Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository
As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-processing charges” to a publisher. “Green” OA papers are available because the authors self-archive their work on a personal Web site or institutional repository that is publicly accessible.
The self-archived copies are generally the accepted manuscripts, rather than the final published version, largely because academics foolishly assign copyright to the publishers. This gives the latter the power to refuse to allow members of the public to read published research they have paid for with their taxes, unless they pay again with a subscription to the journal, or on a per article basis.
You might think that is unfair and inconvenient, but easy to circumvent, because the public will be able to download copies of the peer-reviewed manuscripts that the researchers self-archive as green OA. But many publishers have a problem with the idea that people can access for free the papers in any form, and demand that public access to the green OA versions should be embargoed, typically for 12 months. There is no reason for academics to agree to this other than habit and a certain deference on their part. It’s also partly the fault of the funding agencies. The open access expert and campaigner, Peter Suber, explained in 2005 why they are to blame:
Researchers sign funding contracts with the research councils long before they sign copyright transfer agreements with publishers. Funders have a right to dictate terms, such as mandated open access, precisely because they are upstream from publishers. If one condition of the funding contract is that the grantee will deposit the peer-reviewed version of any resulting publication in an open-access repository [immediately], then publishers have no right to intervene.
Accepting embargoes on green OA at all was perhaps the biggest blunder made by the open access movement and their funders. Even today, nearly 20 years after Suber pointed out the folly of letting publishers tell academics what they can do with their own manuscripts, many publishers still demand – and get – embargoes. Against this background, ACS Publications, the publishing wing of the American Chemical Society, has come up with what it calls “Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” (pointed out by Richard Poynder):
A number of funders and institutions require authors to retain the right to post their accepted manuscripts immediately upon acceptance for publication in a journal, sometimes referred to as zero-embargo green open access (OA). More than 90% of ACS authors under these mandates have a simple and funded pathway to publish gold OA in ACS journals.
For those not covered by an institutional read and publish agreement or through other types of funding, ACS offers the option to post their accepted manuscripts with a CC BY license in open access repositories immediately upon acceptance. This option expands this small subset of authors’ choices beyond the existing option to wait 12 months to post at no cost.
Great news? Well, no, because a hefty new fee must be paid:
The article development charge (ADC) is a flat fee of $2,500 USD and is payable once the manuscript is sent for peer review. The ADC covers the cost of ACS’ pre-acceptance publishing services, from initial submission through to the final editorial decision.
That is, if academics publish a paper with the ACS, their institution must pay $2,500 for the privilege of being allowed to post immediately the accepted manuscript version on their own institutional server – something that should have been a matter of course, but was weakly given up in the early days of open access, as Suber pointed out. There is a feeble attempt to justify the cost, on the basis that the $2,500 is for “pre-acceptance publishing service”. But this apparently refers to things like peer review, which is generally conducted by fellow academics for free, and decisions by journal editors, who are often unpaid too. In general, the costs involved in “pre-acceptance publishing” are negligible.
“Zero-Embargo Green Open Access” sounds so promising. But it turns out to be yet another example of the copyright industry’s limitless sense of entitlement. Publishing is constantly finding new ways to extract money from hard-pressed academic institutions – money that could be used for more research or simply paying underfunded researchers better.
This is a personal issue for me. In 2013, I spoke at a conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Berlin declaration on open access. More formally, the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” is one of three seminal formulations of the open access idea: the other two are the Bethesda Statement (2003) and the original Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) (all discussed in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available). I entitled my speech “Half a Revolution”, and the slides I used can be freely downloaded from SlideShare, along with many more of my presentations.
My Berlin talk concluded with a call to action under the slogan “Zero Embargo Now” (ZEN). Back then, I looked forward to a world where all academic papers would routinely be available under green OA immediately, without any embargo. I’m still waiting.
Blows my mind that everyone in academia hasn’t rejected this and moved to a platform more like GitHub, but for papers.
Publishers are no more than leeches in an internet-enabled society.
A lot have in some capacity; see preprint servers like arxiv.org.
The problem is that without papers published in actual journals, you are literally worth nothing in academia. Nothing. Can't stress this enough, publish or perish is no joke. You won't get any kind of job without a stupidly high number of published papers. Young researchers have nowhere near the bargaining power to initiate any kind of change there. Neither do older ones, tbh.
That’s a culture problem that could be fixed with collective bargaining. Everyone knows it’s wrong, they just don’t have the balls to fights against it.
