Considering evidence-based approaches to open policy

According to the world’s most influential open access policies, only certain types of information outputs are genuinely open. In practice, however, there are actually many types of open access outcomes and solutions. A more flexible, evidence-based approach to creating open access policy will better meet researchers’ requirements and also reduce the unintended consequences of our current policies.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The most influential open access policies in the world today are founded on the belief from the early 2000s that only specific types of information outputs are truly open. In this ideology, all other types of outputs (such as free to read but still copyrighted) are unacceptable, particularly for academic journals.

After seven years of global, multi-stakeholder engagement and research—during which our understanding of the global information landscape has evolved a thousand-fold from the early 2000s—the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has reached the opposite conclusion: that openness has many definitions and outcomes, and that many different open solutions are working well in modern research communication. In fact, some of today’s most robust and promising open solutions would not even be considered open by the ideology of the early 2000s.

As policymakers around the globe move forward with the challenge of making research more accessible, it is crucial that these efforts be based on solid, democratic, fact-based foundations. Particularly, policymakers should pay close attention to what researchers need, what information sharing solutions are already working in the research world (including solutions that do not fit common definitions of open), and the negative unintended consequences of our current open policies.

UNESCO has long argued that equity should be a pillar of this next-generation open policy framework. OSI has proposed that doing something with open should be a second pillar, treating open as a tool to help research succeed rather than as an end in itself. OSI’s 2022 research communication surveys indicate that the majority of researchers agree with this perspective and methodology.

Reconsidering our open policies does not necessarily mean abandoning Plan S, the Nelson Memo, the UNESCO open science policy, or major transformative agreements. In any case, these policies are all evolving gradually in response to feedback and market pressures. Rather, it suggests that in the future, we should also develop broad, inclusive, flexible, evidence-based policies as part of a tapestry of open options and approaches. Doing so will benefit researchers and societies worldwide, improve global equity in research and research communication, allow the world capitalize on the full potential of open research, and help prevent research from fracturing along regional and ideological lines.

INTRODUCTION

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is an international group of leaders and experts in scholarly communication. Approximately 450 individuals have participated in group discussions since 2015, representing over 250 research institutions from 32 countries and 18 stakeholder groups. UNESCO, non-profit foundations such as Sloan, commercial publishers and publishing industry groups, scholarly societies, universities, scholarly communication experts, and participants themselves (by way of conference fees) have supported OSI’s work.¹

OSI has served as an open policy observatory, facilitating direct communication between high-level leaders in scholarly communication, and synthesizing policy recommendations for UNESCO’s consideration based on our group’s extensive knowledge. Our policy recommendations have always been more a collection of perspectives than a consensus opinion, given that we represent so many diverse global regions and differing points of view. For example, when we issued a generally negative critique of Plan S in 2019 due to how it would widen the gap between high and low income countries by replacing paywalls with “playwalls” (i.e., by eliminating subscription access to published research and replacing it with a system where researchers are charged for publishing their findings), roughly a third of OSI participants still supported Plan S with minor or major modifications, while another third did not (Hampson 2019).

These honest differences of opinion exist not only within OSI but within the broader scholarly communication community as well, where some are cheering the current state of open access policies like Plan S, others are urging a more thoughtful and restrained approach, and still others are resigned to the fact that rapid change is happening and are just trying their best to adapt. On social media, these differences of opinion frequently manifest as a battle between good and evil, between those who support rapid reform for the greater good and those who support a status quo characterized by entrenched dysfunction and profiteering.

In reality, though, we are all working toward the same goal: A future where we can do more with research because more research is open and accessible. There are some who want to act now, and others who are committed to finding solutions that truly work for researchers everywhere, not just in the United States and the European Union. Our commitment to working for more inclusiveness and equity is what best defines OSI’s work. Generally speaking, this challenge has appealed to scholarly communication analysts (many of the world’s leading scholarly communication experts have contributed to OSI’s work) but has frustrated those on the far right and far left. Open access (OA) critics have not engaged much with OSI over the years, fearing reputational damage to their careers and institutions by speaking negatively about OA reform ideas and policies, while those who are morally outraged by publisher profits have not engaged much with OSI because OA reforms are, in their mind, a social justice issue with a clear cause and clear solution. For these OA supporters, debate equals appeasement.

To-date, OSI’s authors have published six policy perspectives (including this one) that detail the group’s findings and recommendations. Our first policy perspective, published in March 2019, analyzed the pros and cons of Plan S and suggested that the organizers (cOAlition S) modify their plan to prevent the kinds of unintended consequences we’re currently witnessing with regard to growing inequity between researchers with large publishing budgets and those without. The second policy report from OSI, which was published in April 2020, examined the common ground for policymaking in this space. OSI argued, based on our internal discussions, conference proceedings, and original research, that there are numerous areas of common ground in this community, and that working together on these areas was the most rational approach to policymaking. OSI’s third report, published in June 2020, served as an introduction to OSI’s participation in UNESCO’s open science policy initiative. In this document, OSI provided UNESCO with extensive research on how open science is variously defined and what global open science policies should look like (OSI later participated in UNESCO’s regional consultative meetings and served as an official observer during the final passage of this policy). The fourth policy perspective from OSI, published in February 2021, investigated the technical and policy overlap between all open solutions, including open access, open data, open code, open government, open educational resources, open science, and open methods. This original research led us to the conclusion that the most effective framework for inclusive open solutions policies will be built on a foundation of achieving common goals, such as working together to cure cancer by creating open policies and resources that enable more information of all types to flow between cancer researchers, as opposed to thinking of open as a way to collect information in text, data, or code format. OSI’s fifth report, published concurrently with this report, summarizes the results of its 2022 researcher surveys.

This sixth OSI policy perspective is, in a sense, the culmination of our five previous OSI reports, bringing together their observations and recommendations. In this document, we will reiterate that APCs are harmful and that ideologically-based policies limit the potential of open (OSI Policy Perspective 1); that common ground is abundant and should be our primary policy focus (Policy Perspective 2); that open science policies are an obvious vector for change, but these policies must be grounded in evidence and make sense to researchers (Policy Perspective 3); and that developing broad, flexible, long-term, goal-oriented strategies is essential (Policy Perspectives 4 and 5). In building our case, we will also summarize the key recommendations of OSI participants since 2015 and note how the results of our global surveys of researchers in 2022 support these recommendations.

We believe the observations and recommendations in this report have withstood scrutiny and can serve as the foundation for a new generation of open research policies that are more effective and sustainable than current policies. This claim may appear overly confident. After all, current open access policymaking efforts are continuing unabated, and countries have an abundance of existing policies to choose from without considering new policy frameworks from OSI. As we will discuss in the introduction of this report, however, many of these policies, particularly those of global significance, are not based on evidence or vetted through democratic policymaking processes, as we would expect for sound public policy. A weak foundation is only part of the problem; failing to understand the needs and perspectives of researchers is also a major flaw.

The recommendations in this report describe a range of global open access policies that can be used as templates by researchers, institutions and countries around the world. If you have any questions or would like to provide feedback on this report, please email OSI program director Glenn Hampson at [email protected] by August 31, 2023.

HOW WE GOT HERE

Walt Whitman, the American bard of democracy, noted 150 years ago that democracy isn’t just about voting. It’s also about respecting different points of view in all walks of life.

Representative democracy was a nascent and revolutionary form of government in Whitman’s time. Today, about two-thirds of the world’s countries are democratic. In most of these countries, when it comes to making public policy, democratic principles are the ideal: Experts convene to study an issue, they invite broad and representative public comment to inform their deliberations, and they draft thoughtful recommendations for policymakers and elected politicians to consider. Some policies get codified into law; other policies are amended or disappear entirely over time.

The reality, of course, is that policymakers aren’t robots. Rather, they are individuals who enter the arena of public policy with their own opinions, biases, and motivations. In addition, policymakers are not independent of political leaders. Even though one of the most important characteristics of the modern administrative state is that public servants strive to be impartial and objective, politicians sometimes task administrators with “color by number” policymaking rather than building policy from the ground up, using supplied “facts,” or implementing predetermined partisan solutions. Even when expert policymaking processes are adhered to, political judgment frequently trumps expert recommendations, and interest groups focus more on demonizing opposing viewpoints and misrepresenting facts than on finding common ground and workable solutions.

In the US, this is the history of much high-profile public policymaking, from manifest destiny to slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and immigration. In the area of science, public policy smear and disinformation campaigns have taken place over issues like DDT, tobacco, acid rain, the earth’s ozone layer, clean air and water, climate change, and COVID vaccines (Oreskes 2011). Anti-democratic dynamics in policymaking tax our time and patience, harden our positions, deepen our distrust in facts and government, and delay solutions to important problems. They can even lead us to adopting the wrong policies altogether.

What does any of this have to do with open access? Open access is a term that has gained much attention in research communication circles over the last twenty years. Generally speaking, it means making information easier to find and share, including but not limited to research information. Countries around the world have focused on open solutions reforms (including but not limited to open access, open data, open educational resources, and more; see Hampson 2021) as being essential to the future of research. The reason for this is not entirely clear, although effective advocacy and constant publicity about publisher profit margins has elevated open access into a sort of cause celebre, with OA advocates being heroic Robin Hoods stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Our passions appear to have inflamed OA reform ideas into being proxies for reforming the future of research. There is no actual international effort for this kind of work, of course (see Box 1), so open access policies, and to a lesser degree open science and open data policies, have become global research reform policies writ large, soaking up policymakers’ attention and creating changes that affect a broad swath of research and research communication practices well beyond just making information more open. In this open solutions race, open access policymakers have so far created the most policies with the most wide-ranging impacts on research.

Unfortunately, the evidence our policymakers have been relying on is inadequate, and the seriousness of our deliberations has not been commensurate with the significance of the policies in question. Our debates have instead been swirling in an anti-democratic eddy for decades, during which time we have not carefully listened to all parties involved—despite what in many cases are genuine efforts to listen and learn—and have instead allowed the policymaking process to be guided more by the opinions of interest groups and biases of policymakers than by objective facts and evidence. This pattern is, maybe unsurprisingly, consistent with the policymaking biases we have seen for many other high-profile science-related issues over the years. As a result, some people view the open access regulations we have created today as a significant and noble accomplishment while others see them as a complete failure unworthy of science. Is there a path toward open access policymaking that is more democratic and evidence-based? And if so, is it even possible to backtrack and think about new policy frameworks?

AGREEING ON DEFINITIONS

A first step might be to agree what open access even means. As mentioned above, this term generally means making information easier to find and share. At its core, this means free to read. But the exact definition involves lots of caveats, depending on who is doing the defining. Some say information is only open access if it is free to read plus licensed in a way that permits unlimited reuse with attribution (a CC-BY license). Others say free plus CC-BY is not sufficient, and that additional conditions are also necessary, like zero embargo (no delay between publishing and accessibility). Still others pile on even more conditions like metadata, repository requirements, and data sharing. The same caveats are true for open data, open code, open educational resources, and more, where different kinds of information have different kinds of open definitions, conventions, options and outcomes.

In this report, we will use the terms open and open access interchangeably (along with the term open solutions, which is a blanket term describing all open approaches). This overlap is intentional. The world outside the confines of scholarly communication experts has conflated these terms and used them interchangeably, so much so that trying to make a distinction between them is now more confusing than helpful. At least in the policymaking world, OA and open now mean the same thing.

UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

Over the past 20 years, many valiant open access scholars have tried to organize the different ways in which “openness” is described.² Their efforts have ventured beyond just defining open, and have instead focused on trying to understand why we speak with so many different languages when it comes to our open goals and methods. These scholars have invented a multitude of plausible explanations, all correct to some degree, including noting that many different philosophical motivational, epistemological and economic motivations exist for open. But how did all these differences arise in the first place? The economic explanation may be correct one to adopt (Mirowski 2018), but there’s also a simpler explanation. As it turns out, the concept and practice of openness has been evolving along at least half-dozen distinct historical paths over a very long time, in some cases for centuries already. Over the years, these histories have led to the formation of entirely different branches of open, each with its own completely and legitimately different ideas about what open research looks like and how it should grow in the future.

The first historical branch of openness comes from within research itself. The need to share ideas and discoveries has always been a bedrock principle of scientific investigation (Poskett 2022). Over time, researchers have been adept at inventing the solutions they need (and that work) to communicate more openly and effectively with each other, including forming new scientific societies; attending conferences; creating new journals; creating a multitude of data catalogues and indexes; creating new standards; creating binding guidelines on the social and ethical need to share research data (see Box 2, for example); and creating highly successful data sharing and research collaboration partnerships and networks, particularly in the life sciences, high energy physics, astronomy, and genetics.

A closely-related second branch of OA evolution centers around publishing practices. Research and the dissemination of research findings have always been closely tied.³ Widespread use of the printing press started around the late 1500s and was a transformative event in human history that fundamentally changed our expectations for how knowledge could and should be shared (see Johns 1998), particularly for the practice of systematized research, which was just beginning to take root. By the mid-1800s, publications established explicitly to share ideas and discoveries were proliferating—over 1300 journals now existed. It was crucial for scientists to be aware of what knowledge already existed in their field, but even then, doing so was becoming increasingly difficult. This need for more openness and increased awareness gradually led to standards and systems for what constituted clear and rapid sharing of knowledge, claims to discovery, proper citation methods and more (Csiszar 2018). These standards and systems have continued to evolve today in response to the ever increasing growth of research, in response to the ever changing needs of researchers, libraries, funders and governments, and in response to the huge market opportunities available for creating the best new systems.

A philosophical offshoot of this second branch, technically distinct enough to be considered a third branch, is the growth of computer technology and the Internet starting around the mid-1980s. Once again, as with the advent of printing, these developments fundamentally changed our expectations about access to information, and paved the way for more open developments in research and society, such as the launch of GenBank in 1992 by the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world’s first public access repository of nucleotide sequences; creation of the world’s first preprint server, arXiv, in 1991 (originally for physics and astronomy research); publishing of the world’s first OA journals (through SciELO in 1997); formation of the Open Source Initiative in 1998 to help govern computer code; the world’s first OA megajournal (PLOS in 2000); and development of the first open educational resources (by the Hewlett Foundation in 2001). Today, it’s impossible to underestimate the influence that technology and the Internet have had on all things communication, from rapid download speeds to social media to the proliferation of publishing platforms. These developments continue to raise our expectations and increase the potential for what communication can become, not just in research but across society.

The fourth distinct branch in the evolution of open knowledge has centered around social development. Over time, the slow and steady march of the scientific method—valuing evidence, openness, transparency, accountability, and replicability—and its success at unlocking true knowledge has influenced everything from philosophy to politics, law and industry, which in turn has created more “norming” of this approach, particularly in the West.⁴ For example, not long after the start of the Scientific Revolution in Europe, when natural philosophers such as Copernicus and Galileo successfully challenged prevailing explanations for how the world worked (as defined by Aristotle and the Catholic Church), social philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau (among others) were inspired to start questioning the world’s social order. This work led directly to revolutionary new political concepts, including France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the US Constitution (both passed in 1789), which employed the Scientific Revolution’s spark that even man and society were tied to the natural world through natural rights.

In parallel with this growing appreciation of and our need for the scientific method, science and technology became driving forces of global development in the 1800s, with breakthroughs in physics, medicine and biology igniting massive change throughout the world. The public’s thirst for knowledge and enthusiasm for learning more about the natural world became a global phenomenon that continued into the first decades of the 1900s. By the aftermath of World War II, Karl Popper’s “Open Society and It’s Enemies” made the case that the open knowledge ethos of science needed to spread beyond science and into the fabric of societies—that it was important now more than ever to construct societies where truth is widespread and easily accessible, lest we backslide again into a world ruled by totalitarianism and fascism.

Popper’s work is generally acknowledged as the formal intellectual beginning of the open society movement. Today, many open advocacy groups travel along an offshoot of this branch, characterizing the need for open science as a social justice issue. The massive technological influence of the Internet has both influenced and enabled this ongoing work and development, raising our expectations for what technology can do for open knowledge and open society, and enabling this change, which in turn has lead to higher expectations and even more change.

A fifth historical branch of open has been accountability. Before the mid-1950s, accountability in research was largely internal, focused on ensuring that research was accurate, and that systems for reporting and writing about research were broadly accepted. In the post-WWII era, as government spending on research increased dramatically, the need for greater public accountability in research also developed, both financially and in terms of public access to what we were spending money on and why. Systems of accountability have now evolved to sophisticated heights, from grant evaluation procedures to modern research impact evaluation procedures and freedom of information laws, all from different government agencies and with different objectives. For example, the world’s first nationwide open access policy for scientific research was implemented by the US National Institutes of Health in 2008 (Suber 2008). What we now recognize as peer review was born out of US Congressional oversight into research in the mid-1970s (Baldwin 2018). And many countries now have their own research impact evaluation systems, perhaps none more carefully designed than the UK’s Research Evaluation Framework (REF 2021).

A SIXTH BRANCH EMERGES

Amidst this centuries-long evolution of open thought and practices, participants at a 2002 conference in Budapest (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, or BOAI) advanced the idea that open access meant only one thing: that in addition to being free, research also needed to be licensed in a way that optimized the potential for its unrestricted reuse, free of its typical copyright restrictions. The goals were simple: by making information free and easier to access and reuse, we could democratize research, lower publishing costs (by untethering publishing from publishers), and better serve the public good.

The language used in the BOAI declaration was lofty and Panglossian, reflecting the vision of the Internet circa 2002 that we were on the cusp of a world where information would soon flow freely across borders with little cost and enormous benefit for all mankind. Adding fuel to this declaration, several of the BOAI signatories would in the coming decade become the most prolific, eloquent and vocal opponents of high profits in commercial science publishing, including Steve Harnad, Leslie Chan, Jean Claude Guedon, Peter Suber, Michael Eisen, two representatives from the Open Society Institute, and one representative from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; SPARC in particular would lead the anti-publisher march over the next 10-15 years).

Subsequent modifications to BOAI made at conferences in Berlin and Bethesda stipulated that research also needed to be made immediately available, with no delay allowed between publishing and free access to the public.

THE SIXTH BRANCH BECOMES ALL WE NOTICE

Over the next decade, promoted by the effective voices who helped craft this statement, supported by the money and organizing acumen of SPARC and the Open Society Institute,⁵ and made timely by the spiraling cost of journals for academic libraries where, prophetically, commercial publishers played the role of the boogeyman to perfection,⁶ the BOAI approach to open access became the bedrock philosophical foundation for most subsequent open access policies, and it continues to be so even today. All other historical branches of open access have been ignored.

This isn’t to say that BOAI’s policy recommendations were wrong. To many believers, they were exactly on target. Rather, the most vocal post-BOAI open advocates tended to portray open access as a contest between good and evil. Policy debates became urgent, polarized and confrontational—even personal. The policy space became a battlefield where there was no middle ground, and no willingness to understand issues from all sides, ignoring the different histories involved and the differing needs and points of view centuries in the making. Ideology was not only trumping the expert-driven democratic policymaking ideal, it was beating it into the ground with a hammer of righteous might (see Box 3 and Plutchak 2022). As one research leader remarked on the OSI listserv in 2018, we were going about reforming science in a very unscientific manner.

Today—and despite a large, meaningful and influential array of open tools, policies and efforts, from the Panton Principles and FAIR Principles governing open data (2009 and 2016 respectively) to a thick alphabet soup of important organizations and principles (DORA, GitHub, OSF, Lindau, PubMedCentral, et al)⁷— the BOAI approach has become an article of faith for most of the world’s significant open access policies,⁸ from Europe’s Plan S to UNESCO’s open science policy to the University of California’s transformative agreement with Elsevier and the new US open access policy (the Nelson Memo).

The idea that open means free, immediate and licensed for unlimited reuse is not challenged. Most major funders have also fully accepted this approach to open access.⁹

As our global open access policymaking efforts move forward, it’s important to remember there are many histories and forces still influencing open practices. Understanding this will help us better understand what needs to be done and where we might want to concentrate our efforts for maximum effect and sustainability. In this policy space, there is a tangle of history, actors, needs, motives, and objectives. We may want “open” to be a simple notion with a straightforward past and an obvious future, but as we shall continue to explore in this report, it is none of these things.

OSI

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) was founded in late 2014 to listen to all sides in this debate, lower the temperature of the discourse, broaden understanding of various perspectives, and develop fact-based approaches to open access policy. There have been many other multi-stakeholder conversations happening as well, such as FORCE11, the Research Data Alliance (RDA), the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (CODATA), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). OSI’s unique value proposition has been to bring together high-level representatives from all key stakeholder groups and organizations and have them work directly together to find common ground on key issues in scholarly communication—not just open access, but tangential issues like impact factors, peer review and the culture of communication in academia. An important part of our mandate has also been to represent and protect the interests of all countries in this conversation, not just focus on what works for the EU and US.

Where does OSI stand on current OA policies? As noted in our 2020 Common Ground paper (Hampson 2020) it’s fair to say most participants in OSI agree that (1) Research and society will benefit from open done right; (2) Successful solutions will require global and inclusive collaboration, (3) Connected issues (like peer review and impact factors) need to be addressed, and (4) Open isn’t a single outcome, but a spectrum of outcomes.¹⁰ Beyond this, OSI participants have a wide variety of opinions, and our role isn’t to speak with one voice. There are some in OSI who are thrilled with these policies, and others who aren’t. It’s also probably fair to say that amongst the analyst community—and this is the community which has been most active in OSI conversations over the years—there has a been a considerable amount of discussion regarding the pros and cons of various policy approaches, and a general understanding that we need to be on the lookout for unintended consequences.

Probably the most impactful transformation happening today involves flipping the subscription model for scholarly publishing to a model where authors pay for publishing via article publishing charges (APCs). The APC model is mandated by Plan S, covering a large portion of the EU (even though this affects a small global portion of publishing, publishers have been transitioning to Plan S requirements for years now), and is strongly directed by the new Nelson Memo covering all federally-funded US research (which will give a huge new push to the transition).¹¹ The general idea is that authors can simply tap their research budgets to pay for publishing, and in exchange the publisher will get paid and make the article free to read.¹²

There are many other transformations happening as well, of course, such as eliminating embargo periods, requiring a CC-BY license on all work in all disciplines, improving data availability, negotiated agreements at major universities whereby access to published work and APC charges are bundled together, and more, It is unfortunately well beyond the scope of this paper to dive into each of these policy prescriptions at length. For our purposes here, many in the OSI community have expressed four general concerns about the overall nature of these reforms: (1) ignoring the unintended consequences of APCs; (2) ignoring the evidence that in practice, openness exists along a broad spectrum of outcomes; (3) our tendency to overreach and design policies for which we lack the requisite expertise; and (4) forcing one-size-fits-all open solutions on researchers, even where these solutions don’t match researcher needs and resources.¹³ The following subsections describe each of these concerns in more detail.

THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF APCs

The APC-funded approach to open (which is central to policies like Plan S) is not free. Indeed, APC charges have risen to stratospheric levels for premium research journals over the last few years, now topping US$10,000 per article for publishing in top research journals. Even the average APC charge (around US$2600 for OA mirror journals, although there is wide variation by field, publisher, and journal quality; see Smith 2022) is now far higher than most researchers around the world can afford unless they are based at a major institution in the US or EU or are well endowed by their private funder.¹⁴

As noted is OSI’s official critique of Plan S, many worry that our widespread use of APCs will widen the chasm between the haves and have nots in research, and substitute one equity imbalance with another: the inability to pay for access (paywalls) due to high subscription costs, with the inability to publish (playwalls) due to high APCs. Since this chasm roughly equates to a fracturing of the open access policy space along economic and regional boundaries, the US and EU will have their own rich open universe, other parts of the world will have their less endowed universe, and the gaps between these worlds may end up hurting research instead of helping it (for many reasons: technical difficulties with sharing, cost differences, protectionism, less collaboration, and more).

The APC approach to open access also doesn’t reduce the power of major commercial publishers to the degree BOAI and other OA ideologies originally intended. The power of major commercial publishers is increasing instead, because the APC model is proving to be quite financially robust (Pollock 2021 and Zhang 2022) and because society and university publishers need help navigating the rapidly changing regulatory landscape.¹⁵

This power will probably continue to grow in the coming years as publishers lock in their consolidation by offering value added tools to their customers (like advanced search and synthesis). Rich countries and institutions who can afford to climb the ladder of publisher-controlled offerings will partake in a buffet of new capabilities made possible by more open access, while lower income institutions and countries will have to make do with the bare minimum Author Accepted Manuscripts and Excel spreadsheets mandated by open policies. There is no money or incentive to make this kind of advanced access available for everyone everywhere. Rather, everyone will be required to contribute their information for free, and only the rich will be able to extract maximum value from it.

THE BROAD SPECTRUM OF OPEN OUTCOMES

As discussed, our most influential open access policies are not, unlike actual public policy, grounded in a wealth of evidence, nor have they been developed through the expert and impartial consultative process we expect to see in democratic societies. Instead, they are ideologically grounded. This ideological approach makes sense to those who consider the act of locking research behind subscription paywalls to be an inherently immoral act. For this group, trying to put commercial publishers out of business is a morally justified imperative. But not everyone feels this way. In practice, open access efforts are driven by a variety of motives such as the desire to improve impact, efficiency, reproducibility, accountability, transparency, and collaboration. Many researchers also readily appreciate that publishing adds value to the research record through processes like gatekeeping, peer review and preservation, and note that without a reliable process akin to quality journals, the scientific record may become unreliable.

This difference between ideology and evidence is also apparent when it comes to defining what open means. Ideology says that open is, at minimum, CC-BY licensed information without embargo, but evidence clearly shows open comes in many different forms and looks different for different users in different fields and different parts of the world. OSI participants developed an information model called “DARTS” to describe this open spectrum, where the five letters of this acronym stand for discoverability, accessibility, reusability, transparency, and sustainability. On this spectrum, we allow for the fact that some kinds of open are free to read but still copyrighted; other kinds may be closed to the public but robustly open and interoperable within designated user groups (this solution is common in clinical research); and still other kinds are public domain licensed but not very discoverable, transparent or sustainable. So-called “green” open, which accounts for the vast majority of open resources, is exactly this: a hodge-podge of information that is free to read but whose discoverability, accessibility, reusability, transparency and sustainability vary widely. This diversity reflects the fact that different user groups have different resources, needs, incentives, motives, conventions, restrictions, and so on. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t strive to improve their openness, but it also doesn’t presuppose that one type of open is necessarily superior for all users and circumstances. Movement toward better open solutions should continue, but this movement should be based on evidence and need, not assumptions.

FIGURE 1: OSI’S DARTS OPEN SPECTRUM

DISCOVERABLE: Can this information be found online? Is it indexed by search engines and databases, and hosted on servers open to the public? Does it contain adequate identifiers (such as DOIs)?
ACCESSIBLE: Once discovered, can this information be read by anyone? Is it available free of charge? Is it available in a timely, complete, and easy-to-acceess manner (for instance, is it downloadable or machine-readable, with a dataset included)?
REUSABLE: Can this information be modified? Disseminated? What conditions (both legal and technical) prevent it from being repurposed or shared at will?
TRANSPARENT: What do we know about the provenance of this information? Is it peer reviewed? Do we know the funding source (are conflicts of interested identified)? What do we know about the study design and analysis?
SUSTAINABLE: Is the open solution for this information artifact sustainable? This may be hard to know—the sustainability of larger, more established solutions may evoke more confidence than new, small, or one-off solutions.

The DARTS framework is currently only a concept and not a measuring tool, although quantifying this tool might help make it useful to open research in other ways. For example, imagine running a scale from let to right, and then assigning a value for each DARTS attribute of a paraticular information artifact. Assignng a transparency score of zero means we know nothing about where this information came from, whereas a nine means we are very clear about this. Doing the same for each DARTS attribute, we could then assign a perfectly open object a DARTS score of 99999, and an absolutely closed object a score of 00000. Almost all information exists somewhere in between. This paper, for example, will have good discoverability and accessibility (although not as good as a commercially published report), limited reusability, acceptable transparency, and good faith sustainability (although not perfect, like commercial publishers). Therefore, its DARTS score might be 77586 or some such.

Indeed, after 20 years of pushing for ideologically perfect open solutions, most of the world’s open information is still published in other formats (which isn’t to say closed, just imperfectly open). Estimating the exact distributions of open outcomes depends on which indexes are analyzed (different indexes skew toward different journal types and disciplines), which regions of the world are being measured, and the sampling methodology used (see Box 4), but according to a recent analysis of eight million journal articles listed in the Web of Science between 2015 and 2019, BOAI-compliant articles (for which Gold OA is a rough proxy) account for only a small fraction of the total (Table 1 and Simard 2022). What researchers want and need for open information, then, isn’t necessarily always the same as what’s being prescribed. Open access policy may require one outcome, but evidence shows many different outcomes are possible, even preferred.

TABLE 1: PERCENTAGE OF OA PUBLICATIONS BY TYPE AND FIELDS (2015–2019)

Field	Total OA	Of which Gold*	Of which Green
Natural Sciences	45.4	19.9	36.3
Engineering and Technology	30.4	13.0	21.4
Medical and Health Sciences	50.0	20.8	40.4
Agricultural Sciences	35.9	17.1	22.0
Social Sciences	35.5	7.9	29.8
Humanities	21.2	5.9	15.8
Unknown	35.8	2.2	31.3
All Fields	42.9	18.1	33.8

Source: Simard 2022.
*Gold OA represents open access materials which have been made open through APC charges and made immediately and freely available to the public without embargo. It does not necessarily mean the materials are CC-BY licensed, however. DeltaThink estimates that of all the open materials currently being published during this same time period (2015-2019), about 55% in aggregate was CC-BY licensed, meaning that only about 10% all published materials (55% of 18.1%) are strictly BOAI-compliant. See Pollock 2022. This figure is consistent with other global estimates of gold open (see, for example, Zhang 2022 and Piwowar 2019).

How can we know for sure which of these outcomes are best? We can’t—we need more research, without which our policy conversations have been stymied and our positions hardened along ideological lines. This need for more research isn’t a red herring argument like the tobacco industry used in the 1970s and 80s to slow down anti-smoking policy. In truth, as a community we have conducted almost no solid research into fundamental questions, such as which researchers need open and why, what types of open work best in each field, how short embargo periods can go, the cost-benefit of replacing the subscription model, the open access citation advantage (see Box 8), and more.¹⁶

What we can clearly see from a number of researcher surveys over the years¹⁷ is that at minimum, getting free and immediate access to journal articles isn’t the only concern researchers have. Researcher also want lower publishing costs, improved connections with colleagues, and increased visibility and impact for their research work. This isn’t to say that improving access isn’t an important goal, just that it is one of many goals and we may not want to reach it by trampling on other goals and creating a world of unintended consequences which end up being harmful to research on balance. If we follow the evidence, we may want to focus first on the highest priority communication needs of researchers instead of on the priorities highlighted by current OA policies. Exactly how these priorities might rank is discussed later in this report.

OVERREACH

Open access policymakers are generally guilty of at least two kinds of overreach. The first kind involves designing policies without possessing the needed expertise. Open access, open science, open data, and other open movements all have different perspectives and priorities. An open science led effort makes no sense for humanities researchers; an open access led effort makes no sense for open data. Today, however, we see a good deal of mission creep, where open access advocates are designing policies having to do with the future of open data, and where plans for the future of journals are designed with STM disciplines in mind, not the humanities. While there is some overlap between these communities with regard to tools and basic principles, they are in fact very different. Therefore, it is ill-advised from a policymaking perspective for open access advocates alone to write such policies—as is the case with Plan S, the UNESCO open science policy, and the US Nelson Memo—since the facts and nuances of all open practice communities are not even remotely captured in policies like these. The reverse situation would never be tolerated by the open access community, where open data advocates working alone decided what the future of open access should look like.

To elaborate on the case of open data, all major open access policies have open data requirements (usually including provisions to make data FAIR—findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable—or to deposit data in specific repositories) but most lack any evidence-based operational details. In truth, open access policymakers (as distinct from the open data experts) have very little grasp of what open data actually looks like, particularly in clinical research where the OA community wants to see faster discovery. This data realm is awash with challenges, such as protecting patient privacy (conforming with existing data protection laws like HIPPA and GDPR), protecting proprietary data (owned by drug companies who sponsor research work), preventing the misuse and misinterpretation of data, and struggling to make the sharing of datasets complete, timely and compatible, even when this data is being generated by the same research group. OA policymakers have not even begun to understand the complexity, diversity, and best practices of this real world sharing, yet they are designing one-size-fits all policies that mandate sharing nonetheless based on open access ideals. Table 2 describes of some of this complexity, and shows how the type of data sharing envisioned by open access policies fits into this array of other data sharing models.

TABLE 2: COMMON DATA GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES AND THEIR ATTRIBUTES

Governance structure	Number and linkage of parties	Degree of data Availability	Degree of freedom to use data	Challenges common to the governance success	Primary governance design pattern
Pairwise	One-to-one	Medium/High	Medium/High	Uneven status of parties, value of data	Informal or closed contract
Open Source	One/some-to-many	High	High	Rights permanently granted to user	License
Federated Query	Many-to-many, via platform	High	Medium/Low	Defection of creators	Contract and club rules
Trusted Research Environment	One/some-to-many	Medium/Low	Medium/Low	Users agree to be known, surveilled	Data transfer and use agreements
Model-to-Data	One-to-many	High	Low	Not all who apply can use data	Restricted analyses, data curation
Open Citizen Science	Many-to-many	High	High	Capacity for analysis is uneven	Contract or license
Clubs, Trusts	Some-to-some	Medium/Low	High	Easy to create things governed more liberally. Trusteeship can be revoked.	Club / Trust rules
Closed	Many (to none)	Low	High	Fundamental limits to collaboration	Public laws, security protocols
Closed and Restricted	Some (to none)	Low	Low	Fundamental limits to collaboration	Public laws, security protocols

Source: Mangravite 2020

In the meantime, there is a long list of promising work being done in open data and many success stories to share, but these experiences originate from efforts that have nothing whatsoever to do with global open access policies. For example, there are a number of highly successful research collaboration efforts that demonstrate what the cutting edge of open access development can accomplish (like DataSpace, Vivli, SDSS, CERN, GenBank, DataSphere, and Sage Bionetworks), and what evidence-based data sharing and collaboration challenges exist on the road ahead.

