KEY TAKEAWAYS

• OA publishing can place financial stress on authors, but avenues like publisher discounts can offset costs and improve equity.
• Immediate OA mandates for US federally funded research challenge publishing models and author’s control over their work.

Debate continues following the 2022 White House directive mandating immediate open access (OA) for all US federally funded research by the end of 2025. While OA publication has many virtues, including improving access to research and citation diversity, some issues are far from resolved.

Are OA fees prohibitive for authors?

Challenges for OA publication include inequitable opportunities and inconsistent benefits to visibility in the scientific space. In a recent Career Feature article in Nature, Nikki Forrester builds on reports of prohibitive article processing charges, particularly for authors in low- and middle-income countries. Forrester shares advice on offsetting OA costs from experienced researchers, such as:

• seeking support from co-authors, funders, or institutions
• taking advantage of scientific society grants (eg, in partnership with Research4Life)
• utilising publisher fee waivers and discounts, where available.

How will OA mandates affect publishers?

Scientific publishing models rely on payment from authors and subscriptions, and are threatened by immediate OA, notes Kathryn Palmer for Inside Higher Ed: the 2022 directive will require embargo-free deposition of publications in designated, publicly accessible repositories.

Further, some libraries have pushed for use of the federal purpose licence for federally funded work—allowing free publication and reproduction—to simplify processes for authors. US Congress and publishing associations are concerned this move would limit authors’ control, with broad OA licences permitting reproduction, modification, and commercialisation. Given the federal purpose licence is non-exclusive, author and library bodies have rebuffed some copyright-related concerns, simply seeing a “business model conflict” for publishers who held exclusive copyright for articles published under subscription models.

Given the federal purpose licence is non-exclusive, author and library bodies have rebuffed some copyright-related concerns, simply seeing a “business model conflict” for publishers.

In any case, Palmer notes that publishers will face difficult decisions as the OA landscape continues to shift.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Researchers in less affluent countries report challenges getting APC discounts or waivers, posing barriers to OA publication.
• Tiered pricing and alternative funding models have been suggested to improve global equity in access to OA publication.

As scientific publishing shifts to open access (OA) models, authors—particularly in less affluent countries—face challenges paying article processing charges (APCs). A recent news feature in Science by Jeffrey Brainard highlights growing concerns about equity in OA.

Free to read, not free to publish

With ~50% of scientific papers now published under author-pays OA, 2023 saw gold and hybrid OA revenue triple for 6 large publishers versus 2019. This excludes potential reductions from discounts and waivers, relied on by many authors from low- and lower middle-income countries to publish OA. However, processes to obtain discounts or waivers can be complex, and they may not be offered by hybrid journals (who offer free, but paywalled, publication).

APCs can put financial strain on researchers worldwide when grant funding does not cover the fees: some even resort to paying from their own pocket. Brainard notes that when considering journal options likely to aid career advancement, authors in developed countries often prioritise journal reputation—one factor linked to higher APCs—over APC affordability. However, this may not be an option for scientists in developing regions. In the words of one researcher from Brazil, unaffordable APCs risk science from the Global South becoming “nonexistent”, perpetuating global disparities.

Unaffordable APCs risk science from the Global South becoming “nonexistent”, perpetuating global disparities.

Proposed solutions

Making journal articles both free to read and affordable to publish is challenging, but publishers are exploring alternatives to author-paid APCs. Potential solutions include:

• transformative agreements with institutions, allowing affiliated researchers to publish without paying APCs (and access paywalled content)
• tiered pricing based on a country’s wealth and purchasing power. While this would reduce APCs for many countries, costs would increase in wealthier nations if publishers offset lost revenue
• diamond OA, with government or philanthropic funding eliminating individual APCs. Brainard notes this has boosted OA publishing in some regions already, but absent impact factors for many journals can reduce the appeal.

