Publicly funded research should be publicly available — but at what cost to Canadian researchers?
Here is how much it costs to comply with the Tri-Agency open access policy, by journal
If you pay taxes in Canada, a small but not insignificant amount of your hard-earned money goes to funding academic research. Canada invests $235 million per year into its three main research councils: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These three agencies, referred to collectively as the Tri-Agency, support much of the research output of Canadian scholars.
Given that research supported by the Tri-Agency is publicly funded, it only makes sense that the outputs be publicly available. The “traditional” model of academic publishing doesn’t make papers openly accessible to the public: if you want to read a paper, you either need to have a journal subscription, or pay a large fee for one-time access. Enter the “open access” publishing model: papers are freely available online. The Tri-Agency has embraced this model, and, since 2015, Tri-Agency grant[1]-holders must comply with its Open Access (OA) policy.
[1] Note that this applies to grant recipients, not to postdocs/PhD/Master’s/undergraduate students funded by Tri-Agency scholarships and fellowships.
Alas, offering free access to the reader often simply means that publication costs are transferred over to the researcher; i.e. journals will charge authors sometimes thousands of dollars in order to make their articles open access. And while the Tri-Agency’s open access requirements are not unique to Canada, Canadian researchers may have a harder time complying with them than some international counterparts.
Many large funding bodies in other countries like the US and the UK have similar open access policies. But in many cases, US and UK funding bodies and institutions have special agreements with major publishers (e.g. Elsevier), making it easier for researchers to comply with their OA policies. For instance, authors benefit from reduced (or prepaid) publication costs, special exemptions from embargo periods[2] or automatic deposit to repositories.
Unfortunately, the Tri-Agency has not established the same special arrangements. Double-unfortunately, Canadian researchers typically get smaller grants than their American counterparts, thus having less money to allocate to publication costs. As a result, according to this Nature comment’s analysis, up to 79% of SSHRC, 67% of NSERC and 45% of CIHR grant-funded publications are not open access, despite the Tri-Agency’s policy.
These numbers may seem high, but it doesn’t mean that Canadian researchers don’t want to make their work publicly available. We would love to improve our reach! It’s just that open access has been added to the list of factors we must consider when selecting a target journal: the journal must be relevant, ideally high impact, provide a quick enough turnaround period and have 12-month open access… without breaking the bank.
“Without breaking the bank” is key — publications in nearly every journal could be open access, but sometimes at exorbitant prices. So, it can be helpful to see upfront how much it will cost to be OA-compliant, especially when on a tight budget. As such, I have compiled the following list to serve as a reference when considering where to submit manuscripts. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, and it applies specifically to the realm of environmental science and/or food systems (the main focus of our research group).
[2] An embargo period is a certain amount of time during which the article is only available to journal subscribers or paid users. For example, an article with a 12-month embargo will only be available to subscribers for 12 months, and will be freely available to all thereafter.
The results of this exercise intrigued me — why are there such large differences between journals? Presumably the actual amount of work that goes into publishing an article doesn’t change that much from journal to journal. Perhaps more expensive journals are selling promises of higher impact? I decided to take a look:
In fact, no clear trend jumps out, in that paying more money doesn’t guarantee a higher impact factor (although, granted, the impact factor is a flawed metric). Interestingly, the two journals with the highest impact factors (Nature and Science) are both free to comply thanks to a 6-month embargo. But, of course, the challenge with those is getting articles accepted.
Beyond that, there may be a bit of clustering within publishing groups. For instance, Elsevier has several journals with embargo periods longer than 12 months and whose Gold open access route costs upwards of CAD$5000, whereas many journals belonging to “other” publishers who may have less of a foothold in the market have lower fees.
While open access is a great way to ensure that publicly funded research is made available to the public, it can sometimes come at a significant cost to the researcher. Selecting journals that comply with open access policies at a reasonable price can help researchers ensure their work will reach a broad audience while saving more taxpayer-funded money for the actual research. Hopefully this guide can save some authors precious time in identifying such journals.
There is no shortage of excellent journalistic pieces on the topic of academic publishing. For further reading, see:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/time-stand-academic-publishing-industry/
https://www.fastcompany.com/90180552/academic-publishing-is-broken-heres-how-to-redesign-it
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/04/the-guardian-view-on-academic-publishing-disastrous-capitalism
