This post originally appeared on Olivier Pourret’s blog and in Indonesian on Dasapta Erwin Irawan’s blog.
Authors
- Olivier Pourret – UniLaSalle, Beauvais, France – olivier.pourret@unilasalle.fr – ORCID 0000-0001-6181-6079
- Dasapta Erwin Irawan – Institut Teknologi Bandung, Bandung, West Java, Indonesia – dasaptaerwin@gmail.com – ORCID 0000-0002-1526-0863
- Jessica Polka – ASAPbio, San Francisco, CA, USA – jessica.polka@asapbio.org – ORCID 0000-0001-6610-9293
According to Katharine Sanderson, “publishing-industry representatives warn” that May’s EU Council call for a “no pay” academic publishing model is “unrealistic and lack[ing] detail”. However, the proposal is already being implemented via several approaches:
(i) Authors can publish their work for free in ‘Diamond’ Open Access (OA) journals. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, in 2023 67.5% of fully OA journals do not levy article processing charges, and most of them are published by university press.
(ii) The European Commission has launched a publishing platform, Open Research Europe, an OA publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding.
(iii) Preprints are rising in many disciplines and several new initiatives (such as Peer Community In, Review Commons, and RR\ID) organize peer review on preprints at no cost to authors or readers.
(iv) New publishing models such as Subscribe to Open enable journals to flip to OA while retaining library support.
Many of these are already supported directly by institutions, governments, or private funders, and they are here to stay.
It is up to us, researchers and policy makers, to make sure we support “no pay” solutions where they exist. Scientific knowledge is a public good, and it should be treated as such.
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
