A very warm welcome to you all, I'm David Prostler, I'm the Executive Director of REUK and we're very pleased to be able to co-host this meeting today with Copin on open access monographs and the transition from to make mandates a reality. We've got a great slate of speakers today and hopefully we're going to have a really good discussion also with you all. Just a little bit of introductions to start with them, REUK as many I'm sure we'll know is a representative body representing 39 research intensive libraries in the UK and Ireland. These are mainly university members so that means that our members are the people who are impacted by open access policies both around journals and monographs. Copin is the community-led open publications infrastructure for monographs project and that's an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers and that's a bit the same is to build community-owned open systems and infrastructures to enable open access publishing to flourish. The solstice that has just passed makes you think about the passing of time and about the seasons and about cycles and obviously within academia we have lots of those different types of cycles, the most obvious one being the academic year and changes that come through but also in policies there's the ref cycle and they often feel as if one finishes and a new one starts and also within all of that there's also that constant feeling of change so these cycles come along but each time the cycle is slightly different and so we're used to working within an evolving environment. They also feel like that's around open access policy and the UK has had open access policies for journals for something like 15 years now and they have cycled through and have changed and they've been adapted as time goes on and we have just got used to implementing the most recent of the open access journal policies from UKRI but the part that is new is the forthcoming open access monograph aspect of the policy and that seems to be coming towards this as a never-increasing rate and that's one of the reasons why we wanted to have this this session this afternoon to talk through some of those issues and we'll hear more about the policy and also about how reactions to the policy and how we might engage there as we go through this afternoon. I think that most of the people who are part of this call today are from the UK but we also welcome our colleagues internationally who have joined us today. We hope that you will get a lot out of these discussions but we also hope that through the chat through the questions and through the discussions you can also bring your experiences of open access monographs and policies into the discussion so we look forward to hearing from you as well as we go through the day. Thinking about ways of communicating you can use the chat function to put your thoughts or to put questions for the speakers as we go through and you can also raise your hand if you'd like to share any comments as we go through or ask your question yourself. The hashtag today is slightly long but I hope it makes sense. The hashtag is ROUK copim at COPIMOA that's all one word and the meeting is being recorded and we will make that recording available after the event and Martin has very helpfully put the hashtag into the into the chat there. So we will begin by setting the scene in terms of what the policy is and that we're working towards and why it is that we want to talk about that today. Our first speaker is Rachel Bruce. Rachel is from UKRI and I think we'll be very familiar to most of us in the UK as the lead on open science for UKRI and somebody who has been instrumental in formulating the policies around open access over the past few years for UKRI and I think that many of us have had many many discussions as part of the extensive consultation that UKRI undertook in formulating this policy. So Rachel I can hand over to you I think. Thank you very much David. Right so my first thing to try and do is to share my screen so let me just get that going first. Can I just ask David? We're seeing the presenter view at the moment that is perfect almost as if rehearsed wonderful. Thank you so much. Right good afternoon everybody and I am really pleased that this event is being held. In fact it is so well timed because as David has mentioned we have introduced the article policy and as the rest of the sector has been we have been busy toiling away with the early implementation of the research articles policy but we are as we have committed to starting work to clarify implementation on the long form policy. So yeah so this is really well timed and hopefully you'll see why as I go through. So I will give a little bit of context to the policy outline what the policy is and then also talk about some of our plans and priorities around implementation of that policy. Indeed the things that we think we need to do in order to make our mandate a reality. So most people will probably know that UK research and innovation is the largest funder large public funder of research in the UK and so we cover a whole wide variety of disciplines and we also have bodies such as Innovate UK and Research England which undertake slightly different roles within the research system. But overall our vision just to stay at a high level is of course to help deliver an outstanding research innovation system and that is about enriching lives really at a local national and international level and we make very clear in our new strategy that our mission is really about making sure we connect discovery and research to prosperity and the public good. So all of those aspects around global challenges but also just enriching people's lives and making sure that research achieves what the funding is actually allocated for. So where does open research sit within that? So within UKRI strategy we have a few policy priorities which we are collectively working on under the banner of research culture and environment and they are Equality Diversity and Inclusion, Research Integrity, Research and Innovation Culture and Open Research and in a way the work that we're doing there can be seen as a change program across everything that UKRI does and also working in partnership with relevant stakeholders. So for example we expect open research to be part and parcel of all of our funding considerations and not just a policy that doesn't integrate into other policies or a policy that isn't supported by our infrastructure investments so all of those things need to be working together collectively and that's the point of these key strategic priorities to help the research and innovation system achieve that end goal and our mission. In terms of open research so there are three key areas that we're working on so one is the open access to publications which this is part of today, the other open data and I always say open data et al because that would also include code methods and really opening up the research process more generally and where appropriate and then open culture and so we're doing quite a lot of work around incentives also skills and training but part and parcel of the agenda really of reforming research assessment as well so that's a key aspect in terms of our open research strategy. So the backdrop to this policy starts well before actually the government R&D roadmap but I just wanted to highlight that at a government level in the latest research and development roadmap the idea of open research being absolutely essential comes through quite strongly and they're very clear that mandation of open publication is required for publicly funded research and so of course that is an important backdrop to our policy especially given that we are the largest public funder of research in the UK. So as I think everyone here knows the open access review that informed this policy took some time because of course open access is a change agenda and it is really quite contentious with many different views. I suppose the only real point I wanted to make here for today was we started off with review based on an established research articles policy and there was an open question as to whether to introduce long form outputs and to have a monograph policy so that was considered early on and our decision was the yes we would include long form outputs and the basis really for that as again I think lots of people here will be aware of that there have already been quite a lot of work and consideration around the value of open access to long form outputs and in particular monographs in a lot of policy discussions so in particular the universities UK monograph work led by Roger Kane. We had also prior to that had the work of Jeffrey Crosick considering monographs and open access to monographs and how that may be challenging but also what the benefits might be and what might be sensible approaches to achieving open access and again looking internationally there were either other funders introducing mandates or having introduced mandates or considering introducing a mandate and then that all-important one within the UK environment of the the ref and it had already been announced in discussions that monographs and an open access requirement for monographs would be considered in the next ref although none of us know exactly when the next ref will be and so some way into the future so it was considered the right time to introduce the policy and if not now then when but in order to make that policy feasible given the maturity of the landscape we needed to consider the shape of it quite carefully so that indeed it would be feasible to implement. So the policy overall of course includes research publications as I've said but today we've focused on the monographs aspect of the policy and the policy applies for monographs published on or after the 1st of January 2024. Of course we're aware of the time frames and that there may well be contracts already in place which would mean that publication on that day would not be able to be compliant so we've made sure as well there are exceptions in the policy that will allow for certain circumstances. Just to give I suppose a bit of a parallel to the research articles policy so of course much more mature here in terms of the landscape and models to achieve open access albeit perhaps models that we don't want to necessarily persist within the monograph space but immediate open access is that policy it's CC by yes there is a case by case exception for Nd we've tried as far as possible to make sure that our policy is permissive and therefore the version of record and the author accepted manuscript is recognised and different routes through journal publishing or through repository publishing so we've taken a similar approach for the monographs policy but of course it is not directly the same there are many differences and those differences as I've said is partly down to the maturity of the landscape but also there may well be some things that we might want to shape differently working in partnership with others in terms of how to achieve openness in this environment but the policy essentially applies to monographs book chapters and edited collections again version of record and author accepted manuscript which I was quite surprised actually in the consultation you know came up as an accepted concept in this space the difference here with the licensing is we're very permissive about the license requirement so you can you know CC by Nd CC by Nd and C are all acceptable and of course there is an embargo period and also that concept around an author accepted manuscript we recognise is far less mature in this space and so we've made it very clear in the policy that where it is an AAM it needs to be clear that it's not the final published version in terms of the policy there are numerous exceptions or outputs that are out of scope so I suppose the major one is around third party materials so there may be times when of course there are too many barriers in terms of getting reused permissions and it may undermine the scholarly output in this case so if that is the case then we have an exception and then also there's the exception around where there may be a suitable or specialist it was very hard to define I have to admit publisher that is working in such a specialist and niche area that they cannot offer open access and then various outputs that are out of scope so exhibition catalogs, trade books etc so I think in terms of the the title of today I hope that the way in which we've shaped the policy is indeed supposed to be in a way that is nuanced, considers the evidence, considers the landscape and therefore enables the mandate to become a reality but of course in order to do that there's a lot of collective working required I also just wanted to touch on because a lot of consideration and heat is always on the article policy and we talk about these key considerations that we had in setting the research articles policies so one around author choice so basically making sure that there are enough publication values that are compliant with our policy so that authors have a choice whatever discipline they are in and then of course affordability and sustainability and sustainability actually does pertain to being sustainable for the research sector but also the publishing sector and publishing models and of course equality diversity and inclusion so that these were key issues in terms of setting the article policy and again they are also key issues for the monograph policy and in terms of author choice the way in which that plays out I've already mentioned the specialist publisher exception that's one aspect but also the way in which we want to support the funding in the policy is to support a variety of different publishers and publisher models and that will also relate to monitoring and evaluation and of course stakeholder engagement and making sure that we do that in such a way that there is author choice affordability really hard to predict in this space data is quite poor so and also what we do know of course we're talking about a whole different model where I think well Duncan Wingham who is executive champion for open science in universities sorry UKRI he always says yes it's more of a labor of love in this space than a commercial enterprise so we recognize that you know we're not talking about the same economic landscape but what we want to do is seek a variety of different models and of course you know we have to keep our eye on affordability and that also links into sustainability so this whole concept and it came through very strongly in the consultation and all the stakeholder engagement that maintaining biblical diversity was really important making sure that engagement around innovation was acceptable and in the discussions that we had with various different types of publishers so publishers from the big commercial operations and university presses and also new models that were emerging innovation was important to all of those publishers I would say in our discussions and I think our considerations around equality diversity and inclusion are really very similar where we set a policy where we will make sure that we're open and listening we will always seek to make sure there is access to everyone and we will monitor things carefully and where we need to we will have case by case exceptions so in terms of where we are with implementation so in the same way as for the article policy so part of the funding that we have provided to JISC is to also support the long form output policy and so in the same way having work around the negotiation of agreements also considerations around infrastructure from on the graphs advice and guidance communications and strong engagement with a range of different publishers to see to develop open access agreements where we are in terms of our planning for some of the key areas