Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research

Abstract

Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research. This study analyses the global trends towards paying to perform research by combing observed trends in publishing from 2015 to 2020 with an APC price list. APC expenses have sharply increased among six countries with different OA policies: the USA, China, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. The estimated global revenues from APC among major publishers now exceed 2 billion US dollars annually. Mergers and takeovers show that the industry is moving towards APC-based OA as the more profitable business model. Research publishing will be closed to those who cannot make an institution or project money payment. Our results lead to a discussion of whether APC is the best way to promote OA.

AJET in 2022: Bibliometrics, academic publishing trends, and future opportunities

“…AJET has always prided itself on being an open access journal, which means that authors do not have to pay any fees in order for their research to be published in a way that is accessible to everyone. The rise in the number of journals now implementing an article processing charge (APC) is having an impact on the academic publishing field (Zhang et al, 2022). Large publishers are now offering differentiated fees on the basis of how long an author is willing to wait for a review.…”

Towards peer review as a group engagement

“…Maddi and Sapinho (2022) find that the level of APC fees has been growing much more than costs. And Zhang et al (2022) provided a documented denonciation of the evolution of the publishing industry, showing that the cost of publication and the turnover of incumbent publishers not only were not reduced by the emergence of Open access, but significantly increased. With an interesting effect of heterogenesis of the ends, the original movement of Open access, which had a strong anti-capitalist orientation (Schmitter et al 2015), actually opened the way to an extreme for-profit model.…”

“…This proposal has shifted the attention of the academic community and of policy makers away from a rigorous analysis of the consequences of the introduction on a large scale of the Open access model. In particular, it has made the community blind with respect to the unintended but extremely serious outcome that has been recently denounced by Zhang et al (2022), namely, that the cost of publishing has actually increased after the diffusion of Open access. The overall research system has become more closed, not more open.…”

Ciência Aberta, equidade e o cenário brasileiro

“…Levantamentos mostram que as taxas de processamento de artigos (APCs -article processing charges) cobradas pelas revistas internacionais de acesso aberto têm aumentado acentuadamente e constituído uma barreira à visibilidade dos produtos científicos de pesquisadores no âmbito global. 2,3 Assim, a comunidade científica brasileira está entre aqueles agentes cuja capacidade de participação está comprometida por restrições orçamentárias em pesquisas e pela ausência de recursos dirigidos às taxas de publicação pelos órgãos de fomento no Brasil.…”

“…Surveys show that the article processing charges (APCs), charged by international open access journals have increased sharply and constituted a barrier to the visibility of scientific production of researchers globally. 2 , 3 Thus, the Brazilian scientific community is among those agents whose capacity to participate is compromised by budget constraints for research and the lack of resources directed to publication fees by funding agencies in Brazil.…”