Introducing The Open Lab

Author: Steve Lodge

Like every independent publisher we strive to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders seeking to both consume and publish academic research content whilst also ensuring the models which provision these are viable and sustainable for our business.

This isn’t always easy, particularly given we look to cater to multiple, often competing, incentives globally. And we do so largely within the social sciences disciplines where there are disproportional funding opportunities when compared to the wider sciences.

Long-established models for accessing research content are not suitable for everyone. Greater demand for open access coupled with the increased influence of Artificial Intelligence raises questions about where Publishers can add the most value. Growth in open access appears to be stalling and we want to understand why that is.

Researchers continue to often be left out of the discussion. Authors’ legitimate concerns about how their work is, or can be, used cannot be ignored. Given barriers to publication, funding challenges, perpetual discourse on ‘who pays?’ and ‘what for?’ and a lack of alignment on what constitutes research value, success or impact; is Open Access only part of the solution if we are collectively committed to developing globally sustainable, equitable models of access and participation?

In any event, as of today, no model currently looks wholly sustainable and we want to further our understanding about what might be. We have not been afraid to try new things in the past we felt would help – we launched our Emerald Open Research offer aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2019 but overwhelming feedback was that outputs still needed to be article & journal shaped to meet incentive structures, whilst funding for APCs remained extremely challenging. Similar feedback followed for our Impact Services offer in 2021 as we aimed to support the building of impact literacy across the sector. But we need to keep trying.

So, we’ve recently launched our Open Lab as a dedicated Incubator unit. We’ll ask questions; what truly incentivises authors to publish open access? How do we enable access to the right information for people to benefit from research outputs? What further services are needed to create better value for open models already on offer? What’s the future of paid access and what does this mean for licensing? How can we ensure equity for all authors and readers? How does access translate into real-world impact?

We’re committing to testing new models on a small scale, and we’ll be very open and frank about what works and what doesn’t – this is an industry-wide concern, not just an Emerald one.

We welcome input from across the field, watch this space, feel free to reach out, and wish us luck.