UKSG – final thoughts – the future is in your hands

I didn’t have time to blog during UKSG so here are a few random bits.
I had the general feeling of a community knowing that inevitable unspecified change was going to happen but no sense that they could do anything about it. It will happen, and the more that you act now, the more you will be in control. I feel, for example, that the societies and universities (possibly through their presses) had the change to change things in the mid-90’s but there were no experiments so we’ll never know.
I spoke about Open Scientific Data and several people thanked me later – they hadn’t realised the importance of the problem (there were few scientists there). Several said it had help them realise that they should now fully commit the Open Access – I did not draw a strong distinction between access and data. I got one formal question – sorry I can’t remember the name – but I think it was from an officer of the IOP. “If we move to Open Access, won’t societies lose their lifeblood?” My reply was to highlight the new business models introduced by Wellcome Trust and  SCOAP3 (the High Energy Physics community publishing consortium). Essentially these are “funder-pays” models and I promoted these as examples of how a community could take control of its publishing and also provide a useful business model for publishers. My questioner seemed genuinely encouraged by the response.
For me the important point about funder-pays is that it is the community in control and not the publishers. There is still competition in the system – the funders and the publishers will groups and regroup according to business interests and quality of service. The current “library-pays” model gives all the power to the publishers – they know very well how to divide and conquer individual libraries with “special bundles” of journals – this has to and will come to an end. Now the funders are in control and they can negotiate a fair price with the publishers. There will be a great deal of squealing, but that’s part of the fun of capitalism.
I believe that this actually gives more power to the societies, if they are brave. Funders need responsible societies who ultimately in many cases are the judge of what is good science. Certainly they set the canons of acceptable practice in many cases. I think of the International Union of Crystallography which for many years (decades) has worked on the details of what makes a responsible crystallographic experiement and dataset. I know that it has worked with organisation like JISC on Open Access and it’s Acta Crystallographic E is now a funder-pays (or institution-pays) Open Access CC-BY journal. Cost per artcile 150 USD. Note that this is without the financial clout of Wellcome or CERN. So it can be done. There is no single model – some disciplines require more complex reviewing than others, including crackpotism. Some are data-rich. Some have to offset commercial interests such as the pharma industry.
But the messge is clear. You can change your community to Open Access publishing. There are enough examples to give inspiration. Read Peter Suber’s blog. It’s got pointers on how to prepare for Open Access.
And if you don’t prepare to change your life, others will do it for you. Without asking.