Open Access Expertise
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Experts Like Wendy Patterson
Pablo Markin, Ph.D.
Adjunct Instructor, Academic Blogger, University of the People, The Open Access Blogs
Recent Comments
It is not necessarily the case that the costs of publishing in scholarly journals shift to researchers with transitions to Open Access, as these also likely entail savings that departures from existing closed-access journal subscription agreements involve. In other words, whereas traditional subscription models have apparently centralized reading and publishing arrangements with market dominant publishers, while paying for implicit per-researcher costs of these, Open Access models separate, no longer cost-dependent, reading access from consequently explicit, author-facing publication setups. Rather than providing blanket funding to journal portfolios, Open Access, thus, channels budgetary allocation to venues in which publication activities of affiliated researchers takes place. The flip side of this, however, is that, with Open Access models, budgeting limitations become transparent and researchers explicitly participate in funds' allocation decision-making. Incidentally, this also creates demand for financially sustainable Open Access arrangements.
Just for the sake of extending this argumentation a bit.. According to the recent study commissioned by cOAlition S https://zenodo.org/record/4558704, there are over 29,000 diamond open access journals worldwide – together, these journals publish 44% of the total open access content and 8–9% of the total number of scholarly articles. Such agreements lead to further stratification between the universities and researchers with strong funding and those who do not. Is this really the vision of scholarly publishing we want to support? Is this kind of agreement a strategy that is fair to the global community of researchers? Are people involved in making these agreements aware of the huge difference between the cost and price of publishing in many of the venues they are supporting with these agreements? Lots of rhetorical questions packed in here, but the point I wanted to make is that these new agreements may not be an improvement but rather a way to shift resources around and to maintain the unfair and costly system of traditional publishing. Many of us in the diamond OA community feel that this traditional system is outdated and that we, as a community, can do better.