“Local, not-for-profit institutions from two lists of countries, areas and territories (Group A and Group B) are eligible to join Research4Life based on five factors:
Total GNI (World Bank figures)
GNI per capita (World Bank figures)
United Nations Least Developed Countries (LDC) List
Human Development Index (HDI)
Healthy life Expectancy (HALE) – World Health Organization Figures…”
Deville, J. (2023). Beyond BPCs: Reimagining and re-infrastructuring the funding of Open Access books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.bd1b0402
If you have heard any of the Open Book Collective team talk about our work, perhaps in a meeting, perhaps in a talk, then it’s likely that at some point, the issue of ‘BPCs’ will have come up. BPCs, or Book Processing Charges, are to books what APCs (Article Processing Charges) are to journals. BPCs are levied — usually to a university or a funder, but also in principle potentially to the author — as a fee for making an academic book available on an Open Access basis. By Open Access I mean work that can be accessed online without barriers, published using an open license — typically, but not necessarily, a Creative Commons licence.
Within the academic publishing industry, BPCs remain the most common way to fund Open Access books. They are used by publishers small and large, and by not-for-profits and commercial publishers. For small/not-for profit publishers, BPCs are usually used to cover the core production costs associated with book publishing. For large commercial publishers, BPCs can sometimes also be used to offset some of the profit — for example, from books sales or licensing contracts — that is lost when a book is made openly available to all.
[…]
“On April 17, the premier journal NeuroImage’s entire editorial team, comprising more than 40 scientists, resigned over the “unethical fees” charged by the journal’s academic publisher, Elsevier. With more than $2 billion in annual revenue, the publisher’s profit margin approaches 40 percent—rivaling that of Apple and Google. “Elsevier has become kind of like the poster child for evil publishing companies,” said neuroscientist Kristen Kennedy, one of the recently resigned senior editors.
Kennedy relies on taxpayer money to study the aging brain. At the University of Texas at Dallas, federal grants help fund the staff, equipment, and experiments in her lab. But this public money, largely from the National Institutes of Health, is being drained by exorbitant publishing fees….”
Fradenburg Joy, E. A. & van Gerven Oei, V. W., (2023) “What is Your Threshold? The Economics of Open Access Scholarly Book Publishing, the “Business” of Care, and the Case of punctum books”, The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3627
Abstract: Open research practices are relevant to all stages of research, from conceptualization through dissemination. Here, we discuss key facets of open research, highlighting its rationales, infrastructures, behaviors, and challenges. Part I conceptualizes open research and its rationales. Part II identifies challenges such as the speed and cost of open research, the usability of open data and materials, the difficulties of conducting replication research, and the economics and sustainability of open access and open research generally. In discussing these challenges, we have sought to provide examples of good practice, describe and evaluate emerging innovations, and envision change. Part III considers ongoing coevolutions of culture, infrastructure, and behaviors and acknowledges the limitations of our review and of open research practices. We argue that open research is indeed a large part of our future, and most—if not all—challenges are surmountable, but doing so requires significant changes for many aspects of the research process.
“Two trends in recent library-publisher relations have been the unbundling from big deals and the bundling of open access publishing onto read deals. Neither directly addresses how libraries undertake that fundamental role of brokering access to paywalled content from scholarly publishers on behalf of their communities.
Read-and-publish deals bundle a ‘publish’ component onto a preexisting ‘read’ component but, practically-speaking, little changes for the read component. And while unbundling from Big Deals does change the structure of read deals, this is not a proactive subscriptions strategy, it’s a retreat from a failed one. While neither trend offers a model for a new read deal, understanding how they shape the current terrain does help us navigate a future path.
Let’s consider the role of equity, which is gaining headway into library decision-making. Read-and-publish increases the overall number of articles published as open access through a publisher, which increases free access for readers; this increases equity. This also standardizes author-side OA publishing fees, decreasing opportunity for under-affiliated authors, which decreases equity. Some will argue that read-and-publish is good for equity, and others will argue it’s bad for equity, which is evidenced by the continued growth of read-and-publish deals as well as the continued criticism of them.
Setting that debate aside, where can energy be redirected productively? Easy. Consider less controversial frameworks that libraries operate under, such as the desire to maximize fulfillment of local users’ content needs within set budgets. Read-and-publish doesn’t necessarily do this in a ‘read’ subscription context and, unless we consider retreat from Big Deals as advancement in a different direction, the strategy vacuum left in that space is largely unfilled….
I propose that publishers make all of their paywalled content available to a partnered library’s users and, in turn, libraries pay invoices based on total usage of paywalled content at a single flat rate. (As opposed to a bespoke formula based on journal brand value and institutional classification.) Giving users the ability to read everything from a publisher is maximum coverage. Paying only for the paywalled articles that users use is maximum value….”
