Open Access: APC management in libraries

Open Access APC management in libraries

On May 31st 2022, I gave a presentation at the German Library Congress (BiblioCon), specifically during the public session of the German Library Association (dbv) Commission for Acquisition and Collection Development, and this is an updated version of the original posting. The topic of the session was ‘APC Management in Libraries,’ which focuses on the management of publication fees (Article Processing Charges, APCs) incurred for Open Access publications.

The honor of being allowed to deliver the keynote gave me the freedom to focus less on details such as technical implementation or administrative processes and more on the formative aspects of this task, which is still relatively new for libraries compared to acquisition and collection development. My view on APCs and everything associated with them, both inside and outside of libraries, is strongly shaped by the Open Access perspective, even though I once held the position of Head of Acquisitions at the Saarland University and State Library (SULB).

Libraries and Transformative Open Access: A Love-Hate Relationship

Transformative agreements and the German DEAL contracts represent the strongest connecting element between acquisition management and Open Access. The suitability of transformative agreements to quantitatively promote Open Access is not without controversy; it is no coincidence that Plan S imposes strict criteria for transformative journals that want to be considered compliant. In libraries, too, at least in my opinion, transformative agreements are considered cumbersome: the contract details and Open Access policies of publishers are too varied, the workflows too different, and it is unclear to what extent researchers understand this concept and its inconsistent implementation. The same applies to DEAL: Libraries and MPDL Services GmbH sometimes seem at odds over additional payments, and libraries have concerns about potentially even higher costs compared to the subscription model. Additionally, DEAL affects not only acquisitions but also Open Access representatives, for example, with time-consuming affiliation checks or (co-)financing negotiations. Further criticisms of such agreements are sharply highlighted in Brianna Selman’s ‘Transformative’ Agreement Bingo.

Pablo de Castro (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) aptly summarized further critical characteristics of transformative agreements and read-and-publish deals (here RnP) in a presentation. I would particularly like to highlight his observation that Open Access consultants and officers are turning into accountants through read-and-publish and transformative agreements – at the expense of activities more conducive to Open Access, such as consulting or (infra)structure building.

Issues around R&P deals? Pablo de Castro
taken from a presentation by Pablo de Castro

Despite their unpopularity among libraries (both in acquisitions and Open Access), it should not be forgotten that libraries also benefit from transformative agreements and DEAL: both primarily follow the principle of consortial subscription and are unthinkable without libraries, thus strengthening their raison d’être.

But let’s assume that DEAL achieves its goal and the agreements with Springer Nature and Wiley shift from Read and Publish (RAP – which is, in my opinion, the current status quo, as the APC is based on the subscription payments of a reference year; see also Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe’s contribution in Scholarly Kitchen, especially the section ‘Read-and-Publish vs. Publish-and-Read’) to Publish and Read (PAR) agreements, and the transformative journals become Gold Open Access journals financed by APCs: As long as no prior deduction of APCs takes place and the costs are socialized across the university, there would be a need to allocate costs to the responsible individuals/units. In other words: APC management by libraries. It would be different with a radical alternative that could function without libraries: individual publication budgets for each researcher, potentially with bulk discounts or other reductions.

A Foreign World

Unlike subscription, transformation, and RAP/DEAL, the management of APCs is structurally foreign to libraries: it involves an individual purchase transaction, comparable to a researcher purchasing a book for the department library. Or, as Harald Gerlach from the University Library of Darmstadt put it during an online event on information budgets: one can essentially compare a publication involving the payment of an APC to an individual journal subscription.

Moreover, in my opinion, handling APCs is difficult to reconcile with a traditional library budget, among other reasons because the total costs, unlike the expected expenses for Faculty X’s media needs in Year Y, cannot be budgeted in advance. Additionally, decisions to purchase Open Access publications are not made at the department or faculty level but rather on a highly individual and granular basis.

Lastly, it’s hard to justify a cap on APC spending, as Bernhard Mittermaier pointed out at the aforementioned event. Who would want to tell researchers in June that they can’t publish a university-produced work because the APC budget has been exhausted? I know that in theory, one could suggest Diamond Open Access (or even subscription journals with liberal Green Open Access options) in such a case, but in practice, publication options are rarely interchangeable for researchers, and despite all the criticism of the focus on high-impact journals, universities often still prefer the more frequently cited publication venues—which are not always, but often, fee-based in Open Access.

Efforts

The assumption that a university’s acquisition and Open Access costs behave like communicating tubes (again, thanks to Harald Gerlach for this metaphor) seems debatable: does a library budget actually function in such a way that an increase in Open Access (and the associated costs) automatically leads to reductions elsewhere (subscription), thereby balancing acquisition and APC costs?