that we need to clarify in detail I've just got these mapped out in a table that my colleague to hear who is leading on our main mongras policy implementation has put together so obviously as I mentioned we've got exceptions now managing and defining exceptions around third party materials and trade books and specialist publisher exception is quite complex and we recognize that through our consultation that we need to define this but also implement something which is really based on understanding the workflows and where the decision points are made so we are starting work on that we will commission some external expertise to help guide us and we will also undertake workshops with a range of different stakeholders to help define those processes also copyright and licensing guidance is very important so we've been working with Jisk in terms of a guide for the policy in general but again around third party rights and the treatment of third party materials we probably need something richer and more in depth for this area we have as part of the policy support made funding available and at the moment we've stated that there's 3.5 million per annum earmarked for this policy and we are now scoping out the mechanism and the options for that and again we will have some workshops with stakeholders to help develop that make sure that that model is as inclusive as it can be. Stakeholder engagement is going to be very important we've already announced that we will have a stakeholder forum for the articles policy we've recently made the decision that we need to have a dedicated stakeholder forum for monographs so we will be establishing that and then I've mentioned infrastructure considerations in the Jisk work but we're also quite conscious that there may well be elements of infrastructure that we could help facilitate engagement with in terms of enhancing discovery of monographs or similar issues looking at compliant routes I suppose and we did actually undertake or funded a piece of work which looked at infrastructure considerations so we'll be picking that up as part of that. In terms of our monitoring and evaluation process we have just I can say today well in fact the consultants don't know but we have made the decision of who to appoint to develop the monitoring and evaluation framework for both the articles policy and the monographs policy and so again there's a lot of co-design in that methodology and we will be able to at least announce the scope of the monitoring and evaluation framework in November 2022. Further information is coming out in July another set of information in November and then there are a few processes that we would seek to have finalised by March 2023 so that we're trying to be as in advance as we can. So that is me thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much Rachel that was a really helpful introduction to the policy context that we're working under. We've had a lively chat session in the text while you've been speaking with a number of questions and I think the first one is an amalgamation of two of those really. There seems to be quite a bit of anxiety among smaller institutions that nonetheless have research outputs and do get UKRI grants about how they can participate and the basic question is how do those institutions that don't normally have an OA block grant participate in ensuring the openness of their research monographic outputs under the policy. Thank you for that question. So the block grant that was allocated only supports the research article policy so the funds for the long form policy will be a centrally held fund and any institution will be able to have access to that fund but the way in which that operates we are still defining and we need to consider consider that issue more fully the way in which UKRI issues its funding is it doesn't issue direct to researchers so it would be via research organisations and as far as we are concerned it would be any research organisation and what we've got to do is try and work out what the application process is and how to make that judgment so that it is fair and equitable and reasonable. Thank you and I guess there's a follow-up question to that which is about second authors and you know the primacy of who applies but you might not be able to answer that yet if the policy hasn't been behind it. But I think we want to hear about those issues that's why I said this is really well timed so yeah a very good point. Thank you so another question that's come through is from Katie Hughes at KCL who asks what should we be telling researchers now? We've been getting questions from UKRI funded researchers who are negotiating their book contracts now for books to be published after January 2024 and they don't know if they need to opt for OA and if so how they will pay for it. Some are working on collections and are looking at about £36,000 in BPCs says Katie. I think that universities should use their discretion of course we encourage open access and that there's certain judgments that need to be made and you can look at the policy and interpret it to your local environment. That's helpful I suppose. You're always thinking you're wrong but you know that doesn't quite work we recognise there's a little bit of lack of clarity here but yeah. I think the slides you showed earlier were quite helpful on this though particularly with the fact that contracts are negotiated now before then they're not under the mandate necessarily so there is a bit of leeway in the schedule to perhaps think about what you're telling researchers and you know reassuring them rather than scaring them at this point when we don't have all the details on paper is probably the way to go. Sounds about right Martin yeah. Thank you. I'm just trying to catch up with the chat here a little bit. Dawn says small universities without OA block grants already struggle with articles they're having to pay article process and charges for so it's good to hear it'll be central with an application process. Small universities feel themselves being squeezed to meet the OA requirements for articles already and they don't want to see that replicated in the monograph space so I think that sounds like it's a really welcome development. Do anyone want to come in and ask a question live if you want to put your hand up that is something that I believe you should be able to do otherwise it's just me trying to pick up things from the chat. Nikki Clarkson does have another chat question though which is will there be guidance on what is a reasonable amount to pay for a book processing charge? I think that's going to be you know a consideration yeah we're going to have to but I really can't give an answer on that at this point in time. I know that in discussions that we've had with other funders that have similar funds they have set limits. They have also found it incredibly challenging to go beyond the BPC and find ways in which you can manage a fund which supports more innovative models and we really want to support more innovative models so we've got lots of questions to answer on that point. Brilliant thank you. Kevin says in the chat and I've seen there's a hand up and I'll come to Chris in a moment. In terms of TAs what are the future plans for changing conditions of TAs through just negotiation? As obviously the only for the corresponding first author and institution and not any author means that either in case for our staff and not that corresponding author they would not be able to publish them or be expected to continue to spend more money to comply which doesn't give any of the flexible savings that transformative agreements were supposed to give on that basis. The lower funding was given quite complex and we get a lot of questions and have had a lot of questions about the corresponding author issue and I think Karen has said in the chat that there is a round table to discuss that further. We've put some guidance in our FAQ as far as we can at the moment but we recognise that we need to look at further solutions but Karen might want to come in on that. Yeah I need to say that the round table is set up with the prospective date for early July and really we have to work through the solutions so we'll have representatives from the sector alongside representatives from the publishing sector to look at the possible solutions recognising that ensuring the ongoing affordability to institutions is absolutely integral to any solution that's put in place. Thank you Karen for that.  Thanks Rachel that was really interesting. To pick up on the question about those authors who are seeking to understand what they should do now I think it would probably be really helpful to understand what the timeline for the advice and decision making on the application process will be because what I'm seeing and I'm sure there are some authors on this call what I'm seeing is the authors who have long been advocates of open access and who have welcomed the policy and who have welcomed the fact that funding will be centrally held are keen that their work can be made open access and there's a sort of bit of a policy or an information vacuum at the moment which is causing them and my association us some frustration around what options are open to them given sometimes some of the large sums involved so I wonder if there's there's some guidance on at least a timeline that we might have in mind for that. Yeah so I can't I tried to give some which is you know we we will say as much as we can in November but some things will not be finalised until March 2023 so however there's oh well I think that's probably as much but why will say Chris is we definitely want to have a timeline out there in July so if we can schedule that on our website then there will be a timeline and to try and make as much material available so yeah I recognise that and thank you for pressing us. Thank you so much I think there are a number of questions actually that alongside Chris is there asking about you know what what should we say what are the timelines but I think you've given some guidance on that now that's really helpful so thank you. Rachel that's been really helpful and I'm really grateful to you for coming today thank you so much for your time. Obviously we're looking forward to hearing about the next stages and where we go from here but I'd just like to say thank you very much again and virtual virtual applause. Thank you and I just want to say again thank you so much it is great timing and I'm going to stay for the whole thing because we really want to know what's going on and make sure because we as I say we are moving on to this phase so thank you so much and I'm sorry that we don't have all the answers yet. Brilliant thank you and I now I get to hand back over to David I think to introduce our next speaker. Thank you Martin great great start to the afternoon and a wonderful piece of scene setting so we know what we're aiming towards and we know the challenges that are involved in that. Next we're going to turn to Karen Reloy who we've heard from a little bit but we'll give floor to who's going to talk about just collections and the funding landscape what Karen doesn't know about funding for journals and books is can be written on a very small postage stamp and she's one of the international experts in this area who's worked for just for many years now and has been instrumental in many of the negotiations with publishers for a variety of content so Karen we'll hand over to you. Okay so yeah thank you very much for having me along today and that very generous introduction David. I have been at just for 20 years and in those 20 years I have worked in the field of open access monographs in fact back in 10 years ago 2012 I was leading the open UK open access monograph project so I do have a background understanding in many of the challenges, frustrations and pain points that come alongside a transition to open access monographs but I also have the view of where possibly some of those solutions might be and the learning that we at just can apply from the work that we've done on the journal space as well. So I'm going to today talk to you a little bit about the funding landscape and how JISC is working to support institutions our members in that transition to open access and in the implementation of the open access monograph policy. I do have my colleagues Graham Stone who many of you will know and Caroline McKay on the line as well so if you have questions they may well pick those up as we go along. So our goals at JISC are really to help you sort of to prepare for the policy so it's really interesting to hear some of those questions coming through about how do we prepare what is the information that we need to provide to authors and really engaging with you to think through what is the guidance and support that you need to put in place to ensure that your authors have clarity over the processes and also to then feedback some of that to UKRI to help them inform the development of how that open access monograph funding pot is going to be made available and the conditions upon which it applies. And that's quite similar to the work that we've done as well in the journal space where we've worked with Welcome Trust UKRI and we're currently working with NIHR to think about how their funds are being applied and the conditions that can be used with those. So we're also obviously really focused on putting in place those affordable and sustainable routes for publishing. And that's really important well what's really important for us and for our members as we hear is really supporting that Biblio diversity and creating a dynamic environment where open access monographs can be published but also providing that balance into the marketplace which means that we really need to drive and support many of the community led initiatives that we see being developed at the moment. We want to make it as easy as possible for authors and their institutions to understand which publishers are going to be offering compliant routes and then also to actually find those open access monographs or the chapters or those edited collections once they've been made openly available. And the current process and systems that are in place within publishing houses which are all set up to sell make that slightly more challenging than you would imagine and a lot of that's about getting the right metadata flows in place and ensuring that that is findable in our various catalogs and solutions that we have within institutions and also within library hub. We also want to try and reduce that administrative burden for authors and institutions by undertaking much of the data collection as possible and so again mirroring some of the activity that we undertake on the journal side collecting data from the publishers and presses that are providing open access monographs helping us to verify and evaluate that data to support monitoring reporting and also to really help us to understand the performance of different types of agreements or what's actually a reasonable BPC would be which is something that that was mentioned earlier and it is by having the data behind agreements and behind uptake usage number of monographs or chapters being published and the costs that go into that that we can then think about what the reasonable and affordable means for our sector. And lastly we want to continue to engage with our international partners to support the alignment and interoperability of infrastructure and policies. There is absolutely it's absolutely clear that in order for open access monograph publishing to be affordable and sustainable we have to do this with our international partners to ensure that that infrastructure is there and that there is some policy alignment given that UKRI is just one of the funders in this particular space and we have many other funders providing you know where titles are being published from and from lever hune etc. So it's no secret that in order to support that diversity in the marketplace it's really important that we don't go down a single model and that we really think about what the book processing charge model means for the market and think about finding balance in the marketplace and supporting those alternative models particularly with the the high cost of book processing charges in many cases and the affordability for institutions. So we really have been saying for quite some time and working in this field since 2012 as I said to really support and ensure that we are harnessing a number of initiatives exploring a variety of different business models and not just going down one route which is the book processing charge. In just licensing we have a number of licensing agreements already in place and as I said we're really trying to support those community driven initiatives or initiatives which are really looking at how we can collectively support the availability of open access titles. So we have support and memberships with Compton books and open book publishers, we have models where the fees support the new frontlist content being made available with MIT Press and there's the opening the future initiative with CUP and Liverpool University Press participating in that. We have an initiative with University of Michigan Press, Dick Reuter and most recently we've run an open access community framework and we've got several submissions for that framework and one from OpenUp which is six UK presses and university presses, we've got the University of Westminster Press, University of London Press and White Rose University Press. So you can see from the types of agreements that we're currently putting in place that we are really focusing in on supporting that diversity and really thinking about affordable routes to ensure that authors have access to compliant options and with many of these agreements there is actually quite a modest fee that's being applied and often that is less than what one book processing charge would be for a title with one of the larger publishers for example. So it does look like these models are very viable and that there is great opportunity for us to consider how we take these forward and think about what the long-term view of that is by working very closely with our members. This just gives you a sense of participation in our current agreements and so off the I think there's seven included here in this slide of the seven agreements we've included in this slide. We have 104 subscriptions in total and we have participation from 54 institutions so there's 54 institutions participating in at least one of those agreements and that's really encouraging to see that spread across the bands actually so representing from the very research intensive to the smaller specialist institutions and seeing that there is active interest and support for these types of models and initiatives. However when we look at the the number of subscriptions we can see that it's quite variable across the board for those different models and sometimes it can be quite low some of them are quite new that might be why but also in many cases they've been around for a while but the level of participation is quite low still and that really speaks to one of the challenges that institutions and in particularly the library have in trying to get the support and to transfer budgets to support open access publishing initiatives in the monograph space and often what we see is that these when the participation of the subscriptions come through it's often an end of year decision and based on on remaining budget and what we'd like to do is to work with our members to try and increase the number of institutions participating in these agreements and to try and work with them to really sort of share best practice and guidance about how to initiate with that within your institution what does that mean for your local library budgets where the bulk of this funding is coming from but also to get that very senior high-level support for these types of initiatives understanding that if we are to succeed in this space of open access monographs it's really important that we do have that diversity particularly given the breadth of publishers in arts and humanities as well. So we have been doing some blogs and we've run some sessions recently and we have been sharing the advice and guidance that's coming through from our members so sort of learning from each other and sharing best practice and advice and that's really important to encouraging that uptake and really important to ensuring that we as a community are getting that balance in the marketplace and so this is a quote from Suzanne at Sussex and she's saying you know just how important it is that we support that plethora of models and that we ensure that we put those affordable models in place and then just two more from our recent Open Access Community Framework event which is all about supporting those diamond based community models and so we've got Peter Bar from Sheffield and also Scott Taylor at University of Manchester just talking about how they actually took the approach to internally to get that support and buy in for pushing forward with Open Access Monographs and these more community diamond based models but it's obviously not all about just the monograph as a whole we've got edited collections and we've got book chapters and we recognise that book chapters is an important area for the UK right policy and we believe that there are from the REF data from 2014 which I think Simon Tanner analysed there are far more book chapters than there are books and so it's really important that we are working with the community to try and and publishes obviously to look at what viable routes will be for those open access book chapters and again introducing what you might call CPCs you know there's all these acronyms that will be problematic potentially due to the cost and therefore we believe that piloting green routes for author accepted manuscripts for chapters is going to be something that we take forward and we are looking to set up pilots with publishers and presses to explore the viability of these models and to really learn from them and share our findings with with our member institutions and publishers. In addition we'll obviously be looking at the metadata requirements for book chapters thinking about how the information around those chapters flows through our systems and to try and make it as efficient as possible efficient as possible that those that metadata is surfaced in the relevant services or in the relevant reporting for for this particular space. So in this field of sort of licensing in those those negotiations work that we undertake and in just licensing we will be working with our university's UK just content negotiation strategy group and for the last two meetings we've been talking about open access monographs in fact Martin came and presented at our last meeting and we are revising our strategic objectives which will be discussed next week to ensure that we are incorporating open access monographs and really thinking through in the future what the sector's requirements will be for open access monographs chapters and edited collections. We'll also be thinking through the negotiation strategies you'll note that we don't have a big agreement in place open access monograph in place agreements in place with some of the bigger publishers and that is that is on purpose because we believe we need to ensure that we understand what your requirements are for those agreements before we put them in place and we really think about what the negotiation strategies are for that and we do that in collaboration with you. We'll also be scaling up our engagement with publishers presses and obviously the negotiation of then putting in place compliant options or open access arrangements with those particular publishers. We are going to be analysing the ref data the last round of ref data to get a sense of the scale. We know when we look at the funding being provided to publishers from UKRI on the journal side of things we've scaled our agreements by the negotiations and discussions we're having have scaled by a further 380 odd publishers so we imagine that we will see some of the same publishers there but also some very different publishers that really reflect that diversity in the arts and humanities space and social sciences as well and of course we will be continuing to support the work that we do and I say we very loosely it's mainly Graham in the space of community led publishing so working with those new university presses the new university press collaborations like White Rose for example really working with them to ensure that they are a they remain viable and offer a sustainable route to open access monograph publishing for our members as well. I'm just going to briefly touch on some of the other areas that we are working on either as part of the UKRI funding that we've been provided or as part of the ongoing work at disk but the infrastructure that supports open access is really really important particularly open access monographs and there was the UKRI gap analysis of open access monographs infrastructure and so the work that we are doing to either expand or develop or look at existing disk services and how they can be enhanced to support open access books and chapters and also we'll be really taking forward those conversations with some of those emerging infrastructures to ensure that we get that real joined up approach that interoperable approach across those infrastructures. So that means you know we'll be continuing to work with OAPN, DOAB and looking at some of the other international initiatives and COPN and and operators as well. We'll also be ensuring to really thinking about how to make it easier for authors by reducing that bureaucracy which we know is a really important factor in making an efficient process and supporting a policy implementation. So some of the areas as again you know really thinking about whether we expand or how we might expand the access to understanding where the compliant routes are for authors so that could potentially be an enhancement to the share of services really thinking about how we then find the monographs that are made available and those chapters as well potentially again an expansion with Library Hub to ensure that the metadata and that that information is being shared across systems and of course really supporting our members by trying to really think through the data side of things how we can take on some of that data burden in terms of monitoring and policy compliance and reporting and provide that centrally on behalf of our members to UKRI for example and potentially using our services such as monitor. Of course I started by saying that you know we've we've really been thinking about how we support some of your challenges so it's really good and this as Rachel said this session is a really good opportunity to hear about some of the challenges or some of the concerns that you have right now that we can actually just crack on and start working on with you to to provide some more guidance or even just supporting that sharing of practice and we do actually have a UKRI community of practice site and that I do recommend you join and that really helps you share learning across institutions which I think is what is often very helpful to thinking through what you are saying to your authors as well and but we will be undertaking sorry high level briefings and workshops over the next couple of years and planning some sessions around myth-busting webinars for for for authors really thinking through those copyright and some of the challenges there supporting tool kits and continuing to work with publishers learning societies institutional publishers really working through and supporting that dynamic publishing environment. So this is just some of the things that we we have either available or that we're working on and some of the sessions that will be coming up in the future including some of the roundtable events for publishers and institutions and lastly I think within my last minute I just wanted to note that disk will continue to work internationally again I've you know the success of open access monographs is really linked into that wide engagement and support for sustainable infrastructure at that global level and we will continue to participate in some of the international initiatives and work very closely and collaborate very closely with our colleagues and of course you know coping is one of those initiatives that we participate in so we're very pleased to to see this event being taken forward as a good opportunity for us to think about how we are building that really strong affordable sustainable open access monograph publishing space and I shall stop there thank you. Wow thank you Karen that was that was absolutely brilliant so I'm going to change things up a bit and take over on the Q&A instead of Martin and David just to make it a bit more varied but yeah I thought that was a really interesting presentation and loads and loads of stuff in it so I really hope we can share the slides with everyone afterwards we'll we'll speak to Melanie and David about that after this and but what's been really interesting for me actually is to see how joined up today's session already seems to be perhaps more by good luck than good management I don't know for anyway what I mean by that is you've touched on so much there that I know I'm almost sure Martin will be talking about and I'm almost sure Sarah and Simon from the libraries will be talking about which so it's great to see how embedded just really are in the real issues so it's on me to to just pull together a few of the questions that popped up in the chat and your colleagues Graham and so forth have been jumping in and fighting the good fight for you Karen so I'm going to try and pick out a few that weren't answered answered a really good one from Isabella Cambridge who noted about we need to reflect on the diversity of the research community she's noted that established researchers with tenure appear to be more open to OA and alternative publishers can you talk a little bit about what support there is for ECRs who need to build their CVs and are perhaps more concerned with the reputation of a publisher that's a really a really good question and that is obviously across the journal side and on the monograph side I have to say I've often found that in previous research that we've undertaken that the early career researchers are much more open to the idea of publishing but it is of course linked into that career progression and thinking about their CVs etc so yeah it's a really good question we recognize the need to engage with early career researchers really thinking about how we can bring them in and support them through the publishing experience and to develop that confidence and that goes hand in hand with developing confidence in the research culture within institutions as well and that is a one of the strategic objectives of the content negotiation strategy group that they're going to be agreeing so I do anticipate more coming through around that particular space but I shall just leave it there at the moment Fantastic thank you so that's great and another interesting question that popped up I thought was from Alex at Bristol who asked well mentions that Bristol have a university press that charges BPCs and could you talk a little bit about what support is out there to move presses like that to something well Alex has said better yeah what support might be there to move a press away from BPCs I think it's about looking at the variety of models so as we speak to the to the range of publishers in this in