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Dealing with the grey zone of publishing or… how I will never be an editorial board member of MDPI Publications.

The “predatory publisher” category raises more questions than answers. Just like “academic fraud”, it tends to validate a black & white world in which rules and norms are clear-cut and universally shared through time, disciplines and countries. There is now an extensive literature presenting lists, criteria and even automatic detection for such publishers or their journals, most of it being written without questioning the label “predatory”1. More interestingly, there are a few papers describing the point of view of authors publishing in such vilified outputs, showing both the deceptions performed by the publisher and the good faith of most authors2.

Such results could be downplayed on the grounds of the authors’ peripheral position or the low power of the studies. On the opposite, everyday stories show that separating the wheat from the chaff is rather complex because a huge and diverse “grey zone” exists, even for scholars well versed in the arcane of publishing. This post aims to describe such an example by making the story personal rather than abstract, using testimonies, personal opinions and statements. In this world, the choice to review, write or edit for a given journal or publisher remains tricky, based on existing alternatives, personal ethics and situated decisions

It has become an almost daily ritual: an invitation to present at a conference, to submit a manuscript to a journal, or even to join an editorial committee, sent by people you don’t know, with a vague personalized message through your name and the reproduction of the title of an article you’ve written, with zero relevance to the issuing conference or journal. On August, 9th 2023, I received one of these messages, entitled: “[Publications] (ISSN 2304-6775) Invitation to Serve as an Editorial Board Member”. It caught my attention for three reasons: firstly, it’s that time of the year with the lowest e-mail volume; secondly, there was an apparent MDPI account in the copy of the mailing; and thirdly, I know this journal, some of its articles I found relevant or even enlightning, and others cite some of my work (which is not a sign of quality but could explain this invitation). So let’s read it again:

We would like to invite you to join the Editorial Board of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications). Publications is open access and peer-reviewed, covering all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication. You can find the proposed scope of the journal here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications/about/.
Publications is abstracted and indexed by Scopus, ESCI, DOAJ.

This presentation is not typical of « predatory » emails that begin by flattering the recipient of the message, emphasising the importance of their work and what they can contribute to the journal, and at the same time inviting them to join the editorial board and submit a manuscript.

Editorial Board Members will be responsible for final decisions on  manuscripts in their field of expertise and may be invited to review manuscripts. The initial term lasts for 2 years, and entails:
• Pre-screening and making decisions on new submissions related to your research interests;
• Providing input or feedback regarding journal policies;
• Helping to promote the journal among your peers or at conferences;
• Attending Board Meetings to suggest journal development strategies;
• Reviewing manuscripts.
• Helping to attract suitable expert authors.

The job description for editorial board members is typical of a journal owned by a commercial publisher: in a nutshell, you run the journal, you promote it without being the decision-maker on its policies and, obviously, without compensation except in what many colleagues name a prestige economy.3

If you accept our invitation, please provide your contact information and a list of keywords reflecting your expertise, in accordance with the entry examples at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/publications/editors/. If possible, please also send, for our records, a CV or an official website with your biographical data (including a list of your publications). If this is of interest, but comes at an inopportune time, you may have a recommendation for a senior expert to serve as an Editorial Board member. If you have any questions, suggestions or recommendations, please let us know.

This detailed procedure is another hint to add in the direction of a genuine invitation for a position in the committee of a standard commercial publisher journal, which is rarely considered as a “grey zone” output. Nevertheless, there is another surprising piece of information about the ‘benefits attached to the position of editorial board member. I don’t know if it is a standard practice in APC-based journals5. Yet this three-line paragraph looks extremely problematic to me for three cumulative reasons. Once again, others could consider it completely benign, due to shared ethics and practices, which would prevent everything that follows.

Additionally, you are welcome to publish with the journal—this will be free of charge once accepted for publication. The term for the Editorial Board membership lasts for two years and can be renewed.

This paragraph alone could have made me cringe and refuse the invitation. But it also comes from a publisher which is piling up 50 shades of grey stories.

At the end of the last century, a Chinese chemist woking in Switzerland invented a preservation practice: to deposit a sample of compounds associated with an article, and to do so confounded the la Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). He then created a journal, Molecules, published by Springer, taking the position of editor-in-chief and explained his aim:

Soon, the relationship with the publisher turned sour, and the chemist, Sun-Kun Lin, decided to add to MDPI operations the publication of a journal entitled… Molecules. Springer threatened to sue him claiming it owned the title but finally did not. The lone rebel quickly developed a successful business formula, sometimes labelled “low-cost full open access journals”. It was a striking example of the “new journals” that the open access activists pushed for in the BOAI. Later, MDPI was rebranded MultiDisciplinary Publishing Initiative, became one of the top 5 academic publishers as far as volume is concerned, with most journal titles being as generic as possible from Acoustics to Youth, passing by Genes, Physics, Societies and Software. So, the initial declaration of indépendance made by one academic grew into a worldwide success story, but went along with dubious reputation and negative narratives.

