2.1. Open Access as Game Changer in Scholarly Communications

With the wide adoption of the Internet and the development of digital technology, digital publishing has been expected to be a solution for disseminating knowledge at a much lower cost and as an optimistic prospect for institutions facing serial budget cuts. Yet other researchers have pessimistically speculated that digital distribution would be no solution at all. The growth and the impact of large commercial publishers was observed through the investigation of 45 million articles indexed in the WoS for the 1973-2013 period (Larivière et al., 2015). The European University Association (EUA) conducted the EUA Big Deal Survey and the overall Big Deal costs reported a total of 82 subscription contracts and over 90% of periodicals expenditure concentrated in the top three publishers, Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer. Large scientific publishers have created steady profits while university sectors are under severe financial strains (Morais et al., 2018). Open Access has been regarded as the new driving force to change the landscape of the scholarly ecosystem by removing barriers for the whole society to access scientific assets and provide faster solutions for responding to global issues such as pandemics, climate change, and others, accelerating knowledge learning and sharing, enhancing openness and transparency in scientific research, increasing the reusability of scientific publications, recovering control over scholarly publishing from large commercial publishers, and bringing new opportunities for smaller and society publishers to be revisited.

Using one terminology, a number of approaches, models, and initiatives have been designed and tested with varying objectives. The fragmented and unconnected initiatives have all been limited in scope and impact, and the subscription system still prevails and is even in good shape (Schimmer et al., 2015; Vacek & Kaliaperumal, 2022). At the 12th Berlin Open Access Conference OA2020, a global project to realize the transition to full and immediate Open Access was launched. This project has grown steadily, collecting signatures from all over the world. The OA2020 team have suggested the practical methodology for libraries to engage in the transition to Open Access, the so-called “transformative agreement.” The announcement of Plan S was initiated by funders followed three years after, which has formed collective and powerful forces to impose new rules in scholarly communications and accelerate the transition to Open Access on a large scale (Momeni et al., 2021; Smits & Pells, 2022). Currently, making research open as a matter of principle seems obvious to most members of the scholarly community. Even if a funding body never explicitly joins in Plan S, many of them have supported other programs with the same goal. The firm stance toward full Open Access taken by libraries and funders controlling cash flow to commercial publishers has urged the fundamental changes in publishers’ attitudes. COVID-19, the unprecedented pandemic crisis, has shown that publishers have conceded to Open Access (Smits & Pells, 2022; Szomszor & Quaderi, 2020).

2.2. Roles and Responsibility of KISTI in Open Access Quest

KISTI, as the only research organization designated by the Science and Technology (S&T) Framework Act for establishing a National S&T infrastructure, has its mission (1) to develop national S&T data platforms and content curating applications, (2) to provide infrastructure for national research data management, and (3) to implement an integrated portal of national R&D information. KISTI has played a significant role in promoting and implementing Open Access in South Korea. In January 1997, the Information Center for Physics Research (ICPR) at Seoul National University, financially supported by the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (currently, National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF]), constructed a mirror site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Preprint Archive (currently, arXiv). KISTI conducted a survey on Korean researchers’ awareness of and attitudes to Open Access. With the bilateral agreement on information exchange between ICPR and KISTI, Science Attic was launched in 2006 in order to provide Open Access to preprints of domestic S&T research outputs.² Although the South Korean mirror (formerly kr.arXiv.org) has been discontinued since 2008 due to discontinuous support for the mirror site operation and the policy change in the mirror network of arXiv,³ the level of awareness of and involvement in Open Access from the Korean research community has been high.

The Korean government has emphasized the development and expansion of ICT (information and communication technology) infrastructures and led informatization projects actively since the early 1990s. The Ministry of Science and Technology initiated the Academic Society Informatization Projects in 1996 aiming at the digitization of scholarly publications and records and the informatization of scholarly activities within academic societies. KISTI has taken the responsibility of converting scholarly publications in print format to digital format to a large scale, providing websites (both for the societies and for the journals), and e-mail accounts, hosting those websites, and operating the KREONet. The academic societies have agreed on the provision of public access to their digitized scholarly publications through a portal service named Society Village, operated by KISTI (Choi et al., 1999). The first Korean prototype system for automatizing the editorial process was designed by KISTI in 1999. The Article COntribution Management System (ACOMS) has updated its version and has been utilized by more than a hundred domestic academic societies up to today. ACOMS is distributed free of charge for academic societies who lack the capacity to develop their own peer-review system and suffer from insufficient budgets and personnel resources for managing their scholarly publishing. ACOMS has contributed to collect scholarly publications and records from the submission stage and has provided free access to those journals’ articles for Korean researchers and citizens (KISTI, 2002). In 2009 the first national Open Access project, Open Access Korea (OAK), was initiated by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Korea. This project was performed by KISTI for five years.⁴ The two routes of Open Access were discussed and implemented; for Green Open Access, a suite of institutional repositories and linking services to the central system, OAK Portal, was developed and distributed to universities, research institutions, and public organizations. In order to pave the forward to the Golden route, information on Open Access journals in South Korea was collected and provided through OAK Central. The creation of JATS XML for a set of selected Open Access journals was supported by KISTI.

