"Midterm review of OpenAIRE grant" Presentation delivered during the workshop BEYOND APCS: ALTERNATIVE OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING BUSINESS MODELS Royal Library, The Hague, Netherlands April 5th and 6th, 2018

1. Midterm review of
OpenAIRE grant
Jean-Sébastien Caux
Chairman, SciPost Foundation
6 April 2018
KB, Den Haag

2. A complete scientific publishing portal
(it’s a fully-featured publishing entity)
Journals
Commentaries
Theses links
What is it?
Who runs it?
Professional scientists
(it is and will remain entirely grassroots)
What does it offer?
Two-word summary? Openness
Quality

3. Implement true-to-spirit Open Access
two-way: free for readers, free for authors
Decouple scientific & financial issues
isolate scientists from the latter
remove publish-to-cash-in flaw of current APCs
Modernize the refereeing procedure
Give more credit to referees
Streamline post-publication feedback
Reform impact assessment
What does it aim to achieve?

4. Organisational structure:
Stichting SciPost
non-profit foundation, ANBI
Advisory Board
a dozen preeminent scientists
Editorial College
professionally active senior scientists
(numbers scaled with operations, currently 50+)
Executive
Admin + teams of officers
running operations
Development
Production
Support
Supporting Partners
Financial backbone

5. Classifying publishing business models
jscaux.org/blog

6. Gradations of openness

7. Supporting Partners Board
(Inter)national funding agencies
Universities & libraries
Government
Foundations
Benefactors
Our needs:
Running costs depend on success level.
Partnership: ~ €1K per univ per year/domain
Current estimate: about €300/paper average
Financing model

8. Activity 1:
Consolidation of the Supporting
Partners Board
Consolidate SciPost’s consortial business model
by expanding the Supporting Partners Board to a
sufficient size to ensure sustainability.
~

9. Activity 2:
Consolidation of the
Editorial College (Physics)
Ensure the presence of expertise within the
College for all specializations of Physics;
Maintain the workload of each Fellow to handling
around 5 Submissions per calendar year.
~
~

10. Activity 3:
Promotion of SciPost
among active scientists
Citation invitations
Flyer
Promotional video
✔
✔
✔

11. Activity 4:
Groundwork for expansion
into areas beyond Physics
Produce a concrete template to operate the portal
in other areas;
Ensure that the site’s codebase is fully operational
in a multi-area setup;
Initiate work on open sourcing the codebase;
If opportune, launch titles in other areas
✔
~
~
?

12. Our first Supporting Partners:

13. Representation at OA meetings:
COUPERIN: Journées Science Ouverte
(Paris, January)
Humans of Copyright meeting at EU
(Brussels, March)
Wuppertal (June)
Paris (June)
+ at all conferences & workshops during professional activities

14. Immediate challenge: how to respond to the
EC Call for Tenders for
Open Research Publishing Platform
EC asks for ~what SciPost already does
Barred from applying (turnover < 1M€, 1 area)
In a sense, an opportunity for SciPost:
vindication/endorsement of our publishing model
chance to profile ourselves as the better platform
by capitalizing on the “faults” of the call
must accelerate pace of expansion, before support
(through SPB) is secured

15. Thanks