this space in the presses it's really about exploring and showing okay if you look at your profile of how you have published in the past or what you have been published and your scale of your activity that also maps to how this press is using this type of community based model so to encourage them to like to sort of compare and contrast the different types of models and to see that okay this might actually be a viable option for us and also I think there's going to be some I hope when I speak with my with the content negotiation strategy group I think there's going to be some recognition in the sector's requirements that book processing charges in the long run will not be a viable solution or not that will not be a viable sustainable solution if it is the only solution so I do think there will obviously be some in publishers that go down that route but we want to be pushing in and stressing as a sector I think the the need for those alternative models and that hopefully will come through when we talk to you all about your requirements for for open access monograph agreements great thank you thank you Karen um I think we've probably got time for maybe one or two more questions um I quite like this this late entry from Catherine at UCL who boldly asks is it too early to ask whether JISC and UKRI anticipate transformative agreement like agreements with commercial book publishers sorry to put you on the spot oh Catherine um my honest answer is I don't know yet as to whether that would be something that we would want to go down uh in terms of of a model for for monographs um it's not out of scope at the moment but I think understanding what's good looks like in the future is going to be critical to looking at whether we we do TA like agreements but yeah everything is in is in scope but we want to make sure we're getting the right type of agreements in place for monographs sure Rachel raised a hand would you like to very briefly just to say that we have had publishers approach with ideas about models around that space but you know obviously taking into account whether that's good value whether it really is going to achieve um I suppose the the principles that we've already sort of got set out in terms of negotiations for the sector are the things that we need to check against super thank you and I'm mindful of the time but I think we could just I can see Isabelle has a hand up Isabelle at Oxford not Cambridge thanks Tom thank you and thank you Karen very interesting um we're still finding our feats like everybody else presumably and this is a half formed question in my mind but one of the questions or things that we are thinking about is um assessing the content in those deals and I'm just curious how those are going to interface how an open access agreement is going to interface with the EBA ebook deals that libraries also have with the publishers which are also kind of the new current current content that you're going to be getting and it's it's really unclear in my mind how this is all going to pan out in future and when you potentially end up with duplicate content are there any kind of thoughts about this that you might want to share with us if you have any I do I don't know if they're fully formed thoughts uh Isabelle um but yeah we are entirely conscious of the fact that we have a number of those sorts of agreements EBA agreements in place which support the the availability of of monographs so I guess that links into Catherine's question around you know would we then be looking to transition those agreements into open access agreements using a similar sort of type of read and publish model um and you know there are some publishers as as Rachel has said that are interested in in that type of model um so I do you know I don't know if I have I don't really have the answer for you but we are fully aware of it and thinking about the interplay and that will lead into those conversations that we have with our strategy groups around the negotiation strategies looking at that broader landscape thank you okay I think we've probably grilled you enough Karen you've done very well thank you ever so much um thank you terrific Q&A and terrific presentation um I think I'll just hand straight over to Martin now um or David's probably going to introduce Martin and um and Martin will do his his talky thank you very much thanks Tom yes I I couldn't choose Martin I mean I suddenly realized that we've seen Martin already and we haven't actually bothered to introduce him so apologies for that I could play the you all know who Martin is anyway card but that would be perhaps just a bit rude uh just to say Martin's professor of literature technology and publishing at Birkbeck at the University of London but he also has a very deep interest in issues around open accesses and has been thinking seriously about these issues for many many years now and has appeared on many committees helped to write reports appeared before the House of Commons Select Committee on open access and such likeness and that knowledge expert in this area he also does the thing that perhaps not everybody does in this field which is that he publishes in open access and he has a wide range of monographs which you are able to get access to for free right now through the fact that Martin practices what he preaches Martin over to you thanks very much David and everyone for being here today so I'm going to talk today a little bit about how we get from where we are to a more systematic landscape of open access we've heard discourses for many years now of the need for experiment and I think we are still in a period where we need to experiment and we should acknowledge that we don't have all the answers yet and certainly that's coming through in in the questions we don't know what we should be saying quite to researchers yet we don't know which models are going to prevail and so on but I think we also need to start thinking about how we get from the current landscape of experiments to something that is normalized, routinized and part of what we do if we don't have a plan for what we do at the end of experiments and how we appraise whether experiments have worked we just end up in a period of perpetual experiment and that leads to discourses that legitimate endless stalling and never never getting ahead with this. By way of background I just wanted to note that I'm here today representing the COPIM project which is the 3.6 million pound funded initiative of Research England and the Arcadia Trust which is the charitable fund of Lisbeth Rowsing and Peter Baldwin and the goal of this project over its multi-year lifespan has been to bring together libraries, universities, OA book publishers, researchers and infrastructure providers to think through what's missing in the landscape for open access books at the moment and that ranges from technological aspects so we've built a system for metadata storage and dissemination called totes for example through to thinking about the business balls landscape and I'm going to talk a little bit about the opening the future model alongside others that we've been piloting as part of this. There's also a platform the open book collective forthcoming that will have a range of the current initiatives lined up in a single space for libraries to easily cross-evaluate and participate in but essentially the COPIM project has been set up to try to bridge some of the current gaps in the infrastructure acknowledging that there are gaps in the infrastructure and acknowledging that we're just simply not as far on with book thinking as we were in the journal space I think we've got somewhere with the project and have ended up closer I wouldn't say we've achieved everything yet but do please check out the COPIM website if you'd like to know more about the things that we're doing. So we've heard about UKRI review for project funded research and that's really important UKRI as Rachel said is an extremely significant funder of high quality research that's been through a peer reviewed process and that has specific project funding attached. We recognize that those outputs are very likely to be high quality because they've been through an aforementioned screening process they've almost been pre peer reviewed in some senses before the outputs are even written. The challenge though is that UKRI does not represent an enormous body of funded research in the humanities and social sciences compared to the total body of research which is often conducted on institutional time funded by streams like QR that come from the UK's research excellence framework and its allocation measures. So a really important point stress is that yes it's great to hear UKRI's plans we also really need to hear what the REF review turns out and what kind of level of harmonization is between UKRI's project funding and REF and it's very difficult to know how that works as a mechanism. REF funds work prospectively in a sense but on the basis of assessing the work from the last cycle so five years worth of work is assessed a ranking is produced funding is allocated for the next five years on a rolling basis. How do we allocate within that future outputs that will be submitted for the next REF is one of the crucial questions we don't know which books will necessarily be going into the REF ahead of time and so it becomes a much messier process to attach books to a specific funding stream when you start to think about REF rather than project funded research. A recent paper that I wrote with several members of the speaking contingent today estimated that if you wanted 75 percent of compliance with REF books you're looking at approximately 19.2 million pounds of funding per year on the basis of an average market rate book processing charge. We didn't suggest the book processing charge was the way you should do that it was just a way of coming up with a figure to think about what level of funding would be necessary. It's not clear where in REF that would come from it's great to hear that UKRI is centralizing the fund for books that gets around a lot of problems would people be happy to see a similar central hypothecation for REF policy if one came out. I think I also want stress though this notion that book processing charges are problematic they look as though they're really handy because they give you an accountable unit to which you have recourse and when you're funding a project with a specific outcome attached to its specific book it's very good to be able to say well that book costs this much to make open access and we have a book processing charge and it's directly attached but we also know that these types of mechanisms concentrate costs on institutions in ways that become quickly very unaffordable. Research intensive institutions end up paying many many more times than they were under a purchasing model while those who benefit from the global collection of OA find themselves unable to contribute at even a single book level because it's more than than they were paying in the first place. The money simply is not in the right places even if it is in the system in the system is the phrase that's often banded around but if it's not at the place where you need to pay that's a problem and book processing charges tend towards that type of setup. What's encouraging though is that we've seen over the past couple of years the emergence of strands of different models that are trying to think through new ways of funding open access monographs these are the experiments to which I I gestured at the start of this talk and there the experiments which Karen has already very helpfully pointed us with her presentation and these mostly take the form of various types of either threshold or library membership models and they can be categorized broadly to some extent by the size of the press is involved there's probably some unfair categorization going on here in the name of oversimplification but I'm going to try just talk through a little bit of what this landscape looks like so people can get a flavor for some of the new newly emergent models I should say that lots of this came initially out of the scholar led open access presses where scholars who are frustrated by the lack of progress and open access have set up their own presses and quickly found that book processing charges are not good models for what they do so the aforementioned open book publishers and punkton books for example have membership schemes in which libraries can participate and that's not to fund any one specific title to be open access it's to fund the ongoing operations of the press to have editorial independence the select titles to publish but to have then the revenue in place that they're not reliant on a pure economy of paywalled or gated sales for what they do and they can just make the material open access without worrying about having to hit the revenue threshold and that can sometimes be balanced against sales as well so various studies have shown that you do still see sales in an open access monograph environment it's not as those sales all disappear overnight and you have no revenue from sales so you get this mixed economy model of a membership support this coupled with more conventional sales like approaches at the other end of the scale you have some quite large and very well known presses who have implemented different models of how they can get to open access without book processing charges MIT very prominently launched its direct open scheme in the last couple of years which is a subscription threshold system where if enough people subscribe to the front list in any one year they'll make the entire front list openly accessible or even just part of the front list openly accessible. Cambridge University Press has a pilot called Flip It Open I think it's called Flip to Open where on an individual book level there's a threshold set for a revenue projection and if that threshold is reached the title is made openly accessible so the books that meet their expectations for revenue become open that's an interesting one because obviously the challenge there is that you are funding the books that are most widely purchased and used to be open access whereas the ones that are perhaps not getting those sales are the ones that might benefit from the additional exposure of open access and so there are a set of mixed motivations in there that become quite complex and difficult to juggle quickly. Michigan has a program called Fund to Mission as well which is designed to showcase the press's alignment as they see it with institutional libraries and their desire to move to open access and again a threshold that if they can get to their target they can make books from their front list that year openly accessible. What I've been doing with Tom at Copham is working with small to medium size academic presses with substantial back lists to try to work out what we do for those presses that don't fit within those two poles of size and who also need very low risk models for a transition to open access because they're not operating on huge margins that would allow them to take enormous financial risks. So we've been working particularly with Liverpool University Press and the Central European University Press to build a model called Opening the Future. The basic idea behind Opening the Future is that libraries subscribe to the back list of titles at the press so Central European University Press for instance has sets of 50 books in packages that you can subscribe to as a library and that's a subscription it's not open access in any way but what the press does is that it uses the revenue from that back list subscription to build a fund to open books in the front list progressively. So as the press gets to the next revenue threshold that it would need for an open access book from your subscription to the back list they'll make another