Jan Velterop (coordinator)
Leila Posenato Garcia (editor)

We so loved Open Access

Authors
Abel Packer
Peter Suber
Robert Kiley
Rob Terry
Ginny Barbour
Martin Paul Eve
Melissa Hagemann
Subbiah Arunachalam
Bernard Rentier
David Prosser
Hélène Bosc
Susan Veldsman
John Willinsky
Dominique Babini
Jan Velterop

São Paulo, 2023

Copyright © 2023.

All the contents of this work, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Front Cover: Gabriela Nascimento (DEC Studio)
Electronic Publishing: Giovanna Brito (SciELO Books)

ABEC Brasil
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Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Elaborated by Amanda Ramalho - Librarian CRB 8/9192

N897

We so loved Open Access [eBook] / Coordinated by Jan Velterop; Edited by Leila Posenato Garcia. - Botucatu: ABEC Brasil; SciELO, 2023.
1.212 Kb; EPUB

Book published to celebrate 25 years of the SciELO Program.
ISBN: 978-65-993452-4-1

1. Open Access 2. Scientific Publishing 3. Repositories 4. Journals 5. Open Access Policies 6. Advocacy I. Velterop, Jan II. Garcia, Leila Posenato.

CDU 001.891

Digital version: September 2023.

Foreword

Thirty years ago, access to scholarly publications was expensive and effectively limited to those who had access to libraries at universities and other research facilities. And then only to the collections that those libraries subscribed to. All those publications existed only in printed form, although electronic versions were already widely used in the production of printed journals. Shortly after, the World Wide Web appeared on the scene, as well as web browsers to navigate it. The environment in which easy – electronic – access to scholarly information became possible, emerged as an option. And with that, the potential for much wider, quicker, and easier dissemination of the information. Researchers could freely communicate with the entire scientific community in their fields and beyond without the involvement of publishers. In theory at least.

But free scholarship was a most appealing concept. A number of people decided to adopt possibilities the technology afforded, and advocated for a world without the encumbrances of the existing publishing system. The notion of free scholarly communication took hold. At about that same time SciELO was born. Free access was not yet called ‘open access’, as that term was coined later and embraced by the group of early adopters who were brought together in Budapest, Hungary, at the initiative of the Open Society Institute. It was as a result of the meeting there that the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) presented a formal definition of what open access should be.

Some of those early adopters – pioneers – have, on the occasion of the 25th jubilee of SciELO, written up their experiences with open access, its progress, its successes, its collaborations, its advocacy, its conceptual evolution, but also its disappointments, and some regrets. Plus, there are also some views on the future. Together, these pieces, published as an e-book by the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC Brasil), give a good picture of the developments regarding open access in the last 25 years. This volume, with contributions by open access pioneers from the Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern hemispheres, is a tribute to the essential role SciELO has played in the quarter century of its existence, supporting open access as well as putting parts of the world that were previously not as visible as they deserved, firmly onto the global scholarly communication map.

The Journey of SciELO’s 25 years: reality beyond utopia and illusion

Abel L Packer*
July 2023

To belong to, manage, and lead the day-to-day operations of SciELO since its conception in 1996 dates to the implementation of the pilot project in 1997 and the start of regular operation in March 1998. Its evolution and growth into an international network – the SciELO Network, simultaneously as a project, a framework for public policy, a national research infrastructure program, an international technical cooperation program, a methodological and technological platform – emerge as a proactive component of the global flow of scientific communication and the open access and open science movement. This journey holds both similar and unique meanings for its many actors, indelible for many, as it is for me.

There are many personal experiences and feelings of accomplishment that need to be shared. An undertaking of the magnitude and complexity that the development of SciELO has been certainly entails frustrations, but what has prevailed is a multifaceted and collective commitment to advancing research communication in open science. In fact, the celebration of SciELO’s 25 years has the theme "Open Science with IDEIA – Impact, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility" as an expression of the program's nature and aspirations. Undoubtedly, the celebration of SciELO’s 25 years brings us a sense of joy and pride that, however, does not diminish the challenge of continuing the daily, operational, and strategic struggle. The question that arises in this exercise, and that I present below, is to what extent and how our origins, visions, motivations, goals, and pioneering promises have shaped and endured over time.

In these two and a half decades, SciELO has emerged and consolidated itself to a large extent as a unique solution and model for research communication in open access and, more recently, in open science. Since 1996, the potential of the web as a means of scientific communication and open access was already in place. Those of us who dared to adopt it accumulated learning gains along with the vicissitudes of innovation and pioneering. There was nowhere to copy from or models to follow intentionally.

In fact, SciELO was born four years before the conceptual formulation of open access in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The solution that emerged from the pilot project conducted in 1997 and early 1998 advocates for a decentralized vision of online research communication, where each country operates a national collection of quality journals selected according to quality criteria applied by a national scientific committee. The solution functions as a “virtualized metapublisher” by creating a common methodological and technological space for the convergence of research communicated by not-for-profit journals published by universities, societies, and scientific associations.

Highly dynamic and ceaselessly improved over the past 25 years, this space is continuously nourished as a global public good with articles, journals, national collections (such as SciELO Argentina, SciELO Bolivia, SciELO Brazil, etc.), SciELO Preprints, research data archives from the SciELO Data repository, books and book chapters from the SciELO Books collection, and the entire set through the network portal - www.scielo.org. The space is supported by an operational platform identified as the SciELO Publishing Model, whose conceptual and operational evolution is projected as a differentiated solution for a future of fully decentralized networked scientific communication, operated by research communities. This unique status of SciELO in the global ecosystem of scientific communication is, in my view, the most remarkable advancement, not initially conceived as an objective, although plausible given the circumstances of its origin.

The fundamental motivation upon which Professor Rogerio Meneghini and I based the first project to create SciELO, which persists resilient and pervasive as a specific objective, is to maximize the visibility and impact of the journals and the research they communicate. This aligns with the nature of science, national and international research systems, academic disciplines, and especially the researchers' careers. In fact, in the early days, we used the analogy of an iceberg to illustrate that Brazil, with over 200 quality journals identified by research evaluation systems and with the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC Brasil) established as a thriving national association of scientific editors, had less than twenty journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which were increasingly considered a quality reference for research in the scientific community, particularly in the biological and physical sciences. Along the same lines, we often cited the article with the revealing title "Lost Science in the Third World" by W. Wayt Gibbs¹. Faced with the exclusion of nationally edited quality journals from the international flow of scientific communication and evaluation systems, SciELO emerged simultaneously as a bibliometric index and a web publisher. Thus, the SciELO platform integrates the infrastructures of national scientific production systems and the global flow of scientific communication as a program and policy for scientific communication. Nationally, it complements the research communicated in journals designated as mainstream, academic books, and other media.

The raison d'être of SciELO, centered on the need for countries to develop the capacity to operate the entire research cycle with quality, stems from the relevance of pure and applied research communicated in nationally edited journals in both the national language and English. This operational centrality of SciELO is framed by the principle that scientific knowledge is a global public good, where equitable publication and access are social determinants of development, essential for informing public policies and overcoming the know-do gap phenomenon that mainly affects developing countries, especially in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This commitment of SciELO, which aligns with the foundations of open access, originates from the open systems of bibliographic information that were developed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the late 1960s, promoted and supported by technical cooperation for the social, economic, scientific, and cultural development by United Nations agencies, as well as agencies and foundations from the United States and Canada in all major thematic areas.

However, the viability of the SciELO model comes from its progressive symbiosis with the properties of the web, following Marshall McLuhan's vision that “the medium is the message”. The path forward is to gradually imbue research communication objects with the properties of the web, such as disintermediation, universalization, virtualization, and interoperability, which are now emerging in open science practices and in the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) principles adopted by SciELO. Our McLuhanian vision has been successful in initiating and sustaining the operation of SciELO, but achieving full alignment with web properties faces the major difficulties, resistances, frustrations, and challenges in the history of SciELO.

The technological platform of SciELO originated from bibliographic information systems developed in Latin America and the Caribbean, with data field registration structures derived from the United Nations International Scientific Information System (UNISIST)² Reference Manual and implemented by ISIS family software specially designed for storing and retrieving bibliographic databases. Developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME),³ ISIS systems operate variable-sized records and fields, text formatting functions, index generation, and Boolean search. They initially ran on medium and large computers and, starting in 1983, were widely disseminated with versions for personal computers.

In developing SciELO technological platform we maximized the potential of ISIS to operate structured full texts, initially in SGML and later in XML. The ISIS system seamlessly supports the operation of metadata and full texts in the SciELO Network, which comprises over 1.1 million documents serving an average of over 1.5 million unique accesses daily. In the case of SciELO Brazil, the platform operates online over 99% of the time.

However, our greatest frustration remains our inability so far to develop or adopt a native XML-based, open-source technological platform that fully explores the disintermediation, virtualization, and interoperability properties of the web throughout the research communication flow involving authors, evaluation systems, publication, and dissemination. The need to empower processes with artificial intelligence adds a new dimension of challenges that signal a potential radical paradigm shift. This frustration within the SciELO Network extends to open access as a movement, whose organizations and policies are effective in advocacy but not in the development of advanced public domain platforms that open science requires.

The conceptual and operational engineering of SciELO model has always succeeded to be benefited from a political and institutional superstructure, both national and international, that provides direction, authority, and sustainability. In Brazil, the project for the creation and development of SciELO since 1997 has received support and leadership from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)⁴ with the assistance of BIREME. For FAPESP, SciELO has evolved as a research infrastructure program, and for BIREME, it has become the source of full-text information for the Virtual Health Library (VHL), its advanced program of technical cooperation in scientific health information. The collaboration between FAPESP and BIREME that gave rise to the SciELO project was promoted by ABEC-Brasil ⁵ at its annual meeting in 1996 when I proposed the project to adopt the web as the publishing media to overcome the visibility limitations of the nationally edited journals, and personally met with Prof. Meneghini, who was interested at the time in measuring the impact of Brazilian journals, and we both converged our goals in formulating the SciELO project. Prior to its formal launch in 1998, the SciELO model was adopted in Chile, by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT), later replaced by the National Research and Development Agency (ANID), for the implementation of its online journal plan within its scientific information department, under the coordination of Ana Maria Prat.

The adoption of the model by Chile gave rise to the SciELO Network, which, in less than 10 years, included 14 of the 17 countries that currently form the network. In Brazil, SciELO is still operated as a research project from the FAPESP, that is periodically renewed, with the Foundation for Support to the Federal University of São Paulo (FapUnifesp) as the executing institution. In Chile, it is operated by ANID itself. In the other 15 countries, similar forms with variations are adopted for the national collections. In Brazil, the federal agencies National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) started supporting the maintenance of SciELO, in 2002 and 2018, respectively. Similarly, in most countries within the network, the SciELO Publishing Model operates as public policies to support nationally edited journals.

As dictated by the SciELO model, operational and financial sustainability is managed in a decentralized manner in each collection, in line with national priorities and conditions. The production of final version files of articles in PDF and XML/JATS⁶ formats, following the SciELO methodology, varies among countries based on the level of participation of the national collection coordination unit, journals, and service providers. In the SciELO model, strengthening the national capacity to operate the complete cycle of research communication presupposes a coordination unit that operates the SciELO collection assisted by a scientific committee and the development of a national market for scientific publishing products and services, involving small companies or consultants. The funding structure also varies from country to country, depending on the resources invested in the coordination unit and in the decentralized production of journals. For most countries, it is challenging to estimate the cost of operating SciELO due to its research community nature and networked operation, which heavily relies on physical infrastructure, information technologies, and human resources of the universities and other institutions publishing the journals. However, the average cost we estimate for article production and operation in the national collection ranges from US$200.00 to US$300.00, representing 10% to 15% of the average cost of over US$2,000.00 for article processing charges (APCs) charged by commercial journals.

The sustainable progress of SciELO as a public policy and community-based research communication model and platform is intrinsically boosted by the medium web but faces resistances to changes by authors and journal editors, and the challenge to be submitted to inequity national research evaluation systems.

Editors and authors of SciELO Journals are closely academically connected as active members of research communities of different disciplines and movements. Editors are predominantly senior professors, active researchers, and mentors in master's and doctoral programs. Accustomed to the traditional research communication, many naturally approach open science practices with caution and conservatism which influences early career researchers, despite the potential gains in visibility and impact. This mindset is reinforced by the absence of well stablished open science policies and the lack of recognition or promotion of open science in national research evaluation systems. SciELO Brazil has set the end of 2024 as the deadline for all collection journals to align with the modus operandi of open science. It is expected that other collections will define their own deadlines. However, resistances to abandon old and adopt new practices are typical in paradigm shifts.

The critical challenge that SciELO faces to increase the visibility of the journals and of the research they communicate as the program raison d’etre is followed by the evolution of metrics of the accesses and citations they receive. The number of accesses is followed monthly according to the COUNTER release 5 which excludes known robots and counts only once several human accesses to the same document in a session. It can be very sensitive regarding the popularity of individual articles, journals, and collections. For example, during the isolation measures due to the COVID pandemic, the number of accesses exploded, reaching in 2021 a daily average of 1 million (2,3 per doc) in journals of the SciELO Brazil collection, 370,000 (4,1 per doc) in the SciELO Mexico journals, and 270,000 (3,6) in the SciELO Chile. However, in 2022, the numbers decreased to 820,000 (1,8 per doc), 260,000 (2,7 per doc), and 190,000 (2,3 per doc) respectively.

