For the second year since the beginning of the initiative, JSTOR has produced its 2024 list of open titles. While some of these titles are still yet to be made available fully Open Access, JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative promises to deliver 300 titles being published annually over the course of the pilot from 2024-2026. Unfortunately, while access has been expanded, there is a de facto embargo on these titles, as the thousand-odd titles that are too be released each year would only be accessible for participating institutions in the Path to Open platform – and the full release of the titles would not take place until three years after the release to the subscribing university presses or libraries. The good news, however, is that Boston College is indeed a participating institution, so Boston College affiliated students and faculty will have the opportunity to access JSTOR’s Path to Open collections as soon they are made available.
Despite the “embargo,” this initiative will continue to push the conversation in the direction of full open access – as subscription based platforms like JSTOR continue adapt models that allow for more openness. Additionally, these titles are not selected at random, rather, JSTOR’s Path to Open is clearly prioritizing diverse voices that can have the largest impact on the discourse:
“The collection features peer-reviewed monographs in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on works that bring forward diverse perspectives and ideas.
To help in identifying titles that would be most impactful for libraries and scholars, titles were selected that were associated to disciplines with the highest overall usage and were associated to the highest used search terms on JSTOR.”
JSTOR has provided title lists of resources that are currently available to members via the 2023 title list – and also have provided links to some of what is, or will be, released in 2024.
Professor Lucina Uddin, with Justice Catalyst and the law firm Lieff Cabraser, has filed an antitrust case against six of the largest for-profit publishers: Elsevier; Wolters Kluwer; Wiley; Sage; Taylor & Francis; and Springer Nature, as well as the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, commonly known as STM. Interestingly, this is a class action lawsuit from a private plaintiff, not a government action.
The complaint is a broadside against the current state of the scholarly publishing industry. For its antitrust claims, the plaintiffs point to three major areas: uncompensated peer review; the requirement that authors submit exclusively to one journal; and the requirement that, upon article acceptance, authors sign away their rights to publishers that prevent the authors from sharing their research. The plaintiffs point to language found in STM’s International Ethical Principles for Scholarly Publication, which all publishers in the case agree to, in support of their case.
It is important to keep in mind that a complaint does not need to go that far in detailing the legal arguments that go into a case. The plaintiff says the defendant did some things, asserts those actions were unlawful, states the source of the unlawfulness, and asks for some relief. The first of those take up the majority of the brief. Before the court can really get into the lawfulness question, it will have to resolve the issue of this being a class action, and the definition of the class. The publishers will likely assert that individual authors cannot be joined as a group, and need to be treated individually. They might have a point, in that some people may have only interacted with the system as peer reviewers, and some people may have only been submitting authors.
Allegations
The first allegation is about unpaid peer review labor. This allegation should give the defendants the most pause. Why aren’t peer reviewers compensated financially? Whatever that reason is, is there a better way to deal with that issue rather than not paying them? By many accounts, we are reaching a peer review crisis in terms of finding enough reviewers. The biggest problem the plaintiffs face here is that their allegation is pretty weak in terms of pointing to the actual language in STM documents that say reviewers should not be paid. There is acknowledgement that it is volunteer work, but none of the ethics requirements say not to pay.
The second is the requirement that authors only submit to one journal at a time. This certainly predates STM, but it is mentioned in the STM ethics. It is an interesting idea to consider what academic publishing would look like where journals compete for articles at the submission stage. Most law publishing is already this way. Allowing multiple submissions has not led to any monetary compensation for authors, but there are ways authors use the system to maximize prestige, which is one of the main benefits authors get from publishing. It is also arguably quite inefficient, with potentially hundreds of journals all spending time to review a submitted manuscript with no pay-off.
The final claim is against the practice in author agreements that prohibit sharing of the manuscript. I’m not sure that this is completely factually correct, as it seems to mix articles under submission and articles that are published, but the claim will need to be fleshed out in light of policies on things like preprints. The complaint is also against publishers requiring authors to sign publishing agreements where the authors transfer their copyright.
Analysis
Overall, I do not think this lawsuit will “fix” scholarly publishing. It does not effectively address the prestige economy that drives authors to certain behaviors in the first place; nor would the industry become less consolidated. However, even if it turns out that the business of scholarly publishing is not the way it is due to unlawful market collusion, it is good to question why the industry is shaped like it is.
I am not sure how the large Open Access publishers, MDPI and Frontiers, did not get listed as parties in the lawsuit. Given the suit alleges the defendants own a little more than half of all academic journals, they must be more concerned with titles than articles published. In addition, totally OA publishers likely could not be included in the third alleged unlawful practice, as authors are allowed to share their work.
I think the case will eventually be whittled down to the peer review compensation issue, where it will be easiest to define a particular class of people affected. At that point, a settlement that includes changing the language of the ethics guidance of STM, plus a monetary payment to reviewers (where the lawyers received a nice percentage of the total) would probably be in everyone’s best interest.
More and more across academia, students getting involved with scholarly publishing on their campuses. Whether this takes the form of contributing to research papers or authoring articles and submitting them to journals, young scholars are seeking opportunities to participating in developing discourse and add to the scholarly record. Boston College libraries in particular supports this in a variety of ways; all students are welcome to apply for funding via the Open Access Publishing Fund, which provides support with the coverage of Article Processing Charges for authors interested in submitting work to, and our Open Journal Systems platform, which currently hosts nine student journals publishing material.