Let’s give a few examples of these stories. A neurosurgeon received a request for an assessment from the Journal of Clinical Medicine and responded with a very negative assessment within 2 days. In his view, there were major methodological problems preventing publication, in particular discrepancies between the protocol described and the reality of the clinical trial. Two days after sending his review, he received a request for the revised article. This new manuscript was very different from the first:

Despite these problems, two other reviewers accepted the manuscript, while another colleague agreed to reject it, ‘forcing’ the editor-in-chief to refuse publication. But the story doesn’t end there, because the same manuscript reappeared in another MDPI journal, Geriatrics… in a version very similar to the first manuscript submitted. The reviewer contacted the editor-in-chief, shared his experience and the manuscript was ‘withdrawn’ in agreement with the authors. But like a B-movie with undead enemies who never disappear, the manuscript was eventually published in a third MDPI journal, Medicina. This story is typical of the grey zone: authors willing to do anything to get published, complacent reviewers, a system of manuscript transfer to ‘optimise’ publication, but also honest reviewers and editors willing to listen even when they want to reject.

Let’s turn now to the employees of MDPI, those who maintain the supply chain publication. In Bucharest, a young employee died of a heart attack on MDPI’s premises, and the local media questioned the employer’s responsibility in dealing with the health emergency and, more broadly, working conditions. As in other capital-intensive production facilities, journal editors are partly judged and rewarded on the basis of quantitative indicators. Not only does the APC-based model generate income only if the manuscript is accepted, but the workers are directly incentivised by this ‘success’:

This production culture, which combines speed and pressure, is felt by both editors and reviewers. It is always in this form of experience and testimony that colleagues react, in a ‘me too’ frame. This often leads them to break off all relations with the publisher, its journals and its editors, despite frequent reminders by e-mail:

Responses to the Neurosurgeon reviewer story on Blue Sky https://bsky.app/profile/supersciencegrl.co.uk/post/3l2kapfizr626

These experiences happen within the frame of “normal” journals, but there is an elephant in the room: MDPI developed/invented the concept of multiple special issues happening at the same time for any given journal. As a social scientist, I normally enjoy special issues on my topics of interest and cherish a well-crafted collection of papers which, ideally, discuss with one another. For example “Women in Chemistry Science” seems like a very interesting topic for the already cited Molecules. But MDPI twisted this nice idea making the traditional “special issue” another grey object.

I said at the beginning of this post that I would give priority to a situated view, to experience rather than objective data. But for those of you who don’t know, here were the figures for MDPI on the importance of special issues:

Source: https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/overall_articles_si_waffle.png

This figure is extracted from a very informative blog post by Paolo Crosetto, written almost 4 years ago, and entitled “Is MDPI a predatory publisher?” in which the author answers “yes and no”.

That very fine post was heavily commented on the data, its interpretation, showing very contrasted views to answer on the nature of MDPI publishing. Furthermore, by the end of 2021, the number of special issues had exploded, with some journals publishing more than one a day. On the producer side, we now know that the special issue system has a similar “point system” that pushes MDPI employees to publish more. But how do we explain this success on authors side? In my opinion, it is a perfect combination of what at first sight might not seem to be so: the close relationships of small groups of colleagues sharing peculiar interests and a large-scale industrial production model. Again, let’s be concrete and talk about my own experience. After not responding to the invitation to join the editorial board, I received an invitation 14 months later to manage a special issue:

Dear Dr. Torny,

This is Mike Tang, Section Managing Editor of Publications.
We are planning to launch a new Special Issue, "Preprint and Open-Access Publishing", in the journal Publications, and we would like to invite you to act as the Guest Editor for this issue.

Wouah ! Preprint and OA publishing, exactly the topics I am interested in. I would easily find 10 colleagues in different countries who would provide very interesting and innovative contributions from diverse perspectives. Sure, I would also suggest expert reviewers, find 10 APCs in grants, manage the whole process and be proud of the results. All for free: I forgot to tell you, there is no financial incentive in getting the job done, no APC waiver,, except fulfilling your dreams as a knowledge creator and disseminator. And all the benefits of such a special issue, as well as your duties are being described in depth by the publisher. Despite being emailed with the exact same message3 more times, I did not answer.

After my narration I could state, with other colleagues that some elements of MDPI business models and practices are unpleasant, incentivize problematic publications or that its special issue model is deeply fraught at scale. That is a personal opinion based on empirical matter, it does not make enough to stand in an academic article. Especially as the “predatory” label has led to strong responses from publishers, as it has been seen again in the MDPI case. In July 2021, an article was published on the question of predatory publishing definition , taking the empirical example of MDPI journals. Its conclusion could be summed up like this::”The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all singled them out as predatory journals. 

Its fate illustrates the consequences of a black-and-white representation and the difficulties to qualify the ‘grey zone’ in academic discourse. In fact, less than a month later, MDPI responded point by point to this article on its website11. Above and beyond the refutation of some empirical data, MDPI would point out the problems to define the predatory category thus invalidating the overall conclusion of the author.. For example, they discussion the number of editorial board members:

MDPI also insists in several occurrences that it is not unique among publishers, or at least among commercial publishers. It even acknowledges the possibility of predatory publishing… naturally into other publishing houses!

