‘Open’ relationships: reflections on the role of the journal in the contemporary scholarly publishing landscape

"While many members of the CPH Editorial Board are supportive of the concept of open access, they are also concerned about the APC model of open access on offer. These concerns will be familiar to many of our authors and readers....

As stated succinctly by one Editorial Board member, the proposed APC model goes against the entire spirit of the journal....

For many, although strongly concerned about issues of access to the journal, the adoption of an APC-based approach risks compounding existing inequalities. Radical Community Medicine’s origins were in the need for a space to challenge public health orthodoxies, shifting the centre and breaking new ground (Scott-Samuel, 1998), a mandate continued by CPH (Bell & Green, 2015; Bunton, 1998). Critical scholars working from the epistemic margins – early career researchers, independent researchers, and social scientists within public health programmes – are most vulnerable to exclusion if funds are needed to publish. Moreover, despite Taylor & Francis’s promises of ad hoc fee waivers, it will clearly serve to reinforce centre-periphery dynamics in scholarly knowledge production, compounding the exclusion already experienced by scholars outside the global north (see Herb & Schöpfel, 2018). These systematic exclusionary practices would sit uneasily, to say the least, with our mission.

Corporate publishers have been highly successful in conflating ‘gold’ open access (a broad category describing open access delivered directly by journals versus repositories) with APC-based models (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2013). However, other versions of ‘gold’ open access exist, including what is now known as ‘diamond’ access – where the publication is free to the end user and there are no charges for the submitting author....

The difference is that these models are driven primarily by a cost-covering rather than a profit-generating approach to scholarly publishing....

Collectively, we need to decide what journals are for – and how fidelity to our communities can be protected...."