In August, the US authorities introduced that it was adopting a coverage requiring that every one the analysis it funded is open entry. A key ingredient of this plan is that, as soon as the coverage takes impact, each analysis paper that outcomes from this analysis have to be open entry the day of its publication. That means anybody can view the analysis—no journal subscription or one-time fee required.
That, clearly, might pose issues for the tutorial publishing enterprise, which relies upon closely on subscriptions as issues are at the moment structured. To adapt to the inevitable future, many publishers have been adopting “article processing fees” (APCs), or charges paid by the individuals publishing the paper for the privilege of doing so. All of that is elevating a clumsy query: Who’s going to pay the APCs?
On Tuesday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) launched a survey of researchers that means some are already struggling to search out the money to cowl APCs, and in some instances, are taking it out of budgets that may in any other case pay for scientific work.
Paying the worth
Research journals have a protracted historical past of charging charges for publication, going again to the times of what was known as “web page fees” within the days of print (charges for printing colour photographs have been additionally widespread). Combined with earnings from subscriptions and generally promoting, these offset the prices of the printing and the editors who organized for peer evaluate and usually left publishers with a wholesome revenue. For many journals, these fees have gone away with the expansion of on-line journal entry, however there was a historical past of charges for publication that influenced to improvement of APCs
As open-access journals have been fashioned, they confronted an apparent problem: why would anybody pay for a subscription if the articles could possibly be freely downloaded? As far as I’m conscious, all of them turned to APCs as an answer. These wanted to carry out the identical operate as subscriptions—masking prices and leaving a revenue—and so wanted to be considerably larger than the charges beforehand charged to authors. Many journals that stay subscription-based have additionally adopted an choice the place researchers might have their papers made out there by way of open entry in return for an APC.
The problem is how these APCs receives a commission. Plenty of foundations that help biomedical analysis have insurance policies that allow them to pay the APCs on behalf of the researchers they fund. But many extra researchers obtain funding from authorities organizations just like the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. To learn the way they have been managing, the AAAS did a survey of US-based researchers, receiving over 400 responses.
Those responses revealed a wide range of issues.
Where’s the cash come from?
Even earlier than the federal authorities’s open-access mandate kicks in, many of the researchers surveyed (over 60 p.c) had already paid APCs, over a 3rd of them having executed so a number of occasions. But when it got here to planning for the APC fees they confronted, the numbers have been roughly reversed, with 63 p.c of the researchers saying they hadn’t budgeted something for the charges. Given that, it is not shocking that, when it got here time to pay, solely 10 p.c or so discovered the method simple.
The overwhelming majority (70 p.c) took at the least a few of the cash out of grants. About a 3rd managed to get at the least some help from their division, and about half that quantity managed to get funds from elsewhere within the college. Strikingly, 15 p.c stated they paid a few of the APCs utilizing their very own cash. (Numbers add as much as better than one hundred pc as a result of researchers both paid a single price utilizing a number of sources, or used completely different sources when paying multiple APC.)
The downside is that grants should not have a separate class of funding to cowl APCs. As such, publishing will compete with different potential makes use of of the grant cash: analysis. Nearly 80 p.c of the researchers who responded stated that the cash for the APC would in any other case have gone to purchasing tools or supplies. About a 3rd stated that the APC took away from cash that may in any other case have paid grad college students or technicians. Another huge sacrifice? Costs related to attending conferences, which have been cited by 60 p.c of the researchers.
The whole variety of individuals responding is pretty small, and never everybody answered every query, so it is troublesome to understand how widespread these issues are. But the problems themselves are fully predictable, given that the majority labs are run solely off a single pile of cash that has to repay analysis and publications. And these issues, even when anecdotal, are going down earlier than open entry turns into necessary.
The apparent resolution is to have companies allocate some extra cash to the researchers they fund to cowl the price of publishing. But this is able to merely shift the issue upstream, because the companies must discover that cash elsewhere within the price range—which most likely means funding much less analysis except they’ll get a price range enhance devoted to this problem.
In any case, the authors of the AAAS report paint the issue very clearly: “We face a rising threat that the power to pay APCs—relatively than the deserves of the analysis—will decide what and who will get revealed.”