So the author made a paper claiming a lot of MDPI journals were predatory, the publisher responded in a very civil academic way. What happens next ? One month later, Research Evaluation/OUP published an Expression of concern without detail, then retracted the article and published simultaneously a new version, redacted by them and the author. Beyond the fact that such a process is rare – you would expect a simple correction, has MDPI played a role in the process ? Was there pressure? How dit the author feel? As often, we have to turn to Retraction Watch to have all the details, with interviews of the author and MDPI12. We will focus here on MDPI position:

So not only MDPI claims to have been left in the dark, but ironically considers that the largest university press (and one of the oldest) does not follow best practices. Their call was heard as a PDF was published a month later as supplementary data, depicting all the changes between the original and the revised version. Let’s simply take the following two exemples:

In both cases, the author has kept her general argumentation, but she has abandoned her objective language in favor of verbal modalisations that leave room for subjectivity: we may think that these journals are predatory, but we no longer assert, without any possible discussion, that they are classified as such. In other words, we’re back in the grey zone where it’s up to everyone (authors, reviewers, publishers, institutions) to decide what they want to do.

And this is where we go back to our starting point. Why did I receive that invitation to join Publications editorial board in the first place? Because the vast majority of the editorial board of Publications had resigned a few months earlier, relatively discreetly. The most immediately visible trace came from its former editor in chief, Gemma E Derrick, which started the exit movement.

Source: https://x.com/GemmaDerrick/status/1636719479441727488

Her justification is typically framed as a ‘grey area’ one : it is not possible to articulate good editorial practices in her specific scientific collective with the multiplication of stories about the problematic practices of MDPI, the owner and publisher of the title. The subsequent resignations are reported by a Norwegian newspaper13. In addition to the reasons given above, it is also the case that this particular journal deals with publications that need to be brought even more into line with current publishing standards. I was already aware of the resignations when I received the first MDPI email, and that was an additional reason for me not to accept the invitatio, as it would belittle the move from colleagues whom I hold in high esteem, and not to show the solidarity they have thus expressed.

Unlike other cases of mass resignation from journals, Publications editorial board members didi not directly criticize MDPI, because they target the publisher’s general policies rather than their specific treatment. Their resignation reminds us that we can decide, in each of our micro-acts, in which scholarly communication world we want to live . Let’s take a final MDPI example: one journal had really become their flagship, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH). In fact, its growth seemed limitless, notably through the special issue format, to reach the incredible number of 16,889 articles published in 2022. And then, in April 2023, Clarivate announced the delisting of more than 50 journals, notably many Hindawi journals, but also MDPI IJERPH. What were the consequences? MDPI’s PR stated that still 90% of its content was listed by Web of Science. But authors fled in flocks as soon as the announcement was made, even before the journal was going to effectively lose its Journal Impact Factor.


Source: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.orgwp-content/uploads/2023/09/Figure-1-1024×530.png

This trend has been confirmed in 2024, with the total number of IJERPH articles making less than 10% of its peak in 2022, raising the question of authors’ responsibility. All it takes is Clarivate’s ‘quality signal’ to disappear for them to turn their backs on a journal in which they used to publish en masse. This is the magic of the grey zone, where one can venture without any real consequences. Playing with the rules, bending practices, encouraging mass production – these are not specific to MDPI, but to varying degrees are shared by all commercial publishers, with authors complying and most often editorial teams. And it is probable that their megajournals like Elsevier’s Heliyon and Springer’s Cureus will meet a similar fate.

  1. On the geopolitical consequences of that position, see Taşkın, Zehra, Franciszek Krawczyk, and Emanuel Kulczycki. “Are papers published in predatory journals worthless? A geopolitical dimension revealed by content-based analysis of citations.” Quantitative Science Studies 4.1 (2023): 44-67, https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00242 []
  2. Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Chérifa, Lucas Pergola, and Hugo Castaneda. “Profiles, motives and experiences of authors publishing in predatory journals: OMICS as a case study.” (2023) []
  3. For example, Tennant, Jonathan P., et al. “Ten hot topics around scholarly publishing.” Publications 7.2 (2019): 34.https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020034 []
  4. This is a theoretical division, actual tasks performed are another story see on the Diamond journals case, Dufour, Quentin, David Pontille, and Didier Torny. “Supporting Diamond Open Access journals.” Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies 4.2 (2023): 35-55., 10.7146/njlis.v4i2.140344 []
  5. To my knowledge there is no data on these policies towards editors, except on the question of paid editorial board members, especially in biomedicine []
  6. Teixeira da Silva, Jaime A. “The Conceptual ‘APC Ring’: Is There a Risk of APC-Driven Guest Authorship, and Is a Change in the Culture of the APC Needed?.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 55.3 (2024): 404-425.https://doi.org/10.3138/jsp-2023-0060 []
  7. Lin, SK. Editorial: A Good Yield and a High Standard. Molecules 1, 1–2 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00783005000). []
  8. Rene Aquarius, “My reviewer experience at MDPI”, August 2024, https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2024/08/guest-post-my-experience-as-reviewer.html []
  9. Young employee’s death puts workplace culture in spotlight at publisher MDPI, Retractionwatch, 22nd October 2024 []
  10. Paolo Crosetto, “Is MDPI a predatory publisher?”, 12 April 2021 []
  11. MDPI: Comment on: ‘Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)’ from Oviedo-García, []
  12. .Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced, Retraction Watch, 8 May 2023. Once again, it has become a very commented post []
  13. https://www.khrono.no/truer-med-a-flykte-fra-tidsskrift-etter-at-redaktoren-ble-kastet/794389 []

Who wins after a divorce?… or how to interpret the DEAL-Elsevier new agreement

Imagine that you are a young researcher in Germany, having started your thesis in September 2018. For the last 5 years, you have had no legal access to articles published by the world’s largest publisher, Elsevier. Your institution has saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of euros, but you don’t really know where that money has gone. By contrast, on a day-to-day basis, then as a PhD student, now as a post-doc, you tinker with your access by writing to authors, asking your colleagues abroad if they can send you this article, requesting your library to buy that crucial paper, scanning preprints, using the unpaywall button or, late at night from home, typing the full combination of letters and signs to reach the platform whose name you must never utter or write.

