Open Access Week Retrospectives: The View From America

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The United States is a pivotal country in the development and success of the open access project. There is no federal mandate obliging authors to observe the tenets of OA, but some states have come close to making this a requirement. Funders are particularly powerful in this context, since they can not only influence the publishing models used by scholarly authors, but actively withdraw funds unless the author signs up to making their work ‘free’ at the point of use. The US is, of course, also a major contributor to the revenues of most international scholarly publishers.

In this post, Professor Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, reflects on the stage that OA has reached in the US and how it might further develop in the next five to ten years. The interview was conducted by Gold Leaf‘s Linda Bennett.

Linda Bennett: To what extent do you think open access has been successful?

Michael Levine-Clark: One measure of success is that funders have gotten behind the idea – as witnessed by Plan S and the Nelson Memo. Especially if they are funded by federal agencies, authors are obliged to make their work OA. More researchers now understand OA – and some have always been behind it – but in the past there was a persistent misunderstanding that it represented lack of quality. The fact that major publishers have embraced it is another measure of success – they all operate OA models to some extent. OA now accounts for roughly half of all published scholarly articles, and if you include those published under the Green model, it is considerably more.

A third measure of success is that scholarly information is being disseminated much more quickly. What we saw happening with Covid research shows the power of OA data: the speeding up of vaccine development and the general understanding of the health impacts of Covid couldn’t have happened without OA.

Fourth, from the institutional perspective, the influence of OA is largely neutral. To some extent, OA helps to secure funding and increase the visibility of scholarly work and is therefore embraced by the institution; but when it comes to choosing between making their research open or high impact, most institutions and researchers would go with high impact.

“More researchers now understand OA – and some have always been behind it – but in the past there was a persistent misunderstanding that it represented lack of quality.”

LB: What have been the greatest triumphs and challenges, from your own perspective?

MLC: APCs are a challenge. They’re not working as well as people had hoped. Even in the US and Europe, there is a large number of have-nots – institutions that are not particularly well-funded – and of course the problem increases dramatically in the Global South.

Other barriers to publication include disciplinary differences. The disciplines where research is well-funded and the traditional vehicle for publication is the scholarly article do well; but for disciplines that are less well-funded, especially those in which research is traditionally published as the monograph, it doesn’t work out as well.

The key question is where does the money come from? Read & Publish deals are a nice idea in theory, but at the institutional level we can’t continue to fund them. Hybrid journals are also less successful in terms of fulfilling the desired outcome: They are not easy to manage at the library level, and researchers consulting them may think that since the journal as a whole isn’t open, the article they are looking for won’t be either. It is a model that doesn’t quite seem fair. Subscribers do not receive a discount for the portion of the journal that is open. They’re not great as part of the scholarly ecosystem, but they do have a positive aspect, and that is that they provide opportunities for researchers in disciplines where fully Gold journals are less common.

LB: What, if any, have been the unforeseen consequences of OA?

MLC: Well, the hybrid journal, for a start: I don’t think any of us imagined the model working out the way it has. The APC, as well: It is reasonable to assume that there is a cost attached to publishing, but as I’ve indicated, there are wide disparities in the ability to pay at both disciplinary and institutional levels.

Another concern is the degree to which publishers can make money from OA. Some seem to be making more money than under the subscription model, while others are undoubtedly making much less and therefore sustainability is a problem for them. The Transformative Agreement is a good example of this disparity. A truly transformative deal would take publishing to the level where everything is open, but we’re not making much progress.

“I’d love to see librarians and publishers jointly coming up with models that allow us to transfer costs from Read to Publish. S2O seems to be the best model available at present, but it’s not perfect.”

LB: To what extent has OA truly created a ‘level playing field’ for both authors and readers?

MLC: I don’t really think it has helped researchers in the Global South, which was one of the original intentions. We have somewhat levelled the playing field for readers, but the opposite is the case for authors. On the contrary, we have dug up the turf and made life harder for the great majority of authors. The APC is itself a barrier to publishing. It is interesting to think about Read versus Publish: if the goal is making more content available to more readers, it has worked; but it hasn’t improved accessibility to publishing for authors.

LB: Do you think it will ever be possible for all scholarly publishing to become available via OA?

MLC: No. I think it will be possible for some disciplines to get close to 100% – those with a lot of funding and a culture of disseminating preprints – but there is little incentive for disciplines where the monograph is the main vehicle and which typically have little funding. Some OA publishers of monographs have said that libraries have not taken them seriously; in fact, libraries have not necessarily been able to take OA for journals seriously, either.

If you consider the Read & Publish model, we haven’t had the funding to convert articles to open. Funding for the APC versions certainly falls far short, and in addition there are restrictions on how this funding can be used: for example, not for publication in hybrid journals; not beyond a certain cost per article.

Some funders and some publishers (such as AAAS) support the Green model, which involves the depositing of the preprint in the Institutional Repository – but this is an imperfect model, too, since the disconnection between the preprint and the published version of record can be confusing for readers. And ironically, though books are more expensive to convert to OA, they are generally required for disciplines for which there is little or no external funding.

Most of the OA book models exist to support a ‘transition to open.’ Contributing to JSTOR’s Path to Open or to such initiatives as Knowledge Unlatched helps convert more books to open, but does not necessarily support the publications of the individual institution. Instead, they are supporting publishing in general. There is a disconnect here which makes it hard for institutions to contribute to open book projects at the level at which we have supported journals.

“Ironically, though books are more expensive to convert to OA, they are generally required for disciplines for which there is little or no external funding.”

There are compelling reasons why Green is better: it incurs no additional cost for the author and only a small cost for the institution (maintaining the Institional Repository) which is a justifiable expense. Gold costs are hard to justify. There’s a clear incentive to publish more if you’re a publisher operating an APC model: you may be providing more opportunities to publish, but you’re also making more money and the incentive to publish more carries the danger of reduction in quality.

Open Access Week 2024: Learn more about open access at De Gruyter Brill in our interview with the editorial team of Semiotica.

LB: How do you think the OA movement will progress in the next five to ten years and how would you like to see it progress?

MLC: I’m most interested in what happens to the book model. The JSTOR S2O model is a good example of widescale adoption. I think we’ll see more university presses making books open and this is a positive – so we’re heading in the right direction. If it happens that most university presses make a significant number of their titles open within two or three years of publication, this helps authors. Transformative Agreements will continue, but I imagine that in 10 years at most they will have died. The Read & Publish deal is just a bigger ‘Big Deal’ – and if we couldn’t afford the Big Deal in the first place, how could we afford this? I think libraries will pull back from TAs and embrace Green. This is an important indication of how some publishers, especially not-for-profit society publishers, are thinking. We’ll see more Diamond publishing, too, but it’s not a scalable model. I’d love to see librarians and publishers jointly coming up with models that allow us to transfer costs from Read to Publish. S2O seems to be the best model available at present, but it’s not perfect. Similar models that will genuinely create a sustainable future have yet to be thought of.

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