Guest Post - Article Processing Charges are a Heavy Burden for Middle-Income Countries - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Many scientists worldwide have embraced the idea that research publications should be openly accessible to read, without paywalls. Rightfully so, as academic research is mostly supported by public funds, and contributes toward societal progress. Indeed, the quest for open publications has led to many groundbreaking initiatives, including the creation of new author-pays open access (OA) journals and publishers, the expansion of public preprint and postprint repositories, and the establishment of Sci-Hub, a radical open repository of scientific publications, often obtained illegally. But subscription publications persist, as well as resistance toward depositing preprints, leading to more recent initiatives to accelerate the universal transition to OA in scientific publications. Notably, a recent mandate established that US federal agencies must create policies to ensure all peer-reviewed publications are made publicly accessible by the end of 2025. This follows Plan S, launched in 2018 by a consortium of mostly European research funding and performing organizations, which requires that all publications from 2021 on must be OA. An additional mandate within Plan S is that hybrid models of publishing, in which authors can pay to publish OA papers in journals that also publish under subscription models, are acceptable only under certain circumstances, and only until December 31st, 2024. This means that major subscription journals wishing to publish work by authors with Plan S funding will need to transition to OA-only by 2025...."