That is a very hasty and reductive opinion to my mind. While I absolutely agree with you on what the issue is, this is a complex problem and not a question of genital appendages.
It is impossible for young researchers to "earn" a permanent position without giving their soul and toil to this system. This makes sure that the people actually "succeeding" are the ones less likely to actually go against the system, since it benefited them. The ones that do try are hopelessly alone, and no amount of male gonads is going to help them change the culture.
Thanks for saying this. This is the absolute main problem of academia. It selects people who don't want to change a failing system because they are great at gaming that system. This is also the reason average quality of academic researchers has dropped so much, while the best minds moved to industry, doing incredibly well very mundane tasks.
They are great at gaming that system and that system gives them the impression they are the most brilliant people to ever grace the earth. Don't get me wrong, many are indeed brilliant, but the degree of self proving masochism that is academia would turn anyone that manages to survive it into a raging narcissist.
I used to work in academia in a field where salaries in financial and tech industries are pretty good. The best people left. Most who stayed were average at best with great egos. Only 1 person deserved to stay and he is now living in a shithole city, with a salary that is 1/3rd of mine as lecturer.
It is a broken system. We all had too much passion and were willing to sacrifice. They mistreated and exploited us. No regrets, only a deep sense of sadness
Same story here. This is sad as all hell.
A common tale since the advent of the transistor, biotech, and quant finance. This is more or less my story, as well.
Eh. I’ve rubbed elbows with maybe 20 Nobel laureates. Meaning, I’ve spent a good amount of time in the system, at the elite end. Being a prof at Very Prestigious University is not in any way a guarantee of raw intelligence.
I've known tenured researchers that believed HIV did not exist so yeah, agreed.
Reminds me of the current American political system and the politicians it selects for us.
I mean, it’s also a question of poor mentorship, money, and work-life balance. I make a lot more money than I would in academia, working fewer hours, less frequently having to bend to some egomaniacal tyrant’s will. Sure as hell beats the tenure track.
The current publishing cartel is like an abusive spouse in this situation. They gaslight you into thinking there’s no way for you to survive without them, but they are the ones who would suffer without you.
It would take less than 12 months for the system to completely collapse if there was a general publishing strike. But people are paralyzed by the idea of leaving that abusive system in favor of a far superior unknown.
Maths and physics have largely moved to arXiv, which is open access. Biology seems to be finally moving in that direction. Of course, many academics also leak their own papers to SciHub.
Alas they have not moved there. They use them for preprint, and sure you can get the exact text of what will become the printed paper most of the time, but they are still being forced to feed the greed machine.
Right, but once almost everyone in a field moves to a preprint system, publishers and authors both start realising that the publishers aren't really essential for sharing results, and so the balance of power shifts to the authors. As more and more places stop treating journals as the sole providers of information, we may move to a system where journals do the quality-control, but the papers themselves can be found on the authors' websites or other online repositaries.
I'm afraid availability is not the issue here. Perceived legitimacy is.
In order to get a job (or simply to exist) in academia you must publish. There simply is no alternative. And so the greedy parasites will continue to be fed, whether or not the papers are available elsewhere.
I understand your concern, but I feel that free access will eventually erode the monopoly that journals have on conferring legitimacy. If only a few can read the actual text of a paper, the rest of us have to trust the journal's quality control. But as papers become more accessible, they will start getting judged on their own merit, rather than based on the journal's impact factor. This change could take years to happen completely, but at this point I feel that it will happen sooner or later.
I worked in academia. Everybody already has access to the texts (thanks to arxiv) where I did. And yet still publishing was the only way to gain legitimacy. This is the problem.
I think there are two different issues here. The first is how journals make money off publicly funded research. The second is how journals and impact factors act as a gatekeeper in academia. I think open access is solving the first issue pretty well. The second is a bit more complicated. The pressure to publish at any cost is bad, but what is the alternative. If we go by subjective criteria, we will probably end up with nepotism and corruption. Of course the current system needs reform, but I feel that it is a huge improvement on the previous system.
Nepotism still runs rampant in many academic fields, since the editors of those journals are also academics themselves, and not always the most ethical ones.
I guess a policy of transparent review could help. And pre-registering so papers do not get rejected for not being 'exciting' enough.
I’m sorry, I can’t pay you any mind until you give me your count of ScienceNatureCell.