Report from Equity in Open Access workshop #2: Why do professors pick paywalls?

The second Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) workshop in the Equity in Open Access series took place on 28 March 2023, with publishers, librarians, funders, and other stakeholders. Participants came from a wide range of countries: Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Kenya, Mozambique, Netherlands, Panamá, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Participants built on the first workshop in which participants discussed why equity is important, current challenges to global equity, examples of good practice, and priorities for increasing equity in OA.

In the second workshop we explored ways to increase equity in two categories of OA models: those where transactions are per-article or where prices are based on article volume, and those where there are no author fees and prices are de-coupled from article numbers. We also explored ways to reassure researchers around the world that OA publishing is as credible as other forms of publishing.

The payment problem 

OASPA’s conversations about the ‘OA market’ and input from the Equity in OA workshop #1 revealed how researchers across many countries and continents opt for paywalled publishing as it is the only way they can afford to publish articles in the journals of their choice. The OA route is closed off to them because of the exclusive nature of author-facing Article Publishing/ Processing Charges (APCs) used by an increasing number of journals to enable OA. Of course, alternative venues for OA publication without fees do exist, and we will handle separately why researchers do not find or select these venues. But the fact remains that a payment barrier removes choice from professors and forces many to publish paywalled articles (despite waiver/discounting programmes). This needs tackling to increase equity in OA.

An interesting companion while considering these issues are the survey findings from an October 2022 report from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) highlighting facts and figures around unintended consequences of the APC facing researchers. This report pulls together 422 survey responses from US-based college and university faculty. Researchers were at a range of career stages with varying experience publishing articles as primary or corresponding authors. Key findings from the AAAS survey paint an instructive picture of researchers’ use of budgets, their struggle to obtain funds to enable OA publishing, and the trade offs made in paying for APCs. As a researcher at any career stage, it is easy to imagine each of the AAAS report’s key findings being accompanied by some version of: ‘therefore paywalled publication is preferable / more suitable / more economical’.  

Attendees at the first Equity in OA workshop identified APCs and waivers to be an important and practical area for OASPA to address in this workshop series. We also heard (again) in workshop #2 how, in certain world regions, when it comes to APC payments, “The researcher is on their own”. Per-article payments that have to be administered by individual authors will exclude many researchers. Despite steps taken by libraries in some world regions to remove author-facing invoices, institutional and other funding systems around the world are not at a place where OA publishing can be inclusive enough that researchers are shielded from facing payment burdens. It is ironic that author-facing invoices originally developed to facilitate OA could now be helping to sustain paywalls. 

In OASPA’s Equity in OA workshop #2 a rich conversation about APCs, waivers and addressing the administrative burden involved with the APC approach was had, including about how authors ‘prove neediness’ to avail of waivers. Increased automation in eligibility checks and discounting/waiver workflows, standardised language to smooth over communication issues, and increased clarity and transparency to help with prevailing disparate practice across publishers were all touched on as ways to improve the current payment system. 

The concept of using differentiated pricing (e.g., Purchasing Power Parity) to alleviate some pain points of the author-facing payment problem with APCs were also discussed. Both pros and cons came to light, as covered in the formal workshop report.

Workshops #1 and #2 had different participants sharing how funding for OA publishing is not the priority of several governments that are focussed on basic and pressing social infrastructure for citizens (ranging from primary education to roads). This is a different direction of travel compared with funding bodies in places like the EU that are actively seeking to fund OA publishing and readily make APC funding available (most often on a per-article basis). 

Libraries, too, are in different places in different parts of the world with some eager and able to fund OA, and actively working with publishers on agreements that remove author-facing invoices for their affiliated scholars. Other libraries in other world regions are either still rooted in a journal-acquisitions mode, or only now starting to come to terms with shifts to OA and newer models – which may not suit and work for all regions and all contexts. 

What then can be done to dissolve barriers to participation in OA publishing in the here and now? 

Workshop #2 participants felt that addressing the ‘payment issue’ needs short and long term fixes. A first step would be to improve APC oriented approaches (and related procurement or article-output-based agreements such as Read & Publish / transformative deals) with the aim of making these systems and workflows more inclusive. This will be the focus of a future OASPA ‘Equity in OA’ workshop. The case of one workshop (publisher) participant introducing automated APC waivers for authors affiliated in certain countries was a compelling example of how when OA is automated, the engagement increases, the uptake increases, the publishing process becomes more inclusive, and barriers to participation in OA publishing reduce or are dissolved. 

Separate to what were seen to be short term fixes to per-article payments, several workshop participants were also in favour of a wholesale shift beyond APCs and article-based Transformative Agreements / Read & Publish deals. The next section explores what we discovered in that discussion.