Time for change… again
We currently fund open access publishing for our researchers in a number of ways. Despite hopes that this would enable a flourishing of open access dissemination of science, most of the growth has occurred in hybrid journals. These are publications that combine OA articles with those behind a paywall – this means the publishers will still charge for university and institute libraries to access them, even though researchers have paid for their work to be published. For us, this means we currently use donated money to fund our researchers, institutes and centres to publish OA research articles, yet they still have to pay to access the majority of journals in which those articles appear. The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it.
Couple this with the rise of predatory publishing practices and the common complaint that current academic publishing is too slow, and too expensive and it’s easy to see why this is such a huge concern. For researchers however, getting your work published remains one of the most impactful things you can do.
For our part, Cancer Research UK are working to widen the way we evaluate research in order to mitigate the heavy focus on publication outputs. It’s clear to us that a broader view of an applicant’s career is vital to gauge potential success. By signing up to DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), we encourage our reviewers to assess the quality and impact of research through means other than just journal impact factor. Additionally, we invite applicants to submit a narrative CV, allowing a more holistic view of their track record, research outputs and career progression.
Despite our, and others, attempts to limit the emphasis of the ‘publish-or-perish’ mindset, it will take time for the culture to change. As such, journal publishers still yield a lot of power – and they make a lot of money from that power. Some of the big publishing houses have profit margins approaching 40%. That is higher than Microsoft… and Google.
Academic publishing then, remains an industry ripe for disruption – and open access is a case in point here. Nearly 25 years on from the original attempt to codify this model it hasn’t achieved what it set out to do. Relatively quickly publishers introduced the now infamous Article Processing Charge (APC) – no doubt a very useful tool to keep those profit margins in such rude health. And with many institutions and funders – including CRUK – adhering to the Plan S model, the publishers have made a very shrewd move to adopt it. It was disruptive, but just not to them. To the researchers now navigating this new world of ‘pay-to-publish’ however, it certainly has been, and not necessarily in a good way.
