In recent years, the dramatic growth of open access to the literature has quite reasonably been hailed as a major success, which it most certainly has been in these terms. It is difficult to deny the impact that policies have had on facilitating this growth, not forgetting the investments that institutions have made is developing systems and cultures that support the stated purpose of open access.
In actuality, however, open access is far more complicated than this. Open access has a broad range of lineages and histories as Sam Moore has unpicked and emphasised. This disparate politics that these differences imbue is incredibly significant if we are to assess the contemporary successes and failures (and problems, etc.) of open access.
Some advocates of open access refer to open access as a “movement.” This can seem simplistic as it homogenises the disparate politics of various stakeholders. Issues such as pedagogy, gender, race, coloniality, and economics sometimes propel a particular drive or approach towards open access. Conflating the rationales of these heterogenous entities into one singular movement seems somewhat limiting, and fails to understand the legitimacy of different routes that any of these could take towards achieving their goals. This is where the benefits that of open infrastructures may be forgotten in the quest towards simply ‘achieving’ open access: distributed infrastructure of open repositories, and open publishing platforms afford opportunities to have multiple open accesses. It is important to remember that different forms of open access are a strength rather than a weakness.
For instance, colleagues at Kent have recently published their access statement for their repository, KAR. This is a comprehensive statement articulating the roadmap that KAR is on towards making KAR more functional to a wider range of users. Importantly, it is not about ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ things per se, but it is about honestly and openly discussing the intention and the current issues in the process of making their repository more inclusive. We are similarly progressing this with GALA, and are currently liaising with our vendor to help identify the current status of GALA in this regard and I look forward to sharing something more concrete on this with you in the future. This is important because it highlights that we are thinking beyond operational issues in relation to open access policies with a more considered focus on people, and I would like to take this forward in a range of broader and deeper ways.
I have a strong interest in digital privacy as a human right. This may seem antithetical to open access, but openness and privacy are the obverse of one another, and thus one necessitates the other. I have previously discussed the issues of digital surveillance in relation to open access repositories, and have tested EOTK on various open services to make them available as onion services. Recent issues around personal data from social media has been used have made more of us aware of the underlying risks that exist as a result of merely using online services, and scholarly autonomy, privacy, and security necessitate that we consider how we might be able to support this to ensure that open access is inclusive and safe.
For open access to build structural equity and inclusion, it needs to be more than achieving compliance rates of 80% against a policy. We need to articulate the politics of our respective personal approaches towards open access and openness, and how this interacts with out institutional approaches to open access.
At this point we have looked at the beginnings of open access, what it means now and the various reactions surrounding it, but now we will look at what we can expect for the immediate future.
We can see that open access is not going away anytime soon and is in fact growing. Examples include the REF 2021 and Plan S. In addition, we have seen an increase in open access deals such as the recent one between Springer and 700 German universities. Though these deals are controversial as they do not translate to complete open access, they are nonetheless a stepping point towards it. Open access also does face problems despite its growth, such as a recent article from Science Magazine highlighting that open access megajournals are in fact declining in performance.
REF2021
Most of those who have been following us up to this point are probably very familiar with the REF 2021. As part of the rules governing REF 2021, submissions must follow, at minimum, the green open access route. The gold open access route is also an option and is sometimes preferred, due to the embargo restrictions normally placed in green open access. For guidance on how to deposit your academic outputs to the Greenwich Academic Literature Archive we have tutorials available. It is important to note that if you plan on going through the green open access route, that you are aware of any embargoes and of the deadlines REF 2021 imposes. These deadlines include that you must deposit an article or conference proceeding item no later than three months after the date acceptance. After the item has been deposited it must meet the open access requirements. If there is no embargo then the output must be available within one month of deposit, conversely if there is an embargo then it must be available within one month after it expires. If you decide to follow the gold route these do not apply to your output.
In addition to open access there are also similar movements, believing in similar principles for different fields. Such examples include:
Open Data. The belief that all data should be openly available and can be reused.
Open source software. The movement that believes that software code should be openly available, reused and modified by everyone.
Open science. The general umbrella movement that includes both of the previous movements, but also includes others that share the same goal of making research open and transparent.
From all of this we can see there is more than just open access. That the principles are not restricted to this one particular movement, and that there are others that share them as well. If you have reached this far and you would like to get a more in depth understanding about the history of open access, then you can find more details at Ars Technica.
Although open access has become more mainstream since its inception as demonstrated from our “Modern Open Access” post, it didn’t do so undetected. Inevitably both the public and publishers found out about open access and reacted in their own unique ways.