To my knowledge, this divorce between a major publisher and a national consortium, DEAL, folowed by a reconciliation, has been the longest for a very rich country,. This post analyses how the separation happened, what is known of a long period of divorce in which no German institution had a subscription to ScienceDirect, and finally moving on to the reconciliation agreement published on September 6th, 2023 and validated in January 2024.

From harsh talks to full divorce (2016-2018)

Indeed, it was not for the lack of money that DEAL did not sign with Elsevier, but because the conditions of a signing were not met. By contrast, reading DEAL’s agreement with Springer-Nature, analysed at length 3 years ago, shows what was expected: an agreement including subscription and open access publication, all at a cost deemed reasonable by the German consortium. So how did they get to a “no deal”? As often when trying to rest on past information with institutional sites and changing policies, I shall say that most documents cited below have disappeared from the DEAL website and, therefore are captures made by the Internet archive.

At Elsevier, serving research is our paramount goal. We have therefore chosen to continue providing access to Elsevier journals for dozens of German institutions that cancelled their individual subscriptions at the end of 2016. They did so anticipating that a new Germany-wide license agreement would be in place by January this year, which we regret so far has not been achievable. We strongly believe that access to high-quality research is important for German science. The continuing access for the affected institutions will be in place while good-faith discussions about a nationwide contract carry on. This reflects our support for German research and our expectation that an agreement can be reached.”1

I hope one day some colleagues will systematically study the rhetoric of big publishers PR. Anyway, the one above is typical of a service industry which makes believe its aims are totally aligned with the ones of its clients. Imagine the reverse situation, where DEAL would state : “at DEAL, assuring service providers profit is our paramount goal…”. Back to our main topic: the unconditionnal reconnection decided by Elsevier is not something unusual: at the same time, it happened for example for Taiwanese institutions in a similar situation2. But Elsevier hopes for a soon-to-be new German agreement would not be fulfilled. Indeed, after these back and forths, the negociations stalled, leading to a full divorce by mid-2018, as stated by the German Rectors Conference, which had “no choice”:

“The excessive demands put forward by Elsevier have left us with no choice but to suspend negotiations between the publisher and the DEAL project set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany.” That was the verdict of the lead negotiator and spokesperson for the DEAL Project Steering Committee, Prof Dr Horst Hippler, the President of the German Rectors’ Conference, speaking in Bonn, where the last discussion took place this week.”3

At this point, we shall note that all cited documents are written in English, while negociations surely happened in German. DEAL had the clear intention of making its moves very public and widelly known beyond the Federal German space and Mitteleuropa.

Learning to work without simple legal access (2019-2022)

So Elsevier pulled the plug in July 2018 and everything went quiet after almost two years of turmoil. That was not a given: you could think that protest letters, petitions or lobbying from unsatisfied lay researchers would multiply as a whole nation of scientists were cut from at least a fifth of the published literature. To lift the veil on the actual frustrations and losses resulting from the switch-off, it was… Elsevier, which commissioned a survey in the summer of 2019, the summary results of which can still be seen on the pages of one news agency.

Most German researchers agree that losing access to ScienceDirect made their research activities less efficient (61%) and delayed the production of the research output (54%). High-quality research further required access to current, international research results. However, the survey shows that 49% of the scientists surveyed believed that the lack of access to new research findings leads researchers to miss current developments or to become aware of them only with a delay. 44% of respondents fear that this will have a negative impact on the quality of their research. All in all, 84% of researchers surveyed think ScienceDirect was important or somewhat important while 76% supported or strongly supported the restoration of full access to ScienceDirect in Germany.

Of course, no raw data has been published and the study itself has not been shared beyond this PR. Nevertheless, in the body of the text, Elsevier mentions another ‘independent’ study carried out by the University of Münster. Like the previous one, this is not an actual academic study, but a library survey, published only on their blog, in German. Despite its limitations (size, a single institution), it presents some interesting, and most probably unique, results on the representations of German researchers one year after the cut. In particular, the following graph should be highlighted:

Extract form Münster Univeristät Survey, which results are presented here (in German).

The orange answers indicate respondents’ agreement, and the statements have been ranked in descending order of positive responses. They show a mixed picture in terms of opinions, both across the population as a whole and for many respondents themselves. from one question to the other. Though the vast majority, namely two-thirds (66%), agreed with the statement “I need more time to get the literature” and 58% thought that the right thing to do was to put pressure on Elsevier to give in, also the option with the fewest disagreeing votes (5%). That does not imply support for the shutoff: in fact, 55% agreed that “No deal is no option – negotiations should be resumed as soon as possible”, and 46% that the lack of access was “a serious competitive disadvantage”.

