[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi all,

The 1500 USD charged by Hindawi for the journal in question is by global 
standards fairly reasonable, given the impact factor level of the 
journal. The problem is that uniform APCs for all countries is probably 
unsustainable in the long run. For this reason many gold OA journals 
give Waivers for authors from developing countries. In this particular 
case authors from around 60 countries, mainly from Africa and Asia and 
curiously also Ukraine can get waivers. Egypt alas is not on the 
relevant World Bank list.

The leading publishers do not charge the same amounts for big deal 
subscription licenses in different countries, but take into account the 
potential customers ability to pay (its a bit like airline ticketing). 
Likewise I would hope that if we convert to a dominating APC funded gold 
OA solution, then OA publishers will develop more tieried APC schemes 
than the current binominal full APC- waiver one. There are already some 
examples of policies with at least three levels.

Bo-Christer Björk


On 4/11/15 5:58 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
> David, Jan & Peter: thank you for your comments. I agree with some of what 
> you say, would like to point to where we said basically the same things in 
> the original post. and have some comments to add:
>
> Agreed - Hindawi has a deserved reputation as a leader in scholarly 
> publishing, and in particular for commitment to quality. I also acknowledge 
> that Egyptian researchers can benefit by reading the OA works of others. 
> Following are words to this effect from the original blogpost:
>
> Details, first paragraph: "Hindawi is an open access commercial publishing 
> success story and an Egyptian business success story. Hindawi Publishing 
> Corporation was founded by Ahmed Hindawi who, in an interview with Richard 
> Poynder conducted in September 2012, confirmed a revenue of millions of 
> dollars from APCs alone – a $3.3 net profit on $12 million in revenue, a 28% 
> profit rate (Poynder, 2012). Hindawi is highly respected in open access 
> publishing circles, and was an early leader in establishing the Open Access 
> Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA), an organization that takes quality 
> in publishing seriously". Towards the end: "Egyptian researchers can read 
> open access works of others".
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/
>
> David Prosser said: "I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from 
> academic salaries.  In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. 
> tend not to be paid for from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research 
> grants and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless".
>
> Comment: one way to think of this is that there are larger pools of funds 
> from which both academic salaries and monies for other expenses (including 
> APCs, subscription payments, reagents) are drawn. I argue that providing 
> funds for research per se is a necessary precondition to dissemination of 
> research results. I further argue that research funders working in the 
> developing world will be more effective if they prioritize funding for 
> academic salaries, student support,  and other direct supports for actually 
> doing the research, rather than paying APCs. A subsidy of two APCs for 
> Hindawi's Disease Markers - or a single APC of $3,000 charged by some other 
> publishers - would pay a year's salary for a lecturer position in Egypt.
>
> Of course I am Canadian, have never been to Egypt, and do not speak Arabic. I 
> am merely commenting on the impact of a model that I am viewing from a 
> distance. To understand what is best for Egypt and her researchers requires 
> in-depth knowledge of the country, consultation with and ideally leadership 
> by Egyptian researchers themselves.
>
> best,
>
> Heather Morrison
>
>
>
>
>
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[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[Heather Morrison]

David, Jan & Peter: thank you for your comments. I agree with some of what you 
say, would like to point to where we said basically the same things in the 
original post. and have some comments to add:

Agreed - Hindawi has a deserved reputation as a leader in scholarly publishing, 
and in particular for commitment to quality. I also acknowledge that Egyptian 
researchers can benefit by reading the OA works of others. Following are words 
to this effect from the original blogpost:

Details, first paragraph: "Hindawi is an open access commercial publishing 
success story and an Egyptian business success story. Hindawi Publishing 
Corporation was founded by Ahmed Hindawi who, in an interview with Richard 
Poynder conducted in September 2012, confirmed a revenue of millions of dollars 
from APCs alone – a $3.3 net profit on $12 million in revenue, a 28% profit 
rate (Poynder, 2012). Hindawi is highly respected in open access publishing 
circles, and was an early leader in establishing the Open Access Scholarly 
Publishers’ Association (OASPA), an organization that takes quality in 
publishing seriously". Towards the end: "Egyptian researchers can read open 
access works of others".
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/

David Prosser said: "I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from 
academic salaries.  In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend 
not to be paid for from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research grants 
and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless". 

