KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Japan’s government gets started on its nationwide plan to make publicly funded research free to read by investing ¥10 billion (£50 million).
• This investment will be used to standardise institutional data/publication repositories, making all research available on the same national server.

In June, the Japanese government took another step towards its goal of making publicly funded research papers free to access from April 2025. As reported by Dalmeet Singh Chawla for Nature News, this makes Japan one of the first countries in the world to launch a plan for open access (OA) on a national scale.

Investment in infrastructure

To make the transition to OA, the Japanese government will invest ¥10 billion (around £50 million) to standardise university data and publication repositories. While each institution will host research by their own academics, these repositories will all be hosted on the same national server. The result: Japan will have “a unified record of all research produced by its academics” that, importantly, does not overlook articles published in Japanese.

A green OA strategy

Japan’s transition to open science is based on green OA, a strategy the government considers more feasible for universities than a gold OA model. As reported by Singh Chawla, experts in open science and OA have praised the Japanese government’s plans.  Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S, supported the use of green OA “especially for all the content that is still behind the paywall”. Meanwhile, Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, highlighted the equitable nature of the plans.

Although slow to embrace open science, Shearer notes that Japan is now leading the way in OA publishing.

Japan is now leading the way in OA publishing.

————————————————–

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Open access research is not only cited more often than research behind paywalls, these citations also come from a broader range of fields, institutions, and regions.
• This citation diversity is an important metric for exploring the true impact of research.

Open access publications have the potential to reach a wider audience, evidenced by increased citation counts compared with those behind paywalls. However, a recent large scale study by Dr Chun-Kai Huang and colleagues probes further, challenging the research community to look at the diversity of the readership behind those numbers.

In the largest study of its kind, the authors drew on 19 million research outputs and 420 million citation links, covering 2010–2019, to examine citation diversity. Their data reveal that:

• open access is indeed associated with higher citation counts
• open access consistently provides a ‘citation diversity advantage’ (in other words, open access publications are cited by researchers from a more diverse range of fields, institutions, and regions)
• this citation diversity advantage is stronger for green open access than for gold.

One concern raised by the study is that, while open access increases citation diversity for research from regions typically under-represented in the published literature (eg, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean), the advantage was more pronounced for those areas that already have greater visibility (eg, North America and Northern Europe). The authors question whether this is another instance in which the “rich get richer”, and urge the research community as a whole to advocate for equitable open access.

Open access consistently provides a ‘citation diversity advantage’.

Nevertheless, Dr Huang and colleagues put forward citation diversity as a key metric that looks beyond citation count to explore the impact of research. It would seem that if this measure was commonly used, and valued as highly as the impact factor, we could broaden the reach of medical research.

————————————————

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

• 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.

—————————————————–

Earlier this year, Science published a guide to the new open access (OA) landscape that has emerged since the Plan S initiative came into effect in January 2021. The initiative requires research funded by cOAlition S members to be published OA,  which has led to a number of subscription journals changing their OA policies.

Some journals, such as Nature, introduced a Gold OA option in which authors pay a fee to have their papers published OA and immediately available to all. The top fee charged by Nature for this option is €9,500, which has been criticised by some for being too high. Such high fees can make publication financially out of reach, particularly for early-career researchers or those in lower-resource countries, further exacerbating longstanding inequalities for authors. Therefore, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the publisher of the Science family of journals, announced an alternative Green OA policy. This option allows authors to deposit near-final, peer-reviewed versions of papers that have been accepted in pay-for-view journals in publicly accessible online repositories (previously, manuscripts could only be shared on personal or institutional webpages). Importantly, authors funded by cOAlition S organisations will retain the rights to share their accepted manuscript openly, a condition stipulated in Plan S, and a right that will not be extended to all authors. AAAS will pilot the policy for a year to determine whether the approach is sustainable.

AAAS follow other publishers and journals, including The Royal Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, which have either had a Green OA policy for some time or have introduced them in response to Plan S. Although this approach does have its advantages, such as avoiding high publication fees, some have voiced concerns. The near-final drafts of manuscripts that are archived may lack useful sections of the final version or may not include subsequent corrections or retraction notices, making it more difficult to ensure the integrity of the scientific record. Others have argued that a focus on Green OA undermines progress to full OA. Rick Anderson, university librarian at Brigham Young University commented:

“Every open-access model solves some problems and creates other problems.”

Approximately 31% of articles in Science and 35% in Nature acknowledge grants from a Plan S funder and would therefore be able to utilise the new OA options. It is hoped that shifts in OA policies, like those driven by Plan S, will allow new findings to be disseminated faster and ultimately accelerate scientific discovery.

——————————————————–

——————————————————–

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

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