Roadblocks to Better Open Access Models - The Scholarly Kitchen

"As a preview of the session, my thoughts will be about a threshold I think the community has reached, largely due to the remarkable success of Plan S, the attempt to accelerate the transition of scholarly publishing to open access (OA). Although it remains unclear how well Plan S will work for researchers funded by Coalition S, it is increasingly clear that even before it has gone into effect, Plan S has achieved one of its major goals, changing the conversation around OA. What I largely hear from the community is no longer, “eventually things will move to OA,” but instead a sense of urgency, “we’re on the clock for a move to OA.” That’s inspiring a huge amount of analysis on business models, and finding ways to make that transition in a sustainable manner. Through that process, perhaps one of the most significant shifts we’ve seen is the increasingly widespread recognition that the author-pays model for OA is an evolutionary dead end....

The flaws in the author-pays business model for journals have been evident for more than a decade. The APC model represents a lateral move in terms of access, greatly improving access for readers but shifting the inequity in the system onto authors....

As a publisher, the author-pays models causes a shift from focusing on readers as your customers to focusing on authors. This creates pressure to favor quantity over quality, and rewards bulk publishing approaches, as well as creating a now-thriving industry of predatory scammers....

There are no easy answers here, and no models available without significant negative consequences. This is the biggest complaint I’ve heard about Plan S – not the desire to move to OA, but rather the required immediacy, despite the lack of a clear roadmap to a sustainable and equitable future. Those complaints are not just coming in from traditional established publishers like scholarly societies, but also from born-digital, born-OA publishers, who are already seeing themselves shut out of library budgets in the “transformative agreement” gold rush (note: you can’t sign a “Read and Publish” deal if all of your content is already OA). The uncertainty is pushing the market into the hands of the largest and most-profitable publishers, those that can withstand potentially troubled times ahead...."