Open access publishing: article processing charges pose possible negative consequences for authors and the marketplace of ideas
 |
Open access publishing has major benefits to readers, library systems, and anyone who would forgo reading due to the subscription price or who would pay subscription fees. I am (or maybe was) a huge fan. In the 1990s open access arose as a non-profit, often university-based system. Around 2002, commercial publishers entered the market. Along with them came significant article processing charges (APCs). Open access publishing operates using several models. Some university-based publishers do not charge article processing fees and have university funding to cover the costs of operating. They also tend to be volunteer based with student editors. Voices in Bioethics is like that: a university supported journal using Open Journal Systems financed by the Columbia Libraries, but using a volunteer staff for management, peer reviewing, and editing. The commercial models vary as well. Hybrid journals are transitioning from subscription to open access. Generally, an author can pay to have an article published open access or follow the older, subscription model under which the publisher makes money from (mostly institutional) subscribers and keeps the article behind a paywall. Springer Nature has many such journals. Authors choosing open access get the benefit of more readership in exchange for paying the publisher. Commercial fully open access journals do not offer a choice. They tend to charge a fee unless they are specially funded through benefactors. They sometimes offer a waiver of the APC or an application to find funders at the time of submission or acceptance of the paper. However, generally the author is responsible for the funding.
University libraries and authors
University libraries benefit from the ability to access once expensive journals for free. But whether they need that cost savings is a matter of opinion. Universities theoretically use their savings to pay APCs for researchers / professors.[1] There are tradeoffs: the university researcher has a high likelihood of having outside research grants that could cover APCs but would enjoy the free ride when submitting to subscription journals. There is not a body of evidence supporting the notion that the library savings go to the researcher’s APCs. Like any author, the researcher/author who has a full-time position at a large research university may benefit from broader readership and more citations. But all else even, the open access system poses more of a barrier to publication than a help when there is pressure to find grants to cover the APCs. And people with university affiliations (students and researchers) often have access to subscription journals through their library. Articles behind a paywall to others are free to them anyway or have hidden pricing – incorporated into tuition or detracting from salary. For example, I can access many journals using the Columbia Libraries. Whether the Libraries paid for the university subscription or the journal was free does not impact me as it would impact someone without access to a free library.
Readers
The public benefits the most from open access publishing as anyone with internet access can read, watch, and learn for free. When the average person faces a paywall when trying to access a scientific journal, the fee for even one article can be very high. Open science is a movement to make more scientific papers and publications free and accessible for the public. It refers to both open data and output. Unpaywall is “an open database of 48,851,639 free scholarly articles” taken from the public domain of open access journals.[2] Journalists benefit from easy access to articles upon which they base their stories.[3] Mainstream media brings science, technology, health, and humanities research to the public. Journalists’ access and interpretation of scientific articles are crucial to improving the public’s knowledge base.
Open access publishing helps level the playing field for knowledge seekers. With many journals remaining subscription based, university students and employees are privileged in research and information gathering. The open access trend serves people who cannot navigate around paywalls simply by logging in through their institution. Some universities have access to more content than others. Harvard boasts student access to “millions of pages of online content”.[4] If all journals were open access, everyone could have information. This is a government priority[5] as well as a social movement steeped in transparency and access to educational goods.
Unaffiliated authors
The unaffiliated author in the humanities likely suffers the most from the open access movement. While removing paywalls helps citizen scientists and amateur or unaffiliated historians research and create, they often have fewer funding offers. The benefit to researching could be outweighed by the inability to afford publication even if a paper passes the muster of peer review. Authors from the social sciences and humanities from low-income countries pay their own fee more often[6] than scientific authors or authors in the social sciences and humanities in high-income countries. Among journals, “around 60% of SAGE Open. . . self-funded their publication fees.” Half of the open access article authors publishing in PLOS ONE, a scientific publisher, paid fees using grant money.[7] Authors may even try to partner with those with access to institutional grant money for the sake of publication.
