KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Free-to-publish, free-to-read diamond OA may improve equity in publication opportunities, but uptake may be held back as authors are attracted to non-diamond journals with an established reputation.
• Questions remain around whether diamond OA will reduce the costs of publishing overall.

Open access (OA) is key to making research more accessible, with gold OA ever-growing: it accounted for 42% of Web of Science-indexed publications in 2023. In a recent article in Research Professional News, published by Clarivate, Ulrich Herb and Benedikt Schmal highlight that gold OA is no stranger to scrutiny. Article processing charges (APCs) can pose equity issues, and transformative agreements have not shifted the OA landscape as hoped. Diamond OA, providing both free-to-publish and free-to-read articles, has been hailed as a solution by funders, libraries, and OA advocates; however, it may not provide a complete fix.

Money, money, money

Herb and Schmal debate whether, on balance, diamond OA will lower the costs of publishing compared with the current landscape. They note that journals have many costs, including:

• managing peer review, editing, and quality control
• operational infrastructure
• indexing and archiving
• training and capacity building
• marketing and outreach.

Despite this long list, Herb and Schmal suggest that many assume large commercial publishers and non-profit outfits have the same costs. Think again. Diamond OA publishers are unlikely to replicate economies of scale at larger publishers, so face higher costs. By their nature, non-profit publishers also lack motivations to reduce costs to widen profit margins.

Is reputation everything?

Diamond OA levels the financial playing field for authors, but Herb and Schmal ask whether this will truly provide equity. With reputation often a key factor in journal selection, the authors question whether there is sufficient appetite for new diamond OA journals: these would need to compete with established rivals to build their reputation and gain broader appeal.

Diamond OA levels the financial playing field for authors, but Herb and Schmal ask whether this will truly provide equity.

Herb and Schmal push for a pragmatic assessment of diamond OA models to establish their viability and sustainability – or note that OA advocates once again risk disappointment.

————————————————–

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.

————————————————–

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.

————————————————–

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Publishers should address disparities in open access publishing across different academic disciplines and regions.
• Gold open access is the preferred choice for publishing research.

With the recent publication of its one millionth fully open access (OA) article, Springer Nature’s Chief Publishing Officer, Steven Inchcoombe, used a Guest Post for The Scholarly Kitchen to look back at over a decade and a half of OA publishing at Springer Nature. Inchcoombe summarised the progress made in the transition towards universal OA and provided some suggestions on how publishers can facilitate the move to sustainable OA publishing .

What does OA publishing look like now?

In 2020, one-third of articles published in Springer Nature journals were OA. However, this was largely driven by the academic disciplines of Medicine and the Life Sciences. Primarily due to lower funding levels, the humanities and social sciences have found it more difficult to meet the requirements of Plan S. That said, these disciplines have succeeded in doubling their OA share between 2015–2020.

Regional disparity in OA publishing is also apparent. While Europe and Asia were strong contributors to OA content in 2021, North America contributed substantially fewer OA articles, which may reflect the lower uptake of Gold OA by US funders.

Inchcoombe highlighted the value that authors derive from making their research OA, noting an average of 2,600 downloads for each of the one million articles in the last 5 years.

In the last 5 years, these one million OA articles were downloaded 2.6 billion times – an average of 2,600 downloads per article.

Where next for OA?

Notwithstanding the progress made since the first OA article was published back in 2005, Inchcoombe suggested three steps that could ease the transition to OA:

1. The industry as a whole needs to accelerate the adoption of OA. Springer Nature is aiming for 50% of their published articles to be OA by 2024.
2. The barriers some academic disciplines face in publishing OA articles need to be addressed. Transformative Agreements between publishers and research institutions are one mechanism that can help, ensuring that OA publishing is available to all academics, irrespective of their field of research.
3. The regional disparity in OA publishing should be overcome. Journals should consult across geographic regions to understand and remove the barriers to OA publishing.

Going for Gold

Inchcoombe emphasised that publishers need to ensure that suitable OA options are available to all authors. Springer Nature is working towards this through their provision of 600 fully OA journals, and a further 2,000 journals available through their Transformative Journal commitment. Furthermore, he suggests that it will take the combined efforts of publishers, funders, institutions, and consortia to ensure sustainable OA publishing options. Warning that Green OA is not a sustainable model – as the version of record remains behind a paywall – Inchcoombe hopes that the industry can move rapidly towards the adoption of Gold OA as the preferred publishing model.

—————————————————–

In recent years there has been increasing support for data sharing and transparency within scientific publishing to improve the quality of research and expedite scientific advancements. Indeed the need to make research freely and rapidly available has become particularly apparent during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Publication Plan talked to David Mellor, Director of Policy Initiatives at the Center for Open Science, to find out how the organisation is working to make open science an achievable goal for all.