Comment: one way to think of this is that there are larger pools of funds from 
which both academic salaries and monies for other expenses (including APCs, 
subscription payments, reagents) are drawn. I argue that providing funds for 
research per se is a necessary precondition to dissemination of research 
results. I further argue that research funders working in the developing world 
will be more effective if they prioritize funding for academic salaries, 
student support,  and other direct supports for actually doing the research, 
rather than paying APCs. A subsidy of two APCs for Hindawi's Disease Markers - 
or a single APC of $3,000 charged by some other publishers - would pay a year's 
salary for a lecturer position in Egypt. 

Of course I am Canadian, have never been to Egypt, and do not speak Arabic. I 
am merely commenting on the impact of a model that I am viewing from a 
distance. To understand what is best for Egypt and her researchers requires 
in-depth knowledge of the country, consultation with and ideally leadership by 
Egyptian researchers themselves. 

best,

Heather Morrison





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[GOAL] OAI9 poster submission deadline

[Thomas Krichel]

  The OAI Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication
  is being held in the University of Geneva on 17-19 June 2015. It has
  a call for posters. The deadline is 17 April 2015. See
  http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/page/6 for more details.

  The Workshop will contain 6 plenary session, focussing on the
  following topics:

   1. A Technical Open Access/Open Science session led by Herbert Van de Sompel

   2. Barriers and Impact

   3. Open Science Workflows: CHORUS and SHARE

   4. Quality Assurance

   5. Institution as Publisher

   6. Digital Curation and preservation of large and complex scientific objects

  Use https://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/registration/ to register.


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
  skype:thomaskrichel
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[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and open access question: who is the Licensor?

[Heather Morrison]

On 2015-04-10, at 5:04 PM, Graham Triggs wrote:

But practically, that is of little concern. You can stop publishing something 
with a CC license, but you can't revoke it. Anyone that has the work acquired 
under a CC license, who has done nothing to invalidate the CC license, can with 
proper attribution redistribute / republish that work [and perpetuate the 
license]. And as long as it can't be proven that the work was not acquired and 
used legally under a CC license (or rather, you can prove that the work was 
issued under a CC licence at some point, that we work in question corresponds 
to that CC licensed version, and that this has all been done legally in 
accordance with that CC licence) then there isn't anything that anybody can do 
about it.

Comments: 

I have explained my background, and it would be helpful if Graham would explain 
his as well. For example, you have clarified that with PLOS CC licenses, PLOS 
is the licensor. Is this your interpretation, or are you a spokesperson for 
PLOS? Are you an academic, or an employee of a company seeking to profit from 
commercial use of academic works?

Agreed, CC licenses are not revocable. This works well for the individual 
licensee who has a copy of a particular work. If you want to be sure of ongoing 
access to all of the CC licensed works, either you have to make a copy of all 
such works or we need repositories with a long-term commitment to public 
access. The public access repository solution can work for everyone; it's what 
I recommend. 

It is good advice for downstream users to retain evidence of the license terms 
permitting re-use. Note that this is tricker than one might think. For example, 
the article my group published earlier this year in MDPI's Publications is 
licensed CC-BY-NC-SA - but if you find this through DOAJ you'll first come 
across the DOAJ indication of a journal-level CC-BY license and then click 
through to the article which is incorrectly labelled as CC-BY. 

DOAJ lists many journals as CC-BY, however one should note that these journals 
may include works or portions of works that are not licensed CC-BY, including 
third party content and works that were published before the journal switched 
to a CC-BY default, unless the journal went through a license revision process 
with previous works. This could be a significant amount of work unless the 
journal was very small.

Note that this is only one of the objections to CC-BY. In addition to my work, 
the RCUK implementation review document points to a number of concerns brought 
up by various people. I haven't gone through all the evidence to come up with a 
report at this time, but would note that RCUK reports that they were hearing 
substantive, principled objections. One such objection is academic freedom; if 
authors are restricted to publishing material that can be made available for 
blanket commercial use and re-use, this restricts what academics are able to 
publish. Some academics expressed concern that CC-BY would open up the 
possibility that their work would be sold or re-used in ways that they would 
not approve of. The report seems to brush off these concerns as a 
misinterpretation of the CC-BY license, however I think these concerns are 
quite realistic. As evidence, I would note that the current CC-BY license gives 
licensors the authority to insist that downstream users do NOT use attribution. 
This suggests that CC received complaints from licensors whose works were used 
in ways that the licensor did not want to be associated with. If a blanket 
license is granted, a downstream user would have to be psychic to know what 
kinds of commercial uses or re-uses might be acceptable or offensive to the 
original author. I am using author, not licensor, here on purpose; if an author 
publishes with PLOS as the licensor, it is important that the author's rights 
be respected even if PLOS is the licensor.  