The performance of journals in terms of citations received is followed annually by the evolution of bibliometric indicators of citations in Google Scholar H5 indicator, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, which are used by research evaluation systems. The performance varies between indexes, indicators, thematic areas, and collections. Overall, considering the Scimago SJR⁷ or the SNIP⁸ indicators with Scopus database, about 30% and 25% of the journals, respectively, are above the median. The relatively low value of the average indicators is due to the intrinsic variables of their respective algorithms, which have determinants such as language, international collaboration, journal age, previous value of the indicator, determinants that especially affect SciELO journals due to their diversity. However, in general, the collections have succeeded in maintaining their normalized impact with the evolution of the number of journals and thematic structures. Another important aspect is that, based on WoS All Databases, collections receive on average 4 times more citations from non-SciELO journals. Also, as the collections reach their core, domestic citations tend also to stabilize and increases of citations become dependent on external journals.

A key factor to increase impact by citations would be to empower journals to receive and publish better manuscripts mainly from national authors. However, this approach is limited by research evaluation and rewarding systems based on journals metrics that rank nationally published journals together with the so called main-stream journals ignoring obvious incompatibilities such as language of publication, limited international collaboration, high number of research related to local problems, time of indexing, etc. This is a critical weakness national research systems that support SciELO Journals have in recognizing the relevance of the research they communicate. As recommended by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and being worked out by the Latin American Forum for Research Assessment (FOLEC-CLACSO) and the European Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (COARA) initiatives it would be more appropriate to avoid the use of journal metrics as proxy of research impact and quality. Meanwhile, a separate ranking for national published journals would provide more equitable evaluation.

This overview of the development of the SciELO Program expresses my intellectual and professional commitment with open science as the most advanced means of producing knowledge as a global public good and promoting equitable access to information and scientific knowledge as a social determinant of sustainable development, essential for overcoming the conditions of the know-do gap. This commitment guides my professional practice with a focus on the paradigm of the library as a dynamic means of network the management of collections of knowledge objects in open access, following standards, quality control, and progressively endowed with the web properties of disintermediation, virtualization, and universalization, along with their respective performance metrics.

Fast and slow at the same time

Peter Suber*
May 2023

Congratulations to SciELO for 25 years of innovative open access publishing, influential advocacy, and inspiring growth.

To honor its birthday, I’d like to expand on a recommendation I’ve only made briefly in the past.

We should work for open access on all fronts at once. For example, we should work for OA through journals and repositories, universities and funders, libraries and publishers, authors and readers, policies and practices, for-profits and non-profits, journals and books, preprints and postprints, data and code, sciences and humanities, north and south, all at once.

I want to focus here on a special case of this parallel processing that is often overlooked. We should pursue fast and slow strategies at the same time.

Here are some examples of faster, short-term strategies:

publish more work in OA journals

deposit more work in OA repositories

enable more authors to retain the rights to their work

cover more new publications with open licenses

make more new work open without embargoes

negotiate better agreements with publishers next year

correct more misunderstandings about OA itself

Here are some slower, long-term strategies:

adopt strong OA policies at more funders and universities, and strengthen policies that already exist, for example to eliminate embargoes and add open licenses

reform research assessment, for example to drop perverse metrics, stop mistaking impact for quality, and stop outsourcing judgments of quality to publishers

amend copyright law to facilitate OA to research

build, improve, and adopt open infrastructure for open research

move away from article processing charges

move away from read-and-publish agreements

We can make incremental progress on the faster strategies every day, and we should. But we can’t afford to wait on the slower strategies while we work on the faster ones, or vice versa. To avoid unnecessary delays, we must work on both sets at the same time.

This kind of fast-slow parallelism isn’t strange if you’ve ever started a soup on slow simmer while you work on the salad and sides, or if you support immediate steps toward climate adaptation while working toward the longer, harder, and deeper goal of climate mitigation.

If we accept the wisdom of fast-slow parallelism, then we must also accept that the slower strategies are — well — slower. When the faster strategies are obstructed, our impatience is understandable, even functional. But we can’t bring that impatience to the slower strategies. On the contrary, we must bring the patience and persistence they demand. We can’t lose hope, energy, or motivation when we encounter the friction and cultural interia that make these strategies slow. Indeed, one ground for optimism in the face of difficulties and harmful trends is the mere fact that we’re playing the long game.

One long-term goal of the OA movement is to reach the point at which OA is routine or second nature. This is slightly stronger than saying that OA should be the default. It’s about attitudes and habits, not policies. It’s about culture, not cultivation. OA should be as ordinary and unexceptionable as publishing. Researchers today would find it unthinkable to finish a new piece of work and leave it hidden on their hard drive. It should be just as unthinkable to finish a new piece of work and leave it hidden behind a paywall or shielded by an all-rights-reserved copyright.

One critical strategy to get us there is for researchers and their institutions to care more about research itself than where it is published or (specifically on articles) to care more about article quality than journal prestige, brand, or metrics. But this is a slow, long-term strategy.

We can take steps in the right direction by making OA easy (technically, legally, and financially), and we should. We can also reform research assessment to expect and reward OA, and we should. But those steps merely make a start on the needed changes to research culture.

We make incremental progress by caring more than we do now about research itself and less than we do now about the brand, prestige, or metrics of the venue where it is published.

The further we go along this path, the less it will matter where new research is published. Note that this is goal-setting by will, not prediction by evidence or trends. The aspiration is that research authors and research readers won’t care where new research is published. Promotion and tenure committees won’t care. Funders won’t care. It won’t matter whether authors make their work OA through journals, repositories, or other channels still to come. Above all, journal name, prestige, and metrics won’t matter. Journal business models won’t matter, at least to researchers and research institutions. If some journals charge author- or reader-side fees, and researchers shun them for that reason, nobody will care except the journals themselves, which in time will either change their models or quit the field.

It will only matter that new works meet certain functional conditions, for example, OA under open licenses, with adequate metadata, exposed to peer-review services, hosted on open infrastructure, running under open standards, interoperable with related platforms and tools, subject to effective discovery and preservation, in file formats friendly to humans and machines, and so on.

This long-term strategy is intimately tied to our short-term strategies. Research culture changes through the cumulative successes of our faster, short-term strategies.

This long-term strategy is slow because we can’t directly engineer cultural change. We can create new incentives, and we should. But incentives start as “nurture” and take time to become “nature”. It takes time to think of good incentives, time to adopt them, time for them to have their effects, and time for new practices to become new habits. It’s not just a challenge to our patience. It’s a challenge to our imagination.

In the short and medium term, we want to change policies, journals, publishers, repositories, business models, prices, licenses, tools, services, platforms, infrastructures, and incentives. But in the long term we want to change research culture, and changing culture is the longest of long games. To do this in the full spirit of parallelism, we must keep the long-term goal in mind while occupied with our foreground projects and exertions, like mountain climbers who never forget the summit while focusing on the zig-zag path and loose rocks in front of their feet.

One difficulty with fast-slow parallelism is that progress on the most important goals is slow. Another is our natural impatience. A third and more delicate difficulty is that not all friends and colleagues see the need to pursue fast and slow strategies at the same time. It’s always easier to find allies on short-term strategies than long-term strategies, for the same reason that it’s easier to hitch a ride to the next town than the town ten exits further down the road. It’s hard enough to play the long game on its own terms. It’s harder to play it with the dispiriting twist that many research institutions embrace inadequate interim solutions that may function as obstacles to long-term solutions. Part of working on all fronts at once is to work constructively with all friends and allies, if necessary on short-term projects alone, and if possible on long-term projects as well.

Supporting Open Access for 20 years: Five issues that have slowed the transition to full and immediate OA

Robert Kiley*
May 2023

For the last 20 years, Open Access (OA) has been at the centre of my professional life. 

My first encounter with the concept of Open Access (OA) was during a Wellcome Library Advisory Committee meeting in 2002, where academic librarians expressed concerns about the escalating costs of journal subscriptions.  This prompted discussions about Wellcome's role in addressing the issue, particularly as their funded content was part of what libraries were paying to access.

Fast forward to 2023, and OA has become mainstream, global and, I believe, ultimately irreversible. 

Current estimates suggest that more than 50% of the world’s research articles are published open access, and that there are around 20,000 fully OA journals.  Data also indicates that publishing OA is, on average, cheaper than publishing in subscription journals.  For example, analysis by Delta Think shows that around 45% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2021, but this accounted for just under 15% of the total journal publishing revenue.

However, after two decades of discussions, advocacy, policy development and strategy, can this level of OA be considered a success, particularly when half of all research articles published today is hidden behind a paywall?  I think not.

In this blog post, I will reflect on the work I led – both in my role at Wellcome in supporting the implementation of its OA policy and more recently as Head of Strategy at cOAlition S – and highlight five issues that have hindered the transition to OA.  On a more positive note, for each issue discussed, I will address how things are changing.

Issue 1: Reforming researcher assessment has been too slow

As early as 2005, when Wellcome become the first research funder with a mandatory OA policy, it was made clear that when funding decisions are taken what counts is the intrinsic merit of the work the researcher has undertaken and not proxies, like journal name and impact factors.

Despite this explicit statement, which was backed up by subsequent initiatives, such as Wellcome signing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and implementing changes to the grant application form and review process, many researchers continued to believe that their future success depended upon having an article published in a high impact factor journal. 

This fear not only discouraged some researchers from publishing in new, fully Open Access issues, as discussed in Issue 4 below, but it also resulted in some researchers not fully complying with OA policies.  This non-compliance was in part due to high-impact factor journals being slow to adopt OA-compliant publishing policies.

What is changing to address this issue?

The recent development of initiatives such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) – backed by a combination of research funders and higher education institutions – demonstrates a serious commitment to reform researcher assessment.

Issue 2: Business models based on APCs and subscriptions are highly inequitable.

The dominant business models that underpin scholarly publishing – namely subscriptions and Article Processing Charges (APCs) – are highly inequitable. It would be a significant policy failure if, in the transition to OA, we simply swapped one form of inequity – where subscription paywalls prevented a researcher from accessing research – with another, where APC barriers prohibited researchers from publishing their research.

Although in the early days of the OA APCs were seen as a credible strategy to deliver OA –the PLOS founders described APCs as “a natural alternative to the subscription model” – evidence now suggests that this model tends to exclude authors of particular career stages, genders, and institutions, in addition to also excluding those from certain regions in the world.

What is changing to address this issue?

Aware of the challenges discussed  above, multiple stakeholders are currently exploring alternative models which prioritise global equity.

One approach that meets this condition is the Diamond publishing model, defined as one in which neither the reader nor the author pays, but where the costs of publishing are met by academic institutions and/or communities.  Although Diamond journals have been in existence since the late 1980’s, they have gained momentum since the publication of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access in 2022.  At the time of writing, over 140 institutions and funders have publicly endorsed this plan, including agencies such as the French National Research Agency (ANR), the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

In addition, we have seen the development of the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model, described as a “pragmatic approach for converting subscription journals to open access—free and immediate online availability of research—without reliance on either article processing charges or altruism”.  Currently, 168 titles from 20 publishers are published under this model.

Other publishers, such as PLOS, are experimenting with non-APC or volume-based models, as seen, for example, in their Global Equity Model.  Furthermore, cOAlition S has commissioned a study to explore the feasibility of using the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) as a potential model for devising an equitable pricing model for academic publishing.

Issue 3: Research funders and institutions worked independently, rather than collaboratively

Transforming a global, academic publishing system – which generates over $10bn in annual revenue and substantial profits for commercial publishers – was always going to be challenging.  The task was made more difficult by the researcher assessment system (Issue 1) and the inherent conservatism of some researchers, who saw how the publishing system had worked for their senior colleagues and saw no reason not to emulate them and follow their publishing practices.

However, given that much of the funding to support academic publishing comes from academic institutions and funders, it is disappointing that these two stakeholders did not work more closely together to drive change. 

Looking exclusively at funders, although there are a number of dedicated funder groups – such as the Global Research Council, the Heads of International Research Organisation, Science Europe, and the Open Research Funders Group – there was no attempt to align funder policies.  Indeed, in 2005 when Wellcome developed its OA policy, it allowed an embargo of 6 months, believing this would align with the NIH policy.  In the event, the NIH adopted a 12-month embargo period, which persists to this day.

What is changing to address this?

The launch of cOAlition S in 2018 was the first attempt to get research funders and performing organisations to align on a common OA policy.  Over the past five years, membership has grown from 12 to 28, including funders in Australia, South Africa, Europe and the United States.  In addition,  even where funders have not joined cOAlition S – such as the federal agencies in the US – there has been significant progress towards broad policy alignment on key issues, such as zero embargoes and rights retention.

There is also greater coordination with institutions on OA issues, as evidenced by the close collaboration with members of the OA2020 initiative, the (time-limited) financial support for institutionally negotiated transformative arrangements and the development of institutional rights retention policies (IRRP), which mirror the rights retention strategy of cOAlition S.

By joining forces, funders and institutions can play a crucial role in supporting the transition to OA.

Issue 4: Unbalanced focus: commercial publishers receive too much attention over new publishing models

In the push to make research articles OA, much attention (and funding) was spent encouraging existing subscription, and in the main, commercially published journals, to develop OA publishing options and eventually to flip to OA.  While this approach was reasonable, since many researchers were continuing to publish in subscription/mixed model journals, it likely slowed down the adoption of fully OA journals and emerging scholar-led models, such as pre-printing and publishing platforms that supported a post publication peer review model.

Ultimately, the goals of commercial publishers, with a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for their shareholders, were invariably at odds with those of funders and institutions. This misalignment is manifestly evident in the response from publishers to cOAlition S’s Journal Comparison Service, where just 28 publishers have provided information on the prices they charge for their services, despite community calls for greater transparency.

What is changing to address this issue?

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the value of publishing research findings ahead of peer review, with researchers – and not third-party suppliers, like publishers – deciding when and where to publish their research results.

