Category: Funding models

Study examines 5 commercial academic publisher profits from open access author processing charges

The authors of a recent study, “The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges” in Quantitative Science Studies, a gold open access (OA) journal published by MIT Press, looks at revenue generated between 2015-2018 by the five largest academic publishers from author processing charges (APCs) for open access publication of journal articles. Over the four years, the authors conservatively estimate that SpringerNature ($589.7 million), Elsevier ($221.4 million), Wiley ($114.3 million), Taylor and Francis ($76.8 million) and Sage ($31.6 million) all derived significant revenue from gold and hybrid open access journals as funder mandates and policy directives drove a shift to open access publishing. Both the number of OA articles and APC charges increased over the four years studied: Studies show that in 2020 the global journal publishing market was valued at $9.5 billion, with open access journals accounting for $975 million of it.

The study provides a good overview of the scholarly journal publishing market and the evolution of open access funding models. The methodology covers how publications where identified along with their OA status and how APCs were determined. The data analysis shows variations in funding models (gold or hybrid) between publishers, growth of OA outputs, average APCs charged and revenue generated by publisher and by top journals. The authors note that APCs are market driven rather than based on publication cost. The Fair Open Access Alliance determined that a cost of $50 per page was enough to sustain an open access journal, and they recommend a total APC of no more than $1,000 per article. These 5 for-profit publishers are charging considerably more than that and making a greater portion of their revenue from open access publishing based on their market dominance.

This study illustrates how the dominant scholarly journal publishers are using open access article publication to increase their profits to the detriment of equitable access to publication for researchers. It also underscores how critical it is to diversify publication platforms and promote ethical practices to sustain the research enterprise.

Applications Now Open for Supporting Open Access Research (SOAR) 2024 Fund

UMass Amherst faculty, staff and students who are the corresponding author of an open access (OA) journal article, book chapter, or book are invited to apply for funding to cover their publisher’s author processing charge (APC). Nandita Mani, Dean of Libraries, has increased the total Supporting Open Access Research (SOAR) Fund to $25,000 based on historical use of the fund and current trends in scholarly publishing. This year the maximum award is $1,900, up from $1,200 in past years. 

For full details on eligibility requirements, award determination criteria, and the application form, visit the SOAR Fund guide. Applications will be considered after October 6th, 2023 and April 19th, 2024 review deadlines, and awards will be granted equitably to authors from STEM and Humanities/Social Science fields. Over the 2023 academic year, 16 awards were granted to authors representing 14 departments. A bibliography provides links to funded works since SOAR’s inception in 2016.

New toolkit for existing and start-up open access journals

The Open Access Journals Toolkit is a new resource developed collaboratively by the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to guide existing and new open access journal publishers in a volatile global scholarly communication landscape. Articles (with references) cover issues of funding, setup, peer review and quality assurance, running a journal in a local or regional language, software and technical infrastructure, persistent identifiers, licensing, recruiting staff and building an editorial board, and much more. The Toolkit is organized into 6 searchable sections:

  • Getting started
  • Running a journal
  • Indexing
  • Staffing
  • Policies
  • Infrastructure.

Checklists, a definition of open access with a grid of different funding models, a glossary, an FAQ and an “About” section round out the Toolkit. It is openly licensed with Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 and can be downloaded and printed as a whole or as individual articles. Versions in English and French are currently available, with other languages forthcoming. The Toolkit is intentionally designed for accessibility and use by scholarly publishers working in different contexts and regions across the world. Because of its comprehensiveness, it serves those thinking about starting an OA journal, those considering how to better establish their journals, those who are concerned with their journal’s financial sustainability and those with challenges in specific areas. The Toolkit fills a much needed gap in the nuts and bolts of open access journal publishing.

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.

Open, digital editions of history books: SHMP

The Sustainable History Monograph Project (SMPH) was a three year (2018-2020) Mellon-funded initiative to publish open, digital editions of books about history from twenty-two university presses. While no longer “new”, the pilot from Longleaf Press, a University of North Carolina Press subsidiary, distinguished itself from other open access monograph programs, such as TOME and Knowledge Unlatched which explored different funding models, by focusing on a single discipline and optimizing digital technologies throughout the publication workflow. The pilot, which published about 60 open access books across 5 platforms (Internet Archive, OAPEN, ProjectMuse, Books at JSTOR and EBSCO), yielded lessons on funding, workflows and analytics which certainly informed subsequent models from MIT Press (Direct to Open), University of Michigan Press (Fund to Mission) and JSTOR (Path to Open), among others. What remains unique to SMPH is its focus on books about history, and as such titles in the collection provide a window on attributes of open digital editions – including open licenses that enable reuse, persistent identifiers for book and author, funder and publisher identification, metrics, etc. – as they pertain to historical subject matter. Analytics show increased use of collection titles over time and across the globe. What we don’t know is how author attitudes about publishing an open digital edition may have evolved, and that would be an interesting insight into the culture of the discipline.