“LERU welcomes the presently developed draft Council Conclusions on “high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing”, to be adopted at the Competitiveness Council meeting of 23 May 2023[1]. They take Open Access to the next stage of implementation across Europe and thus represent a key move in embedding Open Science into the European research landscape. Many LERU papers, on Open Access, Open Data and Open Science have advocated the same causes.
For LERU, it is important that the upcoming Council Conclusions recognize that the increasing costs for scholarly publishing associated with certain business models may cause inequalities in communities and actually prove to be unsustainable for research funders and universities. Many people are now aware of the increase in publishing prices and the spread of transformative agreements, a result of which is a consolidation of the oligopoly in the publishing system.
The essential problem occurs when there are no reductions in price but increases, and where the resulting coverage is low. The threat is what will happen if everything is flipped to Open Access with high APC charges, both individual and under an agreement….”
“As anger mounts over cost of open access deals, moves to finance diamond journals and expand state-run digital platforms have divided opinion…
Calls to transform the European Union’s research repository into a “collective, non-profit, large-scale publishing service for the public good” that could rival commercial publishers have been described as “naive” and a distraction to the open-access mission by experts….
Amid growing unease over the high cost of several national open-access deals, including Springer Nature’s new three-year agreement with UK universities, the European Council was set to agree a motion that says “immediate and unrestricted open access” without author fees should become the “norm” in scholarly publishing.
The European Commission, which runs the €105 billion (£90 billion) Horizon Europe research funding scheme, should introduce funding policies to support open-access publishers that do not charge author fees, it adds. That might mean Horizon funding being tied to publication in so-called “diamond” journals, which are both free to read and publish in thanks to subsidies from universities, governments or other funders.
The memo, first presented by the Swedish presidency of the EU in February, also suggests a massive scaling-up of the EU’s open-access platform Open Research Europe (ORE), a site launched in 2021 that has fewer than 500 publications so far.
That proposal received a mixed response from the League of European Research Universities (LERU), which noted the scale of the proposed project was “massive” and a “single pan-European system is not likely to work successfully”.
Instead, the umbrella body suggested that what “Europe may really need is the development of an open, inter-connected, publicly owned infrastructure”, and urged the creation of funding calls to support university engagement with this kind of system….”
“In the old pre-digital days of [scholarly] publishing, the true costs of providing print-on-paper to would-be users required the services of another profession for the production and delivery. But (let’s cut to the quick) those days are over, forever. Online publication is not altogether cost-free, but the costs are so ridiculously low that all an S&S author needs pay for is a blog service-provider, rather like a phone or email service provider.
In this world, the idea of paying a £2,700 (US$3,400) per article fee to publish is as grotesque as it is gratuitous….
So, you should ask, with online publishing costs near zero, and quality control provided gratis by peer reviewers, what could possibly explain, let alone justify, levying a fee on S&S authors trying to publish their give-away articles to report their give-away findings?
The answer is not as complicated as you may be imagining, but the answer is shocking: the culprits are not the publishers but the S&S authors, their institutions and their funders! The publishers are just businessmen trying to make a buck. In fact, £2,700 is the same amount they were making per article before the online-access era, in the Gutenberg era of print-on-paper….
The publishers’ golden goose had been successfully converted to ‘Fool’s-Gold OA’ (open access), meaning continuing to pay the obsolete costs at the same price, but as author-end fees for publication instead of user-end subscription fees for access. (‘Fair-Gold OA’ would have been to charge only the tiny fee for managing the peer review.)
The publishers are to be congratulated for successfully pulling off this scam, with the obsolete 40% mark-up of £2,700 per article in exchange for next to nothing suspended above by a skyhook, gloating, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile.
It is not as if the S&S community had no other choice. ‘Green OA’ self-archiving had been offered to them as an alternative, with the University of Southampton providing the free software for creating Green OA institutional repositories as well as the model for institutional and funder mandates that would require all university researchers and all recipients of research funding to self-archive their refereed research therein, immediately upon acceptance for publication (‘or perish’)….
That policy would have forced the publishers to downsize to the minimal remaining costs of managing peer review. But superstition (and habit, and digital laziness – of the fingers) prevailed, and the publishers are still laughing all the way to the bank.”
“Description: Open access seeks to make research globally available and discoverable for the long-term and not only in times of crisis. While considerable progress has been made towards realising this ambition, financial, equity, and other barriers remain. This high-level session will bring together stakeholders from major regional and global initiatives, and IFLA, that seek to create more inclusive, diverse, and sustainable means of achieving open access. The contribution of open access to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, UNESCO Open Science Recommendations, and a rights-based approach to access to information will be explored, together with practical examples for implementation at regional and local levels. These include the need for a diversity of models, sustainable funding, and underpinning infrastructure. The session will also focus on the recommendations from IFLA’s 2022 statement and call to action on open access, and progress towards implementation. A strong global position that makes space for regional diversity and needs is critical to achieving open access, and in turn, to a positive and inclusive open research and open science culture. Opportunities must be taken to strengthen networks among libraries and stakeholders and the voices of all regions. The session will conclude with recommendations on how to continue to build these networks and partnerships so that key priorities and barriers to equity at global, regional and local levels can be identified and addressed. This session is currently scheduled to take place 15:15-16:00 on Monday, 21 August 2023 and is expected to attract around 300 delegates. Each speaker will give opening remarks, followed by a panel discussion.”