Publisher Reactions
We have already had a glimpse at the reactions of publishers back in our post “The Adventure Begins”, where they were worried about E-biomed bringing in the US government as competitor. This was because E-biomed was being supported by the National Institute of Health, however this was not the only instance of a big reaction from publishers.
Another example was the introduction of “predatory” open access publishers. After seeing the success of PLoS ONE, these publishers adopted a business model that would allow them to declare themselves open access but charge a very large publication fee without providing editorial or publishing services normally given in legitimate journals. Methodology and outcomes varied, from smaller publishers giving poor service to those who outright use open access to charge a massive fee to naïve academics. The problem became so bad that Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and researcher at the University of Colorado, created the Beall List. This list contains the names of publishers that have been deemed to be “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers”. Though it must be noted that these are just advisory and that academics should check out the publisher before deciding. To this day the list is still being updated when possible to ensure academics are aware of potential predatory open access publishers.
In addition to this there was also the event where in 2007 a group of scientific publishers became concerned at the success of open access and hired a communications consultancy, Dezenhall Resources, to deal with it. The idea was that they would use simple messages such as “public access equals government censorship” to try and discredit open access, however it ultimately failed.
As open access continued to progress in the US, lobbyists were able to persuade the government to introduce legislation that restricted it. In 2011 the Research Works Acts (RWA) was created in order to keep the private sector publishing research and keep its integrity. The main issue with the act was that it had been drafted in way that gave publishers veto powers over publicly funded research to be made available through PubMed Central, who in 2008 made it mandatory to deposit such research.
Luckily the act was not widely supported and was not in the end enacted. In fact, the outrage from academics was massive to the point where people like Tim Gowers, mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal, refused to publish with certain journals because of it. All of which led to the boycott we touched on back in our “Modern Open Access” post.
Additionally, the RWA wasn’t the only major event concerning the actions by publishers. In 2015 a group of academics resigned en masse from Lingua after Elsevier’s refusal to make the title purely open access. Afterwards they decided to create their own open access rival journal, Glossa. Furthermore, the publishers were also engaged in a race to bring open access into their fold. The acquisition of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by Elsevier in 2016 being one example. Although not much was changed it did give Elsevier the ability to mine information and metrics associated with scholarly publishing. This was seen by open access advocates as encroachment on their territory and although open access was making progress a few of the members of the movement had decided that open access had become almost no better than traditional publishing through the gold and green routes.
So far, we have seen the reactions of publishers to open access. Now we’ll look at the reaction of these actions in the form of piracy.
Piracy
Image created by A.Carter
Given the actions of publishers, many people felt disenfranchised with open access and believed that the only way to properly obtain it was to do it through illegal means. A particular example is the case of Aaron Swartz. He believed that open access was a partial solution to the issues in academic publishing but that it was flawed in that it would only apply to future works.
In 2008, Aaron published a document he titled the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, where he proclaimed that anyone who had access to academic publications should pirate them and make them freely available. He believed that this was a moral duty of all people who had access to paywalled papers regardless of the legal ramifications of those involved. In 2011 he was caught downloading 450,000 academic papers from JSTOR in 12 hours and in total had about 5,000,000. He was charged with numerous offences and facing up 35 years in prison. Two years after his arrest and still awaiting trial, Aaron unfortunately committed suicide.
Although Aaron was an example of individual piracy, there are also entire organisations centred on pirating academic papers. One such organisation is Sci-Hub, set up in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan. Claiming to have over 47,000,000 academic papers, Sci-Hub has a popularity with people wanting to gain unauthorised access to blocked off papers. Some claim it is because legal methods of access are too expensive or that searching for them is a complex route. In comparison to Sci-Hub who didn’t charge for access and had a simple search engine.
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”.
As we have seen in our previous post “The Time Before Open Access”, Panizzi was able to achieve much of his ambition over the course of the 19th century. He was able to gather a massive number of books during his time and make them openly available to anyone who wanted to read them. Unfortunately, the technology of the time limited the ability of people to come as they were only available from the British Museum in London. However fast forward to over a century later and the limitations have been, for the most part, solved by the advancement of technology. The internet was particularly important given its ability to instantly send information quickly to other people across the globe. Now let’s look at the first website that was recognised as being open access.
