Guest post by Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications Manager, Springer Nature

This week is global Open Access Week, with events around the globe. We’re pleased to say that open access is thriving at Nature Publishing Group (NPG).

Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications Manager

Sixty three per cent of original research articles published on nature.com so far in 2015 are open access, which amounts to nearly 10,000 papers. It was ten years ago that NPG introduced its first fully open access journal. Today, NPG publishes over 80 journals with an open access option, from Nature Communications to Scientific Reports, Scientific Data and our Nature Partner Journals series (to name just a few.)

This year has seen several changes to our growing portfolio. Starting in January 2015, NPG introduced Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as the default open access license option on its 20+ fully owned open access journals. The percentage of authors choosing CC BY across all of NPG’s open access journals has risen dramatically – from 26% in 2014 to 96% in September 2015. Other licenses are still available on demand.

Open Access Week also marks one year since we announced that Nature Communications would become our flagship open access journal, and it has gone from strength to strength in the last year.

Sam Burridge, Managing Director, Open Research at Springer Nature said: “We believe we’re the first of the longstanding science publishers to reach the landmark of over 60% open access content. By switching Nature Communications to full open access one year ago, we demonstrated our willingness to take a bold step and innovate in the open research space, creating a home for the highest quality open research. And we’re encouraging our authors to choose more permissive licenses too.

“By combining our portfolio with BioMed Central, Springer Open and Springer Plus, Springer Nature is the largest publisher of open access articles. But we want to lead on offering outstanding service in open access to authors, not just on scale. We also want to lead the research community in innovation, which is why we are prioritising ‘open research’ – including open data. Our goal is to release the enormous positive power that open approaches can have in facilitating collaborative and interdisciplinary research to solve today’s global challenges.”

Nature Communications is now the leading open access journal in the multidisciplinary science field,* and number three in its Journals Citation Report category after Nature and Science. Research has also shown that open access articles published in Nature Communications are more highly viewed and cited**. Submissions to Nature Communications have increased from 1600 per month in 2014 to 2000 per month in 2015

As the latest step in Nature Communications’ transition, NPG will be making all the legacy subscription content in the journal free to access from January 2016. This includes archives and backfiles. All new content published in Nature Communications in 2016 will be open access, with CC BY as the default license.

Furthermore, yesterday in China, NPG announced npj Pollution Control, a new open access journal in partnership with Tongji University, Shanghai. The journal aims to publish original, high quality research results and breakthroughs in a broad area of environmental science and engineering with relevance to prevention, control, monitoring and mitigation of environmental pollution, to address this global challenge spanning a number of disciplines.

Perceptions of open access are gradually changing for the better. A survey we published earlier this year (available CC BY on figshare) found that in 2014, 40% of scientists who had not published open access in the last three years said “I am concerned about perceptions of the quality of OA publications.” But this year, only 27% said they were concerned. In the humanities, business and social sciences (HSS), the drop was similar; from 54% in 2014 to 41% in 2015. Nonetheless, concerns about perceptions of the quality of OA publications is still the leading factor in authors choosing not to publish OA. Dan Penny, Head of Insights at Nature Publishing Group has said that he believes perceptions are likely to change over time as more open access publications establish strong reputations, funders mandate open access, and authors publish their best research in OA journals.

NPG is involved in a number of events across the globe for Open Access Week, from the USA to UK, China and Australia, involving authors, librarians and early career researchers. You can find out more here.

*Journal Citation Report 2014, Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2015)

** Research published in the journal Scientometrics found Nature Communications articles published open access received higher citations than non-open access content. It also found that open access papers not only have higher total downloads, but experience a more sustained number of downloads over a longer period, where non-open access articles have a shorter period of attention. This supports a study carried out by the Research Information Network of articles published in Nature Communications which found that open access articles are viewed three times more than non-open access content.

Guest post by Mark Ware, a consultant who assisted with the analysis of this years’ Author Insights Survey. The data from this survey has been made open access for anyone who would like to use it.

It used to be said that journal publishers knew little of researchers and the detail of their roles as authors and readers, despite representing the lifeblood of their businesses.

