By Miles Thompson and Kait Clark
Below is an extended version of a piece first published on the UWE Bristol Library Research Blog. It explores issues around publishing academic articles and books, different open access arrangements, maintaining academic standards and the profit levels of academic publishers.
In short, in terms of journal articles, UK universities, including UWE, have open access arrangements with academic publishers. These agreements reduce or remove Article Processing Charges (APCs) for authors. While this might sound like a universally good thing, authors still need to carefully consider the quality of the publication process before choosing an outlet for their work. Growing numbers suggest: i. being wary of MDPI, Frontiers and others in term of standards, while also ii. being aware of even more established publishers in terms of their profit margins.
In terms of academic book publishing, we explore the #ebookSOS campaign – another issue questioning the charges levied by publishers. We also provide some pointers towards the growing number of truly open access routes for academic chapters and books (no charges for authors or readers of digital versions).
Journal articles
Things are not clear cut in academic publishing. There are not predatory publishers on one side and perfect publishers on the other. There are large areas of grey.
Predatory publishing
Most of us are aware of straightforward predatory publishers. They will publish any article for money, with no or minimal review, and few if any academic standards. The Think Check Submit checklist is a good guard against this trap.
Profitable publishing
But increasing numbers suggest that even traditional academic publishers can be bad for science (see here and here). Academic publishing used to incur appreciable costs in terms of typesetting articles, producing physical copies of journals and distributing them around the world. More recently, desktop publishing software and online articles have reduced these costs considerably. Today, the academic publishing industry reports profit margins of around 40%. A New Scientist leader article argues it is the most profitable business in the world.
While the business model of academic publishing is extremely profitable for the publishers, it is extractive in terms of the academic labour involved (see here and here). Academics write articles for free, associate editors find reviewers for free, peer reviewers critique the articles for free, and even many editors in chief guide the whole process for free. All the while, some publishers are making huge profits.
New publishers
Traditional publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE are arguably the biggest and oldest fish in the academic publishing pond. But that pond now contains many other fish. And, if there is room for big, old fish who focus on profit while hopefully keeping academic standards high (…but keep reading) – is it any surprise there might also be room for smaller, younger fish, whose academic standards and processes might be more malleable to enable them to make their profits?
For example, multiple concerns have been raised about MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), see here, here and here.
- Some are worried by them charging high APCs. (However, it must be noted that Nature itself has been called out for charging APCs of £8,490 per article for Gold Open Access).
- Some are worried by a seemingly unsustainable increase in journal output. This can often be through a focus on special issues or guest editors. We are sure many academic colleagues have been invited by e-mail to edit a special issue for some of these publishers, perhaps on a topic that fell outside your area of expertise. It is often the case that your article would be published for free, but you would also commission other articles from colleagues who would then need to pay APCs.
- Some raise concerns around tight turnaround times between submission and acceptance. It seems to raise concerns that reviews might be less than ideal or not be overseen by subject experts.
- Relatedly, some are worried by concerns over pressure on editors or interference in their work. For example: reviewer recommendations or editorial decisions are ignored and articles appear in print anyway (see here, here, here and here).
Some similar concerns have been raised about the publisher Frontiers. Yet, both MDPI and Frontiers also have open access agreements with UWE and other universities, offering a 10% APC reduction.
Not just MDPI and Frontiers
Recently, Clarivate delisted more than 50 journals from the Web of Science for failing to meet its quality criteria. Two of these were owned by MDPI, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health which previously had an impact factor of 4.614. But 19 were owned by Hindawi, which itself is now owned by Wiley, a traditional publisher. And one was directly owned by Springer Nature (see more details here and here).
Wiley itself, has noted that some of the previously listed Hindawi journals had become “paper mills” (see here). Paper mills are outlets which allow the publication of fabricated content through manipulations of the identities of authors, guest editors and reviewers, which the special issue or guest editor model probably makes more likely.
More problems and possible solutions
These aren’t the only problems facing the world of publishing academic articles. Among other issues, the fundamental model of peer review is creaking. Journal editors are struggling to find willing reviewers, leading to an increase in publication times (see here and here). Of course, some reviewers may be disengaging from peer review, in part, because of some of the problems described above.
Sadly, we do not offer any easy answers. But perhaps, as others have argued, we need to stop talking about predatory / non predatory publishers as a simple binary. Indeed, back in 2015, the then director of the Harvard University Library, Robert Darnton wrote: “We have to try to limit the predatory activities of big publishers like Elsevier and Wiley. It is a crazy situation of monopolistic abuse, and is costing libraries huge amounts of money”. Look who Darnton was calling predatory back then. Not the newcomers, not MDPI, nor Frontiers, but the big established names.
One possible alternative is Diamond, or platinum, open access publishers. In many ways this is “true” open access, It offers free content without charging fees to either readers or authors. There are no APCs. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists many of them. Tick the box titled “Without article processing charges (APCs)” when searching for journals.
