The theme of this year's International Open Access Week is Community Over Commercialization. It invokes the various ways that the academic community - researchers, librarians, funders, administrators - are collaborating to create a scholarly publishing ecosystem which is an equitable, sustainable, and open alternative to the legacy system dominated by a handful of commercial publishers who have monopolized the market and reaped huge profits at the expense of nonprofit academic institutions and the people they serve.
By pooling resources, sharing infrastructure, and agreeing to operate by a set of shared principles, the community is finding ways to pay for open access (OA) publishing which do not rely on giving publishers even more money in the form of article processing charges or APCs. The commercial publishers who run hybrid journals charge high subscription fees and then require authors to pay an APC on top of that if they want to publish the article OA. These fees, which commonly range between $3000 and $5000 but can go as high as $11,000, are simply inverting the inequity from reader to author.
By working together, the academic community is preparing to walk away from such inequitable arrangements by the end of 2024. Thanks to the many signatories to Plan S and the billions of dollars of research funding they control, the scholarly publishing system is being forced to flip to open access on a firm timeline. Furthermore, new guidance from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or the so-called Nelson Memo, means that the results of all federally funded research must be immediately and openly available to the public starting no later than December 31, 2025. If journals want to publish the results of research funded by any of these institutions, they must abandon their subscriptions and find new ways to fund their operations.
Thankfully, the academic community has been hard at work finding new business models and collaborative arrangements which can and are allowing many journals to flip from subscription to OA without charging author-facing fees. Below you will find information about some of the many community-based initiatives helping to make OA scholarly publishing sustainable for scholars as well as publishers.
Open Access Week Webinar
Open Access Publishing at a Crossroads: Community over Commercialization
Monday, October 23rd at 1pm on Zoom.
The Open Access movement is approaching a crossroads. Major funders in Europe and the United States have given publishers until December 31, 2024 to find a pathway to full open access (OA) and after that date will no longer fund publishing in “hybrid” journals. This has major implications for OA publishing and the use of article processing charges, or APCs. APCs are currently the most widespread means of defraying the cost of OA publishing, but they are inequitable and simply transfer the financial burden from readers to authors.
How are publishers responding to this deadline and what does it mean for researchers looking to publish in their journals? What new models for funding OA publishing are being implemented and what is the best way to take advantage of them? How will this affect the transformative agreements being signed between publishers and universities?
In this talk Prof. Chris Barnes, Digital Publishing Librarian, will address these issues through the lens of this year’s Open Access Week theme: “Community over Commercialization.” By developing community-owned infrastructure that is nonprofit and sustainable, as well as leveraging the power of consortia and other groups of like-minded institutions, the OA movement is demonstrating the advantages of a scholarly communications ecosystem unbeholden to the profit motive.
Slides can be viewed here and are available for download as a PDF file.
The Nelson Memo
On August 25, 2022, the leader of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House, Dr. Alondra Nelson, released a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies which fund research. It was an update to the 2013 OSTP memorandum, Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research, which required that all agencies with $100 million or more in expenditures on research and development had to make the results of that research freely and openly available to the public. Importantly, it allowed for publishers to enforce a 12-month embargo before making the research openly available to all.
The 2022 memo is entitled Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, but it more commonly goes by The Nelson Memo. In the memo, Dr. Nelson updates the 2013 memo by 1) removing the option of a 12-month embargo and 2) extending the public access policy apply to all federal agencies administering research funding, not just those with more than $100 million.
Federal agencies were given between 6 and 12 months to develop public access policies in accordance with the new guidance, and they are to be finalized and published no later than December 31, 2024. The new policies must go into effect no later than one year after they are published.
We are now awaiting the release of the draft policies, especially those from the many departments with under $100 million in research funds and did not need to develop one formerly.
- The Nelson MemoFull text of the memorandum
- Economic Landscape of Federal Public Access Policy"OSTP was asked to provide a report to Congress on the potential economic impacts of anticipated federal public access policy changes."
- 2013 OSTP Memo on Public Access to Federally Funded ResearchThe first guidance offered by the White House and still in place aside from those sections updated or superseded by the 2022 Nelson Memo.