Crucially, preprint servers like bioRxiv, and medRxiv, offer a much faster publication process, typically publishing in-scope submissions within 2-4 days, compared to the estimated 125 days in traditional publication venues.  Although the immediate urgency of the pandemic may have subsided, researchers are continuing to make use of preprints, with bioRxiv reporting 3477 new articles published in March 2023.

At the same time we are also witnessing the emergence of scholar-led, journal agnostic peer review models, such as Review Commons and Peer Community In (PCI), where preprints can be formally reviewed, without having to submit to a journal.  As funders are increasingly recognising refereed preprints as equivalent to articles published in a peer reviewed journal, this should help to diminish the impact of journal names, and allow readers and those engaged in researcher assessment exercises to focus on the intrinsic merit of the published research.

Finally, the Council of Europe’s draft conclusions on High-quality, Transparent, Open, Trustworthy and Equitable Scholarly Publishing, highlight the importance of “not-for-profit, scholarly open access publishing models that do not charge fees to authors or readers and where authors can publish their work without funding/institutional eligibility criteria” and “stresses the importance of supporting the development of such models founded on led by public research organisations”. 

Though it would be a brave commentator to suggest that commercially published journals will cease to exist in the near future, I think it is likely that their ability to continue to generate significant profits from the public purse will reduce.  Moreover, I anticipate that they will focus their efforts on service provision – for example, research integrity services, copyediting and so forth – but will no longer have control over the content created by researchers.

Issue 5: Rights Retention should have been at the core of OA from day 1

Intrinsically linked to the matter discussed above is the issue of rights retention.

Rights retention ensures that researchers own and control the content that they created, based on the discoveries they made. Typically though, researchers hand over the copyright to their work to the publisher, and all subsequent use of that work (including the author being able to re-use their own content) is controlled by the publisher.

Rights retention was initially considered as a solution to encourage publishers to develop Open Access (OA) publishing options, with the idea that it would be used as a last resort when no other options were available to make research publicly available.  In hindsight, as one of the architects of this approach, I believe that this was a mistake.

It gave too much power to the publishers, enabling them to set an APC at whatever price they deemed suitable.  Consequently, this led to the emergence of APCs that exceed  $11,500.

To be clear, I believe publishers should be fairly compensated for the services they provide, though this should not give them ownership (copyright) of the work, and the prices levied must be commensurate with the services provided.  As most publishers have not shared their price and service data though the Journal Comparison Service, determining whether the price is fair and reasonable is impossible.

What is changing to address this issue?

Although rights retention is not a new concept – Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose back in 2008 – in recent years it has become more mainstream.  Specifically, several research funders include rights retention in their open access policies (and provide templated language to researchers to assert their rights).  By way of example, those in receipt of a Wellcome award are required to “grant a CC-BY Public Copyright Licence to all future Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs)”, and that all submissions of original research to peer-reviewed journals must contain the statement: “for the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission”.

Many universities are also implementing institutional rights retention policies in support of funder policies.  In the UK alone, some 16 universities now have such policies, and more are expected to follow. 

Several publishers are also supporting rights retention by explicitly stating in their publishing agreements that authors retain the right to share their author accepted manuscripts at the time of publication with a CC-BY license.  The Royal Society and the Microbiology Society are two such examples. The scholarly publishing trade association (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association – OASPA) has also signaled its support for rights retention, commenting that the proposal from the NIH to develop language to support authors in retaining their rights and bring clarity to the submission process for both authors and publishers “is welcomed”.

These combined approaches will help to ensure that, in the future, authors – not publishers – will retain control over how and when their research articles are openly shared.

Conclusion

Some 20 years after the publication of the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin declarations, OA continues to be a topic that generates a huge amount of interest, discussion and passion.  And, though progress has not been as fast as I would have hoped, I am confident that it will not take another two decades before full and immediate OA is realised.

Research is born free but everywhere is in chains… (apologies to Rousseau)

Rob Terry*
May 2023

I arrived at the Wellcome Trust at the end of 1999 having spent the previous two years running an international science exchange programme at the Royal Society in London. It seems amusing today as we chase social media notifications and RSS feeds across tablets and handhelds, but I remember one of the last meetings I attended of the publishing group at the RS concluding that the digital publication of research articles was an interesting development, but no one would want to actually read an article on a screen. That still might be the case but misses the underlying significance of digital content. It can be searched for, analysed, linked and read by computers. And today, more than twenty years on, we still seem to be missing that point – open access is the enabler for the creation of new knowledge through unrestricted access to the scientific literature and its underlying data.

Access to research data was very much on our minds in the early 2000s as Wellcome was one of the major funders of the sequencing project to map the complete human genome.  At the time there was a real possibility that the human genome would be completed by a commercial venture, individual genes patented and subsequently placed behind a subscription paywall. Some argued the innovation created by Craig Venter - shotgun sequencing - and his Celera Genomics company sped up the completion and publication of the first draft of the whole genome. This was disputed by those closest to the UK sequencing efforts, including the Wellcome-funded Professor Sir John Sulston at the Sanger Institute, but the competition certainly reignited the debate on what was best for science.¹

Those working in the public domain felt that genetic sequence was too fundamental to scientific progress to be trapped behind a paywall. An open, community-led resource as set out in in the Bermuda Rules would yield the most benefit to society.²  This is now an accepted part of the discipline and the publicly available genomic resources were a major contributor to recent efforts at identifying the underlying virus of COVID-19, its potential origins, tracking variants and ultimately providing the tools to develop effective vaccines. 

In parallel Wellcome was tracking developments in academic publishing and aware of the calls by the Public Library of Science (2000) to make all digital content freely available no later than 6 months after publication.³ This protest was supported by many librarians, including Robert Kiley in the Wellcome Library, who had for many years highlighted their concerns about subscription pricing outstripping inflation coupled with the need to buy whole packages of journals in order to include the most popular titles. In 2002, as part of the work of the Wellcome Policy Unit, I commissioned a report to understand in more detail the economics of academic publishing.⁴ That report published in 2003 and a companion piece in 2004 on the different business models of academic publishing (essentially a comparison of subscription versus open access author pays costs) were heavily quoted in a UK Government Select Committee on Science and Technology which broadly supported a move towards open access through an author-pays model and/or archiving.⁵, ⁶ I won’t go into it here but the figures on publishing costs, the wasteful cost of rejections and the viability of author-pays (for well-funded scientific disciplines) still hold up today.

So, in 2003 Wellcome was already primed to think about how open science approaches could unlock the potential of digital content.  In the spring we received an invitation from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to attend a 1 day workshop on open access publishing.  At the time Wellcome was in transition between Directors so the newly appointed Director Designate, Dr Mark Walport, attended and signed the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing released in June of that year.⁷ This statement provided one of the earliest definitions of what open access publications should be covering: the definition of a licence that allowed the work to be read and digital derivatives created without restriction and that the digital version be archived in an appropriate repository to ensure long-term archiving and interoperability. PubMed Central, established by the US National Library of Medicine in 2000, was highlighted as an appropriate repository. Spurred on by this combination of drivers in 2005 Wellcome introduced its first open access policy as a requirement of its grant conditions, one of the first research funding organizations to do so.  While the importance of use and unrestricted reuse of the literature was always mentioned, it seemed the whole debate about the best way forward for open access quickly became skewed towards addressing how to reform a failing market.  There were endless debates about how to fund article process charges and maintain income streams for learned societies.  If I have a regret, it was not to push those societies further in exploring the scientific and societal benefits of open science, putting to one side the distraction of how academic publishing had become such a money spinner.

One element of the first Wellcome Policy was the need for an appropriate repository.  PubMed Central would have been ideal but not open to non-NIH authors at the time so it was the vision of Robert Kiley at Wellcome to lead on the development of a Wellcome-funded mirror site to PubMed Central, which eventually became Europe PubMed Central.⁸ This did start us off on the right path to realising some of the gains that all articles in a standard computer readable standard (the NLM XML) bring with increasing specificity in searching and the generation of hyperlinks between the text and the data. However, the argument that open access was just better for science remained a footnote.

And then in 2019 a global pandemic hit.

Almost overnight most, not all, publishers dropped their paywalls in an admission that free-to-read access to COVID-19 research papers (not open access) was a necessary response during an emergency. The counterpoint of course is that subscription-based access hinders scientific progress – literally too high a price to pay at the time.

In medical sciences the long held suspicion of preprints fell away, and we saw a necessary and dramatic rise in pre-print deposition as well as their use.⁹ In the World Health Organization the near real time evidence of preprints was essential in developing guidance on everything from ventilation to personal protection equipment (PPE) to potential therapeutics.  An army of volunteers at WHO was needed to search, read and grade this literature. At one time a colleague bemoaned the fact there were over 1400 publications that had some reference to PPE and children that he was supposed to make some sense of in as short a time as possible.

WHO had to quickly re-think how it produced its guidelines. A process that typically took two years following an extensive systematic review of the literature and consideration by experts now had to be truncated into weeks if not days and continuously reviewed for updates. These new ‘Living Guidelines’ hosted by the MAGICapp became an essential resource. Working with the late Tomas Allen, a senior librarian at WHO, I looked at the references used in the 5th edition of a living guideline on therapeutics and COVID-19.¹⁰  I think it is quite telling.

Analysis of the references in version 5 Therapeutics and COVID-19: Living guideline 5 March 2021:

44% pre-prints

33% unpublished results shared directly with WHO

<25% traditional peer reviewed then published papers

So, at a time when we needed reliable research evidence the most, the traditional approach to publishing was not fit for purpose. Some of the high profile journals, in attempts to publish quicker rather than better, rushed papers into print that resulted in the publication of peer reviewed papers that were quickly shown to be baseless without any mechanism to verify their underlying data.¹¹

My colleague Dr Maria van Kerkhove, WHO COVID-19 Technical lead, expressed her feeling at the HDR UK conference in June 2021 where she said, what we have always known, that ‘…just because it is published in a high impact journal doesn’t actually mean it’s good science…’¹²

So publication in a high impact journal does not equal quality.

To me the rapid changes in publication during the pandemic have made up my own mind about where we go from here. In health research, every area has importance, it just might play out on different timescales.  Anti-microbial resistance is a worldwide emergency where all publications and their data need to be openly available, not paywalled.

And we need to link this information across disciplines.  In combating COVID-19 we needed data from chemistry, engineering, architecture, behavioural sciences, not just in medicine.

So, in my opinion, the publication of articles via the web requires a complete re-set in the publication process as demonstrated by the pandemic. The traditional system in no longer fit for purpose it feels like we are trying to run electric vehicles along steam train tracks.  We no longer need journals per se, why do we need volume numbers when we have DOIs? The so called ‘Version of Record’ is outdated and damaging. Science is dynamic and changing – we don’t need to draw a line under something.  Yes, we need good version control but also quicker and more obvious mechanisms to retract false or misleading papers. But not to remove them from the record.

Peer review needs to be open and signed. Papers need to be published first – then peer reviewed – then gain impact.  Giving impact to a paper on publication because of the venue it is published in, is like awarding the gold medal in a race before the runners have set off based on the running shoes they are wearing. The impact factor is a toxic indicator that needs to be stripped out of academia.

And most importantly of all we need research to be as open as possible so we can apply the artificial intelligence that is rapidly developing.  We need better and more focussed searching to find the relevance in a paper and the ability to make the links to the underlying data and across disciplines.  We were saying this back in 2005 but COVID-19 has brought those hopes in to sharp focus and made them a reality.

In conclusion I asked my AI associate, ChatGPT what it ‘thinks’ the future holds for open access.  Here is its answer – which I couldn’t have worded better myself:

As an AI language model, I don't have the ability to predict the future. However, the current trend of Open Access suggests that it will continue to grow in popularity and acceptance. With the rise of digital technologies, it is easier than ever for researchers to publish and access research without the traditional barriers of paywalls and subscription fees. Furthermore, funders, institutions, and governments are increasingly adopting Open Access policies and mandating that research funded by public funds be made openly available to the public. Therefore, it is expected that the future of Open Access will continue to grow and become the default mode of publishing research.¹³

References

Sir John Sulston. Knight in common armor: an interview with Sir John Sulston by Jane Gitschier. PLoS Genet. 2006 Dec 29;2(12):e225. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0020225. PMID: 17196043; PMCID: PMC1756915. ↵

Human Genome Project Archive (1990-2003) https://web.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/research/bermuda.shtml (accessed 28 March 2023). ↵

BROWER V. Public library of science shifts gears. As scientific publishing boycott deadline approached, advocates of free scientific publishing announce that they will create their own online, free-access archive. EMBO Rep. 2001 Nov;2(11):972-3. doi: 10.1093/embo-reports/kve239. PMID: 11713184; PMCID: PMC1084138.↵

Economic analysis of scientific research publishing: a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust,  March 2003. ISBN 1841290475 https://wellcomecollection.org/works/e9edrgbv ↵

Costs and business models in scientific research publishing / a report commissioned by the Wellcome Trust ; compiled by SQW Limited. April 2004. ISBN 1841290513 https://wellcome.org/sites/default/files/wtd003184_0.pdf). ↵

House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Scientific Publications: Free for all? Tenth Report of Session 2003-04 Volume I: Report https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm (accessed 28 March 2023).↵

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing released June 2003 (accessed 28 March 2023) https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4725199/Suber_bethesda.htm ↵

Europe PubMed Central: https://europepmc.org/ (accessed 28 March 2023)↵

Europe PubMed Central Pre-prints: https://europepmc.org/preprints ↵

MAGIC Evidence Ecosystem Foundation. Therapeutics and COVID-19: living guideline:  https://magicevidence.org/.↵

MEHRA MR, RUSCHITZKA F, PATEL AN. Retraction-Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis. Lancet (London, England). 2020 Jun;395(10240):1820. DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31324-6. PMID: 32511943; PMCID: PMC7274621.↵

HDR UK Scientific Conference - Data Insights in a Pandemic.  23 June 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al_gALItQuk (accessed 28 March 2023). ↵

Question ‘what is the future of open access?’ asked to ChatGPT Mar 14 Version 28 March 2023. https://chat.openai.com/chat ↵

The power and importance of open access

Ginny Barbour*
May 2023

I first realised the power and importance of open access when I was working as an editor at the Lancet in the very early 2000s. I also remember the paper that triggered my interest – it was on the risk of stillbirth after caesarean section. It was an important paper, and it was reported on sensationally in the press – that the risk of stillbirth doubled after caesarean section. This result was true as a relative risk, but the absolute risk was small – but you could only understand this if you read the whole paper. And the paper was closed access so most people could not.

