Open Access: The Half-Revolution Continues | A Way of Happening

"Let’s get to the meat and potatoes here though. We are at this weird spot in the open access movement where publishers realize how beneficial open access is for their publications (higher readership, citations, downloads, promotion…etc) but they still are immensely enjoying the big dollars library subscriptions cost them. So larger publishers often try to get the best of both words. And I mean, of course they do! They are profit-driven!

We’ve seen this from publishers using double-dipping. i.e. Letting authors pay APC’s to make articles open access and then still charging for them. Or from just flat-out charging for articles that should be open access. Publishers’ incentives and motives are just unaligned with what researchers and libraries want/need.

SharedIt and Wiley’s new pilot is just another way for publishers to do this. A key finding in Nature’s original pilot of SharedIt was:

'The trial had no adverse implications for subscription-based journals either in terms of institutional business or individual article sales'

One of the main goals of the Open Access movement, beyond just providing access, was (is) to solve the serials crisis and stop libraries from going bankrupt from trying to afford journal subscriptions. SharedIt is a way around this. Publishers get the benefits of open access articles + they keep the library subscription dollars. Just another way the Open Access movement is still a half revolution.

There is more here though. Libraries still struggle when it comes to accurately assessing usage of the journals they subscribe too. Let’s say that one of journals has 1,000 PDF downloads for the year, The subscription is about $3,000, so $3.00 and article sounds fair and we keep subscribing. However, what if 900 of those downloads are for articles for which their are open access copies online? They may be in a open access in a repository or maybe even OA on the publisher site but we have no way of knowing (though, thanks to Counter we are making some progress with the latter). We continue subscribing to this journal because it has such high usage. Thinking we are paying $3 per article, but really we are paying $30 per article because 900 of these articles could be found open access online. Admittedly, this is a bit of an extreme example – unlikely that high number are all available open access online – but it is possible."