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Now that we’ve discussed the basic mechanics of the scholarly publishing system, let’s move on to a deeper examination of the way that it operates. Let’s ask why it’s set up as it is. Who does it benefit, and how? Who holds the power? Because power goes hand-in-hand with money, control, and influence, and because scholarly journals are at the center of the system, let’s start by asking: 

Who owns and operates scholarly journals?

A large proportion of scholarly journals are owned and operated by commercial (for-profit) publishers, and specifically by a cluster of large companies or “oligopoly” that dominate the scholarly publishing marketplace. In fact, “the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013.”^[1] In some disciplines, such as the social sciences, the number was even higher, at 70%. These “big five”  or “giant” commercial publishers, as they are known, include RELX Group (formerly Reed-Elsevier), Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage.

What do the publishers gain, and at whose expense?

Commercial publishers are just that: commercial. They are like any other business in that they exist to generate a profit. They usually do this by charging fees (typically subscription costs) to access the content. Academic libraries are the primary subscribers. They allocate part of their budget each year to pay for journal subscriptions in order to provide their user community (students, faculty, and staff) with access to the scholarly content they need for research and educational purposes. Because many scholarly journals are quite expensive — subscribing to a single journal can cost several thousand dollars every year — individuals rely on this access paid for by their library.

But the academic community created scholarly literature in the first place . . . right? Why are they paying for their own content?

That’s why it’s problematic. In the current scholarly publishing system, scholarly articles — whose authors, editors, and peer reviewers are most often faculty, academics, and researchers  — eventually become goods owned not by the people who created them, but by a commercial entity who profits from them and their use. The people who are doing the labor — conducting research, writing articles, editing articles, and performing peer review — are not the ones who reap its rewards, at least not financially. Instead, corporate publishing businesses essentially commodify the work and wield control over how it will henceforth be handled, including its curation, discovery, dissemination, usage, and preservation. Further, there is ample evidence that these publishing conglomerates are steadily extending their reach beyond publishing endeavors to encompass, control, and profit from all aspects of the research lifecycle by making and selling tools for the entire scholarly workflow, from data management to impact analytics and even to open access.^[2]

Why don’t authors choose to publish with not-for-profit journal publishers? 

Because faculty authors are embedded in academic culture and its tenure system, they face pressure to conform to traditional publishing expectations. For example, it’s often the case that disciplines and fellow academics in the field favor specific journals, such as those with established name recognition and with a high ranking or impact factor (calculated by citation rates of recently published articles). Authors may feel they need to submit their articles to these prestigious journals in order to impress their reappointment, tenure, or promotion committee. Whether or not the journal is operated by a commercial publisher may be less important to them than having their article accepted and published by a “big name” journal in their field.

Why don’t authors demand control over their own work?

Remember that many journal publishers ask authors to sign away their copyright via a copyright transfer agreement, or CTA. This exchange usually happens after the author has already had their article accepted for publication. They are eager to complete the process and may be willing to sign whatever the publisher asks them to in order to have their work published. Or they may not fully comprehend the ramifications of relinquishing their copyright. Or it may not even occur to them that they have a choice in the matter. They may not realize that they might be able to request or negotiate more favorable terms to retain rights to their own intellectual property.

Why don’t authors just post their articles on the Internet for anyone to read freely?

Refer back to the chapter on copyright. Authors can only legally post their non-previously published work — that is, content that they have not already published in a journal — or articles that they have published in a journal that permits them to retain their copyright and thus share and re-use the material.

In the case of the former, authors often don’t want to post work that hasn’t been formally published by a journal because 1) it hasn’t undergone peer review, and 2) any author who is seeking tenure and/or promotion needs the prestige conferred by journal publication.

Sometimes authors may post working drafts or other preliminary work on their blog, website, or an academic social network. But the system of scholarly communications is, at present, structured such that journal publication is the gold standard of sharing one’s work. The current system prioritizes sharing new knowledge with other academics and researchers rather than on making it available and accessible to those outside academia: the general public. This fact is at the core of the movement — the Open Access (OA) movement — calling for systemic reform.

What is Open Access (OA) and how does it seek to reform scholarly communications?

To understand Open Access, let’s start with by watching this excellent overview of OA and what it looks like in real life:^[3]

The Open Access movement argues for the “free and unrestricted online availability . . . of peer-reviewed journal literature.”^[4] It is the radical idea, rooted in social justice, that knowledge should be open and available to all, regardless of ability to pay or affiliation with the academy. According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)^[5], originally convened by OA advocates in 2002 in Budapest, Hungary, the OA movement seeks to revolutionize the scholarly communications system, transforming it from a closed, exclusive, and outdated model to an open, inclusive, and collaborative knowledge exchange:

Here’s another definition of Open Access, this one from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC):

On its website, SPARC eloquently lays out the rationale for Open Access, articulating why the current system is deeply flawed:

To summarize, while large amounts of funding and labor go into the production of scholarly knowledge, the final product is restricted, not even fully available to those who contributed to its creation unless they pay additional fees or have conditional access (via their academic library) by virtue of their membership in the academy.

How does Open Access help shift power away from commercial publishers?

Open Access rejects the notion that knowledge is a commodity available only to those who can pay and instead argues that access to information is a human right. If everyone has access to academic literature, it means that scholarly knowledge is no longer controlled (or at least to a lesser extent) by corporate interests. Rather, authors can share their findings freely, readers worldwide can access those findings, new knowledge can be built, and greater advancements and developments can impact society.

Here is a useful image that lays out the many benefits of making knowledge openly available. The orange symbol in the middle is commonly used to denote Open Access.

How can authors make their scholarly journal articles available Open Access?

There are three main avenues to Open Access for authors of scholarly articles:

1. Some scholarly journals have transformed to a fully OA model. In other words, every article they publish is Open Access; the full text is freely available to all readers. Typically, fully OA journals allow authors to retain their copyright. One example of a fully OA journal is College & Research Libraries; take a look and its website and you’ll notice that all of its articles are openly available for anyone to read.
2. Some scholarly journals publish a mix of both “closed” (non-OA) and “open” (OA) articles. These journals are often referred to as hybrid journals and typically charge authors a fee (known as an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) or an “Open Access Publishing Fee”) if they want to make their article freely available. Different journals charge different APCs, and the amount can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousands. Sometimes authors may have grant or institutional support to help them pay an APC. International Business Review is an example of a hybrid journal; at this writing, its APC is $3,620 plus taxes.
3. Open Access institutional or disciplinary repositories provide a pathway for authors to deposit a copy of their articles in order to provide free access to them. In this scenario, an author publishes their article in a scholarly journal and then deposits it, or a version of it, into an OA repository. The version that can be deposited depends on the publisher’s policies. For example, the journal ACS Chemical Biology permits authors to deposit the “accepted peer-reviewed manuscript” after 12 months have passed (an embargo) since its initial publication. The “accepted” version, sometimes called the “post-print,” refers to the version of the article after undergoing peer review, but before the publisher applied its signature formatting and layout. In other words, the content is identical to the final published version, but its appearance is different.

Open Access repositories typically house pre-prints and post-prints, but in some cases they have permission to share the version of record. An example of an institutional repository is Digital USD, the institutional repository for the University of San Diego. ArXiv.org is an example of a disciplinary repository. For more examples of OA repositories, complete the exercise below.