Although gold open access publishing allows articles to be accessed by all, it has significant downsides: the costs of publishing in this way born are by authors/universities and benefit for-profit publishers rather than the research community as a whole. And yet there are good reasons why academics often choose to publish their articles in journals that operate in this way: many are prestigious, and so publishing in them is just about required for a successful career as an academic. In this post I outline this problem before considering whether and how academia can move away from this model, and towards a different model: one on which neither authors nor readers pay a high price to publish and read academic research (often called ‘diamond open access’). Such a move will not be easy, but it’s plausible that, in time, it will occur.
Open access publishing: who pays?
In most cases in which an article in an academic journal has not been published as open access, then the article can only be read if someone pays the publisher for it. Usually either the reader themselves will pay per article (it costs US$20 to access this article on Einstein’s methodological views, for example), or some institution (such as a university library) has a deal with the journal publisher which allows access to articles in those journals to those connected to the institution. These deals are significant: a headline in Times Higher Education in 2018 reads Top universities’ journal subscriptions ‘average £4 million’.
There are clear reasons why this is not an ideal way for the publication of academic articles to work. Blocking access to research slows down the dissemination of results, slows down economic benefits built on these results, and locks away information from the many people who cannot afford to pay to access articles, including academics at less well-off institutions (including many in the Global South). Further, much of the work done by academics which results in published articles is publicly funded. It seems unfair that the public should be locked out from access to the research it has paid for.
If a paper has been published as open access (I’ll focus on ‘gold access’—on which anyone can read the paper) then it costs nothing to access the article. But although the reader does not pay in this situation, someone else does. There are steep fees—called ‘author processing charges’ or ‘APCs’—which must be paid to the publisher by those who want to publish in this way (in 2023 the ‘standard APC’ at Cambridge University Press, for example, is £2,110). Often these APCs are paid by an author’s employer or with funding they have been awarded.
But publishing in this way is not without problems. The cost is prohibitive for most authors who don’t have the funding, or the right kind of job, or the right kind of job at the right kind of institution. These will include independent scholars or those yet to have an academic position. (Famously, Einstein’s four annus mirabilis papers (one of which led to his Nobel Prize) were published while he was working at the Swiss patent office in Bern.) It will also include many academics and researchers working in the Global South (see posts by Prem Ranjan and Parvathy Ramesh for more on this). So open access achieved in this way is only open ‘at one end’: anyone can read these articles once they are published, but not everyone can afford to get them published in this way. This unfairness has further consequences: articles that are available via open access get cited more, have more impact, and so are more helpful to an author’s career.
So, whether or not an article has been published as open access, someone has paid the publisher—either at the author’s end, so that there is no charge at the reader’s end, or vice versa.
Open access publishing: who profits?
We might think that this is unremarkable. After all, getting an academic article to its published state involves a lot of work, and we can really expect people to work for nothing. Fair enough, but, as we’ve seen, the fees publishers charge are not cheap. It costs more to access a single article than it costs to buy the latest Steven King novel; and it costs more to allow others to access a single article than it costs to buy every novel Steven King has ever published (in both hardback and softback and ebook editions (probably—I haven’t crunched the numbers)).
It’s true that publishers do work to earn this money. It costs money to copy-edit and to typeset, to produce professional graphics, to print and distribute hard copies of journals, to produce pdfs, and to archive them securely online. But it’s not clear that these costs justify the fees that publishers charge (xyzpaul links to—but casts a skeptical eye over—a list of 96 things that publishers allegedly do to earn their fees). Certainly, academic publishers reap huge profits: in 2017, total global revenues for scientific publishing were more than £19bn.
Further, a lot of the work—the work of the authors, editor, and reviewers—that goes into producing published articles is done by academics. Much of this work requires specialized knowledge, but these academics are not usually paid for this work. Plausibly this kind of work is part of the job of an academic, and many academics are paid by the universities they work for to do this work for journals.
But that means that one university pays an academic to write something, another university pays an editor (and perhaps others pay sub-editors) to play their role, and yet other universities pay the reviewers to review submitted papers. And this happens at every journal the paper is submitted to (it’s not uncommon for journal’s to accept fewer than 10% of submissions; and most rejected submissions will be sent (perhaps after changes are made) for consideration at another journal). Finally the paper is accepted and either the university pays to get gold access so that anyone can read it, or the university pays to get institutional access so anyone connected to the university can read it.
So universities plausibly pay three times (for the work involved in producing the submitted article, for the time of editors and reviewers, for access) for each published paper. And there are lot of academics doing this work: even fifteen years ago the true cost of this work was estimated at £1.9bn.
Prestige
It looks as though academics and the universities they belong to get little out of the deal they have made with for-profit publishers. This raises the question: what is stopping academics from submitting to and publishing in journals that don’t charge for access but also don’t requires APCs (such journals are sometimes called diamond open access journals).
One thing to note is that not all academics do put up with it: the entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage resigned earlier this year over the refusal of the publisher to reduce publication charges.
Nevertheless, it does look as if there are incentives built into the current system which make it hard for academics to simply stop dealing with publishers. In a word (as pointed out by both Paul Shore and Yokoso), the answer is ‘prestige’. It’s important to academics for their work to be published—that is how research and results are disseminated. But where work is published—in which journals—is also important. As Paul Shore notes, where academics publish has consequences for finding employment, for getting promoted, and for receiving funding. (In the US it influences whether one gets tenure.) Academics want to publish their work in many of the journals which charge significantly for access because many of these journals are prestigious.
