Open Access Week 2024 — commencing 21st October — advocates “’Community over Commercialization’ and…approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and academic community”. So what does this mean? Its relevance draws on OA’s (open access) origin, purpose and evolution over time with the interests of conflicting stakeholders.
Open Access in academic publishing took off at the start of the century, with pioneers of the OA movement championing the 2002 “Budapest Open Access Initiative” which embraced new technology to argue for free and open access to scholarly content as an “unprecedented public good”. In this vein, OA can be seen as a social movement built on a communitarian ethic, where scholarly output is a public resource. This openness was championed as “levelling the playing field between richer and poorer institutions [and] countries”, speeding up the creation of knowledge, and freeing scholarly content from the cage of an exclusive academic audience.
In reality, movement towards this utopian goal was stifled by the economics of academic publishing which had been operating as a ‘big business’ since the 1980s, typified by “Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon press which was an early mover…recognising that the expansion of university research would lead to an expansion in the demand for the dissemination for results”. The publishing industry – now dominated by a ‘big five’ of Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – grip of industry through ownership of prestigious ‘high impact’ journal titles (the ones all academics want to publish in) giving them an effective monopoly within the market. This ownership ensures that the mainstream publishers, with current profit margins of 40%, are well placed to monetise government and funder OA mandates that have become a feature within the last decade. Within the UK, this has taken shape with the REF and UKRI open access policies as a response to “Plan S” – a European wide initiative to allow immediate access to research outputs without embargo. Initially, publishers charged libraries high fees for subscription content whilst simultaneously demanding article processing charges (APCs) from institutions, academics, and research funders who wanted (or needed to) publish their outputs open access. This process, known as “double dipping”, opened up a lucrative revenue stream for publishing, monetising the societal push towards open content. The politics of OA publishing continues to evolve, with sector action to temper the excesses of double dipping through “transformative agreements” (TAs) whereby universities pay a single fee to cover both read and publisher costs. In the UK, TAs are negotiated by JISC with individual publishers, often in protracted and complex negotiations where taxpayer “value for money” is pitted against profit margins. As a consequence, TA’s can be seen as complex and opaque financial products, couched in corporate language with a design to protect financial self-interest.
Seen this way, the current state of OA publishing, and the debates that surround it, feel more like a commercial neo-liberal economic debate integrated within an existing paradigm that reduces to the profit margins of publishing sector, rather than an exploration of the societal benefit that motivated the OA movement, that is, as a benefit that places communities (academic and further afield) as the centre of concern.