Open-access publishing

“ Since 2003, average journal prices have increased more slowly, but they’ve still continued to rise about nine percent each year.
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING
The “closed access” publishing system limits the impact of the research produced by the scientific and scholarly community and progress is thereby slowed significantly. By contrast, Open Access literature is defined by the scholar Peter Suber as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” [2] The graphic in figure 5.2 provides a quick overview of how an open-access publishing system works. ”

“ The tensions in the open access publishing world are representative of those in all aspects of openness in education: Incumbents have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo; there are considerable sums of money involved; the open approach allows new entrants to the market; the open label becomes a marketing tool; and there are tensions in maintaining the best aspects of existing practice as we transition to new ones. Driving it all is a conviction that the open model is the best approach, both in terms of access and innovation. ”

“ A large-scale shift to open access publishing will also require publishers to develop—in consultation with their customers in universities and other research institutions, and also with other intermediaries such as subscription agents—more efficient arrangements for the payment of APCs on a much bigger scale than hitherto, in order to minimise transaction costs. ”

“ In the humanities, where much research is undertaken without specific project funding, open access publishing has hardly taken off at all; and it is patchy in the social sciences, for similar reasons. ”

“ The open access publishing field demonstrates why it is so important. In theory, the same restrictions existed previously under the print model, but when academics had no real control over the distribution channel, it didn’t matter in any practical sense. Signing copyright forms with publishers meant surrendering film or merchandise rights, but Hollywood rarely came calling for academic authors, so it had no practical impact. ”

“ This has now become the mandate for many research funders, and many governments have adopted open access policies at a national level which stipulate that the findings of publicly funded research are made publicly available. This has extended to data from research projects as well as publications. Open access publishing is now the norm for many academics, and not just those who might be deemed early adopters ”

“ But one of the advantages of open access publishing is that it brings greater transparency about the costs, and the price, of publication and dissemination. The measures we recommend will bring greater competition on price as well as the status of the journals in which researchers wish to publish. We therefore expect market competition to intensify, and that universities and funders should be able to use their power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them both of APCs and of subscriptions. ”

“ A recent report from Wiley found that 59% of authors had published in OA journals, the first time the proportion has exceeded half (Warne 2013) . Open access publishing is not a minority pursuit any more, reserved for those with a particular zeal for it; it has moved into mainstream practice. ”

“ All three stress that open access implies that authors should grant free access and rights to use published works, subject only to proper attribution of authorship. Each also acknowledges two complementary routes to open access—publishing in open access journals, and providing access by depositing material in open access repositories—and the need to develop appropriate financial as well as legal frameworks to support the moves to make the published findings of research more widely available via the internet. ”

“ Publishers perform necessary labour that must be compensated and any new system of dissemination, such as open access, will require an entity to perform this labour, even if that labour takes a different form at different levels of compensation. One may be opposed to specific practices of extant publishers, or particular hypothetical publishing enterprises, but it is not possible to desire the functions of filtering, framing and amplification without there being a publisher, even if this publisher is also the author. ”

“ Our goal was to agree on significant, concrete steps that all relevant parties —the organizations that foster and support scientific research, the scientists that generate the research results, the publishers who facilitate the peer-review and distribution of results of the research, and the scientists, librarians and other who depend on access to this knowledge— can take to promote the rapid and efficient transition to open access publishing. ”

“ Publishers of subscription-based journals will face a number of challenges in the mixed model environment we recommend. Many of them are already considering a transition towards open access publishing, including hybrid journals. But in the new environment, that will become a much more urgent issue. The new policies and procedures we are supporting and promoting put the UK in the vanguard of moves towards open access, and we have stressed the need for international action. ”

“ So with existing publishers on one side demanding high fees for open access, whilst also continuing with subscription models, and predatory journals seeking to swindle money from authors on the other, it can feel to many authors that open access has not improved the practice of publishing at all. This is a reminder of the lessons we saw from other victories in Chapter ­1 – ­victory doesn’t feel like victory should. ”

“ Academic ­publishing is a practice that is at the core of academic identity, and as such, this fundamental change in its nature illustrates the impact of ­openness, and the importance of engaging with its future direction.
If open access publishing is the most established area for open education, then open educational resources runs a close ­second and offers a comparative study of a movement being owned largely by universities themselves. ”

“ And even though scholarly research is largely produced as a result of public funding, the results are often hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers or paywalls. Open Access publishing is an alternative model—one that takes full advantage of digital technologies, the web, and open licensing to provide free access to scholarship. ”

“ Open access publishing is perhaps the most recognisable aspect of how scholarly activity is adapting to the opportunities afforded by digital and networked technology. Other practices form what is termed open scholarship and include sharing individual resources such as presentations, podcasts and bibliographies; social media engagement through blogs, twitter and other routes; and generally more open practices, such as ­pre-​­publishing book chapters, open reviews and open research methods. ”