These data sharing networks are most often developed through private partnerships with strict and distinctly BOAI-unfriendly data sharing guidelines and eligibility, not through generalist OA policies and repositories. Open access policymakers have not studied, learned from, or even cited these examples. See Boxes 5-7 on the following pages for more detail.

A second and equally important type of overreach is that policymakers often grant special powers to open that aren’t merited. Take the widely touted claim, for example, that open access increases citation rates. The evidence for this phenomenon is actually not clear, nor is it clear that focusing on increasing citations instead of increasing research quality is the right approach to take (see Box 8).

Or consider how excited the policy world is becoming about open science. Like the UNESCO policy before it, a major open science policy being developed by the US National Academies Roundtable (NAS 2022), considers open science to include transparency (“scientific process and results should be visible, accessible, and understandable”), inclusiveness (“process and participants should welcome participation by and collaboration with diverse people and organizations”), accessibility (“data, tools, software, documentation and publications should be accessible to all (FAIR)”), and reproducibility (“scientific process and results should be open such that they are reproducible by members of the community”). However, this policy and similar ones attempting to define open science are simply describing what good science looks like and has always looked like. Transparency and reproducibility are not new ideas—as mentioned earlier, they are the fundamental building blocks of research—and research has always been global and deeply interconnected; and integrity is a function of good science, not open science.¹⁸

In other words, open science means good science, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. Good science doesn’t necessarily mean open science. There is obviously some overlap between all these concepts, but in a Venn diagram, the “open” circle just intersects with lots of issues related to research reform, from improving access and equity to having a role in improving transparency, reproducibility and reliability, to also having a role in important issues like impact factors, tenure evaluation, and peer review (see Figure 2). Open science policies can play a role in addressing all these issues, but they won’t solve all of them. Policymakers often forget this and use the term open science when what we really mean is something else. As Jon Tennant noted in 2020 (Tennant 2020), “Rebecca Willen has … identified that there might be two, perhaps three, different sub-movements that intersect in different ways, involving ‘open science’, ‘replicable science’, and ‘justice-oriented science’…. [I]t could be the case that now, open research is diffused in such a wide variety of ways that there cannot plausibly be a single, cohesive community and set of practices that define it…. Instead, Open Scholarship, Open Research, and Open Science might best be thought of as overlapping/intersecting ‘boundary objects’ (Moore 2017) that represent this inherent diversity.”

FIGURE 2: SETTING REALISTIC EXPACTATIONS FOR WHAT OPEN SOLUTIONS CAN ACCOMPLISH

Attributing special powers to open science is nowhere more apparent than the claim that open science is why COVID vaccines were developed in record time. Both the UNESCO open science plan and the US Nelson Memo make this claim, and say this sharing represents the potential of open access (and even the victory of open access policies).¹⁹ This characterization is mostly inaccurate. While the rapid sharing of data was important with COVID research and is a key potential benefit of effective OA policies, the evidence suggests a murkier role for open data in COVID research (e.g., with lots of misinformation being published rapidly in preprint form, and none of the actual proprietary vaccine-related data being openly shared). The true hero of our quest to rapidly develop COVID vaccines were policies that allowed researchers to conduct their due diligence rapidly, with ample funding, and in parallel with manufacturing instead of in sequence (see Box 9).

Open access does have the potential to speed discovery, though, and to vastly improve the value and impact of research, which is why so many people believe in open and want it to succeed. But in order to make progress toward this future, and build the right kinds of tools and policies, we need to be honest about our facts and assessments. Our efforts must be guided by clear-eyed answers to questions like why, specifically, do we need open solutions, and which solutions work the best under which circumstances? We also need to develop, as a global community working together (in concert with other global policy efforts), a clearer understanding of our goals. Open isn’t that goal. It’s a tool that can help us reach our goals. And if our current open policies aren’t helping us reach these goals, or are even throwing sand into the gears of research, then we need to stop overreaching and either improve our knowledge of the space we’re regulating, or allow for more flexibility to accommodate the expertise and experience of researchers who have a better understand of what they need.

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL

One-size-fits-all open access policies like Plan S are a bad fit for the world of research because, at the risk of sounding too obvious, this world is very large and diverse, encompassing a wide variety of research needs and resources, differing interpretations of what open means, numerous concerns about open, and copious amounts of activity from many different governments, agencies and institutions (recalling our previous discussion about the historically different paths for open policies):

• VARIETY OF NEEDS AND RESOURCES: It is well established the researchers in different fields and regions have different needs, resources, and applications for open solutions. Please see OSI’s other Policy Perspective reports for more detail and references.
• DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS: Different stakeholder communities support open efforts based on very different interpretations of what we mean by “open.” Working to create a world where more information is free to read has very different policy implications than a world where all publishing is paid by authors and is made immediately available for unrestricted reuse. Many researchers and institutions support open policies in a broad and generic sense, but far fewer may support the policies that prioritize strict licensing and liberal reuse (see Table 3, for example, for how our OSI2022 researcher survey participants define open). Misinterpretations also happen at the analysis level: it’s often the case that policymakers and analysts misconstrue the facts about open because they are, for example, looking at only one index (typically limited to high impact STM journals), examining journal-level statistics instead of article-level statistics (there are a great many journals that produce very few articles), categorizing all green articles as open (when in fact the majority of archived green is still copyrighted material), or assuming that all open is CC-BY licensed. One needs to read the fine print on studies to make sure we’re really comparing apples with apples.
• NUMEROUS CONCERNS: It is well established that many researchers have a variety of reasons for not favoring blanket open solutions, including but not limited to affordability, reliability, sustainability, practicability, usability, privacy, and secrecy. Please see OSI’s other Policy Perspective reports for more information and references. The negative impacts of these policies are also a major concern, varying by field, region, type of open, and more. Our policy solutions need to work for all researchers everywhere and not just STM research in the US and EU.
• A WORLD OF ACTIVITY: The open access policy reform space encompasses a diverse array of actors, definitions, methods, needs, barriers and goals, as well as an endless variety of motives, adaptations, and best practices. There is also a great deal of inspiration and innovation from all corners. No one is sitting still; everyone is listening, learning, and developing new tools and systems for the future. Some of this development is aligned with the idealism of Plan S; some is focused on national interests; some is more narrowly tailored to institutions or disciplines. This is all far more activity than any one organization can track, including OSI. Developments are everywhere and often well below our radar; debates in one corner of the open universe are often completely disconnected from and uninformed by debates in another corner; information issues of great relevance in one field are completely unheard of in another field; policy issues of great relevance in one region have no priority in another region.
  
  As an observatory, OSI hasn’t been able to keep pace with the totality of these developments and synthesize them for consideration by UNESCO. We have done what we can with our limited funding, but we are also aware of our limits and of the limits of any group making policy or advising on policy. Perhaps it is because of all this diversity and activity that policymaking bodies have seemingly given up trying to embrace it all and are instead simply buying into overly simplistic depictions of open that aren’t accurate or representative. Or, maybe OSI’s message about diversity just isn’t getting through to policymakers as well as open advocacy messages. Either way, as Jon Tennant observed in 2019, our lack of common understanding in this space has “impeded the widespread adoption of the strategic direction and goals behind Open Scholarship, prevented it from becoming a true social ‘movement’, and separated researchers into disintegrated groups with differing, and often contested, definitions and levels of adoption of openness” (Tennant et al. 2019).
  
  BOAI signatory Leslie Chan agrees. Long a powerful advocate for the development of open access policies, Chan notes in his latest work that “Far from a democratizing force, open science has become a practice of complying with standards and funders’ policies and mandates, further exacerbating deep-seated structural inequalities in knowledge production. Reflecting on our many failed attempts at reclaiming the knowledge commons and co-creating open infrastructure, I call for new imaginaries and narratives of what open scholarship may look like or aspire to be.” (Chan 2023)

TABLE 3: WHICH OF THESE CONDITIONS ARE NECESSARY FOR RESEARCH INFORMATION TO BE CONSIDERED “OPEN”?

Condition	% saying this is OFTEN or ALWAYS important
The work is published according to best practices (e.g., such that it is properly reviewed, indexed and archived)	88%
The information must be free to read	83%
The work is transparent as necessary for all good research (e.g., with regard to methods, sources, funders, and potential conflicts of interest)	80%
Data is included	73%
The information must be available to read immediately without any delay (e.g., subscription journals often impose a 12-month embargo for non-subscribers)*	73%
Publishing costs are paid by authors (or their funders or institutions), not by subscribers	44%
The publisher discloses their profit margins to the public	44%
The protocol (if there is one) is pre-registered	44%
The publisher avoids mixing free to read content with subscription content (as is currently the case with the journals published by most scholarly societies)	34%
The information can be re-used in any way without your permission (including copying and pasting everything and selling it commercially)	27%

Source: OSI2022 Global Researcher Congress, week 2, questions 8 and 9 (Hampson 2023).

*This response is analyzed in OSI Policy Perective 5 (Hampson 2023). Concerns other than embargoes may also be reflected here, including publishing delays and library access delays. Future surveys will try to understand this concern more precisely.

SUMMARY OF POLICY OPTIONS

What might Dr. Chan’s new and improved global open scholarship narratives look like? At their core, these ideas must be built on solid foundations of researcher input and support, fact-based assessments, and global equity. They must also embrace diversity. Given the many different paths, histories, ideas, perspectives, needs, methods and goals of open, layered atop a vast diversity of regional and institutional resources, global open policies cannot possibly prescribe how open is defined in all circumstances and how it must be addressed, nor should these policies aspire to do so. Rather, they should embody and empower an affirmation of our common goals and needs, and be built around flexible frameworks for addressing these goals and needs together so that no field, institution or region of the world is left behind. Research is and always has been a global enterprise. Preserving this inclusive and unifying aspect of research is essential.

There are many examples of policies that meet these requirements. Boxes 10-12 on the following pages describe a dozen such policy frameworks that have been mentioned at some point in OSI since 2015 (which doesn’t indicate an endorsement; we’re just noting that these ideas, among many others, have been noted over the years in reports or discussions). Table 4 illustrates the main differences between these frameworks (bearing in mind that hybrid policy frameworks could certainly be constructed). The most significant difference between these policy frameworks is that some are more complete and action-oriented than others. Only one (Plan A) is truly comprehensive, meaning it has all the features needed to fully reboot the global OA policy mindset. Six policies are action-oriented, meaning their main reason for being is to develop new solutions to open. The remaining five policies are passive, which isn’t to say they are ineffective, but that they lead from behind by laying the groundwork for and encouraging the development of new OA solutions, but stop short of investing the time and money needed to develop and pilot these new solutions. All frameworks are flexible and general, all embrace a diversity of approaches to open, and all lead to the same end point: A world where research is being shared more freely, and in a manner that maximizes collaboration, objectivity, and equity. Being general and flexible, all these policies can interact with each other at the margins in productive ways.

TABLE 4: TWELVE POSSIBLE OA POLICY OPTIONS

*Develop a better understanding of how open is working (or not), how it works in various information ecosystems, its diversity and interactions with respect to different types of open and different form (code, text, data, OER, etc.), case studies of best practices, economic analyses, and more.