It was this paper and the realisation that the Lancet – and indeed other influential medical journals other than the BMJ – were not going to change anytime soon, that set in train the sequence of events that led me to leave the Lancet in early 2004 to set up PLOS Medicine with two other editors, Barbara Cohen and Gavin Yamey, and a committed and talented small staff, who had already launched PLOS Biology in 2003. It was one of the defining moments of my career and led me to be part of what I believe was then the most important development in the dissemination of academic knowledge since journals were founded.

PLOS was founded to make research accessible to all and to do this it aimed to turn publishing on its head through changing the business model – to pay upfront once for the publication of individual articles through article processing charges, instead of the established system then of subscriptions, where of course multiple people paid multiple times to access individual articles. Making research open was a cause I believed passionately in and which I also believed could be combined with a better vision for medical journals: as we said in PLOS Medicine’s first editorial, we aimed to be a medical journal that published on disease that took the greatest toll on health globally. We were ambitious and edgy: we were once called the “journal of left-wing epidemiology” (we took that as a compliment) and in a very proud moment managed to annoy the right-wing American commentator, Rush Limbaugh.

We also wanted to shake up publishing in other ways: PLOS One, launched in 2006, had the astonishing slogan at the beginning “we want to publish your work” – a revolutionary concept in a time of then predominantly selective journals. PLOS also began to incorporate some of the foundations of open science – with requirements for data sharing, and, well, before DORA existed, calling out the problems with impact factors.

What I didn’t have a good realisation of then was the much wider world of open access and the importance of a diversity of models, especially those that provide an alternative to individual article processing charges, such as SciELO and the other Latin American models in particular. We had begun to realise that article processing charges could turn inequity in accessing research into inequity in publishing research and from very early on, fee waivers were built into the PLOS model and budget, but this was a far from satisfactory solution.

When I moved to Australia in 2013 and became director of an open access advocacy organisation – now known as Open Access Australasia – I really became aware of the huge ecosystem of open access models, most recently and eloquently described as bibliodiversity. It became part of my day job to advocate for these diverse models, including, critically in our region, publishing outlets that support local, Indigenous led research. I also gained much greater understanding of the role of university repositories as a route to open access, especially as an alternative to commercial models. I’ve also worked to support a greater understanding of how open access fits into the wider open science landscape.

The last few years have strengthened my opinion that we must have a clear-eyed view of the roles and motives of all participants in the global publishing system. Where open access – and more recently open science – has been most successful is where there has been wide engagement by organisations and individuals across the system, with, crucially, leadership from the top. The COVID pandemic showed us as never so clearly before, just how critical open access and open science is in addressing the global challenges of our times. Yet, even then some traditional publishing companies had to be cajoled to participate and now, as the pandemic recedes in our collective consciousness, many publishers still do not fully embrace open access, unless it can protect their profit margins. I’m completely convinced that if back in 2004 the influential medical journals had decided that they would embrace open access, we would have accelerated adoption across all levels of publishing. That they didn’t, I think, is a real stain on those journals and their publishers. Furthermore, it should make us alert to other activities - around data collection for example, as recently articulated by Sarah Lamdan, in her book Data Cartels, and not walk oblivious into a future dominated by one model of publishing.

The future of open access must be one that is bibliodiverse and equitable. As open access becomes more and more mainstream, there is a collective responsibility that every organisation – whatever their business model – commits to these principles.

“The guy who bangs on about open access”

Martin Paul Eve*
Masy 2023

Among other things, I am a professor of literary studies. But I am best known, for better or worse, even in my own field, as “the guy who bangs on about open access”. For almost two decades I have badgered colleagues about the importance of making our work openly accessible to various publics, rather than locking it away from those who cannot afford to pay. Such activism has made me enemies among those who would uphold the existing system, but the tide is turning. I see a whole cadre of younger researchers in my discipline who want open access for their work (even while they know they must still play the prestige game). And that’s a change.

Why do I care about open access? It’s actually selfish: it’s because I care about the future of my discipline. I see advances elsewhere, in medical science for instance, where much of the literature is now openly accessible, and I worry about the fact that much humanities scholarship is behind paywalls, despite it concerning artworks and histories of cultural objects. You would think that such research would be prime for public consumption. Yet, when even the most politically engaged scholarship sits behind an expensive payment barrier, I am reminded of the well-known aphorism: “If it’s inaccessible to the poor, it is neither radical nor revolutionary”.

I have become more pragmatic as my activism has gone on. Open licensing has been such a battle in the humanities that I have accepted that people want to use the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses, for now. That is, for me, an acceptable compromise on the road to full OA. Indeed, I myself am a fan of the Share Alike licenses; mostly because I want to force others who re-use to make their own creations open!

It has felt, though, like a long, slow road. Even as SciELO celebrates its 25th anniversary, every week I see someone new to open access going through the same initial thought processes. I believe that it is easy to underestimate how many people know nothing about the economics, mechanics, and digitalisation of academic publishing.

I should also note that I have benefited, personally, from open access. I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, vasculitis, neurological hearing damage, kidney failure, and secondary immunodeficiency. Having access to medical articles has made me an informed patient, even when I could not get to a library, because I was in hospital. There are many people, though, who when arguing against open access would have said that I did not deserve that access. They would have said that I didn’t need access, or that I wouldn’t understand it, or that I could have just gone to the library. In every case, they would have been wrong.

My hope is that we will see a nearly 100% transition to open access in my lifetime, for journals and academic books. Academia changes at a glacial pace and so I am not naive enough to think that we will have an overnight switch. But given my health problems and related reduced life expectancy, this is perhaps a more ambitious timescale than you might think! However, if we can achieve this, I feel the world in which I have moved will have become a better place than when I arrived.

Reflections on the Development of the Open Access Movement

Melissa Hagemann*
May 2023

With roughly 50% of journal articles published as Open Access, more has been achieved to make research openly available to read than we could have hoped for when we defined OA through the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). However, it was never our goal to help launch a movement that would make research openly available to read, while at the same time creating new barriers for authors to publish. And the barriers to publish, including APCs, are not impacting academics evenly. Equity has been at the heart of our vision since we first gave this idea a name, and we must continue to strive to create a scholarly communication system that serves the whole global research community.

A year after the Open Society Institute (OSI) released the BOAI, I worked with legal experts to explore the copyright status of federally funded research. Our study concluded that governments are free to make the research they fund openly available. OSI then supported SPARC to advocate for public access to publicly funded research. We expanded our advocacy support to include the EU, as well as developing and transition countries through SPARC Europe and EIFL, respectively. Over the years, various governments around the world have adopted policies supporting public access to the research they fund, but often with one-year embargoes. Last August, thanks to the tireless work of SPARC and their partners over two decades, we saw our greatest victory, as the Biden Administration adopted a new policy that will make all US federally funded research openly available upon publication. And at the end of February, it was reported that the EU is likely to adopt a similar policy.

While OA policies are being considered and adopted around the world, the movement faces many challenges, including those that have created new barriers for authors to publish. To address the pressing challenges facing OA today, and to mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI, we worked with leaders of the OA movement to develop the BOAI20 Recommendations. Released last year, the new recommendations emphasize that “OA is not an end in itself, but a means to further ends. Above all, it is a means to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.” And to achieve these further ends, the BOAI20 recommends “inclusive publishing and distribution channels that never exclude authors on economic grounds. We recommend moving away from article processing charges (APCs).”

SciELO’s publishing model has long served as a global exemplar of what can be achieved when equity is placed at the heart of the publishing system. Decades before “Diamond” OA had been defined, SciELO was making all their journals openly available, without charging APCs. However, Juan Pablo Alperin has warned that the Diamond model, pioneered in Latin America, is under threat: “APCs have become ubiquitous in the global north, embraced by for-profit journals and encouraged by many leading European and US funders. The vibrant publishing ecosystem in Latin America (and elsewhere in the global south) will not be left unscathed.” 

In addition to their publishing successes, SciELO also plays a leading role in advocating for OA globally. In 2005, SciELO spearheaded the development of the Salvador Declaration on Open Access: a developing world perspective, which urged governments to consider the cost of publishing as part of the cost of research. I was lucky enough to participate in the International Seminar on Open Access, organized by Abel Packer in Salvador, which produced the declaration, and was thrilled to collaborate on such a forward-looking global statement.

On SciELO’s 25th anniversary, the organization continues to play a critical role in the global OA movement, and I look forward to celebrating their achievements throughout the year.

Open Access in India: A long way to go and miles before we sleep 

Subbiah Arunachalam*
May, 2023

Happy Silver Jubilee SciELO! The entire Global South is proud of what you folks in Latin America have achieved in the past 25 years.

When I received an invitation to contribute a short personal account of my OA journey, I was thrilled. It was at the 10th International Conference of Science Editors hosted by BIREME and SciELO in Rio in August 2000 that I first spoke about Open Access Archiving outside of India. It was also then I first met Stevan Harnad, although I had corresponded with him before, and Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan, all three of whom became comrades-in-arms in my campaign for promoting open access.

My path to OA advocacy

I think I was destined to be an Open Access advocate. Growing up under the care of my mother till I was 12 and the three years (from age 5 to 8) I spent with a Gandhian social reformer at the Children’s Home he ran instilled in me the belief that everything is for sharing and public good is above self-interest.  After my Master’s, I worked as a scientific assistant at a national laboratory in a mofussil town in the deep South. From there I moved to editing scientific journals in New Delhi, where I had access to many good libraries and all kinds of people and ideas, and was exposed to global art, music, theatre, talks, poIitics, activism and much else. New Delhi transformed me, a small-towner, into a world citizen and an information scientist. And much later in life, in my mid-50s, my conviction on sharing and public good was reinforced when I, on my own initiative, joined Prof. M S Swaminathan’s Research Foundation, where I could feel and see in practice how access to information could help transform the lives of the poor.

My limited experience in laboratory research and editing journals made it amply clear that information is key to research and development. I obtained through friends at the British Council Library tape-slide presentations on searching information and used them in the many talks I gave at academic institutions (such as INSDOC, AIIMS and IITM). 

In January 1975, I invited Gene Garfield to the Indian Academy of Sciences in Bengaluru (where I was editor-cum-Secretary) for three days of talks at several institutions and discussion with researchers. Meeting with him led to the opening of new doors. Association with men like Garfield, Mike Moravcsik and Harnad led to a clear appreciation of the state of scholarly communication and science in the developing world.

All through this period, India was short of dollars, libraries were starved for funds and journals, and scientists and students depended largely on word of mouth and reprint request cards for their research. It was clear to me that to do science one has to “stand upon the shoulders of giants to see further,” or in simple English, have access to the work done around the world as well as make one’s own work visible to researchers everywhere. Seuen Ogunseitan, the Nigerian science journalist had felt the same way too. At the two-day workshop on Advances in Information Access held at ISI, Philadelphia, in 1982, I proposed differential pricing of journals and databases to make them affordable to people from developing countries. Immediately after the workshop, I visited several US cities and met many Indian academics and requested them not to throw away their personally subscribed journal issues but to send them to me so I could distribute them among some needy and deserving colleges in India. Later I even spoke to Garfield about shipping the thousands of journal issues received at ISI for preparing Current Contents to me (instead of shredding) so I could distribute them to Indian academic libraries! My long-time friend and catalysis researcher Balasubramanian Viswanathan was a pillar of strength in this and several other of my efforts. The idea did not materialize, though.

My engagement with OA

After returning from Rio, I was even more determined to make India a fully OA country. I launched a campaign, nay a blitzkrieg, gave many talks across the country, wrote many articles, and wrote to members of Parliament, individual scientists, directors, vice chancellors, and Secretaries of science-related Departments (and met some of them). I kept writing about OA in an online list serving over 6,000 librarians and information professionals. I continue doing that even now. I was interviewed by, among others, Richard Poynder (four times), Leslie Chan, ACCESS, Biomed Central, the Harvard Beckmann Centre, IISc’s CONNECT magazine, and the DBT-Wellcome Alliance.

In the early days, starting from the late 1990s, three great institutions, viz. M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian Institute of Science, and not to forget the then fledgling Centre for Internet & Society, provided invaluable support to the movement. Many global experts - including Stevan Harnad, Alma Swan, Barbara Kirsop, Leslie Chan, Leslie Carr, John Willinsky, and Abel Packer - visited India to promote the culture of OA. Although Peter Suber and Richard Poynder have not visited India, they have done much to promote OA in India (and the world). British Council, IDRC, and the Open Society Foundation, provided financial and logistical support. Larsen & Toubro, an Engineering company, supported the first ever conference in India, in 2000, where Harnad spoke about scholarly skywriting and the need for self-archiving.