“ For open access and hybrid journals, as for all journals, unit costs depend on a number of factors, including the rejection rate, frequency of publication, the average length of articles, and the amount of editorial material they provide in addition to research articles. All these factors therefore have an influence on the level of APCs; and journals considering a move from subscription-based to open access publishing, have to take careful account of them. ”

“ Overall, however, we believe that open access publishing can offer a sustainable mechanism for increasing access, while sustaining high quality research and high-quality services to readers. In seeking to maximise access to the UK’s research publications free at the point of use for the benefit of the greatest number of potential users, we are clear that a policy direction set towards promoting the publication of research articles in open access or hybrid journals is the right course to take. ”

“ For faculty and learners alike, open access can seem like a scary new world, particularly since the pressure to publish has increased. There are many guides to debunking the myths of open access publishing, and reading these carefully to dispel any fear or misunderstanding is crucial in the current academic landscape. ”

“ It's an area where openness has 'won', to a large extent, with mandates from research funders, government and institutions which make open access publishing compulsory. And yet at the time of victory, open access advocates are also beset with doubt and conflict.
The Gold route is to make journals open access, so any reader can access the content free of charge. The focus of the Gold route is on using journals as the means to share content. There are different ways that such journals can be funded; for example, a university or professional society might fund the journal itself. ”

“ Open access publishing solves both problems by making current scholarship available worldwide at little expense. For that reason, faculty at several influential research institutions have voted to authorize archiving and distribution of their scholarship on open-access terms. ”

“ The argument of this book is that openness has been a successful approach, and while that is relatively easy to establish for open access publishing, it is less clear with OERs. From the perspective of establishing a movement that has continued to grow over more than a decade, then OERs are a reasonable success story, compared with learning objects, say, or many other educational technology movements. ”

“ In this chapter, I want to flag up several ways in which the current system of academic publishing could be reformed in a new digital era. Nothing written here is to be taken as necessary for open access. ”

“ The other aspect of labour that is potentially hidden through the zero-price point of open-access research is publishing. While open access to research presents an object as free, this is not to say that academic publishing can ever be conceived of as a labour-free enterprise. Regardless of how the process is framed, even without any allowance for profit, publishers must be remunerated for their work. ”

“ The people who perform the labour of publishing, however, move about between jobs and set up new companies, as in any other field. That the same individuals, with the same skillsets, could have different reputational appeal to scholars based upon brand illustrates, once more, the idiosyncrasies of prestige as it currently stands.
The differences between books and journals, in these respects, are often over-stated. There is a nonetheless pressing need to ensure that the transition to an open-access model preserves those aspects of the monograph that are of use to scholars. ”

“ Such evidence has reinforced the concerns of subscription-based publishers who may be, for whatever reason, unable to make a rapid move to open access publishing, that a reduction in the allowable embargo period to only six months, especially if combined with a requirement to eliminate any restrictions on use and re-use, would put the viability of their journals at severe risk. ”

“ We recognize that publishing is a fundamental part of the research process, and the costs of publishing are a fundamental cost of doing research.
Scientific societies agree to affirm their strong support for the open access model and their commitment to ultimately achieve open access for all the works they publish. They will share information on the steps they are taking to achieve open access with the community they serve and with others who might benefit from their experience. ”

“ Universities have a key role to play in implementing our proposals. Some universities have already adopted policies to promote or require open access for research publications, either via repositories, or (less frequently) through open access publishing funds. It is likely that most universities will respond to changes in Research Council and Funding Council policies by developing and implementing their own policies and systems to promote and support open access, each in accordance with their individual institutional missions and profiles. ”

“ If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term 'open access' in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of 'pay-to-say' publishing. ”

“ In both cases, these objections have been prominently raised in the humanities disciplines in particular. The degrees of 'disruption' and objection to the current ecosystem are, though, tiered according to the ways in which OA is implemented. While, therefore, some forms of open access require new economic models to sustain the labour of publishing, other mechanisms seem to co-exist peacefully with a subscription ecosystem, at least at present. ”

“ This adds needless obstacles to the growth of OA. For example, by percentages more humanists than scientists believe that publishing in a high-prestige non-OA journal rules out making the same work OA through an online repository, that even well-implemented OA risks copyright infringement, that most OA journals charge author-side fees, that most fees at fee-based OA journals are paid by authors out of pocket, that most non-profit society publishers fear and shun OA, and that most OA publishers are lax with quality control. ”

“ Journals owned by learned societies may be published on their own account or on their behalf by commercial, university press or other learned society publishers.
The main business models for journal publishers are
subscription-based, where revenues come mainly in the form of payments from libraries for licences to gain access via the publisher’s platform open access, where revenues come mainly in the form of article processing or publishing charges (APCs) paid by or on behalf of authors. ”