IN PRAISE OF GENERALITY AND INCLUSION

None of these policy frameworks are fully developed, which is an intentional oversight. Filling in the policy particulars is best left to governments, research networks and individual research institutions after they choose the most appropriate OA policy framework for their needs. This is an important point. Laws, codes, and statutes require specificity, whereas policy guidance is often best described briefly. For instance, the UN Declaration on Human Rights contains 1772 words (UN 1948) and describes these rights only in general terms.²⁰ The United States Declaration of Independence contains only 1337 words (not including the names of the signers). In contrast,²¹ UNESCO’s 7400-word declaration on open science (UNESCO 2021) hits most of the same high notes about open as OSI’s Plan A, but then goes on to bury these overarching ideals under mountains of detail specifying acceptable outcomes. Would-be adopters are likely to miss the main points of this policy, or worse, ignore them because they agree with the overall tone but disagree with the specifics. Imagine if Thomas Jefferson had written an additional 5,000 words about his predictions for the future of the United States and his specific implementation requirements. Would the impact of his first 1337 words have diminished?²²

If we truly endeavor to build a world where open research reaches its full potential, then generalities that get us on the same page and empower us to work together toward common goals are the only way forward. We can’t change the future, after all, by first unilaterally deciding what this future will look like²³ and then prescribing exactly how all of us must get there. Much like Jefferson’s goals for democracy and freedom, our community’s goals for scholarly communication can serve as guideposts and inspiration. To the extent our policies exclude researchers, fail to address their needs, or make research communication worse, we end up nipping the flower in the bud.

Writing in generalities can also lead to policy that is more inclusive, not only because we don’t actively foreclose options, but because we invite a broader range of input, interpretation, collaboration and innovation. A famous (and probably overused²⁴) example from public policy history is how the world’s major urban centers were struggling in the late 1800s to dispose of increasingly large piles of horse manure. Horses were still the dominant form of transportation, and city streets were piling high with millions of pounds of horse manure every day. Architects in New York began building stoops on all new buildings, elevating front entrances a half-story from street level so they could stay above the mountains of waste and all the flies and rats it attracted (Paul 2016). New York city planners predicted that at the current rate of accumulation, city dwellers would be buried several stories deep in horse manure by the 1930s. Something had to be done.

When the world’s first international urban-planning conference was held in 1898, it was dominated by discussion of the manure situation. But the architects, public health officials and social workers who attended were unable to imagine cities without horses—industrialists and innovators were not invited because urban planning at the time was mostly about architecture (Erickson 2014)—so the conference adjourned after just three days (Morris 2017). Fortunately, a technological solution to this crisis emerged soon thereafter. Electricity had just started arriving to cities in the late 1800s, and the internal combustion engine was catching on. By the early twentieth century, cars outnumbered horses and electric trolleys replaced horse drawn ones. The manure crisis was averted (albeit, exchanged for the beginning of the climate change crisis).

This parable has been told many times with varying aims. Climate change deniers have used it to claim we shouldn’t worry about global warming because technology will come to the rescue; anti-regulation types have used it to suggest that all government policymaking efforts are comically flawed. In this case, the lesson we’re drawing out isn’t denialism or blind faith, but the power of inclusion. Experts who stay in their own silos make bad predictions about big picture issues, from the architects, public health officials, and social workers who met alone in New York to discuss the future of horse waste, to the many business, military and engineering tycoons around the world who never saw a practical use for what the Wright brothers had invented, to politicians who never saw the need for social safety nets, to tech wizards who thought the computer would never amount to more than an electronic recipe box, to techno utopianists who thought the Internet and social media would only lead to global peace and understanding. For complex and interconnected challenges, one group alone cannot see the full picture.

Making global research more open is one such complex and interconnected challenge, and it doesn’t lend itself to neat answers. If we’re trying to help researchers succeed, we first need to develop as broad and accurate an understanding as possible about how the global research environment works. In this environment, researchers are the key stakeholders. It is essential to secure their input and involvement.

It may be surprising to note, then, that suitably large numbers of researchers have never been consulted in any meaningful way on any of the major OA policies currently in use.²⁵ The need for open has been pushed by governments, agencies and funders, and the solutions in place have been designed by governments, funders, open activists, libraries, and publishers.²⁶ Researchers haven’t even been consulted after the fact; it sometimes seems the only time the OA community hears from researchers is when they sign petitions complaining about the OA policies that have suddenly intruded on their academic freedom (see, for example, Kamerlin 2018).

In everyone’s defense, researchers are not a monolithic group. From art historians to virologists, astronomers to sociologists, postdocs to emeritus professors, academicians to private industry experts, there is no typical profile of a researcher and no single group of researchers whose opinions can serve as a proxy for all researchers everywhere. Researchers are also busy, not just with their research work but in many cases also with grant-writing, teaching, mentoring, attending conferences, writing papers, and more. All this diversity and scarcity makes it difficult to truly understand the perspectives of all researchers everywhere when it comes to designing policy.

Still, given how important it is to include researchers in conversations about the future of research communication, this oversight is significant. OSI has tried to include as much input as possible from researchers in its deliberations over the years. A number of prominent researchers have participated in our conferences and online discussions, and we have made every effort to incorporate their viewpoints into our analyses and recommendations. Several large surveys have also been conducted in recent years that attempt to measure various facets of researcher opinions about open access. We have reviewed all this work, and also attempted to fill some remaining gaps in our understanding by conducting our own global surveys of researchers in early 2022.

SUMMARY OF OSI’S 2022 RESEARCHER SURVEYS

Box 13, below, contains a summary of key findings from the major researcher surveys conducted over the last five years. These surveys give a consistent portrayal of researcher perspectives across many fields, institutions and countries, where researchers generally dislike APCs, have concerns about sharing and reuse, and value academic freedom, journal quality, and impact. Researchers aren’t necessarily happy with current OA policies, but they aren’t particularly aware of the details or agencies involved.

These findings largely align with what we found from OSI’s 2022 researcher surveys, summarized in Box 14.²⁷ From these surveys, we learned that most researchers want new communication solutions and are ready to embrace the ones that address their key needs. These needs are most urgently to lower the costs of journals for authors and institutions, and also to improve research infrastructure, narrow the global access equity gap, make more journal articles (plus accompanying data) free to read and quickly accessible, find the right research papers to read and stay up-to-date on the latest research, ensure free classroom for journal articles use while limiting misuse and commercial reuse, ensure the continuation of a high quality publishing environment, retain the freedom to decide where to publish avoid one-size-fits-all solutions, ensure proper credit and recognition (especially as it relates to advancement), make more of an impact on society, improve collaboration and communication with colleagues in the same field, and reduce administrative workload and improve funding sustainability.

Overall, this group recognizes that developing successful OA policies will require broad collaboration, and that researchers are a key stakeholder in this conversation. They also believe science and society will benefit from the right policies. However, these policies cannot be one-size-fit-all approaches anchored in a limited understanding of the broad spectrum of global research communication needs and perspectives, or in the idea that open is a narrow construct since there are in fact many different kinds of open.

As noted in the last bullet point of Box 14, not only do the findings from these different surveys align with each other, they also align with the general points of agreement among OSI participants (as mentioned earlier in the “OSI” section of this report; see Table 5) that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in OA, OA exists along a spectrum of outcomes, researchers are a key stakeholder group in scholarly communication, and real solutions will require broad consultation and cooperation. There is also strong overlap between the concerns researchers have about OA policies and the concerns many in OSI have noted about the overall nature of global OA reforms (also as described earlier in the “OSI” section)—to wit, how policymakers are: (1) ignoring the unintended consequences of APCs; (2) ignoring the evidence that in practice, openness exists along a broad spectrum of outcomes; (3) overreaching and designing policies for which we lack the requisite expertise; and (4) forcing one-size-fits-all open solutions on researchers, even where these solutions don’t match researcher needs and resources

Going forward, then, and based on what we can tell from our analyses about what researchers want and what research communication experts think should happen, open access policymakers should turn their focus to the following:

1. Give researchers the solutions they want and need. Researchers are looking for ways to lower costs, improve collaboration, improve impact, ensure quality, and generally make their research lives better. These needs are not the focus of our current global OA policies. At best, these policies focus primarily on much lower priority concerns like reusability, embargoes, and CC-BY licensing (see Box 15 and Table 6). At worst, they have been sold as a magic elixir that will cure all that ails research, but they can’t and won’t. Some researchers will benefit from these policies, others will not; some issues will be addressed, the highest priority issues will not; some regions of the world will be able to adopt these solutions, most will not.
   
   As we consider designing new research communication policies, we should keep researcher needs and priorities squarely in mind. Rather than merely creating policies that satisfy the definition of BOAI, researchers and the research world would be better served if we focus on the communication solutions researchers actually want and need.
   
   Before we can take this more considered approach to OA policy reform, it will first be necessary to better understand exactly what these need are—and these will differ greatly by region, discipline and field. In time, research will greatly benefit from solutions that are centered on meeting these specific objectives and that truly involve researchers in creating the best solutions. This strategy will also help improve the discourse around research communication reform from one where we merely prescribe blanket solutions to challenging issues to one where we search for best practices and fact-based solutions that researchers actually want and need.
   
2. Do something about APCs. The high cost of publishing figures prominently in researcher concerns. It may even be accurate to say that cost is the number one concern of researchers. APCs have been touted for years as the best possible solution for publishing, even though many groups (including OSI) have warned that the widespread use of APCs will widen the gap between the haves and have nots in research, and substitute one equity imbalance with another—the inability to pay for access with the inability to publish. Indeed, as costs have shifted (in different ways for authors in different fields and institutions, with some authors relying on support from grants, foundations, or libraries to pay for APCs, others less so, and still others not at all), the cost burden for many authors in an APC-based world is now much heavier than it was in the subscription world it is trying to supplant.²⁸
   
   All this said, it’s possible the disruption we’re witnessing today will be resolved over the next five to ten years as adjustments take hold, such as APC waivers and discounts (all major publishers offer waivers and discounts to researchers from certain countries), or the increased willingness of funders and governments to cover APC costs as part of grant funding. For now, however, the subscription-to-APC transition in scholarly publishing is not being greeted by many (or maybe even most) researchers with open arms.
3. Respect the fact that research is a profession. Many individuals choose professions where making an impact is more important than earning a large salary. Research is one such profession. Nevertheless, these occupations are susceptible to the same challenges as all others, including recognition, retention, and promotion. In our 2022 surveys, as well as surveys undertaken by other organizations (see Annex), researchers place a limited amount of value on open research. They want to be able to connect effectively with their peers, read the work of other researchers, publish economically, and have an influence. We can score a victory for open access inasmuch as these research communication goals align with open policies, but the vast majority of researchers (globally and across disciplines) are not primarily motivated by the desire to make their work accessible. This is what we should expect.
   
   However, this incentive dichotomy researchers perceive is rarely respected in the world of policymaking. Researchers are told the quest for knowledge belongs to all humanity and that they should be entirely motivated by participating in this pursuit, disregarding incentives which better align with their career demands and objectives. This is the essential premise of our current OA policymaking environment: that open outcomes are the highest priority, and valued more than quality, reputation, and cost. In the meantime, the majority of academics face the career-driven reality that quality, prestige, and cost are more important than open. The challenge of our future OA policymaking efforts is that we must achieve both goals, collaborating with researchers to develop solutions that align with their career incentives while also meeting the needs of a more open research environment.OSI has long maintained that researchers are key stakeholders in the OA policymaking process, or at least that they should be. Over the years, our group has closely tracked survey research in this subject to gain a deeper understanding of researcher viewpoints on open access. Numerous researchers who have participated in OSI’s conferences and online discussions have also provided us with guidance, information, and perspectives.