Libraries’ SOAR Fund now accepting applications for FY’23

The UMass Amherst Libraries are accepting applications for the Supporting Open Access Research (SOAR) Fund. The deadline for applications is March 30, 2023. 

The SOAR Fund was established by the Libraries in 2014 to support open access publication of articles, book chapters, and books in the sciences, social sciences and humanities by faculty, staff, and students when funds are not otherwise available. This fiscal year, Nandita Mani, Dean of Libraries, doubled the Libraries’ previous allocation to $20,000.   

The review committee will consider applications on January 30 (round one) and April 15 (round two). The maximum amount of reimbursement for a manuscript accepted in the previous 12 months is $1,200. Complete eligibility, award determination criteria, and applications are available from the SOAR Fund guide. 

MIT Press funds works from authors underrepresented in their fields

MIT Press announced that it received significant donations from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to The Fund for Diverse Voices. With this funding, MIT Press is committed to publishing at least 10 new books annually for the next three years by authors who have been excluded or underrepresented in their fields. Through the MIT Grant Program for Underrepresented Voices “current and prospective authors with strong proposals for a book-length work who have significant personal experience or engagement with communities that are underrepresented in scholarly publishing” may apply through acquisitions editors in the sciences, arts and humanities. Grants of $15,000 can cover costs to support research, writing and publishing with MIT Press.

Recent books published with support of The Fund for Diverse Voices” include:

  • Power On! by Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis, illustrated by Charis JB – “a lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering.”
  • Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation by Kevin G. Bethune – “Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.”
  • Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager – “How Vera Rubin convinced the scientific community that dark matter might exist, persevering despite early dismissals of her work.”

Humanities Commons to expand to STEM education research

Michigan State University announced it has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build out its open-source Humanities Commons platform to establish a Commons that focuses on STEM education research. Established in December 2016, the Humanities Commons currently facilitates collaboration among thousands of humanities scholars and practitioners around the world through discussion forums, open access publication of scholarly works, profiles, networks and a robust search and discovery platform. It is a not-for-profit platform operating under a shared governance model. The Humanities Commons is free for anyone to join and use.

The NSF Award describes this new STEM Commons as a “Discipline-Based Education Research plus (DBER+) Commons” that will “…build consensus around and capacity for open science, the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines for use in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.” Other goals include advancing quality control of metadata for research products, stewardship practices, interoperability, reproducibility, sustainability, equity, and democratization of access to research data.” This is a $1.2 million, three year grant starting January 1st, 2023.

Journal prices and “value”

The Periodicals Price Survey 2022 has been released by Library Journal and per usual for this annual survey, it offers a lot of data to interpret. The survey gives number of journals and their average costs by subject between 2020 – 2022 as categorized by the Library of Congress, Clarivate, and Ebsco’s Academic Search Ultimate, and the numbers vary by source. Overall, journal prices have increased by 5.5% between 2021 and 2022 for U.S. titles, 6.7% for non-U.S. titles. These price increases are placed in the context of growing general fund spending in states but declining higher education enrollments and library budgets. It paints a bleak landscape.

Open access publishing mandates have sought to disrupt the higher subscription price trend, and open access journals are projected to account for 50% of publications by 2024 and 50% of revenue by 2039. However, publishing costs have not levelled off. Large commercial publishers (Elsevier, SpringerNature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley) are dominating the open access market and expanding their services to researchers throughout the research life cycle (and employing surveillance technologies to monetize data). Society publishers and university presses are also experimenting with different revenue streams and open access publishing models to remain relevant and viable. Considerable uncertainty looms as library budgets continue to constrict.

The survey ends with an examination of journal value as determined by the intersection of price and citation metrics (Impact Factor and Eigenfactor). The data is presented by ranges of journal cost and by subject area. Higher priced journals do tend to receive more citations, but the increase in citations is far less than the price increase. “The average price ($8,539) for the most expensive journals was 24 times higher than the least expensive ($361) journals, while the Impact Factor slightly more than doubled.” The cost per citation varies by discipline, with chemistry journals providing a low relative cost and philosophy journals a high cost. This also reflects the journal citation tendencies of the different disciplines. Commercial journal publishers are profiting from the reputation economy. “Commercial publishers showed a cost per citation of 31¢ and an average price of $2,646, while university presses showed 12¢ and an average price of $718, and societal publishers showed 6¢ and an average price of $1,620.” It is university publishers and society publishers who provide far better value for the investments libraries and other funders make in them.