Open Access Week 2023: Community Over Commercialization

Open Access Week 2023 events will be held from October 23rd through the 29th. This year’s theme, “community over commercialization” provides an opportunity to raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems.

Open Access week was originally launched in 2008 by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to foster conversations around making scholarship openly available to all. In recent years, the dominance of for-profit publishing companies’ new hybrid OA publishing model, dependent on exorbitant “author publication charges” (APCs), has supplanted conversations about other models of open access research dissemination. In many researchers’ minds, OA publication is now synonymous with APCs running anywhere from $300 to $8,000 dollars. (Academic journals have traditionally been funded by university libraries paying subscription fees, a system in which they are also restricted in who they can allow to access these subscriptions. There are other models of open access publishing which don’t use APCs.) 

The co-opting of OA publishing by for-profit publishers is disappointing, if unsurprising. Companies began purchasing journals from professional societies in the 1990’s, when the advent of the internet created a new, vast market of readers for scholarly publications. Previous social convention such as the 1969 Ingelfinger rule (courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine’s Editor in Chief, Franz Ingelfinger) prevented researchers from publishing their works in more than one place, so each journal effectively had, and continues to have, a monopoly on the research they publish (Marshall 1998). Subscribers like University libraries have to buy the journal or their readers will not be able to access the article. Even if it’s one of their own faculty who wrote the article. Consequently, by 2007, the largest journal publishers were making some of the highest profit margins of any company in the world, with Taylor & Francis at 26.4%, Elsevier at 31.7%, and Springer at 37% percent (compared to ExxonMobil at 17%, Google at 30.5%, and Microsoft at 36.7% in that same period) (Lariviere 2015). 

In light of these incredible profits, open access author publication charges like the Lancet’s current rate of $6,830 (Elsevier 2023) clearly have more to do with for-profit publishers’ business models and mission than open access as a principle. OA is a burgeoning field that seems to guarantee higher citation counts for authors due to the greater accessibility of their work once it’s liberated from behind paywalls (Langham-Putrow 2021). That for-profit publishers muscled into this growing community is not surprising. 

And though the strain that libraries, researchers, and taxpayers bear to support these companies has seemed simultaneously ubiquitous as well as impossible to bear any longer, 2023 has seen cultural and organizational shifts that may finally facilitate real change in our scholarly publishing ecosystem. In the last year, the editorial boards of several top-tier journals such as Elsevier’s NeuroImage and Wiley’s Journal of Political Philosophy have resigned en masse over disagreements about author publication charges, recycling rejected article submissions, and accelerating publication schedules by 30% and greater (Scholarly Kitchen 2023, ACRL/SPARC Forum Oct 2023: Editorial Board Resignations to Align Journals with Community over Commercialization). In some cases, the editors have moved their entire operation to an open access model; the editorial board of Neuroimage as a whole started over with a new journal called Imaging Neuroscience, supported by the MIT Press (MIT 2023).  

Where previously just librarian blogs discussed the chimeric mergers of database companies across time (Breeding 2022), stories about publishing are this year beginning to rise to prominence within academic news cycles. in May, the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the news about the Journal of Political Philosophy and NeuroImage with the headline “’A Catastrophic Mistake’: Upheaval at Philosophy Journal Points to Publishing’s Conflicting Interests” (CHE 2023). 

And while these splashy stories capture attention, ultimately each journal represents a small community of scholars, and it is within these communities that conversations about scholarly values, access, and prestige must occur. The rebirth of the Imaging Neuroscience journal was dependent on each individual editorial board member divesting from Elsevier’s NeuroImage, and moving forward they will need to be supported by promotion and tenure committee members (ScholCommLab 2023) considering publications in their young journal to be just as valuable as those in their former (and still Elsevier-owned) journal, Neuroimage. 

This Open Access week, consider starting a conversation with your colleagues about open access scholarship, and how the way we publish shapes not only our conversations, but also who may access our research and ideas. Here at SMHS we are directly engaging with these issues via education as well as publication on our own openly-accessible institutional Repository, the UND Scholarly Commons. Where, by the way, School of Medicine and Health Sciences works are the most popular or any college’s works, not that we are counting. Please reach out to your librarians here at SMHS if you have any questions or would like to chat about open access or our Scholarly Commons, we’d love to hear from you! 

More reading on scholarly communications, open access publishing, and community over commercialization: 

• Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., & Holcombe, A. O. (2021). A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6(1), 14.  
• Altbach, P. G. (1978). Scholarly Publishing in the Third World. Library Trends. Spring. 489-503. 
• Anderson, R, (2017) ‘When the Wolf Finally Arrives: Big Deal Cancellations in North American Libraries ‘Scholarly Kitchen blog, 1 May 2017.  
• Clark, R. (2012, 13 July). Information Wants to be Free. [Blog post]. Retrieved from  
• Fyfe, A., Coate, K., Curry, S., Lawson, S., Moxham, N., & Røstvik, C. M. (2017). Untangling Academic Publishing: A history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. Zenodo.  
• Guttenplan, D. D. (2010-11-01). “For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web”. New York Times.  
• Johnstone, Sally M. (2005). “Open Educational Resources Serve the World”. Educause Quarterly. 28 (3). Retrieved 2010-11-01 
• Larivière, V., Haustein, S., Mongeon, P.. 2015. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLOS. New York. Retrieved 2010-12-19 
• McKenzie, L. (2019). UC Drops Elsevier. Inside Higher Ed.  
• Taylor, S. Spilka, S. Monahan, K., Mulhern, I., Watcher, J. (2020). Evaluating equity in scholarly publishing. Learned Publishing, 33(4), 353-367.  
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act | U.S. Copyright Office. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2021, from  
• U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGs. 2014. Fixing the Broken Textbook Market.   
• U.S. Copyright Office. More Information on Fair Use.  
• Van Noorden, R. (2017). Publishers threaten to remove millions of papers from ResearchGate. Nature.