front list title openly accessible and in that way what we're trying to do is to build this kind of melioristic improvement program where book by book we gradually unlock the front list of titles rather than saying it's an all or nothing on the front list where either you get there or you don't and that's been going pretty well so far we're getting well towards our targets to convert the front list at Central European University Press and a series at Liverpool University Press to this model and as I said in that model we try to get this kind of orange segment diagram going where it's a book by book and we can be transparent about what we're doing with the revenue. So we've got this discourse of experiments we've got say these three strata of sizes of press trying things. What does it look like on the ground? Are people participating? Are we getting somewhere where these experiments are yielding results to give us some confidence about what the future should be and what it looks like? It's a mixed bag I'd say. The challenge of COVID-19 was enormous for library budgets the uncertainty that was engendered by that hugely influential event on student recruitment and just not knowing for that year-long period in particular what revenues were going to look like at UK institutions in particular which are particularly susceptible to fluctuations in revenue from student recruitment dips. We also had the challenge that during the last couple of years the student numbers cap in UK institutions has been lifted which has given greater financial uncertainty and a greater division between institutions where larger institutions have felt more certain in their revenue projections even while smaller institutions have started to really feel the pinch. So participation is perhaps uneven between different types of institution according to to their ability to participate and their projected risk from the pandemic due to student recruitment fluctuations. The challenge is that we need participation in experiments and it's not enough for people to sit back and say we're going to see what happens because if people don't participate and they sit back and see what happens the experiments fail because everyone just watched and waited. There has also been a little bit of a discourse in recent days about the legibility of the landscape and the complexity of trying to understand a variety of different models. I mean one of the good things actually is that there aren't that many models for open access monographs. Some of them have some complexities you know I had to explain opening the future and take care around the relationship with the back as the front list and it it does take a little bit of understanding but I think we're actually at a point where at the moment there are few enough models that we can get people to understand these and we can get outcomes from experiments. As Karen said the experiments are also very affordable. Those models that try to distribute costs through membership models are less than a single book processing charge by a long way in many cases they're less than an article processing charge in the natural sciences and I think that affordability premise is absolutely key because we know that the humanities and social sciences where the long form output is so core are not well funded by comparison with their scientific cousins but we also need to think about as I said this long-term transition and where we get from the models that work to as experiments to the models that work as long-term acquisitions, budgets, replacements and one of the things to do that that we need to think about is how we appraise investment I'm really pleased that we've got Tasha Melinda Cohen from counter going to talk just later about open access book metrics but we need to think about how libraries decide where to put their acquisitions budgets and how that translates into open access. So one of the points is that those teaching centric institutions have local teaching need as a core premise for what they're doing. It can sometimes be then very hard for them to see how a book processing charge model translates into something that's useful when local teaching need is your core reason for buying books. However if you think of open access as building a global collection once for everyone suddenly that local teaching need is met by open access when you've got a central pool of titles on which you can call. Other institutions are thinking about local research environment and open access and what they can do say for future REF environment statements to make themselves appear as though they are well to show that they are embracing open science and open research practices. Supporting experiments in open access monograph publishing is certainly one thing that can look quite good on those forms but it needs to be incorporated as part of a longer term strategy. And lastly I just wanted to stress that we've got to be careful about comparing book metrics with journal usage metrics. We know we have a much longer half-life on these titles. We know that the way that they influence disciplines is difficult, is not sheer numbers of eyeballs on a page that makes a difference. It's actually how, narratively speaking, disciplines are affected by a publication and its significance and how that can take a very long time to filter through. And so I think we need to be cautious around resisting the move to pure metrification of how we appraise where we're putting our money and what titles are used in that quantitative sense. So my last slide before we go to questions. We've had this several times today already but the acquisitions budget at institutions needs to change if we're to see a transition to open access monographs. We can't have open access monographs just being an additional cost on top of the acquisitions budget that would not meet the affordability criteria under which we're operating. The good news is that lots of the experimental models that are coming through have acquisitions like components. So opening the future for instance you do buy something directly for your own library. The subscription premise of direct or open even for example is a direct purchase for the library because if they don't make the threshold you have access to that front list. And so there are ways in which already you can narrativise participation in experiments through the acquisitions budget. I think we should take care around metrics as I said on my last slide but I also won't say that it's heartening to see so many people from the library community here today because library leadership is key and we're going to hear later from two libraries that have been leading on this about what their practices look like and what they've been doing to try to make this more of a reality. So thank you very much. If you have any questions afterwards do please stay in touch. You can write to me at martin.ev at bbk.ac.uk and there's the copin website there copin.ac.uk and other useful links like openingthefuture.net. Thank you very much and looking forward to some Q&As. Thank you Martin, that was superb and I think the issues that you raised about how we make that shift from experimentation through to business as usual, how we think about appraising our investments and then how we operate with acquisitions is really interesting. I think that people were concentrating so carefully that they haven't really had much chance yet to put in questions. I want to just come in but before I turn to that one thing that struck me, I mean I was thinking about some of these flipping models and the subscription aspects to it and I'm wondering if there's a danger there that they might fall foul of the policy because with all of these with all of these sort of subscribed open type models the assumption and the hope is that the material will become open access but there's always going to be a danger that it might not and if you're an author who is under the UKRI's policy is that a risk that you would be willing to take and so I wonder if there's something about the way that the policy is set up that would discriminate against those types of models although to partially try and answer my own question I guess there's always a possibility that you could you could put an author accepted manuscript in but maybe people won't want to do that but I don't know they've got some thoughts. So I think this is a basic question about accountability and funding and how outputs are linked to particular funding streams or otherwise. If we think about a broader environment of REF where we don't have a specific knowledge about a specific output being open access but we know that it's likely that we want it to be open access because the REF policy says so we need an environment where essentially we have converted the vast majority of front lists at the vast majority of presses that people want to publish with to an open access model and we need to get there before the policies kick in. So for example with our work with Central European University Press the goal is to get the entire front list of research monographs to be openly accessible at that press so that any author who comes to that press doesn't even have to think about this what we've done is we've made it possible for everything there to be openly accessible without your thinking about it. Now are we going to reach that in time across all presses? I shouldn't think so and that is where this risk starts to come in. I wouldn't encourage anybody to violate their funding agreement with their funder that would obviously be not a good thing to do but I suppose that's where things like the UKRI essentially held funds could be helpful you know if it turns out it's not covered by an existing flip of an entire press then actually having having recourse to a book posting charge for that title could be really helpful. We in fact we do take a mixed model that are open in the future where the press will accept a book posting charge if one is available but that's kept as a separate revenue stream from the other titles that we're converting that don't have recourse to those funds. So I think if we can get these streams mixed in a way that doesn't overlap I don't want to see people double dipping but if we get it so that we're trying to convert presses as holes via subscribe to open type principles but we've got fallback to book processing charges in the cases where that doesn't work we can think further about green and authors accepted manuscript doesn't even further fall back on that we've actually got quite a variety of hopeful looking ways that we can achieve this and that makes me feel quite hopeful about it. Great thank you. Philip Keats has put in a question about book budgets in smaller teaching focused institutions which are essentially spent on academic determined reading lists and is there a role here for advocating academics to use more open access materials in their reading lists to free up budgets for them to make more materials open access. I think there's a really strong argument around thinking of monographs as open educational resources in some senses and thinking about how we talk to students about this. Students end up paying quite a lot to buy books that they need to use it's not often research monographs or not always at least but you know titles like companions edited collections and so on students do sometimes end up buying. If a core part of an institution's teaching offer is that actually you know what we ensure the vast majority of texts that you will need to read will be available to you digitally in a convenient form that you can access at home without having to go to the library essentially you know this is a really powerful part of an institution's teaching offer I think that we should be capitalizing on. I also think that we end up thinking about you know well we need to get that book this year so we'll subscribe to the book package for this year that gives us access to it and then we end up subscribing to it next year again and again and again and over time we've ended up actually paying for the book multiple times in multiple ways. Going back to this idea of a central global OA collection for everyone is a really powerful way of centralizing this as let's buy it once for everybody and then we all benefit and start and think of the global collection as a shared pool could be a really useful thing for teaching as well as research. I think I should say also in the disciplines where these books really matter there isn't that clear divide between that's just a research thing and that's just a teaching thing. We teach with the research materials and it's core part of it so these spaces overlap a lot more than we see in perhaps natural scientific disciplines. No Matthew that's true thank you. The question around that sort of move from experiment to a more business as usual I think is is is underpinning a question from I'm a Samsung at UCL here about some of these packages and the content that's within them and how whether or not libraries can get more involved and libraries can get more involved in choosing the books that are included in the package. I guess if I can add a gloss to that I think there's been a number of occasions where libraries have said well we're not entirely convinced these are the titles that we need or want but this is an interesting experiment and we want to support it so we'll do that but if we want to move from the experimentation then obviously we need to get that. Sorry to Anna if I'm slightly hijacking her question there but hopefully that gives a sense. No I'll try and answer that in two parts so I think one part of Anna's question is how do we get more publishers on board? As I said I think the challenge is that the monograph publishing sector doesn't operate in the Elsevier realm of 37% profits for the most part. On these titles they're not making enormous margins and certainly more mission-oriented ones are not but they are still beholden to their institutions their host institutions to ensure that they break even. So they need low risk models that allow them to try things and move forward step by step rather than jumping with both feet and that's where projects like Copim are really helpful. We've had resource to go out to some presses and pilots and models we're producing a toolkit that we're going to put out in the next few weeks I hope if I finally get around to finish writing it that says what we did you know what it means on the ground as a publisher to go through this what resource you need to allocate to make it viable what the risks are what the benefits look like. We want to do a phase two of this work at Copim as well and think about how we could bring some more publishers on board to show them these benefits and also show them that it's not just the first mover advantage that's getting this to work because that's then worries well you made it work with two presses but that's because there was all this attention and as David said you know it's easy to get excited about those first experiments but what do you do when it's more routinised. And then just quickly on the choosing the book front you know there has been some anxiety around our publishers in these experiments or even in their more broader OA offerings just giving the titles that we didn't want or didn't need it's really difficult but you know we've worked very hard on that opening the future to say actually we want to put the most impactful titles into the open access and we've got a library committee together to tell us which titles they most wanted to be in the backlist collection and then the frontlist titles have just made open access on the basis of the next one coming through and I think building trust by getting librarians in a room together to tell us what they want is actually quite useful and going forward you know that