Author: smacdonald

Open Access Week 2024  — commencing 21^st 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, designed 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.  

As librarians we talk about open access (OA) a lot — it’s seen as a core competency within librarianship and taught in library related postgraduate courses. Within academia, however, it may be treated within indifference, ambivalence, and occasional hostility. This is often because the goals and benefits of OA are not often understood by the academic community, with academics burdened by confusing REF and funder mandates.  

In the spirit of open access week’s theme – ‘Community over Commercialization’ – this blog post looks at five benefits that accrue from open access publishing.  

1. Visibility and Impact 

Open access publishing increases the visibility of research. Traditional subscription-based journals limit access to those who can afford the high subscription fees, which restricts access to a small, privileged groups. Open access articles, by contrast, are freely available, leading to higher citation rates and greater impact, as more researchers, practitioners, and policymakers read and build upon research outputs. 

2. Accelerated Discovery and Innovation 

Open access accelerates discovery and innovation. When researchers have unrestricted access to outputs, they can quickly identify gaps in knowledge, replicate studies, and develop new hypotheses. The accelerated dissemination is most impactful in medicine and technology where there is high need for recent research.   

3. Collaboration 

Open access facilitates collaboration among researchers across disciplines and countries. Researchers from developing countries, who may not have the financial resources to subscribe to expensive journals, have informational equity with colleagues in developed economies. This ‘democratisation’ of knowledge creates an inclusive community and maximises scope for innovation. 

4. Public Good 

Open access benefits the general public by providing access to scientific research that would otherwise be unavailable. This accessibility allows members of the public including educators and students to engage with the latest research, increasing decision-making and increase community engagement. 

5. Preservation 

Institutional and subject and repositories often provide long-term preservation of research outputs, helping preserve knowledge over time. Repositories use standardized formats and metadata, making it easier to archive and retrieve research articles. This preservation is crucial for maintaining the integrity and continuity of the scientific record. 

These benefits provide a flavour of OA’s importance outside the tight remit of funder and REF mandates that have come to dominate the scholarly communications landscape, shifting emphasis from commercialisation and compliance to community and public good. None of these benefits, however, oppose rules governing OA compliance. Instead, by highlighting the benefits OA, they strengthen the justification for mandates, providing evidential reasons stretching beyond ‘tick boxing’. This wider societal benefit should be championed and celebrated.