Open Access Week

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.