People who research and write but are not affiliated with universities include retirees, post-docs working in the gig economy, solo practitioners (e.g. lawyers), professionals at NGOs and 501(c)(3)s, and employees of businesses and organizations without university research collaborations. These authors may have more (or different) experience than ones who hold current professorships. Among 501(c)(3)s, access to funding differs greatly. Charitable trusts and other sources of very large donations tend to favor partnerships with universities or large, well-established organizations. Small 501(c)(3)s may rely on membership dues or small donations.
The marketplace of ideas
There are some big open questions: will there be fewer good ideas expressed in journals? The marketplace of ideas is a free speech theory that holds that people will accept rational and true information and weed out unsubstantiated, false claims.[8] While it may be on the brink of fossilization,[9] the marketplace theory of free speech is relevant to academic publishing. Like government, publishers with APCs have the potential to suppress viewpoints and voices, while privileging the views of those with access to grant money or independent wealth. There are some solutions like the Fund for Fair Open Access.[10] While open access publishing helps people find data and information and the peer review process to some degree weeds out the unsubstantiated and false, some ideas may be inadvertently suppressed. Some authors with valuable ideas will not pay the APCs. As is, peer review can lead to rejection of well researched, accurate academic articles. Even if the APCs deter submissions evenly across viewpoints, they probably will suppress some important, innovative papers. Another way of looking at it is that the ideas can be more widely read, but there may be fewer.
There are many platforms for non-peer-reviewed work: organization and individual blogs, media blogs like Substack, and self-publishing options like Medium, LinkedIn, and Academia, etc. While journals may eventually have fewer authors due to rising APCs, other outlets should flourish and fill any gaps. But would readers trust the information? There are many ways to vet and fact check that could render peer review less necessary.
Quality control: Is there evidence that open access publishers that charge APCs compromise the peer review process?
Studies have tried to answer this. The findings are inconclusive. Studies submitting fake papers found that peer review in open access journals with APCs was not as rigorous as expected.[11] Open access journals could face temptation to accept more articles to generate revenue. In hybrid journals, there is a financial incentive to prioritize open access although many hybrid journals peer review prior to the author’s decision about whether to choose open access. Many authors do not want to pay to publish.[12] Journals are to some degree judged by acceptance rate, the lower the more prestigious, but that too can change. If they receive fewer submissions and have strong financial incentives to accept more papers, they may not hold onto any particular acceptance rate. It may be that there is not a true relationship between acceptance rate and article quality. Authors also prefer a high likelihood that their submission will be accepted. If authors perceive open access journals as more likely to publish their papers, they may tolerate the APCs.
The open access model leads journals to focus on attracting authors rather than subscribers. (One would think they would make it easier to submit manuscripts based on the incentives.) But authors want to submit to journals that have readers and high impact factors. Articles in open access journals are cited more. The citation advantage is likely due to higher visibility.[13] Authors may choose to pay APCs in exchange for more citations. However, if papers are cited more but less properly vetted, that is an issue.
Shifting costs
An odd result of the changing paradigm is that legitimate journals now look a lot like predatory journals. And open access began as a movement toward transparency, public education, and a level playing field for learning, but it now looks like a way for commercial publishers to shift their costs to authors from subscribers. In doing so, they trade the inequity of keeping important papers behind paywalls with the inequity of privileging authors with more financing. Online publishing has led to savings for publishers compared to print journals, especially with color charts, but those savings are not passed along.
Approaches
Breaking up the hierarchy of old established journals is likely a good sign. Open access journals may be younger and fresher with new editors. The open access paradigm’s popularity stems from leveling the playing field of access to research. That side of the equation may outweigh the downside for authors. But there are other options to make publishing accessible to people who have important, well researched, views to offer, but lack university affiliations and funding sources. Perhaps something in between self-publishing and a formal journal should prevail. Blogs that are vetted are abundant. When people develop trust in a media outlet, they may not need peer review or the infrastructure of journals owned by large publishing companies. While many people believe strongly in peer review, others do not. A friend of mine tells a funny story of a philosophy peer reviewer who is a grocery checkout person with no philosophy experience. Many journals allow readers to sign up as peer reviewers without any vetting or training. The hierarchy of journals may matter in that excellent journals train their peer reviewers and choose experts. An experienced editorial staff could make educated decisions as well. In the sciences, and now the social sciences and humanities as well, peer review is undermined by the trend of preprint repositories that make papers available. Retraction never quite retracts an idea once it is floated to the public.
