Category Archives: Open Access

OASPA Conference

The Open Access Scholarly Publication Association recently held a conference inviting Scholarly Communications librarians from all over the world to come together virtually and discuss the current trends and new ideas in Open Access.

Articles Processing Charges (APCs)

While the movement for broader Open Access publishing, and knowledge and interest continues to increase among faculty and scholars in all disciplines, not all Open Access is equally free. Transformative journals may provide some of their content open access – but still require a subscription for all of it. Additionally, the increasing popularity of “Read and Publish” agreements – while generally beneficial for universities and libraries, providing a wide breadth of access for scholars at a given institution or set of institutions, do have some drawbacks for the scholarly ecosystem as a whole.

A good deal of the poster sessions therefore focused on models of Open Access publication that do not require Article Processing Charges at the point of submission – this is known, generally, as Diamond Open Access. In order to be considered Diamond Open Access, publication schedules cannot contain embargoes and the cost of submission and of accessing the content must be zero. These funding models are generally sponsored by universities, research institutions, and libraries themselves – as more and more institutions of higher education are recognizing that investing in consortial open access projects help budgets in the longer run, as they continue to support the free access and publication of research, which in turn lowers – or outright eliminates – subscription and APC fees.

Open Access Community Investment Program

“The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders – including academic and public libraries, academic departments, institutions, museums, and funding agencies – to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access (OA) journals.” – taken from the OACIP website

Lyrasis presented a relatively new program at OASPA; OACIP. Projects like these can provide the framework and model for Diamond OA so that institutions do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to figuring out their own equitable processes for publication. Additionally, having a large consortia of libraries participating and contributing to the discourse, credibility, and viability of Diamond OA projects make them all the more tenable in the eyes of researchers and faculty members trying to balance the pressures of publishing equitably.

Scottish University Open Access Press

Another example of a consortial approach to Diamond OA is the Scottish University Open Access Press. The goal of this project is to create a press managed and published by and for member university libraries. While the initial investments and staff times may demand higher education professionals working on projects that might not benefit their university in the short term in terms of semester to semester collections, growth of projects like these promises to significantly reduce the dependence on high-cost subscriptions – as an Open Access Press would ensure must more affordable access to materials that are already being generated by those same universities to begin with.

Consecuencias Accepted into the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) International Bibliography

For the past four years, Consecuencias has been publishing issues and articles covering different aspects of Spain’s cultural production via Boston College Libraries’ Open Access Journal portfolio. Articles in English and Spanish come together to create an interdisciplinary study of Spanish cultural artifacts, historical movements, and thought leaders. In the past year, since the beginning of the 2022 fall academic term, the relatively new journal has been downloaded 2,581 times in 68 different countries across the world in over 300 cities.

Recently, Consecuencias is also celebrating indexation in the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography – a renowned database for scholars in the humanities, which all but assures that more researchers, authors, and students will be able to access Consecuencias publications. Not only does indexation in MLA’s International Bibliography signify that it will be reachable by those who use that database to conduct searches, indexation is also an excellent way to increase a journal’s performance around search engine optimization, as well as providing prestige and implicit accreditation, as scholars considering submitting work to an (especially open access) journal will often check where it is indexed to get a sense of its legitimacy and reach in a given discipline.

For more insights on readership statistics, click on the image below to view a data visualization.

OA Week this October

Open Access Week is October 23 -29th. Details are still being worked out, but expect to see library displays, blog content, and an on-campus event that week. Keep an eye out for announcements!

International Open Access Week is organized by SPARC and an Open Access Week Advisory Committee. For this year, they are focusing on the theme “Community over Commercialization.” The theme casts a light on some of the tensions between publishing using commercial publishers, which benefits specific private businesses, and publishing Open Access to benefit the public interest.

An image promoting Open Access week, from October twenty-third to twenty-ninth, with the hashtag #OAWeek

Image credit: https://www.openaccessweek.org/attributions

MIT Direct to Open 

In 2021, MIT Press established the Direct to Open (D2O) model as a sustainable framework that engages libraries as a way to circumvent the profit motive for academic publishing. As publishers continue to raise the prices of APCs – to the point of driving some of their own editorial staffs away – universities and libraries are trying to find more sustainable, cost efficient ways to access scholarly materials so that collection budgets are not consistently weighed down by yearly subscription, or one time purchases of articles. Under the D2O model, if enough libraries agree to purchase a package of books published that year at a certain price, all of the books in the package will be published Open Access. As the count of member libraries increases, the price for each library in turn drops. Direct to Open is also committed to equity, as the fees for participation are determined based on the library size, type, and collection budget. Boston College Libraries, as part of its support of sustainable Open Access Publishing, has participated in the program since its inception.

The increased participation of libraries in Direct to Open allows for MIT Press’ full list of scholarly monographs to be published directly to the MIT Press Direct platform. As the participation has increased, the international scale of D2O continues to grow, as the Press reached agreements with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, the Council of Australian University Libraries, Jisc, SCELC, Lyrasis, and more. 

The list of books which will be opened is available on the MIT Press website. While libraries participating can know their payment goes to making what would have been paywalled content open, there is also a direct benefit, as participating libraries have term access to backlist or archives materials, discounts on high-quality works that are also available for print purchase, and opens access to new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections. 

Mass-Resignation in Response to “Greed” at Elsevier

“Elsevier preys on the academic community, claiming huge profits while adding little value to science.” Professor Chris Chambers makes his thoughts clear as one of the contingent of one of the over 40 leading scientists who have resigned from the editorial board of NeuroImage in response to Elsevier’s arbitrarily high costs of publication – despite the fact that, as Chambers makes clear, the company adds little value to science.

Unfortunately, while this mass-resignation sends a clear message regarding the feelings of many academics, Elsevier does not stand alone – as publishers are able to keep their profit margins extremely high just based on the current business model. Universities and Institutions sponsor research – at not cost to the publisher, academics generally sit on editorial boards, conduct reviews, and collate the issues and prepare them for publication at zero or minimal cost to the publisher; but for authors and researchers, the cost comes either in the form of consistently increasing Article Processing Charges, or subscription plans that can be unsustainable for individual researchers or labs, and often take up a massive portion of a library’s yearly acquisition budget.

NeuroImage‘s most recent cover – the current cost to publish in NeuroImage is $3450, which is more than double the average APC as of 2021.

Ultimately, despite some of the developments urging academics and publishers to support independent, open publication practices, reputations of well-known established publishers allow them to raise APCs to prices that would otherwise be completely uncompetitive and inaccessible. This mass-resignation could be the type of action that could leverage big publishers into keeping prices for publication for open access work more reasonable, as the threat of rival journals with the reputations of the new, formerly Elsevier editorial teams could present a threat to their business model.

More recently this summer, the editorial board of Elsevier’s Design Studies also left the journal in mass in response to removal of the editor-in-chief Peter Lloyd, fairly nakedly in response to his resistance to rapidly increasing the amount of articles accepted by the journal each month. One of the editors involved in the walkout, Linden Ball, who is a board member and professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, reported that board members were “‘appalled’ by Elsevier’s decision to remove Lloyd.” He continued to Inside Higher Ed, “‘This focus on the quantity of published articles rather than their quality appears to be purely motivated by a desire for large profits.‘”

In a moment where the future modes of publication and the ethics of those modes are constantly being scrutinized, the editorial boards of journals published by Elsevier and companies like it hold unique power in there ability to shut down production and point authors and editors to methods of publishing that are more equitable and accessible; motivated by the reputations of the editors and authors involved, rather than the profit motive of a large publishing company.