The Situation of Open Access Initiatives in Europe
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Psihologia Resurselor Umane, 17 (2019), 3–6 Copyright © Asociația de Psihologie Industrială și Organizațională (APIO) http://dx.doi.org/10.24837/pru.2019.1.490 EDITORIAL The situation of Open Access initiatives in Europe GEORGE GUNNESCH-LUCA Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Academic journal publishers are currently that the $3.5m bill – representing the yearly riding an enormous success wave. That amount due to publishers – is not sustainable, academic publishing is really big business citing in some cases an increase of 145% over should take no one by surprise, nevertheless, a the previous six years. Furthermore, the memo rundown of the numbers may provide some also encouraged the faculty members to stop perspective on its magnitude. Take, for submitting to paywalled journals, and start example, Elsevier, the Amsterdam-based making their research freely available via publishing powerhouse: According to 2017 Open-Access alternatives. This was a warning data, the publisher has been reporting yearly shot to everyone, as the issues at hand were not profit margins that reach upwards of 36%, isolated to Harvard alone. Pricing hikes were something that companies with considerably observed worldwide. For example, even if the larger mindshare, such as Apple, Starbucks, or exact numbers are not precisely known Disney, are struggling to even come close to. because the contracts are – for the most part – Several factors are at play here: Good confidential, the increase in overall costs was management, solid business practices, a strong estimated by librarians in Germany at the paywall system, but perhaps less obvious is beginning of 2017 to be about 5% per year, access to a constant stream of public with almost 60% of the yearly library budgets expenditure. Of note, about a third of the total being allocated to the top three publishers global research budget is spent on publishing (Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley). This and communicating research results. trend of increased pricing has put more However, this has not always been the case. pressure on national research budgets, which, In times before the Internet, the deal in turn, must be defensible and approved between national or private academic yearly. Therefore, allocating large amounts of institutions and publishing houses was financial resources to libraries has been relatively straight-forward: For a fairly low increasingly difficult to justify to national price per article, the institutions could gain authorities. access to a large number of journals. As time Money, however important, is only part of passed, however, and for a variety of reasons the problem research institutes are facing. The (e.g., increasing number of journals), paywall system developed to counter the publishers started to increase prices, so much consequences of rapid Internet adoption, and so that in early 2012, one of the world’s the issue of free labour that is provided by wealthiest academic institutions, Harvard authors, peer-reviewers, and editors, are University, issued an internal memo warning considered to be just as crucial to research Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to George Gunnesch-Luca, Department of Business and Economics, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90402, Nuremberg, Germany. Email: george.gunnesch- [email protected] 3 4 George Gunnesch-Luca institutes, if not more so. Within the existing main pillars, as “…the principle of 'open status-quo, academics donate and invest tax- science' will become the modus operandi of payer subsidised, valuable work hours, know- Horizon Europe, requiring open access to how, and information in the research process, publications and data. This will assist market whose end-product (i.e., the research report) uptake and increase the innovation potential of will not be accessible to the vast majority of results generated by EU funding.” The plan is the paying population due to publisher pay- to make it sustainable through a combination walling. This is, in fact, the fundamental issue, of policies, hardware solutions, and research and the main motivating force behind what aid, known as the European Open Science was to come, for, why should research Cloud (EOSC). sponsored by taxpayers end up behind a These international developments, coupled paywall? There are several additional minor with various national stances on science arguments along this main contentious point, budgeting, provided academic institutions such as the natural desire for a bigger impact with the motivation and leverage to stand up factor (which is innate to research – why for contract renegotiations, something they research at all if not for the benefit of all?), and have been vigorously doing for at least two a derivative of it; a moral argument of years now – with some remarkable outcomes. providing researchers from low income From 2016 onward, Germany’s Project countries free access to new and relevant DEAL – which represents a united front of information, thereby speeding up global more than 200 German