Evidence supports Plan S call to end publication fees, say Daniel Spichtinger and Elena Šimukovič
Towards Responsible Publishing, a proposal by Coalition S—the alliance of funders pushing for full and immediate open access to research papers—is a vivid illustration of academics’ and policymakers’ dissatisfaction with the current state of scholarly publishing.
The plan, issued on 31 October, advocates reshaping the publishing system, with publishers becoming third-party service providers that supply publishing tools but do not set the rules. Whether the proposal succeeds will depend on support for such a change among researchers, institutions and funders.
Gold open access, whereby publishers levy article-processing charges to liberate publications from journal subscription paywalls, has been criticised for its expense and for moving the financial barriers in academic publishing from readers to authors. This is a hurdle in the global south, but also in less affluent countries and research institutions within the EU.
A recent study estimated the five major commercial publishers—Elsevier, Sage, Springer-Nature, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley—collected €1 billion from open-access publishing charges between 2015 and 2018 alone. Another study provides even higher figures of about $2bn (€1.9bn) for article-processing charges alone in 2020.
The other main instrument for open-access publishing is the transformative agreement, also known as transitional or ‘read and publish’ agreements. These are large deals between research institutions, or consortia thereof, and major academic publishers that aim to transition payments from journal subscriptions to full open access. Publishers receive a bulk prepayment for a certain quota of open-access articles that can be used by members of the consortia. Authors affiliated with participating organisations may then publish open-access in selected journals at no extra cost.
These deals have been part of the landscape long enough for their long-term effects to emerge. One of us (ES) studied a pioneering agreement of this kind between the association of Dutch research universities (VSNU, now Universiteiten van Nederland) and Elsevier covering 2016-18. Interviews with stakeholders, open-access monitoring statistics and policy documents showed that, despite the deal being portrayed as a success story, the response from the Dutch research community was mixed—even among those who negotiated it.
Many researchers saw it as a poor investment of public money. One professor described the agreement as “one big betrayal”.
Despite this, the agreement has been renewed until the end of 2024 and expanded to include “open-science platform products and services”. Other countries have also adopted the same approach; Elsevier alone has struck dozens of similar open-access agreements with institutions and consortia on six continents.
Hunt for alternatives
The lessons of the VSNU-Elsevier agreement show that research institutions need to move away from article-processing charges and read-and-publish agreements towards publishing models that are more in line with their goals and missions.
The quest for alternatives is gathering speed. In May, the conclusions from the Swedish presidency of the European Council called on the Commission and member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. In October, the first global summit on diamond open access, which aims to make publishing free for readers and authors, took place in Mexico.
The $19bn-dollar question (the annual revenue of the scientific publishing sector) is how to implement such a switch.
The Commission is already funding Open Research Europe, a publishing venue for EU-funded researchers across all disciplines with no fees for authors. As the latest Council conclusions propose, one avenue could be for national funders to join this platform. However, so far, ORE only publishes a handful of articles each day. Open-access megajournals, admittedly with a global reach, publish more than 1,000 each month.
Towards Responsible Publishing gives a more radical answer. Describing both read-and-publish agreements and article-processing charges as “highly inequitable”, it advocates a publish-review-curate model, where peer review and curation are seen as distinct but integral processes managed by the academic community. In this, all research outputs, including preprints and peer-review reports, would be shared openly, with “all content-related elements…controlled by, and responsive to, the scholarly community”.
The proposal’s scope and breadth is groundbreaking in its attempt to move to a more equitable open-science system fit for the 21st century. Whether the envisioned scholar-led publishing ecosystem can be achieved will ultimately depend on the scientific community’s response.
Daniel Spichtinger is an independent EU research policy specialist and former member of the Commission’s open science unit; he writes regularly for Research Europe on open science. Elena Šimukovič is head of research and infrastructure at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences library.
This article also appeared in Research Europe