kind of community involvement seems a key part of the governance stakes in the future. Yeah that partnership working I think it's going to be it's going to be increasingly important. So there's a couple of questions that I think have either been partially answered actually in the chat themselves or we will come to in the conversation. I mean one from Ian Simpson is talking about how we persuade higher ups in the institution to allow us to change acquisition budget models and I think that our library colleagues after the break might talk about that a little bit but I mean is there what's your top tips for the levers that we can pull here for forgetting that those shifts? I think there's two levers. The first is well the first thing that libraries don't have to do is something publishers have to do which is to make the new models for open access have an acquisitions component so that it's really easy for a library to say well that's what we're acquiring. You know we're not going to get every high level manager at every institution to sign up to the open research agenda tomorrow. So I think that in the interim period what we need to do is to build models that that are congruent with what libraries expect to spend on. The second thing though is that those policy conversations need to be happening at institutions. We need to articulate the strategic value of open access. We need to articulate what it does for teaching for research in those two spaces and make it part of institutional thinking and planning. And also just thinking that if you look at the international landscape it feels to me as though the US is is ahead of us in the UK in many ways in the development of scholarly communications departments and librarians specialties. We are now seeing that in the UK I'm not saying it's not there but it's perhaps been slower here and I think we'll probably see more of that over the next decade which will then result in a budgetary transition as well. I think my reflection there which I do agree with you but I wonder if partly it's we're seeing those posts because especially the larger universities tend to be more better funded. So I think there's there's enthusiasm and interest within universities here but not necessarily the specific posts and so there may be a slight difference there. And I think that also the higher ups you know the attitude is shifting so much. I mean those of us like yourself Martin who have been in open access advocacy for a long time. I mean the environment is very different now in terms of you know not perfect but very different as it was 15 years ago when you know people didn't even want to talk about some of these some of these issues apart from a lot of enthusiasm but it is putting in that open research and open learning and teaching agenda really picks that up. There was a question about impact and metrics from Joe but I'm going to suggest that we carry that forward. I so mangled Anna's question that she's now sort of like put some clarification in there so thank you for that Anna and apologies for the fact that I didn't quite ask the right question there. We're now on 22 we wanted to have a good break because we've had an intensive first session. We want to continue that conversation in those discussions after the break but we wanted to give you all the chance to move away from the screen to perhaps stretch your legs. I will though I'm just notice Isabelle's question and asking Martin about how long we might it might take to get to a sustainable of the open book model. So I'm going to give you the chance to answer that before before we break.  It's always five years out as long as I've been looking at it but I think over the next 10 years we will see a substantial shift that is different to the previous decade is my feeling and one of the things about that as she links to Anna's point and question which is that more authors are asking about this at publishers. I edit a book series at Bloomsbury and it's now very common to get author questions often fueled by anxiety rather than enthusiasm I should say you know it's not that people are really keen on it but they do say what can I do about making my book open access. We don't have a great answer for them at that series at Bloomsbury at the moment but it would be nice to think in the next decade we might and that is driving change because every time a publisher sees one of those questions they realise that it's not something that's just going to go away anymore. So we've got an interesting second half of the session and we're going to be talking and picking up on some of the issues around metrics which we've already touched on and then looking at a view from a couple of libraries to look at how the library world can adapt and change to this new environment before we close. So it's a great pleasure to, I just have a slight point when you see your next speaker heading to the door but she's back thankfully. I'll speak up to start this session is Tasha Mann Cohen from Counter. Tasha is the project director at Counter and she's got over 20 years of experience in society, scholarly and commercial publishing. She's also been an independent publishing consultant. Tasha already joined Counter in April of this year so it's perhaps a little bit unkind of her and kind of us to expect her to be about to solve all of our problems around metrics for open access monographs but I'm sure that she's up to that Joel. So Tasha we'll hand over to you. Thank you David I have to say I've only been employed by Counter since April but I have been one of our volunteers since 2015 so I've got a little bit of experience there. Yes I shut the door because I decided you probably didn't want to hear the noise of somebody providing voiceover from next door so please bear with me and I will start my slides. In the now traditional question can everybody see my slides? They look perfect that's great. Lovely thank you. So usage data for OA monographs. Most people that I speak with tend to think about counter data as being the information that librarians use to evaluate subscription content and I'm here to tell you that actually usage has a real role to play in showing the value of open content including open monographs. So I was going to start with the question raise your hand if you think that usage data is relevant but I've already told you that it is so I'm going to skip this slide and move on to giving you my answer. Usage data is one of the suite of metrics that we can use to measure impact and with enormous thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for this definition which is far better than mine. Impact is a contribution that research makes to society and the economy and two of the big factors that are driving the changes in scholarly communication are open access and the increasing demand for measuring impact and that's coming from funders, it's coming from institutions, it's coming from researchers themselves and of course it's coming from publishers. The problem is we all tend to mean slightly different things when we're discussing impact but broadly speaking it's going to fall into either the academic side so that's research that moves forward our understanding of the world or economic and societal impact. That's lovely right it's very fine sounding definition but we are human at least I hope everybody here is human and we haven't seen the rise of the robots and I've missed it and as such we like to simplify complex matters. In the case of measuring impact that's often boiled down to a count of citations in the past and that's a very direct measure of impact, it means that the work has been found and hopefully read and found useful by a scholar. Citations however are quite laggy and in some fields we can be talking about decades before they really start to accrue so in recent years we've added altmetrics to the mix and that is typically going to be assessing social media and other online activity like blogs or inclusion in citation management tools and the issue is that while those are very immediate compared with citations altmetrics are often quite reflective of fleeting attention rather than lasting impact on scholarly practice and let's be realistic hands in the air I've done it myself a lot of people will retweet or share articles that they've never read so that means that altmetrics must be considered flawed. I argue and a lot of my counter colleagues would argue that usage metrics and particularly the comparable consistent usage metrics produced by counter compliant platforms are a third type of impact measure and unlike citations usage does accrue from the day of publication while unlike altmetrics we can be sure that usage reflects some form of engagement with the original content so yes counter is still relevant in an OA world including for OA monographs. Having said that and I'm going to come back to this again and again I want to be really clear that research assessments should be a holistic exercise none of these metrics should be used on their own and none should be used without an appreciation of the scholarly merits of the work. So I'm sure the librarians in the audience will be very familiar with this calculation your cost per use or cost per download calculation and this is quite a helpful addition to the use of usage apologies for showing impact. Usage metrics can be part of a suite of metrics that show return on investment very directly by creating this cost per use calculation. So if you have funded open content and we've been having a fabulous Twitter string about the alfabeti spaghetti that is apc bpc ccc cpc all the rest of them if you've invested in open content you can divide the amount you spent making a piece of content open whether that's a book processing charge a contribution to knowledge unlatched funding for the open libraries of humanities of whatever it might be by the total unique item requests for that piece of content and you can then show whether you're getting good value for money compared with subscription content for making research openly available again this is not to say that usage and cost per use are the only metrics that apply but I have been asked to focus on usage metrics. So if we're going to measure usage for open access content the traditional institution level counter reports are not particularly helpful open really does mean that we need to look globally the code of practice released in 2017 included the concept of global usage metrics which we for some reason called the world reports and those global usage metrics are built up of attributed and non-attributed usage of content on publisher platforms that is the usage that we can link to an institution which is attributed and that which we cannot link to an institution which is non-attributed even for subscription content many publishers report that a lot of usage averaging about 80% when we asked last year is not attributed usage so it's hidden in institutional usage reports and within the attribution split whether content is paywalled or free to read or open access is a rather secondary question what I will say specifically for this group is many publishers who are open access only will not have any mechanism to link usage to an institution typically that would be IP recognition and I know that liblinks and PSI are offering a way to do that but again it's only going to cover a small proportion of your usage so really total usage global usage is the way to go so we know we need to be tracking usage we know we need to be tracking it at the global level what does that actually mean for monographs so in counter terms we need monograph publishers to provide two reports one is the platform report which is the top line summary of all activity across an entire platform and the second is the title report which breaks that information down into metrics at the level of each book and there are some preset filter views including preset presets within the title report for books specifically but really once you've built the title report and the platform report delivering the filters is fairly straightforward within those reports you will find three flavours of usage metric as I've already said denials turnaways are really not relevant to purely open access publishers as everybody can get usage access and I'm sure you can guess what the search metrics are about so I'm not going to delve into those I will however focus in on the investigations and requests because these can be a little confusing to people who've not come across them before so an investigation highlights users engaging with metadata about a piece of content so that could be a book blurb it could be chapter titles it could be the table of contents by comparison a request indicates that a user has accessed the full content record now that typically could be a chapter but if you only deliver your books as a whole book then it would be the book that would be the subject of the request we've also then got the distinction for investigations and requests of whether we're looking at total investigations or unique so total usage what we're saying there is if a user access is an article abstract five times in one session that is five total item investigations but it's only one unique investigation and the reason that that is important is because it makes unique usage metrics comparable across publisher platforms and really does take account of those different user interfaces and deviations between experiences and lastly investigations and requests are delivered at different levels of granularity at the title level so for example a book and at the item level so that would be a chapter so a couple of key differences between books and journals or databases or other types of content firstly investigations and requests for monographs are usually lower than the usage metrics for journals this is nothing new and it is nothing to worry about secondly book usage often takes longer to accrue than journal usage and in as much as it's got a longer half-life it doesn't always take longer to accrue the first usage but typically we'll see books accruing investigations and requests for far longer than a typical journal article and thirdly book usage can be rolled up from the item to the title so we've we've sort of said that here the the where is is showing that so that means if you're looking at a counter title report for a mixed content publisher you will see total and unique item investigations for both books and journals but you'll see total and unique title investigations only for books and that has some implications if we consider a scenario where a user reads or downloads three chapters from two different books that's going to show up in the title report as three unique item requests and two unique title requests whereas if we have another scenario where a user reads or downloads five chapters all from the same book that's going to show up in the title report as five unique item requests but only one unique title request I would argue and I would think many people here agree with me that that second scenario the use of five chapters reflects more usage and that is the reason that counter always recommends using unique item requests when evaluating usage on the question of supply chain I wasn't actually briefed to talk much about supply chain but I do want to just raise here the question of disambiguating chapters or items from their parent titles that is typically done using identifiers so an ISBN for book and a DOI or an internal proprietary identifier for a chapter again I would advocate for using persistent identifiers that are underpinned by open infrastructure rather than using internal proprietary IDs because that delivers maximum interoperability and traceability through the scholarly communication system very much takes me on to this word of warning global usage reports when we talk