Simon Linacre Academic journals, Academic Publishing, Open Access, Scholarly Communication

OA Week: Open Spectrum

This week sees the 14th Open Access Week (#OAWeek #OAWeek2021) since it started in 2008. To mark the event, Simon Linacre looks at the challenges and opportunities the movement may face in post-pandemic times.


For many in the scholarly communications industry, Open Access Week is a fixture on the calendar just as much as Frankfurt Book Fair and The Charleston Conference, which bookend OA week. So, it may surprise people to learn that it only started as ‘Open Access Day’ in October 2008 as a follow up to the National Day of Action for Open Access in February 2007, growing to a week’s worth of activity in 2009. OA has come a long way since then – but how far does it still have to go?

Open Access content was minimal in those days, with an estimated 8.5% of published articles available as OA in 2008, and a further 11.9% available in repositories. By 2020, several estimates put the total number of research articles available via some form of OA as well over half of all articles published.

Judging the success of this growth since the inception of OA Week is difficult, and it probably depends where you are on the spectrum of opinion on OA itself. If you strongly believe that all research should be freely available period, then there is probably some frustration that a significant slice of content is still behind a paywall. The growth of OA as a percentage of all content has been sustained and consistent but is unlikely to reach the vast majority of published articles for some time yet. However, this availability varies hugely in terms of geography, with some countries such as the UK having national mandates in place to ensure almost all newly published articles are Open Access.

If you are on the other side of the spectrum and have no problem with the traditional subscription model, then you may be surprised how developed OA has become. So-called transformative agreements, initiatives such as Plan S and the increased use of repositories for scholarly communications have all contributed to the tide turning in favor of OA.

And if you are on this side of the spectrum, then you may also have concerns about the decrease in use of peer review as a method of validating research. The COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted the risks of research being shared without peer review checks, and also stressed the importance of the sharing of vital medical research as quickly as possible. The net result is probably an acceleration, both of the availability OA research and worries about the consequences of this.

But where does this acceleration lead to? It was inevitable that most research would become available as OA, and if funding – either for authors or for publishers – was available to cover the costs of that, then few would disagree with this outcome. But for many it was not about when most research would be made OA, but how that would happen, and for them the validation of research in an age of fake news and deep fake images is perhaps more important than ever.


Simon Linacre Academic Publishing, Open Access Week, Predatory publishing

Open with purpose

This week is Open Access Week, which you will not have missed due to the slew of Twitter activity, press releases and thought pieces being published – unless you are an author, perhaps. In this week’s blog, Simon Linacre focuses on academic researchers who can often be overlooked by the OA conversation, despite the fact they should be the focus of the discussion.

The other day, I was talking to my 16 year-old son about university, as he has started to think about what he might study and where he might like to go (“Dunno” and “dunno” are currently his favourite subjects and destinations). In order to spark some interest in the thought of higher education, I told him about how great the freedom was to be away, the relaxed lifestyle, and the need to be responsible for your own actions, such as handing in your work on time, even if you had to pull an all-nighter.

“What do you mean ‘hand in your work’?”, he said.

“You know, put my essay in my tutor’s pigeon hole”, I said.

“Why didn’t you just email it? And what do pigeons have to do with it?”, he replied.

Yes, university in the early 90s was a very different beast than today, and I decided to leave pigeons out of the ensuing discussion, but it highlighted to me that while a non-digital university experience is now just a crusty anecdote for students in education today, the transition from the 80s and 90s to the present state of affairs is the norm for those teaching in today’s universities. And in addition, many of the activities and habits that established themselves 20 to 30 years ago and beyond are still in existence, albeit changed to adapt with new technology.

One of these activities that has changed, but remained the same, is of course academic publishing. In the eyes of many people, publishing now will differ incredibly to what it was in the 80s pre-internet – physical vs digital, delayed vs instant, subscription vs open. But while the remnants of the older forms of publishing remain in the shape of page numbers or journal issues, there are still shadows from the introduction of in the early 2000s. This was brought home to me in some webinars recently in Turkey, Ukraine and India (reported here) where the one common question about predatory journals was: “Are all open access journals predatory?”

To those of us who have worked in publishing or to Western academics, this may seem a naïve question. But it is not. Open Access articles – that is, an article which is both free to read on the internet and free to re-use – are still relatively unknown by many academics around the world. In addition, being asked to pay money to publish is still not the norm – most journals listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals do not charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) – and publisher marketing communications are dominated by spam emails from predatory journals rather than press releases during Open Access Week. As such, while the dial may have moved appreciably in Europe and North America following initiatives such as Plan S and high-profile standoffs such as that between the University of California and Elsevier, discussion about OA may not have been replicated elsewhere.

So, while there will be many interesting conversations about Open Access (and delta Think has some fascinating data here), it is also important not to forget many authors may be hearing about it for the first time, or previously may have only heard negative or misleading information. Thankfully, there are plenty of useful resources out there, such as this introduction from Charlesworth Author Services to help authors identify the right OA outlet for their research. And of course, authors should remember that most Open Access journals are not predatory – but to be on the safe side, they can check our Predatory Reports database or criteria to judge for themselves.