While 43% agreed that “Elsevier as a profit-orientated company would only harm science”, and only 11% disagreed, only 29% would “refrain from writing or review articles for Elsevier journals” against 40% who would still perform it. After some questions on the importance of Elsevier journals and the use of spared funds, the last question shows another divisive view on the resuming of negotiations, with only 16% in favour of it – which of course was not addressed in the Elsevier PR mentioned.

These two surveys are the only public manifestations of a debate in Germany during this period. If opinions remain relatively unpublic, what about practices? Does the impossibility of immediate legal reading actually have an impact on the way German academics write, their choice to publish in Elsevier journals or their productivity? To my knowledge and through the extensive use of Matilda, only two academic articles have addressed these issues The first is counterfactual, in that it looks at the behaviour of affiliated authors in Germany in chemistry for Springer and Wiley with which DEAL has signed an agreement. Published in 2021 in economics, it only considers the first year of the agreement (2020), in comparison with the previous period and with a control group with no agreement of this type. Nevertheless, the authors are already measuring some effect :

“researchers’ submission behavior in the field of chemistry has changed to some degree, as eligible researchers have increased their publications in Wiley and Springer Nature journals at the cost of other journals. While the effect is not overly large yet, it is statistically significant, and it may increase over time, as the agreements become even more well-known among scientists. Hence, journals covered by the DEAL agreements appear to have a competitive advantage in attracting authors”.4

If agreements signed raise attractivity, then unsigned ones shoud diminish it. The second one deals with the latter by considering the evolution of publication and referencing activities of the whole population of German authors in Elsevier journals, with no control group.  Published in 2023 in scientometrics, it is based on more than 400,000 articles and more than 33M references:

“We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature.”5

The two studies therefore show that the structure of publications is affected by the agreements; whether signed or not, but only marginally, at least over a short period. Furthermore, reading seems to be remarkably unaffected by the lack of legal and rapid access to the literature. To enable simple and legal reading, It is likely that other internal work has been produced by the consortium or that self-support systems have been put in place, similar to what the Swedish libraries deployed during their own breakup with Elsevier6. Beyond this study, there is anecdotal evidence, given by colleagues, but also an interview of a member of the negociation team, Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier, head of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s Central Library, which tends to show that they were following the rate of publications:

“The option to publish with Elsevier was not affected. Some scientists, however, asked me whether a publishing boycott would make sense in view of the fact that many editors from Germany – including Prof. Wolfgang Marquardt – had discontinued their work for the publisher with reference to the stalled DEAL negotiations. In fact, Elsevier’s share of all Jülich publications decreased from 26 % in 2018 to 18 % in 2022. Across Germany, there was a decline from 19 to 15 %. This may also be a reason why Elsevier returned to the negotiating table.”

In the end, it is reasonable to consider that German researchers have adapted to a life without ScienceDirect over the long term, still reading articles published by Elsevier, but publishing less in journals disseminated by it . What the French and British did not dare to attempt after lengthy negotiations, the Germans did, with very substantial savings and a diminished dependance to the biggest commercial publisher. But what happens afterwards, when the time comes for one or other of them to consider recontracting?

Dealing again… on different terms (2023-2024)

2023 began, as in previous years, without ScienceDirect for German researchers. Im Westen nichts Neues, as a fellow economist lamented :

 

Bartosz Bartkowski tweet

In fact, Elsevier had returned to the negotiating table in autumn 2022 and, after a four-year drought, seemed ready to make concessions that would have been unthinkable four years earlier. The negotiations took place behind closed doors, until the sudden announcement of their success at the beginning of September 2023, followed by the publication of the contract itself. Let’s dive into it, as DEAL has always been transparent on their agreements (nice PDF, full text and monetary information,…), published under a CC-BY-ND license7.

We will not delve into the details of the usual characteristics of this type of agreement (definition of the parties, services expected, users authorised to read, corresponding author limitations, etc.), but will instead focus on the most central elements and on some unique features compared to the bodies of agreements analysed elsewhere.8. This agreement is a “classic” Read & Publish, which includes in its core payment articles published in hybrid journals, but not articles in full open access journals, for which the fee is simply reduced by 15% or 20%. It also includes a back catalogue upgrade for all institutions, at a total cost of €10m. It is a “pay as you publish” agreement, with a PAR fee for each article, depending whether they are in a “regular journal” (2,500 €) or a Cell Press/The Lancet journal (6,450€), with an inflation rate of 3% and 4% respectively9.

This payment model has two consequences that are quite specific to this agreement. Firstly, with the exception of the back catalog, institutions have no front money to commit. Whereas in the past some agreements offered “tokens” or “waivers” for publication, the opposite is now true: you only start to pay after publication. Secondly, this provision would encourage free riding: as withalmost all agreements of this type, the corresponding author is offered, as a priority, to publish in open access under the CC-BY licence, but he or she can refuse. There is also a provision in the contract that prevents this refusal to publish in open access from being organised by counting all the publications:

“For the avoidance of doubt, the applicable PAR fee for Core Hybrid journals for the year of the acceptance date will be applied to both open access and subscription articles in these journals and to subscription articles published in Cell Press and The Lancet journals.”

