Analysis and news
A collaboration may be literal, through researchers from different backgrounds recognising a previously siloed common challenge. Others may be more abstract, as open research that can be read and built upon is better able to inform and even inspire future research projects. We have seen a steady increase in the
size and range of open access publication venues in the physical sciences. Over the past three years we estimate the number of larger open access journals (those publishing more than 100 articles per year) rose by around 30 per cent, from 23 in 2016 to 30 titles in 2019. However, many communities are not yet evenly served by open access publication venues – particle and nuclear physicists and those in optics and photonics are better served than most other physics sub-disciplines for instance. And although we have those 30 open access publications, there remain more than 500 larger publication venues for physics that do not operate on an exclusively open access model. We are among the growing number of publishers launching fully open access journals. We have launched eight since 2016, covering a range of fields in physics, materials science, energy, photonics, environmental science and machine learning. However, to ensure researchers can publish openly and continue to choose the right venue for their research, we still enable authors to choose what is known as hybrid open access (where an article is published under an open licence in a subscription-based journal). This model will remain crucial to growth in open research for some time. The practicalities of getting from where we
are to a more open publishing, open science landscape are often overlooked, given the considerable cultural and financial obstacles. Scientific research is a global endeavour.
But moving to a fully open publishing model may erect new financial barriers to those in relatively less well-funded subject areas and geographical regions. For instance, we know researchers based in lower-income economies have fewer resources to cover the costs of open access article publication charges. Even better-funded groups in many countries may not be incentivised to prioritise funds for open access publication (especially when existing subscription-based journals may serve their needs in all other respects). To provide some shorter-term support many publishers, including us, reduce or even remove open access charges for researchers based in lower-income economies. But this model is unlikely to be sufficiently sustainable to support transition to open publishing globally. New open publishing models that avoid
author-based charges are becoming more common, albeit largely in Europe currently.
Often called transformative agreements, they see institutions or institutional consortia wishing to publish their faculties’ peer- reviewed outputs openly make agreements with publishers combining the cost of open access article publication charges with the license fee for subscription-based publications. Such deals enable researchers from these institutions to publish their work openly without any direct cost to themselves. IOP Publishing currently has 12 such agreements, but challenges remain that exemplify wider barriers to a global conversion to open publishing. Economically, there is the issue of winners
and losers – meaning research-intensive institutions and countries will likely need to pay more as they take on more of the costs of open publishing models, while institutions and countries producing relatively little research would no longer have to pay for subscriptions to research journals and therefore likely pay less.
“Preprints may offer a shorter- term way to make science more open”
Some argue there is enough money in the
system to afford a transition to open access. Whether this is the case or not, there is no current solution or global plan in place to adjust the allocation and flow of funding so it resides at the levels exactly commensurate to where research is produced. These are not intractable challenges. But they require global consensus on the goal of open science, coordinated action to build the infrastructure, and incentives to create lasting change. This will take time.
Preprints – a short-term solution? While funding models evolve, preprints may offer a shorter-term way to make science more open. Community preprint repositories such as arXiv are recognised by researchers as an increasingly important part of the scholarly communications process. But they are not yet fully embraced by institutions and research funders. In recognition of preprints’ value to open
science, our policy is now as liberal and supportive as possible for this early sharing of results, and we see more publishers also recognising their value and supporting them. Access is perhaps where publishers can and should focus efforts in support
of open science. But they should not ignore incorporating greater transparency in research communications to aid reproducibility and foster trust in science. Some publishers are experimenting with
more open forms of peer review. We have introduced transparent peer review, where the published article includes the full peer review history, with reviewer reports, editors’ decision letters and authors’ responses, and with reviewers electing whether to maintain anonymity. Following a successful year- long trial on several of our journals, we are considering how to extend this process to other communities we serve, so a scientific article’s journey through peer review, and the editorial decisions made about it, are clearer for all to see. A significant route to increasing the
reproducibility of research is open data sharing – making data underpinning a scientific article and any associated code publicly available. Access to research data can enable detailed scrutiny, reuse and replication of research, strengthen trust in the results, and provide the basis for future scientific innovation. In recent years, this has gained increasing traction in the research community, with publishers responding to support it in their policies and processes. Many major research funders now
require research data to be more, if not completely, accessible and re-usable. Such mandates are crucial for cultural change, but further consideration is needed into how to incentivise researchers to share data and credit others for data sharing. Scientific publishers are seeking to support researchers in complying with these new requirements for data sharing through evolving standards and systems, and with gaining more acknowledgement for doing so through encouraging and accommodating data citation. We have introduced new data sharing policies, where authors must include a statement in their article on whether data is available and where it can be found. In the months since introducing the new policies the response is encouraging, with more authors (where applicable) stating their research data is accessible than unavailable. Although Covid-19 might have reinforced
the value of open science, its benefits are well understood by many in the physics community, and we are a long-standing proponent. But there is still much work for all involved if we are to transition to a fully and sustainably open landscape in physics and beyond. l
Daniel Keirs is an associate director at IOP Publishing
Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021 27
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