Notable among the workshops I organized are:

Two three-day workshops on electronic publishing for editors facilitated by Barbara Kirsop and Leslie Chan being;

Two three-day workshops on open access and EPrints repositories facilitated by Leslie Carr of the EPrints team from Southampton, Leslie Chan, T B Rajashekar and D K Sahu; and

A session at the Indian Science Congress, Hyderabad, Jan 2006, with Alma Swan as the key speaker.

I helped CSIR and the National Aerospace Laboratory to host OA workshops in New Delhi and Bengaluru with Leslie Chan and John Willinsky acting as resource persons.

Some success stories

ARD Prasad and I conducted an OA awareness session at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, which later set up the first OA institutional repository in the CGIAR system.

I tried and succeeded in persuading the CGIAR management, based on the experience of ICRISAT, to adopt a system-wide open access policy [https://poynder.blogspot.com/2010/05/].

With a view to strengthening the culture of OA in other emerging (and low-income) economies, I organized a two-day workshop in 2006 with financial support from OSF. Participants came from China, Brazil, South Africa, Ethiopia, etc. and also from Germany, UK and USA. We came up with the Bangalore Declaration[See https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5832.html, and Barbara Kirsop, Current Science, Vol. 92 (10 Feb 2007), 276-77 and]. As of 2021, 39.5% papers from China, 47.5% of papers from Brazil, 50.1% of papers from Argentina, and 57% of papers from South Africa are OA.

It didn’t take a minute for the Director General of CSIR (in 2011) and the Secretary of DBT and DST (in 2014) to accept my suggestion that research funded by their departments must be made openly accessible through institutional/national level repositories. Today we have many institutional repositories and two national level repositories, CSIR Central and Science Central. Unfortunately, the implementation of their policies is tardy. 

Other champions of OA

I am not the only one who has been trying to promote the culture of OA in India. Padmanabhan Balaram, a name to reckon with in Indian science, wrote many editorials in Current Science on the need to adopt OA, especially OA archiving. Sahu, a pediatrician, created a great platform for OA journals and helped many medical societies make their journals OA. 

ARD Prasad, one of India’s finest information scientists, Rajashekar, the man behind India’s first institutional repository, Francis Jayakanth, Muthu Madhan, the man responsible for India’s first institutional OA mandate, have all made significant contributions. Arul George Scaria, a professor of Law, wrote a comprehensive report on open science in India (and South Asia). 

Status of OA in India today

The status of OA today in the country is not at all encouraging.

In India there are 55,000 higher education institutions  (including more than 1,170 universities and nearly 43,800 colleges) today [https://www.statista.com/statistics/660862/higher-education-institutions-bytype-india/], but less than 150 institutional open access repositories. Many of these repositories are incomplete; not all papers published by an institution's researchers find their way into the institution's repository.

India, with over 1,37,000 papers in 2021, is seventh in number of papers published, as per Web of Science. But, with only about 30% of papers from India available as open access (as of 2021, as against 50.2% for the world) India is third from the bottom in a list of about 200 countries in % share of OA documents, just above North Korea (293 papers, 18.8% OA) and French Polynesia (one paper, 0% OA). What is distressing is that most of India’s OA papers are open through paying APC paid out of taxpayers’ money. But in fields like Astronomy & Astrophysics and Particles and Fields, more than 84% of Indian papers are OA, largely thanks to arXiv.

The situation would have been far better had Indian researchers self-archived their papers and the funders insisted on making publicly funded research OA.

There is much talk about OA in India. It is time for walking the talk. At times when I feel a bit let down, I remember Pasternak’s wise utterance, “you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.” And the statement on my Terry Fox Run T-shirt, “I am not a quitter.”

Liège, a cradle of academic Open Access voluntarism

Bernard Rentier*
May 2023

SciELO was the first continent-wide organisation I heard of when I became interested in Open Access (OA) and it appeared to me as a real proof of concept.

First awakening

My experience as a researcher and teacher gave me a strong desire for efficient bibliography management and for a wide access to scientific literature. I had tasted a bit of that during my stay at the US NIH, from 1976 to 1981, where I benefited from the outstanding institutional library and the nearby National Library of Medicine. Such a total access was allowed by the financial means of these institutions. Back in Belgium, the limitation of access was all the more cruel...

Some twenty years later, in 1997, my election to the Université de Liège (ULiège) vice-rectorate put me in charge of research and bibliographic resources. Simone Jérôme, the director of the Sciences Faculty Library, introduced me to the advances by OA pioneers such as Stevan Harnad, Jean-Claude Guédon, Alma Swan or Peter Suber. I felt the need to engage my University in the OA movement, starting with the signing of the Berlin Declaration.

ORBi

As rector in 2005, I undertook a proactive OA policy concerning our researcher’s publications. Paul Thirion, the director of the library network, and his team developed an institutional repository that we called ORBi (Open Repository of Bibliography)¹. The originality of the project, for the time, lay in the obligation of deposit imposed on authors. At the beginning, compliance was low, as researchers considered this deposit as an administrative hassle. This difficulty was initially resolved by the decision of the university's Board of Directors to consider only their publications accessible in full text in ORBi for any evaluation of researchers. In a second phase and quite quickly, the researchers understood the multiple advantages that the process brought them, and compliance was rapidly increased, reaching more than 80% within two years, a ratio never reached in universities that simply leave the deposit optional. Many features helped meeting our needs² and were (and still are) much appreciated by the users.

Today, ORBi has produced offspring in the universities of Luxembourg (ORBiLux) and Mons (ORBiMons).

EOS and PASTEUR4OA

The ULiège quickly gained a reputation for this mandate and, as rector, I was invited to many places, including several South American universities, to describe the method and its successful results. This was also the time when, in 2009, at the instigation of Alma Swan, we created EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship)³, an association promoting open access to scientific publications, which I had the honour of chairing until its termination in 2016, rapidly endorsed by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics)⁴. It included pioneers mentioned above, S. Harnad, P. Suber and A. Swan, together with Tom Cochrane, William Dar, Martin Hall, Keith Jeffery, Sijbolt Noorda, Stuart Shieber, Ian Simpson, John Willinsky and myself. This association enabled us to promote the principles of OA, and then progressively those of Open Science, throughout the world.

EOS is the originator of the PASTEUR4OA project, Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research (funded by the Seventh European Framework Programme for Research and Development, FP7)⁵.

Impact in Belgium

In 2018, the French-speaking part of Belgium adopted a decree aiming at the establishment of a policy of OA directly inspired by the institutional policy of the ULiège already in place for 10 years at that time. The decree is applicable to all French-speaking universities and public research centers in Belgium and it covers all publications concerning research carried out in whole or in part with public funds⁶.

Drawbacks and difficulties

It would be a great oversimplification to suggest that implementing OA was easy. First of all, we had to overcome fierce resistance from publishers, both large and small⁷. As university leaders, we have experienced pressure in the form of threats of lawsuits as well as seduction attempts, but the tremendous development of the OA and of the associated concepts of Open Science as well as the objective benefits of universal access to scientific information have gained a strong support with many researchers. The resistance came first from the researchers, of course, but in an indirect way: disagreement of their hierarchy, of their evaluators whoever they were and of a large part of the scientific establishment. It was then that the need arose for a thorough review of the criteria for evaluating research, researchers, and their careers.

Matrix, not metrics

In 2016, I had the privilege of co-chairing the «Working Group on Rewards under Open Science» set up by the European Commissioner for Research Carlos Moedas. We were tasked with exploring this issue and we published in 2017 a report under the auspices of the European Commission entitled "Evaluation of Research Careers fully acknowledging Open Science Practices - Rewards, incentives and/or recognition for researchers practicing Open Science"⁸.

In summary, we made the following proposals:

A more comprehensive recognition and reward system incorporating Open Science (OS) must become part of the recruitment criteria, career progression and grant assessment procedures for researchers at all carriers levels.

There should be a review of the European Research Area policies, roadmaps and national action plans through the lens of OS and policies must be updated to ensure compatibility with OS.

Researcher participation in OS should be encouraged through support and funding mechanisms.

The assessment of researchers during recruitment, career progression and grant evaluation should be structured to encompass the full range of their achievements including OS, using the instrument OS-Career Assessment Matrix (OS-CAM) that takes into consideration the full range of achievements to reflect diverse career paths. There should also be a validation process on the content and feasibility of the OS-CAM in researcher assessment as well as taking into account the wide spectrum of disciplines, research funding and research performing organisations.

This document has been included in the European Union's Open Science Toolkit and it has been adopted by the DORA organization on a worldwide scale⁹.

The Open Data challenge

The next step without which a truly open science cannot be envisaged, is full and open access to the original data on which scholarly articles are built. Here, the reluctance comes essentially from the researchers themselves or their supervisors, who consider their data as their property and as the best guarantee of their professional progress. Reproducibility imperatives are however at stake. Having launched the European Strategy for Data in February 2020, the EU proposed a global approach to foster data sharing across sectors and to make more data available for R&I¹⁰.

Along these lines, the EU adopted the Digital Services Act ("DSA") on October 4, 2022, imposing new rules on intermediary service providers (cloud services, file sharing services, search engines, social networks and online marketplaces) that will be fully applicable on February 17, 2024. Designed with the large technology sector in mind, and particularly the GAFAM, it  applies also to institutional repositories in higher education, resulting in administrative burden and cost. Science Europe¹¹ and many other organisations such as the EUA, CESAER, COAR, LIBER, thé Coimbra Group, LERU, etc, request that data users for scientific research purposes, digital repositories and not-for-profit libraries be excluded from the DSA scope and obligations.

Hope

When looking upon the long journey since the first initiatives towards free access, two major principles emerge. First, nothing would have been possible without building adhesion to an ideal of sharing and solidarity. Second, always keep in mind that these advances are fragile in front of the power of profit, backed up by the resistance of some academics who try to preserve the old system or who firmly believe that the quality of science can only be guaranteed within the framework of a costly edition business¹².

As long as an influential part of the establishment does not curb their enthusiasm, and as long as they are offered adequate training, the hope for universal open science lies mainly with the new generations.

Publication Equity: a neglected aspect of open access?

David C Prosser*
May 2023

Just over twenty years ago, in October of 2002, I had the honour of becoming the first Executive Director of SPARC Europe. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) had been formed in the US by the library community as a response to what was called back then the ‘serials crisis’. Journal subscription fees were rising year-on-year greatly in excess of inflation, library budgets could not keep pace, and so institutions were cutting subscriptions – slowly reducing the number of titles that libraries could make available to readers.

SPARC was set up to help provide community-owned, low-cost journals in competition to high-priced titles from for-profit publishers. But in February 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) was published setting out the moral case for open access and outlining two parallel approaches to practical implementation. Although the idea of open access was not new and there was already some experimentation around models, the BOAI crystalized thinking and showed many that there was a new game in town. No longer would the community look to create competition for subscription journals, but instead pivoted towards promoting and supporting open access routes. (It is worth noting that Rick Johnson, the founding director of SPARC, was at the original Budapest meeting.)

So, when SPARC Europe was formed – taking the European members of SPARC as its foundation – the focus was entirely on open access rather than alternative subscription journals. And access to research was the key. Western subscription journals were, effectively, closed to authors from the global south. It is sobering to note that even today, a third of the papers published in The New England Journal of Medicine came from within 200 or so miles of Boston, home of that journal. While an extreme example, it was the case that these ‘prestige’ journals rarely published papers by corresponding authors from, say, sub-Sahara Africa. This was around the beginning of the growth of China as a science superpower, and Japan was already well represented, but in general these journals were a western club, publishing western research for a mainly western audience. There were some schemes to widen readership – such as Research4life – but, as I recall, none to widen authorship.

So, my focus in SPARC Europe was on advocating for the opening-up of research that was currently being published in these journals. Making them available to interested readers both within academia globally, but also to the general public outside academia (such as journalists, policy makers, the incurably curious). And twenty years ago, that in itself was an uphill struggle. The case for open access to research had not yet been accepted and it was often greeted with indifference. (I still remember the talk I gave at one university to the three academics who were sufficiently interested in open access to turn up!)

Opening up equity around authorship and publication routes was not at that time on the agenda. That was probably a blind spot on my part and many other western open access advocates. Our campaign was focused and perhaps too narrow. But with the prize of open access to the journal literature still tantalizingly beyond reach, there was a concern that we didn’t take on too much and dilute the message. Topics such as open peer review, data sharing, open textbooks, were all being discussed at that time, but were they a distraction from open access? These issues were naturally important, as was equity of publication routes for all authors, but they were separate issues. Opening up the research in journals and diversifying the demographics of the authorship seemed too much to achieve in one go.

However, there were people who were not only thinking about these issues together, but doing something about them. I don’t recall exactly when I first heard about SciELO, but by 2006 I was including links to it in my standard ‘what is open access’ presentations. (I see that I also mention the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which by that year was listing a total of ‘2,400 peer reviewed journals’. There are now at just over 19,000!)

What I admired about SciELO then I admire now. They were early adaptors of what has become known as ‘Diamond’ journals. (In 2006 they were just ‘gold’ journals, before ‘gold’ became irrevocably and unhelpfully associated with Article Processing Charges (APCs).) They were multi-lingual – accepting that there are circumstances where using English is better for a global audience, but also recognising that there are times when not using English gives greater impact to the research that is being published. But of greatest note to me sitting at my desk in the global west was SciELO’s refusal to play the western scholarly communication game. Not to chase impact factors or to priorities ‘prestige’ journals. Rather than attempt to engage on an unfair playing field, they created their own, which respected local traditions and built a solid, multi-national consortium that provided equity of access to publication routes as well as equity of access to the research.

