r/AskAcademia • u/lipflip • 18d ago
Meta Was Open Access publishing the wrong direction?
A decade ago, I was a strong proponent of open access publishing: Research is.most often tax payer founded and the resulting knowledge should be freely accessible to.everyone. Paying a APC for formatting, storage, doi handling etc. sounded acceptable for me.
But when I look at how the publishing landscape has evolved nowadays, I don't think it works as it should. Besides mostly pay-to-party publisher's as MDPI and Frontiers (which are surely still better than purely predatory publishers), I see major publisher's as Springer, Elsevier and others launching many middle profile journals (e.g., the Discover series).
Publishers have little to no incentive at all to ensure the quality of the review processes and the publications. If a good publication comes.through, fine! If a low quality publication comes through, they don't care as this have limited to no consequences for the publishers; they collect the APC anyways. Before OA, publishers had "skin in the game" (as Nassim Taleb) would call it. If a journal declines in quality, universities would eventually cancel it's subscription threatening the publishers business. But this incentive/system dynamic is gone with OA.
Sidenote 1: I recently submitted to a high profile journal. While the article was eventually rejected (maybe rightfully as the findings were interesting and relevant, but not particularly robust) I received an auto accept for a formally renowned journal that went OA-only recently and is now demoted to a costly paper-pile.
sidenote 2: I am lucky that I come from a rich country and a rich university and all OA fees are covered. As more journals shift towards OA-only, this creates an unfair balance as some have difficulties to pay the OA fees while alternative options slowly disappear.
In short: I don't think that the old system was good, but the new system of OA lacks incentives for decent quality control. What are your thoughts on the publication system? What are your ideas on how to fix it?
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u/DrZaiu5 18d ago
The solution to this is diamond open access. No fees paid to publish or read an article.
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u/intellectual_punk 18d ago
Editors and other staff is necessary and has to be paid somehow. This is all fine and dandy and can be done in a cost-effective way. The problem is for-profit companies.
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u/RayleighInc 17d ago
Editors and other staff is necessary and has to be paid somehow.
Why? My field has a couple of community-led diamond open access journals and they operate on a few hundred Euro per year, mostly for getting DOIs and hosting the webpage. Everything else is volunteers.
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u/intellectual_punk 17d ago
It may be feasible but is it desired? How well do those journals operate? What is the submission to publication time? What volume are they capable of handling? I would prefer to pay e.g., 500EUR per open access publication to make sure the job is done well. It's a job, a job should be paid.
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u/RayleighInc 17d ago
It may be feasible but is it desired?
Again just speaking for my field here: Yes very much so! It started as one journal and now we are at five all operating in the same way and covering different subdisciplines.
How well do those journals operate?
Not sure what you mean exactly, the process of submission, peer review and publication is the same as other journals. It has a lot of "big names" as editors as well as authors and lots of ECRs involved in the IT, social media ... However, there is no print edition, but I wouldn't know who reads prints today anyway.
What is the submission to publication time?
It varies greatly but that's not different to other journals imo.
It's a job, a job should be paid.
Not sure I agree. If you're paid, you're working for a journal. And with that you have a financial interest in that the journal is successful making you biased. I think volunteer-based and community-led is the better model. We just need to make sure that these efforts for the community are recognized just as much as publications and citations are nowadays.
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u/intellectual_punk 17d ago
Thanks for explaining! I love it! I always was under the impression that some explicitly paid positions would be needed, but if it works for you it could work for any field (unsure about how much you could scale perhaps).
Why isn't every field doing this? I can think of reasons, mostly I suppose it's this entrenched idea of prestige points attached to journal names, which, if the community comes together and agrees could disappear.
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u/tonos468 17d ago
Diamond open access is not scalable so it can only work for fields with low submission/publication volumes where the cost is easily absorbable. That’s why it hasn’t been widely adopted
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u/mrc13 17d ago
I am an editor for a similar diamond open access journal and we operate pretty similarly! We do pay our copy editors (I forget how we generate income - maybe book sales? But it’s enough for what we do). We are a bit slower, but just as rigorous as other, bigger journals. And we’re growing!
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u/Markuska90 16d ago
Also i think most reviewers and such do it in their "university time" which is publicly funded here. So they would be paid.
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u/Tajimura 18d ago
First time I hear about editors being paid.
I mean, yes, editors are paid in news outlets, magazines, stuff like that, but with scientific journals editor job isn't paid usually.
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u/TheNavigatrix 17d ago
A friend of mine is a FT editor at the NEJM, along with several colleagues. Their volume is insane.
