(updated 8-25-23)
In academia a wide-ranging discussion about open access is weakening academic journals' monopoly on profiting from publishing research findings. Different interest groups view this differently, of course. Meanwhile, as the publishing landscape changes, are academic authors, who have long abandoned claims to copyright on many of their scholarly articles (in the "public or perish" world of university faculty-making), less docile about publishing rights, with tenured faculty positions scarcer and scarcer? This round-up of relevant pieces starts with possible breaks in the pattern:
• Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All by Peter Baldwin (MIT Press) "Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world."
• Understanding the government requirement for open access studies (Tara Haelle, Covering Health, AHCJ, 9-26-22) Journalists who covered medical research during the pandemic know how helpful it was that nearly all COVID-related studies were freely available upon publication. But those who have covered medical research for years also know how unusual that is.
Using medical research in journalism has long involved finding ways past paywalls for journal articles, whether it was accessed through press registration, reaching out to authors, contacting journal publishers, befriending folks with institutional logins, or tapping unsanctioned repositories like Sci-Hub.
But headlines at the end of August brought welcome news: publicly funded research — studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, and other taxpayer-supported agencies — would become freely available to the public, regardless of what journal they were published in. President Biden issued a memorandum on Aug. 25 aimed at “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” as the memo’s subject read, though “immediate” is a bit misleading since federal agencies have until the end of 2025 to comply.
"Open access reflects the desire of researchers and their sponsors to make their work accessible to everyone in the field, which is a serious issue for scholars at universities with limited library budgets, as well as independent scholars others working in developing countries. The paywall for these papers typically is $30 per article and up, so it can be a serious barrier for nonfiction writers without financial support. Please don't look down your noses at open access per se; it's an effort to make information more accessible. Many open access journals offer some provision for open access publication of work by researchers who lack support, although it may be delayed or require special review
• Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/
Two sites for accessing Open Access research articles
---Open Access Button (OA Works) Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors. The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a paywall to an academic article and cannot access it. It is supported by Medsin UK and the Right to Research Coalition. A prototype was built at a BMJ Hack Weekend. All code is openly available online at GitHub.
---Unpaywall A browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that points you to legal, author-posted manuscripts that are hosted on university and government web servers - usually versions that have been posted with the full and explicit authorization of the publishers themselves.
• A Survey of U.S. Science Journalists’ Knowledge and Opinions of Open Access Research (Teresa Schultz International Journal of Communication, 2023) A majority of respondents are willing to use Gold OA and Hybrid OA scholarly articles as sources, although they expressed more hesitancy in using Green OA articles, especially when they are preprints. Respondents showed awareness of the term “predatory publishers,” and a majority expressed concern about them. Some scholars argue that OA publishing, particularly Gold OA journals that charge a fee to publish, leads to predatory publishing, which poses a threat to the gatekeeping practice of peer review. Preprints are scientific studies that have yet to be peer reviewed and are made OA by sharing them on open repositories such as medRxiv and bioRxiv.
• New PLOS pricing test could signal end of scientists paying to publish free papers (Jeffrey Brainard, Science, 10-15-2020) "PLOS, the nonprofit publisher that in 2003 pioneered the open-access business model of charging authors to publish scientific articles so they are immediately free to all, this week rolled out an alternative model that could herald the end of the author-pays era. One of the new options shifts the cost of publishing open-access (OA) articles in its two most selective journals to institutions, charging them a fixed annual fee; any researcher at that institution could then publish in the PLOS journals at no additional charge."
• Want to know if an article is freely available? To check for open access, see
---PLOS
---PLOS ONE (covers primary research from any discipline within science and medicine)
---PLOS Medicine
---PLOS Biology
---BioMed Central
---CORE (UK)
---Paperity (the first multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers)
---Google Scholar
Legitimate open-access publishers should have a peer review process like other scholarly journals, says writer Jeff Hecht, in an Authors Guild discussion. "As a freelance science journalist, I have found open access is my friend in researching for my writing."~Jeff Hecht
• Copyseek Conference for HE Copyright Practitioners 21st August 2014, University of Leeds (Copyright for Education blog, 8-22-14) Copyright for Education (an excellent blog about aspects of copyright law that affect education, primarily in the UK) reports on a Copyseek Conference for HE Copyright Practitioners, University of Leeds 8-21-14. Scroll down to paragraph starting "After lunch Laurence Bebbington (University of Aberdeen) spoke about the tension between copyright law, open access..." "Laurence was sceptical about open access, saying that it didn't sit well with copyright law as under copyright the author of a work gets to choose what they do with their work and should not be forced to do something with it by someone else."..."Gold open access is also problematic; the requirement to add a CC-BY licence to a work means that there is a loss of control of rights by the author and leaves it open to exploitation by a commercial entity. He cited the case of 'Epigenetics, Environment and Genes', a CC-BY journal article that was made into a book by Apple Academic Press and now sells for over $100 without the knowledge of the author. He left us with the suggestion that there may be ethical issues with open access that perhaps we have overlooked." A blog worth following.
• A New Kind of ‘Big Deal’ for Elsevier (Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 11-22-19) Carnegie Mellon University has signed an open-access deal with Elsevier -- the first of its kind for the publisher in the U.S. Elsevier struck a similar deal with a consortium of Norwegian research institutions earlier this year.
• Elsevier Mutiny: Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing (Mathew Ingram, Forbes, 11-2-15) "All six editors and the entire editorial board of the well-respected linguistics journal Lingua have resigned to protest the company’s failure to embrace open access. Read More