For anyone who is not already familiar with the Center for Open Science (COS), could you explain what the organisation is aiming to achieve?

“We are a non-profit technology and culture change company located in Charlottesville, VA, USA. Our mission is to increase trust and credibility in scientific research through transparency and rigour.”

Briefly, what are your key strategies to realise those goals?

“We have three main strategies for achieving our mission.

• First, we seek evidence to understand the barriers to reproducibility in scientific claims. We do this through reproducibility projects in psychology, cancer biology, and the social sciences that attempt to replicate the results of previously reported findings. Challenges in this process include a lack of clarity on precisely how research was conducted originally (which can be fixed through open data and materials) and false positives that result from unreported flexibility in data analysis.
• Second, we advocate for policies and educate on practices that address the barriers identified above. Our main set of recommendations are covered in the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines (TOP). These include specific guidance that journals, publishers, funders, and universities can follow to make science more open and reproducible. Beyond open data, they include recommendations for code, materials, reporting guidelines, preregistration, and replication studies.
• Finally, we build and maintain tools to enable the practices for which we advocate. The Open Science Framework (OSF) is an open-source web platform built to support research projects while connecting directly to built-in data repositories, registries, and preprint servers so that all of the materials and processes that eventually get summarised in a typical journal article are connected and preserved. This is the real evidence that is too often lost in the scholarly workflow.”

Could you tell us a bit about your background, how you became involved with open science and what your role as Director of Policy Initiatives entails?

“My background is in behavioural ecology and citizen science. After receiving my doctorate from Rutgers University, I did a post-doc at Virginia Tech working with citizen scientists in state parks and agricultural areas. Their projects involved studying water quality effects between different land management practices and invasive plant species control in threatened habitats around the state. We built tools to help them collaborate online and work with land managers. This type of collaboration and data sharing is what piqued my interest in related open science practices, and when a position became available at the COS I jumped on board! At the time, we were promoting new habits for the basic sciences, primarily preregistration through an education and award campaign, the Prereg Challenge. ”

The COS highlights that changes in researcher incentives, scientific infrastructure, and scholarly communication business models are needed to increase open science. For each of these aspects could you briefly highlight the main issues with current practices and explain how these could be improved?

“I think that incentives to improve scientific culture are the toughest nut to crack (as Alison Mudditt recently described).

Too much of academic culture is focused on imperfect measures of prestige.

Journals that have a high mean citation rate (ie the journal impact factor) are assumed to be the most prestigious and best, and having a manuscript accepted by such journals is necessary for career advancement. But why should the opinion of a few editors and reviewers, who make decisions in very opaque ways that are not subject to any scrutiny, have any more sway than a more open evaluation process? It’s very unscientific and it leads people to do whatever they think is necessary to appease ‘Reviewer 2’. Likewise, securing funding is subject to the whims of a panel of folks who have to rank dozens of fabulous research projects. The hyper-competition and low rate of funding lends a veneer of excellence when in fact getting into that 5% funded bucket is more a matter of chance than excellence, once you cull through the acceptable set of projects. There has to be a better way. And there is.

Scientists value transparency. It’s the only way to really evaluate evidence, claims, and good research design.

The TOP Guidelines provide a framework for evaluating how these organisations work, and that is what we are doing with TOP Factor. It’s a measure of institutional process – how unbiased and transparently does a journal, publisher, or funder work? That can be measured, and we’re measuring it. Our goal is to include every journal and, eventually, funder in that database. It provides very clear guidance on what needs to be done to improve policies that are focused on rigour, which is valued by science, over impact and prestige, which is of course valued by people but is not an ideal of science!

Supporting open infrastructure is another area where we are active. Frankly, it’s a perennial problem: getting funded to build something new and exciting is (relatively) easy, but maintenance and long-term support require business plans that align with scientific ideals and avoid the common pitfalls of monetising the outputs of science. That requires building coalitions with the stakeholders who have an interest and value the products and services and working with them to find the right way to support the tools.”

There has been much discussion in recent years around pushing towards open science and striving for increased transparency. In your experience has this translated into significant improvements in daily routine practice? Do you think the time will come when all research is openly accessible by default?

“There has been a huge shift. The number of basic scientists who are adding clarity to the process of scientific inquiry through preregistration is sky rocketing, particularly in the social sciences where ideas about bias and sloppy methods have become more well known. There is leadership at major funding organisations, such as the Institute for Education Sciences, that is tackling this head on. But work in future years will focus on connecting these pockets of early uptake and spreading them to more communities. There is a lot of work to be done in the preclinical biomedical sciences to make sure that data sharing is common, that bias is reduced through preregistration, so that open science can have the opportunity to succeed and make all of science more efficient and clear.”