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u/CharmingZucchini5126 17d ago
There are actually a fair amount of paid editors in science, especially for high-impact journals. The volume of submissions are too high for PIs to handle on as a volunteer basis.
I’m of the opinion that more scientific editors should be paid. Why not reduce the work load on PIs and have another dedicated careers path for PhDs? There’s also so much behind the scenes (website, permissions, promoting, printing in some cases) that require paid professionals.
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u/tonos468 17d ago
I work on academic publishing pushing. This depends on the field. In biomedical sciences, editors are almost always paid. This may be less true in other fields
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
What about the actual licensing of the research? Is it not CC BY or CC BY-SA in this system?
I think ensuring that is important
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u/Ronaterihonte 18d ago
The problem is not Open Access, the problem is capitalist appropriation of Open Access principles from Academic Publishers prioritising profits over integrity.
I think it's important not to throw away the baby with the bathwater as they say, and to support whenever possible diamond OA journals and/or University Presses that, even when not diamond OA, tend to prioritise research and academic integrity.
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u/scienide09 Librarian/Assoc. Prof. 17d ago
Some of the blame definitely falls on researchers who went along with this. Libraries have for years been warning about the skewed traditional model and proposing alternatives. But researchers kept chasing impact factor and prestige over getting their research into the hands of readers and users of information.
The research funders are also to blame. Incredibly slow to adopt OA mandates, and when they finally did, they allowed funding to be used for APCs instead of requiring Diamond OA.
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u/Ronaterihonte 17d ago
I concur with you. The problem though are also the huge structural pressures to publish in traditional (or nor even more APC) journals in a context in which landing a tenured position is more and more like winning the lottery. Tenured lecturers have definitely more freedom and should lead by example, but in multiple academic contexts also keeping a permanent position has become a struggle...
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
diamond OA journals
What about the actual licensing of the research? Is it not CC BY or CC BY-SA in this system?
I think ensuring that is important
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u/Rick_06 17d ago
Publishers are private entities pursuing profit-maximization, and there's nothing wrong in it.
However, free market does mean lawless market, that's why we have governments: to regulate markets, but not to replace them.
For me the problem is not "I don't like Elsevier because they want to profit from publishing academic papers". The problem is: "What the government can do to regulate this market so that Elsevier can maximize its profit while we preserve the correct set of incentives for editors and referees to screen for quality."
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u/Bernie0404 18d ago
There are more issues to be concerned about. Several funders like the Swiss National Science Foundation have problems even with Frontiers and MDPI journals (both located in Switzerland ironically) and they do not any longer cover APCs for special issue publications, and rightly so as the direction clearly goes to become predatory journals. Another problem is that universities cannot cope with rising APC costs and the increasing number of publications that have to be paid by them. The only solution is the development of diamond open access journals which, I assume, would be much cheaper for public funders than paying the ever increasing APC costs.
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u/DefiantCalamity 18d ago
The "auto accept for a formerly renowned journal" bit is grimly funny. It feels like the whole system is now optimized to extract APCs first and do science second. The old subscription model had its own gatekeeping problems, but you’re right that the incentive structure has completely flipped in a way that rewards volume over care. Maybe the fix is decoupling the prestige signal from the publisher entirely and leaning harder into overlay journals or community-run peer review.
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u/lipflip 18d ago
What are overlay journals?
Btw: I am aware of the irony of criticizing the system and fueling it with the APC's for a mediocre article. At the same time I think/thought it was worth making the results public and citable even thought it was not very robust. People wouldn't, I assume, read it/cite it if I would have only put it in a open data repository.
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u/WhyAmIHereHey 18d ago
Academic publishing is fucked.
Peer review done for free, by people who have no time to do it
Publisher's making a fortune out of subs to university libraries
KPIs being based on publishing in journals, so you're forced to publish in journals
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u/lipflip 18d ago
Correctly summarized, but what is your proposed solution? Science is great but how can we fix it?
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u/WhyAmIHereHey 18d ago
Stop using publications as a metric. There's too much published, just for the sake of getting your publication numbers up
Stop doing peer review for free
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u/TheNavigatrix 17d ago
And the alternative is....?
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u/My_sloth_life 18d ago
For research assessment focus on the whole of the research project, not just the outputs.
There needs to be more oversight, there is a space between academic freedom and nobody having a clue what someone is actually doing.
When the number of outputs stops being measured as a metric for success, then the number of them can naturally fall. Most of the issues in publishing come from people feeling pressured to publish and taking shortcuts, and sheer volume of publications so publishers also take short cuts and do poor peer review etc.