This has changed dramatically in recent years, with a series of large-scale surveys from publishers and academic researchers, combined with other techniques including online log analysis, focus groups, usability labs observation and ethnographic studies.

The latest Author Insights survey from Nature Publishing Group continues this trend and provides a host of fascinating insights into researcher attitudes. The survey repeats some questions from their 2014 and 2013 surveys, including open access topics, allowing changes to be tracked, but also covers the new topics of journal reputation and how researchers value publisher services.

Over 22,000 researchers completed the survey, with the analysis based on the 21,377 respondents that had published at least one paper in the last 3 years. These active authors included researchers from STM and HSS (humanities and social science) fields, though numerically dominated by STM respondents (86%).

The extent to which open access has become normal is shown by the 59% of researchers that had published at least 1 OA paper in the last 3 years (47% with an APC; 27% without). This proportion only grew a little compared to 2014, though, with what growth there was concentrated in HSS.

A small minority (7%) published exclusively OA; these fans tended to be younger and more likely to be based in Asia (13%).

On the other hand this still leaves 40% not publishing OA, rising to 43% in the physical sciences and 58% in HSS. This wasn’t because authors were unaware of OA options: only 6% cited this as a reason. The highest-ranked obstacle to publishing OA was concern about the perceived quality of OA journals, showing this issue remains potent, particular for older researchers and those in N America. After quality concerns, cost issues dominated, with around a third saying they were unable or unwilling to pay APCs.

Funder policies are acknowledged to be a major influence on the growth of open access, but researchers in this survey were poorly informed about their funders’ requirements. Some 35% said their funder made no requirements, but analysis of these respondents’ stated primary funders showed this was incorrect in many cases. A further 24% said they “didn’t know”, so that nearly 60% lacked good knowledge of their funders’ requirements.

The influence of funders on journal selection, however, appears to be growing. Although this was the least important factor in journal selection, it was nonetheless described as important or very important by 18% of respondents, up from 15% in 2014. Funder influence was highest in Asia (judged as important or very important by 27% of Asian repondents), and lowest in N America and among HSS researchers (both 14%).

The factors used by authors to select journals for submission have been studied before, and there were few surprises here. The most important factors cited were journal reputation, Impact Factor, relevance, quality of peer review, and speed of peer review, with STM researchers placing more emphasis on Impact Factor, and HSS researchers on journal readership. On the other hand, having the option for immediate open access, offering cascade peer review, and funder influence were of little importance to most researchers.

One of the advantages of this survey was its exploration of what researchers actually meant by journal reputation. Most important seems to be the perception of where their peers choose to publish their best work. Encouragingly, consistency of quality was also important; my feeling is that many researchers see consistency as a reflection of good peer review and active editors.

The Impact Factor retains its dominance as a key measure of journal quality, particularly among “next generation” researchers. It was the second most important element in assessing journal reputation, and ranked 1st, 2nd or 3rd by over 60% of respondents. Researchers in Medicine placed the most weight on it, and those in HSS the least. Its importance was greatest among researchers from Asia, followed by Europe, and then N America. Younger researchers also attached more weight to it than older ones.

Readership is an important factor in journal selection, but what aspects of it do researchers value? For journal reputation, what matters is the size of readership within the researcher’s own discipline; conversely, the geographic spread of readership, and having readership among interdisciplinary and industrial or government audiences, are all relatively unimportant. Similarly, in describing their ideal audience, researchers have (on average) a strong interest in being read by their peers, with only limited interest in researchers from outside their own field or practitioners in their field, and have very little interest in everyone else (including lay audiences or policy-makers).

Finally, what publisher services do researchers value? Those highly valued were the core activities: constructive peer review; making the article discoverable; and rapid peer review. On the other hand, least valued were the arguably peripheral services such as supporting rich media; promoting the paper; offering cascade peer review; and pre-submission services. It’s possible that some of these score low on average but remain important to a minority of authors, or in particular circumstances; it may also be that things like supporting rich media are simply taken for granted these days.

Mark is a publishing consultant to the STM publishing and information sectors. Prior to establishing his own consulting practice in 2003, he held positions at Ingenta, CMP Information, and IOP Publishing. He is the author of The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing. More at: www.markwareconsulting.com