Open access needs to be equitable | Research Information

"Consider ‘read and publish’-type transformative deals: for some the fees are simply too high – the recently announced deal between Springer Nature and the Max Planck Digital Library, offering OA in Nature-branded journals for a base fee of €9,500 per article, is far beyond the reach of many institutions even in high-income countries. For others, a cap on the number of OA articles brings with it a need to either cherry-pick authors to maximise the impact and influence of the institution’s research, or create a system that requires authors to time their submissions carefully to avoid being published behind a paywall (the recent suspension of the Wiley / Jisc deal springs to mind).

While not a panacea, the cost-neutral models created and piloted by members of the Society Publishers’ Coalition offer a glimpse of a more equitable option for institutions with funds to transition.

Even these, however, will not work for everyone. Today more than 10,000 institutions in low- and low-middle income countries can access paywalled research from around 180 publishers through the Research4Life initiative, either for free or at a nominal cost, and in most if not all paywalled journals there is no fee for publication. In an entirely OA world, could and would publishers subsidise entire regions of the world in this way? Or would we find that read fees have been replaced by even higher publish fees? ...: