As part of our Annual Forum this year, we’re taking the opportunity to hear directly from the organisations supporting the event and learn more about their perspectives on Open Science and open research. Through this interview series, we’ll explore what openness means to different stakeholders, the opportunities and challenges they see across the Arab region, how they are supporting researchers and authors, and what they hope to see develop across the research ecosystem.
To launch the series, FORM’s Co-Founder and Director Dr. Emily Choynowski spoke with Rebecca Hill, Head of Open Research at Taylor & Francis, about the changing landscape of open research, the particular opportunities and challenges facing the Arab region, and the ways publishers can support researchers in adopting more open and transparent practices.
Read the conversation below, and stay tuned for the rest of the series as we speak with this year’s Forum supporters and explore their perspectives on the future of Open Science and research.
Emily Choynowski: Could you tell us very briefly about the organisation?
Rebecca Hill: Taylor & Francis is a global scholarly publisher. We have headquarters in the UK, but we have offices all over the world. We publish across journals and books, and we have a real kind of heritage in terms of the subjects we’ve been publishing. We’ve been operating for a very long time. But also, I think one of the unique characteristics of our portfolio is the breadth and depth of subjects that we publish. We have a diverse and balanced portfolio across the subjects we publish from medicine to science and technology to the humanities and social sciences. We also have significant imprints that people may know of in their own right that are under the umbrella of T&F. So that includes Routledge, in the humanities and social sciences; and in the open access space, we’ve got F1000, which publishes open research platforms and a really exciting new approach to sharing research openly, Dove Medical Press, PeerJ. And on the book side, CRC Press as well, which publishes more of the science research in books. We publish over, I believe, about 2,700 journals. Whatever kind of subject area people publish in, generally there’s a home for them here.
Emily: You’ve been with T&F for a number of years, and you represent their open research strategies and solutions. How does your organisation really support open science?
Rebecca: Open research and open science are central to our strategy and our future direction. And I’d say our approach at a high level is quite simple, that basically we want to give authors and researchers options and support, as well as appropriate guidance so that we can remove barriers to enable them to engage in open research publishing practices, whether that is publishing their article open access or a book open access, or whether that’s sharing their data openly, their methods, peer review, or pre-printing. And so, because we have such a varied portfolio, as you know, with substantial coverage of humanities and social sciences, but also publish widely in STM as well, we know that it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach. Our approach is committed to providing a diverse set of models for open access and open research and provide the kind of specialist support that’s needed in those areas to evolve practices appropriately—and all of that being underpinned by research integrity and a focus on quality. Hopefully what that means for researchers is that they will find the right home for their publication and the right license and the guidance that they need that fits the context that they’re in.
I can give you some examples of what we mean by those things. When we say a diversity of open access models, essentially, this is something that we’ve been saying for a number of years, that we need to create diverse pathways to support researchers across career stages, across geographies, across disciplines. And we’re in an exciting position now where we do have a real diversity of models for open access, firstly, and then I can talk about open research and open science practices. So, on the open access side, we have over 60 read-and-publish agreements that cover over 1000 institutions. We have open access funds across journals and books and F1000 and Dove, but also, we’re really experimenting with alternative models for open access as well. So, beyond APCs and BPCs, we’ve adopted and are piloting subscribe to open within our portfolio but also have launched our own models that are unique to T&F as well. One that we have called a collective pathway to open publishing, which works on journals and really builds on momentum of read and publish agreements and removes the barrier of an APC.
Emily: Obviously you focus specifically on the publishing arena, but more generally, what does your organisation think is currently the biggest barrier to making open science more sustainable?
Rebecca: So, for T&F, in terms of the challenges, there are portfolio level challenges, and there are external challenges as well. At the portfolio level, I think, is disciplinary nuance when it comes to open access. As you know, there’s huge variability when it comes to funding for open access and the Humanities and Social Sciences, which is the biggest part of our portfolio, is often at the acute end of that with the areas that have the least funding. The second big thing is that there is a real variety in global approaches. Some regions, primarily within Europe, as an example, within our portfolio, are over 90% open access, but primarily through read and publish agreements. But we know that that is not a global approach and there are other places in the world that have taken an entirely different approach. So, India, for example, and the one nation, one subscription, which is very different to the approach that’s been taken in Europe. And then I think the other thing that’s unique to our portfolio is that nearly half of our journals are society-owned, co-affiliated or co-owned. And so, there are lots of partners, which is amazing to be able to work with those embedded in communities, but they have their own sustainability considerations. So, we need to navigate the complexities. But then on top of that, like all the publishers, there are external and broader systemic pressures that complicate the approach to open access. We’ve seen surging submission volumes across publishers, which puts pressure on the system. Increasingly complex research integrity issues, which has definitely been exacerbated by AI and again more resource needed to safeguard, validate, and verify research. Also, geopolitical instability, as you said earlier, and huge funding crises in higher education. So, I think to navigate sustainable open access and open science models, you need this sort of dual approach of aspects within the portfolio that might be unique to a publisher. So, you are operating on a global stage where different people are taking different approaches, but also there are these broader systemic pressures. And I think the surging submission volumes is a really important one when it comes to open access, because the cost of verifying research is going up and there are broader drivers to address that. I think the research assessment angle is a big one, publish or perish culture, which drives the pressure to publish, to disseminate and the increasing submission volumes. And so, these are all kinds of things that a publisher has to manage, to create models that are sustainable and last for the future.
