In August, the US government announced it was adopting a policy that requires all research it finances to be open access. An important part of this plan is that, once the policy is in effect, any research paper resulting from this research must be open access on the day of publication. That means anyone can view the study — no magazine subscription or one-time payment required.
This can of course pose problems for the academic publishing house, which is heavily dependent on subscriptions as things are currently structured. To adapt to the inevitable future, many publishers have adopted “article processing fees” (APCs), or fees paid by the people who publish the newspaper for the privilege of doing so. All of this begs a tricky question: Who’s going to pay for the APCs?
On Tuesday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a survey of researchers showing that some are already struggling to find the money to cover APCs, in some cases taking it out of budgets that would otherwise pay for scientific work.
Pay the price
Scholarly journals have a long history of charging publication fees, dating back to the days of what in the printing days were called “page charges” (color image printing charges were also common). Combined with revenue from subscriptions and sometimes advertising, these offset the costs of printing and the editors who provided peer review and typically left publishers with healthy profits. For many magazines, these costs have disappeared with the growth of online access to magazines, but there was a history of publishing fees that influenced the development of APCs.
When open access magazines were formed, they faced an obvious challenge: why pay for a subscription when the articles can be downloaded for free? As far as I know, they all turned to APCs as a solution. These had to perform the same function as subscriptions – to cover costs and make a profit – and thus had to be significantly higher than the fees previously charged to authors. Many subscription-based journals have also adopted an option whereby researchers can make their articles available open access in exchange for an APC.
The challenge is how these APCs are paid. A number of foundations that support biomedical research have policies that allow them to pay the APCs on behalf of the researchers they fund. But many more researchers receive funding from government organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. To find out how they did it, the AAAS surveyed US-based researchers and received more than 400 responses.
Those responses revealed several issues.
Where does the money come from?
Even before the federal government’s open access mandate came into effect, most of the researchers surveyed (more than 60 percent) had already paid APCs, more than a third of whom had paid multiple times. But when it came to planning for the APC costs they faced, the numbers were roughly inverted, with 63 percent of the researchers saying they had budgeted nothing for the fees. Given that, it’s not surprising that when it came time to pay, only 10 percent found the process easy.
The vast majority (70 percent) got at least part of the money from grants. About a third managed to get at least some support from their department, and about half of that number managed to get money from elsewhere in the university. Strikingly, 15 percent said they paid some of the APCs with their own money. (Numbers add up to more than 100 percent because researchers either paid a single fee using multiple sources, or used different sources when paying more than one APC.)
The problem is that grants don’t have a separate funding category to cover APCs. As such, publishing will compete with other possible uses of the grant money: research. Nearly 80 percent of the researchers who responded said the money for the APC would otherwise have gone toward buying equipment or materials. About a third said the APC took money that would otherwise have paid graduate students or technicians. Another big sacrifice? Costs associated with attending conferences, which were mentioned by 60 percent of the researchers.
The total number of people responding is quite small and not everyone answered every question, so it’s hard to know how widespread these issues are. But the problems themselves are completely predictable, as most labs run entirely on a single pile of money that has to pay for research and publications. And these problems, even if they are anecdotal, are happening before open access becomes mandatory.
The obvious solution is for agencies to allocate some extra money to the researchers they fund to cover the cost of publishing. But this would just shift the problem upstream, because the agencies would have to find that money elsewhere in the budget — which probably means they’ll have to fund less research unless they can get a budget increase for this problem.
Anyway, the authors of the AAAS report outline the problem very clearly: “We face a growing risk that the ability to pay APCs — rather than the earnings of the research — determines what and who gets published. “
