arranging for this to
happen is not negligible. Hell, I could probably have found a few more
reactions mechanism in the time I have spent on achieving GOLD. This is
one of those topics which would be interesting to revisit say in five
years time to see how the world has changed. So I leave this little time
capsule and will update it then!

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rel="author"}
:::


The title of this post refers to the site http://howopenisit.org/  which is in effect a license scraper for journal articles. In the past 2-3 years in the UK, we have been able to make use of grants to our university to pay publishers to convert our publications into Open Access (also called GOLD). I thought I might check out a few of my recent publications to see what http://howopenisit.org/ makes of them.

How-open-is-it?

Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a
research topic in itself. Thus an analysis of big deal journal
bundles\[cite\]10.1073/pnas.1403006111\[/cite\] has attracted much
interesting commentary (including one from a large scientific
publisher\[cite\]10.1038/510447f\[/cite\]). In the UK, our funding
councils have been pro-active in promoting the so-called GOLD publishing
model, where the authors (aided by grants from their own institution or
others) pay the perpetual up-front publication costs (more precisely the
costs demanded by the publishers, which is not necessarily the same
thing) so that their article is removed from the normal subscription pay
wall erected by the publisher and becomes accessible to anyone. As the
proportion of GOLD content increases, it was anticipated (hoped?) that
the costs of accessing the remaining non-GOLD articles *via* a
pay-walled subscription would decrease.

But as was shown\[cite\]10.1073/pnas.1403006111\[/cite\], the publishers
have hitherto arranged for the prices of these subscriptions to be
covered by non-disclosure clauses. Which makes it quite difficult for us
(the readers of these journals, and of course the main sources of their
content as well) to find out if this model is (starting) to actually
work. Certainly, the entire system does not yet appear to be in any sort
of steady state equilibrium; perhaps it never will achieve this in the
current model? For example, although extra funds have been made
available to promote GOLD publishing, these cover only a small fraction
of the total output of a typical research university. One could respond
to this in several ways:

1.  Find the missing funds from somewhere else, which probably means
    less money for the research itself. This of course is the model that
    maintains or increases a publisher's incomes.
2.  Decrease the costs of GOLD publishing. Currently a typical article
    processing charge ranges from £500-5000 depending on the prestige of
    the journal. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that this range
    could change to *eg* £50-500?
3.  Simply persuade everyone to publish less. Perhaps ten times less?
    Every group might be restricted to one or two block-buster articles
    a year, and the rest of their output goes into open repositories? Or
    indeed into blogs! These two options of course are unlikely to
    increase publishers' incomes.

Well, after 350 years of scientific publishing, we appear to have
arrived at a critical point. A cross-roads if you like. But who should
be in charge of deciding what direction is now taken? Should it not be
the very people who create and then "consume" scientific information and
knowledge!

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Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a research topic in itself.

The price of information: Evaluating big deal journal bundles

Text books (is this a misnomer, much like "papers" are in journals?) in
a higher-educational chemistry environment, I feel, are at a
cross-roads. What happens next?

Faced with the ever-increasing costs of course texts, the department
where I teach introduced a book-bundle about five years ago. The bundle
included all the recommended texts for an appreciable discount over
individual purchase. In their first week at Uni, students were
encouraged to acquire the bundle. As it happened, I met them for a
tutorial shortly after this acquisition. The bundle weighed some 9 kg,
and came shrink-wrapped into a strapless plastic sheath, posing a rather
slippery and weighty challenge for the student to get back to their
residency. A few months later, I asked the students how they were
getting on reading their newly acquired texts. You must appreciate that
it does take a few months for students to start getting "street-wise"
about their uni experience. One savvy student recounted they had learnt
that if one did not remove the plastic outer layer from the bundle, it
would retain much of its resale value to the next generation of incoming
students.

Now, I will not mention the publisher of this particular bundle, but its
cost is in the region of £50 per text. And for some students, the 1500
or so pages of each volume remain largely unread. Rarely if ever do I
see these texts brought into tutorials, and I expect the margins remain
blank, un-annotated with any questions or notes (it affects the resale
value if you do that). Which is a stark contrast to how the students
nowadays annotate their lecture note hand-outs often (but not
invariably) issued to them at the start of a lecture. I also observe
that increasingly my tutorials are effectively annotated by the students
attending (2-4 pages of notes can be taken during a 50 minute
discussion. The unit can be declared as pages, since this is also done
on paper).