The individual creator issuing their own work under a CC license and the more 
complex relationship of authors and publishers are very different matters. 
Hence, it does make sense to talk about publishers using CC licenses. 

The RCUK policy review document can be found here:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
heather.morri...@uottawa.ca



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[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[Peter Murray-Rust]

I agree completely with what Jan and David have said.

If the purpose a journal is to communicate between author and reader
without frills and publisher-junk (cf. Tufte's chart-junk) then Hindawi
journals come high up my list. Conversely many mainstream publishers'
technical offerings are simply appalling. They create output which is
designed to promote and brand the publisher rather than communicate
science.

As I am partially moving into plant science I have been working on
content-mining (machine reading) the Hindawi International Journal of
Agronomy (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ija/ ). The content is a clear
reporting of basic scientific knowledge; it may not enhance author's
prestige factors in our sick metric society, but it provides material that
is useful for making sure the world has enough to eat. It's honest
(compliant with the Open Definition, CC-BY) well prepared and with no
wasted effort on unnecessary publisher-junk (e.g. publisher marketing).

In particular the content is well prepared (e.g. uses compliant HTML and
Unicode, with vector graphics) while larger publishers like XXx destroy
vector graphics, XXX can't even create compliant XML and Xxxx and many
others actively lobby against contentmining.

P.


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[Jan Velterop]

I completely agree with David. Let me add a few comments. Although they are 
coming at it from different angles, it seems to me that this is where Heather 
Morrison and Jeffrey Beall converge in what looks like thinly veiled disdain 
for open access publishers from regions outside N America and Europe. Perhaps 
Hindawi could be legitimately criticised (no publisher is ever beyond 
criticism), as David says, but to assume that because they are based in Egypt 
they are bound to be parochial and aim to serve the Egyptian academic community 
more than other academic communities is preposterous. Science is global, and 
science publishers are. 

If a highly successful publisher like Hindawi is a danger, it is not to Egypt 
or to the worldwide academic community, but mainly to traditional publishers. 
After all, they are showing that a company can be successful and profitable 
with open access publishing at a cost level that few in the western world can 
match. The fact that they are based in a non-Western country should not be held 
against them. The fact is that most of the large traditional publishers either 
have the majority of their activities in non-Western countries, of have 
outsources those activities to such countries. However, they don’t seem to 
share the benefit of the massive savings they realise by doing that, with the 
academic community. If they did, their average revenue per article would be 
considerably less than what it is now: in the order of four times the high-end 
APC Hindawi charges. I take the view that it would most likely be beneficial to 
the entire world academic community if more global scientific open access 
publishing outfits were to spring up in areas like Asia, Africa, and Latin 
America.

> However, [Hindawi’s] success is not accompanied by obvious benefits to 
> Egypt’s own research and researchers.


Apart from the obvious fact that their content is freely accessible at no cost 
to the reader, as David has already remarked. What could certainly be said is 
that the subscription-based publishers obviously make life very much more 
difficult for researchers and research in Egypt (and anywhere else for that 
matter) than it should be.

Jan Velterop


Sent from Jan Velterop's iPhone. Please excuse for brevity and typos. 

> On 11 Apr 2015, at 10:12, David Prosser  wrote:
> 
> I’m rather confused by this blog post.  If the argument is that Egypt should 
> invest more in research and build greater safeguards to intellectual and 
> academic freedom then I’m sure that we would all agree wholeheartedly.
> 
> However, it appears to be trying to make a point about Hindawi and for-profit 
> OA publishing.  Here, for me, it fails.
> 
> The main argument is that as the most expensive APC Hindawi charges is high 
> compared to academic salaries in Egypt there is a problem with for-profit OA 
> publishing.  There are a number of points here.
> 
> 1.  I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from academic salaries.  
> In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend not to be paid 
> for from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research grants and so the 
> comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless.  (Unless the situation is 
> different in Egypt and all research equipment is paid for personally by 
> researchers.)  Now, it may be that the highest APC Hindawi charges is out of 
> reach of research grants, but let’s use a sensible metric.
> 
> 2. The authors, no doubt to make an ideological point, have chosen the 
> highest APC Hindawi charges.  It is easy to find journals published by 
> Hindawi that charge APCs of a fifth of that quoted.  Four days’ salary for a 
> professor rather than a month - if that were a meaningful metric.
> 
> 3. Publishing is international - Not all companies price their products 
> exclusively for a home market.  We shouldn’t be surprised when this happens 
> in publishing.  (Although I note that there are papers published by Egyptian 
> authors in Hindawi’s journals.)
> 
> 4. For me, the most striking omission is that in asking the question ‘who 
> benefits?’ and in focusing in on Egypt there is complete silence on the issue 
> of Egyptian researchers (and citizens more widely) as readers.  The whole 
> point of open access is to widen readership and to make papers available to 
> all interested readers, not just to those who can afford subscriptions.  The 
> papers published by Hindawi are now available to the intellectually curious 
> in Egypt (as elsewhere).  These curious readers now have access to a corpus 
> of material that they might never otherwise have been able to read.  I would 
> have thought that deserved a mention in any discussion of ‘who benefits?’.  
> Unless the main driver was to make an ideological point against APCs rather 
> than to answer the question.
> 
> 
> So, it would appear that both Egyptian authors and readers, and international 
> authors and readers, benefit from for-profit open access publishing.  Sh