So, despite the diminishing share of articles observed during the absence of agreement and the lack of front money, Elsevier has a certain guarantee of revenue as 18, 19% or 20% of the German research production will end in one of its disseminated journals. In exchange, the company had to accept very harsh conditions on the data generated by German users. A full page (section 7.6) is dedicated to Data Privacy in the agreement, with reminders of legal provisions derived from the GDOR European regulation. DEAL and Elsevier will co-supervise the whole data processing, the latter refraining from using any personal data without the consent of users. On this point, a loophole was anticipated by forbidding any general opt-in device: German colleagues will be able to fully use ScienceDirect without signing any consent. Of course, all data will be stored in one of the Member States of the European Union. The matter is so sensitive that a future workshop is planned during the first year of the contract, where part of the IP addresses would be automatically erased when IPs are not located in professional settings.

Without doubt, Elsevier’s transformation into a data company and the growing controversy surrounding its new business models on reselling user data10 has been closely observed in a country so keen on privacy. Still, despite these worries, DEAL signed the deal and did not include any fines in case these limits would be trespassed11. But what about the signing of German iHER nstitutions?

Conclusion : which savings, for which uses?

In fact, there was still a little uncertainty when the agreement was unveiled, as a four-month period was about to begin during which the institutions would each have to indicate whether they would sign the agreement. It could only be ratified if at least 70% of the institutions approved it, and fees were lower if 90% did. On 15 January 2024, DEAL announced that this second threshold had been exceeded as “nearly all of Germany’s major universities and research institutions are now participating“. Elsevier has now joined Wiley & Springer in the DEAL family, with very similar agreements focused on hybrid open access. But what does it mean from the point of view of German HER institutions? Let’s go back to Dr. Bernhard Mittermaier’s interview, who talks about his own instiution costs and the global German ones:

“Taken together, Jülich institutes will now save around € 100,000 per year on fees for hybrid open access that were previously paid to Elsevier. For Forschungszentrum Jülich as a company, the costs for Elsevier will even decrease by about 40 % than was the case under the former agreement, assuming publication figures remain the same. This corresponds to about € 300,000 per year that can be saved compared to 2018, the last year of our previous agreement with Elsevier. Elsevier’s fees per article are now much lower than they were in 2018 and similar to those charged by Wiley and Springer Nature.”Compared to 2023, however, when hybrid open access, document delivery, and pay-per-view each cost around € 100,000, additional expenditure of € 200,000 will now be incurred.

Let’s try to do the math (which does not add up), based on that paragraph in the following table, with three references, the last year of the former (local) agreement, the shut-off period and the first year of the new agreement.

Expenditures/Year 2018 2021 2024
Total 600,000€
500,000€
100,000€ 300,000€
Forschungszentrum Jülich Elsevier expendures.

The previous total cost is 500K if you follow the 40% reduction and 600K€ if you add the total savings mentioned. Whatever the case, the new deal is far below the older ones, in which German institutions were known for paying “much more” than similar institutions in Netherlands or France. Let’s now project the costs nationally:

Year pre-2018 2021 2024
Expenitures 70M-100M€
in mostly reading agreements
5-10 M€ max in Hybrid OA publishing? 30-40M€ in P&R agreement
Extimated Elsevier revenue for Germany

The first figure was never made public, but I have heard estimiations in between these two markings, The second one is very maximalistic as OpenAPC counts between, 1M€ and 1,3M€ for Elsevier in Germany for the years 2020 to 2022. The thrid one is based on the number of expected publications and the different fees defined in the agreement. So the savings have been huge during the shutdown and Elsevier lost probably at least 300M€ before resuming negiotiations. And despite losing probably around 50% of its 2018 revenue, the company prefered to sign rather than leaving almost all the money on the table.

While, for example, French institutions have made a major commitment to using some of the resources saved for OA initiatives and by replenishing the National Open Science Fund, this does not seem to be the case in Germany. The national research funder DFG has recently announced the launch of a Diamond OA publishing platform… with a maximum budget of 1.5M€ per year. I let you figure out what it would have been with just 30% of the money spared. So the German HER institutionswon won a lot, Elsevier stalled, but the dependence from big commercial publishers has not been halted, or even reinforced.

  1. Harald Boersma, Continued Elsevier access in support of German science, 13th February 2017 []
  2. Schiermeier, Q., Mega, E. Scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan to lose access to Elsevier journals. Nature 541, 13 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.21223 []
  3. “DEAL and Elsevier negotiations: Elsevier demands unacceptable for the academic community”, 5 July 2018, German Rectors Conference press relase, https://web.archive.orga/web/20181219162556/https://www.projekt-deal.de/elsevier-news/ []
  4. Haucap, J., Moshgbar, N., & Schmal, W. B. (2021). The impact of the German ‘DEAL’ on competition in the academic publishing market. Managerial and Decision Economics, 42(8), 2027–2049. https://doi.org/10. 1002/mde.3493 []
  5. Fraser, N., Hobert, A., Jahn, N., Mayr, P., & Peters, I. (2023). No deal: German researchers’ publishing and citing behaviors after Big Deal negotiations with Elsevier. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(2), 325–352. https:// doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00255 []
  6. Olsson, Lisa, et al. “Cancelling with the worlds largest scholarly publisher: lessons from the Swedish experience of having no access to Elsevier.” Insights-The UKSG Journal 33 (2020). 10.1629/uksg.507 []
  7. Elsevier B.V., & MPDL Services gGmbH, Max Planck Society (2023). Projekt DEAL – Elsevier Publish and Read Agreement. doi:10.17617/2.3523659 []
  8. Quentin Dufour, David Pontille, Didier Torny. Contracter à l’heure de la publication en accès ouvert. Une analyse systématique des accords transformants. [Rapport de recherche] 206 150, CNRS; Comité pour la science ouverte. 2021, pp.81. ⟨halshs-03203560⟩ []
  9. I won’t get here into some society journals excluded from the agreement, either because they won’t go hybrid or because they thought they won’t get paid enough by Elsevier. On the specific question of learned societies journals in such deals, see The Brief https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/out-of-reach/ []
  10. Didier Torny. From paywall builders to data tracking moguls or… How the big publishers have put on a new super vilain costume. Politics of technoscientific futures, EASST, Jul 2022, Madrid, Spain. ⟨hal-03885480⟩ []
  11. Thanks to Björn Brembs for underlying this absence, see his plea for German institutions not to sign the new agreement https://bjoern.brembs.net/2023/09/no-evilsevier-deal/ []