TABLE 6: TIERS OF RESEARCHER CONCERNS (NOT JUST COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED)

Concern	%*	Communications related?
Tier 1 concerns (66%+ of researchers say this is ALWAYS important)
Stay up-to-date on all the latest research in my field	76%	X
Get funding for my research work	66%
Tier 2 concerns (33-65% of researchers say this is ALWAYS important)
Infrastructure support from my institution (good facilities, etc.)	64%
Find, hire and keep good staff	60%
Design good research studies	60%
Make an impact in my field	60%
Find the right research papers to read	59%	X
Publish in a journal	57%	X
Collaborate with other researchers	56%
Read research papers for free	54%	X
Get proper credit and recognition for my work	52%	X
Effectively communicate my findings to fellow researchers	50%	X
Publish in a prestigious journal	48%	X
Advance in my field	48%
Make an impact on society	48%
Figure out what to read—there’s so much information out there	47%	X
Job security	47%
Publish affordably	47%	X
Freely and rapidly share my research work with other researchers around the world	41%	X
Effectively communicate my findings to the general public	41%	X
Effectively communicate my findings to policymakers	41%	X
Tier 3 concerns (0-32% of researchers say this is ALWAYS important)
IMMEDIATELY (without waiting for embargo periods) read what other researchers have published in a subscription journal	32%	X
Publish in the right journals	32%	X
Publish enough—the pressure to “publish or perish”	28%	X
Make my data available in a format that others can see and use	28%	X
See the data generated by other researchers	25%	X
Protect my research from getting “scooped” before I can publish it	24%	X
“Register” my discovery (publish quickly so the world will recognize I was the first to discover something)	24%	X
Pay	24%
Publish quickly	20%	X
Reuse the data generated by other researchers	18%	X
Protect my research from misuse	16%	X
Regulation	16%
Protect my research from theft	8%	X
Copy and paste large chunks of text from other research papers or otherwise reuse these works (beyond what is already permitted by copyright under Fair Use and Fair Dealing)	6%	X
Competition	4%
Other	4%

Source: OSI Research Communication Survey, question 5 and OSI2022 Global Researcher Congress, week 3, question 2
*% column is averaged across the two source questions

Even after all this work, though, we cannot say for certain, of course, what all researchers everywhere think about OA policies, but we can say for certain that policymakers must do a better job of engaging with and listening to the global research community. A policymaking strategy that does a better job of listening to researchers and addressing their top priority demands is necessary because there is a great deal of unmet need and misaligned incentives, potential for harm from our current policies, and a great deal of benefit to be gained from new and better policies.

BROADER STILL

So far, we’ve made the case that the many global stakeholders in research communication (researchers in particular) haven’t been working together, and that they should be working together, to develop OA policies that work for all researchers everywhere. It’s important to recognize for perspective that this lack of collaboration extends far beyond OA policy. Research communication is a broad and incohesive field and typically doesn’t work across boundaries at all.

Research communication is less a field, in fact, than a collection of unrelated activities with dissimilar needs and goals, including specializations such as science writing and outreach for public audiences, journal editing, grant writing, technical writing, research administration, tech transfer, project management, data management, education (with different specializations for different grade levels), public relations, policy analysis, and informatics. The diversity of needs being addressed include sharing, access, affordability, visibility, transparency, clarity, multilingualism (e.g., see Helsinki Initiative 2019), precision, privacy, secrecy, and persuasion. And the philosophies, approaches, skill sets, goals, and best practices involved vary by region, field, study, institution (including industry), audience, purpose and budget. We talk in this report about research communication reform as though everyone in research takes this to mean open access reform, but in conversations across the entire spectrum of research communication professions, open access barely rate mention in many official reports, and even then only in the most general and generic way.²⁹ Therefore, should broad research communication reform policies be written even more broadly than proposed in this report so they give direction and unity to what more of the world considers to be research communication?

This may already be happening at some level. For example, in June 2022 the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union issued a proclamation on “Research assessment and implementation of Open Science” touching on many of these broader issues like research assessment, innovation, education, multilingualism, public policy, and economic development. The details of Plan S don’t even rate mention in this statement. In this broad policy proclamation, EU member states are simply encouraged to develop research that is high quality, impactful and shared for the benefit of all.³⁰

Similarly, the US Nelson Memo sets up new open requirements for researchers but is otherwise solution agnostic. It’s likely that the net effect of this policy will be to push the US (and world) toward more gold OA solutions (that is, research published using APCs and carrying a CC-BY license), but at the same time this directive doesn’t insist on CC-BY licensing or APC funding, so in this sense it is a general policy directive pushing US research communication reform in a general direction without getting entangled in specifics (see Crotty 2022).

The open policy strategy currently being developed through a US National Academies Roundtable process is another example of an emerging generalist policy, which is a bit surprising given that the effort is being chaired by reformers from the more ideological side of the OA policy divide (leaders of the Open Research Funders Group effort), and because the early organizing work around this effort was very activist sounding.³¹ Now, after several rounds of input from agency and research leaders, the emerging policy is sounding general in nature, soft-pedaling to university leaders what an open future should look like (see Box 16, below).

Source: NASEM 2022a.

Granted, the NAS Roundtable is not technically centered on open science or open scholarship. Rather, it is an attempt to align incentives across sectors so efforts to support more open and equitable practices in one sector are not met with counter efforts in another just because of the way policies are constructed.³² Still, this policy effort could have easily steered into the weeds like Plan S, but it didn’t (or at least hasn’t so far), and this is significant. We see the same dynamic with Plan S itself, whose policy evolution process so far has been to set steep requirements (with regard to funding disclosure, data deposits, transition time frames and more) and then soften these over time as compliance falls short of targets.³³

The underlying reasons for this policy broadening are anyone’s guess. Maybe this is what common ground looks like when taking many stakeholder perspectives into account. Or maybe what we’re seeing here is some middle ground between activism and market forces. It’s also possible we’re seeing a fall from grace—a grudging admission that overly detailed OA policies don’t work, or a realization that our techno-utopian visions of 20 years ago need updating.

In this broader context, one thing is certain: We need to keep in mind that research has always been both enormously diverse and globally interconnected. The development and expansion of research has always depended on communication, sharing, and building on the work of others. As a community, we must refrain from presenting open access and open science policies as the creators and forces behind this dynamic and as the single most significant reforms required for research communication. They are not. They are potentially very significant forces that, if implemented properly, might have a revolutionary influence—hence the attention and debate—but they are only one of many crucial reforms that must take place, many of which are interconnected. If we recalibrate our expectations for open solutions and at the same time refocus on solving the highest priority needs of researchers as well as addressing all these other crucial connected issues, we will be able to carve out an effective path for open solutions reforms that make sense and that fit logically within the broader needs and priorities of researchers and the broader research community.

HUMPTY DUMPTY

It’s possible, and maybe even likely, that as the world continues down our current APC-based path toward OA reform, we’re going to see more unintended consequences from our reform actions. Some of the major possible consequences are discussed below.

EQUITY

We’ve mentioned this issue already in this report but it bears repeating: The APC solution simply replaces paywalls with playwalls, and arguably, the latter is more damaging. APC charges have risen to stratospheric levels for premium research journals over the last few years, now topping US$10,000 per article for prestige journals. Even the average APC charge (around US$2,600 for OA mirror journals, although there is wide variation by field, publisher, and journal quality; see Smith 2022) is now far higher than most researchers around the world can afford unless they are based at a major institution in the US or EU or are well endowed by their private funder (see Scaria 2018, Kwon 2022, and Nwagwu 2018 for discussions about the cost burden on Global South researchers, who are much more likely than their Northern counterparts to pay these APC costs out of their personal budgets).

While most publishers do offer APC waivers and discounts to researchers from lower income countries, and around 200 publishers also support the Research4Life UN-Publisher partnership providing free and low-cost access to research publications, a recent study of this waiver system confirmed that very few Global South authors publish in high APC mirror journals, and that “the authorship of OA mirror articles is overwhelmingly concentrated in high-income countries” (Smith 2022). The researchers note that “Despite being based in countries nominally eligible for APC waivers, authors from middle-income countries published proportionately few OA articles, but authors in low-income countries published almost entirely subscription-only articles in Parent journals. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that APCs are a barrier to OA publication by scientists from the low-income countries of the Global South.” The authors speculated there might be three reasons for this outcome: (1) In practice, waiver requirements can be stringent (e.g., publishers might only waive APCs in cases where every coauthor of an article is based in a country that is waiver eligible); (2) lack of awareness about the existence of these waivers (a hypothesis supported by other research); (3) even partial waivers on very high APCs is still entirely unaffordable (see Smith 2022). See Box 17 for additional discussion of APC waivers and discounts.

DIVISIONS

Closely related to our concern about equity is our concern that the research world is being split into different camps—wealthy researchers versus everyone else. The fault lines are already clear. While the US and Europe are careening toward APC-based policies, China is developing their own internal publishing system, India will have a national subscription system (recently announced; see Niazi 2022), Japan will have a light-touch hybrid system (Salter 2022), and the remaining 40 percent of the world’s researchers will need to decide whether to pay to play, or create their own more affordable system. More research findings will be read across borders as a result of US and EU open access policies, but researchers from outside the EU and US will publish in other venues, likely at a lower cost, and these venues’ visibility and significance, as well as the research they publish, may diminish over time as the higher priced venues become even more prestigious. Moreover, it’s primarily the researchers from wealthy countries and institutions who will have access to the high-speed computing resources required to exploit global databases (to which Global South researchers are still expected to contribute).

Will these dynamics also result in wealthy researchers seeking out other wealthy researchers to help their publishing budget go further (see Matthew Effect, below)? Will it result in a Global South researchers being reluctant to collaborate with US and EU colleagues because only the wealthier researchers will be have the resources to process data and publish new findings and discoveries? Will it mean that issues of importance to Global South researchers will slide even farther down the global priority list? Combined with the impact of APCs on preventing researchers from the Global South from publishing in the first place, enlarging the gaps between these worlds may end up hurting research instead of helping it, for these and probably other reasons as well.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The damage to research caused by a world with such fragmented OA policies could also affect international relations. Suppose we continue along our current path and there is no relief for high APC prices (although there may be relief in time, as mentioned earlier). In this case, we might not only see impacts to research, but socioeconomic impacts as well, even political. Research and development is a major economic driver in all nations, and universities are the pillars of policy consultation, education, and social progress. What happens to the cohesion, promise, and growth that research brings to each country and the world when the rich countries co-opt the tools and benefits of research? Are we creating a system where research will cease being a global force for collaboration and unity?

FRAUD

Scholars everywhere but especially in the Global South are on the lookout for lower priced APC options. This need has spawned a huge industry for predatory research publishing over the last decade. Predatory publishers pose as legitimate publishers but they aren’t: they claim to offer peer review, expert editorial boards, high impact factors, indexing, professional affiliations, and physical locations in big cities but they actually lie about most or all of these things. Combined with promises of ultra-fast turnarounds and low prices, these fake journals can seem like reasonable alternatives to unsuspecting buyers, but even for savvy consumers, they are often the only affordable option.

Experts worry that the articles from predatory publishers pose a risk to the larger body of legitimate scientific work. Researchers in the future might end up basing their work on poor quality or even fabricated findings; funders might invest scarce dollars and Euros on the wrong areas of research based on bogus findings; and governments and health officials might develop policies based on wholly fictitious information and expertise. The emergence of the APC model has fueled this rise, but other factors like the spread of DIY desktop and web publishing technology have also contributed, where most anyone with a computer can become a “publisher” and make lots of money. Also to blame are academic evaluation practices that value publishing volume, easily faked journal reputation metrics that lure authors like moths to a flame, a lack of industry oversight, and for the most part (with very few exceptions) almost no punishment for the owners of these paper mills. Although there are no exact figures available, somewhere around 9% of the 3.5 million journal articles published every year, and nearly one-third of the world’s 50,000 scholarly journals might be classified as predatory (see OSI 2021 and Anderson 2019).

