Equity in Open Access: ALLEA Statement

"Regrettably there appears to be some danger of this happening. The “gold” open access route requires authors to pay substantial “article processing charges” to get their work published in immediate open access. While for obvious reasons this route is promoted by commercial publishers, it effectively replaces a barrier to access with a barrier to participation. This strategy has driven the emergence of large “read and write deals” negotiated between library consortia and commercial publishers. These deals, while advantageous for individual researchers affiliated to the large institutions whose libraries can enter into such agreements, effectively incentivise such researchers to publish in the journals covered by the deal, which are often expensive journals that trade on their high ‘impact factor’ – a metric noted as problematic by Open Science initiatives. This tacit incentivisation risks further increasing the market dominance of the big commercial publishers and clearly disadvantages smaller specialist and learned society publishers. ... In addition to this threat to bibliodiversity, there is an obvious inequity in this situation. It takes no account of the fact that, at least in the humanities, there are still a significant number of researchers not affiliated with institutions covered by the deals, nor in some cases with any institution. It privileges established over early career researchers. It ignores the needs of researchers based in the Global South, in smaller institutions, or in industry. It favours well-funded areas of research over equally important, but less well-resourced areas. And it risks perpetuating the myth that the best research is only done in large institutions and published in the commercial prestige journals with all the well-known damaging effects on research assessment...."