Monthly Archives: October 2024

International Open Access Week returns this year, from October 21st – October 27th. The theme is once again “Community over Commercialization.” Open Access as a mode of publishing is more successful than ever. According to the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, in the last ten years, the share of publications available only to subscribers has fallen from 70% to 52%, meaning many more people are able to read scholarship at no cost.

But within that success is also a story of commercialization. Gold OA, where the author or research funder pays the Article Processing Charge, has more than tripled as a percentage of publishing, while Green OA, which is a version of open publishing that does not cost extra, is now half of what it was. With APCs averaging nearly $1,400, and large publishers like Elsevier averaging $2,100 for Gold OA, and $3,440 for publishing Open Access in a hybrid journal, Open Access is coming at quite a cost.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration, one of the guiding documents of the Open Access movement, was issued in 2002, at a time when print still dominated scholarly publishing. One of its big ideas is that the move to the Internet for publishing would make it much cheaper. This has not proven to be the case. As we enter this Open Access Week, it is a time to reflect on how we can better balance the need to compensate all parts of the scholarly communications ecosystem for the work they do, while keeping the dissemination of knowledge and the betterment of society as the goal we hope to achieve.

This year at the Boston College Libraries, we have put together a display on the third floor lobby of O’Neill and in the Theology and Ministry Library, highlighting works from our collection having to do with access to scholarly materials and the push for open models. Boston College Libraries also publish a number of undergraduate journals, and will be holding an editors forum October 24th at 3pm where editors can learn how to use tools like OJS and Tableau to help kickstart a new publication or highlight journal statistics. To find out more about the movement toward fuller open access, check out Peter Suber’s book on the subject, Open Access, which is available in print – and also fully free online, (an open access version!)

Recently, the staff of the Theology and Ministry Library added a new permanent display to its current periodical reading area promoting the discovery of open-access publications.  They made the new addition to both highlight the importance of this form of publishing and to support the particular research needs of the students of the Clough School of Theology and Ministry (CSTM).  Many key international publications in theology are now being made available open-access, and this helps students from the CSTM, 32% of whom are international and from 24 different countries.  To complement the physical display, the staff also created an online guide to provide direct links to publications.

While open access publishing is gaining popularity in the United States, global developments in adopting open access policies and building infrastructure generally outpace the rate of developments in the United States. Of course, it is not a competition, and learning about open access publications and presses from all over the world will help contribute to a more thoroughly connected, diverse, and complete scholarly record. In recent decades, different organizations are working to consolidate different open access policies, publications statistics, and trends in one place or dashboard.

One of these is the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, which has compiled statistics on open access output by country and by institution. And while the United States has the highest quantity of open publications between 2000 and 2024 at 7,269,454, this represents only 44% of total domestic publications – while countries like Indonesia (1,487,632 total open access pubs) and Peru (97,881 open pubs) publish 91% and 82% open access, respectively. Dashboards and initiatives like these help to track progress – or comparative lack of progress, over the years as it relates to the actual publication of open materials. Studying the examples of countries that have quickly transitioned to producing a much higher percentage of open access publications is an important part of the work of open access advocates.

Another excellent tool for the tracking of open access projects is OpenAPC, which attempts to track where Article Processing Charges (APCs) are being paid from and which publishers are being paid. While the project does not have enough data from the United States institutions to suggest any sort of narrative domestically, many European (especially German) institutions have contributed data to the project – and the site is very useful at understanding all the differing pieces that make open access publishing work across the world.

The top funder of APCs in OpenAPC, rather unsurprisingly, is listed as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Having contributed over 31 million euro in APCs, the foundation alone has funded over 7% of all APCs on the site itself – and that is just what IS recorded by OpenAPC. The site also usefully tracks to increased prevalence of Transformative Agreements and expenditure on processing charges for open access monographs.

While the landscape around open access changes rapidly depending on the discipline, country, and institutional attitude, having a sense of what policies exist and what publications can supplement or compliment collections with low cost can help open access advocates and librarians fight for more equitable access for our students.