Hybrid open-access journal

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A hybrid open-access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. This status typically requires the payment of a publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher in order to publish an article open access, in addition to the continued payment of subscriptions to access all other content. Strictly speaking, the term "hybrid open-access journal" is incorrect, possibly misleading, as using the same logic such journals could also be called "hybrid subscription journals". Simply using the term "hybrid access journal" is accurate.[ original research? ]

Contents

Publishers that offer a hybrid open access option often use different names for it. The SHERPA/RoMEO site provides a list of publishers and the names of their options. [1] The Open Access Directory [2] provides a list of funds that support open access journals, and provides information about which funds will pay fees of hybrid open access journals. [3]

Origins

The concept was first proposed in 1998 when Thomas Walker suggested that authors could purchase extra visibility at a price. [4] The first journal recognized as using this model was Walker's own Florida Entomologist ; it was later extended to the other publications of the Entomological Society of America. The idea was later refined by David Prosser in 2003 in the journal Learned Publishing. [5] The larger academic publishers began offering hybrid open access journals around the same time, with Springer and Wiley both having started by 2005. Within two years, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis and the Nature Publishing Group had followed suit. [6]

Gradual uptake of Hybrid Open Access

The early uptake of Hybrid Open Access was slow, and differed between countries. A study in 2012 noted that "The number of hybrid journals has doubled in the past couple of years and is now over 4,300, "but concluded that there was "lack of success of this business model", with only 1 to 2% of researchers making use of it. [7] [8] However, the United Kingdom was a notable front runner in using the model, "its use of OA in hybrid journals and of delayed OA journals is more than twice the world average". [9] Growth slowly continued, and a 2018 large-scale survey of Open Access business models across global scholarly publishing estimated that between 3 and 8% of articles were published via Hybrid Open Access. [10] Research carried out a year later indicated that Hybrid Open Access had actually peaked around 2016. [11]

Criticism

While hybrid Open Access began as an agreed method amongst publishers, scientists and libraries for a gradual transition towards full Open Access, it soon attracted various criticisms for being unfair.

Allegations of double dipping

Since one source of funds to pay for open access articles is the library subscription budget, it has been proposed that there needs to be a decrease in the subscription cost to the library in order to avoid 'double dipping' where an article is paid for twice – once through subscription fees, and again through an APC. For example, the Open Access Authors Fund of the University of Calgary Library (2009/09) requires that: "To be eligible for funding in this [hybrid open access] category, the publisher must plan to make (in the next subscription year) reductions to the institutional subscription prices based on the number of open-access articles in those journals." [12] On 12 November 2009, Nature Publishing Group issued a news release on how open access affected its subscription prices. [13]

However, university libraries were unconvinced that the decrease in prices was occurring. [14] A report on work carried out by the University of Nottingham since 2006 to introduce and manage an institutional open access fund has been published by Stephen Pinfield in Learned Publishing. [15] In this article, the author comments that: "As publishers' income has increased from OA [open-access] fees in the hybrid model, there has been little or no let-up in journal subscription inflation, and only a small minority of publishers have yet committed to adjusting their subscription prices as they receive increasing levels of income from OA options." By 2018, this particular problem was considered so extreme in the area of open access book (as opposed to journal) publishing that the Anti Double Dipping Alliance was formed. [16]

Institutional responses

Towards the start of Hybrid Open Access, some universities, research centers, foundations, and government agencies designated funds to pay publication fees (APCs) of fee-based open access journals, including hybrid. However, as criticism of hybrid has grown, a substantial number of such funds (40%) will not reimburse APCs in hybrid journals, including Harvard University, CERN, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Columbia University and the Norwegian Research Council. [3] The European Commission has also announced that the ninth framework program (Horizon Europe) will not cover the cost of APCs in hybrid journals. [17] Science Europe has set up a coalition of European research funders (cOAlition S) who have explicitly ruled out reimbursing APCs in hybrid journals from 2020 with the express aim of driving a more rapid transition towards full open access (see transformative journal). [18]

Publishers have argued against the above criticisms and responses, arguing that hybrid "as successfully meet[s] market demands and foster[s] growth in open access publishing." [19]

Advantages and disadvantages to the author

An author who wants to publish in an open-access format is not limited to the relatively small number of "full" open-access journals, but can also choose from the available hybrid open-access journals, which includes journals published by many of the largest academic publishers.

