Every two years, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) publishes in College & Research Libraries News an article on the top trends and issues affecting academic libraries and the change our institutions are experiencing. We will be highlighting some of these trends through a number of blog posts over the academic year, including: supporting student well-being post-pandemic; open access and equitable publishing; AI and AI literacy; open science and reproducibility; open pedagogy and instructional design; and disrupting and reconceiving collection practices.
It’s Open Access Week! This year continues last year’s theme “Community over Commercialization,” which “prioritizes approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and academic community.”
According to SPARC, a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education, Open Access (OA) is the answer to barriers that have been put in place by the current system for communicating research, which “uses a print-based model in the digital age.” In contrast, OA is “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.”
For some context, since 1996, journal publishers have marketed licensed bundles of journals at a discount off aggregated list prices (called the “Big Deal”). Institutions are provided access to a large volume of journal titles, at a lower per-title price than they would if purchased individually. However, over time, prices of the packages have increased 5-15% which has far outpaced library budgets. A growing number of libraries are deciding to cancel big deals after assessing their collections. SPARC tracks big deal cancellations on their website.
The OA movement emerged in response to several factors: the introduction of the internet and digital journals, the exponential growth of journal subscription costs, and disparities in access to research. Between 2013 and 2023, the number of gold (the most open option, where the article is freely and permanently available) open access articles, reviews, and conference papers increased from 11% to 38%. Researchers have found that open access papers attract more total citations, and those citations come from a wider range of locations, institutions, and research fields.
However, despite this increase, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) notes that faculty perceptions of open access publishing have pretty much remained unchanged over the last 20 years. Common challenges continue to persist as faculty face pressures when deciding whether to publish OA articles. Researchers in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication found that concerns about OA acceptance in promotion and tenure (P&T) considerations is an important factor for faculty in deciding not to publish in OA journals (Source). In fact, faculty who do choose to publish OA do it in spite of perceptions that P&T committees do not value OA publishing, and they tend to have stronger beliefs about the impact of OA. Additional concerns for faculty included OA journal quality, colleagues’ perceptions of OA, and OA articles’ wider impacts. The researchers recommend that advocates for OA should look at P&T policies as a place for making change, as well as raising awareness for the quality of OA journals.
Another study found that tenure status and age are important distinguishes in the perspectives on deciding where to publish (Source). Overall, surveyed faculty value journal readership, journal or publisher prestige, and whether the journal will be read by their peers, but “older and tenured faculty were less likely to value prestige and metrics for publishing, while nontenured respondents were more likely to value these factors.” The results help to confirm that faculty’s perceptions of the P&T process have an important role in shaping where they publish.
Despite faculty’s perceptions of OA, it’s been found that students are increasingly relying on OA articles. A study of research projects by students at a small community college found that more than half (56.8%) of the articles cited by the students were open access. The researchers note that “open access publishing levels the information playing field for students at small and under-resourced institutions… allowing them to have access to a greater number and wider variety of research materials than our modest budget could ever support under a traditional publishing model” (p. 13).
Advocating for Equitable Publishing
At the heart of OA is equity. ACRL reports that researchers are advocating for a return to scholar-led communities, having felt that the OA movement has been “co-opted” by commercial publishers. Researchers have been urging libraries and consortia to support researcher communities by avoiding bundled publishing service agreements.
At the same time, there has been a focus on inequities within open access publishing–a “growing understanding that open access does not necessarily mean universal accessibility.” An example of this are exclusionary article processing charges (APCs) to publish OA, which means the cost of access continues to fall on the researcher. In 2023, editors from the Elsevier journal NeuroImage resigned in protest of high APCs, which they estimate is $2,000 more than is required to publish. Evidence has shown a relationship between high impact metrics and higher faster rising APCs, meaning two major concerns have been raised: poorly funded researchers’ inability to publish and their impact on journal quality.
Libraries have been urged to support bibliodiversity, or the “diversity of academic content.” Researchers have discussed how the current prevalence of commercial publishers and gold OA articles have not boded well for a truly OA movement. They call for support for library publishing, which “plays an important role in maintaining bibliodiversity by providing venues and scholarship overlooked by traditional publishers,” though this faces its own sets of challenges in funding, scale, and training.
Recently, new tools and proposals have been released to guide and support a “values-driven publishing ecosystem.” These guidelines focus on things like scholarly communication systems in which scholars can choose when their research is made public and decenter the journal article in the research lifestyle, library publishing infrastructures that align with key values and ethical frameworks, and resources to help OA journals navigate open access publishing.
Marla Koenigsknecht is a Library and Information Science graduate student at Wayne State University. She is serving as a practicum student at The Catholic University of America Libraries.
Further Reading:
References
Big deal cancellation tracking (n.d.). SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/
Borrego, Á. (2023). Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review. Learned Publishing, 36(3), 359–378. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1558
Brainard, J. (2024, January 24). Open-access papers draw more citations from a broader readership. Science. https://www.science.org/content/article/open-access-papers-draw-more-citations-broader-readership
Cooper, D.M. & Rieger, O. Y. (2021, June 22). New report: What’s the big deal? Ithaka S+R. https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/new-report-whats-the-big-deal/
Dolan, T. & Claflin, D., (2023). Assessing the value of subscription journal packages and open access journal articles in a community college context. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15673
Dyer, O. (2023). Editors of neurology imaging journal resign to start new publication in protest at author fees. BMJ : British Medical Journal (Online), 381. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p992
Kirschner, J., Miller, H., Kamat, P., Alcaine, J., Chaparro, S. & Exner, N. (2024). To open or not to open: An exploration of faculty decisions to publish open-access articles. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16894
Library Publishing Coalition Ethical Framework Task Force. (2023). An Ethical Framework for Library Publishing, Version 2.0. Educopia. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317619
Ma, L., Buggle, J., & O’Neill, M. (2023). Open access at a crossroads: library publishing and bibliodiversity. Insights: The UKSG Journal, 36(1), 10. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.613
Mendonça, A., Chiarelli, A., Byers, A., Nobes, A., Hartgerink, C., França Dias Carneiro, C., Malcolmson, E., Lujano, I., Foxall, K., Loffreda, L., Wojturska, R., Santos, S., Murray, S., Olijhoek, T., & Patterson, W. (2023). The open access journals toolkit (English) (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8017033
Niles, M. T., Schimanski, L. A., MicKiernan, E. C., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations. PLOS ONE, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914
Open access. (n.d.). SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/open-access/
Stern, B., Ancion, Z., Björke, A., Farley, A., Qvenild, M., Rieck, K., Sondervan, J., Rooryck, J., Kiley, R., Karatzia, M., & Papp, N. (2023). Towards responsible publishing (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8398480
Toledo, E. G., Kulczycki, E., Pölönen, J., & Sivertsen, G. (2019, December 5). Bibliodiversity – What it is and why it is essential to creating situated knowledge. The London School of Economics and Political Science. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/12/05/bibliodiversity-what-it-is-and-why-it-is-essential-to-creating-situated-knowledge/
Total view: Uptake of open access (OA). (2024). STM. https://www.stm-assoc.org/oa-dashboard-2024/uptake-of-open-access/