In addition, a series of seminars and conferences took place to provide domestic librarians and researchers with an open forum for discussing global trends in scholarly communication and Open Access in the Korean context. At the 2010 Open Access Conference, SCOAP3 was introduced as the global partnership for sponsoring Gold Open Access (KISTI, 2012). In 2011, KISTI joined SCOAP3 as the National Contact Point of South Korea. As the first Asian partner, KISTI has resonated with the voice of the global Open Access initiative across the border and supported the conversion of key journals in high energy physics to Open Access.⁵ For South Korea, SCOAP3 is the first project to convert journal articles published in paywall journals to Open Access. Due to the absence of national, institutional, and funders of Open Access policy, Korean researchers have agreed to transfer copyright and assign exclusively to publishers all rights when they publish their articles, which are mostly outcomes funded from the national R&D programs. KPubS, the Open Access publishing platforms of domestic science and technology journals, has operated since 2014. In 2019, KISTI contributed to the signing of the contract for the conversion of 25 research institutes between the National Research Council of Science and Technology (NST) and Elsevier for the first time in Korea. After this transformative contract, more members in scholarly communication in South Korea have involved in the discussion for moving forward to Open Access.

In June 2021, three members of the National Assembly of Korea agreed on the need for further review of related bills and the formation of public opinion on Open Access transition, and collaborated with NRF, KISTI, and the Korea Federation of Science and Technology (KoFST) in co-hosting National Open Access Policy Forum 2021. Two months later, six organizations representing national research funders and public and academic information services, including NRF, KoFST, KISTI, Korea Education and Research Information Service, National Library of Congress, and National Library of Korea agreed to release a joint statement on Open Access in order to reassert their collaboration and commitment to advance the Open Access agenda within the nation-wide context. Critical issues addressed in the joint statement include the provision of infrastructure for Open Access, mandates for Open Access to public-funded research articles, support for flipping domestic journals to Open Access, implementation of Open Access transformative agreements (TA), support for researchers and academic societies to retain copyright, avoidance of predatory publishing practices, and commitment to global Open Access initiatives.⁶ Particularly, more voices from various bodies with regard to supporting Open Access publishing in international journals have been shared nationwide and aroused sympathy.

As mentioned in the Introduction, South Korea is an active producer in WoS indexed journals, ranking eleventh among G20, and Korean researchers favor publishing their articles Open Access even in the absence of specific policies and systematic support. To make a commitment to Open Access transition and to spend the R&D expenditure on Open Access publishing by Korean researchers more effectively, more various bodies and stakeholders need to convince of the benefit of Open Access at the national level based on the well-tested examples and related data. SCOAP3-Korea’s being conducted and tested in the higher energy physics field over eight years will give implications for South Korea to make an informed decision in Open Access Transition at a larger scale.

3.1. SCOAP3 in Global Context

SCOAP3 is a global partnership of libraries, research centers, funding agencies, and intergovernmental organizations, working to achieve equitable Open Access to research in high-energy physics through collective action (Bianco et al., 2007). CERN as a host organization operates SCOAP3 with participatory governance including more than 3,000 libraries, funding agencies from 45 countries, and three intergovernmental organizations.⁷ All these participants are part of SCOAP3. By design, this is a departure from so-called ‘author-pays’ models where authors, or their institutions directly, cover publication fees. Creating the ‘invisible infrastructure’ of SCOAP3, and in a comparable way, also the emerging national and institutional-wide agreements with selected publishers, aims to realize the largest amount of advantages for authors and readers in parallel. This, in turn, allows a fact-based approach for institutions, and libraries in their new role of managing Open Access therein, to articulate the shifting of publication costs and processes to a central institutional point rather than the author level. A guiding principle of SCOAP3 is to remove any barriers or burdens for authors to achieve Open Access and give any reader access to any article in the field.