In your recent presentation at the ISMPP Annual Meeting, you noted the low reproducibility of research (being able to produce the same findings of previous studies). What is the main reason for this? How can this situation be improved?

“Being able to replicate empirical research findings is a very old idea, that dates back hundreds of years. Essentially, if I make a claim, then others should be able to obtain the same findings if they follow the same steps. If not, it’s just a shallow statement. Now, sometimes the events that surrounded a claim can be recreated, so instead we want to see how the data were gathered and analysed. In either case, it’s only scientific if we can follow your logic from data to conclusion. Unfortunately, this concept is not widely applied. It takes time to look under the hood. Doing a study for a second time seems like a waste compared to chasing a new experiment. We’re all busy. But we’ve let those excuses cloud our thinking and assume that no one is ever going to check. That’s unfortunate, because it’s changed how we act. Across many fields, we see bad practices such as ‘p-hacking’ and HARKing being widely applied, and this undermines our methods. When most research can’t be replicated by others, it erodes trust. And we can either try to sweep that under the rug, which will just lead to less and less trust, or we can tackle these issues head on.

The expectation that others will do the same work or check our steps should be comforting, not threatening. Besides, if we want our results to ever break out of the Ivory Tower and make a positive difference in the world, we need to take these actions. That’s why the steps in the TOP Guidelines are so critical.”

“We need to know that replicating research will get published and funded so that we’ll have jobs and positions to keep finding new discoveries and confirming them in this way.”

Finally, looking to the future, are you able to share with us details of any upcoming initiatives or projects in the pipeline?

“Most of our work in the coming years will be focused on applying these methods to related disciplines. Preclinical disease research suffers from too much bias and opacity, and there are unique challenges to data sharing and replications in education studies that need to be tackled. We’re working with key communities there to ensure that these processes can result in a fair view of the evidence for all research.”

David Mellor is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Center for Open Science. You can contact David via david@cos.io.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

——————————————————–

With thanks to our sponsor, Aspire Scientific Ltd

Plan S is the action plan of CoalitionS which aims to bring full open access to all publicly-funded scientific research by 1 Jan 2020. A call for feedback on the implementation guidance of Plan S, which closed 1 February 2019, generated a wealth of public responses from more than 600 individuals and organisations. In the spirit of openness championed by cOAlitionS, all feedback will be made openly available; however, many respondents, such as the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, have already published formal statements. Others have taken to social media platforms such as Twitter to voice their opinion. Overall, there appears to be strong support for open access, but the approach to implementation received both positive and negative responses.

A preliminary analysis of the publicly-available feedback by the Scholarly Kitchen (the official blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing) reveals broad themes related to the feasibility and validity of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach’. A move to a ‘gold’ open access model financed by article-processing charges (APCs) was considered well-suited to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, where such costs are already defrayed by research grants, but social science researchers often do not have the same funding provision. The need for a more tailored approach taking into account discipline and geographic region was echoed in a statement from the League of European Research Universities, while a representative of the American Historical Association argued that a ‘green’ open access model (where the author’s manuscript is uploaded to a freely-accessible online archive) would be better suited to the humanities.

Other debated issues included the feasibility of a fair and reasonable APC. Respondents highlighted how APCs introduce a new financial barrier for researchers from low- and middle-income countries. However, highly-selective journals such as Nature cite publishing costs as high as €10,000–30,000 per article due to time spent evaluating a high volume of rejected articles and production of non-research content such as news and opinion articles.

Concerns were also raised that full implementation in the timeframe permitted would not be feasible, proving especially challenging for smaller publishers. Responding to this point in an interview with Publishing Perspectives, David Sweeny, co-chair of the implementation task force of Coalition S, contended that Plan S would come into effect only for projects funded after the 2020 deadline, with a further delay expected before the resultant data would be ready for publication.

The response from the research community shows a high level of engagement and general enthusiasm for open access, but there is also fear that Plan S may have unintended negative consequences. An initial analysis of the feedback is planned for release this spring and will feed into an updated version of the Plan S implementation guidance.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

——————————————————–

Summary by Julianna Solomons PhD, CMPP from Aspire Scientific

——————————————————–

With thanks to our sponsors, Aspire Scientific Ltd and NetworkPharma Ltd

Recorded 13 June 2018 at a MedComms Networking event in Oxford. Produced by NetworkPharma.tv.

Elizabeth’s presentation (PDF format) is available here.