Let’s arXiv everything
In 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing and information science at Cornell University, launched arXiv. This was a repository for preprints (early versions of academic papers before peer-review) and was set up so that he could upload them to a server, as the storage capacities of computers at the time was extremely small when compared to the latest hard drives. Additionally, he allowed physicists and mathematicians to also upload their preprints without a fee or permission needed. As a result, this made arXiv quite popular however a much larger influence was the adoption of Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system. The TeX typesetting system allows the production of high-quality papers with minimal effort and allows the complex symbols used mainly in STEM fields to be written as basic text. Given that academic papers could now be written in basic text, academics could send emails containing entire papers to individuals or groups. These papers could then be reviewed through arXiv and eventually would become the first draft sent to publishers. To this day arXiv has come a long way from its original 100 submissions per year, to 105,000 in 2015. It also boasts a download counter of over 139,000,000.
Scholarly Skywriting
The process of sending entire papers across the internet to other academics to review was defined as “Scholarly Skywriting”. The one responsible for its definition is Stevan Harnad, currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. In order to help pave the way in understanding the benefits, and inadvertently the benefits of Open Access, he wrote three papers: Scholarly skywriting and the prepublication continuum of scientific inquiry, Post-Gutenberg galaxy: the fourth revolution in the means of production of knowledge and A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. This ability to do peer review with ease showed that the costs for publishing through traditional means were no longer as great as they were before. This is especially true as papers are reviewed by other academics, who do not see much compensation for their services.
Let us now look at some of the early attempts at open access.
SciELO
Following on from arXiv we come across the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Established in 1997, Brazil, SciELO had two objectives. The first was to move the publishing of journals to online and the second was to increase the visibility of academic journals in developing countries. Although SciELO does not completely fall under open access, those two objectives are both a part of what open access aims to achieve.
PubMed
At the same time in North America, PubMed was launched by the National Institute of Health (NIH). Unlike SciELO, PubMed did not give access to the full text of academic papers, but it did allow people to search through a comprehensive bibliographic database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.
BioMed Central
In comparison to SciELO and PubMed, BioMed Central can be considered the first series of open access journals. In 1998, British publisher Vitek Tracz visited David Lipman, head of PubMed at the time as well as GenBank (an open database of DNA from the Human Genome Project). During his visit Tracz proposed the idea to create a central online repository, where academics could then deposit their papers and bypass publishers. The papers would then be made freely available.
When Tracz made the proposal, he believed that Lipman should be the one to create it, however Lipman declined. He believed that it was an interesting idea but due to his current commitments he didn’t have the time. Upon hearing this, Tracz decided to launch online only journals, which he referred to collectively as BioMed Central. He also decided that as academics were already paying for some of the extra services in traditional publishing, such as coloured pictures, he decided to make it the basis for BioMed Central. He would charge for publication but make the articles freely available online.
E-biomed
After initially declining the request from Tracz, Lipman did get back in touch with him and stated that he was going to talk with Harold Varmus, then director of the NIH, about radically changing the structure of publishing. Soon after that meeting, Varmus and a young researcher, Patrick Brown, created E-biomed, a repository for scientific reports. This repository would proceed to make the reports available to everyone online. In order to show the purpose of E-biomed, Varmus created the E-biomed manifesto.
A gentle beginning
So far, the attempts at open access have resulted in some success. However, they were still limited and comparatively less coordinated than the current form of the open access movement. On the other hand, even these small successful ventures were a cause for concern from traditional publishers. An example would be E-biomed and its backing by the NIH. At the time publishers believed that it was turning the government into a competitor, though this was soon addressed in 1999 with the launch of PubMed Central. It was considered a halfway between PubMed and E-biomed, operating with PubMed integrated and providing free access to online users by absorbing E-biomed. The only downside being that there was a requirement that articles must have a six-month embargo before being made available. However even this was not enough to sate the publishers.
In response to the publishers’ gripes, Varmus, Brown and another researcher, Mike Eisen began the Public Library of Science (PLoS) advocacy effort. Essentially it was a boycott of traditional publishers and that they would no longer submit articles, pay for them or provide any other services unless the journals deposited them into PubMed Central.
Initially, PLoS got tremendous support with more than 30,000 academics from over 100 countries signing a pledge. In contrast, traditional publishers did not acknowledge the group as a serious problem. Out of roughly 6,000 biomedical science journals, only about 100 signed up. The traditional publishers ended up being correct as when the time to deliver came, not many of the pledged academics carried it through. The result was an embarrassing failure. Those behind PLoS were not deterred though, and instead went even further by becoming a publisher themselves under the same name. They utilised the business model created by Tracz with PubMed Central and in 2003 launched their first title PLoS Biology and the second title PLoS Medicine in 2004.
At this point we have seen the beginnings of open access, a few of the early attempts at implementation and some of the reactions to it from both academics and publishers alike. In our next segment we will see how open access as we know it today was defined.
