Open for whom?

The theme of this year's International Open Access Week is 'Open for whom?'. Thom Blake writes about models for achieving open access and how we can ensure equity.

A red door one side open with glass ventilator one closed

by torange.biz, CC BY 

The economies of scholarly publishing may not be something that most people spend a lot of time thinking about, but whether you need access to resources for your own research, are publishing research yourself, or benefit from the results of research - so, everyone - the effectiveness of scholarly communication systems is important to you. The ever-increasing role of digital technologies in the communication of research has led to many changes and innovations and one of them is an increased emphasis on open access to research outputs; ensuring that they are available to anyone across the globe with an internet connection without financial barriers and with minimal technical and legal barriers. But it’s a shift that needs reflection; how can we be sure that the new models of research communication that emerge don’t replicate the inequalities of previous models, or bring about inequalities of their own? Ensuring equity in Open Access has, in one form or another, been the theme of International Open Access Week for the past two years, but how researchers, libraries, publishers and research funders will work together to shape this ecosystem in a way that is both equitable and sustainable remains to be seen.

The rise of the APC

For many - in the UK at least - open access publishing has become almost synonymous with an article/book processing charge (APC/BPC) model. This is a ‘pay-to-publish’ model where authors, their research funders, or their institutions pay a fee to the publisher in return for their work being published as open access. The 2012 ‘Finch report’ - Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications - set UK national policy firmly in the direction of publication charges as the route for increasing access to publicly funded research.

For the advantages that the APC/BPC model brings, there are drawbacks. There is a risk that an inequality in who can access research outputs is replaced by an inequality in who can afford to publish their work and where. At the University of York we receive funding from a number of research funders to cover the cost of publishing the research they fund - the York Open Access Fund  - but universities, in general, are not in a position to pay publication fees for all of the research done under their auspices. While some researchers are able to reimburse publication costs from research grants, this certainly isn’t the case for everyone. Most open access publishers offer some form of fee assistance or publication charge waiver for those that cannot afford to pay, especially from lower-income countries, but this does feel more like a sticking plaster than a long-term solution.

Hybrid publications initially seemed like a potential solution. In the hybrid model, those that can afford to pay for open access can do so, but those that can’t afford it don’t have to. But with higher publications charges, fear that libraries are being charged twice for the same content ('double-dipping'), a lack of discoverability, and concerns over the long-term effects on the scholarly publishing environment (Rettberg, 2018, The worst of both worlds: Hybrid Open Access) hybrid is out of favour. In Plan S - the new open access policy framework from Science Europe to which UK Research and Innovation is a signatory - hybrid publication are not seen as a viable route to open access. The Wellcome Trust has announced that from 2021 they will no longer support open access in hybrid publications, and other research funders are sure to follow suit. 

Transition?

Open or Closed by Alan Levine, 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/8223240010, CC BY.

What Plan S does support is the ‘transitional agreement’. Under these agreements, support for hybrid publishing can continue as long as an arrangement is in place that provides a route for a journal to ‘flip’ to an open access model within an agreed timescale and for libraries to transition from paying subscriptions to funding open access publication. The most common transitional model emerging is ‘read-and-publish’, in which a single institutional subscription allows members of that institution to access subscription content in a publication, and allows authors affiliated to the institution to publish their own work as open access for no additional cost. On our website we maintain a list of open access memberships available to York researchers.

At a local level, read-and-publish style agreements provide a useful solution to the equity problem; any member of the University can take advantage of the ‘free’ open access publishing irrespective of career stage or research funding. At a global level, however, these agreements may prove more problematic. If the ambitions of Plan S are successful in ‘flipping’ prestigious publications to an open access model, where does this leave those researchers not affiliated to a subscribing institution? What about authors from less research-intensive universities? What about researchers from lower-income countries who may find themselves locked out of the publishing structure? One of the key societal benefits often claimed for Open Access is a levelling of the playing field for researchers in low-income countries (Tennant et al., 2019, The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review) but the potential is there for the opposite effect. 

Self-archiving?

Another way for researchers to meet the requirements of Plan S is through deposit of their accepted manuscripts to a repository, something that researchers already do to meet the open access requirements for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). All researchers at the University of York can deposit the outputs of their research to our institutional repository, White Rose Research Online. The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) lists over 4,000 repositories and many, such as the EU’s Zenodo, do not require an institutional affiliation to deposit.

But for published outputs deposit to a repository requires the agreement of the publisher. Plan S sets a standard of immediate open access under a Creative Commons CC-BY licence and while Royal Society may have adjusted it’s policy to meet this requirement it's uncertain how many other publishers will follow suit. If, in the face of Plan S, publisher’s choose to flip to a pay-to-publish model, the potential of repositories to provide equitable open access might be diminished.

Human castle, by Nancy Leon, CC BY

Or collaboration?

Of course, not all open access publishing works on a pay-to-publish model; far from it. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a directory of high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals and over 70% of those listed are free not only for readers to access content, but also for authors to publish.

In some cases these journals are fully subsidised by a scholarly society of research institution, although this is often only on a temporary basis while a new journal established itself. New university-based and scholar-led presses, like White Rose University Press which The University of York run in collaboration with Leeds and Sheffield, often do charge APCs or BPCs but at a rate much lower than commercial publishers.

Other publications are made open access without ‘pay-to-publish’ through cooperative models. SciELO makes over 1,700 journals open access through a collaboration across 16 countries, primarily in Latin america. SCOAP3 relies on a partnership of over three thousand libraries, funding agencies and research centers to provide open access to journals in the field of high-energy physics. The preprint server arXiv, based at Cornell University, demonstrates the role that community can play in sustaining open access enterprises, relying not only on the support of an active community of researchers but also on financial support from a community of member institutions, of which the University of York is one. This community funding model can translate to peer-reviewed publications. The Open Library of Humanities, for example, provide open access with no publication charges through voluntary subscriptions from supporting institutions; again including the University of York.

Open access monograph publishing may be where some of these community-oriented approaches are most fruitful. Knowledge Unlatched offers a scheme for the library community to collectively fund open access for academic books. Just this week, MIT Press announced plans to experiment with a subscription-like model to make monographs open access.

So we’ve cracked it then?

Ummm… not quite. Some of the models emerging for the provision of open access give us a glimpse of the potential for full, equitable and sustainable open access publishing, but there is plenty of scope for further innovation.

One of the commitments in Science Europe’s Plan S is for research funders to provide support for the development of open access infrastructure. While it’s only natural for funders to be concerned primarily with the research that they themselves support, considering how infrastructure can be open to all will be an essential part of ensuring the kind of sustainable open access to which Plan S aspires.

Thom Blake is a Research Support Librarian at University of York.