As the host organization of SCOAP3, CERN has contributed its human and financial resources to make this initiative sustainable and growing. Indeed, from its start in January 2014, more than 1,300 new universities from 28 countries and two intergovernmental organizations have joined SCOAP3 (Kohls & Mele, 2018). SCOAP3 has been regarded as one of the most successful projects pioneering global partnerships for Open Access transition and lowering the cost of Open Access publishing charges to 1,100 Euros. The best practices of SCOAP3 were benchmarked to set up the Roadmap for OA2020 (Schimmer, 2017). According to Larivière et al. (2015), the proportion of scientific articles in all STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) fields except physics is concentrated in large commercial publishers. Only physics showed a different pattern: After increasing from 20% in 1973 to 35% in 2000, it has since then remained stable and is subsequently the discipline where the top five publishers account for the lowest proportion of papers published. The study assumed that arXiv, a preprint server of physics, mathematics, and computer sciences, and SCOAP3 contributed to make the field less profitable and thus less interesting for commercial publishers. SCOAP3 has sponsored society and university publishers as well as commercial ones to flip their journals to open access without economic barriers, as shown in Table 1.

3.2. Collaboration and Financing Model of SCOAP3-Korea

South Korea has shared the vision of SCOAP3 from the OAK conference held in 2010 and has contributed the national financial commitment since the beginning of SCOAP3. SCOAP3-Korea follows SCOAP3 in general. With the tripartite involvement of research libraries, an academic society, and publishers, KISTI has contributed to establishing a multi-lateral collaboration among stakeholders in South Korea and delivering on its objective “to provide open and unrestricted access to all higher energy physics (HEP) research literature” on behalf of the SCOAP3 global. The fair share principle is applied when calculating the institutional share of SCOAP3 journals for measuring its benefit as described in Section 3.3. However, the previous subscription fee and the share of publication of each institution is taken into consideration for assigning the institutional contribution. This mixed approach has been chosen by participating libraries since 2014 and was re-confirmed in the survey on the assignment of institutional SCOAP3 contributions conducted in 2018 (Lee, 2019).

From the beginning of SCOAP3-Korea to date, there has been no institutional Open Access policy established, as mentioned in the Introduction. Without any change in the institutional policy, libraries have difficulties in making a sole decision to re-direct their expenditures from subscriptions to publications and they want their institutional contribution based on the subscription, not on publication share. In order to meet the demands from participating libraries and potential participants, the institutional contribution is assigned as follows: (1) the contribution is assigned based on the subscription fee to ongoing participating libraries; (2) an even 0.5 weight is given for the subscription fee and the publication fee for calculating the contribution for potential participants who have subscribed to the target journal before; and (3) the institutional contribution is based purely on the share of publication in SCOAP3 journals for potential participants who never subscribed to the titles before, but their researchers have co-authored in publications of SCOAP3. For the purpose of promotion, the institutional contributions are offered at a 20% discount through the consortium. In addition, as an administrative framework, MOUs between KISTI and participating libraries are established upon each SCOAP3 phase. SCOAP3-Korea has been proposed as a consortium package to the KESLI consortium⁸ since 2014. SCOAP3-Korea is the first and only partnership among libraries aligned with the global initiative for supporting Open Access publishing in overseas journals in South Korea. As SCOAP3 has contributed to the public good globally, SCOAP3-Korea has contributed to research communities in South Korea, as illustrated in Section 3.3.

3.3. Outcomes of SCOAP3-Korea for Phase 1 and 2 (2014-2019)

In this section, the effect of SCOAP3-Korea from various aspects is assessed. More specifically, the analysis is designed to answer the following research questions: (1) is the growth of research and research outcomes in HEP found?; and (2) Is SCOAP3-Korea cost-effective? For answering these questions, three types of data, including 1) SCOAP3 publication data, 2) cost data, and 3) R&D outcome data were used. Firstly, the publication data by authors who are affiliated with domestic research institutions in SCOAP3 journals for the last six years (2014-2019) were collected from the SCOAP3 repository. Secondly, data on subscription fees paid by each institution before SCOAP3-Korea was collected from the KESLI system and participating publishers. Lastly, the national R&D project and research outcome data (2009-2018) from NTIS was integrated to investigate the research articles benefited by SCOAP3 and research publications in non-SCOAP3 journals. We refined the affiliation name manually because the level of affiliation was different in each data source. R was utilized for conducting the descriptive and regression analysis.

3.3.1. The Growth of Research in Higher Energy Physics of South Korea

In order to examine the growth of research actors and outcomes in HEP during the SCOAP3 Phase 1 and 2, three types of basic statistics are generated as shown in Table 2 and Fig. 1. The number of articles, the number of authors affiliated to institutions in South Korea, and the number of institutions which the authors are affiliated to keep increasing for five years. The number of articles as of 2018 was 573, which doubled the number of articles in 2014. The number of domestic research institutions is steadily increasing from 33 in 2014 to 43 in 2018. The growth of articles and research actors in the field of HEP in South Korea presents the revitalization of research in the field.

