Month: March 2022

Budapest Open Access Initiative 20 Years Later

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) issued its original declaration in February 2002 and UMass Amherst was a signatory. It gave us a working definition of open access we still use:

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration, February 14, 2002

The original goal of BOAI was open access to peer reviewed journal literature. In the ensuing 20 years, that goal has broadened in several respects. The BOAI 20th Anniversary Recommendations recognize the growth of OA published research, repositories, new journals and greater consideration of policies, funding models, peer review, infrastructure and barriers placed on authors on the basis of financial limitations. Upon review of its history BOAI realized “…that OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.”

In clarifying these other goals, BOAI 20 issued 4 new recommendations, succinctly put:

1. Host OA research on open infrastructure. Host and publish OA texts, data, metadata, code, and other digital research outputs on open, community-controlled infrastructure. Use infrastructure that minimizes the risk of future access restrictions or control by commercial organizations. Where open infrastructure is not yet adequate for current needs, develop it further.

2. Reform research assessment and rewards to improve incentives. Adjust research assessment practices for funding decisions and university hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Eliminate disincentives for OA and create positive new incentives for OA.

3. Favor inclusive publishing and distribution channels that never exclude authors on economic grounds. Take full advantage of OA repositories and no-APC journals (“green” and “diamond” OA). Move away from article processing charges (APCs).

4. When we spend money to publish OA research, remember the goals to which OA is the means. Favor models which benefit all regions of the world, which are controlled by academic-led and nonprofit organizations, which avoid concentrating new OA literature in commercially dominant journals, and which avoid entrenching models in conflict with these goals. Move away from read-and-publish agreements.

Below each of these recommendations are several suggestions for further consideration, along with references to other useful guidelines and tools. BOAI 20 readily acknowledges unintended consequences of the original OA movement, specifically the consolidated control of scholarly research among existing for-profit publishers according to Global North norms, and seeks to remedy them. Its new emphasis on open infrastructure and shared governance is welcomed. BOAI 20 remains focused on research articles and pre-prints, though it gives a nod to other OA research outputs, e.g. data, metadata, protocols, books, code, courseware, standards, peer review, etc. These recommendations are a welcomed update and guide.

Taking credit for peer review, warts and all

Peer review is designed to determine scholarship’s validity and relevance to a particular publication through the process of subjecting it to the evaluation of experts in the same field. In its ideal form, peer reviewers check methodology, outcomes, analysis and writing clarity, and they offer helpful suggestions to improve scholarship for publication. However, its problems are legion: bias, fraud, unpaid labor, insufficient capacity, duration, private retaliation, etc.. In “Owning the peer review process: If we have to do this work, we should own it,” Charlotte Roh elaborates on these issues, and she provides examples of alternative approaches. The American Geophysical Union, In the Library with the Lead Pipe and up//root are intentionally diversifying their editorial boards, providing training for early career editors and reviewers, and attending to processes and timelines to make them more inclusive and supportive for reviewers, particularly women and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). up//root is paying authors and reviewers through a SPARC grant, a rarity in academic publishing in contrast to the estimated $1.5 billion of unpaid labor provided by U.S. based reviewers in 2020.

Unpaid labor is at the crux of Roh’s critique of a peer review ecosystem. It is built to give legitimacy to academic publishing and platforms that are dominated by for-profit providers driven to increase profits by expanding these publishing systems beyond Western culture. They do so by using scholars representing narrow demographics and by perpetuating models to sustain and build power and profits. In conclusion, Roh advocates for claiming the review processes and scholarly communication platforms to benefit scholarship produced by a wide swath of researcher, editor and reviewer identities that represent a range of models and types of research. While Roh does not explore here how scholars can reclaim scholarly communication ecosystems generally and peer review in particular, she does remind us to examine who benefits from reviewer labor and to give one’s labor where there is mutual benefit.