and policy makers. Nick said: “As more and more funders and government make it clear that open access is a requirement, we will see greater and greater need for publishers like the MIT Press.” Arcadia, which supports shift+OPEN and has announced another $10 million grant to help MIT establish a permanent endowment to support open access pub- lishing in perpetuity, has a similar view. Dr Ross Mounce, Arcadia’s Director of Open Access Programmes, said: “There is widespread concern that in some instances governments and universities are overpaying for academic publishing services. I think in this instance the NeuroImage editorial community feels that Elsevier is raising prices, whilst its costs of providing that service have remained flat. The editorial community thinks that the ‘fees don’t reflect direct article costs…’ (
www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-023-01391-5). We predict increas- ing attention being paid to the amounts that libraries and governments are collectively paying academic publishers. “We think that academics should pay close attention to the publishers they work with. Scholarly publishing draws on the free labour of millions of researchers as authors, peer-reviewers and editors. Funding for publishing – whether through libraries or research funders – tends to follow where academics choose to pool their labour. If academics chose to give their time (as editors, authors, and reviewers) to well-governed non-profit publishing venues, then in-turn we expect that those publishing venues would receive more support, creating in turn more incentive for others to follow. This won’t happen quickly but an unsustain- able level of profit-taking by commer- cial publishers may accelerate it.”
Resist speed
OA may be evolving more slowly than crises in academia are emerging. But Arcadia sees no benefit in attempting to match that pace – or the pace at which articles are now being published. “It is well known that some research- ers working at some institutions just need to get publications published in ‘indexed’ journals. The actual substance and value of what they publish becomes secondary. Ethical and equitable open access needs to be seen in the context of an ethical and equitable research cul- ture, in which knowledge and the ways it is created are valued and researchers are not assessed purely on either the quantity of their outputs or the ven- ues in which it is published. We need reform of research assessment (e.g. Tools to Advance Research Assessment (TARA), another of our grants) to underpin a healthier system of dissem-
June 2023
says problems at NeuroImage don’t yet worry investors in $58bn RELX. While 40 per cent of RELX profits come from Elsevier, journals are around half of that business, and it publishes 2,800 of them. “It’s a blip in a blip,” Claudio says, but “if they start to experience widespread defec- tions then there will be problems,” adding that “some of the barriers that boards face to setting up in a more ethical environ- ment may be being lowered by the likes of Arcadia and MIT”.
He said views are changing, but it is behaviour that needs to change. “People are starting to see how OA has been co-opted by publishers and poses other ethical issues. Five years ago people who opposed high APCs were only a handful of activists, that has changed.”
Broken system Claudio Aspesi.
inating research online for all to read and re-use.”
He said that publishers who see the proliferation of research papers as profit drivers “may be fuelling an unsustainable research culture” and he warns against scaling up open access to meet the current unsustainable level of output: “We would resist the temptation to always ‘scale- up’ as it can lead to homogenization and monopolisation. Instead, a ‘scaling small’ approach might be prudent to retain dis- ciplinary cultures and bibliodiversity.”
Status quo
Despite turmoil in academia, the busi- ness case for publishers only improves. In 2022 Elsevier said (
https://bit.ly/43TumZj) submissions to its journals had tripled to around 2.6 million per year in the last decade, while the articles it publishes has doubled to 600,000 per year and expects its pay-to-publish (open access) business to be as profitable as pay-to-read. Claudio Aspesi, an analyst who has watched RELX for 16 years – predicting a tipping point in 2011 (
https://bit.ly/3J7NH0U)
Open access can’t escape the complex transformative deals between libraries and publishers. The recently negotiated deal between Elsevier and UK Universities includes a 15 per cent discount on APCs for Elsevier’s open access journals. Michael Williams, Head of Collection Development & Management, Associate Director, Cambridge University Libraries, said: “The frustration with the discount is that it is a discount on an opaque figure – there is no transparency on Elsevier’s costs and what the APC is spent on. This lack of transparency does make you ques- tion whether the APC is hiked so Elsevier can appear generous with their discounts. It also bakes in the APC cost for the life of the agreement.”
“I would say that the system is broken. These ‘Read & Publish’ agreements are transitional agreements to enable hybrid titles to transition to fully OA but that change is getting slower and slower. I’d question whether some publishers are committed to making the transition and are instead using the Read & Pub- lish agreement to increase profits. This questioning is inevitable when there is a complete lack of transparency for what the money is being used to pay for in the publication process. As a sector (UK HE) we are now developing our vision for a post-transitional landscape.”
Michael Williams.
A spokesperson for Elsevier said: “We uphold the highest standards of quality and integrity at scale to ensure value to our customers... Our overarching principle remains to charge unit prices below the market average while delivering above- average quality, and publicly available data shows this is the case.” He said information about Elsevier pricing policies and APCs were availa- ble at
www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing and publishing volumes for the whole of Elsevier at
http://cuts2.com/rpunY IP
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 33
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