Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan and Jessica Polka
09/09/2023
| This is an opinion submitted as a Correspondence to Nature but not considered for publication. |
According to Katharine Sanderson, “publishing-industry representatives warn” that May’s EU Council call for a “no pay” academic publishing model is “unrealistic and lack[ing] detail”. However, the proposal is already being implemented via several approaches:
(i) Authors can publish their work for free in ‘Diamond’ Open Access (OA) journals. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, in 2023 67.5% of fully OA journals do not levy article processing charges, and most of them are published by university press.
(ii) The European Commission has launched a publishing platform, Open Research Europe, an OA publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding.
(iii) Preprints are rising in many disciplines and several new initiatives (such as Peer Community In, Review Commons, and RR\ID) organize peer review on preprints at no cost to authors or readers.
(iv) New publishing models such as Subscribe to Open enable journals to flip to OA while retaining library support.
Many of these are already supported directly by institutions, governments, or private funders, and they are here to stay.
It is up to us, researchers and policy makers, to make sure we support “no pay” solutions where they exist. Scientific knowledge is a public good, and it should be treated as such.
| Except where otherwise noted, content on this personnal blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. |
Olivier Pourret 
Nice, short piece, but you seem to have missed the largest, oldest and most advanced option of them all: (v) (or, rather (i) 🙂 institutional repositories. They can form the basis of an decentralized, federated, non-profit infrastructure, exactly as laid out by the Council. It doesn’t seem like any of the other options you list ticks all the boxes as thoroughly as repositories do. This is why COAR is also welcoming the Council’s Conclusions:
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/coar-welcomes-the-council-of-eu-conclusions-on-high-quality-transparent-open-trustworthy-and-equitable-scholarly-publishing/
and we also mention them very prominently:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230206
The main question, however, remains: who needs to change what to make the plan a reality?
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Dear Björn,
thanks for your comment. You are absolutely right. This piece was written to reply to the paper of Katharine Sanderson with a very limited number of words.
In a first draft we plan to add this sentence:
« Repositories, either institutional or disciplinary, allow self-archiving and are the recommended ways to achieve the OA vision described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative. »
but removed it to focus on journals.
And yes the big question remains « who needs to change what to make the plan a reality? » and i will continue to advocate for open science 😉 with my little influence 😉
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Dear Olivier,
Following up on Björn’s comment, you may be interested in also having a look at our own correspondence to Nature that highlights a specific working example of how repositories can be used as publication platforms without the need to « reinvent the wheel »: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02315-z
Also related and somewhat more detailed is our recent press release: https://www.openscholar.info/let-us-not-reinvent-the-wheel-institutional-repositories-as-innovative-publishing-infrastructures/
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