CU Boulder is a top research university for sure, but how much of our research is freely available for anyone to read or examine data without having to navigate a paywall? And how much money are CU Boulder authors paying to get their research published?

The “2024 State of Open at the University of Colorado Boulder,” is now out which shares analysis from the University Libraries on open access (OA) article publishing activities, OA repository usage and data publishing practices by researchers at CU Boulder.

This is the sixth report on CU Boulder’s OA activities since the Libraries started tracking in 2018.

Andrew Johnson, head of the Data and Scholarly Communication Services Section and co-author of the report, shares what is in this report and the impacts of OA at the university and beyond.

Andrew Johnson

What are some key findings in this report? What does this mean for CU Boulder and the Libraries?

One key finding from a new section of the report that we just added this year estimated the total cost of the amount of article processing charges (APCs), which are the fees authors are required to pay for some types of OA journals, for all articles with at least one CU Boulder author published in 2023. The methodology we used resulted in an estimate of nearly $6.6 million total APC costs for 2023. This is a really important finding because that’s obviously a pretty significant amount, yet we don’t really know how much of it is being paid directly by researchers, coming out of grant funds, being paid by co-authors’ institutions, or being covered by the Libraries’ agreements with publishers or our fund for OA APCs. We’re already exploring ways to investigate this question further, which could provide important data for future decisions about the Libraries’ investments in support for APCs.

I think the other finding that jumps out at me is that an estimated 75% of articles published by CU Boulder authors in 2023 are available via some type of OA. We really are getting close to a world in which the vast majority of research is available as OA, but what this means for CU Boulder and the Libraries is complicated. Since there are so many different models of OA, reaching a certain threshold of OA doesn’t automatically mean that we can make major changes to how we support the significant subscription costs that we still have or that the overall cost of scholarly publishing will decrease substantially.

Finally, after seeing increases across the board for all of the metrics we’ve been tracking related to open research data, we have seen a bit of a plateau with those numbers over the past two years. We’re going to keep a close eye on those data points in the coming years, but this could indicate that we need to devote more effort to outreach about our services that support open data publishing or that we might need to find a way to track those activities more comprehensively, which we already know can be challenging due to the heterogeneous landscape of data repositories and data sharing practices.
 

We really are getting close to a world in which the vast majority of research is available as OA, but what this means for CU Boulder and the Libraries is complicated. 

This is the sixth annual “State of Open Report” that you have published. What trends are you starting to see emerge since you have started tracking?

As I mentioned, the big one is that, by and large, the amount of open access publishing, open data sharing, and open repository usage at CU Boulder has increased significantly since we started producing these reports. This is certainly in line with what we see in the professional literature and at our peer institutions. So, the question becomes, if we’re headed toward a world in which the vast majority of, or even all, research is openly available, then is this being done in a way that actually improves the production and widespread sharing of knowledge in sustainable and equitable ways? We’ve seen some positive trends that this is happening with open research data where the metrics we’ve been tracking over time indicate increasing use of formal repositories that theoretically do a better job of ensuring data will remain usable over the long term.

I think the answers are less clear with regard to OA journal articles where we’re seeing increased spending on APCs for OA articles over time in the data we track in our reports, whether that’s by the Libraries or from other sources, yet in the wider landscape we’re not seeing the overall costs of scholarly publishing being significantly reduced. As I mentioned, the Libraries are doing a lot to try to address these issues, and having data like we track in these reports in addition to other data-gathering efforts we’re developing is essential to inform critical decisions about where to put our investments in OA.

Why is Open Access a priority for the University Libraries?

While there are several definitions of open access (OA), OA broadly refers to a model with no costs to readers or users to access and use scholarly information and data. Most often, you see OA in reference to the scholarly literature (e.g., journal articles), but our team of authors from the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) takes a broader view in the “State of Open at CU Boulder” report to cover more of the “open” work that our group supports across campus. This support equally covers open research data in addition to open access to the literature. We also chose this scope because it aligns with the public access policies emerging from federal funding agencies that specifically apply to both journal articles and data from federally-funded research.

For the University Libraries, “Open Models of Access” is one of our three strategic initiatives, and it is aimed at our goal of being a leader “in equitable information production, discovery and access.” Enabling open access to journal articles and research data really gets to the heart of this goal. In the case of journal articles, much OA work is in response to increasingly unsustainable costs of traditional journal subscriptions that only allow access for researchers affiliated with subscribing institutions. With regard to research data—which in many fields is still to a great extent only accessible by requesting it from the researcher who collected or created the data—open efforts are driven largely by the potential for wider reuse of data to advance the pace of discovery and enable new forms of inquiry while making research more transparent and reproducible.

Open efforts are driven largely by the potential for wider reuse of data to advance the pace of discovery and enable new forms of inquiry while making research more transparent and reproducible.

How are the Libraries supporting open access?

In so many ways! With regard to OA journal articles, we are attempting to address the dual and sometimes conflicting goals of increasing access via equitable publishing models while working to make costs more sustainable. We do this through a variety of initiatives and strategies led by Melissa Cantrell, scholarly communication librarian, that include negotiating agreements with publishers to cover fees related to OA publishing for all authors at CU Boulder, providing a “last resort” fund for OA fees for individual articles by eligible CU Boulder community members, helping fund open monographs by CU Boulder authors, and providing a publishing platform for hosting OA journals affiliated with CU Boulder faculty, students and staff.

For open research data, the data librarians in CRDDS, Adi Ranganath and Matthew Murray, provide consultations with researchers across campus on everything they need to make their data openly available from how to plan for those activities in grant proposals as required by federal funding agencies to meeting journal publisher requirements for open data by actually helping researchers deposit their data in open repositories like our own CU Scholar. Adi and Matthew also curate all of the open data we receive in CU Scholar to ensure it is reusable, and if they don’t have the necessary expertise with a particular discipline or data type, they can collaborate with expert colleagues in the Data Curation Network, which we’ve been a part of since 2021, to address those specific needs.

Finally, the CU Scholar repository, which I’ve mentioned already, is a resource we provide to campus for making all types of scholarly content openly available (not just research data). For example, faculty can use CU Scholar to make versions of their articles (published in any journal) openly available for free in line with our campus open access policy, which has been in place since 2015. Melissa and Ryan Caillet, the CU Scholar repository manager, oversee workflows aimed at making this process as easy as possible for faculty, and Ryan provides support for depositing all types of open research in CU Scholar.

For those who want to learn more about publishing their research as open access, what resources are available to them?

For resources related to OA journal articles, I would point people to this great newly-refreshed page on the Libraries’ website: https://libraries.colorado.edu/research/open-access.

For publishing other types of research openly, this page on the CRDDS website has a lot of information about the resources we support: https://www.colorado.edu/crdds/what-we-do/open-research-publishing.

Finally, if the need for publishing research openly is related to a grant proposal, then this page describes a lot of the ways we can help meet that need: https://www.colorado.edu/crdds/what-we-do/grant-support.

If anyone is unsure where to go for information or has other questions that aren’t addressed on any of those pages, I would always recommend just reaching out to crdds@colorado.edu, and we can make sure to connect people with the appropriate experts or resources.