Unpacking the many different open access models - part 3

Author: Laura Bonald, Emerald’s Regional Director, Southern & Eastern Europe

From transformative agreements (TAs) to green, gold and diamond models, there’s a need to offer a diversity of publishing models and publishers to ensure an equitable landscape for all stakeholders.

However, we don’t believe there’s an open access (OA) model yet that offers the right solution for the global research community, as Laura Bonald, Emerald’s Regional Director, Southern & Eastern Europe, explains.

The OA landscape is complex and can be confusing. With different stakeholders pushing different agendas, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. We know customers are starting to understand that the transition to open will take a lot longer than anticipated. The focus seems to be shifting towards transitioning entire countries to OA rather than just individual journals or publishers. This reinforces the need for a variety of OA models and highlights the importance of providing diverse options for publishing and accessing research and scholarly content.

Let’s start with transformative agreements (TA). They aim to change the traditional subscription model of academic publishing into a more sustainable, open, and equitable system. Under a transformative agreement, an institution will pay a fee to publishers to cover the cost of publishing open access, and in return, publishers make their content openly accessible to everyone within the institution.

Whilst they’ve been around for a few years now, without doubt, the costs of managing TA arrangements have increased for both libraries and publishers, with the larger market players having the scale and resources to develop those workflows. The TA model is intended to transition library spend from read value to publish value. Increases in research output that map through to publication output will result in growth of publications, but as the volume of OA publishing increases, those costs are likely to increase, too.

We have 18 active agreements currently in place, but this is significantly lower than many publishers. Customer demand is limited as our customer’s balance of subscription (read) and authorship (publish) does not typically map well to the model.

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is another approach for converting subscription journals to open access without reliance on article processing charges (APCs).  Here, publishers convert journals from subscriptions to OA, one year at a time. Using the model, a publisher offers a journal’s current subscribers continued access.

Whilst S2O is having some success, typically for small programmes of journals, we remain concerned around the sustainability of the model should library subscriber participation fail in any given year, and the viability of the impacted programme when the publisher attempts to revert to a subscription only model, per the conditions of the S2O model itself.  We maintain a watching brief at this point but believe that the serious unintended consequences of TAs are now having a negative impact on market stability, participation and diversity.

The two main types of OA models are gold open access and green open access (self-archiving). It is clear at this point that whilst the volume of gold OA publishing has increased, the model on its own does not represent a sustainable and equitable solution for the global research community. For many researchers, the article processing charge (APC) to publish gold OA is unaffordable which straight away effects the diversity of viewpoints within research. Again, reinforcing the need for a variety of OA models.

I also wanted to touch on a 'Rights Retention Strategy' which we’re aware a number of UK universities have implemented. This strategy compels authors to deposit author accepted manuscripts (AAMs) in their institutional repository where they will be made publicly available by the University under a CC BY licence. Emerald does not support these strategies for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, this approach undermines the rights of authors who lose control over where or how their work is subsequently published or otherwise commercially exploited. For example, under a CC-BY licence an AAM can be republished in a journal other than that to which it was originally submitted and neither the publisher nor author would be able to take any action to rectify this.
• Secondly, this approach is a threat to the integrity of the research published. AAMs could be disseminated widely with no ability for publishers to correct or retract the work and no obligation for those subsequently publishing the work to comply with COPE guidelines.
• Lastly, we believe that the legal basis under which a University can claim to 'retain' rights to an AAM is flawed. This approach ignores the significant value and investment that publishers make in the peer review process and in their journal brands. The intellectual property rights in an AAM are a combination of the work of the author and that of the publisher. Whilst in some cases the university may own author copyright under an employment contract, it cannot unilaterally 'retain' the rights of the publisher or co-authors who may not be employees.

In the meantime, we remain open to consider any equitable approach that increases OA routes for our authors. Our belief is that the creative commons approach taken to date is not fit for purpose in the context of scholarly publishing and we would welcome further discussions between institutions, funders, authors and publishers with a view to finding a solution which promotes equity, whilst recognising the contributions of all of these stakeholders in the creation of robust academic research.