So, although the financial costs give academics (and universities) good reasons against publishing in for-profit journals, the value of prestige provides a strong incentive in favour of publishing in (at least some of) the very same venues.
At this point, we might feel that there is a glimmer of hope. After all, what determines whether a journal is prestigious is the attitudes of the relevant experts, namely, academics. As Jessica Hekman puts it: “The big name journals are prestigious just because we [the academics] say they are, and because we make hiring and promotion decisions based on publication in them.” This is surely right. If academics stop taking the fact that an article is published in, say, the hypothetical-yet-prestigious For Profit Review as evidence that the article is worth reading, and that other work from its author(s) are also likely to be worth reading, then the journal will no longer be regarded as prestigious, and so the reasons for aiming to publish there evaporate.
The problem is that the reason why academics judge work in the For Profit Review as being worth reading is because that work is worth reading: it is (or is highly likely to be) good work. We can see that there’s a sort of positive feedback loop at work here:
Academics want to publish in the For Profit Review because doing so is prestigious and so good for their careers. Because academics want their own work to be published in the journal, lots of academics submit their work to the journal. In particular, in order to give their papers the best chance of being accepted they make sure they submit their very best papers. This means that the journal has lots of high quality submissions. Unsurprisingly only the very best articles get accepted. Thus the For Profit Review consistently publishes high quality work. Since it reliably publishes good work, academics view it as prestigious and want to publish in it. And so on.
So prestige is not something that academics can simply choose to withdraw from a journal. And nor is there anything particularly problematic with some journals being seen as more prestigious than other work. After all, some articles are better than others. And reading any article has a cost—the time and attention you spend on it can’t be used to read a different article, or to mark a dissertation, or to prepare for your lecture. So having evidence that a particular article might be worth your time before you spend that time on it is a useful thing. And, as just suggested, that’s more or less what prestige is.
Further, as we saw earlier, the ultimate explanation of why a journal is prestigious does depend on the judgements of academics. A journal is prestigious because it publishes work that is judged—by readers, and peer reviewers, and editors—to be of a high quality. And these people are the right people to judge the quality of work produced in the area in which they are experts. So there’s nothing dubious in the fact that some journals are regarded as prestigious.
Converting to diamond open access
Academics can’t simply decide by fiat, then, that a previously prestigious journal like our For Profit Review is no longer prestigious. But instead of aiming to remove prestige from for-profit journals, efforts could be made instead to convert prestigious for-profit journals into prestigious open access journals. Doing so does not require the difficult job of escaping from the positive feedback loop described above.
In their 2016 paper, Laakso, Solomon and Björk survey the ways in which subscription-based academic journals have converted to open access (for the full-length report on which the paper is based, see here). Some of these journals have done so by requiring APCs for gold access in the way that I criticized above. But some have managed to publish open access articles without relying on authors (or their employers) paying large sums to allow this.
Laakso et al. describe two main strategies employed by individual journals which have converted to diamond open access. The first involves some sort of institutional subsidy: a society, or association, or other institute helps to cover the cost of running the journal by channelling part of its income (from, for example, membership fees) to the journal. The second strategy relies on reducing the costs of publishing both by relying on volunteer input and by adopting a low-cost infrastructure (such as using open source software). Each of these strategies can be bolstered by additional means of creating income such as running (appropriate and clearly labelled) adverts on journal websites or appealing for funding (most useful for one-off costs like initially converting to open access or in order to create an endowment fund).
A third strategy described by Laakso et al. has been used to successfully convert collections of journals from closed to open access. This strategy involves “a broad cooperative consortium agreement among libraries” (p266) and, to gain benefits of scale for both members and publishers, multiple journals are involved at one time. Ideally, the funding for this strategy provided by libraries would come from funds previously used to pay for subscription access to non-open access journals.
Laasko et al. note that there is no single solution that will work for all journals aiming to shift to open access. Nevertheless, it is clear that, for at least some journals, the shift to diamond access publishing is possible.
Moreover, there are reasons to think that it is becoming easier for journals to convert to diamond open access. The MIT Press’s recent shift+OPEN initiative is an illustrative example. This scheme allowed journals to apply to receive support to make this conversion. The winning application will receive funding to cover the costs of conversion for up to three years, will have access to MIT Press’s publishing services, and will receive support to develop a sustainable funding model which will allow the journal to remain open access beyond these three years.
The prestige of the For Profit Review
It should be noted that none of the strategies and schemes just described solve the problem of prestigious, for-profit journals like our imagined For Profit Review. It’s not hard to see why the owners of journals like this—for-profit publishers—might want to resist them being converted to less- (or un-)profitable diamond access journals.
But the easier it is for journals to convert to diamond open access journals—whether funded by library consortiums, university presses, volunteer labour or professional associations—the more likely it will be that at least some prestigious journals adopt this model of open access publishing. And it’s plausible that—other things being equal—many academics will prefer to publish in a prestigious diamond open access journal rather than an APC-requiring gold open access journal. We can expect that, over time, this will erode the prestige of journals like the For Profit Review and so reduce the financial drain that they impose on academics, universities, and researchers in general.