Over the years I wondered why other regions did not follow suit and adopt this model as vigorous as SciELO had done. Europe and North America always felt too addicted to the high impact factor journal to make such a radical move – hence the time and energy we spend with legacy publishers negotiating ‘transitional’ and ‘transformative’ journals. But elsewhere? A range of initiatives have started and had success, but it is hard to think of any that has made such an impact as SciELO.

Perhaps as we in the west become more attuned to the issues of APCs and as even well-resourced researchers hesitate at paying €10,000 publication fees, we will look again at the range of options available for authors. Greater attention is being paid to alternative business models, especially diamond, and the issues of journal ownership. We face a classic collective action problem to move entirely away from our addiction to and reliance on the journals owned by the large publisher. But as we consider these issues, we can look towards SciELO as a model of how to do this well, in a sustainable and equitable manner.

In the meantime, I wish SciELO a happy 25th Anniversary and salute everybody who has worked to initiate and sustain such a valuable resource that has realized in such a concrete way the vision of open access.

My Open Access librarian’s story

Hélène Bosc
May 2023

In the 1990s, I worked as scientific librarian at the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA today INRAe), in the Centre de Tours (France). INRA counted about 4300 researchers working in 213 units distributed in 19 centres. All centres had important documentary resources. There were about 50 researchers in my unit and I was in charge of 130 scientific journals in life sciences and 20 technical agriculture journals. At that time, journals were only printed and the serials crisis was upon us all.

1995: INRA journals turning electronic and free?

I met Jean-Claude Guédon, in 1995 at Bordeaux University where he had been invited  to give a conference on the possibility of fighting against this crisis. He talked about the free electronic journal “Surfaces” that he had created, in 1991. In 1995-96, there were a lot of other new free and peer reviewed electronic journals. For example, Documenta Mathematica created in 1996 by Ulf Rehmann and Psycoloquy created in 1989 by Stevan Harnad (with open peer commentary). I became persuaded that if a researcher alone, had succeeded in creating a free electronic journal, a large institute like INRA could easily do the same. INRA was the owner of some 10 journals that it had created and published between the 1960s and 1980s. These journals were under contract with the publisher EDP Science in the 1990s, but they could have been reclaimed by INRA. I would have liked the Head of Communication to become aware of the new possibilities. Despite persistence, however, I was not successful in getting Guédon invited to a meeting in Paris at the end of 1995. Nevertheless, I never gave up on the idea and in 2003, I succeeded in giving two talks specially addressed to the INRA editors, presenting Green and Gold Open Access (specially the BMC journals not yet known in France). I finally managed, to get Guédon invited to participate in an INRA seminar in 2004.  In 2006, however, the INRA publishing policy elected to leave its journals with Elsevier (with Gold Access) or BMC (later taken over by Springer).

2002: Open Access Initiative (OAI) and self-archiving

I met Stevan Harnad at a conference organized for librarians in France in Lyon in 1997 and I subscribed to the new forum he created in 1998: the American Scientist Open Access September Forum. It allowed me to collect a lot of information on the very new scientific medium of electronic communication and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) for making it interoperable.  In 2000, I decided to share my knowledge and created a web page at INRA: “La communication scientifique revue et corrigée par Internet” (“Scientific communication edited and reviewed by Internet”). It was updated monthly, till my retirement in 2005 (see the pdf of the last web page). 

The archive “Animal Physiology and Livestock system”

If changing INRA journals to make them free online was not under my responsibility, I knew that self-archiving was the other Green Road to OA that I could try for freeing the research results. Therefore, at the end of 2001, with my lab computer technician’s help, I succeeded in implementing an OAI-compliant archive. He had found a very old and slow computer and had downloaded the free software Eprints.org (Southampton University). I started to fill the archive very legally with 2 or 3 articles and in October 2002, I obtained my Head of Department’s official agreement. But I also had to get the agreement of the Head of Communication of INRA. After three months, I obtained that too! That is how, in 2003 “Animal Physiology and Livestock system” (also called PHASE), one of the first OAI archive in France, was born. When I retired 2 years later, it was filled with 54 researchers’ publications of my unit.  That may sound like very few, but I first had to convince each author that they could auto-archive legally. I described 4 possibilities:

Archiving their older publications in INRA journals (the years when INRA was its own publisher)

Retaining copyright (this was possible at this time in some journals)

Depositing the final, revised draft before acceptance (following Harnad’s recommendations)  

Publishing in gold OA journals like BMC

It was difficult for researchers to decide to publish in BMC journals because they lacked the ISI Impact Factor in the first years since their launch (1999). My Head of Department tried the experiment of publishing in BMC Neuroscience in 2003 and after his rapid positive experience, other researchers in my unit followed suit. At that time my own unit counted about 50 researchers. But in all of INRA there were about 4,000. It could have been possible to provide free access to at least 3,000 INRA publications in two years if other archives like mine had been launched in each INRA Centre.

The BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative)

In the beginning of February 2002, I was invited to join the small French group in charge of the translation of the BOAI declaration into French just before its worldwide launch on the 14th of February. In translating the document, it occurred to me that the use of “Libre Accès” (Free Access) in French, was richer in significance, than “Accès Ouvert”, the literal translation. This terminology has been adopted by francophones but when the movement started to grow worldwide “Libre Accès” returned to the international expression “Open Access”.

OAI workshops at CERN

The first OAI workshop was organized in 2001 by European scientific librarians at CERN, in Geneva; the second, in 2002, was: The Open Archives Initiative (OAI): Gaining independence with e-prints archives. As I had already launched an e-print archive, I was asked to convene a francophone round table on “Launching a digital archive”. There were about 12 attendees. Two were from France, one or two from CERN and about eight from Belgium. This last high number is probably due to the influence of Simone Jérome, librarian at the Liège University and very active in promoting OA till her retirement in 2002. 

2003: The acceleration of the OA movement

In the first years of 2000, few researchers were ready to undertake such a change in their way of sharing their scientific results. Fortunately, in 2003 three physicists, Euroscience members, Simeon Anguelov, Pierre Baruch and Françoise Praderie, discovered my trial of self-archiving and perceived its interest. They asked me to join Euroscience and give a talk about Open Access at the first ESOF meeting in Stockholm in 2004. Later I was in charge of organizing a mini-conference on self-archiving at Munich ESOF 2006 -- a 3-days meeting where 400 speakers were giving talks on diverse subjects. I invited Alma Swan, Eloy Rodriguez, Eberhard Hilf and Stevan Harnad [LPG1] to give talks.  They were the best champions for Green OA via self-archiving at that time. Nevertheless, in presenting my project, I first had some difficulties in getting Pierre Baruch to agree to invite Harnad. Why? Because Harnad’s vision of distributed OAI archives was the opposite of the idea of centralised archiving defended by Franck Laloë, a French physicist, and emerging since 2001 in France. Laloë had begun, with the participation of CNRS, a project for a centralised preprint archive (HAL) for all CNRS publications (not only physics). I had some mail exchanges with him at that time. One among the several points of disagreement was centralization. We were at the very beginning of self-archiving and this “faraway” archive would probably not have been adopted by researchers of different French universities. Harnad’s strategy proposing an archive in each university (connected together via OAI HTM) seemed me easier launching and filling an archive rapidly. The best examples of success in rapidly filling archives are the archive created by Eloy Rodriguez at Minho University in 2003 and the archive ORBI in 2007 created by Bernard Rentier at Liège University with Paul Thirion’s participation.

Despite my reports, publications and talks, I did not succeed in convincing the INRA decision makers of what was at stake in rapidly implementing  OAI archives with a free already existing software such as E-prints or CDSware (CERN). INRA’s Head of Communication at that time had preferred a purpose-designed software. After two years of technical trials an open archive, ProdINRA, was launched in 2006. In 2004, a young scientist has been recruited as the Head of Communication. She showed her interest in OA from the beginning. She is now Head of Open Science at INRAe. Following a new policy since 2020, INRAe articles are deposited in HAL.

Interest in OA has been growing since 2002. In 2003-2004 there were more than 20 international meetings per month about OA organized around the world. In consequence, between 2002 and 2010, I was invited to give many talks on OA and self-archiving in France as well as in Europe (Stockholm, Budapest, and Berlin). Thanks to Iryna Kuchma (EIFL) I could also present my experience in Africa, at Dakar University, in 2010.

Conclusion

In France, the initial objectives and policy of the OA archive HAL, as they were originally presented in the 2000s, have progressively changed. It is now the main French archive. In 2021, the percentage of French OA publications was 56% and the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education adopted  its second plan for reaching full OA in 2030. Some will say: “Fine,” But I would add “30 years of research access, usage and impact needlessly lost since 2000”. Failing to anticipate the power of internet (and probably preferring to stay “comfortable”) the majority of decision makers in France and everywhere in the world (except Latin America) have been too slow to measure what is at stake with full OA: a global window of access on the research output of every country and accelerated and enhanced scientific progress throughout the world.  

Sivulile – “We are Open” – in South Africa

Susan Veldsman*
May 2023

My journey as an Open Access Advocacy driver started at the now University of Johannesburg (in South Africa) when a colleague and I installed the National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) repository software in ignorance, intending to conquer and change the world. This was one of the first such initiatives in South Africa. The software of NDLTD was established and launched in 1996. As its scope became international, in 1998 interested institutions began meeting annually for what would become a series of symposia on electronic theses and dissertations sponsored by NDLTD and designed to help universities initiate Electronic Thesis and Dissertations (ETD) projects.

My colleague and I decided on our own that it be a good idea to load the then Rand Afrikaans University (in Johannesburg, South Africa)’s, Master’s and Doctoral theses and dissertations on an unused server, loaded with the necessary NDLTD software. Our objectives were to see how easy it would be to load, and what challenges we would experience. We were very inspired by the possible exposure the research would elicit and wanted to be the first adopters in South Africa in this arena of hosting open, accessible, and visible Masters’s and Doctoral theses and dissertations. We hoped that this would solve the problem of searching for misplaced and stolen theses and dissertations for very unhappy students who believed that their career and pass rates were dependent on those publications!! We were very proud of the result and thought we were very innovative, forward-thinking, and proactive!!! Just to be called in by our Chief Director of the Library returning from a Senate meeting, to be asked:

Did you ask permission from any Management to load the thesis and dissertations – as the University holds the copyright?

How will you maintain the server, and with what monies?

Who will train the librarians to solicit and load them, and readers to use the system?

Have you built a proper workflow to ensure that once students graduate that we receive an electronic copy?

What about plagiarism?

What is open access and why should we support this?

We don’t want those things openly available. And we are concerned about quality issues!

I can confidently say that this was the fastest way to learn lessons regarding the building blocks of OA and its adoption into the research community. This lesson served as a blueprint to me as to what processes are needed to implement OA and ultimately Open Science, in institutions, and eventually country adoption through OA policies.

Fortunately, we were soon forgiven, and our Library Director was drawn into the establishment of eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) as a Board Member, and I was nominated as country coordinator for South Africa, from 2000- 2005. Due to my growing interest and work in OA, I was employed by eIFL (2005-2009) responsible for negotiating country licenses for commercial access to databases and open access. This move led to one of the most rewarding periods in my career.

eIFL works with libraries worldwide to enable access to digital information for people in developing and transition countries. They are an international not-for-profit organization based in Vilnius, Lithuania, with a global network of partners.

At eIFL the sky is the limit, and they allow energetic people to move the organisation forward. I was privileged to attend the very first meeting of eIFL in Budapest in 2002, and the first AGM in St Petersburg, Russia later that year. I was also granted an exceptional opportunity to visit Tehran, Iran, alongside Rima Kupryte, Monika Segbert, and Alexander Kuznetsov as resource persons in the eIFL workshop in 2005.

I was also the founder member of the informal group Sivulile ("We are Open" in isiXhosa) – which came together in 2004 to support OA developments through advocacy, policy, technology, and research in South Africa. In 2004, the first conference was held that introduced the OA model in South Africa – “OA Scholarly Communications” This conference was held and co-hosted by eIFL, the Open Society Institute, and the South African Site Licensing Initiative (SASLI), now the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC). In May 2005, the first Institutional Repository (IR) workshop in South Africa (a three-day event coordinated by SASLI and CSIR/CILLA), was held with the support of eIFL, that provided hands-on training on setting up and managing an IR), as well as the third key event co-sponsored by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), aimed at broadening awareness of OA in the region.

A second highlight of my career was when in January 2009, I was appointed to the position of Director: the Scholarly Publication Programme at the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf). In this position I am responsible for driving the Open Science agenda by advocating for the opening up of the entire research process from agenda-setting to the dissemination of findings; and by raising the visibility, discoverability, and accessibility of South African scholarly journals through OA and online journal content management systems.

My Open Access journey over the last 23 years has at times been frustrating and sometimes it has felt that the country’s research community would never embrace the Open Access / Open Science agenda; as well as the benefits that OA would bring to the National System of Innovation, and international partnerships. However, I can report that 50% of South Africa’s output (Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative¹ is open accessible, with 44 institutional repositories registered in DOAR, 115 journals indexed in DOAJ, and 14 research data repositories registered, despite challenges.

However, two main events in South Africa changed the OS landscape going forward:

Firstly, in June 2021 South Africa National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC) members adopted principles to replace existing journal reading subscription agreements (which no longer served the interest of our researchers and the South African National System of Innovation), with agreements that incorporate online reading and publishing services. In so doing, the research agenda and the dissemination developed towards negotiating agreements that would incorporate pre-established principles that reflect the needs of research institutions.

Secondly, an inclusive stakeholder workshop was held, in December 2016, to develop a set of recommendations for consideration by the authors of the Open Science Framework for South Africa. The topic of these discussions was Open Science, which encompasses Open Access to scholarly publications, open data, and open and collaborative research, all essentially related to the democratization of knowledge in South Africa. The workshop provided the sector with an opportunity to think collectively and offer advice on moving the system forward to achieve the objectives of national digital policies.