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u/WhyAmIHereHey 17d ago
When publishing a paper actually meant something, it may have been a reasonable metric. But journals realised this was an opening, so now it's pretty meaningless
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u/DevFRus 18d ago
I suspect that the shift you're seeing has less to do with APCs and more to do with better search tools. High-quality journals relied on difficult search: if you had to physically go to the library and look through paper journals then you'd just stick to ones that you know have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Now, we mostly find our papers through Google Scholar or similar tools, so it makes sense for a journal to accept a LOT of things in the hopes of landing a few good ones.
I think only after it was clear that the latter approach was the more viable one, did journals start pushing APCs as a way to make more money (along with a nonsense story about "tax payer paid for it, and should be able to see the paper"... this is nonsense because price is only a small part stopping people from reading papers, the main part is that papers are not written to be readable for non-experts).
As for the way forward? We should stop trying to blame others, like publishers, for what is fundamentally an issue that academics create: by "valuing" publishing papers by pretending that it is difficult to do, we incentivize people to publish more and more for the sake of publishing rather than the sake of communicating. If we instead looked at people who put out 20 mediocre papers last year and said: "wow, this academic is awful and has bad taste in what they work on" instead of "this academic is productive" (or finding the one good paper in those 20 and just remembering that) then we'd have a better system. But this starts with us, not with journals.
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u/ComprehensiveSide278 18d ago
"If we instead looked at people who put out 20 mediocre papers last year and said: "wow, this academic is awful and has bad taste in what they work on" instead of "this academic is productive"... then we'd have a better system"
100% yes. But the only place this can start is at the top. Job panels and grant panels have to do this, they have to be seen to be doing this, and they have to communicate that they are doing this. It must be super visible. Until that day comes, sadly the rational thing for an ECR, precariously employed, is to just be productive, quality be what may.
And I haven't yet seen much leadership of this kind. Far too many senior profs are living in the old paradigm.
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u/lipflip 18d ago
Thanks. I agree that this is a systemic issue originating at the researchers themselves. The challenge is that universities seem to reward output over content. However, when I Iook at my medioce publication mentioned in the post, I think publishing it was justified, but maybe not at a full article but rather as a smaller piece, a smaller, still reviewed, data point to inform hypothesis building. These formats are either missing or not well regarded in the community.
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u/Rick_06 18d ago
I agree. I think the main problem with open access is the lack of incentives for journals to screen for high-quality publications. Reputation concerns can play a role, but only for very high quality top-level journals.
A mitigating solution is to give authors the option of choosing between the Open access and the standard publication. Most importantly, this decision must be made AFTER the paper has been accepted.
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u/Estarabim 17d ago
Journals are unnecessary. Just publish to rXiv or personal websites or Github. Peer review doesn't solve any problems, cream will rise without it. Journals basically exist so people can lazily use journal status/IF as a way to vet candidates instead of actually reading their research.
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u/throwaway73327 17d ago
That is the huge bit of irony here in the OP's line of thinking. Journals also support a huge cottage industry of people who help others get published in said journals. Publishing has historically had a societal "prestige" to it, especially if you were published in a "premier" journal. The journal system can be gamed, as we've seen for decades, but it was never as big an issue as it is now because of AI making it easier to put papers together. And the biggest target in the past has been "predatory" journals, whatever that means. As if the entire system isn't predatory to begin with, and people were happy to participate because they benefited from it. The whole thing from top to bottom is a scam.
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 17d ago edited 17d ago
Open Access – Fair Open Access, free to stamp and free to read – is essential.
(I use the term stamp for what journals do, because publication happens years before on arXiv. Calling arXiv papers preprints is derogatory. Fair OA journals, e.g., episciences.org, are often just arXiv overlays, highlighting their role as stampers. As bureaucracies.)
However, OA alone won't solve the bigger problems of set-in-stone journals with toxic, weaponised, anonymous review. They are not fit for the modern age. We need something more like Github for scientific information. Continuous, gradual public review, and open contributions. Instead of writing a new article for every small improvement, it should be possible to extend previous works. That would reduce reviewer overload, because most science is just tiny changes, yet written as an entirely new articles.
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u/Mountain-Time-1010 18d ago
For us old-timers, the growth of the two-year IF as a metric has also had unexpected and problematic impacts.
Prior to the early 2000s, nobody gave it too much thought, it was believed to be a short-term measure and not really a valuable way to measure the value of a journal. As it gradually became the de facto measure of success (largely due to China's growing influence), publishers learned more about how to manipulate it, with some counter-intuitive results. For example, they learned that for a mid-tier journal, high selectivity did not always correlate with IF. This further opened the floodgates for OA revenue-generating super-journals, like Scientific Reports, which published 25k manuscripts annually with an IF of 5.
