Finding the Right Balance: The Future of Content Sharing

Late last year, I was the project lead on a collaboration between Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Digital Science to make much of nature.com’s journal content sharable. When Nature approached Digital Science about this project, the intent was to find a way to enable Nature subscribers to share individual articles with colleagues, collaborators, friends, family or pretty much anybody they wanted to. There was also a second string to the project; Nature articles linked from a trial group of media outlets are also available for readers to view without subscription. Many justifiably argue that we are in a time of transition towards a more open and collaborative future in scholarly communication, however, so much of publishing is still supported through subscription models. It’s not practically possible to flick a switch and convert the industry overnight and so NPG is trying to strike a good faith balance between the need for researchers to share and collaborate, and the need to sustain a business.

Most of the coverage of the trial was very positive, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that there were a few misunderstandings along the way. In some media outlets, the project was mistakenly reported as a move towards open access (which it was never intended to be). Understandably, the confusion caused a level of disappointment among some open access advocates. Open access and sharing of subscription content are two different ideas and are attempts to solve different issues. The first is about leveling the access playing field, the second is primarily about enabling collaboration in a world where a subscription business model exits. Sharing is very important, but if it’s going to work in a broad, consistent and sustainable way, the industry needs to both take a step back and reach out to the research community to discuss how it’s all going to work. That is why I welcomed an invitation last year by the STM Association to join a working group to look into the issue of sharing.

The purpose of the working group is to explore how publishers could help make sharing as seamless as possible for academic researchers. This reflects a growing acknowledgement by publishers that sharing and collaboration are essential to scientific progress; publishers have an obligation to their readers – and science itself – to support it. Authors also have a genuine need to share their published work. Of course, authors and collaborators already share articles, but they generally have to do so through clumsy, haphazard means and are often unsure about copyright obligations. Publishers therefore must find ways to support sharing that are sustainable for their business models while truly benefitting researchers. This will only work with the support of the scientific community – it can’t be a solution driven solely by publishers.

While scholarly collaboration networks associated with publishers (e.g. Colwiz, Mendeley, Papers, ReadCube) have been keen to engage to solve these problems, others in the industry have been less willing to discuss the issue – perhaps because publishers in the past tended to take an “all or nothing” position. This consultation is about closing that gap to get a dialog going.

Chaired by Fred Dylla (CEO and Executive Director of American Institute of Physics), the STM working group brought together ten representatives from commercial and society publishers and ‘scientific collaborative networks’ owned by publishers: Mendeley (Elsevier), Papers (Springer) and ReadCube (Digital Science). Among its members are Grace Baynes of NPG and myself.

After an initial meeting in October, 2014 we agreed to create a set of draft voluntary principles. The idea was to first achieve consensus among the ten participants, capturing at least a portion of the publisher and scientific collaborative networks’ perspective, and using this as a framework to solicit feedback from institutions, researchers, other publishers, and scientific collaborative networks like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

The resulting principles were posted on February 9th 2015 and a period of public consultation was announced:

• Publishers have an obligation to support sharing
• Sharing articles in private groups is generally supported
• More work needs to be done to determine a working policy for public posting of subscription articles, requiring input from stakeholders across the scientific community
• Any underlying technical infrastructure should be open and accessible to all platforms, publishers and institutions
• In exchange for enabling sharing, it’s reasonable for publishers to understand the level and nature of sharing activity, in an anonymised way.

The STM consultation is a sincere effort to solicit opinions and feedback from interested organizations and individuals in order to refine the thinking and approach to article sharing. Feedback is requested particularly on the following topics:

• What impact do you think a unified approach to scholarly article sharing would have?
• Do you have other ideas about how the sharing of scholarly research should function within the research community?
• What feedback or guidance can you or your organization offer for further consideration or to help next steps?
• Would your organization be willing to actively participate and contribute to this process?
• Do you support the initial outline ‘Voluntary principles for article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks’?

Support for the proposals and views can be sent to scnconsultation2015@stm-assoc.org. The consultation period formally ends on 10 April, but if this post comes as news to some readers, I’m sure STM will entertain some slightly late responses. The next meeting of the task force is schedule for 21 April, at which point we will review the feedback we’ve received thus far and discuss how to best open up the initiative to a wider group, as well as a substantive steps needed to make sharing of subscription of articles seamless, commonplace and friction-free.

*Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ben Grey (https://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_grey/)