Category Archives: Open Access

OA Policy Changes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has recently announced a “refreshed” Open Access Policy, to start in 2025. There is a lot to unpack.

The headline change for publishers is that the Foundation will no longer pay Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its funded researchers to publish Open Access. However, they have not stepped back from their support of Open Access. Rather than paying for post-publication OA, they are requiring posting all manuscripts on a preprint server. Not just any preprint server – one approved by the Foundation, with “a sufficient level of scrutiny to submissions.” The works must be licensed as CC-BY 4.0, or something similar. Interestingly, authors also must assign the license to an Author Accepted Manuscript of the article if it is published later. Any data that is used in the manuscript must also be made immediately available.

The Foundation is working with F1000, a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis, to create a preprint platform named VeriXiv. The platform will do a series of “ethics and integrity checks,” looking for things like plagiarism and image manipulation, as well as author-related conflicts. One thing that it is not doing is peer review. An author can still publish the article in a journal as well, as long as that journal respected the OA requirements of the Foundation, and the author would have to pay any APC themselves.

The question is how will this affect the publishing ecosystem? The Foundation awards more than five billion dollars in grants per year, which is enough to create real change. On the one hand, authors could decide that traditional publishing is not worth the time and cost, which the Foundation’s policy strongly suggests, and just move to preprints. On the other hand, authors may still have other institutional incentives tied to publishing output and prestige. Will this just shift the cost of traditional publishing to authors, and indirectly to libraries and universities that support them? It might work out that this is a lever to reduce prestige-based incentives at institutions, or it might work out that authors with fewer resources fall a little further behind.

This may also just be a business fight between funders and publishers, with researchers caught in the middle. Publishing is a bundle of services, including ethics and plagiarism checks, peer review, distribution and preservation. Commercial publishers charge a lot for that bundle. Starting with posting a preprint and then layering on other services could be cheaper, especially if one thinks different research outputs need differing levels of service. This opens the door to new business models, like stand-alone peer review services, as contemplated by the Publish-Review-Curate model of publishing. We will see who steps in to fill those needs.

American Library Association Book: Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

In 2023, the American Library Association published Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge; discussing the current landscape for for librarians in academia and including case studies and a more modern definition for scholarly communications. Chapter two focuses particularly on open access and new thoughts and projects around open data and open educational materials. As Boston College Libraries continue to publish open access journals and maintains the open access publishing fund, it is always good to reflect on the larger picture and try to get a sense of the popularity of open access publishing as librarians and scholars continue to think of it as a means of a more equitable publishing model, and a more diverse and inclusive scholarly record.

Once a buzzy, cutting edge model of publishing, open access publications and models have become more common over the past two decades – for good reason. With increased accessibility and generally author-friendly licensing agreements, more and more academic libraries and scholars are seeing the benefits of publishing their work in an open access. However, as more and more researchers, universities, librarians, etc. are growing familiar with open access models, further definitions that encourage wider and more proactive dissemination are being more popular. The generally accepted definition is that open access materials are freely accessible to their readers – no paywall or subscription stands between the content and the prospective reader.

This chapter, however, begins by discussing the UNESCO definition, which goes further:

A publication is considered in Open access if:

its content is universally and freely accessible, at no cost to the reader, via the Internet or otherwise;
the author or copyright owner irrevocably grants to all users, for an unlimited period, the right to use, copy, or distribute the article, on condition that proper attribution is given;
it is deposited, immediately, in full and in a suitable electronic form, in at least one widely and internationally recognized open access repository committed to open access.

Going beyond being freely accessible, this definition includes the submission to an “internationally recognized open access repository committed to open access,” a definition that poses itself directly across from larger publishers continuing to try to use open models as a means of increasing their profitability. While perhaps a bit optimistic for now, chapter author Amy Buckland discusses the implications of allocating resources for more permanent, purposefully open repositories; including machine readability as a part of open publication models; and considering more critically large publishers role in their ability to bolster their own reputations as far as being, “open” despite being the driving force behind paywall and subscription models. As different consortia and coalitions of universities and university libraries begin to create repositories themselves and become less reliant on the likes of Elsevier and Springer to provide access to cutting edge scholarly content, there could be a struggle as universities and their researchers begin to develop leverage as they enter their annual negotiations for subscription deals with these same publishers.

The chapter continues discussing some of the nuances of open access – making clear that not everything should be open access just because of the technological capabilities; privacy is still an important part of publications, particularly if they might contain personal information. Digitizing everything librarians are able to legally digitize might not consider artists or subjects consent as far as the scope of publication prior to a digitized era – and indeed, librarians and practitioners ought to take heed of these pitfalls. Tara Robertson details the experience of finding exotic digitized materials from the 60s, 70s, and 80s whose subjects might not have been able to anticipate the ability of future generations to digitize the pages printed at that time.