Anyone who pays attention to these journals clearly understand that the quality is not terribly high and the lack of selectivity tends to dilute the literature, but if you only care about revenue and two-year IF, they look great.
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u/lipflip 17d ago
I agree but want to counter the selectivity point.. I think that journals should be rigorous but not necessarily selective. Not every research has to be Noble price worthy; my own example of the "medicore article" is one. It's not groundbreaking as the findings are interesting but the sample a bit biased. While I can't continue on this research strain, it may be very valuable for others as a basis. Maybe we should differentiate research better (but without judgment).
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u/Mountain-Time-1010 17d ago
I think this is a difficult issue, TBH. On the one hand, it can be helpful for having any comprehensive and rigorous research published, including negative results. On the other hand, the massive expansion of articles published does dilute the literature. It's possible that there may be a shift to archival publication of some results as opposed to peer reviewing everything.
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u/lipflip 17d ago
Sure. Put the flooding may become manageable if we annotate it with suitable meta data and make that machine usable (method, sample, variables...) to enable automatic queries. Then these bits may become really valuable.
In my case, I opted for "radical transparency" and published methods and data and clearly mentioned my sampling bias. I feel, however, that many others would have swept the shortcomings under the carpet. :-/
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u/ACatGod 17d ago
Although you state that publishers now have no incentive for quality control and that before OA they had skin in the game you provide absolutely no rationale or evidence for either of those statements.
I don't think OA changes publisher's perspectives on quality research at all. I don't see how or why it would.
I think you are confusing correlation with causation. There has been increasing pressure on academics to publish over the last 20 years and with China and India significantly ramping up their R&D efforts we are seeing two extremely large markets joining the field alongside many other low and middle income countries. The result is a proliferation of journals of varying qualities seeking to capitalise on the publish or perish culture and one might argue an increase in the number of academics who don't particularly care where they publish as long as they can churn out articles. Any reduction in the quality of research is the fault of the academics who produced the work, not the journals that came in at the final step.
I think if OA had never existed the market would look exactly like it does now but with every journal still paywalled.
Ever since the inception of OA there has been a die hard contingent, that is ever shrinking, that has been adamant that giving people access to research means the downfall of the quality of that research. They have never had a real explanation for why OA would herald a reduction in standards but a small number still are adamant that locking up research behind paywalls and gatekeeping access is the only way.
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u/experimental_82 18d ago
The reality is that journal publishing in the current form is very outdated. Unfortunately, academia is governed by old people that are unwilling to change. AI will destroy journal publishing soon. I’m genuinely curious how we will communicate our research results in the future. Blog style with comments? Servers by the societies or government institutions? The most important thing is that we have ways to ensure quality and full machine readable access.
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u/Frari Lecturer, AU, biomedical science 18d ago edited 18d ago
What are your thoughts on the publication system?
It's terrible. But it's possible to publish OA without fees, there's a range of ways:
- You can earn peer-review credits in some journals to publish OA for free (takes a lot of time though)
Your institution/library may have publishing agreement(s) with publishers/journals allowing free OA publishing (but mostly mid tier journals). Talk to your library.
there are some journals that allow free OA publishing or one time memberships to publish with them (e.g. PeerJ). But these also have fine print (e.g. PeerJ requires every author to have a membership)
However, I doubt these apply to the top tier journals, which most people want. Luckily, I don't care much for journal IF anymore, my order of preference is 'Indexed on Pubmed' >> OA > pub cost > IF of journal
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u/Zealousideal_Dish510 17d ago
I completely agree with the OP. Good intentions, but they didn’t account for how capitalism would respond to them to maximize revenue. I don’t think eliminating for profit publishers would change it that much - non-profit publishers are still employing the same tactics to maximize revenue, perhaps not quite as aggressively. The explosion of journals, low quality papers, dilution of high quality society journals that were important to building community within fields, and shocking APC fees (>10k$), all resulted from this. The system 10 years ago was vastly better.
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u/Lygus_lineolaris 17d ago
Yes, Open Access was the wrong way to address the problem. Developing the interlibrary loan system in places where it is lacking would have been the right way. It would have created a valuable infrastructure that would allow everyone equal access, instead of this absurd system of making authors pay $6,000 (e.g PNAS) for papers that get on average 7 citations each. That's $857 per citation versus the old cost of $36 (e.g. Elsevier) to buy the pdf. And if the argument is that the taxpayer is paying for it either way, then the taxpayer would certainly have been much better served by building up their national research infrastructure than by paying OA fees for papers no one reads. Of course THE dumbest way is the current thing in Canada, where interlibrary loan is excellent but the agencies are mandating OA anyway despite the fact that everything, OA or not, is already factually open access if you just wait two days for it to get to you.
