The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has received funding from Congress to continue its implementation of the Nelson Memo. This memo requires any federal agency that awards research grants to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to publications resulting from that research, as well as access to data and the use of persistent digital identifiers in article metadata.
During the lengthy Federal appropriations process, the House Appropriations Committee released a bill that specifically defunded any attempt to implement the memo. No individual or lobbying group ever came forward to take any credit for trying to kill the OSTP memo in the budget, nor was there much explanation of why it might have been included.
The final appropriation bill (technically the explanatory statement accompanying the bill) only included a requirement that OSTP produce a financial analysis of the impact of the memo, “including the policy’s anticipated impact on Federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process,” within 100 days of the bill passing. In other positive news, this was the only requirement. There is no trigger stopping development of policy depending on what the report says. This likely means that after the report, there would be a round of Congressional hearings before more action is taken. Being an election year, there may not be enough time for a truly adverse legislative action. Overall, this means plans will progress, and there should be some good reading on the state of scholarly publishing sometime in mid-June!
The Scholarly Communications team had a chance to ask some questions to the editors of the Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College! The undergraduate journal is sponsored by the Institute for Liberal Arts here on campus and has been in publication since its first volume in 2015. Recently, the journal has moved its online editions to Boston College Libraries’ Open Journal Systems platform iteration, which ensures that the journal will be preserved and search engine results optimized.
What kinds of pieces are generally solicited? How do you approach your call for submissions?
A variety of pieces! We accept short stories, poems, works of art, photographs, research papers, narratives etc. We usually post on our Facebook page (@BostonCollegeMedicalHumanitiesJournal) when we are accepting submissions with instructions on how to submit!
From what disciplines do most of your submissions come from – where do most of your articles come from?
Our journal is very interdisciplinary so we receive submissions from a variety of disciplines! Although the journal is based on medicine and the humanities field, we receive and publish submissions ranging from Biology and sociology to majors in CSOM.
What was the main motivation for adding your journal to our digital collection on OJS?
With the difficulties of the pandemic and reduced physical interactions, we thought that adding the Journal to a digital collection such as OJS would be more convenient and easily accessible to the public. Additionally, now our journals can be read anywhere and at any time – even on the go!
Is there a reason that Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College has decided to publish Open Access – was it always an OA journal?
We liked the idea of a sort of repository where a bunch of BC Journals lived and wanted to be a part of it! MHJ has always been open access, but we think that this platform will make our Journal easier to find and on an editorial level, easier to manage.
Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College’s most recent issue. Click the cover to navigate to the journal’s home on our Open Journal Systems platform.
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.
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.
Earlier this year, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communication (C4DISC) held their first community meeting. The main mission of the coalition is “to work with organizations and individuals to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communication.” The coalition officially launched in 2020 – and January’s meeting was in fact the coalition’s very first community meeting. Among its members and partners, the coalition boasts Crossref, the Library Publishing Coalition, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and more. As the push for more equitable models of publishing continues to be at the forefront of the minds of scholars and librarians, best practices around diversity, inclusion, and accessibility will lay a key foundation in assuring that scholarly publishing is not only published and consumed by the most privileged layers of our society.
To provide some context as the meeting started, coalition members presented on some of the priorities and outcomes from the past year – including toolkits and surveys developed by the coalition as a means of getting librarians and scholarly publishing practitioners thinking about their own roles in creating a more diverse scholarly record. Thee were also tools to help proactively change the culture around scholarly publishing so that marginalized voices can be centered, rather than continually obscured.
As the coalition continues to hold larger community meetings and launches its communities of practice, librarians and practitioners can start to think about best practices for ensuring diverse, equitable, and inclusive academic publishing that highlights marginalized voices and works as seminal parts of a collection or publishing portfolio.
Toolkits
As a means of providing helpful ways for institutions to build more equitable diverse models for themselves, the Coalition provides links to toolkits that have been put together by leaders in publishing and higher education.
In addition to the Toolkits above, the coalition is also currently working on an Equity on Editorial Boards toolkit – a resource that will aim to assist journal and editorial managers in figuring out the best ways to ensure an attitude and editorial board that reflects a global population.
Surveys
In addition to the toolkits, the Coalition also provides links to the 2018 and 2023 Workplace Equity Surveys. While the results and analysis from the 2023 is still being published, an article from Learned Publishing gets into some of the details from the 2018 survey.
