Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Alicia J. Kowaltowski, José R. F. Arruda, Paulo A. Nussenzveig, and Ariel M. Silber. Alicia is a Full Professor of Biochemistry at the University of São Paulo. José is Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Campinas. Paulo is Professor of Physics and Provost for Research and Innovation at the University of São Paulo. Ariel is a Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the University of São Paulo.
Traditionally, academic publishers have covered their costs with subscription fees and paywalls. For some, the amount of profit some have been making might be regarded as profane. The drive towards open access for publicly funded research is disrupting this paradigm. Some publishers have introduced Article Processing Charge (APC) where the author pays a charge for their article to be published. The publisher makes their money by the APCs they receive. Very quickly, it was pointed out that the APC system benefitted rich countries, and punished poorer countries. Rather than making scholarly publishing more democratic and open it created a class system that benefitted more wealthy countries and served to silence the voices of researchers without the same wealth. Some publishers acted promptly to introduce concessions and supports for researchers from poor countries. This had a couple of obvious problems, middle income countries maybe more affluent than the poor but still be unable to afford the APC fees. The same is probably true of poorer institutions in affluent countries. Jurisdictions like France have responded to this challenge by directing that papers are published with Diamond Open Access publishers where there are no subscriptions or APC fees and their costs are covered by grants or philanthropic contributions. Such an approach, would be genuinely open and egalitarian.
Plan S covers peer-reviewed publications, so depositing a preprint in a public and open archive platform (green OA through preprints) is not sufficient for compliance, although the practice is encouraged. Publishing in a subscription journal and making the accepted version of the manuscript immediately openly available in a public repository (green OA through postprints) is compliant with Plan S, but undesirable for many publishers. Although there have been concerted actions promoting the creation of alternative publishing models that are both open to read and free to publish (known as diamond or platinum OA), these are still rare or poorly publicized in most scientific areas. Diamond OA journals are often the result of personal efforts within small groups of scientists and will need time to reach adequate funding models, quality, visibility, reputation, and indexing, while repositories created by large organizations, such as Open Research Europe (European Commission), have limited visibility in the scientific community. As a result, authors of scientific papers who wish to equitably showcase their research may have limited choices outside of article processing charge (APC)-based journals as soon as 2025. In this scenario, the cost to publish OA is quickly becoming a new paywall in science, substituting the difficulty to read papers with the inability to showcase results in journals seen as reputable, due to the financial barrier of APCs.