However, the author must still find the money. Many funding agencies are ready to let authors use grant funds, or apply for supplementary funds, to pay publication fees at open-access journals. (Only a minority of open-access journals charge such fees, but nearly all hybrid open access journals do so.) So far, the funding agencies that are willing to pay these fees do not distinguish between full and hybrid open-access journals. On 19 October 2009, one such funding agency, the Wellcome Trust, expressed concerns about hybrid open-access fees being paid twice, through subscriptions and through publication fees. [20]

If an author is unable to pay the fees or chooses not to do so, they often retain the right to share their work online by self-archiving in an open access repository.

Variations

The American Society of Plant Biologists has adopted a policy [21] that articles contributed by society members to its journal, Plant Physiology , will be made open access immediately on publication at no additional charge. Non-member authors can receive OA through payment of $1,000, but since membership is only $115/year, [22] it is expected this initiative will boost membership.

Partial open access exists when only research articles are open (as in BMJ ), while articles in other categories are paywalled.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic publishing</span> Subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship

Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsevier</span> Dutch publishing and analytics company

Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

The serials crisis is a term that describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions’ library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers’ needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index for several decades, while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining current subscriptions. Increased prices have also led to the increased popularity in shadow libraries.

Delayed open-access journals are traditional subscription-based journals that provide free online access upon the expiry of an embargo period following the initial publication date.

In academic publishing, an embargo is a period during which access to academic journals is not allowed to users who have not paid for access. The purpose of this is to ensure publishers have revenue to support their activities, although the impact of embargoes on publishers is hotly debated, with some studies finding no impact while publisher experience suggests otherwise. A 2012 survey of libraries by the Association of Learned, Professional, and Society Publishers on the likelihood of journal cancellations in cases where most of the content was made freely accessible after six months suggests there would be a major negative impact on subscriptions, but this result has been debated.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association</span> Industry association in scholarly publishing

The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include matters pertaining to open access books and open scholarly infrastructure.

Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.

<i>PeerJ</i> Academic journal

PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predatory publishing</span> Fraudulent business model for scientific publications

Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. The phenomenon of "open access predatory publishers" was first noticed by Jeffrey Beall, when he described "publishers that are ready to publish any article for payment". However, criticisms about the label "predatory" have been raised. A lengthy review of the controversy started by Beall appears in The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Beall</span> American librarian

Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.

The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.

Open access scholarly communication of Norway can be searched via the Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA). "A national repository consortium, BIBSYS Brage, operates shared electronic publishing system on behalf of 56 institutions." Cappelen Damm Akademisk, Nordic Open Access Scholarly Publishing, University of Tromsø, and Universitetsforlaget belong to the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. Norwegian signatories to the international "Open Access 2020" campaign, launched in 2016, include CRIStin, Norsk institutt for bioøkonomi, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, University of Tromsø, University of Bergen, University of Oslo, and Wikimedia Norge.

Project DEAL is a consortium-like structure spearheaded by the German Rectors’ Conference, on behalf of its fellow members in the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany and tasked with negotiating nationwide transformative open access agreements with the three largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals for the benefit of all German academic institutions, including universities, research institutes, and their libraries. Through each of these agreements, the consortium aims to secure immediate open access publication of all new research articles by authors from German institutions, permanent full-text access to the publisher’s complete journal portfolio, and fair pricing for these services according to a simple cost model based on the number of articles published.