This led to the draft DSI National Open Science Policy, currently waiting to be discussed in parliament, which requires both open access to scholarly publications and research outputs and an open data policy that facilitates equal opportunity of access to research data. The National Open Science Policy is set in a broader government policy context of socio-economic development that takes cognizance of global issues codified within the Sustainable Development Goals. This to me signals a far better opportunity for the adoption of Open Science principles in research and taking the notion of openness to the next level. It will certainly broaden the benefits of science, both to research and to society at large; recognize that reproducibility and validation of scientific results are required for science to remain credible; and ensure technology changes that both enable and require, new mechanisms for scientific endeavor.

In conclusion, looking back, it has been a very exciting journey to reach a point where I am responsible for driving the Open Science agenda, raising the visibility, discoverability, and accessibility of South African scholarly journals, improving the quality of its research output, and support the development of policy frameworks to facilitate optimal use and access to publicly funded research. I also received the Electronic Publishing Trust (EPT) award for my outstanding contribution to the promotion of Open Access in Developing Countries.

Reflections on twenty-five years of the Public Knowledge Project

John Willinsky*

In 1998, out of a similarly inspired optimism, I’m sure, around the internet’s seeming promise for sharing knowledge in new ways, which must have played a part in founding SciELO, I initiated the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Given their common goals, and the long and close association of the two initiatives, it seems fitting to share something like the PKP origin story “from the very early days of open access,” as a tribute to this shared 25th Anniversary between SciELO and PKP.

Before PKP was PKP, it was PKp. The initial project arose out of a modest gift to the University of British Columbia from Pacific Press, a company that owned Vancouver’s two newspapers, the Vancouver Sun and Province. On learning of this gift to UBC, where I was a Faculty of Education professor, I proposed a Pacific Press Professorship that would direct the funds toward using the internet to increase public access to research and scholarship. This would complement Pacific Press journalism, I suggested, as well as advance educational goals, by expanding the storehouse of public knowledge.

As the new Pacific Press Professor, I was invited by the Vancouver Sun editor-in-chief, John D. Cruikshank, to come by the paper and discuss with him and a few Sun reporters how this public knowledge connection might work between university and newspaper. We decided to collaborate on a news series dealing with the hot topic of computers in education. To the Sun’s stories (only on paper), PKp would add a website of relevant research with an expert on hand to lead a discussion.

It ran for a week in April 1999 with reporting on, among other things, gender discrimination in computer classes, shortfalls in technology funding for the schools, and the introduction of internet access in libraries. Three graduate students and I had set up a website with links to research on, for example, the distance between information and understanding, and, presciently, the future of the electronic journal (thank you Wayback Machine¹). You might notice that these studies do not match the stories in the paper.

While we had come across plenty of far more relevant research, we had run headlong into two issues. First, journals had only begun to slowly migrate online. Second, and more importantly, the university library’s publisher contracts prevented our sharing this research with the public. Something seemed terribly amiss with this picture of a public university prevented from sharing timely research about a community’s schools. There were a few brave ventures at the time in free access, such as Educational Policy Analysis Archives. PKp tried to a similar in this area of education policy in collaboration with the BC Teachers Federation and BC Ministry of Education. Yet this only further convinced me that before universities joined forces with the news media, schools, government, and libraries to produce a greater democratic engagement with knowledge, the universities had first to get their own houses of learning in order.

As devoted as the academy was to conducting research in the public interest, what these initial experiments with public knowledge brought home to me was how these institutions were, in effect, producing an increasingly expensive and restricted private good. This had only been reinforced by the 1990s’ “serials crisis,” with journal pricing reducing university access.

My first response was to naively think it best to begin over, to approach this emerging online journal publication with a clean sheet of paper. I designed scholarly publishing models for turning the internet into a site for public knowledge. My colleagues in more than one setting wasted little time in making clear to me that starting over was simply not an option. They had built their professional lives around the current journal system, which was moving online with as little disturbance as possible.

I realized that I might do better at winning them over by finding a way to help them move their existing world into the digital realm. After all, I had had the experience, earlier in the decade, of designing online project management systems as part of the education startup Knowledge Architecture. Vivian Forssman and I had addressed the school’s IT support shortage by designing online platforms that helped technically adept high school students manage their technical support services for teachers and students. I was struck by how all that I’d learned of online dashboards and workflow management for students could be applied to the journals I edited and published in as they moved online.

So by the turn of the century, what was by then PKP  was intent on building an open source publishing platform that would make it easier and cheaper for editors and publishers, as well as conference organizers, to manage, review, and distribute research online through a single system. This contribution to the daily work of publishing would convince some, I had hoped, to consider freely sharing the resulting publications. Of course, few had managed anything online at that point beyond their email and, so our early releases of Open Journal Systems (OJS), beginning in 2002, were not greeted by immediate enthusiasm nor widespread adoption. We persisted in developing open source systems for journals and books, while advocating for open access and researching its roots and implications.

Gradually, over the last two decades, editors, publishers, societies, and libraries found their way to what I would now characterize as a consensus around the value of open access and open science for research and scholarship. Our service to that cause is reflected in the more than 30,000 journals now using OJS, almost all Diamond OA (Khanna et al. 2022). It is reflected in our long-term association and common cause with SciELO, most notably in collaboratively developing Open Preprint Systems (OPS) released in 2020, just in time for SciELO Preprints to make a significant contribution to the pandemic response. There is, then, much to celebrate in the gains made, over the last quarter century by SciELO and related organizations, even as much remains to be done to ensure everyone’s right to all that this public good has to offer.

Reference

KHANNA, S., BALL, J., ALPERIN, J. P., & WILLINSKY, J. (2022). Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process. In SciELO Preprints. https://doi.org/10.1590/SciELOPreprints.4729 (Original work published 2022)

The movement towards open access and open science in Latin America: the view from CLACSO

Dominique Babini*
May 2023

To this call in celebration of the 25th anniversary of SciELO, to share in this Blog our personal experiences in the movement towards open access and open science in our region, I add my story as part of the CLACSO team, with whom I have traveled that path in the last 40 years, starting in 1983, and am still traveling today.

It was the early 1980s, when some of our Latin American governments were restoring democracy after several years of dictatorship during which the social sciences and critical humanities were systematically persecuted and made invisible. While I was doing my doctorate in political science in Argentina, and preparing my thesis on national information policy, I was invited by Jean Meyriat from the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, who later guided me in my thesis, to collaborate as a volunteer in the collection of bibliographic information from Argentina for the International Bibliography of Social Sciences, which at that time was distributed by UNESCO every year in printed format. One day, a few months before the return to democracy in Argentina in 1983, at my job at that time, I received a visit from the person who directed CLACSO at that time, Francisco Delich, who was interested in my work. I explained to him that the purpose of my task was to give international visibility to the production of social sciences, made invisible in the times of dictatorship. I was immediately invited, initially as a volunteer until we got funds, to join the CLACSO project to restart the activities of its own library after the return to democracy that year.

Since CLACSO is a network of research centers distributed throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, I accepted the invitation and proposed that new technologies be used to create databases that would give regional and international visibility to information on the social sciences and humanities in the region (institutions, researchers, publications) for which we joined the IDIN-International Development Information Network project (1988-1995), which resulted in several years of collaboration with similar projects of social science networks in Europe, Africa, Arab countries, and Southeast Asia.

The publications database allowed us to access the bibliographical references, but the difficulty continued to be how to access the full text of the publications, at that time still printed, and the costs to send the printed version between cities and countries in the region were very high. There were also delays of several weeks, and even months, to receive the printed publications, be they purchased or borrowed via interlibrary loan, in the post. Driven by the need to innovate in order to increase the circulation of knowledge generated in the social sciences, we at CLACSO began to experiment with sending digital texts via the Internet through the recently created email that was inaugurated at CLACSO using experience gained in the library. Later, with the creation of the Web, many opportunities opened to think about how to share complete digital texts in the modality that was later called open access.

In the 1990s, various regional scholar-led projects were developed in Latin America and the Caribbean to give visibility and access to the scientific publications of the region, a region that did not outsource the management of scientific communications to the commercial sector. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico-UNAM, Latindex was created, whose databases provide information on journals published in the Ibero-American region, and at the same university, from the PERIÓDICA and CLASE databases of journals, BIBLAT was later developed to provide access to full text and indicators. Also in that decade, several thematic networks in the region created their digital libraries that initially provided access to the bibliographical references of the publications, and little by little added links to the digital full texts in open access. Examples are the Virtual Health Library (Biblioteca Virtual de Salud-BVS), the Agricultural Information System (Sistema de Información Agrícola-SIDALC), and from CLACSO the Network of Virtual Libraries of Social Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean (Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales de Ciencias Sociales en América Latina y el Caribe), as a subject repository of social sciences and humanities, an initiative that allowed us to be part of a regional movement to promote a cultural change in the way of communicating and accessing knowledge produced by the social sciences of the region in a diversity of formats, including open access to academic books, a joint activity of CLACSO’s network of editorial and library teams that together have built one of the most important social sciences books collection with more than 4.000 open access books.

Concerning scientific journals, innovative developments emerged in Latin America to give visibility, open access, and indexing services to peer-reviewed journals published in the region (SciELO, Redalyc, Latindex Catálogo). And, starting in the new millennium, universities were encouraged by open access policies to create institutional repositories that reflect their own production published in open access, later allowing the creation of national repository systems in 12 countries that today make up the regional network of repositories La Referencia. The first national open access policies approved in Peru (2013), Argentina (2013) and Mexico (2014) prioritized repositories to implement open access.

In each of these pioneering initiatives in the path to open access and open science in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is a mixture of institutional visions and individual passions that, collaborating with other initiatives, built a regional vision of community-led open access implemented with collaborative models.

This regional movement that sought to promote and implement open access in the region, was supported by several declarations on open access and open science, from SciELO (2005), CLACSO (2015), Latindex-Redalyc-CLACSO-IBICT (2017), and more recently the Declaration of Panama on Open Science (Declaración de Panamá sobre Ciencia Abierta, 2018) and the declaration of Latindex-Redalyc-AmeliCA-CLACSO-La Referencia (2022) in support of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021) approved by the governments of 193 countries in 2021. In 2022 Colombia approved a National Open Science Policy (Política Nacional de Ciencia Abierta) and Argentina carried out the Diagnosis and Recommendations for Open Science Policies (Diagnóstico y Recomendaciones para Políticas de Ciencia Abierta).

This background characterizes Latin America and the Caribbean as an example of an international region that supports knowledge as a public good, and the management of open access as a common good, without profit, with collaborative models, with shared costs and in-kind contributions. It is a great achievement for the region, and a significant contribution to the international debate on how to accelerate open science and open access at the global level in a participatory, equitable, and sustainable manner.

One of the main pending challenges for open access in the region is to advance the regional and international interoperability of the initiatives mentioned above in order to generate consolidated indicators of scientific and academic production published in the region, indicators that can be used in the research assessment processes in the region, a process today dominated by the WoS and Scopus indicators that very poorly reflect the wealth of knowledge published in the region. CLACSO contributes to this objective and these debates with the Latin American Forum on Research Assessment (FOLEC-CLACSO), created in 2019, and with its Declaration  (2022) and documents.

One of the biggest frustrations of this path towards open access, I would say, has been to observe in the so-called international “mainstream” publishing circuit a sustained advance over the past decades of the commercialization of scholarly communication and its evaluation indicators, and in the relentless transformation of this sector into a large, increasingly consolidated market, dominated by a few international corporations and among the most profitable in the world. That commercialization is continuing in open access publishing by charging APCs (article processing charges) and BPCs (book processing charges).

In this sense, one of my greatest hopes is to see greater investments and public policies committed in all regions to strengthen community-led open access initiatives in open infrastructures, with collaborative, mutually supportive, and inclusive working modalities for diversity of knowledge and communication formats and providing non-for-profit services. This approach to manage open access to knowledge as a commons that prevails in Latin America and the Caribbean – and has a growing presence in other regions – seems to us the most appropriate one to contribute in moving forward with each of the Sustainable Development Goals, with the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation, and with other priority agendas at the global and local level, which require both international and local knowledge. We must take care that it is the community, and not the market, who defines the needs and priorities for research, for open access to publications, and for the evaluation of science. I had the privilege of representing CLACSO in the group of specialists that have drafted the new international open access recommendations (BOAI20) where open access publication and distribution channels are recommended that are inclusive and do not exclude participation for economic reasons. Where it is also recommended to move away from commercial models that charge APCs for publishing in open access and that propose transformative agreements that only benefit the permanence of a commercial system that has already shown that its decisions respond more to commercial needs than to those of open science. To help the move away from increased commercialism, CLACSO has also joined the organizing committee of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access.

Open Access, an inevitable evolution to fit a fundamentally changed environment

Jan Velterop*
May 2023

The concept of universal open access could never have developed in the print era. But when the World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s, universal open access was all of a sudden, a realistic possibility. At least technically. Primarily technically, as it turned out. Sure, the concept itself has since taken hold. However, the acceptance and implementation in the scientific world faced – and still faces – several impediments. Progress, while there, is still slow.

The main issue, in my view, is the seeming inseparability of the dual needs of the scientific world: proper and timely communication of research results on the one hand, and prestige and reputation of individual scientists and institutions on the other. The perceived need for prestige is often dismissed, but given the observed behaviour of researchers and institutions it is still a formidable force that affects the rather reluctant advance of the scientific publishing system towards universal open access. 