In addition to these pure acquisition costs, one must of course consider the workload involved, such as even with centrally managed funds, processes like checking the author’s affiliation, eligibility for reimbursement, possibly clarifying (co-)funding, tax issues, compliance with funding guidelines, correct licensing, reserving funds, monitoring, and reporting to the German Research Foundation (DFG), OpenAPC, university administration, and the relevant ministry—each in different data formats. Compared to traditional library workflows, this demands a significant amount of micromanagement per APC.

At a medium-sized university, this micromanagement could easily occur more than two thousand times if Open Access transformation is successful, just for journal articles alone.

Beyond APC Management

What role do libraries play in Gold Open Access, apart from APC handling?

For one, they are certainly important in advising researchers. They also play a role in operating Diamond Open Access services like publishers or journals. However, I am skeptical about the viability of scattered hosting of Open Access journals: in 2018, I identified 246 journals operated with the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software at 86 institutions in Germany, which means on average fewer than three journals per institution. Only six institutions hosted more than five journals, only four hosted more than ten, and 59 sites published only one journal. The median was one journal per institution.

There is also a growing trend of libraries supporting external (preferably non-profit) Open Access publication infrastructures (e.g., the Open Library of Humanities OLH). Here too, extensive micromanagement occurs, though on the side of providers like OLH. In my view, the long-term financing of such publication platforms, as valuable as they are, is inherently more insecure than covering APCs from university funds, as they tend to be viewed as a “nice to have”—and their financing (unlike an Open Access publication in a DEAL or transformative agreements) is not prepaid through a subscription deal with an Open Access clause. The funding for such Open Access platforms is organized by the platforms themselves (see OLH), through pledging by commercial service providers like Knowledge Unlatched or projects like Konsortiale Open Access Lösungen Aufbauen (KOALA). The decision on which platforms to support financially from the library budget usually lies with the subject specialists – not scientists.

Another approach could be this: (Diamond?) Open Access is supported by a percentage infrastructure fee. Regardless of which budget the funds come from, many stakeholders could be involved in deciding which services deserve funding: for example, subject specialists in libraries, departments or faculties, scholarly societies, or DFG review boards.

Libraries have undoubtedly built up competencies in advising and operating publication services. They are also familiar with consortial financing of Open Access platforms (through consortial subscriptions), although acquisition and collection building lose significance here. The infrastructure fee approach, however, generally no longer necessarily requires libraries.

Happy End? Conclusion?

Luckily, a keynote doesn’t require a happy ending. But I will try to draw a conclusion nonetheless.

Internally, universities and their libraries face the challenge of balancing acquisition and Open Access costs, which will likely remain in the form of APCs, at least in the foreseeable future. Even though there are useful tools, such as unsub, and successful concepts (e.g., by Tobias Pohlmann, University Library Kassel) to assess the efficiency of subscription expenditures and, where possible, repurpose funds for Open Access financing, it remains questionable whether the phenomenon of communicating vessels will occur in this balancing act.

A less financially oriented internal question is: if Open Access indeed becomes the dominant publication model, it would result in a loss of importance for traditional acquisition and collection building—this is not new. But how would institutions respond internally? Will APC management become part of acquisitions? Or would locating it there simply reflect a belief in the communicating vessels assumption, where subscription budgets and APC costs harmonize into a single budget? If APC management becomes part of acquisitions, what would then remain their responsibility? Handling the funding of non-profit Open Access services, infrastructure participation, processing invoices? Where is the line between Open Access departments and acquisition departments? What will remain of acquisition departments and also media processing if they do not open up to Open Access?

Open Access involves a great deal of interaction with publishers, funders, authors, budget and finance departments, third-party funding departments, and faculties—activities that, in my opinion, were not present to the same extent in traditional acquisition. Moreover, there are constant changes, for example, in pricing models, new funder requirements, or DFG programs requiring complex applications.

Libraries will probably have to answer these internal organizational questions in different ways. More significant is the fact that Open Access (and APC management) could, in my view, also function without libraries. Why shouldn’t universities consider the idea of individual publication budgets (a clever provider is surely already developing the software for this)? Pledging via KOALA or Knowledge Unlatched, or an infrastructure fee for Open Access, require libraries only to a limited extent, and in radical forms, not at all. The same applies to the Community Action Publishing (CAP) program by PLOS, which follows a flat-rate principle.

However, since universities must (and do) pursue Open Access, and it will likely be primarily organized around APCs in the foreseeable future, effective APC management by libraries may not be a survival guarantee, but it is certainly a very important element of their raison d’être.

Autor: Ulrich Herb

Graduate sociologist, information scientist (PhD degree), associate of scidecode science consulting – De Castro, Herb, Rothfritz GbR, working for the Saarland University and State Library (Germany)

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