THE MATTEW EFFECT

The Matthew Effect is the principle of accumulated advantage—essentially, an explanation for why the rich tend to get richer. The continued use of APCs in scholarly publishing is going to lead to profound Matthew effects on researchers, journals, and research itself. How? With regard to researchers, we already know that most are concerned about the cost of publishing. At the same time, most don’t work at a university that has a transformative agreement with a major publisher (where it is free for researchers to read and publish), and many don’t live in a country or institution where APC funding is readily available. Therefore, we’re going to see an uptick in authors shopping around for co-authors to help pay their publishing costs (even by authors who do have APC funding, so they can make their publishing budgets go farther). These sought-after authors are already privileged, working at wealthy institutions in the US or EU. As co-authors added for their deep pockets, these researchers will get even longer publishing resumes and more promotion and grant opportunities as a result (Farley 2021)

With journals, previous research has established that APC prices are largely driven by market power and market concentration, meaning that the largest publishers with the best stable of journals in a particular discipline can charge higher prices for its products (prestige also matters but to a lesser degree; see Budzinski 2020). Since only wealthy researchers will have the resources available to publish in these journals (whether through lots of grant funds or access to transformative agreements), then it stands to reason only the most prominent researchers (see the first paragraph of this section) will be publishing in these journals. The end result will be that these journals will become even more important and will be able to charge even higher prices; by extension, all other journals and the researchers who publish in them will become increasingly less important.

Combining these two effects, it’s clear that research itself will also be affected. What the privileged researchers focus on will be where the research attention goes and funding gets spent; and what the major journals publish will be what other researchers read about and what gets the highest consideration from grant evaluators and policymakers.

PUBLISHER POWER CONSOLIDATION

Economist Philip Morowski has studied and written extensively about how platform capitalism is re-engineering research from the bottom up, and is now in the early stages of monetizing the entire process of science. The big five publishers, says Morowski, have seen the writing on the wall for a long time with open access, so they have basically taken control of open science, open access and open data efforts so they can make more money from these movements. They’re doing this by breaking up research into smaller component parts, and then using tech platforms to monetize each part, extracting all manner of value from the process in real time. So, instead of destroying commercial publishers, the open movement has made them important loci of control within this newly engineered system (with publishers rebranding themselves as “information analytics” companies in the process). We’ve seen Morowski’s dystopia begin to take shape in recent years as the big publishers have each acquired various key companies that give them beginning-to-end coverage of the entire publication cycle. Even if Morowski is totally wrong and what we’re seeing in the marketplace is more benign maneuvering for advantage in a competitive and rapidly changing marketplace, there’s no denying that publisher power has been increasing. What does this increase mean for the future of open solutions? How about the future of research? We’re investing an awful lot in the judgment and expertise of privately held publishing companies to tell us what research we should and shouldn’t be reading, and what the future of open should look like. There’s an argument to be made that maybe the relationship between research and publishing was better before we started tearing it down and putting it back together Frankenstein style.

CHANGES (DAMAGES?) TO OA INSTITUTIONS

There are many ways our current APC trajectory might create unwanted downstream changes to OA institutions. For example, when university systems negotiate transformative deals with publishers (whereby university authors basically pay a bulk publishing plus access fee instead of one-off APC charges), what does this mean for universities who don’t have the market power to negotiate such deals? Will library consortia unravel as the larger institutions (who publish more) are in effect subsidized by the smaller institutions who publish less (Hinchliffe 2019)?

We might also see open access legacy publishers come under pressure. For example, what happens to PLOS, Frontiers, and Hindawi once authors realize they can publish in most any journal for a fee? That is, if authors are going to pay US$3,000 to publish an article, why not see what else that money can buy (in general, these legacy OA journals have lower Journal Impact Factors than the specialty journals who will be flipping from subscription to APC).

What about society journals and university publishers? Will they fold completely under the pressure of converting to APC format? For generations, subscriptions to society flagship journals formed the backbone of the revenue stream for these organizations. Or will they subcontract the management of their product lines to the major commercial publishers (a shift that has been accelerating due to Plan S because of the tremendous administrative burden involved; see Clarke 2018)? What impact will these changes have on the unique scholarship these institutions have been able to support over the years?

GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION

Over the short term we’re going to see lots of debate around who should foot the APC bill. Researchers? Universities? Research grants (which for most research is the same as saying “government”)? If the debate pushes too hard on this last option, government will push back.

Asking governments to foot the entire publishing bill (through grant supplements), means either reducing the amount of money we actually spend on research (for example, if $5k of a $100k research grant needs to be earmarked for APCs, that means 5% less is available for research), or it’s going to encourage lawmakers to question what on earth we’re doing, meaning a lot more oversight will be in store (at minimum, although this might not be a bad outcome). It definitely doesn’t mean just getting a five percent boost across the board to cover publishing. Even during the best of times, politicians have a hard time boosting research spending. And in the US, it’s almost comical to believe this that the current Congress will boost spending for research so American researchers can give away more of their American-funded work to the rest of the world for free.³⁴ The US is just not in that kind of financial or political mood at the moment. Instead, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see a Republican-controlled US Congress demand explanations for why US researchers are paying European publishers with US taxpayer dollars, or to clamp down on sharing until better solutions are developed.

One such solution? A highly-placed industry insider mentioned to OSI in 2019 that pushed far enough, we might see huge government funders like NIH simply create their own publishing capacity in-house, bypassing commercial publishers altogether. If APC charges become burdensome for US researchers and Congress catches wind of this, you can be sure that there will be serious talk about redirecting how this money is spent, whether it’s toward an NIH publishing type of solution, or maybe some kind of national market power solution where the US treats publishers like drug companies and negotiates for lower bulk prices. The US is in the right position to do this; although China publishes slightly more papers per year than the US, the US is, by far, the world’s most prolific publisher of high quality natural sciences research, so the participation of US-funded researchers in the global publishing ecosystem is tremendously important.³⁵

If not APCs, are there any viable alternatives on the horizon? Time will tell. The APC landscape may eventually stabilize, or different open models like subscribe to open (S20) or even India’s national subscription plan may become the wave of the future. Or, harkening back to the horse manure crisis of the 1890s discussed earlier, developments in artificial intelligence (think ChatGPT), big data, blockchain, quantum computing and other technologies may end up completely altering the way we go about digesting and communicating research information.

There is also the possibility that external forces could altogether derail our carefully crafted plans and Humpty Dumpty will be difficult to put back together again. It is not implausible that East-West political tensions could eventually result in information geowalls that undermine our OA policy objectives. Or that politicians not only in the US but throughout the civilized world withdraw their support for building high-functioning global databases through which research data can flow more freely across international borders to countries whose leaders are bent on death and destruction. Or that predatory publishing becomes such a problem that the researchers and the legitimate publishing industry will need to join forces to figure out completely new models for sharing research information because the old model has simply become too corrupted.

We might also see some pushback against Plan S from within the EU, or pushback against the Nelson Memo from publishers (by way of, for example, stepping away from participation agreements with PubMedCentral (PMC), the world’s largest green repository. Since it was first launched in 2000, publishers from around the world have been depositing historical data plus AAM versions of their research papers (with links to VORs) into this repository. Since around 2010, publishers have supplied almost 90% of the content in PMC (Williamson 2019). SpringerNature announced in early 2023 that it will no longer deposit the AAMs from its subscription journals into PMC but will instead leave this for authors to do (Crotty 2023 and Clarke & Esposito 2023). To be clear, SpringerNature is a leader in open access publishing and doesn’t have many purely subscription journals left anyway (almost all are either open or hybrid). So the unintended consequence here isn’t what impact NatureSpringer’s move will have on the world’s largest green open repository, but what might happen if other publishers follow suit.

WHAT NOW?

The most influential open access policies in the world today are rooted in the belief that open means one thing and that open solutions must fall within a limited range of possibilities. OSI’s open access policy framework ideas, developed over years of research and global, multi-stakeholder consultations, clearly demonstrate that instead, open definitions and solutions are diverse, and the needs, perspectives, and resources of researchers from around the world cannot be captured by policies that are one-size-fits-all. As a result, OSI’s policy framework ideas are broad and adaptable, with the primary goal of helping researchers everywhere succeed, and built on a deep, shared commitment to enhancing equity, following the evidence about what works, and ensuring that research can continue to be a force for good for all of humanity.

From this foundation of equity, objectivity, and researcher success, we can and should collaborate to do something with open access, rather than viewing open as an end in and of itself. OSI’s 2022 research communication surveys suggest that vast majority of researchers agree with this perspective and approach, but it is crucial to test this assumption by redoing our survey (or a similar one) with a much larger sample size.

The potential of OSI’s approach to open reform is significantly more promising than our current approach. We are currently constructing a world where everyone has free access to Author Accepted Manuscripts but not official Versions of Record, where “open data” means spreadsheets deposited on GitHub, where only researchers from wealthy countries will publish their findings in the highest quality journals, and where the incentives for openness are not aligned with the career and needs of researchers, all of which leads to a costly and cumbersome global information hodgepodge. This approach should at minimum be supplemented with broad new policies that encourage innovation, generate new value for research and researchers, and contribute to achieving global equity parity between research communities. Not only will we enrich the global research dialogue, but global societies and economies as well.

Adopting these types of solutions does not necessarily mean abandoning Plan S, the Nelson Memo, the UNESCO open science policy, or university transformative agreements. Rather, it suggests that in the future, broader and more flexible policies should be woven into a tapestry of open options and approaches that will make open research more feasible for researchers everywhere. Instead of continuing to implement policies that are one-size-fits-all based on rigid criteria, we can create policies that work well for everyone and better meet the original objectives and aspirations of the open access movement.

What If the policy world has spoken, however, and APCs are the future for everyone? Is this policy approach still worthwhile? Absolutely. Practically, the majority of the world outside of the United States and Europe still requires viable open access policies. The concepts presented in this report can assist in laying this foundation and integrating policies from around the world. Philosophically, the world of scholarly communication is squeezing itself into a narrow approach to open access without understanding why, where this will lead, or the repercussions on the developing world. It is crucial to develop this understanding as soon as possible, before we are too far along in this shift, so we can still adjust our policies as needed. Otherwise, we risk missing out on the full potential of open access, and also fragmenting the research communication space which is so integral to research itself.

As noted early in this report, in our quest to develop a better future for research and research communication, it will surely help inform our discussions if we remember where this journey began, with so many different paths and histories. The concept of open scholarship wasn’t suddenly invented with BOAI. Openness is what scholarship is and has always been about. The concept and practice of openness have evolved over centuries, influenced by politics, philosophy, research requirements, technology, and the market. Using BOAI as the cornerstone of contemporary OA policy is inaccurate and unjust, as this approach is neither democratic nor objective.

The correct approach to the future of open policy is to avoid getting entangled in ideological specifics and instead recognize that our original hopes for open access are all the same—born from a shared vision that open methods can help improve the visibility, transparency, and accountability of research, improve public education and participation, level the knowledge playing field, reduce publishing costs, and harness the Internet’s potential to truly demystify information. This is the path originally envisioned by open access, not one in which costs rise, inequity increases, and the rich get richer, but one in which barriers fall, innovation accelerates, and all researchers everywhere benefit. The narrow ideological path to open is a dead end; the true promise of open lies down a road less traveled.

This road less traveled is, oddly enough, a six-lane highway of diversity and innovation compared to the ideological path. On this road, we know where we’re going, we avoid ideological detours, we work together to make the journey rich and meaningful, and along the information highway’s hubs and spokes, development sprouts everywhere. Possibly, this journey takes place without many rules or structures, without lanes or speed limits. Or perhaps at least basic rules and structures will be useful. We know that better communication and collaboration are essential to the development of new and more effective policies, so structures that facilitate this communication and collaboration would undoubtedly be beneficial—perhaps even the same types of policy structures the international community uses for trade, security, intellectual property, and environmental policy, if the UN can support this effort.