In an environment of an ever faster scientific research pace, open and immediate access to research results is vital. The success of open science depends on it. It appears that publishing outfits – including not just commercial ones but also not-for-profit society publishers – face the fiduciary need, and often the corporate desire, for their business models to ensure growth of financial turnover and profit. At the very least they want to avoid a decrease of profits – or of surpluses in the case of not-for-profit outfits – and to keep those minimally at the level they have grown used to if and when they change their traditional subscription model to offer open access.

The consequence of this corporate ‘law of preservation of profit’ leads inexorably to an alternative to replace subscription income. Enter Article Processing Charges (APCs). In order to support open access publishing APCs are levied on authors. There are several problems with this. Although in theory a charge for article processing can be levied in the form of a submission fee (see more below), in practice, due to competition between journals, they can only be levied on articles that are accepted for publication. This means that the costs of arranging peer-review for all the articles that are submitted to a journal fall on the accepted ones. For selective journals, which many claim to be, this means that a large proportion of the costs of publication is the cost of rejection. The larger the proportion of submitted, but rejected papers, the larger the cost per accepted article – and the higher the APC. The original idea of APCs taking the place of subscription income included the expectation – possibly naively – that the behaviour of publishers would move in the direction of competition on price, while authors would seek out the journals giving them the best value for money. The hope that this would result in not only an open research publishing infrastructure, but also a more efficient, less expensive, and less profit-extractive one, was, alas, not fulfilled.

The scientific publishing system, largely organised along the principle of journals (though there are exceptions), had evolved to bestow recognition and prestige on the authors as a side effect of journals’ selectivity. As a result, the authors’ perception of ‘best value for money’ turned out not to focus on the cost of publishing. Instead, their idea of the ‘value’ of a published paper remains most often found in the ‘prestige’ rather than in the price. And that prestige is often still being – rather lazily – reduced to the ‘Impact Factor’ of the journal in which their articles are published. All it takes for an article to immediately be perceived as having a high impact is being published in the same journal as highly cited papers: impact by association. After all, it is the average number of citations to all the articles published in a given period of time that determines the Impact Factor. Since the Impact Factor is regarded as virtually synonymous with ‘prestige’, the moment an article is published in a high impact journal, it immediately attracts the sought-after prestige label, before it has even been cited.

Another factor is also responsible for the lack of effect on author behaviour of the price an APC, namely, that the author does not pay. From the early days of APC-enabled open access many funders – initially led by the Wellcome Trust – picked up the APC bill. That was a most helpful development to get open access publishing on the rails. Although the amount funders would reimburse per article was limited, it proved high enough for many publishers to take the plunge and offer open access paid for by APCs, albeit as just an option in the case of the major publishers. The ‘hybrid’ journal was born. Suspicions of ‘double-dipping’ (getting income from subscriptions simultaneous with APC income) were voiced, and while some publishers were scrupulously setting subscription prices solely on the basis of the non-open-access articles in their journals, the double-dipping suspicion was almost impossible to disprove. (There are a few notable exceptions. The Royal Society, for example, has shown how the subscription price for the journal Biology Letters fell by 4.74% – even after inflation of 4.1% had been added – because of the increase in the proportion of OA content.)

In any event, the constantly growing number of articles being submitted for publication – most of which are eventually published in one journal or another, a process that still continues – means that the collective cost of the scholarly publishing system, whether charged for via subscriptions or APCs, keeps growing as well. The hope that the amount of money siphoned off from the budgets for scholarly research – just to pay for publication – would decrease did not materialise.

The proposal that publicly funded research be compulsorily published with open access in journals resulted in Plan S¹. This plan does require that “All scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.” Plan S provoked criticism, as voiced in an open letter², gathering, to date, almost 1,800 signatures. One of the important risks of Plan S was identified as the likelihood that its requirements could well solidify the model of APC-funded publishing.

The response has been that Plan S remains agnostic on business models. Yes,’fair and reasonable’ APCs would be paid in fully OA journals, but author-self archiving (also known as ‘green OA’) is also supported, and, for a time-limited period until the end of 2024, ‘transformative arrangements’ which are meant to be cost neutral (also known as ‘Read and Publish’) will be financially supported, too. Nonetheless, given the continuing annual increase of articles submitted for publication, the total costs of scholarly dissemination could well rise further, rather than reduce under Plan S.

A – hitherto futile, but essentially sensible – case was made for covering the costs of journal publishing by submission fees instead of APCs, a potential option already mentioned above. This is ‘Plan T’, so called for apparently no other reason than that it is an alphabetical response to Plan S. Sensible, as submitting an article to a journal can be seen as submitting it to a test, and as with many tests – take a driver’s test as an example – one pays for the test, whether or not one passes. Plan T, however, turned out to be a dead-end street.

To get out of the whole conundrum, I (among others) have been advocating for the communication and peer review functions of the publishing process to be disentangled. The process whereby journals invite or appoint peer-reviewers – usually only two or three – whose reviews provide advice on acceptance or rejection to the Editor-in-Chief, is responsible for much of the perception of journal’s prestige (read: reputation enhancement for authors). With the increasing acceptance of preprints, communication and peer review can – and should – be disentangled. And with that, sharing research results with open access via preprints and acquiring prestige via journals – if at all needed or desired – can also be separated. Peer review is not necessarily dependent on journals, either. After all, seeing science as a continuous process of review by other scientists – peers – is likely to challenge the problematic, but widespread, perception that peer-reviewed publications represent the ‘truth’. Criticism that preprints lower the trustworthiness of the reported scientific results does not seem to be borne out by the facts. An article in the (peer-reviewed) journal Research Integrity and Peer Review, for instance, concludes that the “quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions.” And a regular visit to Retraction Watch³ does not exactly instil unconditional faith in peer-reviewed publications.

Although Plan S just required that the results of publicly funded research “be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo”, and the Plan S principles⁴ do not mention that ‘being published’ necessarily means ‘being peer-reviewed before being published’, it seems to leave the door open for publishing those results in the form of preprints, as long as those are open access. However, on another page of the site, called “Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S”, the following phrase can be found: “Plan S principles refer to peer-reviewed scholarly publications”. This probably means ‘peer-reviewed articles published in journals’, as those published as preprints, even when peer-reviewed, are not likely to need much financial support.

The next, and in my view most welcome, idea was ‘Plan U’ (for Universal open access, thus neatly fitting the alphabetical sequence of Plans S, T, and U), which advocated that funders mandate that  research results must always be posted on an openly accessible preprint server before they are submitted to a journal. Not all research papers may be deemed by the authors to need publication in a journal at all. As long as preprints can be reliably cited, forgoing subsequent publication in a peer-reviewed journal should not be a problem. Quite the contrary: it would save funds that can then be used for research itself. If a certain level of approbation or recognition that is perceived to result from publication in a specific journal is deemed essential, then the ‘service’ of publication in a peer-reviewed journal can be paid for by whoever needs or desires it. This has a number of consequences. It means that a) if an article has already been posted on an preprint server, subsequent publication in a journal (for instance for career purposes) need not necessarily be in an open access one; and b) communication and peer review can truly be disentangled.

It is my hope that the system described in Plan U will take hold and the U of Universal OA will become reality. Plan U has, in my view, the best chance of making universal open access a success, and with that, spread the benefits of an efficient and timely dissemination of knowledge, and the opportunity for research carried out anywhere in the world to be seen and to fully play its role in the global pursuit of science. I am optimistic, but aware that it may take a while, as the publishing culture in the scientific community is not exactly given to speedy change. The maturing of spirits is a slow process.

That said about open access, accessibility and openness are not enough for proper, equitable and efficient scientific knowledge sharing, let alone for the wider concept of Open Science. What is also needed, is a more robust way to secure the long-term, future-proof availability and readability of research results, data, software, as well as their early availability. Currently, the consensus seems to be that the PDF, as the ‘version of record’, reflects the ‘minutes of science’. But the PDF is no more than a print analogue, and allows only limited use of the capabilities of the internet and the world-wide-web. The PDF is fine (and possibly ideal) for human reading, but the PDF is merely a simplified representation of the much richer underlying information. Ideally, this underlying information should be robust and free of errors, after which PDFs – and other formats and representations, if needed or desired – can be automatically generated. Techniques for that exist. This underlying information should really be seen as the ultimate ‘version of record’, convertible into a human-readable format, but eminently machine-readable and archivable as well.

And finally, it is good to realise that everything keeps on changing. In science communication as anywhere else in the universe. Open access can not be a goal in itself; it is necessary, but not sufficient, and must be seen as a means to the eventual goal of an optimum and broad scientific communication culture, Open Science. Science communication is not static, but keeps evolving. I have for years used the metaphor of the asteroid that precipitated the demise of the dinosaurs, as an illustration of the significance of the emergence of the internet in science: a fundamental change of the environment. Evolution did not stop then, and it will not stop now. 

Congratulations to SciELO, for having been a leading light in this evolution for the last quarter century! Long may this light keep on shining!

References

VINES, T. Plan T: Scrap APCs and Fund Open Access with Submission Fees [online]. The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018 [viewed 12 April 2023]. Available from: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/20/plan-t-scrap-apcs-and-fund-open-access-with-submission-fees/

CARNEIRO, C.F.D., QUEIROZ, V.G.S., MOULIN, T.C. et al. Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles in the biomedical literature. Res Integr Peer Rev 5, 16 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3

SEVER, R., EISEN, M. and INGLIS, J. Plan U: Universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates. PLOS Biology [online]. 2019, vol. 17, no.6, e3000273 [viewed 12 April 2023]. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000273. Available from: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000273

Notes

The Journey of SciELO’s 25 years: reality beyond utopia and illusion

Abel L Packer is co-founder of SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and Director of the SciELO/FAPESP Program.

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GIBBS WW. Lost science in the third world. Scientific American 1995; 273(2):76-83.

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The United Nations International Scientific Information System (UNISIST) was launched in the early 1970s with the aim of providing guidelines for the development of information systems and policies.

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Still known as BIREME, referring to its former designation (Regional Library of Medicine), it is a specialized center of the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

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In Portuguese: “Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo”.

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Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_Article_Tag_Suite

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Scientific Journal Rankings

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Impact per article normalized by source indicator, developed by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (CWTS).

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Fast and slow at the same time

Peter Suber is a Senior Advisor on Open Access at the Harvard Library

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Supporting Open Access for 20 years: Five issues that have slowed the transition to full and immediate OA

Robert Kiley is Head of Strategy at cOAlition S.

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Research is born free but everywhere is in chains…. (apologies to Rousseau)

Dr Rob Terry is the Manager of Research Policy at TDR (the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases at the World Health Organization WHO Policy on Open Access). Previously he was Senior Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust 2000 – 2007. The opinions in this article are those of the author and do not represent any official positions of the organizations referenced.

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The power and importance of open access

Virginia M. Barbour is a professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, and serves as the Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group

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“The guy who bangs on about open access”

Martin Paul Eve is a Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, at Birkbeck, University of London, he is a founder of the Open Library of Humanities and author of “Open Access and the Humanities”

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Reflections on the Development of the Open Access Movement

Melissa Hagemann is the Program Manager for Open Access Initiatives at the Open Society Institute (OSI)

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Open Access in India: A long way to go and miles before we sleep 

Subbiah Arunachalam is a Visiting Professor at the DST Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Science, and Distinghished Fellow at the Centre for Internet & Society, in Bengaluru, India

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Liège, a cradle of academic Open Access voluntarism

Bernard Rentier is a Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium and Rector Emeritus of the Université de Liège.

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https://orbi.uliege.be/?&locale=en

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https://orbi.uliege.be/page/background?&locale=en

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https://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/09/23/enabling-open-scholarship-launched/

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https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en79/in-brief/ercim-endorses-qenabling-open-scholarshipq

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http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/home

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https://gallilex.cfwb.be/document/pdf/45142_000.pdf

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https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/open-access-academic-publishers/

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https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/47a3a330-c9cb-11e7-8e69-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

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https://sfdora.org/resource/european-commission/

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https://ni4os-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NI4OS_RI_ORDMwebEN_single_pages.pdf

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https://www.scienceeurope.org/our-resources/dsa-nfp-exemption/

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https://academie-editions.be/accueil/369-open-science-the-challenge-of-transparency.html

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Publication Equity: a neglected aspect of open access?

David C Prosser has been the Executive Director of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the representative body for the UK’s leading research libraries. Before moving to RLUK, he was, from 2002, the founding Director of SPARC Europe, an alliance of over 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries advocating new models of scholarly communication. Previously, he spent ten years in science, technical, and medical journal publishing for both Oxford University Press and Elsevier Science. During this time, he was involved in all aspects of publishing from production through to editorial and financial management of journals. Before becoming a publisher, he received a PhD and BSc in Physics from Leeds University, UK.

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Sivulile – “We are Open” – in South Africa

Susan Veldsman is Director of Scholarly Publishing at the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).

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open.coki.au

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Reflections on twenty-five years of the Public Knowledge Project

John Willinsky is a Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and directs the Public Knowledge Project.

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https://web.archive.org/web/19991006060820/http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/ctg/pkp/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20001027050327/http://www.educ.ubc.ca/faculty/ctg/pkp/libraries/research/index.html

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Open Access, an inevitable evolution to fit a fundamentally changed environment

Dominique Babini is an Open Science Advisor, at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO)

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Open Access, an inevitable evolution to fit a fundamentally changed environment

Jan Velterop, Independent Open Access Advocate

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Plan S https://www.coalition-s.org/ (viewed 14 April 2023)

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https://sites.google.com/view/plansopenletter/open-letter (viewed 14 April 2023)

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https://retractionwatch.com/

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https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/ (viewed 14 April 2023)

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