The Open Access Debate

Home page Description: 
Why research institutions are facing off with publishers.
Posted On: September 24, 2019
Image Caption: 
Many academic institutions are fed up with high subscription fees and additional costs that prevent scientists from accessing critical research papers.

By: Candice Tang, ORT Times Science Writer

Have you ever found a great article on PubMed, only to see a paywall when you try to read the full article? We have all been there.

If you are not working against the clock—to meet a grant deadline, or article submission—you may have time to borrow the article from a library with a subscription to that particular journal for a small fee. Or, you could reach out to the authors directly, asking for a copy of the manuscript. More often than not, most of us would find an alternative article we can freely access.

Not all journal articles are open access because subscription fees help publishers generate revenue. Consider one of the leading publishers of academic journals, Elsevier. In 2018, the company reported €2,538 million (approximately $3.7 billion CAD) in revenue from its science, technical and medical services, 74% of which came from subscription fees. On top of subscription fees to individual journals, academic institutions or libraries are charged an additional article processing charge, which makes individual articles open access.

While this system greatly benefits publishers, some researchers and academic institutions feel these fees are unreasonable. They argue that high subscription fees and restricted journal access hinder the progress of science. If a scientist cannot read about the latest research in their field, they might lose opportunities to collaborate or repeat the same mistakes as others. If all articles were open access, scientists would not face these problems.

Earlier this year, the University of California announced that they would boycott Elsevier, becoming one of the first institutions in the United States to do so. This announcement followed an unsuccessful 8-month negotiation to establish a “read and publish” deal, which gives institutions full access to the publisher’s journals and makes all articles published by the institution freely available on the web.

Elsevier was unable to reach the same deal with many institutions across Europe, some of which took their business elsewhere. In August, a consortium of 700 German research institutions signed an agreement with Springer Nature, which allows authors to publish open access articles in approximately 1,900 Springer Nature journals for a small fee. The deal excludes open access publications in certain journals like Nature and Nature Medicine. The same consortium, called Project DEAL, signed a similar agreement with Wiley, which publishes over 8 million articles from 1,600 journals.

Even though the so-called open access movement is gaining momentum, do not expect publishers to offer open access articles across all of their journals. For now, scientists will have to face the paywall or find other ways to advance their research.