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

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.

Actions taken against Sci-Hub for their piracy seem to follow a circular route. An injunction is made against the site to bring it down, but then the site’s domain is changed, resulting in another injunction needing to be filed in order to try and bring it down again. The process then repeats itself. Given how easy it is to send files over the internet and that digital storage capacities are ever increasing, it does not seem likely that these piracy sites will be taken down permanently any time soon.

This brings us to end of this episode. Our next, and final, segment on open access will be about the immediate future of open access.

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”.