Brainard highlights that OA publishing is actively changing: cOAlition S, Elsevier, and Springer Nature have introduced tiered pricing initiatives this year. We look forward to seeing how the OA landscape continues to evolve.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A recent survey by Delta Think saw article processing charges (APCs) for fully open access and hybrid journals rising by around 10% and 4%, respectively, between 2023–2024.
• Delta Think concludes that because APC increases are below the rate of inflation, these costs are becoming cheaper in real terms, with authors getting slightly more value for money than in previous years.

Article processing charges (APCs) and open access (OA) have certainly been hot topics here at the Publication Plan. While OA is considered essential for broadening the impact of scientific research globally, the APCs associated with gold OA can represent a barrier to publishing equity. Monitoring trends in APCs is, therefore, important. To that end, the Delta Think group run an annual survey of >30 key publishers to assess price changes. In a recent report, they explored the realities of APC increases after adjusting for inflation.

Using the global consumer price index (CPI) to examine whether APCs are becoming cheaper or more expensive in real terms, Delta Think found:

• APC list prices rose between 2023 and 2024, with increases of ~10% and ~4% for fully OA and hybrid journals, respectively.
• Real-term APCs for all OA journals (fully OA and hybrid) fell most years since 2017, with the exception of 2021 when large increases were seen alongside a modest inflation rate.
• Fully OA journals show a slightly different picture, with real-term APCs rising as often as they have fallen over the same time period.
• Above-inflation price rises for fully OA journals were particularly notable going into 2021 and 2024.

As context to their findings, the group highlight that the average inflation rate for this period (per the global CPI) was ~4%, spiking at >8% in 2022, with a prediction of ~6% for 2024.

Delta Think conclude that, overall, OA prices are rising, but not as fast as the rate of inflation, meaning the cost of OA is actually becoming cheaper, with authors getting slightly better value for money.

Delta Think conclude that, overall, OA prices are rising, but not as fast as the rate of inflation, meaning the cost of OA is actually becoming cheaper, with authors getting slightly better value for money. They note that while the prices of fully OA journals are increasing faster than inflation, these remain cheaper than hybrid prices and are thus growing from a lower starting point. Finally, Delta Think call upon authors to be mindful of this detail: if concerns exist around OA affordability, understanding real-term costs is key.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The rise of online-only, open access publishing inadvertently spawned a parasite industry of predatory journals.
• AI, checklists, critical appraisal by authors, and registers of respectable open access journals can all help protect scientific integrity.

Predatory journals aim to lure unaware, unscrupulous, or disillusioned authors, ensnaring their research and money. In an editorial for the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, Editor-in-Chief Are Brean describes how a “tidal wave” of increasingly sophisticated predatory journals is degrading trust in science. Over at Medscape, Neurology Editor-in-Chief José Merino and host Andrew Wilner discuss how to identify legitimate, peer reviewed journals in the era of online-only, open access publishing. Read on for a summary of their top tips.

Apex predators

Brean warns that predatory journals have come a long way since librarian Jeffrey Beall coined the term in 2008. Modern predators may:

• use names that look like those of established journals
• list reputable scientists as colleagues (without their knowledge)
• use counterfeit indexing in recognised databases
• be linked to paper mills
• ‘hijack’ legitimate journals via URL fraud.

Open access fees: when are they a red flag?

Article processing charges (APCs) are a recognised and established funding model in open access scientific publishing, and most journals are now online only. So, in this environment, how can researchers tell the difference between a legitimate journal and a fraud? Brean and Merino make the following suggestions:

• Critically assess the journal’s credentials. Ask yourself:

1. Have you heard of this journal? Has anybody you know published there?
2. Does the journal have a track record? When was it established?
3. Is it supported by a recognisable publisher?
4. Is it accessible?

• Read a sample of the journal’s output. Are the articles ‘interesting, credible, and of good quality’?
• Use a free checklist.
• Ask your medical librarian for guidance.
• Consult a register of reputable journals such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Defence mechanisms

Brean also suggests that artificial intelligence could be used to expose predatory journals. Research in this area is ongoing.