libraries, universities, development rates. and research institutes – forced academic Academic bodies argue, “Reform is publishers into lengthy negotiations, with the needed,” and one proposed solution is to move purpose of advancing a new business model to a full (or a flavour of an) Open-Access that includes open access and a fairer model. Open Access (OA) literature has been subscription system. For example, DEAL has defined as “digital, online, free of charge, and been pushing for a so-called PAR (Publish and free of most copyright and licensing Read) model, in which all publications by the restrictions” (Suber, 2012), and includes corresponding authors become open access almost all types of scholarly communication: the moment they are published (representing preprints, articles, books, book chapters, and the Publish component), and all the datasets. institutions represented by DEAL obtain European universities and libraries have continuous access to the whole portfolio of the been pushing for contract re-negotiations with publisher (the Read component). Furthermore, publishers for some time now, partly because DEAL has been pleading for a new pricing there is a strong shift in European OA scheme, which would allow it to sink its costs mandates on an inter-governmental level. For from an estimated €4000 per paper (under the example, in 2016, the European current subscription model) to a number Competitiveness Council (formed by the ranging from €1300 to €2000 per paper. It is ministers of science, innovation, trade, and clear that the Publish and Read model industry from the Union States) called for a promoted by German librarians addresses more aggressive stance on adopting OA some of the criticisms levelled at Open Access policies. The initial plan suggested full OA for systems, and meets the publishers at the European research institutes as early as 2020. halfway line. For example, one of the bigger Although overly optimistic, it has definitely challenges is the question of whether OA is a impacted subsequent policies, as viable business model at all. Shifting fees from demonstrated by the heavy emphasis on OA in governments to the authors is clearly not the next long-term EU research and innovation helpful, and would only lead to increased programme, Horizon Europe (2021–2027), for publishing in so-called predatory journals, which the Commission is proposing a budget whose email advertisements even now are of €100 billion. Among several new features, filling up researchers’ email inbox. Platinum Horizon Europe includes OA as one of the OA journals – where publishing costs are 4 The fight for Open Access in Europe. An update 5 supported by the publisher – are rare, and this To sum up this update on the latest would further put authors in an unfortunate developments in the fight over OA, 2018 and bargaining position against the now early 2019 have been quite eventful, as there ubiquitous governmental love affair with seems to be, perhaps for the first time, a austerity measures. definite willingness by European universities These issues aside, negotiations ended in and libraries to adopt a more confrontational 2018, with Springer Nature and Wiley agreeing stance towards large academic publishers. The in principle (perhaps also because their current outcome of future negotiations is uncertain. model already fits the project DEAL’s price However, it will be a long, difficult process range goal), however, Elsevier declined, and before the major publishers will allow for a thus DEAL chose to walk away from the table new publishing model. and lose access to Elsevier content. Sometime In all fairness to the situation at hand, it is later, the Max Plank Society also abandoned not only the publishers who will need to adapt. negotiations, cancelling subscriptions to If we are to escape the closed ecosystem Elsevier. This is considered by some to be a provided by paywall systems, academics also serious blow because the Max Planck Society need to challenge their own set of perceptions. has over 14,000 scientists distributed over 84 For example, publishing in high-impact institutions that publish over 12,000 articles a journals is considered to be crucial for the year, with about 1,500 in Elsevier journals tenure-track of the scientist. The logical alone. sequence is that established journals publish Germany is not alone in this fight, with better research, and thereby if accepted, the several European countries currently engaged quality of the submitted research is somehow in similar contractual disputes. For example, validated. Incidentally, these are mostly the Swedish government has been pushing paywalled journals. However, recent evidence hard towards a goal of immediate open access shows that a more nuanced perspective is by the year 2026. The BIBSAM Consortium warranted. Prestigious journals “…struggle to (an umbrella organisation for 85 higher raise above the average reliability levels set by education and education institutions from the other journals” (Brembs, 2018) and suffer Sweden) has suffered the same outcomes as from lower statistical power (Brembs, Button, DEAL, choosing to terminate all contracts & Munafò, 2013).