[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[David Prosser]

I’m rather confused by this blog post.  If the argument is that Egypt should 
invest more in research and build greater safeguards to intellectual and 
academic freedom then I’m sure that we would all agree wholeheartedly.

However, it appears to be trying to make a point about Hindawi and for-profit 
OA publishing.  Here, for me, it fails.

The main argument is that as the most expensive APC Hindawi charges is high 
compared to academic salaries in Egypt there is a problem with for-profit OA 
publishing.  There are a number of points here.

1.  I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from academic salaries.  In 
the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend not to be paid for 
from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research grants and so the comparison 
to salaries strikes me as meaningless.  (Unless the situation is different in 
Egypt and all research equipment is paid for personally by researchers.)  Now, 
it may be that the highest APC Hindawi charges is out of reach of research 
grants, but let’s use a sensible metric.

2. The authors, no doubt to make an ideological point, have chosen the highest 
APC Hindawi charges.  It is easy to find journals published by Hindawi that 
charge APCs of a fifth of that quoted.  Four days’ salary for a professor 
rather than a month - if that were a meaningful metric.

3. Publishing is international - Not all companies price their products 
exclusively for a home market.  We shouldn’t be surprised when this happens in 
publishing.  (Although I note that there are papers published by Egyptian 
authors in Hindawi’s journals.)

4. For me, the most striking omission is that in asking the question ‘who 
benefits?’ and in focusing in on Egypt there is complete silence on the issue 
of Egyptian researchers (and citizens more widely) as readers.  The whole point 
of open access is to widen readership and to make papers available to all 
interested readers, not just to those who can afford subscriptions.  The papers 
published by Hindawi are now available to the intellectually curious in Egypt 
(as elsewhere).  These curious readers now have access to a corpus of material 
that they might never otherwise have been able to read.  I would have thought 
that deserved a mention in any discussion of ‘who benefits?’.  Unless the main 
driver was to make an ideological point against APCs rather than to answer the 
question.


So, it would appear that both Egyptian authors and readers, and international 
authors and readers, benefit from for-profit open access publishing.  Should 
there be more repositories? Of course.  Should Egyptian researchers use them 
more? Of course.  Should there be a wide variety of gold open access providers, 
including those that make no charge to authors? Of course.  Does the academic, 
and wider, community benefit from for-profit open access publishers? Of course!

(For full disclosure I would say that I have liked everybody I have met over 
the years who works for Hindawi and I admire how the company made the 
transition form subscription to open access publisher.)

David



On 10 Apr 2015, at 21:42, Heather Morrison 
mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote:

a blogpost by Jihane Salhab & Heather Morrison

Abstract

The highly successful Egypt-based open access publisher Hindawi is presented as 
a model of quality publishing and commercial success. However, this success is 
not accompanied by obvious benefits to Egypt’s own research and researchers. 
Even in the best-case scenario for academics in Egypt’s public university 
system, it would take three month’s salary for a full professor to pay the 
$1,500 USD OA APC of Hindawi’s high-end Disease Markers. Egypt’s largest public 
university, Cairo University, has no institutional repository. Fortunately for 
Egyptian researchers, there are open access journals that do not charge APCs, 
and not all open access repositories are institutional repositories. Open 
access may not be the most salient issue for Egyptian researchers at any rate. 
It is not clear that the pre-revolutionary state interference with research 
detailed in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report has been resolved, and the need to 
take on other work due to low salaries leaves many academics with little to no 
time to do research. In this instance, commercial success is not correlated 
with social benefit.

Details here:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
Desmarais 111-02
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
heather.morri...@uottawa.ca


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