CoNOSC discusses research assessment and the cost of OA

Ten European member states attended the CoNOSC meeting on 27-28 June 2024 in Bucharest, hosted by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI), the main funder of competitive research in Romania. The European Commission and Science Europe were also in attendance. As the facilitator of CoNOSC, SPARC Europe brought together national Open Science leaders and experts on Open Science to discuss areas of key CoNOSC priority: developments with research assessment through CoARA and monitoring the costs of Open Access. 

How CoARA supports assessment reforms at national level

Janne Pölönen, Secretary General of the Publication Forum at the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and CoARA Board Member, spoke about CoARA’s support for research assessment reform at national levels, including the influence of national chapters. CoARA has a role in sharing good practices, measuring research assessment progress and impact, and cultural change in research in different countries. There is also a need for CoARA to advocate for targeted discussion and funding to stimulate change in national contexts along the lines of the ERA Action 3 on research assessment. He demonstrated how tightly woven the Open Science agenda is in CoARA’s efforts. Nevertheless, in the following discussion, several participants expressed disappointment at the omission of a dedicated working group on Open Science. It may be possible for advocates to accelerate efforts for Open Science in research assessment by using previous Council Conclusions. Another way to accelerate research assessment reform would be for CoNOSC members to use community-owned shared international open infrastructures in their research assessment.

Cost data on the open access transformation; trends and possible conclusions.
Dirk Pieper, Deputy Director of Bielefeld University Library, spoke about the cost data of one part of Open Access. He presented data on pricing, costs and publication data. Fee-based open access has risen significantly over the last five years, i.e. related to APCs in gold OA journals and in hybrid journals.

Pieper showed that when comparing price and cost data for a selected number of journals and universities, the cost of OA publishing has risen somewhat less sharply than the price trend would suggest. Note that for this discussion, “cost” is considered as the costs for research institutions rather than the term “publishing cost” referring to the publisher spend for their publishing activity. For forward-looking budget planning, he advised relying more on cost data rather than price data. While much data has been aggregated in some countries on APCs through OpenAPC for example, data is still lacking to make a good European comparison. 

He pointed out that the number of open access publications versus their costs is generally not proportionate. At Bielefeld University, for example, the costs for open access publishing have increased from 2022 to 2023, despite the number of corresponding publications having decreased.

Large parts of library and academic institutional budgets are spent today on so-called open access transformation agreements in some countries across Europe. However, we lack publicly accessible and transparent cost data from these deals. We also significantly lack information on cost and publication data on diamond or green OA. Some CoNOSC policymakers stated that they want more data on the difference between publishing costs to the publisher and the institution. Cost and spending should be more transparent, and publishers should comply to enable countries to compare their costs in order to get this more under control, as exponential rises are not sustainable. 

Dirk Pieper claimed that if diamond OA could scale up to achieve decreasing marginal costs per publication, this could be the easier and cheaper route to a complete open access transformation compared to paying APCs in hybrid journals. 

More data on the whole publishing system, including diamond and green open access, would help institutions make more data-driven informed financial decisions. However, in the discussion that followed, since data-gathering is labour-intensive, it was stated that more clarity is needed about what to do with this data going forward before stepping up efforts to monitor these costs.

Developing and sustaining Diamond OA with limited funding.

Vanessa Proudman, Director of SPARC Europe, was invited to present on Diamond OA since she is working on the DIAMAS Project and Diamond’s financial sustainability. She spoke about what is needed to develop and sustain Diamond OA; namely, permanent public government funding, international funding, funding for infrastructures that support Diamond OA publishers and better support and recognition for the in-kind and voluntary work on which most Diamond OA publishers rely. Funding Diamond more strategically could potentially reduce both costs of scholarly communications over time and fragmentation in the industry for example by encouraging savings made on publishing deals to be invested here. Shared services and infrastructures, as well as scholarly communication capacity centres that are organised on local levels, are ways of making Diamond OA sustainable. 

CoNOSC members also emphasised the importance of joining forces on the above, and the point was raised that national OS policymakers, national research funding agencies and institutions need to work together to accelerate OS efforts in a more sustainable way.

In the following discussion, it became apparent that arguments for Diamond OA vary by country depending on the context and how data-driven policymakers are. CoNOSC members were interested in understanding the proportion of Diamond OA to other publishing models and whether it is increasing or decreasing. Challenges going forward include gathering data to support the many arguments favouring Diamond OA. Among these are that Diamond costs less compared to APCs and this model has the capacity to preserve national cultural heritage, create equity and promote bibliodiversity. A few members stated that they were interested in exploring how to reshuffle budgets traditionally going to legacy publishers in favour of other scholarly publishing venues such as Diamond OA. When discussing how to fund Diamond OA on a practical level, one country mentioned that we might consider including funding Diamond OA in collective bargaining. As regards the future of scholarly communications, including Diamond, it was agreed that opportunities for technological innovation in not-for-profit publishing still need to be exploited on national and international levels and may be grant-funded.

During the meeting, members also provided policy updates and discussed current political developments that impact Open Science globally. These include geopolitical developments, knowledge security, misinformation, dual use (civilian and military applications) and AI, the move away from international cooperation and cuts to research funding. It was agreed that a new advent for Open Science advocacy is now necessary in these new contexts. CoNOSC members will focus on the Knowledge Security theme for the upcoming CoNOSC Members meeting later on this year.