Month: April 2023

Theme for Open Access Week 2023: Community over Commercialization

Open Access Week has announced the theme for OA Week 2023 (October 23-29), “Community over Commercialization.” This theme is intended to focus attention and discussion of practices that advance the original open access purpose to contribute to a public good. More recently, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science highlights the need to prioritize community over commercialization in its calls for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities” and support for “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges.”

The Open Access Advisory Committee invites people to explore the benefits and consequences of community-based or commercial organizations in their roles of serving research communities and the public. Does profit have a place, and to what degree? How are diversity, equity, inclusion and justice best served? When does the collection and use of personal data begin to undermine academic freedom?

Editors of 2 neuroscience journals quit over unethical APC charges

Over 40 editors of two Elsevier journals, NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports, have resigned in protest over excessively high and unsustainable author processing charges (APCs) for accepted manuscripts in these open access journals. APCs are a pay-to-publish model for open access journals, an alternative to content paywalled to readers. The APC for NeuroImage is US$3,450; NeuroImage: Reports charges $900, which will double to $1,800 from May 31st. For additional context, The Lancet Neurology, published by Elsevier, has an APC of $6,300; the fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690; and Human Brain Mapping, published by Wiley, charges $3,850.

These fees shift the burden of access to content from readers to authors. The editors who resigned from NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports took issue with the barrier these fees place on researcher/authors, particularly from institutions that are not well funded. They expressed to Elsevier that those fees and revenue were not justified by the costs of producing the journals. They have organized to publish a new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with MIT Press. Publishing fees have not been announced, but are expected to be at least half of the fees charged by Elsevier, who will continue to publish NeuroImage and NeuroImage: Reports with new editors.

Why do researchers choose open access or paywall publication?

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) conducted “Equity in OA” workshops to gather researchers’ perspectives on their choices for publishing in open access or paywalled platforms. Researchers consistently identified two barriers to publishing open access: 1.) cost charged to the author and 2.) perception that high publishing cost or paywall access equate with higher prestige. As unfounded as they are, the dual narratives that publishing open access must be costly to researchers, and open access represents lesser prestige value both serve to reinforce paywall publication choices. Access to publishing and reading research is thus limited to those who can afford it, further exacerbating inequities.

Workshop participants noted the “pain points” of APC waiver workflows that are complicated and highly variable from publisher to publisher. Other OA funding models are not well-known or established (UMass Amherst Libraries participates in several). Researchers expressed their support for funder investment in non-APC/collective action platforms for them to share their works. Equity happens with collective action approaches take hold. It is the work of libraries, funders, professional societies and research organizations to build robust and stable open scholarship infrastructure that removes barriers to publishing, reading and using research outputs. Then, it is the work of researchers to recognize quality research and its impact, regardless of perceived “prestige” of platform based on legacy publishing models.