Despite these trends, pedagogic usage of tablet devices such as Kindles
and iPads remains relatively low. It is a chicken-and-egg situation. The
aforementioned book bundle is not available for these devices, and if it
were, then in the current business model, it would be DRM
(digital-rights-management) protected to prevent resale, and would also
probably retain (if not exceed) the cost of the printed version. Hardly
attractive to a student. The lecture notes we distribute (as printed
handouts) do indeed come as PDF versions which can be placed on a mobile
tablet, but this advantage alone has not sufficed to promote rapid
uptake of tablet here. Few materials are specifically optimised to take
advantage of the unique features of a tablet, and so the printed lecture
notes are considered acceptable. Perhaps this comes to the core of what
such tablets are supposed to be. Are they devices for "content
consumption", or should we also expect them to be capable of "content
creation"? Lecture (and tutorial) annotation is of course content
creation (or perhaps augmentation). 

I might also take a look at the situation from the point of view of the
textbook author. Unless you are a big name, you might expect to redeem
about 10% royalties from one of the traditional publishers of academic
texts. It might take you a year or so to write it, and you would expect
to issue a further edition five years down the line if the book is
successful. Two generations ago, every academic might be expected to
write at least one book. I suspect that aspect has reduced nowadays;
authors can hardly be encouraged to write if they think there is a
prospect that the shrink-wrapping might not even be removed! If you are
intending to write a text about, lets say stereochemistry, you also have
to accept the 2D limitations of a printed book, or the inability to say
animate a reaction path.

Where are these thoughts leading? Well, I do have to give an explicit
example; Steve Jobs' vision of the educational text-book, re-invented
along the lines of what he famously introduced for music distribution.
There, he recognised that the (presumed illegal) sharing of music *via*
download sites that preceded the iTunes store was not a sustainable
model. The \$.99 download was conspicuously cheaper than the price of a
physical music CD (excepting classical music, which did become absurdly
cheap in this form), and a compromise on sharing stipulated only on
devices owned by you rather than more widely amongst your friends. The
same model was introduced for the iBook store. Here, the author of an
eBook (I am no longer calling it a textbook) can if they wish retain 70%
of whatever income it generates (it can also be free of course). The
unit price was a fraction of the traditional paper-based book, low
enough that the DRM-imposed inability to resell it was less of an issue.

What are the downsides of moving on from paper?

1.  Well, unlike a paper book which is instantly useable, the reader has
    to purchase a device. This device can cost more than the book bundle
    referred to above, although at its cheapest, the device is actually
    only about half the cost of the book bundle. And one might expect
    that device to last only 2-4 years before it becomes obsolete.
2.  It can be lost or damaged, although unlike a paper book, the online
    content can be readily restored at zero cost .
3.  If you purchase an eBook for one (proprietary) device, you cannot
    transfer it to another such device (say Kindle to iPad or vice
    versa), although if the content is free, that would not matter.
4.  Authors of such texts will have to retrain themselves to produce
    ebooks; it is not just a matter of using a standard word processor
    any more. I suspect writing/imaging/styling/scripting/widgeting (a
    verb for this collective process is needed; how about to flow?) an
    ebook takes a lot longer than word processing a text-book.
5.  You might have to consider the ongoing cost of using an ebook. By
    this I mean the data-plan that you might need in place to download
    components which are not actually part of the book (see below).

The upsides? Well, rather than my producing a list at this point, you
might want to take a look at the first two examples below, both created
by Bob Hanson, and think about how such inclusion in an ebook might
enhance it:

1.  [A device-sensitive page for
    display](http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/chemdoodle/test2.htm){target="_blank"} (try
    this out on an iPad or Android tablet; the Kindle might be more of a
    challenge).
2.  [A page for building and minimising a molecular
    model](http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/chemdoodle/test3.htm){target="_blank"}
3.  [This example is
    included](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reactionmate/id524541263?mt=8 "Reaction Mate"){target="_blank"},
    since it belongs to a chemistry text book, but actually would exist
    on a mobile device in functional form, if not actually a component
    of an ebook.

So an ebook becomes an environment where you can download a model from
public databases, and annotate it with properties etc. Or you could use
your ebook to build a model from scratch, then minimise its (molecular
mechanics) energy, to say explore conformational analysis in the context
of a chapter on the topic.

Well, at the start I posed the question *what happens next?* The two
above examples give possible answers. An equally interesting question
might then be *who makes it happen?* Will that be the evolutionary role
of the traditional publishing houses? Will a new generation of skilful
author capable of "flowing" an ebook emerge? Will students instead
favour retaining their dependency on paper? Watch this space.

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


Text books (is this a misnomer, much like “papers” are in journals?) in a higher-educational chemistry environment, I feel, are at a cross-roads. What happens next? Faced with the ever-increasing costs of course texts, the department where I teach introduced a book-bundle about five years ago. The bundle included all the recommended texts for an appreciable discount over individual purchase.

Messages de Rogue Scholar

How-open-is-it?

The price of information: Evaluating big deal journal bundles

“Text” Books in a (higher) education environment.