Bottlenecks in the Open-Access System: Voices from Around the Globe

Abstract

Note:The order of authors is alphabetical. Marc Greenberg, Ada Emmett, and Townsend Peterson organized the project, collated responses, and produced initial drafts of the synthesis in the paper.Academic writing holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimizing knowledge: however, for discursive and material Abstract A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called "Gold" open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

The World’s Approach toward Publishing in Springer and Elsevier’s APC-Funded Open Access Journals

“…Especially significant is the fact that they have to publish their papers in low-tiered journals where they can afford the publication fees. 41 Hence, the question is whether the APC model is here to bridge the gap between the first and the third worlds or to increase it and thereby further marginalize the role of the latter's already lost science. 42 Furthermore, given the high prices of the APC model, waivers and discounts have been granted to less-endowed authors, in particular those from the less-developed nations.…”

How open access is crucial to the future of science

“…Numerous solutions exist that do not involve APCs: institutional subsidy (e.g., American Museum Novitates , Emerging Infectious Diseases, Slovene Linguistic Studies ), society subsidy (e.g., Microbial Biotechnology , Journal of Pest Management ), low‐cost lifetime author subscription (e.g., PeerJ ), and university library support (e.g., Biodiversity Informatics ), or combinations thereof. We, in spite of our intense advocacy of OA, have argued that OA APCs create authorship barriers out of readership barriers (Bonaccorso et al ), that these barriers are an emerging problem in scholarly communication, and that APCs should be replaced by other sources of support (Peterson et al ).…”

“…In 2014, papers published in JWM came from 30 countries (Krausman ), and a recent issue (July 2016) includes papers by authors from 8 countries, including Croatia, Slovenia, and Uganda. Scholars in such countries may frequently be unable to access society journal publications (and commercial publications), such that closed‐access journals exclude them (Bonaccorso et al ), both as readers and authors (although JWM can excuse page charges in such cases). Romesburg's (2016: 1149) solution was stated as

For researchers in developing countries, for whom publishing in society journals may be deterred by expense, a possible solution is to collaborate with researchers in developed countries who are in a position to pay the page charges.

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“…Although none of us is based in a developing country, based on extensive discussions with developing‐world colleagues (Bonaccorso et al ), it is clear to us that scholars there find these ideas to be patently offensive. Romesburg () seems to be suggesting that developing‐world scholars either sell authorships to coauthors in exchange for payment of page charges or simply write less than the more prosperous authors.…”

Facilitating Global Art Conversations: Availability of Art Scholarship in Latin America

“…He speaks directly to the fact that his work and that of his peers was hampered without this access (Canagarajah, 2002). Consequently, many periphery scholars must employ slow, expensive, or convoluted work-arounds to deal with a lack of access, such as emailing article authors or traveling specifically to visit centre libraries (Bonaccorso et al, 2014). The purchasing power of developing world libraries is further taxed by the extreme prices charged by academic publishers (Arunachalam, 2003;Davison, Harris, Licker, & Shoib, 2005).…”