“We have failed”. With this short statement Tobias Philipp, Open Access Coordinator at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), explained the need to revise the national Open Access (OA) strategy published in 2017. Seven years later, the target of reaching 100% of OA publications was missed by attaining only about 70%. Such a bold and honest reply to the first question of the evening was a perfect kick starter to open the panel discussion “Open Access in Switzerland: Are we reaching the GOALs?” on October 24, 2024.
What follows is an account of the major issues discussed during the 90 minutes of a lively debate. For clarity, the main ideas have been organized around the most salient topics.
The revised strategy of Open Access: A legal framework with grey areas
As mentioned above, it was Tobias Philipp who opened the way beyond obvious appearances, explaining that if we limit our attention to the numbers, we can see the strategy as a failed pursuit. But if we look at the overarching meaning, we can understand the impact of the strategy and the need for a revised version. A percentage of Open Access of around 70%, if not 100%, represents a considerable transformation of academic publishing. Open Access is now the standard for academic publishing in many fields in Switzerland, which means that the situation is different from seven years ago. This does not mean that the work is finished. Much remains to be done, and the new strategy aims to respond to the new challenges, starting with a shift to a more systemic level and a focus on institutions rather than authors, as the 2017 strategy did. This “systemic change”, as Tobias Philipp put it, means that the revised strategy made room for publication types other than journal articles, such as long-form and practice-oriented publications; it also explicitly continues to recognise Green and Diamond Open Access models as legitimate solutions.
In short, the revised strategy broadens the scope and places sustainability at the forefront. However, when it comes to making publications openly available, such statements might be easily misinterpreted. The core of the idea, as Tobias Philipp pointed out, is to make the content available to a wide audience, no matter its particular layout (e.g. that of the publisher). The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, when dealing with the complexity of Open Access.
Tobias Philipp’s overview of the revised strategy was followed by another big framing, this time from Suzanna Marazza of the Competence Center for digital law (CCdigitallaw) at the Università della Svizzera italiana. She made it clear that there is currently no law in Switzerland that explicitly covers secondary publication rights. Contractual law, i.e. the Code of Obligations, is the only instrument available (Article 382, paragraph 3), and it applies to contributions to collections or anthologies and relatively lengthy magazine articles, including scholarly articles. Authors of contributions to collections and relatively lengthy magazine articles are allowed to republish their work after a three-month embargo. This law, explains Suzanna Marazza, is intended to protect the interests of the public, but it is not specific to OA for scholarly publications. This creates a grey area because it is not clear what would happen if someone who has signed a publishing contract with a publisher in which a longer embargo has been set decided to republish their own scholarly article after three months, in line with the national OA strategy but in conflict with said contract. The question is: what prevails, the law or the publishing contract? If someone were to republish after three months but before the end of the agreed embargo and the case was taken to court, the court’s decision would create jurisprudence and thus clarify the situation.
The (many) challenges and entanglements of Open Access
The first two speakers set the stage and pointed out major pain points, including pressing legal questions and ongoing international developments towards full OA. They also provided numerous impulses for the other panelists. During this part of the discussion, the guests highlighted the interconnections between business and operational OA models, as well as the technical and organisational challenges faced by the different actors in the field.
Publishers: Added value and business models.
Echoing the words of Tobias Philipp and Suzanna Marazza, Alain Cortat, the founder of Éditions Alphil, stated that a secondary publication right for journal articles after three months would mean the death of his business as it would mean driving away many of his customers. [Note: Éditions Alphil publishes six journals, three of them Open Access with an embargo policy of two years. It also publishes books in Open Access.]
Mr. Cortat went on to explain the work of publishers and why, in his view, an embargo period is necessary before articles can be made openly accessible. The publisher, he explained, adds value to the author’s work not only by providing an attractive layout, but also by taking care of other factors such as proofreading the manuscript (including linguistic suggestions), finding images that can complement the visual dimension of the work – be it a journal or a book – and promoting the published work through marketing activities. In short, publishers make the author’s work more readable and attractive to the eye of the public. If journal articles were to be made OA almost immediately upon publication, his business would disappear and with it this part of the publishing work. In his further comments, Alain Cortat also touched on the aspect of the printed dimension of publishing, which still exists and is very important for books, especially in the social sciences and humanities.
