By SUSAN JONES
The University Library System and Health Sciences Library System are working to make it easier and cheaper for Pitt faculty, staff and students to offer open access to their published research.
The two library systems have struck deals with several scholarly publishers to allow Pitt researchers to make the work they get published — in journals that Pitt libraries subscribe to — immediately available to distribute through open access either at no charge or at a discounted article processing charge.
The two library systems share agreements with some of the largest scholarly publishers — Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge and Science Advances — but there are many more available just through the University Library System.
Find all the Pitt agreements, which are being added to frequently, at publishopen.pitt.edu. All the agreements are different and not every journal in a publisher’s catalog is included.
Researchers who want to take advantage of these deals need to contact the University Library System, which will help them through the process. Some of the deals, such as with Elsevier and Wiley, also are retroactive to January 2024.
“So everybody from Pitt who has published in an Elsevier journal since January is retroactively eligible to make their research open access if they wanted to,” said Kornelia Tancheva, director of University Library Systems.
There are benefits for researchers, institutions, libraries, governments and society to making research more available, Tancheva said.
For researchers, while it’s important to get published in prestigious journals, it’s also important “that you make your research available to anybody who has an interest or a stake in the research,” she said.
“We’re trying to work for the greater good of our researchers to be able to let them publish,” said Renae Barger, associate vice chancellor for Health Sciences Library System.
In addition, one of the driving forces behind more open access is that many governments, such as the United States and the European Union, have mandated that research that is the product of government funding be made open access.
In 2022, the Biden administration ruled that by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published.
The U.S. government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy memo says taxpayers should be able to see what their tax dollars are producing.
For society, in general, it’s best to have information available to everybody. Tancheva pointed out there are equity issues for less-resourced institutions and countries to have access to the information, even if they can’t afford a subscription to the prestigious journals.
For libraries, the issue is getting unfettered access to information, she said.
“Ultimately, somebody’s got to pay for open access,” she noted. “Librarians have always argued that there’s enough money in subscription models to actually flip the model to open access. What librarians are saying, we can spend the money that we now spend to subscribe in order to read only, and put that money into making everything available.”
Barger said right now it’s difficult because researchers and libraries are working under a system where publishers are transitioning to more open access, but then charging researchers to publish. And yet, libraries are still paying dearly for subscriptions to prestigious journals that don’t provide open access.
“The publishers are money making entities and, unfortunately, assume that libraries have unlimited funds, which we do not,” Barger said. “Right now, we’re in a position where we’re not only paying for our constituents to read, but we’re also trying to pay, to the best of our ability, for them to publish.”
For publishers, selling the rights to publish open access has been a revenue source, with processing charges of $1,000 to $8,000 per article. With those costs, some researchers decide not to pay out of their grants for the right to open access.
With the new deals in place, the libraries pay an average of $200 per article for open access, Tancheva said. “Relatively speaking for the publishers, it’s better to get the all the articles for $200 or $400, instead of two articles at $4,000. Mathematically, it makes sense,” Tancheva said.
Barger said some of the deals only give a limited number of “golden tickets” for free open access.
“We’ve been also encouraging, especially in the Health Sciences, those that are grant funded to bypass our agreement and if they have the grant funds to cover the (article processing charges), to use the grant funds, because again, we’re trying to make it as equitable as possible across the Health Sciences and we also have many, many faculty who aren’t grant funded.”
Publishers know that open access mandates are the future for all governments and research institutions, which means centralized governments, like the European Union, could give researchers the opportunity to publish for free in government-supported publications.
Tancheva said the library is constantly looking at expenses and rebalancing, in order to pay for the journal subscriptions and, now, open access deals. “Every year, our collections budgets never get increases,” she said. “I had to negotiate a three-year increase several years ago because we cannot pay for the inflationary increases. So we look at what are the journals that are most used, what are the journals that are least used. If we need to cut something, we cut things that are least used.”
There also are other ways to get open access publishing rights. Tancheva said researchers need to make sure their journal contracts give them personal rights to put their work in an institutional repository.
One other model that Tancheva likes is called “subscribe to open and it is usually through consortium.” One consortium Pitt belongs to is the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, with which it just signed a subscribe to open agreement. This means the heavy research institutions like Pitt or the University of Pennsylvania pay a premium on top of their subscription to guarantee that the products of research from all the members of the consortium are open.
“Right now through these (Pitt agreements) I’m only guaranteeing that our research is open,” Tancheva said. “But through that other model, everybody’s research is open.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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