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Can We Use Collective Funding To Reclaim Scholarly Publishing?

Can We Use Collective Funding To Reclaim Scholarly Publishing?

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  • The open access movement has dropped barriers to readers only to erect them for authors. The reason is the article processing charge (APC), which typically runs Rs 2-5 lakh.
  • The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls.
  • The emerging APC regime is also re-anointing the commercial oligopolists – the same five firms that fleece universities through usurious subscription charges.
  • Any alternative to the prevailing scholarly communication system must be built atop a different funding model that excludes neither readers nor authors.
  • In broad strokes, that model will center on direct support for publishing, drawn from funds currently allotted to subscription and APC spending. Call this the collective funding model.

The open access movement has dropped barriers to readers only to erect them for authors. The reason is the article processing charge (APC), which typically runs $3,0001 to $5,0002. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls.

Most scholars cannot afford the steep fees, a fact masked by the privileged segment who can: scientists in the rich industrialized world, and scholars in a handful of wealthy European countries and North American universities. The fees are often paid via so-called “read-and-publish” deals, which fold APCs into the subscription contracts that libraries negotiate with publishers.

The emerging APC regime is also re-anointing the commercial oligopolists – the same five firms that fleece universities through usurious subscription charges. Springer Nature, Elsevier and their peers are, with every read-and-publish deal, transitioning their enormous profit margins from tolled to open – and capturing the lion’s share of library spending in the process. Librarians continue to fund the tolled system, while also – at the richer institutions – picking up the tab for their faculty’s author fees. The result is an incumbent-publisher spending lockdown, one that ratifies the APC regime.

Any alternative to the prevailing scholarly communication system must be built atop a different funding model, one that excludes neither readers nor authors. In broad strokes, that model will center on direct support for publishing, drawn from funds currently allotted to subscription and APC spending. The same funders who finance the tolled-and-APC system – libraries but also foundations and government agencies – will, on this approach, redirect budgets to underwrite a diverse, community-led publishing ecosystem. Call it the collective funding model, predicated on open access for both readers and authors.

Also read: What Is the Status of India’s ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ Plan?

Collective funding is an appealing idea, versions of which have been circulating since at least 2006, with important variations on the theme published since. The challenge is getting the model to work beyond a handful of successful, single-resource experiments (including the arXiv preprint server, the Open Library of Humanities, and the SCOAP3 particle physics journals, among others). The two main hurdles are coordination and funder participation. The academic communication system involves thousands of funders and hundreds of publishers, which makes for a nightmarish coordination challenge. A related obstacle, one made much worse with lots of actors, is the free rider problem. Fee-free open access is a public good that benefits everyone, even non-payers; if enough libraries opt out, the collective funding scheme is likely to collapse.

These challenges must be faced with head-on sobriety. One practical advantage of the author-pay (APC) and reader-pay (subscription) alternatives is that they operate as markets for private goods. Both are rife with failures – above all the oligopoly’s lopsided market power, built through the prestige lock-in of the established journal hierarchy. Even so, librarians and other funders purchase goods for their campus constituencies, in the form of reader or author access. Elsevier may charge $20,508 for an annual Journal of Chromatography subscription – and Nature $11,390 to publish OA – but at least the benefits flow to the library-buyer. These costs, of course, aren’t sustainable even for rich institutions, but the point is that the prevailing ecosystem is funded through the uncoordinated coordination of a market. Many buyers and a handful of sellers strike deals for access on the basis of price, as disciplined (in theory) by demand.

, in a strategic but heavily qualified mimicry of a traditional market. Funders, with their own (preferably elaborated) value commitments, browse would-be recipients who have stated their own values. Answers to standardized questions stipulated by the exchange, furnished by publishers and infrastructure providers, offer libraries and other funders a basis for allocating scarce resources over multiple-year commitments.

In the MAFE model, the publishers must be nonprofit and community-led. Each press or journal provides detailed cost and publishing projections, and commits to uniform transparency and reporting requirements. Once a publisher has its stated funding needs met, library and other funders can seek out other worthy recipients. Aspiring publisher-participants are vetted by the exchange, according to principles and criteria endorsed through community governance. That last point is crucial: Any successful exchange will require a shared, tripartite form of governance, with genuine participation from funders, publishers, and scholars. Each of these communities, for the exchange’s legitimacy and durable bonds of trust, must have a say in how the basic rules and expectations are set.

To my knowledge, the idea for such an exchange was first elaborated by Jack Hyland, Alexander Kouker and Dmitri Zaitsev, in a 2019 Insights paper. Their scheme, however, stresses competition on price and quality grounds over value resonance as the key matching mechanism. It was LYRASIS’s Sharla Lair, working with UC Berkeley’s Rachael Samberg, who introduced the crucial mission component.

In their Open Access Community Investment Program pilot proposal, Lair and Samberg placed mission-alignment at the exchange’s center. Their community-driven approach, they wrote, could benefit “bespoke OA programs, output from smaller non-profit or OA-native publishers, or niche scholarly output” – diverse projects without easy access to other funding sources. The pilot’s participating journals were required to spell out their commitments and plans in a structured criteria form to apprise would-be funders.

COPIM’s exchange, slated to launch in spring 2022, plans to operate a similar web-based platform, though centered on book publishers. In a recent report, COPIM researchers outlined the core principles meant to guide the exchange’s development, including collaborative governance. One key innovation of the COPIM platform, as conceived, is to encourage applicants to bundle their funding appeals. The ScholarLed group of publishers, for example, might collaborate on a single appeal for its members. The practical benefit of such exchange-participant nesting would be to foster a smaller, trust-based community with reduced vetting burdens on librarian-funders. The risk is that such bundles could become club-like and favor already-connected publishers from the Global North. An explicit, platform-wide commitment to bibliodiversity should be written in to each exchange’s charter.

Also read: Why I Won’t Review or Write for Elsevier and Other Commercial Scientific Journals

Custody battles

As historian Aileen Fyfe has shown, the current joint-custody arrangement – non-profit universities and for-profit publishers – is a recent and reversible development. The work of reversal, of restoring custody, means bringing the funding back into the community. We can, at the same time, deliver open access in the full, meaningful sense – which is to say, for readers and for authors. This means ruling out the author-excluding APC.

The alternative is collective funding, of one kind or another. In practice, this means that libraries and other funders will underwrite a system that, at its core, is based on ability to pay. This is as it should be: Harvard and the Dutch university system ought to contribute a lot more, per student capita, than the University of Ghana. No one’s ability to publish anywhere should ever hinge on whether they or their employer can afford the fees.

There’s nothing utopian about this premise: When we say that worthy authors should be able to publish regardless of wealth, we’re defending the most uncontroversial, baseline value of the university tradition. How could anyone, outside Elsevier’s boardroom, hold otherwise?

That leaves the practical matter of how to make a just OA system work. We have some promising collective-funding models – especially for legacy publishers looking to parlay subscription and book-sales revenues into support for fee-free open access. But that’s not an option for the emerging, born-OA ecosystem, which has nothing “legacy” to post as collateral.

Here’s where the mission-aligned funding exchange comes in. It’s a practical mechanism for connecting nonprofit funders with nonprofit publishers – a community-governed coordination tool for a system with many participants.

If we’re committed to restoring custody over scholarly publishing – and to furnishing open access for readers and authors alike – we need to push for what is the only fair way forward: collective funding.

Jefferson Pooley is professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College, Allentown. He writes on the history of media research, the history of social science, scholarly communications, and consumer culture and social media.

This article was first published by Commonplace and was republished here under a CC BY 4.0 license.


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