Charlotte Roh also contributes a polemic discussion of the role that open access models play in our capitalist society – and points fairly squarely at the role not only large publishers play in maintaining the hegemonic societal norms, but also institutional complicity in this role, and even the pernicious use of open access to effectively sugar-coat the bitter pill of massive publisher monopolies dictating the market for scholarly publication as they search for ways to maintain profitability.

All in all, as the landscape and technology for developing open access models continues to shift, it is essential that librarians grapple with the effects and limits of open access publications as they become more and more popular; thinking about how to limit barriers for students and scholars at our universities, while ensuring the safety and privacy of authors or subjects in current and historical publications.

The State of Scholarly Publishing

For folks interested in the current state of scholarly publishing, especially regarding Open Access, there are two recent reports that do a great job of summarizing publishing’s move toward OA.

In November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its “Report to the U.S. Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research.” This report, required by a 2023 appropriations Act, describes the different business models currently being used to comply with the requirement of public access within a year of publication (remembering that the U.S. government uses the term “public access” to denote free-to-read access, and not any of the other rights OA implies). It also provides top-level statistics about the rapid growth in OA publishing over the last ten years.

The most interesting takeaway is how difficult it is to estimate how much federally funded researchers paid to publish in the last few years. Even the U.S. government has very limited data. The best guess from OSTP was slightly more than $378 million in 2021, a 39% increase from 2016. The other highlight of the report is the Appendix, which describes the economic concepts related to publishing that can be used to analyze the system.

Also in November, a group of faculty and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the report “Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing.” Much like the OSTP report, it spends most of its time discussing the recent history of publishing, highlighting growth in both scholarly outputs and in spending. There is more detail here on specific publishers and their business models, especially the growth of massive fully-OA publishers.

The benefit of this report is that it takes a slightly larger view of the entire scholarly communications ecosystem. The Nelson memo applied to both publications and data, and this report poses some interesting research questions about open data, like how it should be shared, and what is it going to cost? It also presents questions about preprint servers and peer review, two issues not covered by OSTP.

cOAlition S Issues a New Proposal Towards Responsible Publishing

While October 31st can bring lots of scary sights and frights, researchers and scholars hoping to continue to seek out and create more equitable publishing models were given some food for thought via a new proposal from cOAlition S – a leading initiative in creating more thorough open access models that ensure equity, timely publication, and comprehensive peer review than what is currently offered traditional subscription based models of publishing.

In their proposal, the international consortium puts forward four main ways that Scholarly Communication needs to change in the direction of more thorough open access:

Publishing models are still highly inequitable
Research assets’ publication is needlessly delayed
There is a potential for peer review that is not being fully utilized
Editorial gatekeeping is at odds with academic career incentives and it is damaging to the sciences.

Organizations across the world are fighting for more widely open access – as not all open access publications have the same level of accessibility. As more and more models push for Diamond publication and institutions fight for more transformative deals with more rights for students and faculty, keeping in mind some of the above considerations as well will help ensure that scholars are getting what they need from their institutions.

As more and more organizations and higher education institutions begin to question the inherent power dynamics present in our current publishing models, publishers are attempting to both meet user demand and also preserve their prestigious reputations in order to maintain subscription models and profitability. Additionally, as open access players like MDPI fight off attacks on their consistently high publication volume, it will be more important than ever for authors conduct research on not only the journal they are submitting to but also the publisher; understanding how their academic contributions will affect academic discourse in their field, and perhaps signal to other aspiring authors which journals are the safest, most accessible places to publish research.

Open Access Week Panel

This year for Open Access Week, the Boston College Libraries in conjunction with the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, will be hosting a panel of speakers. The panel includes Raquel Muñiz, Assistant Professor in the Lynch School; Kelly Gray, a third-year English PhD student; and Bryan Ranger, Assistant Professor in Engineering. Raquel and Bryan have also been recipients of Open Access Publishing Fund Awards – opting to ensure that their research is published fully accessible for all – rather than behind paywalls.

This year’s event will be on October 24 at 4:30pm in 245 Beacon, Room 215. Light refreshments and desserts will be served! RSVP is not required. Navigate to the Boston College Events page find out more about the event.

Open Access week is an internationally celebrated annual tradition where professionals in the publishing industry come together to reflect on the inequities of publishing for profit models, and explore models that fund scholarship more equitably, with a smaller burden for researchers who may be coming from smaller institutions with the ability to cover the costs of massive subscription fees.

Sign for Open Access Week Panel: Join us for a discussion about the future of equitable publishing and interdisciplinarity in academia. Pictures of panelists Raquel Muniz, Kelly Gray and Bryan Ranger. October 24th, 4:30 pm, 245 Beacon, Room 215.

Also for Open Access week, look for a display coming up on the third floor near the circulation desk and a new digital display.