The State of Open Access in Europe – Finch Report

Use the link to access the full text article from JEPS Bulletin (The Journal Of European Psychology Students). An excerpt reads as follows: “These are some turbulent times for open access in Europe. Since we try to be the information hub for psychology students on the subject of open access, we will cover the two hot OA topics currently happening in Europe and the development of one student initiative (of which EFPSA is also a member) — Right to Research Coalition — that should become quite vocal on the topic in the near future. The two OA ‘hot potatoes’ currently being discussed in the research community are the Finch Report in the UK and the European Union Horizon 2020 research framework. For our first part of the triptych, let’s talk about the Finch Report. At first it might seem like a country specific topic, but its implementation might have European and worldwide implications, since the UK is the de facto leader in open access policies and practices... the report aims at developing the funding framework to cover article processing charges (APC), and on the other hand, fees in hybrid journals to make specific articles freely accessible. Both APCs and hybrid journal OA fees are usually paid by researchers or their institutions. APCs are a central issue for the report, in it being implied that gold open access journals are by definition funded by APCs. This, though, is far from the truth. As Solomon and Björk (2012) point out in their study specifically researching article processing charges: ‘Not unsurprisingly 80% of the journals from large publishers used APCs versus 20% of the other journals.’ If the APCs are the preferred revenue stream for large publishers, doesn’t it by extension mean that the Finch Report centering on APCs is directly catering to the large for-profit publishers? Take, for example, another finding from the Solomon and Björk (2012) study, only reinforcing this point: ‘…in general we found a clear relationship between the magnitude of the APC and the type of publisher. Commercial publishers, which dominate the multi‐journal publisher categories, have a higher average APC level.’ The UK moving to a research funding framework which specifically caters to the large for-profit publishers by focusing on APCs and fees for hybrid journals means a conservative way to switch the for-profit publishers exorbitant profit source from the readers to the authors. This way, on a surface level, the publisher is moving to open access; while we still have the ‘double-pay’ problem – the universities and funders first pay for the research to be conducted, then they again pay for it to be published through too steep APCs, or even worse, they pay the fees in hybrid journals with shady licensing policies... Let’s say that the UK funded researchers move to pay APCs and fees for hybrid journals because their grants request it — that doesn’t mean the libraries will stop paying the subscriptions to the journals they need. In the transitional period, they pay for both – subscriptions to the leading journals that haven’t moved to an open access or hybrid scheme, and the APCs to those journals that are adhering to the new open access standard (as argued by the Finch Report) or fees for open access (!) in hybrid journals. Swan and Houghton (2012) proposed actual economic models and scenarios for costs the universities would incur in the transitional period, and their models show that: ‘…the cost of adopting Green OA is much lower than the cost of Gold OA, with Green OA self-archiving in parallel with subscription publishing costing institutions around one-tenth the amount that Gold OA might cost.’ (p. 18) Their models provide an even more startling difference in cost in case of unilateral support of Gold vs. Green strategies at the UK’s Elite 5 — with the Green route being about 25 times cheaper than transitioning through the Gold route...”