Informa’s Post

Transcript

What has Taylor and Francis done to expand Open Access and what plans are there to grow it in the future? We've seen significant growth. 1.3% of our articles were Open Access in 2013, and that's gone up to nearly 28% of our articles in 2023 and more than 1800 of our books. Now published Open Access in social sciences, we have seen a rapid rise in the uptake and we've seen really good progress in the Global South as well. So we've also renewed Open Research Europe be agreement with the European Commission working with F-1000, which is enabled researchers across over 600 institutions across Europe to publish Open Access and open research. In many ways, Open Access publishing follows a very similar. Or to traditional publishing in so much that we follow the same approach to independent review. We have the same level of editorial independence. And of course our Open Access content follows the same level of policy compliance and ethics compliance as the rest of our content. But there are two key differences. Open Access means that all content is free at the point of publication with no charge for usage to all users. And they are also able to reuse that content in any way they like due to the use of a Creative Commons. And what are the benefits of Open Access for researchers? The primary benefit is really the increased visibility and usage of Open Access content, where we see content being downloaded four to six times more frequently than subscription content. And Open Access content is cited around about 45% more often than content that is behind the subscription paywall. But there are other benefits. Open Access content is available to a much wider audience than perhaps subscription content would be. So think about things like. Healthcare workers, policy makers, educators, and indeed the general public actually. So that means that we can make sure that the research is being seen by a wider and much broader audience, which in turn means that actually that research is utilized in a much broader sense as well. Additionally, there are benefits with regards to encouraging interdisciplinary research and that's really where we see some of the more complex problems of today's world, such as climate change really being able to be looked at. By a wide variety of different disciplines in a way that researchers wouldn't usually have access to that kind of research if they were only able to access content within their own very narrow niche. And of course, we're being deliberately selective in our growth strategy without compromising quality. And this is critically important. Completely agree with you then, because there's no worth in US growing content if it's not good quality content. And what of course we mean by good quality content is that it's trustworthy we're up against. Times Now where there's a lot of bad actors that are publishing content that has either fake images or fake data or where the authorship has been compromised. And that's something that we're really trying our best to guard against. And there are new challenges because with with all of the new ways of circumventing the editorial decision making process, AI has actually brought new challenges that we're up against at the moment as well. And that's either in the generation of new content that we have. To detect and deter and prevent, but also not in prohibiting responsible use of AI. There's a lot of authors, a lot of researchers out there who will make really good use of the AI technology to help on their publishing journey. So we're really in a moment where we're trying to balance the good against the bad. Now, are we using AI internally to help us to do just that? So one of the ways that we're making use of it is through some detection. Tools. So there are various tools that are either on the market or that we have within the team that are AI based, and these are evolving all the time and they need to evolve all the time because misconduct evolves all the time as well. I would say it's human LED, but making use of AI tools to help scale up the detection and the misconduct really important. Yeah, AI introduces complexity. There's a lot of talk about AI, what it is, what it does. In broad terms, what we are seeing day-to-day is that we are countering. AI generated content. That circumvents our systems and circumvents the way that we. Operate and it can be run at scale almost instantaneously. It becomes increasingly hard to counter, so to that extent it's in the in the negative column. But what I also brings for us are the tools to allow us to, to get ahead and to get in front. But it, as Sabina says it is a, it's a constantly evolving battle. It's a, it's a constantly evolving trial to keep ahead of this. And what we have to do is to ensure that we are aware that we are working across industry, that we're awake and that we're really pushing hard to ensure that we remain. As far ahead of this as we possibly can, but it's it's it's not going to stop anytime soon and we've got to be ready for it. We're talking about safeguarding science. We're talking about ensuring that the investment that funders are making is well spent. Our role is to ensure that researchers and therefore funders are able to get the most out of the research dollar, the research pound that they're spending. And it's it's one of the reasons again that I'm really excited about the move from an Open Access publisher to an open research publisher because of that efficiency back into the. Research Process Move really allows Taylor and Francis to not only look at the distribution of the outcome of the research, but actually play a part in the development of the next piece of research. Either by making that data available, by making a protocol available, by ensuring that you can add more efficiency into that research process. Because we become part of the cycle of it, not just at the end point of it. I completely agree. I think that the future of open research is just the future of research. You can't go back. We have, We've opened up, we have made the. Interactions and collaborations between researchers, I think so much easier and so much simpler because of the ability to to to look at data, the ability to work on a on a different sort of level. So sort of moving back from that isn't possible. It's going to speed up. I think it's going to be more complex. I think it's going to be more challenging, but I also think it's gonna be more rewarding. But I do feel that we are well set to address that future, whatever it throws at us.