Who pays? Reflections on 20 years of The Journal of Community Informatics and the current state of Open Access publishing | The Journal of Community Informatics

by Peter Johnson University of Waterloo, and Colin Rhinesmith Digital Equity Research Center, Metropolitan New York Library Council

In 2004, Open Access (OA) academic publishing was a comparably new concept. The Journal of Community Informatics was an early entrant in this online, OA model. It was exciting times, and from day one, JoCI has aimed to publish quality articles at no cost to author or reader and make this work available on the Internet (Gurstein, 2004). Though the barrier of requiring a computing device and Internet access remains, it is safe to say that the JoCI catalog is more available to academic and practitioner communities, as well as the general global population, than many other traditional forms of academic research output. This original commitment to open access, made 20 years ago, persists to this day, and is the current model of OA employed by JoCI. Over the past 20 years, OA as a publishing mode has changed significantly, splitting into severaldifferent branches. These include hybrid OA, author-pays, institutional waivers, and several other approaches (Lasko et al., 2011). Many different varieties of OA have developed, notably the Article Processing Charge (APC) OA model now promoted by most ofthe traditional academic publishing houses, as well as other more recent online-only entrants, including MDPI, Cogitato, Frontiers In..., IGI Global, and others. The development of OA publishing options reflects ongoing societal and academic priorities to increase the availability of academic research, and these priorities should certainly be applauded, however unintended consequences have emerged (Frank et al., 2023; Williams et al., 2023). For example, many national scientific granting agencies have encouraged, and now even require researchers to make publications from their research available as open access (Puehringer, 2021). This has led to many researchersdirecting grant funding to pay for APCs, which can exceed thousands of dollars for those highly rankedjournals. Institutions and national governments are striking deals with publishers to pay APCs on behalf of researchers ordevelop consortia to negotiate blanket fee waivers -somewhat reminiscent of the traditional library subscription model, but with open access as the goal. These developments in OA publishing have also created some perverse incentives, such as incentivizing journals to accept large numbers of papers to increase revenues, regardless of quality (Frank et al., 2023). In contrast to these new developments in OA publishing, JoCI still follows essentially the same model from 20 years ago, loosely identified as a ‘diamond OA’ model (Borrego, 2023), or perhaps also termed the ‘labour of love’ model of publishing. With this approach, no APCs are levied to authors, no paywall or subscription is required to read the journal, and no editors, reviewers, or authors receive compensation for their efforts. Yet, with the JoCI model of OA, there are real, tangible costs that need to be covered. [...]