 

Table 2

Growth of articles, authors, and institutions during SCOAP3 (2014-2019) in South Korea

Growth	Year						Increase
	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019.4a)
Number of articles	253	270	306	339	573	170	2.1x
Number of authors	2,888	3,384	4,135	5,439	9,075	2,850	2.7x
Number of institutions	33	37	41	41	43	37	1.2x

[i]

^a)The publication data for 2019 are not completely collected at the time of analysis. Data for articles up to April are available and presented as 2019.4 in the table.

[ii]

SCOAP3, Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.

 

Fig. 1

Growth of articles, authors, and institutions during SCOAP3 (2014-2019) in South Korea. SCOAP3, Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.

 

We divided eleven journals supported by SCOAP3 into three groups as shown in Table 1. Group A refers to journals fully supported by SCOAP3, B to journals where from 10% to less than 100% of articles supported by SCOAP3 were published, and C group includes journals where less than 10% of articles are supported by SCOAP3. Non-SCOAP3 journals where the articles are classified as “high energy physics, HEP, particle physics” in the NTIS database are published, but are not supported by SCOAP3 at all.

The number of articles in all groups increases, including non-SCOAP3. The articles published in Group A are significantly increased compared to the others, and compared to non-SCOAP3 journals as shown in Table 3 and Fig. 2. The result reflects the assumption that fully supported journals are preferred by researchers as their publishing venue rather than the journals that are supported inconsistently.

 

Fig. 2

Growth of articles published in three journal groups.

 

Table 3

Growth of articles published in each group of journals

Journals		Number of articles		Increase	p-value of regression coefficient
		2009-2013	2014-2018
SCOAP3 journal group	A	2,033	4,203	2.07x	0.0006
	B	1,521	2,494	1.64x	0.0011
	C	1,801	2,111	1.17x	0.1782
Non-SCOAP3		216,369	363,780	1.68x	0.0001

[i]

SCOAP3, Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.

 

4.1. Limitations

The purpose of this study is somehow ambitious because the study is designed according to the aims of the special issue of JISTaP for reviewing the history of the roles and responsibilities of KISTI and highlighting its outcomes. This study provides an overview of the roles and responsibilities of KISTI in the Open Access quest and the narrative of SCOAP3-Korea within this context. However, the outcomes of SCOAP3-Korea covered in Section 3.3 should be described more specifically. Cost estimation should be more rigorous, reflecting the reality, rather than conservative. In addition, so as to understand the benefit of SCOAP3-Korea thoroughly, the cost-effectiveness analysis should be performed from the perspective views. The analysis should be conducted also from a societal perspective, meaning all society as a whole regardless of who pays the costs, because the SCOAP3 project improves access to the scientific results of the whole population in society. Regarding the publication data for 2019, it has been re-adjusted to the one-year average because the publication data are not of a full year. The one-year average number of publications in 2019 was used for the calculation of the amount of cost-saving in 2019.

4.2. Implications and Lessons from SCOAP3-Korea

SCOAP3 has established itself as a successful Open Access transition model. SCOAP3-Korea has shown its benefits to the research community in South Korea. There are several implications and lessons for the design of the expanded model for Open Access transition covering all disciplines, as SCOAP3 is not an end but the start point in the Open Access quest. Firstly, the robust and collective global partnership has demonstrated its control over costs, and sustained average article investments at a highly cost-effective. As OA2020 states, the global nature of research and publishing requires that the transformation should be a collaborative, global effort while embracing local practices and demands. Commitment to global Open Access initiatives, sharing resources and information, and actions aligned with the global communities will be decisive in the transition to Open Access at a larger scale. Secondly, the transformative contract should be as transparent as possible. For libraries to make an informed decision and share their resources and experience with other libraries, they need to keep the TA transparent and require publishers to keep the confidentiality clause at the minimum level. Thirdly, as most TA are made for converting a certain number of articles to Open Access in hybrid journals, monitoring what share of the journal is covered by each TA is necessary. Each TA made at each institution and country constitutes the entire share of Open Access articles in a journal, and the share of Open Access should be open to the public. A central registry is expected to be designed and managed by a central body such as CERN for SCOAP3 or Max Planck Digital Library for ESAC for monitoring the share of Open Access at the journal level and the package level. With the provision of integrated information, libraries and consortia can improve their ability to monitor all scholarly publication costs, including APCs and other costs, in order to gain a more complete view of the national and international publishing markets. Therefore, it is critical to establish and improve such monitoring mechanisms at institutional and national levels to assess the scale of spending on scholarly publications.