SSP’s Washington DC local networking group recently conducted their second meeting at the American Chemical Society building in downtown DC. It brought in about 50 attendees.
Simon Beale, SVP, Global Sales and Partnership Development at Wiley, jump-started the roundtable discussions with a short talk on the progression of the open access (OA) movement and how the community has found themselves facing such a “shocking” plan. According to Simon, the beginning of the OA movement in publishing coincided with the advent of the Big Deal. This sort of action and reaction is similar to the impact of Plan S on societies and publishers today. One of the lesser talked-about effects is the increase in output (volume and pace) publishers will be impelled to support.
Simon warns that as internal workflows change to keep up, it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate legitimate publishers from predatory ones. Plus, in the author-pays model, the researcher will more heavily bear the burden of both the producer and payer of the published content and subsidize the cost for consumers (readers). Not surprisingly, this will affect producer-heavy geographical regions differently from consumer-, or reader-, heavy ones and will make country or state-specific publishing deals more important. Moreover, fracturing these dealings is a less efficient, admin-heavy way for publishers to do business.
Although there were 7 tables and topics, conversations converged on a few main ideas: Increasing open science while maintaining revenue that in the end supports the continued production and publication of that science; Repurposing existing content and adding services around event content, scientific data, taxonomies, images, and more to capitalize on what we already have at our fingertips; Increasing competition for funding dollars and how this might stress institutions and researchers from various geographical regions in different ways; As business practices adapt to an increase in OA, we will see a concomitant increase in products and services that administer new operational requirements.
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