The future of open research policy should be evidence based

Progress toward open research publications received new impetus in 2022, when the White House OSTP directed federal agencies to update their public access policies to make publications and supporting data resulting from federally funded research freely and publicly available by default and without delay (1).

These policy-driven changes are happening within a turbulent publishing environment with multiple open-access models shifting costs from readers to authors and their institutions, an exponential increase both in the number of articles published, and the number of journals in which to publish them, and, for some journals, a decline in the quality assurance afforded by peer review. In fact, the health of our national research enterprise is uniquely tied to the effectiveness of scientific publishing. Publication of research results represents the primary way knowledge is disseminated, quality is assured, and reputations are established.

Yet there has been no concerted effort to anticipate the implications of the policy-driven changes as they relate to associated costs; the benefits from greater immediate dissemination; and the consequences for the research community and the public at large. Understanding how these policies affect the careers of individual scientists, the progress of scientific research, and the success of academic institutions is critical and is an urgent priority.

The goal of giving the public cost-free access to the results of research is laudable, as is the goal of encouraging a more transparent and less insular scientific culture through the wider dissemination of data and publications.

In the United States, the two dominant models for open access (OA) in journal publishing are referred to as “Green” and “Gold.” In the Green model, the author deposits or “self-archives” a version of an article in an institutional repository on a preprint server, or on a funder platform, at no cost to the author or the reader. The deposited work is typically the author’s submitted or final accepted manuscript, rather than the published version of record, and deposited papers typically go on to be published in subscription journals. In this model, the cost of peer review, layout, dissemination, and mandatory article archiving is paid by readers or subscribing institutions.

In the Gold or pay-to-publish model, the final version of an article (as it appears in the journal) is freely available immediately upon publication. In this case, the cost of peer review, layout, and dissemination, required archiving are paid out of an article processing charge by the authors, institutions, and/or funders. In effect, costs are shifted from journal access/subscription fees to the producers of the article.

The current OA framework provokes a number of high-priority questions for key stakeholders. For example:

For many years, a 12-month embargo afforded by earlier federal policy directives allowed the Green OA model to thrive in parallel with the traditional journal subscription model. Gold OA is likely to become the preferred business model for scientific journals after the new OSTP directive, with several implications for article volume and quality (2).

Subscription models rise and fall on the perception of quality. The journal publisher’s priority has long been producing articles that are likely to attract the greatest number of readers and citations, and increase the reputational value of the journal as a whole. By contrast, under Gold OA publishers have financial incentives to produce more articles, keep their article processing charges high, and cut costs—including costs associated with peer review, curation, and editing.

A volume-based approach has allowed high-volume OA journals from publishers such as Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) and Frontiers to flourish by publishing tens of thousands of articles per year with highly variable acceptance standards—many in an unprecedented stream of reviews or narrowly focused special issues.

This “quantity over quality” incentive of Gold OA may accelerate the consolidation that has already taken place in the academic publishing ecosystem. Unable to compete in terms of costs or institutional sales, many individual journals and smaller publishers have been sold to a handful of large publishers (3). As shown in Fig. 1, five publishers contributed to more than 70% of the growth in number of articles published between 2016 and 2022 [MDPI (~27%), Elsevier (~16%), Frontiers (~11%), Springer (~9.5%), and Wiley (~6.8%)].

By packaging subscriptions for their entire catalog of journals, large publishers have already made it difficult for smaller nonprofit publishers, such as scientific societies and university presses, to garner a share of institutional library budgets. Now, large publishers are using new techniques to raise their revenues (4, 5). For example, they are increasing their competitive advantages through vertical and horizontal integration, offering adjacent services to their academic customers that include data analytics, research platforms, and decision support tools. In the future, if large publishers are the only ones with the resources to take advantage of technological advances offered by artificial intelligence, society publishers, and university presses will be further disadvantaged (6).

A publishing ecosystem dominated and defined by a few for-profit publishers threatens to reduce the diversity of the publishing options available to researchers and to lock universities and researchers into limited choices on pricing and publishing models.

Among the questions that urgently need answers include:

The peer review system that supports quality and trust in scientific and scholarly publishing was already under strain before the rise of OA. Now, with the growth of Gold OA and the associated incentives toward article publication volume, these concerns are exacerbated. Indeed, the last several decades have seen significant growth in the number of journals and articles published (7). As Fig. 2 illustrates, there was a nearly fivefold increase globally in the number of peer-reviewed articles produced annually between 1995 and 2022.

There are several factors that contribute to the soaring number of articles published, including the dramatic growth of research funding and activity in China, India, and other countries. However, the financial incentives for high-capacity publishers to increase OA revenue by publishing more articles and special issues is likely the leading cause.

It is also worth noting that, as a consequence of the dramatic increase in the sheer number of journals available, publishers have been finding it increasingly difficult to attract and retain reviewers. The amount of time that papers are under review has also increased and become highly unpredictable (8, 9). If the scientific community is expected to provide peer review for even more publications in future, it is unclear how it would meet the demand.

Because peer review is critical to research integrity and trust in science (among practitioners as well as the wider public), any research agenda for OA should consider the following questions:

Whether federal research budgets will expand to include increasing publication costs is uncertain. If research funds are diverted to publication, it is possible that research activity itself will decline as a result of efforts to make the results of research activity broadly available to a larger number of people. If instead universities are expected to pay the costs of open access publishing, it is uncertain even at well-financed institutions how those funds will be sourced.

The new OSTP directive also stipulates OA to the research data behind published articles. There remains considerable uncertainty about how such access will work in practice. Key questions for consideration include

To avoid a future with inferior publishing options for scientists and scholars and diminished means of assessing and assuring the credibility of scientific publications, the downstream consequences of OA policies and the shifting publishing terrain must be identified, and planned for.

Along with several colleagues, we have examined these issues in greater depth in a recent report and have posed additional questions (10) about the impacts and trade-offs associated with open-access publishing. As federal agencies develop compliance plans for the OSTP directive, they should also support multistakeholder research programs that can shed much-needed light on the practical implications of these changes. Access to publisher data will be crucial to the success of these research efforts.

The outcomes of this research should inform how future OA policies are designed and implemented. These efforts will help the research community to comprehend the changing scientific communications landscape and adapt to a robust new open science enterprise.