This still doesn’t solve the free academic labour issue which leaves many reviewers fatigued and less willing to take part in future peer review. But perhaps some reviewers may be more willing to re-engage in peer review if the wider result of their efforts did not include excessive corporate profit.
Diamond open access publishing still incurs costs and publishers can struggle to meet them. Arguably, some of the money that universities currently pay traditional academic publishers to publish our work and generate their 40% profit margin could be redirected to Diamond open access publishers to help sustain and grow this more equitable model of producing and sharing knowledge. This may sound optimistic, but just this summer research funders across Europe have been thinking about ways of increasing their support for non-profit open-access like this.
Until then, we should all do our bit to ensure high levels of academic standards when publishing peer reviewed articles. Let’s keep reminding each other that some publishers with open access agreements with UK universities can sometimes have lower levels of standards than we, as a sector, should expect. And with other publishers we might question the level of profit they are making off the back of our labour.
Academic books and chapters
So far, this blog has focused on issues concerning APCs, profits, and standards in and around the publishing of journal articles. But what about academic books and chapters? Many of the biggest publishers of academic journals also publish academic books. What are some issues in this field?
#ebookSOS
One of the main areas of contention is highlighted by the #ebookSOS campaign. It focuses on the availability and cost to university libraries of e-books and e-textbooks. Firstly, many publishers won’t make their books available to university libraries in digital versions. Secondly, if they do, they might only be available as part of a bundle. So, if you want to offer one book to your students, you have to buy hundreds of others. Thirdly, you might have to keep paying the publisher for that same e-book year after year. Fourthly, the digital protections around these books can make them difficult to use for those with accessibility needs. For example, they can be hard to read for those using screen readers.
But undoubtedly the most stand out issue is the prohibitive costs involved. Libraries do not pay the same price as students or members of the public for a digital version. They pay institutional costs. This can mean a book may cost £36.99 in print, but £480 for the equivalent e-book. And the publisher can still stipulate it can only be read by one student at a time. See these articles in the BBC, Guardian and Times Higher for more details and other examples of the prices charged.
Visibility and digital open access platforms
In the past, some have argued that academic books, especially chapters in edited books were less visible and accessible than journal articles. For example, back in 2012, after examining the citations of her own work, Dorothy Bishop memorably wrote: “if you write a chapter for an edited book, you might as well write the paper and then bury it in a hole in the ground“. She notes that to be cited, any work needs to visible, accessible as well as well-written. However, many chapters in edited books lacked visibility and accessibility. Today, writers argue that digital open access platforms offer the possibility for academic chapters to be more discoverable, visible, accessible and promotable. And yet tons of books and chapters still sit behind paywalls or involve the issues highlighted by the #ebookSOS campaign above.
“A” & “B” PCs?
Whereas academic articles have APCs article processing charges (APCs) books have, you guessed it, BPCs (Books Processing Charges). Of course, we acknowledge that publishing books incurs more costs than publishing articles. This is even more the case if someone wants to access a physical copy of the work. See here for a breakdown of potential costs incurred from an open book publisher. But like APCs, there is considerable variation in BPCs. As Frances Pinter wrote in 2018: “There is the sense that BPCs are arbitrary and do not relate to real costs”. This was backed up by her survey of eight European countries, including the UK, where she found BPC’s ranging from €500 to €18,500.
Ways forward?
A few years ago, struggling with the landscape of academic book publishing, one of the authors of this blog created a nano academic publishing press and published a two volume, eight word (yes, eight word) treatise on the topic (see here, here and here). It was not designed to change the world or have any impact. And, in that regard, successfully did nothing.
But other individuals, groups and organisations have done much better at both creating and promoting truly open access publishing routes for academic books and chapters. Routes which can mean no BPCs for authors and no costs for readers who download digital versions of the work.
Since 2008, Cambridge based Open Book Publishers have been an independent open access academic press that does not charge its authors to publish. In the US, Punctum books, was founded in 2011. And in 2015, UCL Press became the UKs first fully open access university press. Today, UCL are also developing a range of open access e-textbooks.
Like with journals, as open access routes grow in academic books so does the variety of options and questions are raised over the legitimacy of some outlets in the marketplace. See here and here for examples. But it is also becoming easier for us to learn more. For example, the Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) promote and support the movement towards truly open access academic books, including a useful toolkit to help educate the open access book authors of the future. They also provide a directory of over 70,000 academic, peer reviewed open access books (DOAB).
More broadly there is, the Open Access Books Network, the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), the Open Book Collective and the Radical Open Access Collective. Drawing in other stages of education and wider learning, there is also OER Commons, the free ebook foundation and many more.
In short, the list of options for open access academic books which do not need to levy a charge directly to authors or the readers of digital versions are increasing.
To conclude, across both journals and books it seems timely for us to become more informed about all the problems and possibilities and to consider looking beyond the big name and/or big profit publishing outlets when thinking about where we place both our academic articles and our academic books. With energy and effort we can be part of bringing about a more truly open access future.