Moving on from our last post “The Adventure Begins”, we can see that at the time, open access was only just starting to be introduced. The methods of publishing were varied and there was no common name for it. Here we will see the birth of open access as we know it today.

In 2001 a group of key individuals met in Budapest. They discussed about making academic publications freely available online and it was here that “open access” was properly defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. The concepts were to then be consolidated and expanded in two further documents: the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, both published in 2003. Over the next couple of years, academics, universities, funders, publishers and governments began exploring this new form publishing, one of the first to do so was the UK-based Wellcome Trust. It not only endorsed open access, but it also stipulated that all Wellcome-funded research was to be published open access. Given that the Wellcome Trust was globally recognised as one of the largest charitable foundations, in 2014 alone they give more than £727m in grants, giving the new approach a lot of positive attention.

Soon afterwards, the UK’s House of Commons science and technology committee became aware of this new trend in scientific publishing and wanted to see if they should intervene. The answer came in 2004, when a report recommended that government funding agencies should make it mandatory for publicly funded research to be made open access through self-archiving in institutional repositories. This form was defined as green open access. In fact, just before the report was made, Elsevier announced that they were allowing green open access, however there was a condition. Only on the author’s personal website was permission not required, but it was still needed for institutional repositories. Additionally, the report also suggested looking into funding options for publications in open access journals, also known as gold open access. We will look in more detail at gold and green open access later.

The UK continued to be a leading figure in open access, this time it was the Research Councils UK (RCUK). In 2005, they made open access a requirement. However, in 2006 the policy was diluted by allowing the research councils individually decide whether open access was a requirement or just encouraged, and they allowed publishers to impose an embargo in order for them to have exclusive use of the content for a short period before it was made freely available from repositories. There was a similar attempt from the European Commission, but that also suffered from the dilution of policy.

CERN’s SCOAP

The next step towards open access was taken by CERN in 2007. What they wished to accomplish was to convert the main journals of high-energy physics papers to open access through a consortium of funding organisations named the “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics” (SCOAP). The idea was that SCOAP would directly pay publishers to make papers open access and the costs would be recovered through the savings made by cancelling subscriptions. In the end everyone was a winner. Readers had free access to papers, authors saw their work become more widespread, publishers got a better business model, libraries saved money and funders saw an increase in the visibility of the work they sponsored.

Although SCOAP was indeed a success, unfortunately it took long time to complete. Devised in 2007 but only launched in 2012 and put into operation in 2014. Additionally, it was proving difficult to adopt the same approach in other fields. Many academics in high-energy physics had been using arXiv as a form of open access for two decades already and so were familiar with the concept. Others were less enthusiastic. Nonetheless, efforts to reproduce SCOAP’s success are still being made, such as the Open Access 2020 Initiative.

A year before SCOAP was devised, there has also been some existing evidence showing the economic benefits of open access. In 2006, a study was published by John Houghton and Peter Sheehan detailing that open access could add about £1bn and £10bn a year to the UK and US economies respectively. At the same time the Public Library of Science launched a new journal, titled PLoS ONE.

PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE was a new kind of open access journal. It focused on biomedicine and related areas, but it’s main difference from other journals was its publication process. PLoS ONE would peer review articles so that it only met the basic scientific and ethical standards, with no regard for anything else. Then it would be published, and the readers would then comment on the paper, effectively allowing the readers to decide what was worth reading or not. This method employed showed that open access was not just a cheaper version of traditional publishing, but that it was also innovative. PLoS ONE was so successful, that it has been able to finance the entirety of PLoS and other journals.

Now that we have seen some of the details of what modern open access looks like, lets now take shift our attention to the three routes of open access: green, gold and diamond.

Green Open access

Green open access is where an earlier version of the article is made freely available outside of the publisher. Typically, these are post-prints or the author’s accepted manuscript (the version that has the same content as the published version but without style, layout, typesetting, etc). These are self-archived either on a repository or on the author’s own website. This route is completely free however there are some non-financial costs. Normally there is an embargo enforced and so the paper cannot be made freely available until a certain amount of time has passed since publication of the article; copyright is still handed over to the publisher and as a result papers aren’t as easily accessible than under open access. An example of where green open access is preferred is in the UK, where the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) believed it would help avoid the problem of inflated prices with gold route. However, this ability of publishers to set the embargo length, meant that they could increase to the point when authors are compelled to pay for an Article Processing Charge (APC) and go through the gold route.

Gold Open access

Gold open access refers to the route where an academic paper is published as open access straight away. This comes in two forms, either the entire journal is open access, or it is a subscription journal that will make the article open access upon the payment of an APC. The latter of which is also known as a hybrid journal. Hybrid journals have become very popular as the idea was that as more articles were made open access through APCs, eventually the subscription cost would decrease until it eventually became a fully open access journal. This is also in part due to the findings of the Finch Group, a working group set up by the UK government in 2011 to expand access to published research findings. The result was the Finch Report, published in 2012, and it stated that the UK ought to embrace open access through both open access and hybrid journals.

However, the hope that hybrid journals would eventually become fully open access has not come to fruition. In fact, the costs of publication have increased, as shown by an analysis in 2015 by the Wellcome Trust, highlighting that the average charge per article in hybrid journals was still 64% higher than in purely open access titles.

Diamond Open access

When compared to the other two routes to open access, the diamond route is not as widely known, but it does achieve open access in its own unique way. It was developed by Tim Gowers, who wrote a blog post and helped lead an unsuccessful boycott against Elsevier in 2012. At the core of his idea was the open access preprint repository, arXiv. Instead of hosting papers themselves, journals under diamond open access use links to arXiv preprints. Then they peer review the paper before allowing it to be included. This drastically cuts down on publication costs, allowing researchers to publish their work without needing an APC at all. The only costs are related to the maintenance of the journal itself and even those are low considering that the journals are all online only. Given the low costs of production, a high publication fee cannot be justified.

So far, we have seen the different routes to open access: gold, green and diamond. They each have their own unique way of achieving open access status. However, as these were being introduced, they were not being done so in secret. Both publishers and the public alike were becoming aware of open access and had their own reactions to the new publishing method. We’ll take a closer look at these in our next post “Reactions Around the World”.