Alain Cortat’s words were complemented by Barbara Preisig with a contrasting, yet also similar example from Brand-New-Life (B-N-L). Although B-N-L has been publishing its content in OA since its inception, they share a very similar challenge of finding a secure way to fund the journal and to keep up with the pace of change and the expanding possibilities for multimedia in digital publishing.
Stefan Sonderegger, editor-in-chief of CHSS – Soziale Sicherheit, took this view in a different direction. The journal, which started as a print publication and went digital only a few years ago, is a federal publication. It does not face the financial challenges of publishers such as Éditions Alphil or journals such as B-N-L. Free from this challenge, Open Access is a valuable asset for the journal, which aims to make the texts it publishes as widely known and read as possible.
Technical challenges and their consequences.
Securing funding may be the most important challenge, but it is not the only one that publishers face. Keeping up with the technical side of digital publishing is a challenge for small publishers, even those who have secured funding, as is the case with CHSS. Stefan Sonderegger noted that there are similarities with the other publishers when it comes to the need to keep up with developments in the digital field. Although CHSS does not employ multimedia or other forms of information distribution such as podcasts, keeping up with technological developments is still something they have to consider.
In the search for a sustainable solution, Éditions Alphil has joined forces with several other publishers to create a digital platform for Swiss humanities journals, libreo.ch. Barbara Preisig added that the technical side of digital publishing is also a challenge for her journal, especially as its content is becoming heavily multimedia-driven.
Alain Cortat provided a specific example to help illustrate existential challenges that his publishing house is facing. A case in point is a journal published by his company that is about to move to a large publisher in Germany, which already has around 300 journals in its portfolio. The planned move is driven by concerns that, while the editorial board is generally satisfied with the current publisher, the board fears the publisher’s ability to meet present and future needs. Although the large German publisher offers an appealing and likely cheaper service now, it may become more expensive over time for Swiss academic libraries and the journal. Mr. Cortat argued that the large publisher could more easily raise subscription or service prices than a smaller, Swiss-based publisher. The question for Alain Cortat was therefore: what do Swiss politicians and public institutions [i.e. academic libraries] want to support in the medium and long term, and what situation do they want to find themselves in?
Publishing cultures: The blend between authors of academic and non-academic institutions
Another issue raised in the discussion was the mix in practice-oriented journals between authors from academic institutions and authors working elsewhere. Scientific journals usually have few non-academic authors. Brand-New-Life, CHSS and the journals published by Éditions Alphil have a significant number of authors who are employed outside of academic institutions. In the case of Brand-New-Life, these may be art critics or artists, and in the other two cases the authors work in a variety of places. According to Alain Cortat, in the journals published by Éditions Alphil, the percentage of authors working in academic institutions can vary from around 30% to 70%. Stefan Sonderegger and Barbara Preisig noted that the situation is similar for CHSS and B-N-L. This speaks to a different publishing culture and readership, and means that the ‘canonical’ OA logic does not quite fit.
Tobias Philipp pointed out further that in the case of authors who are funded by third parties and publish in these journals, they should be given the option of publishing OA, e.g. Green OA.
Enrique Corredera made a brief intervention to comment on the experience of the project GOAL, which is at the crossroads between journal cultures. In at least one case – and this has been suggested to other journals – the GOAL project has managed to get a journal to include a special clause for authors with third-party funding from institutions such as the SNSF. The clause states that authors with such funding should contact the editorial board and ask for OA terms that meet the requirements of their funder (e.g. immediate Green Open Access). This may be a solution for journals that want to go OA but cannot become Diamond or build the infrastructure for Gold OA, and therefore need a temporal embargo to maintain their business model.