Emily: Taylor and Francis has been here in the Arab region for a long time. What does your organisation see as the biggest potential opportunity for open science within this region?
Rebecca: I think it’s a really exciting area and the potential of open science is well documented globally in terms of the direct impact on accessibility, discoverability, visibility of research, and also the potential citations, policy impact, whether that’s sharing your work open access or open research practices, sharing data, etc. So, I think there’s a real exciting potential there in terms of raising the visibility and the connectivity of research from the region. The approach that my colleagues have taken, who are really based within the region is to form what they’re calling knowledge partnerships. So, it’s working really closely with institutions and partners, and it’s not just necessarily about how can we make research open access, but it’s about working closely together to understand the needs, to understand the challenges of those organisations within the context that they’re operating, what their ambitions are around research dissemination, which often is a big part of it is open access and open science, increasing research visibility. And the approach is working closely with them to navigate that step forward and what might be sustainable and alongside the kind of partnerships to access to research and to publish research, there’s a whole programme that we have around workshops, engagement, and capacity building to meet goals of researchers. So, whether that is focused on data management or focused on different routes to open access or preparing a book for publication or whatever that might be, and that latter bit is a free resource we have through our research communications lab that anyone can access, but also there’s real targeted engagement to understand what’s needed. Overall, the potential is huge and our approach has always been to be led by the markets and the different regions we work with and it’s not one-size-fits-all, what works in one place doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to translate into another, but to understand what the goals are and how we can work together to get there.
Emily: What changes would your organisation like to see in the research ecosystem over the next five years in the ideal world?
Rebecca: Oh, this is a big question. It’s hard to answer this without being very high level. So, I think it’s a global approach. Going back to the question around the challenges and the systemic drivers that present challenges to scholarly communication, one of them is that research assessment angle and addressing the framework around how and when people should share research and how they’re rewarded to do that. I think it would be really exciting. I know that there are lots of incredible work going on there with DORA, with CoARA, but I think it would be really exciting if there were incentives around openness and transparency and that we know that that brings potential benefit to research. I think research integrity is obviously a big problem at the moment and it’s global, we see this everywhere and we as publishers are at the last point of the research process and so we have the checks and balances that we need to verify research and check that something is rigorous and fit to be disseminated. But this is really right at the end of the process. And so, one of the things that our research integrity is doing, our VP for publishing ethics and research integrity, Sabina Alam, is working closely with institutions and funders to collaborate on how we can address any potential misconduct at the start of the process. And there’s a lot that can be done on the unintentional side of things, where we can work with the researchers and share information about publishing ethics and best practice in a global context. But also, how can we develop tools to capture and mitigate some of the more deliberate side of the spectrum. So, I think they’re two big things from the research system. Also, as a humanities graduate, I’d also love to see the celebration of humanities research and more funding into humanities research.
Emily: Is there anything else that you’d like to share about Taylor and Francis and the various departments that align with open research and open science, which come under your purview, that you particularly like our members and our network to know about?
Rebecca: I spoke about our approach to open access and the need for diversity of models. When it comes to open research practices, so the tools, guidelines, policies that enable more transparency in the wider research process, open data, open methods, open peer review, there’s a lot that we’re doing on that front as well to support researchers to share their aspects of the research openly. One of the things is that we’re collaborating with research organisations to make sure that any policies we implement reflect the needs of the community and a fit for purpose. For example, we are working with the STM Association and Open Pharma to develop journal clinical data sharing guidelines. There’s lots of information on how to prepare data and how to store it appropriately, and this is focused on the point of publication and best standards around that. We’re also working with the American Geophysical Union on the CARE principles, which is all around indigenous data governance and how best they can implement that through the publishing workflow. And one of the tangible ways we’re working to enable more open research practices is by developing and expanding our article types directly involved around bringing transparency to research. So that might be things like data notes, method articles, registered reports, and study protocols, and these have been implemented across our portfolio, and it is a really exciting way of sharing research that anyone can participate in. We are actively monitoring those as well, seeing where there are gaps, seeing where we can develop more. The other thing that I just wanted to mention, I mentioned research integrity being front and centre of everything that we’re doing. One of the things that we’ve developed recently that coincides with open science, and I do think there’s a real possible intersection between research integrity and open research and open science, because they’re designed to promote transparency and reproducibility, and there’s a nice Venn diagram of aims that they share. But one of the things that we’ve launched in the past couple of years is a verified pre-print server called VeriXiv, and earlier this year we’ve launched a series of trust markers on VeriXiv as well to be transparent about what checks have been undertaken, and what checks have been passed. So, there’s lots of work happening all the time around how we, as a publisher, can make it easier for researchers to share, engage in open research, and develop new innovations across our portfolio!