- Public Access to Federally Funded Research (2023)From the abstract: This new memo removes the option of a 12 months embargo, and it extends the requirement agencies with less than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures. This column investigates the possible impacts of the broader policy, including introducing the public access requirement to new agencies and academic disciplines, and how a repository approach to public access might intersect with publisher provided open access.
- US moves to make federally funded research free upon publication (Physics Today)"The White House has ordered that by 2026 the results of government-supported research must be published open access, but many questions remain about how the policy will be implemented."
- White House requires immediate public access to all U.S.-funded research papers by 2025 (Science)"Policy is a blow to journal paywalls, but its impact on publishing is unclear."
- Plan SBacked by an international group of research funding organizations, Plan S is using the billions of dollars at their disposal to push for a fully open scholarly publishing ecosystem.
- Plan S Transformative Journals: analysis from the 2022 reportsThe Transformative Journal (TJ) model was one of the strategies cOAlition S developed to help subscription publishers transition to full and immediate Open Access (OA) in a defined timeframe. This report looks at the data provided by the participating publishers for the calendar year 2022
- cOAlition S confirms the end of its financial support for Open Access publishing under transformative arrangements after 2024After careful consideration of the outcomes of transformative arrangements, the leadership of cOAlition S reaffirms that, as a principle, its members will no longer financially support these arrangements after 2024.
Subscribe to Open (S2O)
- Academic publisher De Gruyter expands Subscribe to Open programme to accelerate Open Access (2023)Excerpt: "Academic publisher De Gruyter has announced plans to transform its journal portfolio to Open Access by 2028 through a Subscribe to Open (S2O) programme. Via the programme, De Gruyter will gradually transfer approximately 85% of its 320 subscription journals to free online access via S2O, “in close collaboration with journal editors and societies”.
The publisher says it is the first major academic publisher to use S2O as its central Open Access transformation model. Currently, De Gruyter offers 16 journals as open access via S2O. Another five will follow in 2024, and the publisher plans to transfer around 40 journals to Open Access by 2025. By 2028 around 270 De Gruyter journals are scheduled to be available as open access titles via S2O. - Open access through Subscribe to Open: a society publisher’s implementation (2022)From the abstract: "In this article, we focus on one society publisher’s implementation of Subscribe to Open (S2O): an emerging open access model that moves away from article-level charges, instead leveraging existing subscription revenues and infrastructure to achieve seamless and sustainable open access. We outline the advantages of this model for society publishers, the parameters to consider when implementing the model, the initial community response to a successful implementation and some early data highlighting the effect of the S2O model on our journals."
- Subscribe to Open: A practical approach for converting subscription journals to open access (2019)From the abstract: "The S2O model motivates subscribers to participate through economic self-interest, without reliance on institutional altruism or collective behaviour. The S2O offer targets current subscribers, uses existing subscription systems, and recurs annually, allowing publishers to control risk and revert to conventional subscriptions if necessary."
Open Access for Scholarly Books
For more information and news about open access book publishing, visit the book publishing page of the Scholarly Publishing guide.
- MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) achieves second year goal, opens access to eighty-two new books in 2023Excerpt: "With 322 participating libraries and new consortium agreements, the D2O publishing model has now opened access to more than 160 scholarly monographs and edited collections"
- Michigan's Fund to Mission Open Access Monograph ModelExcerpt: "Fund to Mission demonstrates a return to the origins of the university press movement and moves toward a more open, sustainable infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. Our goal is to convert at least 75% of U-M Press monographs published annually to open access by the end of 2023, without any author ever having to pay. We are well en route to achieving that goal."
- Knowledge Unlatched"Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is an initiative that has been working since 2012 in partnership with Libraries and Institutions around the world to expand and enrich the number of Open Access publications and initiatives. Our ground-breaking crowdfunding model offers libraries, consortia and funding initiatives the chance to get involved in a simple, transparent model without great cost or complexity."
- Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for MonographsCOPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. It is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish.
Open access book publishing stands at a crossroads: one avenue leads to the monopolisation of open access by large commercial publishers and for-profit intermediaries, with infrastructures and funding systems set up to serve those businesses and their approaches; the other opens up a more diverse, scholar-led, community-owned, and not-for-profit publishing ecosystem that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply
