By Maya Hale
This is the seventh post in our series about how science is communicated and the consequences thereof.
Academia requires publications for success. They can be a condition to defend a PhD thesis (or dissertation), a part of a tenure application, or guidance for research and education.
Lack of access to primary literature isn’t just restrictive to academics. It also acts as a barrier for aspiring students to break into science. Students submitting papers to the Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI), a volunteer-run scientific journal for middle and high school students, are often unable to explore certain questions or even make reviewer edits to their submissions because they do not have access to publications on their research topic or the statistical analysis needed to improve publication quality.
An answer to the exorbitant cost of primary literature, for both the academic and non-academic communities, is open access journals. These journals provide free access to publications, without subscriptions or viewing fees. This post will talk about the history of monetized academic publications and the momentum behind the movement toward open access journals.
THE HISTORY & STATE OF MONETIZED ACADEMIC PUBLICATION
The concept of academic publication has existed for thousands of years, with one of the oldest literary works dating from 2500 B.C.E. Notably, antecedents for modern scientific journals began around 358 years ago with Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Over hundreds of years, academic institutions and clubs continued to publish both literary and research publications for mass distribution.
Despite their importance, the cost of academic texts and membership to academic clubs has always been prohibitively expensive. For example, the average manual laborer would have needed three days’ pay to buy Darwin’s On the Origin of Species when it was first printed in 1860. Regardless of astronomical costs and inaccessibility, the importance of peer-reviewed journals and publications for scientific advancement has persisted.
The structure of academic publishing and access has not changed much with large publishers still owning and distributing journals to subscribing members. As research fields, questions, and findings have continued to multiply, so has the number of academic journals, with around 30,000 existing as of 2021. Despite the staggering number of journals, there are still significantly fewer publishers. Powerhouses of publishing like Springer, Elsevier, and the Taylor & Francis group, by themselves, publish 27.5% of journals, spanning fields in the humanities and STEM. Such journals own millions of individual papers, and can therefore greatly hinder access to information by choosing to keep them behind a pay-wall. Academic journals generally receive thousands of annual paper submissions from academic authors, with Nature reportedly receiving 10,768 in 2017.
Upon receipt of submission, journals invite peer-reviewers. As early as 1731, academic journals began the tradition of peer-reviewing academic submissions. This process takes into consideration the critiques and suggestions of other researchers within the field – the reviewer – before a paper is published, and publication is often contingent upon revision or response to reviewer comments on the work. After World War II, the increase in technology, research specialization, and publication speeds also increased competition for publication, leading more journals to implement peer review as a means to control both volume and quality. Over time, “peer-review” has become synonymous with “good quality”, making it the gold standard for the most prestigious journals of today. Most scientists accept this unpaid responsibility as a part of an academic’s job description, and many believe it to be an honor granted by success in one’s field. Some even praise peer-review as the “invisible hand,” that connects fledgling researchers with their more knowledgeable peers. Interestingly, despite saving an estimated $1.5 billion in fees through the free labor of academic reviewers, the costs of subscriptions continue to soar. Once the paper gets through peer-review, revisions, and final edits, it is published on the site and/or in the printed copy of the journal’s next edition. In the case of closed-access journals, these papers remain behind a pay-wall because access to that paper requires a subscription to the journal.
Generally, the costs of these subscriptions are absorbed by academic institutions, but for smaller colleges, this can be a heavy lift. A press release about a 2018 publication from The Association of College and Research Libraries reported that, “on average, academic libraries spent 76% of their materials budget on ongoing subscriptions.” Since 2018, the cost has become so contentious that institutions in Germany, Norway, Sweden, and The University of California College System have ended contracts with Elsevier to protest subscription costs.
A learning tool posted by a library at Duke University, reported that 59% of the most cited papers were behind pay-walls and that those without institutional access to their desired sources face fees averaging $33.41 to access one paper. When conducting research, it is common to comb over tens of papers. An analysis by Qualifying Health of 96,685 papers uploaded to PubMed between the 2016 and 2021 revealed that, on average, those papers had about 45 references cited. Following that logic, one paper’s worth of citations– at least the ones that make the final cut– can cost an unaffiliated researcher around $1,500. With the average graduate student making on average $28,180 per year according to Indeed, viewing one paper costs almost 2.5 hours of pay and a publication’s search could cost as much as 2.8 weeks of wages. With a direct comparison to the inaccessibility of the impoverished in Victorian England – think Oliver Twist – it’s unsurprising that there is a call for change to the $24 billion industry that is academic publishing.
OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS & POTENTIAL FOR THE FUTURE
The exploration of open access literature began to gain traction following the 2015 launch of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This Agenda works to, “...end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities and tackle climate change, while ensuring that no one is left behind,” and the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has identified equal access to information, and therefore open access policies, to be vital for the success of this initiative. Then, in 2018, Robert Jan-Smits and Rachael Pells began their push for Plan S, a pledge for a temporary hybrid between traditional and open access peer-reviewed publications that would give publishing companies time to alter their business models to accommodate permanent open-access. In this pledge and following discourse, proponents of fully open access outlined its benefits.
One such advantage is improved equity for less funded researchers. Individuals, institutions and countries that cannot afford subscriptions would now have access to the advancements of their colleagues without the out-of-pocket costs of buying individual papers and traveling to conferences. They would also no longer need to rely on the responses of individual requests to authors for copies of manuscripts. As it stands, Elsevier’s Research4Life hybrid model offers discounts and free access to some low- or middle-income countries, but free access only includes a very limited number of journals.
Another benefit is the improved quality of information. Those who do not have access and cannot find a way around the paper pay-wall are forced to rely on what is available and historically, those are poorly peer-reviewed or un-reviewed publications. This creates a ripple effect in the quality and novelty of research a person can publish, which generally lowers the impact factor of the journals they can publish in later. While impact factor (IF) is a controversial and often misused measurement of success, the IF of the journal a researcher has published in can still carry weight during academic job searches. A paper from 2020 analyzing survey data from post-doctoral researchers implies that this weight falls heaviest on those in the life-sciences.
Proponents also argue that open access for all will break down barriers to information for non-academic readers. In a 2020 study of 6,000 readers on open access Springer Nature publications, they found that 40% of surveyed readers were non-academic. In a small questionnaire posted to the Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy social media and Slack accounts, and shared on graduate student social media and laboratory Slack accounts, twenty-three people responded. Of those twenty-three respondents, eight (34.8%) self-identified as non-academic and fifteen (65.2%) self-identified as academics. In that survey, seven of the eight non-academic respondents listed cost as a reason not to read academic literature. These examples suggest that not only do non-academic readers want to access the literature, but that removing fees may allow them to do that.
Despite these reasons for open access, there are plenty who believe that ending subscriptions would decrease the quality of academic publications. One feared cause for loss of quality is due to assumed decreases in peer-review and editorial rigor of neophyte open access journals. But this assumption is primarily based on their lower IFs and the fact that new open access journals have not had time to build IFs, for which time and volume are key components. There is also the valid concern of who picks up the tab for these publishers. Academic publishing is built on a history of people paying to access the works they publish. Many researchers who want the public to have fast and free access to their findings have already started paying the cost to publish, itemized as editorial and site overheads, in open access journals. Based on a list of 500 open access journals published in the US as of 2023 that was compiled from the Directory of Open Access Journals for this post, the average cost to publish was $1,292, with 25% of papers costing $0, 75% costing below $2,200, and a maximum cost of $8900. In an ideal world, these added costs could be factored into grant and fellowship funding, but in countries that have cripplingly limited federal research funding, this could still amount to out-of-pocket or direct lab-budget costs that still make research inequitable and inaccessible. The inequity of this only worsens when advocates look into the decisions behind these predatory article processing charges. Publishers have started out-sourcing the editing and copy editing to workers in lower-paying countries or switched to online-only formats to eliminate printing costs. With information like that, it seems like if publishers were as inventive with finding ways for researchers to save money as they are with finding ways to expand year-over-year profit margins, that the cost to researchers wouldn’t be so insurmountable.
Although the new open access system is still contentious, countries within the European Union have begun forcing publishers to hasten their transition to fully open access. Here in the U.S., the Biden Administration released guidance to make research and publications funded by taxpayers accessible to the public by December 31, 2025 with significant updates as soon as mid-2023. In the White House press release for this plan, Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy said, “when research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policy makers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society.” At present, it looks like policy makers and researchers are aligned in their movement toward open access publishing. Hopefully in the near future, free, peer-reviewed, high impact publications will be the norm instead of the exception.