Publication charges as a tax on the periphery
A critique of Plan S and the so-called transformative agreements
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
When cOAlition S announced its plan in 2018, the aim was clear: articles written with public money should be available to everyone, immediately and without barriers. Few disagreed with that aim. But the instrument chosen to reach it, a charge paid for every article published, took the cost off the reader and put it on the author. For a university in Amsterdam this shift is a matter of bookkeeping. For a university in Córdoba it is the line between publishing and silence.
In 2015 Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon showed that five large publishers published more than half of all articles in 2013, and a far larger share in some fields of the social sciences. Open access did not break that concentration; it changed its shape. Subscription revenue gave way to revenue from publication charges, and 'read and publish' agreements tied the budgets of Europe's libraries to the same publishers for years to come.
Waivers do not solve the problem. The list of countries that qualify for automatic waivers is drawn up by income per head, and it leaves out countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico: countries with large research systems whose universities are struggling with inflation and austerity. A researcher there must either pay from the meagre budget of a project, or beg the publisher for a discount, or take refuge in a journal that the assessment system does not take seriously.
That is why I use the word 'tax'. A publication charge is a regressive tax: the poorer the institution, the larger the share of its budget it takes. And unlike a tax, its revenue does not go to a public treasury; it goes to the profits of private shareholders. The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access published in 2022 was a step in the right direction, but as long as the main budget is still spent on transformative agreements, diamond remains an ornament on the edge of the old system.
My proposal is that public money should pay for infrastructure, not for articles: publishing platforms, free software, editing, long-term preservation, and translation. A system paid per article has every incentive to publish more articles. A system that funds infrastructure has every incentive to keep knowledge better. Choosing between the two is choosing between a market and a commons.
Questions for discussion
- Have transformative agreements really been a temporary transition, or have they built a new dependency?
- What is a fair criterion for waiving publication charges, if not a country's income per head?
- If public money pays for infrastructure rather than articles, who should decide how it is spent?
References
cOAlition S. 2018. Plan S: Making Full and Immediate Open Access a Reality. Principles and implementation.
Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. 2015. 'The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.' PLOS ONE 10 (6): e0127502.
Butler, Leigh-Ann, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon, and Stefanie Haustein. 2023. 'The Oligopoly's Shift to Open Access: How the Big Five Academic Publishers Profit from Article Processing Charges.' Quantitative Science Studies 4 (4): 778–799.
Ancion, Zoé, et al. 2022. Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS and ANR.