For now, the editors encourage (human) authors and researchers to be careful and critical. Don’t get caught in the predatory publishing trap.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• In a recently published review of Plan S, cOAlitions S describe key initiatives that aim to meet the changing needs of the evolving open access landscape.
• New features of the practical ‘Journal Checker Tool’ were discussed, as well as the latest advancements towards diamond open access.

2023 marked the 5th anniversary of the launch of Plan S by cOAlition S, a group of mainly European research funders with a mission to achieve “full and immediate open access (OA) to research publications”. Although much progress has been made, the group recognise that there is still work to do, with a substantial proportion of new research articles sitting behind paywalls. In February 2024, the latest review of Plan S was released, with a rundown of new and ongoing plans that aim to turn the dial further forwards full OA.

The state of open access

OA rates for research funded by cOAlition S members remained high (~80%), particularly compared with the global average (60%). Gold OA was most widely used among cOAlition S member-funded research, along with an increasing number of OA publications made available via ‘hybrid’ journals. It was suggested that this increase was likely due to transformative agreements, and that this number may fall following the decision by cOAlition S to halt financial support for these agreements after 2024.

Strategic initiatives

The review detailed 4 key initiatives that will have an impact over the course of the next year:

• A study to assess the impact of Plan S was launched, which aims to evaluate how Plan S has contributed to OA and its global effects on the scholarly landscape.
• A public consultation is ongoing to further develop the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal, which aims to move to systems where authors control how their work is shared.
• The organisation Information Power was commissioned by cOAlition S to devise a proposal for a fairer pricing system for publishing. A working group was also convened in partnership with PLOS and Jisc to create a framework to move away from article processing charges.
• Support for diamond OA, which cOAlition S “see as the most equitable OA publishing model on the planet”, continued, and a framework for a Global Diamond Federation was outlined.

Useful tools

As well as new proposals, the report reviewed practical tools already made available to researchers, including:

• the Journal Comparison Service, which allows comparison of journal publishing services and fees
• the Journal Checker Tool, which is used to identify Plan S compliant routes to publishing OA. New features of this tool mean that users are also now able to check if a transformative agreement is in place for a particular journal or institution.

Future perspectives

Executive Director of cOAlition S, Johan Rooryck, highlighted that these initiatives look “forward to a bold vision for the future of scholarly communication”. Indeed, updates on many of the latest initiatives, such as the Plan S impact study, are expected in the coming months. It will be interesting to see how these new developments impact on OA research in 2024 and beyond.

Executive Director of cOAlition S, Johan Rooryck, highlighted that these initiatives look “forward to a bold vision for the future of scholarly communication”.

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KEY TAKEAWAY

• Five years after its launch, Robert-Jan Smits calls on the scientific community to remain committed to Plan S.

In an opinion piece for Research Professional News, Robert-Jan Smits emphasises the importance of adhering to Plan S, the revolutionary initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S to ensure that publications resulting from publicly funded research are immediately available for all to read. He highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic saw a significant rise in open access publishing, fostering hope that this ‘new normal’ could be sustained. However, despite these initial gains, the journey towards full open access remains slow.

Despite initial gains, the journey towards full open access remains slow.

Key achievements:

• cOAlition S has grown to include 25 organisations, including the World Health Organization.
• The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy adopted an open access policy closely aligned with Plan S principles.
• Transformative agreements between academic institutions and publishers were conceived to speed up commitment to immediate open access.

Despite these successes, significant challenges persist:

• 61% of scientific papers published each year remain behind paywalls.
• Persistent myths equate open access with low-quality, predatory journals.
• Academic libraries struggle with the shift from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish’.
• Article processing charges (APCs) are often prohibitive.
• Some journals have been too slow in transitioning to open access.

Smits argues for a hard 2024 deadline for transformative agreements to deliver results. He suggests capping APCs to control costs and advocates for transparency in publishing expenses.

