Open Access Week Retrospectives: The View From Asia
Each Asian country has its own unique stance on open access, reflecting the uneven progress of the OA transformation in the region. In the fourth post of our mini-series, Mazmin Mat Akhir and Professor Dr. Xu Lifang explain their views.
Did you know? Taking Libraries into the Future is also a quarterly webinar series for academic librarians. Learn more here.
At its outset, the open access movement focused especially on Europe, where it was pushed forward significantly by the twin drivers of national mandates and funder stipulations. Australia and New Zealand were also quick to embrace OA. It reached the rest of the world in a slower and more measured way, even though one of its main objectives has always been to prevent researchers in the ‘economic south’ from publication discrimination caused by funding difficulties.
Each Asian country has adopted its unique stance on OA, typically shaped by cultural norms and publishing traditions as well as the availability – or lack – of publishing funds. In this, the fourth post of the series, Ms. Mazmin Mat Akhir, University Librarian at Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia, and Professor Dr. Xu Lifang, Director, Wuhan University Institute of Digital Publishing, China, explain their views in conversation with Gold Leaf‘s Linda Bennett. We begin with Ms. Akhir.
Linda Bennett: How much exposure has there been in Malaysia to open access? What are the awareness and investment levels so far?
Mazmin Mat Akhir: I belong to a library consortium which is looking at Transformative Agreements that will work for us. Some Malaysian universities have already invested in TAs with certain publishers. My own university has some multi-year contracts with specific scientific publishers. However, currently not many publishers are offering concessions for APCs that make them affordable for Malaysian libraries.
I think the creation and development of Institutional Repositories is likely to constitute our most major investment, and how much we spend on APCs will depend on the publishers’ prices, most of which are too large for us to contemplate. Nevertheless, our researchers publish more in Green open access journals, which are still behind paywalls. However, libraries are looking at possibilities for researchers to publish in more sustainable open-access journals such as Gold and Hybrid OA because some Read & Publish agreements expect you to pay a reading fee (while at the same time offering publishing opportunities).
LB: What is the greatest challenge you must address?
MMA: The greatest challenge for us has always been the business model currently operated by the major publishers, because we just can’t make it work with our budgets. Also, our academics prioritize publishing in high-impact journals to attract more citations and research impact factors. The big commercial publishers mostly own these journals and don’t necessarily offer a transformative or transitional agreement for institutions. There are situations where academics sacrifice OA in favor of their research. We’re looking at the Publish & Read [PAR] model from the point of view of consortia and towards a more sustainable ecosystem. We struggle to find a sufficient budget for collection development, yet we still need to be able to offer a comprehensive service for our patrons. Public university libraries successfully establish dedicated committees to address OA, but getting a mandate on a comprehensive OA policy is a long journey. I think the goals of researchers, publishers, and librarians do not align. However, there are always ways of tweaking business models, and libraries will always find ways to experiment with and adjust them.
“We’re looking at the Publish & Read [PAR] model from the point of view of consortia and towards a more sustainable ecosystem.”
LB: Has open access developed in the ways that you expected?
MMA: Not really as expected. Initially we thought that adopting OA model via the consortium would be fair to our researchers and readers; but we notice that the APC model doesn’t really support us. Researchers are questioning more and more the APC arrangement and asking us to suggest a greater range of publishers, to include ones that don’t place the main burden on APCs. Engagement is again shifting to the consortium.
LB: Have there been other disappointments?
MMA: As everybody knows, we expected more of the OA system as it was unfolding. We look at entries in DOAJ and expect to be able to gather a huge amount of content to put in our IRs, but often there are problems with this. Metrics are one issue. If the downloaded content could feed into the metrics that have proved valuable to promote OA – download records, impact factors, etc. – this would help us enormously, but most publishers need to do much more work on metrics. I’m still talking to selected publishers about how to assess the long-term impact of OA articles and we don’t get enough help with this, or enough understanding of how the money we spend on OA business models contributes to bigger impact for institutions. Good metrics, produced by a good formula that captures them accurately, would enable us to support the move to OA so much better. With regard to books, in principle we support S2O, but there are still not enough books available via OA models; so we find ourselves supporting a philosophy that needs a better business model.
“We will continue to measure the impact, not just for researchers, but for the whole community.”
LB: Do you think it will ever be possible for all scholarly publishing to become available via OA?
MMA: I want to think positively – and I believe new business models will emerge. Eventually I think the APC system will be bypassed. We need to move beyond the current publishing ecosystem. We will continue to measure the impact, not just for researchers, but for the whole community. This library [Universiti Malaysia Perlis] is now a community hub, with committees that address the needs of low-income families; people with special needs, especially sick children; new initiatives, including one that will be launched this week, for autistic children; and to embrace the work of the university experts including academic and students who can train community members about robots, how to use robots, how to produce robots and in particular to promote interests in STEM education. Amazingly, the library is also supported by a very talented academic staff.
LB: How do you think the OA movement will progress in the next five to ten years?
MMA: I think that the consortial approach will be most effective in enabling us to contribute to the publishing ecosystem. Researchers of course like to publish their findings, but these must be more truly accessible to the public. We need a new structure for scholarly publishing, so that people across the community can benefit from valuable research findings. We need publishers: we understand that they enable us to address to challenges of quality, content and cost and they have the manpower to do this. Maybe we can even shift some of the involvement currently shouldered by libraries and universities in certain areas to publishers themselves. If all universities have their own IRs, we must find ways of optimizing them – by helping researchers across the globe find what they are looking for. First, we must work with publishers to make sure that everything that is published is of the utmost quality possible.
There follows a contribution by Dr Xu Lifang, in her own words.
The development of the internet and other digital technologies has made the traditional model of scholarly publishing unsustainable. If there had been no OA, then ‘grey area’ publishing operations would have been more prevalent. So in addition to the fact that the number of scientific research outputs that have achieved via open access is increasing year by year, including journals, papers, monographs, etc., perhaps the more meaningful thing about the open access movement is that all stakeholders are starting to recognize the problem and face it, and people are talking about it, and everyone is trying to come up with a way to solve it. Of course, there will be stakeholder games, and the phased results may not be satisfactory to everyone, but it is a good start.
“In China, academic publishing has never been a lucrative business, but a state-funded scientific-educational-cultural course.”
From my experience in China, I realized that OA development must be based on local realities and needs. In China, academic publishing has never been a lucrative business, but a state-funded scientific-educational-cultural course. Therefore, journals and their editorial offices are very keen to use various advanced means such as websites, Apps, and the official accounts on social media to make journals and articles visible and available to more people for free – as long as they can handle them technically. This is primarily because higher visibility gives a strong proof that the journal is worth being supported by the state budget. The result is the same: more researchers and amateurs have free access to the results of scientific research. Although it should be added that many journal contributors in China do not realize that they are using an OA model.
You might also be interested in this blog series
[Title Image by Asobinin/iStock/Getty Images]