about global usage reports we are talking about usage on a specific platform counter reports are not currently aggregated across platforms so what I'm saying is if you have a book in the open library of humanities and it is replicated for example in jisc collections their counter reports from those two different platforms will record the information about those books separately if you have a DOI for each chapter then librarians can start to aggregate the information across different platforms if they choose to do so now I would love and I have said this to my counterboard to start aggregating usage stats from every platform for every unique item but as the just team from jisc will tell you that is an awfully big task it is much easier said than done I know that the open access book usage data trust is also looking at this kind of aggregation and my predecessor Lorraine is involved with that project and I am keeping abreast of what's going on there but again it's quite a technical challenge to start aggregating data across multiple platforms so that is an incredibly basic introduction to the value the reason for usage metrics and specifically the reports and metrics relevant to books I just want to reiterate that nobody within counter thinks that counter metrics should be used in isolation usage just like other metrics only shows a part of the picture when it comes to demonstrating that a book or any other research output has delivered on a funder's goals on an institution's goals so we always suggest using multiple data sources and for me personally I would love to see institutions combining cost per use calculations for the open content they've funded with the citations and alt metric information as well as anything else you track and obviously this is something that publishers should be doing as well this is not purely institutional responsibility beyond those metrics there are downstream impacts of research outputs like new research collaborations either between departments that don't typically work together or with new third parties there are new funding streams and of course there are patents and similar commercial activities those are a little bit less numerical a little bit less fixed but they are valuable to track so that's my plea thank you for listening I'm just going to put in a tiny plug as some of you know counter release 5.1 is going to be coming up for consultation this year and when I say this year I mean next week so we've been massively massively focused on facilitating open access reporting for release 5.1 of the code of practice I would really love it if everybody who's on this call would be willing to respond to the consultation when they see it come out and also promote it to their colleagues because the more feedback we get the better and that is the end of my slides I hope I haven't bored everybody to tears I know usage metrics are not thrilling for everybody I'm personally actually very excited Tasha thank you for that and helping us to think through the the role of of metrics and numbers in fields that are often more about qualitative narratives of success and it's useful to know you know when people have to spend money how can they use these numbers to help them and how do they use them responsibly to make those those decisions so yeah really really useful we've got some questions coming in so I'm really pleased to be able to relay those so one of the first those is what does platform mean in the context of a monograph published by a university is it something like open monograph system or is it the university publications website or repository it is the location where content can be used so a lot of content a lot of open access content in particular is available from multiple platforms multiple locations so institutional repositories absolutely counter the platform as does things like the open monograph system we needed to come up with a sufficiently generic term to cover all the bases and platform was adopted I think back in 2010 and I want to follow up on that actually crossref for many years now has had this idea of a landing DOI that can point to multiple platforms of usage is that kind of permanent identifier system identifier approach with a front landing page one way in which platform aggregation could start to happen yes and actually we did do a project with the appallingly bad name of dull standing for distributed usage logging that was a counter and crossref collaboration project it's somewhat been parked because the technology at the time just didn't really facilitate what we were trying to do but we're now several years further on and it's something that I do want to pick up and start exploring again thank you there's actually a further a follow-up from that last question which was can counter provide usage metrics by domain google analytics has stopped providing this information before we did that we could report the dot gov usage the dot edu us and various other excellent insights seems libraries are looking for an alternative source of this data so counter doesn't actually provide any reports itself we provide the standard and we audit or we work with third party independent auditors to validate that publishers and other report providers have effectively delivered on the standard we don't currently have an extension for reporting on domain it's certainly something I would happily take to the technical advisory group and it's certainly something because we do facilitate bespoke extensions so every report provider if they choose to can provide extensions on the code of practice if that's something that their library customers want so let me let me scribble that down I am actually quite old fashioned that I write things down otherwise I forget extension thank you that's great actually one of the things that we are considering not for release 5.1 just because it's already quite big is whether counter should include the option to report on referral domain so where people have come from before landing on a piece of content it's not currently not going to happen for 5.1 it may happen in the future that's great one of the interesting points that the two people picked up on was you talked about alt metrics and the challenges of people retweeting things they haven't read two two commentators independently noted that people also cite things they haven't read could you just say something about about that yes so I am well aware that people cite things that they haven't read I think it is I hope it is slightly less common than tweeting things one hasn't read one of the frequent discussions with the technical group at counter is the question of intent and whether it is possible for us to measure intent so at one point we've had a focus group with libraries where the librarians were asking us to only report requests where users have stayed on the full text of a piece of content for a certain amount of time which I appreciate would show that somebody has actually potentially read in inverted comments a piece of content but we then had the challenge of well what if they've downloaded a pdf they've just come into the article or the book chapter and downloaded the pdf and taken away and they've read it offline we we have no way of measuring that so counter cannot measure intent we can only measure fact all metrics are flawed counter is flawed and don't tell my boss that I said that but all metrics are flawed counter is flawed citations are flawed alt metrics are flawed it's only when we use them in conjunction that we get something resembling a true picture of the value of a piece of work that's great well well diplomatically said thank you everything's broken there's a good question here from charlotte charlotte lyricist who said since libraries are considering not just justifying investing in oa book programs research but also teaching and learning um other than open syllabus project and annotations of platforms have that feature do you have recommendations for metrics that are associated with teaching and learning activity yes and no so I would always say it's worth looking at the number of students who will be potentially engaging potentially engaging with um open educational resources so if you've got uh the potential for an oer that will be used by 300 students compared with one that will be used by 10 you might want to consider that in your funding decisions um I would also suggest looking at any metrics that the platform provider can give you about interaction so if there are quizzes how many students have completed the quiz if there is an option to create annotations how many students have taken up that option but I would also say it's worth doing some qualitative assessment on that as well because not everything is about numbers I know we're people we like numbers but actually speaking to the students or surveying the students in some fashion is a really good way of getting feedback on that investment brilliant thank you um I suppose that there are there are requests some questions here that might be beyond beyond your remit someone's asking whether you know reading list software can tag away items and track usage and I think that that would be a really powerful set of metrics but it will depend on whether of course people set these these texts on their reading lists for their courses um it can't always be the case that you know the the resources you need are open access but we could start to think about whether we need to pressure commercial the commercial sector to start flagging open access and it's what it reports to us so this was actually something that came up okay so back in 2016 when we started talking about release five we spent eight or nine months trying to define open within the context of counter and we know we didn't get it right because we've had a lot of commentary since and the situation has moved on substantially so we have had another attempt and we still haven't got it right but we have I think got a better definition one of the challenges that we were trying to pin down and one of the the issues that we're trying to to resolve with release 5.1 is coming up is open access content that is either indexed or is also available in a sort of mirror format in controlled databases so I'm thinking about things like ex Libris or the EBSCO databases which have started to index content that is openly available but they are themselves controlled databases you can only search those databases and see results if you are logged in and you're institution has a subscription so for counter purposes we are suggesting we are this is one of the key points of the consultation we are suggesting that whether a piece of content is controlled or open or free to read is determined by the platform on which the usage occurs not necessarily the license under which it was originally published because we don't necessarily have a mechanism for auditing out but from counter's perspective we do not have a mechanism for auditing whether a piece of content has a specific license but our audit process will take into consideration whether something was controlled on a particular platform so I dread to think how many hours of my collective technical groups lives have been spent on the question of how to define open but we would we've come to the end of the road that we can manage internally and we really need community feedback on that piece in particular we're not expecting it to be perfect but we do hope we've improved the definition of open. That's brilliant thank you so much Tasha I've really appreciated that and the fine distinctions you've made and helping us to pull apart book and journal metrics and think about how we can appraise these new models in a kind of brave new world of metrics and narratives side by side. I'm going to hand now back to David to introduce our final set of speakers giving us a library perspective on OA monographs thank you thank you Martin and thank you Tasha as well for for a really interesting presentation so we're now going to shift towards the view from from the library if you like we've been talking quite a bit already about some of the issues around acquisitions about prioritizations and justifications and and making the case for for open access and and and monographs and so we're going to hear from Simon Baines and Sarah Thompson we're going to give them as their perspectives if I introduce Simon first Simon's the university librarian at the University of Aberdeen and he's held that position since 2019 before that he was the deputy librarian at Manchester and before that he was back up in Scotland where he had senior positions at both the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland and we'll ask Simon to speak then I'll very quickly introduce Sarah and then after Sarah's spoken we'll have a discussion and a sort of appalled question and answer session so Simon if I can hand over to you. Thank you David I will share my screen and hope that works David are you seeing the right version of PowerPoint? Indeed the very beautifully blue Aberdonian sky and that is actually how it looks today. So okay so I'll just make sure I can see my my own note so I'm going to start with some background context because it explains what I'm doing and why I'm doing it anyone who knows me will know I can talk relentlessly about open access publishing so today I'm taking a different tack I'm going to look mainly at how we consume open access content and books in particular and the issues I'm seeing there and other speakers have already started to talk about the solutions to some of those issues which is great and I should say as well these are issues some of my colleagues are observing rather than me to a large extent so I want to acknowledge my acquisitions manager Ross Hayworth and cataloging and scholarly communications manager Emma Francis for the data I'm going to show you and a lot of the thinking and I should say that I am they will welcome ideas and solutions from others I don't want to pretend that I'm here today to provide all the answers possibly not even ask all the right questions I'm sure we have an audience we're already seeing that we have an audience of very experienced people who will be able to comment on and correct some of the things I say here and I want to make a point as well having looked at the chat that my driver here is not necessarily one that works for everybody so the reflections on what work for me don't blame me if they're not working for you so Aberdeen three years since I arrived I've started being more vocal and opinionated about open research and this is aimed at positioning the library as more central to it which is quite a shift from where it was back in 2019 and I do have a really helpful lever to pull here we have a 527 year old foundational purpose which says that the university was founded on the basis of being open to all and dedicated to the pursuit of truth in the service of others our university principal and vice chancellor professor George Boyne never begins a speech without saying that so it's a really powerful statement for me to use to argue that Aberdeen needs to be open with its research outputs otherwise it's not delivering on the vision upon which it was founded nevertheless advocacy remains really important to me earlier this year a school research director picked up on a commitment in our recently released research culture report and challenged it at the university's research committee and it was talking about the importance of open research in his view that was something that was being imposed on us by our funders there was nothing we could do about it or any other reason to be interested in it which is hugely dispiriting for me but I've worked on that I think I've turned him around so part of the challenge for me has been to persuade academics to talk to me about it rather than talk to