[GOAL] Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: final report

[Richard Poynder]

Forwarding from Heather Morrison: 

Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Final Report

Thank you to GOAL list members for rich discussion over the years. Following
are my key recommendations and takeaways for future OA researchers. Full
post:
https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2021/12/22/sustaining-the-knowledge-c
ommons-final-report/

Key recommendations for funders (including libraries & policy-makers):

*  Recommendation #1: Support small scholar-led publishers (e.g. journals
and books published by or at universities and scholarly associations) to
transition to open access because this sector can thrive with modest support
(best economic choice) and is the sector in the best position to prioritize
the values of academia over profit and achieve global equity in inclusion of
scholars around the world in a global knowledge commons.

*  Recommendation #2: Support existing and emerging open access scholarly
publishers reliant on open access article process charges (APCs) with
caution and back-up built into policy. There are 2 main reasons for caution:
there are already a large number of journals and publishers that are “no
longer in DOAJ”, many of which are still publishing. While current APC
publishers such as the Public Library of Science have earned top reputations
for publishing quality scholarship, it is clear that the APC model has also
opened a door to a for-profit sector with less than clear commitment to
scholarly quality. The second reason for caution is evidence of price rises
beyond inflation among commercial and professional not-for-profit APC based
publishers. It is not clear that the economics of this model are
sustainable. To put a back-up plan into policy, require that researchers
deposit work in an open access repository. Meeting OA policy through open
access publishing alone makes works available open access today with no
guarantee for the future.

*  Recommendation #3: Look beyond traditional print-based formats such as
journals and books. The open research SKC blog, featuring immediate release
of the results of over 200 small research projects to inform decision-making
in real time, and the OA APC dataverse, are illustrations of what we can do.
Innovation should be a priority, not an afterthought.

*  Recommendation #4: Make global equity and inclusion a top priority in
setting policy, including deciding which initiatives to support financially.
The key question is: will this policy or initiative tend to facilitate a
global knowledge commons that gives voice to all qualified researchers
around the world, or will it further entrench existing interests?

Takeaways for future APC researchers:

*  The Sustaining the Knowledge Commons blog features a rich set of small
research projects, many on individual APC-charging publishers, that are not
available anywhere else. The blog will remain as is for some time and will
be archived with the assistance of the University of Ottawa Library before
it is decommissioned.

*  The most complete dataset in the
<https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/oaapc> OA APC dataverse is
OA Main 2019. This is a unique contribution as journals once included
(journal or publisher was once included in DOAJ) are retained from year to
year. Data including APC amounts for several years derived from a number of
sources is available for close to 20 thousand journals. This dataset is for
serious researchers as it takes some time to read the documentation and
understand the datapoints; misinterpretation would be easy given that the
data is derived from multiple sources.

*  The dataset in the
<https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dataverse/oaapc> OA APC dataverse
that includes journals for which we have data for the longest period of time
is the 2011 – 2021 dataset. Most of the 2011 dataset in included in OA Main
2019, however in preparing analysis we found that some journals were missing
as they had been removed from DOAJ prior to our first sampling (2014).

*  The published open data in the OA APC dataverse reflects a small portion
of the data that we have collected and analyzed over the years. The reason
for not publishing all of the data as open data is the complexity and extra
work required to create publishable documentation. If you are looking for
historical APC data for research purposes, don’t hesitate to ask what I
(Heather Morrison) might have. No guarantees that what you need will match
what I have.

 

Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Cross-appointed, Department of Communication

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight
Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

 

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