Simon Linacre Open Access

Open Access Week 2019: “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge”

It is #OpenAccessWeek, and a number of players in the scholarly communications industry have used the occasion to produce their latest thinking and surveys, with some inevitable contradictions and confusion. Simon Linacre unpicks the spin to identify the key takeaways from the week.

It’s that time again, Open Access Week -or #openaccessweek, or #OAWeek19 or any number of hashtag-infected labels. The aim of this week for those in scholarly communications is to showcase what new products, surveys or insight they have to a market more focused than usual on all things Open Access.

There is a huge amount of content out there to wade through, as any Twitter search or scroll through press releases will confirm. A number have caught the eye, so here is your indispensable guide to what’s hot and what’s not in OA:

  • There are a number of new OA journal and monograph launches with new business models, in particular with IET Quantum Communication and MIT Press, which uses a subscription model to offset the cost of OA
  • There have been a number of publisher surveys over the years which show that authors are still to engage fully with OA, and this year is no exception. Taylor & Francis have conducted a large survey which shows that fewer than half of researchers believe everyone who needs access to their research has it, but just 18% have deposited a version of their article in a repository. Fewer than half would pay an APC to make their article OA, but two-thirds did not recognize any of the initiatives that support OA. Just 5% had even heard of Plan S
  • And yet, a report published by Delta Think shows that OA publications continue to increase, with articles published in Hybrid OA journals alongside paywall articles declining compared to pure OA articles. In other words, more and more OA articles continue to be published, but the hybrid element is on the decrease, hence the reports’ assertion that the scholarly communications market had already reached ‘peak hybrid’

At the end of the Delta Think report was perhaps the most intriguing question among all the other noise around OA. If the share of Hybrid OA is in decline, but there is an increase in so-called read-and-publish or transformative agreements between consortia and publishers, could Plan S actually revive Hybrid OA? The thinking is that as transformative agreements usually include waivers for OA articles in Hybrid journals, the increase in these deals could increase Hybrid OA articles, the very articles that Plan S mandates against.

And this puts large consortia in the spotlight, as in some cases a major funding agency signed up to Plan S may conflict with read-and-publish agreements increasing Hybrid OA outputs. It will be interesting to see how all this develops in the next OA Week in October 2020. The countdown starts here.

Open Access weak?
Simon Linacre Gold OA, Open Access, Open Access Week

Open Access weak?

A recent post on the London School of Economics estimable Impact for Social Sciences blog argued that the ‘problem’ of predatory publishing could be overstated, and should not detract from the movement towards greater open access of scholarly articles. The implication was that predatory publishing behavior was a bit of a sideshow, and should not be overtly linked with the greater good that open access brought to scholarly communications.

Open access is always uppermost in many publishers’ and information professionals’ minds at this time of year, as there has been a flurry of activity around the industry’s big conference at Frankfurt, and are now in the midst of the annual event that has become Open Access Week. For those in the know, it is a time to highlight new open access projects or launch new products, as well as an opportunity to generally talk up OA and its benefits and challenges. For those not in the know, it is… well, a time to wonder again what on earth all this open access stuff is about?

Sadly, for a concept that opens up scholarly communications, the industry has not done a terribly good job of communicating what open access actually is, and it is often not easy to find out a clear answer. Take, for example, Open Access Week itself. Is there one catch-all Twitter hashtag to capture all the activity? No. Instead, we have #openaccessweek2018, #OAweek, #OpenAccessWeek, #OpenAccess Week 2018 and #oaweek to name but a few that have come through the Cabells Twitter feed. 

And even when you do understand what open access is, there is a huge number of acronyms to wade through (SPARC, OASPA, SHERPA, OAPEN, DOAJ etc) representing a seemingly infinite array of related organizations promoting it, together with labyrinthine subtexts and politicking of various factions pushing their angle. One of the problems with open access is a lack of adoption by academics – something which has been backed up by numerous studies – and yet there is an inability to simply explain what it is and what you should do as a researcher. And as a result, few resources to support academics, particularly if things go wrong.

It is this lack of understanding that leads to problems such as predatory behaviors, which can be anything but overstated when they strike. Last week saw the case of an unfortunate academic from Scotland (reported by Times Higher Education here) who admitted being duped by a fake conference organized by the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (Waset). The academic decided to speak out as she feared many others would refrain from doing so for fear of embarrassment or repercussions at their institution. The £2,500 she lost on the event could be repeated many times, as the same newspaper reported in 2017 that some figures showed that predatory conferences could outnumber legitimate ones. 

Open access is a big deal and will rightly be discussed and refined during Open Access Week – but there are also unintended consequences that have to be recognized and addressed, and the personal damage both financial and reputational to those who fall prey to predatory publishing is anything but overstated.

(NB: For help in identifying potentially predatory journals, ask your librarian if your institution subscribes to the Cabells Blacklist)