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Open Access and Information Justice
Criticisms of OA & Equity
Criticisms of OA & Equity
Though the Open Access Movement began with, and continues to espouse, the noble intention of making research and other information available to all, regardless of institution affiliation, funding status, socioeconomic class, or geographic location, it hasn't achieved its goal and, in some cases, has increased the barriers to access; for instance:
Article Processing Charge (APC)- an APC is a publication fee that is charged by a fully OA or hybrid journal to cover the costs of publication. This fee may be paid by the article's author, the author's institution, or the author/researcher's funder. APCs may occasionally be waived in cases of hardship, though this is not a common practice.
- Alicia J. Kowaltowski, José R. F. Arruda, Paulo A. Nussenzveig, Ariel Mariano Silber. Mar 9, 2023. Guest Post — Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/03/09/guest-post-article-processing-charges-are-a-heavy-burden-for-middle-income-countries/
- "Although there have been concerted actions promoting the creation of alternative publishing models that are both open to read and free to publish (known as diamond or platinum OA), these are still rare or poorly publicized in most scientific areas. Diamond OA journals are often the result of personal efforts within small groups of scientists and will need time to reach adequate funding models, quality, visibility, reputation, and indexing, while repositories created by large organizations, such as Open Research Europe (European Commission), have limited visibility in the scientific community. As a result, authors of scientific papers who wish to equitably showcase their research may have limited choices outside of article processing charge (APC)-based journals as soon as 2025. In this scenario, the cost to publish OA is quickly becoming a new paywall in science, substituting the difficulty to read papers with the inability to showcase results in journals seen as reputable, due to the financial barrier of APCs."
- "Although there have been concerted actions promoting the creation of alternative publishing models that are both open to read and free to publish (known as diamond or platinum OA), these are still rare or poorly publicized in most scientific areas. Diamond OA journals are often the result of personal efforts within small groups of scientists and will need time to reach adequate funding models, quality, visibility, reputation, and indexing, while repositories created by large organizations, such as Open Research Europe (European Commission), have limited visibility in the scientific community. As a result, authors of scientific papers who wish to equitably showcase their research may have limited choices outside of article processing charge (APC)-based journals as soon as 2025. In this scenario, the cost to publish OA is quickly becoming a new paywall in science, substituting the difficulty to read papers with the inability to showcase results in journals seen as reputable, due to the financial barrier of APCs."
- John Frank, Rosemary Foster, Claudia Pagliari. Open access publishing – noble intention, flawed reality, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 317, 2023,115592, ISSN 0277-9536, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115592
- "Abstract: For two decades, the international scholarly publishing community has been embroiled in a divisive debate about the best model for funding the dissemination of scientific research. Some may assume that this debate has been thoroughly resolved in favour of the Open Access (OA) model of scientific publishing. Recent commentaries reveal a less settled reality. This narrative review aims to lay out the nature of these deep divisions among the sector's stakeholders, reflects on their systemic drivers and considers the future prospects for actualising OA's intended benefits and surmounting its risks and costs. In the process, we highlight some of inequities OA presents for junior or unfunded researchers, and academics from resource-poor environments, for whom an increasing body of evidence shows clear evidence of discrimination and injustice caused by Article Processing Charges. The authors are university-appointed researchers working the UK and South Africa, trained in disciplines ranging from medicine and epidemiology to social science and digital science. We have no vested interest in any particular model of scientific publication, and no conflicts of interest to declare. We believe the issues we identify are pertinent to almost all research disciplines."
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Juan Pablo Alperin. Why I think ending article-processing charges will save open access. Nature 610, 233 (2022) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03201-w
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Abstract: "In Colombia alone, APC payments are estimated to have grown by 18-fold since 2019. The amount is expected to increase after some five dozen institutions signed Latin America’s first ‘transformative agreement’ (a contract to pay APCs to subscription-based journals that are changing business models) late last year. At least 120 journals in Latin America have begun charging APCs in the past 5 years, although this model inherently links publication to authors’ (or their funders’ or institutions’) ability to pay."
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