Plan S is an initiative for open-access science publishing launched in 2018 by "cOAlition S", a consortium of national research agencies and funders from twelve European countries. The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021. The "S" stands for "shock".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diamond open access</span>

Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subscribe to Open</span> Open access publishing model

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.

References

  1. ↑ "SHERPA/RoMEO - Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access". Archived from the original on 10 April 2016. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  2. ↑ Robin Peek (ed.). "Open Access Directory". US: Simmons School of Library and Information Science. OCLC   757073363. Archived from the original on 30 January 2010. Retrieved 12 July 2013.
  3. 1 2 "OA journal funds". Open Access Directory. Archived from the original on 29 March 2016. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  4. ↑ Walker, Thomas (1998). "Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals". American Scientist. 86 (5): 463. Bibcode:1998AmSci..86..463W. doi:10.1511/1998.5.463.
  5. ↑ David Prosser (2003). "From here to there: a proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access". Learned Publishing. 16 (3): 163–166. doi: 10.1087/095315103322110923 .
  6. ↑ Communication, Office of Scholarly (24 October 2016). "Hybrid open access – an analysis | Unlocking Research" . Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  7. ↑ Björk, Bo-Christer (August 2012). "The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles: A failed experiment?". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 63 (8): 1496–1504. doi:10.1002/asi.22709. hdl: 10138/157318 .
  8. ↑ Björk, Bo-Christer; Solomon, David (2014). "How research funders can finance APCs in full OA and hybrid journals". Learned Publishing. 27 (2): 93–103. doi:10.1087/20140203. hdl: 10138/157329 . S2CID   22774024.
  9. ↑ Jubb, M.; Goldstein, S.; Amin, M.; Plume, A.; Aisati, M.; Oeben, S.; Pinfield, S.; Bath, P.; Salter, J. (16 September 2015). "Monitoring the transition to open access: A report for Universities UK". www.researchinfonet.org. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  10. ↑ Piwowar, Heather; Priem, Jason; Larivière, Vincent; Alperin, Juan Pablo; Matthias, Lisa; Norlander, Bree; Farley, Ashley; West, Jevin; Haustein, Stefanie (13 February 2018). "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles". PeerJ. 6: e4375. doi: 10.7717/peerj.4375/table-3 . PMC   5815332 . PMID   29456894.
  11. ↑ Pollock, Dan; Michael, Ann (21 October 2019). "News & Views: Have We Reached Peak Hybrid?". Delta Think. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  12. ↑ Open Access Authors Fund [ permanent dead link ]
  13. ↑ "Open Access uptake prompts 9% price reduction for The EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports". Archived from the original on 2 June 2017. Retrieved 14 November 2009.
  14. ↑ Cheung, Melanie (6 February 2015). "The costs of double dipping". Research Libraries UK. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  15. ↑ http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2010/00000023/00000001/art00008 Archived 5 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine Learned Publishing (January 2010)
  16. ↑ "Anti Double Dipping Alliance for transparency in Open Access book publishing formed". Knowledge Unlatched. 7 May 2018. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  17. ↑ "Horizon Europe impact assessment SWD(2018) 307". European Commission. Archived from the original on 13 August 2018. Retrieved 13 August 2018.
  18. ↑ "cOAlition S - Making open access a reality by 2020". Science Europe. Archived from the original on 5 October 2018. Retrieved 26 September 2018.
  19. ↑ By (19 February 2019). "Is Hybrid a Valid Pathway to Open Access? Publishers Argue Yes, in Response to Plan S". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 31 August 2021.
  20. ↑ http://ukpmc.blogspot.com/2009/10/wellcome-trust-calls-for-greater.html Archived 22 October 2009 at the Wayback Machine Wellcome Trust calls for greater transparency from journals on open-access publishing costs
  21. ↑ "ASPB - Plant Physiology Open Access Benefit for ASPB Members". Archived from the original on 4 April 2008. Retrieved 20 March 2008.
  22. ↑ "membership". Archived from the original on 5 December 2019. Retrieved 30 September 2006.
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