Ultimately, Smits is concerned that the course may be changing and fears that initiatives such as diamond open access and not-for-profit open access publishing platforms will not facilitate the significant shifts needed to make full open access a reality.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• From the end of 2025, US government policy will mandate immediate open access to federally funded research data and publications, eliminating the current 12-month embargo.
• While further details on implementation are worked out, publishers, funders, and researchers grapple with the best ways to fund open access.

A year ago, the US White House announced plans to make all federally funded research immediately available for free by the end of 2025. So, what progress has been made, and what will this model mean for the status quo in medical publishing?

The mandate from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructed all federal agencies to implement plans to “deliver transparent, open, secure, and free communication of federally funded research and activities”. Under the new directive, publications must be made instantly available to the public, removing the current optional 12-month grace period. In line with a similar mandate from the WHO, the directive also applies to research data.

The mandate from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructed all federal agencies to implement plans to “deliver transparent, open, secure, and free communication of federally funded research and activities”.

The OSTP left it to federal funding agencies to work out the finer details of implementation, which led to a flurry of debate on the policy’s potential impact and how best to enact it. Publishers raised concerns around what they viewed as a lack of consultation and financial sustainability, while the US government pointed to the success of Plan S in Europe, as well as the rapid open access to research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What will this mean for medical publishing?

In an economic assessment report, the OSTP predicted that the policy would lead to changes in publishers’ business models. The move to immediate open access will inevitably make journal subscription models less desirable, and publishers’ incomes will likely become more reliant on the article processing fees levied on open access publications. As reported by Susan d’Agostino of Inside Higher Ed, this raises the question of who will bear these costs. The OSTP allows researchers to “include reasonable publication costs” in their budgets, but some researchers point out that budget squeezes may follow, with open access fees impacting on funds available for other aspects of research.

Following the policy launch, the OSTP held a Year of Open Science, with federal funding agencies obliged to submit initial updated public access plans over the course of 2023. Large funders, such as the National Institutes of Health, have already done so. The year also incorporated 4 ‘listening sessions’ with early-career researchers. These researchers advocated for a broader range of initiatives to ensure:

• equitable access to open access publishing
• incentives for open science, rather than the current ‘publish or perish’ environment
• better use of alternative avenues for early research dissemination, such as preprints.

Meanwhile, some publishers and other bodies advocate for alternative models, such as:

• immediate green open access
• diamond open access (already popular in some regions of the world).

So, what’s next?

Questions remain for publishers, and the road to more fully open access models can be rocky. While the European Plan S initiative is much more advanced, having been in effect since 2021, cOAlition S recently announced that a number of hybrid journals will be dropped from its funded transformation programme, because they failed to make quick enough progress towards full open access. In the case of the US policy, an analysis by Eric Schares found that 265,000 articles a year could be affected, and that some publishers would be impacted more than others.

As work continues through to 2026, we watch with interest to see how the publishing ecosystem will adapt to this change in the landscape.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Article processing charges are popular in the Global North but threaten potentially more sustainable open access models already embraced in Latin America.
• Global support of institutional open access publishing is needed to build an open, non-commercial infrastructure to share research.

Article processing charges (APC) have become increasingly popular across the Global North since the mid-2000s, yet APCs threaten to undermine the open access (OA) ecosystem and only promote published material from well-resourced research fields and communities.

Institutionally funded OA – an alternative ‘diamond’ OA model that excludes fees for readers and authors – is popular in Latin America but is under threat due to the preferences of research evaluation systems and Latin American scholars for international journals (that tend to charge APCs) and their associated prestige. Latin American institutions are resultingly being forced to redirect funds for diamond OA investment towards paying APCs.

Publishers are incentivised to charge APCs due to the proliferation of research funds that are made available to pay them – “APCs beget APCs.”

A recent Nature article highlights this issue, drawing attention to the vicious circle whereby publishers are incentivised to charge APCs due to the proliferation of research funds that are made available to pay them – “APCs beget APCs.” Dr Juan Pablo Alperin, the article’s author, highlights the intrinsic link between APCs and those that can afford to pay them. Dr Alperin, co-scientific director of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)  at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, discusses the importance of making research publicly available and lobbies for global OA funding mechanisms that protect publishing diversity, lower the burdens of production, and raise the quality of journals.