Given the relative increased interest, the timing of this new title could not have been better. How to Edit and Manage a Successful Scholarly Journal: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences was publishing in May of 2024 and consists of eighteen chapters covering a wide variety of central topics that any young scholar should keep in mind. From best practices around building an editorial team to how to judge questionable and predatory editorial behaviors, this helpful guide provides a foundation for higher education practitioners interested in guiding students through the process of being published or attempting to manage a serial. And indeed, the ebook is now fully accessible for rental through the Boston College libraries’ catalogue.
While there are eighteen chapters in the collection that cover a wide range of topics geared towards helping scholars think about publishing in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Chapter 8 “Rebound and renewal: strategies and tactics for journal revitalisation” focuses on some ideas for picking up journals that may struggle to consistent gather and publish content on a quarterly or yearly basis. The chapter outlines best practices around communications with an editorial board and some suggested leadership roles, and also discusses ideas for attracting submissions, such as publishing “special issues” with a clearly defined focus – inviting a wider array of reviewers for a more non-committal approach to introduce young scholars to participating in scholarly publishing. Additionally, sticking to consistent timelines for the review process leads to more consistent positive relationships with authors, which can help provide sources of content when a journal is looking for submissions.
Here at Boston College, we have a number of journals that still enjoy tremendous global readership, but are no longer publishing current issues. Elementsis a interdisciplinary undergraduate journal with a long history of publication at Boston College, but is currently not actively seeking submissions. Additionally, Lingua Frankly, another long time student publication, explores undergraduate work that has to do with language or linguistics, but has not had an active editorial board since the major disruptions of the pandemic. If you have interest in revitalizing or starting your own an open access journal at Boston College, please reach out to Gabriel Feldstein and the Scholarly Communications Team for more information. Click the images below to view the publications from the respective student journals.
Elements has been in publication since 2005 and has published 28 issues with Boston College Libraries.Lingua Frankly, Boston College’s undergraduate linguistics journal, has published 4 volumes starting in 2013.
As publishers, librarians, faculty, and administrators continue to search for more equitable means of providing learning materials to their students, new methods and ideas have surfaced as ways of knocking down financial barriers to accessing textbooks and other educations resources.
One exciting new development from different academic libraries and library coalitions has been the development of Open Educational Resources, or OERs. According to Education Week, “Open Educational Resources are materials for teaching or learning that are either in the public domain or have been released under a license that allows them to be freely used, changed, or shared with others.” Generally, these resources are developed by faculty in conjunction with librarians or university presses with published expertise. As more and more OERs are created, more and more syllabi are including OERs, as professors know that students can access these materials without having to incur costs.
On the other hand, publishers have also tried to address the need for more affordable course materials by packaging access to materials in what they are calling “equitable” or “inclusive” access. When students enroll for a class, if they do not choose to proactively opt-out, the cost of their textbooks is averaged across the entire institution, regardless of the particular courses a student may be taking, and added to the students tuition bill – ensuring that students will be able to access materials assigned by a professor in a course. For teachers and students, these models can seem similar, as both ensure that students will have “Day One Access” to the materials (that is to say, they will have access to the course materials without an extra cost or step of buying the textbook on the first day of the semester). However, the methodology behind each is very different.
Open Educational Resources are built explicitly as low or no cost options for courses. These tools are often developed by faculty and generally under CC BY licenses, allowing for derivatives to be built and possibly improved by future uses and technologies. Inclusive Access, however, is a profit-motivated model that being rolled out by publishing companies to make sure their materials are in the hands of students and being used in courses. Ultimately, because the impact on faculty and students in the classroom or taking a course can be similar at the point of use, sometimes OERs and Inclusive Access can be confused – but as the landscape continues to change and new technologies are developed, it will be important for librarians to be able to make the case for OERs and distinguish the two models for faculty. Studies continue to come out detailing the benefits of differing models – but the nature of OERs and their ability, generally, to be adapted, allows for students and faculty to be constantly engaging and creating new learning materials, while the same cannot be said for Inclusive Access which continues to stir concerns about transparency and overall cost.
Relatedly, Messina College recently opened its doors with a new associate’s degree program. Part of the promise of the program is the commitment to providing one-hundred first generation, high financial need students an opportunity to pursue an associate’s degree at Boston College. And indeed, as a part of this program, the costs of the textbooks and resources like laptops will be paid in advance. In this case, however, the university itself is footing the bill for the resources, without passing the burden of payment on to the students – certainly an exciting move towards a more equitable landscape on the part of the university!
As more and more libraries and authors are seeking open source platforms and technologies for their publishing, the need for a systematic way to consider options arises. Invest in Open Infrastructures has developed a new tool that can help practitioners decide what open source platforms might be best for a given use case.
The InfraFinder tool allows users to browse across 57 different open source platforms that have been developed for different purposes by practitioners prioritizing open models of publication. The tool has a number of different filters to effectively compare different technologies and platforms – in addition to specific information about each solution. When using the tool, a user can select up to four solutions at a time to compare across a number of categories and considerations – a very helpful way to compare open software solutions side by side.
This exciting tool is also relatively new – having been developed and released between 2023 and 2024. As more open infrastructure projects are developed and added to this tool it will become a more and more helpful place for authors and librarians to go to get a sense of what tools exist.