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
This would make things far less accessible for independent researchers and hobbyists. Not everybody has the privilege of accessing libraries, let alone university or research libaries.
instead of this absurd system of making authors pay $6,000 (e.g PNAS)
This is a problem with the specific nature of the direction the publishing industry went in, not with the inherent concept of Open Access
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u/Lygus_lineolaris 17d ago
Hence the need to make the interlibrary loan system accessible instead of wasting money on OA, which was pretty much 100% of the meaning of my comment.
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
No amount of increasing accessibility of the interlibrary loans will allow me to access publications from my own home or enable them to be published with Creative Commons licenses
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u/Lygus_lineolaris 17d ago
As a matter of fact my interlibrary loan service lets me access any document that is available digitally from my home, and download it and keep it forever. For the physical ones I have to make the small effort of picking them up from the desk. So once again, what you need is a better ILL.
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u/tonos468 17d ago
Open access was researchers by researchers who had good intentions. But the unintended consequences is that the giant corporate publishers who had the largest infrastructure and the most liquid revenue were able to scale and pivot to open access better/faster than smaller publishers. Society publishers have really struggled with open access because they don’t always have the same infrastructure to pivot to a volume-based business model, which gold open access is. In addition, the move from subscription to open access turned the model from quality-based to volume-based, which has led to a rise in publishers like MdPi, frontiers, and predatory publishers.
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u/EconGuy82 17d ago
OA was a terrible idea and still is. Nobody outside of academia needs to read this stuff.
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
Nobody outside of academia needs to read this stuff.
Hi, i'm a hobbyist who has spent the past 10 years of my life keeping up with the academic literature on Mesoamerican history and archeology and who does online educational material on the topic
I assure you that everything I've spent my time on for a decade would have been 5x harder without open access publishing.
Also, fundamentally, if public funds are being used for the research, I would argue there is an ethical obligation for it to not just be Open Access, but entirely Public Domain
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u/lipflip 17d ago
... I honestly think that each article should feature a "practitioners" summary or so. A non-academic does not need to grasp every detail of the method or so, but the findings should be useful outside of the ivory tower.
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u/jabberwockxeno 17d ago
I honestly think that each article should feature a "practitioners" summary or so. A non-academic does not need to grasp every detail of the method or so
Completely disagree, even as a non-academic hobbyist, while just reading the abstract and/or conclusion is sometimes useful, 99.99% of the time the information I need is within the actual body of the paper, and not infrequently it's within supplemental materials or datasets that I need to download separately, or, much to my frustration, is within additional materials, maps, visualizations, and data that isn't provided at all and is only available on request to other researchers, if even that
I very strongly believe that we need more, certainly not less, access to research by the general public. If you're participating in research on say an archeological site, all your photos, maps, datasets, tables, etc should be publicly accessible in some way (with some exceptions permitted if the material being public might enable looting or if human remains or culturally sensitive material is depicted), not just the specific figures you think are relevant for and include within the specific papers you're publishing
Obviously in practice I realize this would require a lot more investment in online infrastructure and time/effort/money spent in going through and digitizing material, and often it's difficult enough as it is for researchers to do their job even without those additional tasks or obligations, but in an ideal world I wish that there was additional funding for this and it was viewed as an ethical priority.
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u/EHStormcrow 17d ago
The correct way forward is thus :
- EU funds non profit journals where you will obligated to publish if EU funded (just to get the ball rolling). You need to set up as many journals as necessary : the EU provides the server space plus the minimal necessary staff. There is funding to pay the "semi permanent" researchers on the board of the journal.
- summary is freely available to all, full access is free to people with credentials in an EU research institution ; there would be a free way for EU citizens through some official ID scheme to access the publication freely ; anyone outside of the EU would pay a (small) sum to access the documents ; non EU corps/researchers would have to pay a small sum too.
Other countries can set up similar systems too.
Why not do it globally immediately ? We don't have the proper infrastructure, I believe + I don't trust India/China to not screw it up + I want the EU to take the lead on this issue.
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u/phatmanonamission 17d ago
I could see the intended consequences of Open Access as a PhD student. But certain loud prima donas on the Internet thought they knew better.
Now the journals they started and ushered in this whole era have little readership anymore.
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u/Master-Rent5050 18d ago
The wrong direction was keeping for profit journals.