“How much would you be willing to pay to see your article published: If your answer is between 1,500 and 2,000 Euros then you are in luck. You could get your article published and you would not have to wait too long. It would take less than 15 days from your submission to the first decision on the manuscript. Once accepted, it would be published in less than 3 days. From an academic viewpoint, will this publication be of any use to you? Probably not. Maybe you should think about how to better invest your money or your institution’s money.
In the last 15 years there has been a significant increase in the emergence of open access journals, particularly those known as golden early access, i.e. those in which the study is published immediately on the publication’s website after payment of the article processing charge (ACP, article processing charge).
The agency ANECA 1 has analysed 7 golden open access publishers with a total of 429 journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in 2019, publishing 216,093 articles. Unfortunately, Spanish research ranked fifth in the world in publications in these publishers between 2017-2019, which entailed an approximate expenditure of almost 50 million Euros in ACP for a total of 25,463 articles….”
Abstract: Purpose of review
Open access articles are more frequently read and cited, and hence promote access to knowledge and new advances in healthcare. Unaffordability of open access article processing charges (APCs) may create a barrier to sharing research. We set out to assess the affordability of APCs and impact on publishing for otolaryngology trainees and otolaryngologists in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Recent findings
A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among otolaryngology trainees and otolaryngologists in LMICs globally. Seventy-nine participants from 21 LMICs participated in the study, with the majority from lower middle-income status (66%). Fifty-four percent were otolaryngology lecturers while 30% were trainees. Eighty-seven percent of participants received a gross monthly salary of less than USD 1500. Fifty-two percent of trainees did not receive a salary. Ninety-one percent and 96% of all study participants believed APCs limit publication in open access journals and influence choice of journal for publication, respectively. Eighty percent and 95% believed APCs hinder career progression and impede sharing of research that influences patient care, respectively.
Summary
APCs are unaffordable for LMIC otolaryngology researchers, hinder career progression and inhibit the dissemination of LMIC-specific research that can improve patient care. Novel models should be developed to support open access publishing in LMICs.
“AAAS and other groups warn of rise of inequalities from implementation of White House request Sixteen US scientific societies and associations have called for studies of scholarly publishing costs, as the country’s largest biomedical research funder deliberates on how to respond to government requirements on open access to papers. Last year, the White House asked federal research funders including the National Institutes of Health to ensure immediate open access to publications reporting work they have supported. Individual funders have leeway over the implementation, and the NIH recently sought input on its plan to comply….”
More and more academics and governements consider that the open access model based on Article Processing Charges (APC) is problematic, not only due to the inequalities it generates and reinforces, but also because it has become unsustainable and even opposed to open access values. They consider that scientific publishing based on a model where both authors and readers do not pay, the so-called Diamond, or non-APC model, should be developed and supported. However, beyond the display of such a support on an international scale, the landscape of Diamond journals is rather in the form of loosely connected archipelagos, and not systematically funded. This article explores the practical conditions to implement a direct funding mechanism to such journals, that is reccurent money provided by a funder to support the publication process. Following several recommendations from institutional actors in the open access world, we consider the hypothesis that such a funding would be fostered by research funding organizations (RFOs), which have been essential to the expansion of the APC model, and now show interest in supporting other models. Based on a questionnaire survey sent to more thant 1000 Diamond Open Access journals, this article analyzes their financial needs, as well as their capacity to interact with funders. It is structured around four issues regarding the implementation of a direct funding model: do Diamond journals really make use of money, and to what end? Do they need additional money? Are they able to engage monetary transactions? Are they able to meet RFOs visibility requirements? We show that a majority of OA Diamond journals could make use of a direct funding mechanism with certain adjustments. We conclude on the challenges that such a financial stream would spur.
“Following a year-long negotiation led by Jisc, UK universities have agreed a new, three-year read and publish open access (OA) deal with Springer Nature.
The deal meets the sector’s requirements to reduce costs and to expedite full and immediate open access in more than 2,500 Springer Nature titles, including Nature, the Nature research journals, and the Palgrave portfolio.
It also helps researchers and their institutions meet research funders’ open access requirements.
Results of the consultation on the latest proposal from Springer Nature were conclusive, with all 110 respondents voting to accept the offer, although a large number did so ‘with significant reservations’.
There were concerns around the high cost of publishing OA outside the agreement and the limited transparency, particularly with how Springer Nature’s article processing charges (APCs) are calculated.
Comments were also raised around Springer Nature’s approach to author rights retention, given the publisher’s commitment to gold OA, which some respondents felt created barriers to equitable OA publishing worldwide….”