To further this cause, PKP has developed free software, Open Journal Systems, to manage, publish and index scholarly works. The software is used by a diverse set of journals and has provided access to many academics as well as non-academics on locally relevant literature.

Global support of institutional OA publishing is growing but more support is needed to build an open, non-commercial infrastructure to share research. Whilst Dr Alperin recognises the model relies on volunteers and institutional staff to provide editorial and technical support, he calls on governments, funders, and academic institutions to embrace diamond OA and stop supporting APCs.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• US guidance mandates that, from 2025, all publicly funded research is open access from the time of publication.
• The publishers of Science highlight the importance of equitable access for both readers and authors, and propose immediate green open access as one of the potential solutions.

In recent years, Europe has seen Plan S accelerate open access to publicly funded research. Now, guidance from The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy mandates that, by 2025, all publicly funded research in the US must be open access at the time of publication. As publishers consider how best to meet this requirement, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publishers of Science, have proposed one solution and called on others to join the discussion.

In a recent editorial, AAAS set out some of the key challenges faced by publishers as they seek to “balance the tensions between equitable access for readers and equitable access to publishing”. In other words, how can publishers ensure readers have open access to articles while ensuring researchers can equitably obtain open access publication? The authors highlighted that while the current commonly employed open access model, based on payment of article processing charges, ensures open access for readers, it can result in a system skewed to well-funded senior researchers (who are often white males).

While one of Science’s journals operates under this gold open access model, the publisher plans to use immediate green open access as a tool to meet the US mandate for its remaining, currently subscription-only journals, as outlined in a recent Nature news article. Authors of publicly funded research accepted by these journals are now able to utilise the ‘green open access-zero day’ policy, posting their peer reviewed, author accepted manuscript in a public repository without additional journal fees. AAAS has invited further discussion within the research and publishing communities to refine approaches to open access, stating: “We must not sew more structural inequity into the very fabric of the enterprise we seek to improve.”

AAAS has invited further discussion…to refine approaches to open access, stating: “We must not sew more structural inequity into the very fabric of the enterprise we seek to improve.”

To this end, Science correspondents have begun to share their thoughts and proposals, including suggestions for international standards for article processing charges and open access publication and to designate articles as open access only after a publication decision is reached. Both strategies are aimed at ensuring publication quality is protected over volume.

The ongoing discussions illustrate that providing an open access publishing system that is equitable, fair, and inclusive remains challenging. As outlined by AAAS, such a challenge requires publishers to work together with governments, funding bodies, and the wider scientific community to find a mutually agreeable way forward.

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Dr Anthony Olejniczak and Dr Molly J Wilson evaluated over 1.6 million journal articles by 182,320 unique authors published in 25,894 journals between 2014 and 2018. They performed a regression model to assess the relationship between authors’ individual characteristics (eg gender, professorial rank, institution, years since terminal degree) and the likelihood of their article(s) being published OA.

The results showed that authors were more likely to publish OA if they were:

• male
• employed at a prestigious university (defined by membership in the exclusive Association of American Universities)
• associated with a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) discipline
• receiving federal research funding (because this funding often comes with OA mandates)
• more advanced in their careers (full professor vs assistant or associate professor).

Drs Olejniczak and Wilson believe that publishing OA by paying an APC is “skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security”, adding that while the OA movement seeks to democratise scientific research, APCs may prevent some authors from publishing OA. Men generally publish more OA articles than women and the disparity becomes more pronounced when APCs must be paid. As a result, authors who do publish OA may not be fully representative of their particular discipline or community.

Publishing OA by paying an APC “appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security”.

The responsibility to ensure diverse authorship in OA publications rests with journals, though the issue is rooted in the OA business model, say Drs Olejniczak and Wilson. Organisations like Science Europe have called for public reporting of APCs to improve transparency. We look forward to seeing how publishers will respond and whether business model changes can truly improve equity in OA publishing.

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