The sustainability argument or… How academic journals economic models never really last

The starting point for this post is an article from Scholarly Kitchen in which, once again, the sustainability of Diamond journals and here the Subscribe to Open model, is questioned. This leads the author, Rick Anderson, to define sustainability:

“It’s a concept that gets invoked in many different contexts to mean a range of different things, but in this context its meaning is both basic and simple: a publisher’s business model is sustainable if it’s able to be sustained over time. […] What determines sustainability? For an ongoing and open-ended project like publishing, the baseline determinant of sustainability is simple: recurring, reliable revenue.”

This definition is interesting, though it stands on a muddy ground: how do we define “recurring reliable revenue”? What is the timeframe to judge reliability? My post will argue that there is no such thing as a stable business model, at least for a long time. Moreover, if Anderson is right to question the S20 future, the same questions should be asked to much-lightly considered “stable models”, starting with subscriptions.

Our present is not the continuation of the past: the short history of subscriptions

Over the three and a half centuries of scientific publication in journals, the economic relations between publishers of scientific outputs and their readers were far from stable. It was probably not until after the Second World War that the main relationships became those between publishers and academic libraries, on a national or international scale, not as part of a gift or exchange economy, but rather as a commodity.

As the number and budget of libraries increased and the number of published journals grew fast, a short golden age of subscriptions for journal producers, and notably commercial ones, began1. But by the 1970s, as budgets stagnated, harsh competition for libraries money was the first signal of what was later referred to as the serial crisis. This decades-long relationship, based on the sale of subscriptions and paper issues for each journal, has been profoundly transformed by the digitalization of journals.

In the late 1990s, three major events took place in the contractual relationship between libraries and scientific publishers. Firstly, in a relatively short period of time after the inception of the World Wide Web, the largest publishers put online not only their entire contemporary catalogue, but also part of their archival material. Secondly, publishers have been offering access to packages or bundles, not on a title-by-title basis, but to a long list or even all of their journals. Thirdly, to make this offer attractive, they favoured the emergence of library consortia which, by adding their singular needs, could constitute clients interested in this new plethoric offer. The combination of these three events gave rise to a new form of standard economic agreement, the big deal2.

As a result, the subscription business model has been changed from an audience-centered model – libraries purchase what readers want, title by title – to a model centered on the size of the publisher – libraries buy the most extensive offerings, leading to a much stronger oligopolization through buyouts of publishers and change of publishers for scholarly societies, very visible twenty years later.

Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Natural and Medical Sciences, 1973–2013.3

For most publishers – including self-publishing learned societies – subscription has only been profitable for a short time and is not anymore. It is not sustainable, since it now implies the disappearance of their autonomy or at least dependence on increasingly powerful players, likely to act unilaterally on their revenues. And even for the largest publishers, the threat of non-renewal of Big Deals is growing stronger from 2010 onwards, whether through the sudden drop in financial resources (Greece) or through the choice to no longer pay for a service that does not meet the needs of libraries (United States) or open access demands (Germany, Sweden). It is in this context that Elsevier has started to brand itslef as a data company, while new publishers are trying to make a new model last, based on Article Processing Charges.

The future will not be similar to nowdays: charging authors to the breakdown point

Charging authors is not a recent business model, there have been many examples of vanity publishing, targeted towards academia or outside of it4. In the US, from the 1930s on , an alternative funding model had already thrived, as subscription revenues were considered too low. It targeted authors and their funders, was based on per-page charges, first in Physics, then in other STM disciplines.5 But it was with electronification that the idea of paying a lump sum for authors – as opposed to a multitude of varying services (colour charges, page charges, cover charges…) emerged, soon to be known as Article Processing Charges (APC). Some new publishers have entirely adopted this new model, sooner or later being bought by legacy Big Publishers, like BMC by Springer or Hindawi by Wiley. But other ones have quickly become themselves global Big Publishers.