our research office I arrived at Aberdeen as David said 2019 and it would be fair to say the library was not central to open research at that point it was very much about the administrative support we didn't have a dedicated team we don't have funds beyond the block grants which for us are pretty modest in comparison to other research libraries UK members and I know that's not necessarily true of some of you in the room and I know I've got colleagues from my scholarly comms operation here today so I'm really pleased they're here and I'm pleased we have them now in these roles so it's taken me a while to build up the resources and the skills but I'm now talking publicly about the library's open research leadership at the university and making some reasonably provocative statements so I wrote a series of posts on the university's blog site recently and you can see a couple of quotes here which are challenges to my colleagues at the university and it's off the back of building up a level of trust and respect that I feel I can start to do more to invest in publishers who rely on library support as a sustainable business model so am I putting my money where my mouth is on this and the answer to that is not nearly enough so what you're seeing here is a breakdown of the proportion of spend that we are putting against a number of open access initiatives not all books of course and it also includes the the dohash supporter fee we've recently been added to the dohash list of supporters which is great and this is a very small very small percentage of our overall content budget but the context here is that's against a backdrop of year on year library content reductions up to around 2018 so there's no slack and these are investments which are either displacing other acquisitions or they're coming from available savings so the money I'm putting into it is modest but I am ambitious to do more and this gets us into the conversation we've had already about the transition of library content budget from a subscription and purchase model to another sort of model so what I'm trying to signal to my colleagues is that I'm shifting subscription payments the savings on science direct will be significant for me they will remain in my budget and what I'm starting to do is look at how I use that money to shift what I'm doing over to sustainable open access and I'm making public statements about doing it and you'll have seen if you follow me on Twitter that's what I'm doing but I'm actually aiming at an internal audience as much as anything here I want to establish that this is a defensible position on using the funds and it's part of my strategy to position the library as a leader and connect it with wider university strategy and I couldn't have done this in 2019 it was way off the radar for many people in the institution and very few people were looking to the library to lead the mindset was focused on the library of space and a source of information in the traditional way and I don't want to disabuse any one of the fact that that it is an important space we have an amazing space here in the sedunkerized library and I'm not saying that just because Chris Banks will be wrapping up later and she led the creation of the building it's a real privilege to work here and I feel it every day as I come in but I want to widen what the library is and what it does in the minds of my academic colleagues and Sarah after me will talk more about embedding the this thinking and collection strategy and some of the things we talked about before about the assessment of return on investment as well as doing this because we should how do we demonstrate the value to our colleagues so of course we acquire thousands of open access titles through a variety of e-book collections and what you're seeing in this infographic is our largest away book collections those with over 2000 titles as determined by records in our catalogue and this represents about 190,000 titles for us the long tail which I'm not showing you is another 40 collections but it doesn't add very much more takes us a little bit over 200,000 and it's important to say this isn't the duplicated and as we've started to discuss today getting accurate data is one of the things that's an issue for us so we're building it but will they come and this really relates to what we've just been hearing we we struggle to measure our e-resource use we struggle even more to measure our open access e-resource use but I am pleased to be able to say that I've been using just reports using counter 5 data so good segue from from the last presentation and it's good and perhaps unsurprising to see the the rise over 2020 and 2021 but we've talked about the caveats we're looking at the usage that can be traced back via IP here we know that is probably a small proportion of it overall we also got in touch with open book publishers for data traceable to IP range and got data from them as well and what you're seeing on the left here is the most popular title from open book publishers it's about scott's law a recent tribute to a very well regarded Glasgow academic so this is the problem and I know some of you are thinking particularly about this problem about how do we make the case to invest in open access publishing based on use rather than principle and this is what was holding me back in 2019 I didn't have the confidence at that stage to say you know what we should be doing this it's the right thing to do rather than thinking about it as a business case I'm confident to do that now and I know I'm in a particular context but I do still also care about showing the benefits and Sarah will talk a bit about this in the moment and that's key for you if you're in an institution where the ethical principle around research publishing openly is not compelling enough though I was wondering about other strategic levers you can pull most institutions will say something about how much they value inclusion how much they value community engagement so where research performance might be less of a useful basis are there other things in your strategy you can align this with and then when if they come will they find anything there are a lot of cataloging and discovery issues records can be of hugely variable quality we're seeing some improvement from those records where they come directly from publishers but some of them are all discovery systems can be poor at accurately indicating what is open access we have multiple packages there's a lot of crossover on titles it's really hard if not impossible to have an accurate idea the number of OA books we have access to and we have the issue of bad of de-duplication and that's made more difficult because the records are so bad when we use filters in discovery systems they cut out in our experience a lot of the results that they shouldn't quality control so here's an example of a really terrible catalog record and it's from an organization that some have regarded as predatory but it's in Doab and Doab make the claim that you can trust what is in in Doab but I've seen at least one institution several several actually but I look particularly at the guidance from one institution in the states which asked authors to be careful about considering publishing with this particular publisher and even if this is a quality book how does anybody find it with a catalog record like that and indeed why isn't better I had a look at the intake open sites and they do have doubling core records but we're not getting them and they're for reasons beyond my ken and they may well be folk in the room we'll understand this more than I do and just today I saw via Twitter what looked like a really interesting open book coming out of an Australian university but I don't know if it will appear in the resource I receive records in it's not in Doab do we sit and wait do we catalog it locally difficult to know so I'm coming to the end now I've talked about how we find record and discover or not open access books Sarah will talk a bit more about how we publish them but I'll finish by saying that we've been working hard on pushing the notion of open in Scotland for years and I wanted another excuse to use Derek Law's brilliant paraphrasing of the Declaration of Arborothea which launched the Scottish Declaration on open access way back in 2005 and I'm long enough in the tooth to have been there at the time and part of the formulation of that work and those that don't know Derek Law has been retired for some time he was quite a name in the library profession back then he's held director roles at Strathclyde and Kings College London as recently as this month William Nixon from Glasgow was in Denver at the open repositories conference talking about the power of open access in Scotland the strength of our repositories and we have Skirl here the consortium of university and research libraries in Scotland which has developed the Scottish university's press and just last week at Aberdeen we issued a press release about the relaunch of Aberdeen University Press it's 100 years old but it's now managed by the library and we're about to develop it into an open access publisher so I think my determination to accelerate our commitment to open is part inspired by the work we started in 2005 and I'm taking inspiration from colleagues and I want to acknowledge Glasgow and their work on institutional repository development and Edinburgh who you probably know of so recently blazed the trail on rights retention strategy so that's a strategic context and my motivation for all of this. David that's the end of my presentation. Brilliant thank you Simon really a quick whiz through some of the key issues and they already begin to see how we can tie together some of the things that we talked about earlier with what you're saying. As I say we'll take questions in the discussion in a moment after we've heard from Sarah Thompson. Sarah is head of content and open research at the University of York there she chairs the university's open research operations group and she's a member for us for the ROUK digital scholarship and collection strategy networks so Sarah over to you. Thank you right so yeah I have the privileged position of coming last today so that means a lot of what I'm saying will be echoing the thoughts of others before me which is a great position to be in but I'll just give a little bit about a context at York to start with and I realise that we are actually very fortunate in some respects in being able to push the door of open to the extent we can but that is actually due to having done a lot of work in this space both within the university and externally for a number of years and I think we're now finally starting to reap the benefits of that and what we've been able to do more recently is that in response to the University of York's new strategy and its vision of York as a University of Public Good which is something that we're saying very frequently now and again it's interesting what Simon was saying about his founding statement at York this is very much echoing the founding statement of the University but that only dates back to the 1960s but even so setting that in the current day context and very much thinking about how open fits in with that and also about community engagement and engagement with the world more broadly so that those are all really useful levers as Simon was saying to pull on when we're talking within the University around open and what it means so we've taken the opportunity to develop a new library roadmap in response to the University's strategy and I've just pulled out here a couple of statements that really show our commitment and our strengthening commitment to different aspects of open the wording in these is still draft but it I've included them really just to highlight where our thinking is and why we're in a position I guess to to move on this to the extent we are so we're able to say that we're providing leadership and expertise in open research at the University for example we've had it as David mentioned in the introduction we have an open research operations group University wide which I chair and there is a strategic group partnered with that which which I sit on as well and that's been running now for almost three years and that's been really instrumental in positioning the library in this area and we you know we take a really active role in leading on the work of those groups and actually do a lot of the work that comes out of the resulting action plan to drive various initiatives forward and the second statement here is about our focus on open access and publishing open access publishing and open educational resources and in particular referencing here our continuing and deepening investment in the development of the services that we run with our partners in the White Rose University Library collaboration. So we partner with Leeds and Sheffield to deliver our institutional repositories and we've been doing that for a since I think about 2007 if not even earlier than that so we have the only joint repository in the UK and now we more recently we've invested in setting up a joint university press which is still quite small scale but we have to date published a number of monographs in the arts and humanities and a small number of journals as well so what we're seeking to do through these statements is further demonstrate our commitment publicly within the university to continuing to invest in these services and in other areas of open content. Now we have a set of policy statements about our collections which we drew up a few a few years ago now and you'll see there that the one I've highlighted again is really foregrounding the importance of open access publishing to us and just it just states there very simply that we will incorporate open content into our collections and the strength and commitment to open which we make in our roadmap will results in us spending increasing amounts of our budget increasing proportions of it on open content. So I mentioned White Rose University Press and for us this has been this was an early I guess early indicator even before we were investing in in the open another open monograph initiatives we decided we looked around and decided that we wanted to set up our own press because we really wanted to make a difference even in a small way to the to the publishing marketplace we wanted to support academics who had interesting material they struggled to publish because it wasn't commercially viable we wanted to help scholarly research reach a global audience we wanted the power to be with academics and not publishers we were frustrated as I know everybody around the table will be as we watch scholars signing away their rights in publishing contracts for example we and we really wanted to provide an alternative to the ever-increasing costs particularly of scholarly journal publishing and as I mentioned our output is still small but we are a fully open access press and our model for monographs is currently operating on book processing charges but as was mentioned earlier we're thinking about how how we can move on that and what that means in practice is that we we attract authors who come with research funding or authors with our within our own institutions because as libraries we we fund the book processing charges and for our own academics but obviously what that then means is that we're not attracting a wider pool of academics who may not have funding so we're thinking about what we can do about that and that's one of the reasons for us applying to be on the just open access community framework recently so so the the press is a really important initiative for us and working on it collaboratively we can achieve something that we would really struggle to do alone these are some of the initiatives we've supported to date we want to see greater diversity of busi