This year’s Open Access Week theme is Community over Commercialisation and aims to spark debates around equitable Open Access transitions that would not prioritise profits.
We spoke with Colleen Campbell, Strategic Advisor to the Max Planck Digital Library and coordinator of the Open Access 2020 Initiative, to examine current inequities in the scholarly publishing landscape and to discuss actionable plans that can ensure global equity in the future.
- What are the biggest inequities researchers and learners around the world are experiencing today, and how can Open Access help tackle them?
The inequities that researchers and learners around the world are confronted with in their pursuit of the acquisition and creation of new knowledge are utterly overwhelming. And the roots of those inequities are deep and tightly knotted, creating a complex web that seems impossible to untangle.
The scholarly publishing landscape is still today – more than 20 years after the Open Access movement began – dominated by subscription paywalls. Perhaps the most evident inequities are financial ones, limiting access to scholarly research due to high subscription costs, economic barriers to publishing research openly or lack of resources in general.
Establishing Open Access as the standard for scholarly communication gives us an opportunity to tackle these issues in various ways. As the first and most fundamental order of business, it removes access barriers, making the latest research freely available and usable to all readers, irrespective of their financial resources or institutional affiliations. Then, of course, there is the question of how to ensure that removing access barriers for readers does not create publishing barriers for authors. This issue is already at the forefront of Open Access publishing debates, as the growth in fully OA (gold) publishing over the last years has raised questions around pricing, discount and waiver practices in OA publishing. Initiatives like OA2020 aim to redirect subscription funds towards sustainable OA models, ensuring that authors with limited resources have the means and opportunity to publish their research in the venues of their choice.
Based on the premise that, globally, there is enough money invested in subscription-based publishing to sustain a transition of subscription journals to Open Access models, the process of redirecting subscription funds becomes a means to shape the OA transition to enable equitable opportunities for authors to disseminate their research openly, especially in resource-limited contexts. The ultimate objective is to foster an inclusive scholarly communication system, in which all authors –regardless of their environment or discipline – are supported in freely and openly communicating the results of their research.
- Can you tell us more about OA2020’s work with UNESCO, the International Science Council, Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and cOAlition S?
OA2020 has collaborated with organisations like UNESCO, ISC, EIFL, cOAlition S and others around the globe to think about how to reduce inequities in scholarly publishing. Given the complexity of the scholarly communication ecosystem, it is important to bring together the many actors involved in funding and producing research, to enrich our thinking with different perspectives and approaches. We found alignment in our intention to foster an open scholarly publishing paradigm based on these principles:
- Fees associated with Open Access publishing services should be fair, reasonable, transparent and globally equitable;
- Scholarly communication is part of the research process and, as such, costs for Open Access publishing services should ultimately be borne by research funders and institutions;
- Spending on scientific publishing should enable global Open Access by both readers and authors.
In order to develop actionable plans and practical mechanisms that ensure that authors are not limited in their opportunities to publish their accepted articles Open Access in the journals of their choice, it is essential to hear and understand the challenges they face. We therefore collaborated through a series of regional workshops to identify financial barriers authors from different geographic contexts encounter during the transition to OA models. The aim of these workshops was to understand the state of scholarly publishing and financial flows, and analyse concerns and challenges faced by authors and institutions, with the aim of informing our next steps in the development of practical mechanisms and solutions to foster equitable open scholarly publishing.
- What are some of the key lessons learned from these workshops and what are the next steps?
Perhaps I should premise the ‘lessons learned’ with some general insights that I, personally, gained through the workshops.
Firstly, the idea of ‘equity in Open Access scholarly publishing’ is multi-faceted and involves many actors. Equity can relate to prohibitive pricing or fees of OA publishing services, or the lack of institutional funds to support authors in publishing their work openly. It can also relate to the sustainability of community-specific journals and publishers against a backdrop of market consolidation that reduces competition, or the lack of support for and recognition of a plurality of scholarly communication channels and venues. It also relates to the marginalisation of Indigenous and community-relevant and community-engaged research in the context of national higher education systems that incentivise or assess research with criteria that favour international Anglo-American or commercially owned journals.
Secondly, it seems that in the context of scholarly publishing, equity follows from the principles of inclusion and diversity. If we accept that inclusion and diversity are essential to the process of science or scholarship, and that, indeed, they are beneficial to the process of science, then the development of globally fair and equitable systems to support open scholarly communication can be seen not as a charitable effort to benefit some, but as a basic necessity in the interest of the scientific community as a whole.
Over the course of the workshops, we engaged different actors involved in funding and producing research to brainstorm practical steps that each can take, right now, to reduce inequities.
Focusing on some of the financial inequities, we can see that the current landscape is still dominated by subscription paywalls, which libraries may or may not be able to afford. A great number of subscription-based journals operate under a hybrid model, charging libraries for subscriptions and charging authors article processing charges (APCs) to publish their articles OA, which results in double-dipping and inequities in cost distribution.
In the meantime, fee-based fully Open Access publishing is increasing, but without any institutional approach to enabling Open Access, the financial burden falls on authors. This can be challenging for researchers from institutions with limited resources, and the lack of transparency in pricing and discounting practices by publishers can lead to unfair cost structures.
For scholarly publishing to be inclusive, it is essential to ensure that any fees for Open Access publishing services are reasonable, transparent and globally equitable – taking into consideration Purchasing Power Parity.
Beyond reducing inequities in fees, several actions can be taken to foster a more inclusive system in open scholarly publishing:
- Reforming research assessment: Institutions and funders can reform research assessment criteria to recognise the quality and impact of OA publications, reducing the pressure on authors to publish in high-cost journals.
- Financial support for local journals: Institutions can reorient their subscription-based organisational and financial structures around openness, including providing financial support for their own and community-based OA journals to ensure that authors are supported with affordable publishing options.
- Collective actions: Collaborative efforts among stakeholders, including institutions, libraries, funders and publishers, should continue to explore and implement collective actions to reduce inequities.
The next steps involve ongoing workshops, discussions and initiatives such as cOAlition S’s study on fair pricing for OA publishing, further collaborations and conferences like the Berlin Open Access Conference to drive progress in reducing inequities in scholarly communication.
Colleen Campbell is Strategic Advisor to the Max Planck Digital Library and coordinator of the Open Access 2020 Initiative.
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