It goes without saying that our current efforts to implement global open access policies are in no way comparable to these other global policy efforts. But in order to modify international research communication rules, one must at the very least take a more comprehensive, objective, democratic, international, and research-focused approach. Adopting this new and improved strategy will create a much higher return on investment for research and society than sticking with our current strategy.

The next step in this process is for a body with global authority, such as UNESCO, to convene a large, representative, international gathering of researchers to discuss the policy recommendations presented in this report (a virtual summit would work). Based on what we know through OSI’s work and through the researcher surveys that have been conducted so far, researchers are likely to support the approach put forward in this report, but we should first confirm this recommendation by consulting a larger body of researchers than we have been able to convene. UNESCO can then propose a framework that governments, universities, and research institutions everywhere can utilize to meet their open scholarship goals.

OSI’s observations and recommendations are described in more detail in the many reports and presentations this group has produced since 2015. These reports and presentations are available from the OSI website at osiglobal.org and are also listed in the Annex section of this report.

ENDNOTES

1. OSI has received funding from and worked directly with UNESCO as part of the agency’s Network for Open Access to Scientific Information and Research (NOASIR). OSI is a unique voice in this group, focused solely on delivering evidence-based assessments of open solutions, rather than advocating for particular open ideologies or outcomes.

2. Notable thinkers include Benedikt Fecher and Sascha Friesike (Fecher 2013), Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer (Bosman & Kramer 2017), Samuel Moore (Moore 2017), Philip Mirowski (Mirowski 2018), Jon Tennant (Tennant 2019), and Rebecca Willen (Willen 2020). See OSI Policy Perspective 3 (Hampson 2020) for a more detailed overview of the philosophical underpinnings of open science.

3. Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the Internet) and Keith Yamamoto (UC San Fransisco Vice Chancellor for Science and Policy) both highlighted this point in their opening and closing remarks to OSI’s 2017 conference (see OSI 2017). For Cerf, increasing the reproducibility of published research is of paramount importance for the future of research, which requires increasing access, which in turn requires a much more serious focus on digital preservation—from hardware and operating systems to software and formats. Without this preservation and access, there can be no modern scientific record. For Yamamoto, the act of publishing cannot be separated from research. “If you don’t publish your experiment, it is exactly like not doing it.”

4. Several excellent books on the history of science communication touch on this theme, including David Wootton’s “The Invention of Science” (Wootton 2019), Adrian Johns’ “The Nature of the Book” (Johns 1998) and James Poskett’s “Horizons” (Poskett 2022).

5. At the time, SPARC was part of the American Library Association. It became a separately funded lobbying group in 2016.

6. The number of scientific journal articles published doubles roughly every 17 years (Bornmann 2021) due to a steady increase in research spending, the emergence of new research disciplines, a splintering of existing disciplines into new specializations, and other factors (see Annex). Trying to stay abreast of these changes, publishers note that their cost per article published has dropped over this doubling period, but the total costs of subscribing to all available content has still been too high for university libraries to bear. Richard Poynder’s 2019 essay, “Open access: Could defeat be snatched from the jaws of victory?” gives one of the most detailed accounts of this history (Poynder 2019). For an insider’s account of the politics at play, read “Public access policy in the United States” by T Scott Plutchak, Fred Dylla, Crispin Taylor and John Vaughn (Plutchak 2022).

7. In the 20 years since 2002, various declarations have added nuance and complexity to the cri de coeur of BOAI. For example, in 2010, the Panton Principles qualified that publicly funded science should be in the public domain (CC-0) and that licenses that limit the reuse of data (like CC-BY) should be discouraged. DORA in 2012 and the Leiden Manifesto in 2015 both took aim at Journal Impact Factors, arguing that qualitative evaluations of research should matter more than quantitative evaluations. FAIR in 2016 argued that data must be easy to find, clearly accessible, interoperable with other systems, and optimized for reuse. The Lindau Guidelines of 2020 reiterated the need for scientific data and results to be made “openly available,” while adding that research and evaluation criteria must be transparent. Harkening back to the biomedical research declarations (see Box 1), Lindau also stated that science has a responsibility to society to communicate, educate and engage.

8. The 16-person 2002 Budapest meeting was followed by a 24-person meeting in Bethesda in 2003. The Bethesda group built on the Budapest group’s work, adding provisions for how users will enact open access. A 2003 Berlin meeting that attracted around 100 representatives built on the Budapest and Bethesda definitions of open, culminating in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, which is also a foundational philosophy in open access policy (Max-Planck 2003).

9. Our acceptance has arguably even made us blind to conflicts of interest and hyperbole. For example, the CEO of open access publisher Frontiers was deeply involved in the development of Plan S (Schneider 2019). As for hyperbole, the new US open access policy promotes the merits of open access but lacks factual support for its recommendations (Clarke & Esposito 2022).

10. To help better understand the differences between different types of open and make sure we’re all talking about the same things when it comes to analysis and policymaking, OSI constructed a model called DARTS. This model illustrates how different types of open differ with regard to their discoverability, accessibility, reusability, transparency, and sustainability. The DARTS model is described in more detail in Figure 1..

11. To the Nelson Memo’s credit, it does not mandate specific actions, just specific outcomes, so it remains to be seen whether this latitude will create better outcomes for open than Plan S. The smart money at the moment says that this policy will force the widespread adoption of gold open—APC-funded journal articles where the publishing costs are paid by authors.

12. Or even better, these publishing charges will be paid by a third party like a research foundation. This ideal approach, although still rare, is called “diamond OA.”

13. These points and more are also discussed at length in OSI’s other policy perspectives (available from the OSI website at osiglobal.org). Again, these are just points raised in OSI, not points everyone in OSI necessarily endorses.

14. See Scaria 2018, Kwon 2022, and Nwagwu 2018 for discussions about the cost burden on Global South researchers, who are much more likely than their Northern counterparts to pay APC costs out of their personal budgets. See Zhang 2022 for the global cost of OA. See the DeltaThink website for ongoing news and analysis of the OA market (deltathink.com).

15. Plan S and other OA mandates have set timetables for doing away with the subscription model, and these smaller publishers need help navigating this change and complying with all the new and complex reporting requirements.

16. OSI has tried to raise funding for this work but hasn’t been successful.

17. A separate list of these surveys is included in References section of this report.

18. The US National Institutes of Health defines “research integrity” as “the use of honest and verifiable methods in proposing, performing, and evaluating research; reporting research results with particular attention to adherence to rules, regulations, guidelines, and following commonly accepted professional codes or norms” (including espousing shared values such as honesty, accuracy, efficiency and objectivity). See NIH 2023. So, for example, high integrity research includes ensuring proper analyses and objective conclusions, while avoiding bias, conflicts of interest, plagiarism, p-hacking or fake data.

19. See the three paragraphs of section 2 of the Nelson memo (Nelson 2022), for example, which describe how rapid sharing of science information led the charge against COVID: “Immediate public access to COVID-19 research is a powerful case study on the benefits of delivering research results and data rapidly to the people.”

20. As an aside, article 27 of this declaration states that “Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” It’s possible that open access mandates conflict with this article to the extent a researcher’s copyright interests are taken away unwillingly, or a researcher’s data is made public before they have a chance to analyze it.

21. Not to pick on anyone here, but just by way of relevant example.

22. In the case of the US, the exact details on how to operate a democracy have been added over hundreds of years as the needs and structures have become clearer, beginning with the Articles of Confederation in 1781, followed next by the Constitution in 1788 after years of heated debate, and followed thereafter by 200-plus years of amendments, laws, regulations, and agency policies. The Declaration provided the initial vision guidance; the Constitution provided a framework for operating policy.

23. In this case, especially given that we haven’t even begun to wrestle with how developments such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, quantum computing and other technological innovations will affect research and research communication in the coming decades.

24. But this example is memorable so we’ll use it.

25. UNESCO did consult a variety of science groups and institutions as part of it’s open science policy effort, but these groups did not represent a variety of views and interests with regard to open, and researchers themselves were not consulted.

26. Of course, libraries and funders serve researchers, so they endeavor to craft policies in the best interest of the individual researchers they serve (as well as students, administrators, and others). However, in any large scale and representative sense, researchers are not now nor have they ever been directly involved in the global OA policymaking process. As a group, they are not driving the conversations about need, or creating OA tools and processes. Researchers are also likely to be working on open solutions separate from official open access policy efforts. For example, they may primarily rely on a wide array of open data tools and processes (such as data sharing networks) which are not typically represented in open data policy conversations.

27. See Hampson 2023 for a detailed description and analysis of these survey findings.

28. To the extent this burden even existed before, since subscription costs were covered by libraries and publishing costs were mainly limited to page and color surcharges. Comparing overall system costs is more difficult. A proxy for this determination might be the profit margin of major publishers, and these margins have not decreased during the shift to APCs, so the system costs have probably not come down overall. Indeed, DeltaThink estimates that the OA market is currently much more financially robust than the subscription market (Pollock 2021). Zhang 2022 estimates that the overall costs for our increasingly APC-funded model of scholcomm may now be higher than they were in a subscription-based model.

29. This lack of visibility and focus has meant that funding for research communication reform efforts has long been hit and miss. For example, the National Science Foundation has its own ideas of what research communication looks like, and only funds communication work that fits its thinking. The same is true with other government and nongovernment funders. There hasn’t been any big picture agreement of what this field looks like and what it needs, especially when trying to include industry research as well. By contrast, the good versus evil approach open advocacy groups adopted years ago (stirring up anger over publisher profit margins and directing this anger into effective rallying cries for funding and action) has been a wildly effective way to increase visibility and focus. When your rallying cry is “kill all the publishers!” you’re going to have a more effective fundraising campaign than “let’s find common ground!” (see Lozada 2022 for an interesting overview of the rhetoric of advocacy). This appearance of polarization masks the moderation in this space, however. There are many stakeholders in the scholarly communication reform space who don’t object to change, but at the same time would rather not blindly accept the promises of open activism without more evidence and a more solid plan of action.

30. The conclusions put forward in the 2019 14th Annual Berlin Science Communication Debate sponsored by Bosch are another example of a broad policy recommendation. See Bosch Stiftung 2019.

31. See, for example, Crow and Tananbaum 2020. Greg Tananbaum is a former SPARC consultant, the founder and director of ORFG, and the Head of Secretariat for the NAS Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship.

32. Quote from Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick, an OSI participant who is part of the NAS roundtable and the president of a foundation that is part of ORFG.

33. In November 2022, Plan S coordinating body Coalition-S reported that 27 publishers have complied with the price transparency requirements of Plan S, covering slightly more than 2000 journals (of which Wiley journals account for about 75% of this total; see European Science Foundation 2022 and https://journalcheckertool.org/jcs/). There are no firm figures for how many active journals and journal publishers exist in academia, but a ballpark number is somewhere north of 2,000 publishers and 40,000 journals (Hampson 2019b).

34, The nationalism here is just being described, not advocated.

35. This data point can be derived from a number of different angles. See, for example, the Scimago country rankings at https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php. Or the Nature Index (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01231-w). Or the highly cited article index (see the US Science & Technology Indicators website at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/u-s-and-global-science-and-technology-capabilities).

RECOMMENDED CITATION

Hampson, G, and J Steinhauer. 2023 (April). OSI Policy Perspective 6: Considering evidence-based open access policies. Open Scholarship Initiative. doi 10.13021/osi2023.3553

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ANNEXES

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