Alain Cortat argued that, in his experience, when he offers free terms, as in Green OA, to authors from academic institutions, he is sometimes asked by authors from private companies to offer the same. The argument is that some authors working in the private sector also want their texts to be disseminated and made available as widely as possible (since their publications can be linked not only to them and their subject, but also to their employer), and they ask whether their texts can be made available in this way. This is a problem for Mr. Cortat because it can lead to a reduction in the number of subscribers or purchasers.
This comment brought an additional dimension to the discussion, the impact of OA beyond academic institutions and publishers. Although it was not examined thoroughly by the panelists, it had been implicitly mentioned by Tobias Philipp in his first remarks on the revised OA strategy. Tobias Philipp confirmed that there are also discussions with regard to industry-driven research fields such as chemistry, where some claim that the public sector is subsidising private research companies if they cancel their subscriptions and read articles for free instead. They are then seen as free-riders in academic publishing.
Navigating legal complexities
The legal dimension was not exhausted with the lack of a dedicated law regulating secondary publication rights. There are other legal challenges in the day-to-day practice of OA, particularly in relation to image rights. Mr. Cortat, Mr. Sonderegger and Ms. Preisig all confirmed that this was a relevant issue for them.
Anna Picco-Schwendener commented on the service provided by CCdigitallaw and how they try to facilitate the use of Creative Commons (CC) licences. Image rights are one of the most difficult challenges and hinder the use of CC licences in OA publishing.
Together with Suzanna Marazza, they explained the current situation and pointed out that similar legal challenges exist in the area of Open Research Data (ORD). She argued that citing text is relatively easy but dealing with visual research data [i.e. images and multimedia] quickly gets complicated. In Switzerland, one cannot cite an entire image, as the law allows in other countries such as Germany. It always depends on the relationship between the text in question and the image one is using, namely, whether it’s just there for illustration or whether it plays a substantial role.
Navigating the legal complexities also raised a question from the public: Which law must be complied with when publishing one’s work with international publishers? Suzanna Marazza explained the complexities of the legal landscape in relation to OA and the international interfaces. As a rule, the publication is subject to the law of the country in which the publisher is based. The complexity is increased by the different rights, especially in relation to image quotations. An image cannot be used as a quotation in every country.
The end is only the beginning: Looking towards the future
However, the existence of many challenges and the fears they may generate should not be mistaken for pessimism. Rather, they are expressions of a field that is still a work in progress. Open Access is evolving, and if there are so many questions, it is because the future is still open. This became clear as the roundtable entered its final phase, during which more questions from the audience were answered.
From the online audience it was pointed out that some analyses suggest that it would take more than 70 years to achieve full Open Access through transformative agreements. Shouldn’t we abandon them and invest the money elsewhere? And doesn’t the SNSF want to fund Diamond OA?
Tobias Philipp replied that the SNSF has been discussing this question since 2018. Funding Diamond OA basically means funding infrastructure [Note: the SNSF does not fund infrastructure]. He added that we might have to set up a consortium for this.
A follow-up question was whether we should cancel so-called Big Deals or journal subscription packages with major commercial publishers, as well as related Read&Publishing agreements with OA components now, and have some sort of Big Deals for Diamond OA instead? Mr. Philipp’s answer was brief: we will need both in the near future.
The final take from the panelists mixed hopes for the future with open questions. Barbara Preisig called for a different approach to the Open Access debate, to avoid making it too technical and taking too much for granted. She wondered whether we should be discussing more about how OA and Open Science are changing the research practice itself. Alain Cortat advocated new business or publishing models, particularly in relation to universities of applied sciences. Stefan Sonderegger noted the importance of taking into account the nuances, as each case is different and black and white distinctions are not entirely practical. Anna Pico-Schwendener and Suzanna Marazza hoped for more dialogue between the actors involved (publishers, researchers and funding bodies such as SNSF/universities) in order to build understanding on both sides. In the whole process surrounding the Open Access debate, it must also be clear that rights such as copyright, personal rights and data protection must always be respected. Tobias Philipp noted that Switzerland has a diverse landscape and, to close the circle, wondered not only whether we will ever achieve 100% Open Access, but also whether this is that fundamental, in the end.