Retrospective statistics of the leading academic publishers in 20216

On selected Clarivate sources7, MDPI and Frontiers are now in the top 6 in volume published while added, they were making less than a fifth of ACS, Sage or OUP a decade ago! From the point of view of these new big players, APCs are so sustainable that they create journals almost every week. For example, in 2021 MDPI launched 84 new journals and only acquired two existing titles. As Dan Brockington has shown in his comprehensive analysis of MDPI data, this growth also comes from the lowering of rejection rates:

“Now, some 45% of the MDPI journals I analysed, have rejection rates of below 40% (Table 2). Papers in these journals account for nearly 38% of revenues from publication fees (Table 3). Conversely, the journals with rejection rates of over 50% account for just over 25% of revenues. Measures of esteem, such as listing in the Web of Science, did not seem to make a difference to rejection rates. Average rejection rate for WoS listed journals was 42.7%, and for unlisted journals 41.6%.”8

The incentive for publishers to accept a manuscript in the APC model has been discussed for a decade, and its link to the growth of vanity presses now dubbed “predatory publishers” is well established. Above and beyond what is often portrayed as a potential threat to the whole scholarly communication system, the APC business model is not sustainable from the authors and research organizations’ point of view. A large literature has constantly shown the rise of APC prices through time, would it be for open access journals or for those relying on the hybrid model. Whether they would name it “prestige prices” or “market power”, researchers describe an ever-growing number of APC articles and a rise in individual prices.9

Proponents of market regulation will argue that each author will adjust his or her willingness-to-pay to the audience and the supposed quality of the journal, but instead we see the exclusion of authors for lack of funds or the sale of places in the byline to pay APCs. And of course, the quasi-absence of success for such a business model in underfunded disciplines, like most of HSS ones.

Sustainable for whom? The durability of Diamond journals

The two most visible business models for disseminating journal content are therefore both not only at the mercy of default by their funders, but are unsustainable for both readers and authors and their respective institutions. The fact that they constitute today’s largest expenditure items in scholarly communication should not be taken as evidence of sustainability through the capture of recurrent reliable revenue. In research worlds subject to severe budgetary constraints and increasing visibility of expenditure lines, they are in fact the most threatened in their foundation.

That being said, what are the alternatives? They are well known, and have been running in some corners of the global journal market for decades without any structural sustainability problems, despite being underfunded. Their landscape has been described in a comprehensive study, showing small-scale non-profit community-owned arhcipelagoes10. Far from APC-based megajournals and publishers with huge portfolios, this ecosystem is sustained by learned societies, universities, research organizations, some research funders, but also large-scale technical infrastructures, the most obvious being PKP’s Open Journal Systems.

While it is certain that more funding and more support from different institutions is needed11, thousands of journals – and dozen of dissemination platforms – have shown their reliability as they passed the test of time.

Yet, most don’t pass the “Anderson sustainability test” as they don’t rely on “revenue” but rather support and funding as they have not been comodified. Moreover, the support come from the exact same sources that pay, in a way or another, the “unsustainable publishing models” described above. So, they are obviously sustainable for authors and for readers, but also for these supporting institutions. Though they don’t have a unified business model12 -Subscribe to Open being the latest & adequate to already commidified journals, they seem to thrive, each of them at their low-scale, but with an agregated population still larger than APC journals. After almost three decades of existence, resisting to several “serial crises”, haven’t they earn the right not to be questionned on their sutainibility, but rather considered as one of the most secure ways to build a sustanaible scholarly communication system, allied with institutional archives?

  1. Fyfe, Aileen. “From philanthropy to business: the economics of Royal Society journal publishing in the twentieth century.” Notes and Records (2022). Aileen Fyfe, Noah Moxham, Julie McDougall-Waters, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik , A History of Scientific Journals Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015, UCL Press, 2022, chapter 14 []
  2. Frazier, Kenneth. “What’s the big deal?” The serials librarian 48.1-2 (2005): 49-59. []
  3. Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 []
  4. see for a detailed history on books, Timothy Laquintano, The Legacy of the Vanity Press and Digital Transitions, Volume 16, Issue 1, Summer 2013, https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0016.104 []
  5. On the American Chemical Society example, see Noel, M. (2020). Back to disciplines: exploring the stability of publication regimes in chemistry: the case of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1879–2010). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1-13; on the APS/AIP example, see Scheiding, T. (2009). Paying for knowledge one page at a time: The author fee in physics in twentieth-century America. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 39(2), 219-247. []
  6. from Understanding the increasing market share of the academic publisher “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute”Dan Brockington in the publication output of Central and Eastern European countries: a case study of Hungary []
  7. That is much more restricted than Crossref, so more favourable to legacy publishers []
  8. Dan Brockington,MDPI Journals: 2015 -2021, 10 November 2022, https://danbrockington.com/2022/11/10/mdpi-journals-2015-2021/ []
  9. see for example, Budzinski, O., Grebel, T., Wolling, J. et al. Drivers of article processing charges in open access. Scientometrics 124, 2185–2206 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03578-3 []
  10. Bosman, Jeroen, Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Bianca Kramer, Pierre-Carl Langlais, and Vanessa Proudman. “The OA diamond journals study. Part 1: Findings.” (2021) 10.5281/zenodo.4558704 []
  11. see recommandations from the mentioned study, Becerril, Arianna, Lars Bjørnshauge, Jeroen Bosman, Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Bianca Kramer, Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pierre Mounier, Vanessa Proudman, Claire Redhead, and Didier Torny. “The OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 2: Recommendations.” (2021), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4562790 []
  12. This diversity should be studied, as we will do it in the current European-funded Diamas project []