Open access, open infrastructures, and their funding: Learning from histories to more effectively enhance diamond OA ecologies for books

Authors  : Kira Hopkins, Kevin Sanders

The decade since the “Bottlenecks in the Open Access System” special issue of JLSC in 2014 has been an expansive one for open access (OA) and OA books in particular. The creation of a scholarly publishing ecosystem that enables works to be freely accessible for readers has been successful in many ways.

However, the underlying politics and economics of OA scholarly publishing often remain opaque or under-interrogated (Lawson et al., 2015). The problems with journal OA funding, specifically regarding inequality of access to publishing, discussed by Bonaccorso et al. (2014) in their contribution to that issue, have also increased and become entrenched as we discuss below.

This entrenchment has been largely via the growth and consolidation of gold OA, “transformative” agreements, and read-and-publish journal deals, which have effectively, and unnecessarily, commodified OA publications. We would argue that this is in direct tension with some of the foundations of contemporary OA.

OA was explicitly described from early principles as not a business model and as aiming to reduce financial barriers from authors, libraries, and other groups (Suber, 2024). We would like to note that, while the main focus of this paper is books, we begin with a discussion of journals. This is because we are focusing on the history, development, and critiques of OA fundings in the intervening ten years following the “Bottlenecks” special issue.

OA journal publishing has been at the forefront of discussions of OA funding, and it has dominated the last decade, and more, of this discussion; it would therefore be remiss of us not to discuss this history, the resulting current landscape of inequity, and the potential ramifications if this were to be transferred to OA books, a more nascent field in general.

URL : Open access, open infrastructures, and their funding: Learning from histories to more effectively enhance diamond OA ecologies for books

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18284

 

Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

Author : Burak Ili

Despite the positive effects of the open access (OA) movement on academic publishing, commercial publishers’ profit-driven policies continue to prevail, making the publishing process increasingly difficult for many researchers, particularly those from developing countries. T

his study critically examines open-access Q1 and Q2 journals listed in the Scimago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

Despite the OA movement’s goal of increasing access to information, the capitalist academic publishing model transforms knowledge production into a commercial activity through article processing charges (APCs). The research reveals that high APCs demanded by high-impact journals represent a significant barrier, especially for researchers with limited financial and institutional support.

This situation underscores the urgent need for institutional reform in the structure of academic publishing, particularly within the field of Media and Communication Studies.

The proposed reforms should focus on critical areas such as increased support for OA models, freeing journals and editorial boards from Western monopolies, fairly compensating the labour of reviewers and editors, and offering greater language support.

Steps taken in this direction will contribute to the creation of a more transparent, fair, and inclusive structure for academic production and sharing processes.

URL : Academic Quality or Commercial Concern? The Role of APCs in Open-Access Communication Studies Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v23i1.1547

Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

Authors : Xinyi ChenZhiqiang Liu

Gold Open Access (OA) journals are crucial for scholarly communication, highlighting the need for a thorough evaluation of their academic influence on different research fields. This study leverages the InCites platform to examine article-level characteristics relating to 22 Essential Science Indicators (ESI) research fields, with a focus on the dynamics of gold OA articles, including gold OA uptake in the Chinese mainland and gold OA adoption in the domestic English-language academic journal publishing of the Chinese mainland.

The findings reveal that disparities in gold OA adoption across 22 ESI fields are more pronounced in the Chinese mainland compared with the world scenario. In the Chinese mainland, there is a significant polarization in gold OA publishing volumes across different ESI fields, particularly in Chemistry, Clinical Medicine, and Engineering.

This study builds on the understanding of OA citation advantage (OACA) by incorporating gold OA publishing volume into a two-dimensional framework, resulting in the development of a “distance” metric. It further categorizes gold OA citation effects into four quadrants: positive citation effects (quadrants A and B) and negative citation effects (quadrants C and D), based on category normalized citation impact (CNCI) and journal normalized citation impact (JNCI) indicators from the InCites database.

The findings underscore the importance of developing tailored strategies to address field-specific challenges and promote gold OA dynamics in the Chinese mainland; while prioritizing high-quality gold OA journals is essential for fostering gold OA development in the rest of the world.

URL : Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1630

Is open access disrupting the journal business? A perspective from comparing full adopters, partial adopters, and non-adopters

Author : Xijie Zhang

Two decades after the inception of open access publishing (OA), its impact has remained a focal point in academic discourse. This study adopted a disruptive innovation framework to examine OA’s influence on the traditional subscription market. It assesses the market power of gold journals (OA full adopters) in comparison with hybrid journals and closed-access journals (partial adopters and non-adopters). Additionally, it contrasts the market power between hybrid journals (partial adopters) and closed-access journals (non-adopters).

Using the Lerner index to measure market power through price elasticity of demand, this study employs difference tests and multiple regressions. These findings indicate that OA full adopters disrupt the market power of non-adopting incumbents. However, by integrating the OA option into their business models, partial adopters can effectively mitigate this disruption and expand their influence from the traditional subscription market to the emerging OA paradigm.

URL : Is open access disrupting the journal business? A perspective from comparing full adopters, partial adopters, and non-adopters

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2024.101574

An open dataset of article processing charges from six large scholarly publishers

Authors : Leigh-Ann Butler, Madelaine Hare, Nina Schönfelder, Eric Schares, Juan Pablo Alperin, Stefanie Haustein

This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers – Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley – between 2019 and 2023.

APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations.

The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

URL : An open dataset of article processing charges from six large scholarly publishers

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08356

On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access

Author : Robert Kudelić

The world of scientific publishing is changing; the days of an old type of subscription-based earnings for publishers seem over, and we are entering a new era. It seems as if an ever-increasing number of journals from disparate publishers are going Gold, Open Access that is, yet have we rigorously ascertained the issue in its entirety, or are we touting the strengths and forgetting about constructive criticism and careful weighing of evidence?

We will therefore present the current state of the art, in a compact review/bibliometrics style, of this more relevant than ever hot topic and suggest solutions that are most likely to be acceptable to all parties–while the performed analysis also shows there seems to be a link between trends in scientific publishing and tumultuous world events, which in turn has a special significance for the publishing environment in the current world stage.

URL : On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08313