Some journals resist advertisers while others generate advertising revenue. If advertisers had no say in content, they would be a preferred source of revenue. There have been pharmaceutical advertisers in peer reviewed scientific journals, a point of contrition for years.[14] Journals with advertisers should consider reducing or eliminating APCs while continuing to be open access.
Where I stand
Decidedly confused. I think people should have access to any tool in the academic space that is helpful to their research endeavor. University-run or otherwise fully funded open access journals serve the public well. Taxpayer funding of public free libraries could pay for the subscriptions and the old system could continue for commercial journals. I would think local university libraries would find a way to help a member of the public asking for an article even if the person is not a community member. With online access, each additional click is not really costing anyone anything. One way to expand access would be for universities to be generous with alumni access rather than limiting access to students and employees through university / publisher contracts.
Commercial publishing should see itself as an industry that needs content. It should be grateful to authors – while the trend is that publishers do not pay authors in the journal space, the shift to open access should not burden authors. Rights to music have been changing as well with new pressures on creators to share their music and generate a following.
Open access works very well when it is fully funded. The commercial endeavor with APCs is seeing growing pains and may lead authors to choose subscription, publish in a no-APC journal, or give up and just start a blog.
[1] Borrego, Á. (2023). Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review. Learned Publishing, 36(3), 359-378.
[2] Unpaywall, website. https://unpaywall.org/
[3] Ordway, D.M. (2023) 8 ways journalists can access academic research for free: A lot of academic research exists behind paywalls. We outline eight ways reporters can get free access to high-quality scholarship. The Journalist’s Resource. https://journalistsresource.org/media/academic-research-free-journalists/
[4] Harter, O. (2018) How to Use Your Harvard Key to Get Online Articles Free. https://library.harvard.edu/about/news/2018-10-31/how-use-your-harvard-key-get-online-articles-free
[5] Nelson, A., Whitehouse (2022) Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-Access-Memo.pdf (Memo by Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director for Science and Society Performing the Duties of Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) describing policy “to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible” by December 31, 2025.); See also, McKenna, J. (2023) Open Access Policy in the USA. https://blog.mdpi.com/2023/08/24/usa-open-access/#
[6] Borrego (2023).
[7] Borrego (2023).
[8] Shroeder, J. (2019) ‘Marketplace of ideas’ turns 100 — it’s not what it used to be. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/469715-as-marketplace-of-ideas-turns-100-truth-is-not-what-it-used-to-be/ (the marketplace of ideas holds that government should not suppress speech too much because people will filter out bad information and prioritize what is true and accurate.)
[9] Shroeder (2019). (Many suggest that the public is not weeding out incorrect information in the social media age.)
[10] KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. https://lup.be/pages/ku-leuven-fund-for-fair-open-access (for books).
[11] Bohannon, J. (2013). Who’s afraid of peer review? Science, 342(6154), 60–65. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.342.6154.60 (finding low peer review standards after submitting fake scientific paper to many open access journals); Dell’Anno, R., Caferra, R., & Morone, A. (2020). A “Trojan Horse” in the peer-review process of fee-charging economic journals. Journal of Informetrics, 14(3), 101052 (also submitted fake manual; found that traditional subscription-based journals had incentives aligned with better peer review).
[12] Borrego (2023)(some researchers base their decision solely on the availability of grant money.)
[13] Sotudeh, H., & Estakhr, Z. (2018). Sustainability of open access citation advantage: the case of Elsevier’s author-pays hybrid open access journals. Scientometrics, 115, 563-576.
[14] Othman, N., Vitry, A., & Roughead, E. E. (2009). Quality of pharmaceutical advertisements in medical journals: a systematic review. PloS one, 4(7), e6350; Wilkes, M. S., Doblin, B. H., & Shapiro, M. F. (1992). Pharmaceutical advertisements in leading medical journals: experts’ assessments. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/abs/10.7326/0003-4819-116-11-912
