Funders and researchers are squandering a huge opportunity to create a more just and effective system, says Jon Tennant
August 15, 2019
By Jon Tennant
Plan S has already been credited with sparking something of a revolution in journal publishing. Major publishers are beginning – slowly and reluctantly in some cases – to replace their traditional “big deals” with what are being called “transformative deals”. Often negotiated with national consortia of libraries and research institutes, these combine access to subscription journals with an ability to publish open access without any additional charge.
However, I believe that we should think a lot harder before celebrating a tipping point.
The open access movement has always been intimately bound up with a critique of the whole concept of handing over billions of pounds of public money to wildly profitable private companies in exchange for publishing papers that are written, reviewed and edited by academics. Yet the current “transformative” deals do precious little to drive down margins that are often in excess of 35 per cent.
For example, Germany recently paid €26 million (£24 million) to Wiley to publish 9,500 open access articles a year over three years, at €2,750 per article. Wiley has an operating profit margin of around 29.5 per cent, which means that about €7.7 million of that fee will go straight into its shareholders’ pockets. A similar deal between Wiley and Dutch universities has an estimated cost of €1,600 per paper, but there are suggestions that it has, in practice, cost a lot more so far. However, we do not know the true figures as the contract details are often kept secret, despite involving public funds.
This consolidation of historic spending decisions, focusing funds on a few dominant players, makes it harder, not easier, to truly transform scholarly publishing. A recent study even shows that the current state of open access publishing, with its increasing favour on commercially driven companies, is driving hyperinflation in article processing charges, exacerbating universities’ lack of market control.
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Jon Tennant is a research fellow in palaeontology and open scholarly communication at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity, Paris.
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
The Australian National University
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