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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 []

The fair price of an open access article or… how Nature relaunched a long lasting conversation

If you ask the open access community what happened in October 2003, chances are they will cite the Berlin Declaration as an important moment of consolidation of international mobilisation. At the same time, however, there was a large-scale attempt to charge authors for the publication of their open access research. Indeed, this was the time when the publisher Biomedcentral announced the switch of all its journals to a then little known financial model: Article Processing Charges. Let’s take the example of two journals passing on this announcement when they discuss the price of the service:

Although some authors may consider US$525 expensive, it must be remembered that The Journal of Translational Medicine does not levy additional page or colour charges on top of this fee, which can easily exceed US$525. With the article being online only, any number of colour figures and photographs can be included, at no extra cost.

There is no remuneration of any kind provided to the Editors-in-Chief, to any members of the editorial board, or to peer reviewers; all of whose work is entirely voluntary. Although some authors may consider US$525 expensive, it must be remembered that Journal of Neuroinflammation does not levy any additional page or color charges on top of this fee. Because we are an online-only journal, any number of color figures, photographs, and ‘extra’ pages can be included at no extra cost. Such color and page charges, as assessed by more traditional journals, can easily exceed our flat US$525 per-article APC. Another common expense with traditional journals is the purchase of reprints for distribution, and the cost of these reprints is also frequently greater than our APCs. The Journal of Neuroinflammation provides free, publication-quality pdf files for distribution, in lieu of reprints.

Three elements emerge from these excerpts: firstly, their similarity indicates a copying of elements provided by BMC to justify this change in business model, the financing having previously had to rely on any source except the authors and in particular a support programme for research institutions; secondly, the price is related to the costs of making content and formats available free of charge to readers; and thirdly, the novelty of the payment for authors is minimised in favour of a continuous interpretation between page charges and article processing charges. Indeed, at least since the 1930s, in some disciplines, the authors’ contribution to publication costs – and not only to the cost of reprinting copies for personal circulation – has been documented. And a vast majority of science journals were still asking for such charges at the beginning of the 2010s1

This continuity is debatable, but the APC system put in place by BMC, like the one adopted at the official launch of PLOS Biology around the same time, is a partial legacy of these in print practices. As in the past, only accepted items are invoiced at a single “catalogue” price for defined services.

TO BE CONTINUED

  1. Curb, Lisa A., and Charles I. Abramson. “An examination of author-paid charges in science journals.” Comprehensive Psychology 1 (2012): 01-17. []

“You pay less, I earn more”… or how UC and Springer Nature made a seemingly win-win agreement

Win Win 306/365
CC-BY-ND Dennis Skley

And yet another agreement! While it was celebrated over the ocean as “the largest OA deal ever signed in the US” or a “milestone” for OA, we Europeans are now used to these “groundbreaking” contracts announcements every other week. So much that I have already written one in March on the German Springer/DEAL and another one in May on the Faustian Elsevier/Dutch consortium. So all things come in threes, and for a good reason, as Californians give us some food for thought on the financial side of the agreement.

First of all, it should be noted that the contract between Springer Nature (SN) and the University of California (UC) has not yet been written, but that only the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was made public this week1. This publication derives from a clear commitment on the part of the universities to make the negotiation processes and the principles governing the choice of subscription, support or no deal transparent to the local academic communities, but also more broadly to all stakeholders interested in these issues.

As we are almost in the middle of the year, the fact that the agreement has been signed for the years 2020 to 2023 has a first important consequence: all the mechanisms necessary for the identification of authors, for the various payments and for monitoring will probably not be in place before the end of the year (SN is committed to this by 1 January 2021). In practice, UC will pay in 2020 an undisclosed amount name “UC 2020 spend” for a Read & Publish in which the Publish part will be free of charge. It is only over the next three years that mechanisms will appear, which combined originality is at the heart of this post.

The Muti-payer model.
Getting authors and funders involved

One of the originalities of this contract with Springer is the adoption of a model first experimented in the UC/PLOS agreement, with the splitting of an APC into two distinct blocks: the first 1000 dollars which will be systematically paid by the university and the rest which will be paid by the authors if they have the possibility to do so. This mechanism smells like a device invented by economists, and it is one, a professor at UC Berkeley, who describes its purpose in The Scientist:

“In the US, there already were multiple funding sources—libraries paid for subscriptions, and when authors wanted to publish open access, they paid a surcharge on top of that out of their funds,” says MacKie-Mason. “The key thing here is that we’re integrating those into a single contract. That creates cost control for the institutions and the researchers [during the transition to open access], which is critical because the cost of scholarly publishing has been exploding.”

So the solution to the “new serial crisis” would be to imply authors as UC people have repeatedly stated2, but aren’t they already with classical “one shot APCs”? The idea to combine APC with institutionnal support in a contract is here pushed to the limit as we will see. In some “transformative agreements”, there is no way for a third party to understand who in the end pays what and from which source, especially in consortiia stteings. Here, it is quite the opposite as in the who MoU, a clear separation is made between two sources:

  1. The UC – would it be California Digitaly Library or UC itself – takes in charge a 750,000$ reading fee, 1000$ for each APC and, as we will detail, more if authors can’t pay. All these will be counted apart in “UC Fully OA Spend”, “UC Hybrid Spend” and of course the reading fee.
  2. The authors would pay the “APC remainder”, whoever is the original funder, and these sums play a very limited role into the contract, are not agregated under specific names.

So the splitting is not only made for each article, but for the total contract as “cost regulation” supported by Mackie-Manson but in fact only on the UC side, authors could spend whatever they wish on APC, and benefit from the UC participation. In consequence, as authors shall pay, they have the possibility to opt out of OA in hybrid journals, which is the default option. Consequently, the deal does not guarantee that all UC corresponding authors articles will be OA, but only those who wish so and, to some extent, that are ready to pay, favorable to hybrid journals, or APC gold open access supporters. The division and authors’ choice are highly visible in an exception in the contract. If, despite very short deadlines, SN was able to implement the entire workflow before the end of 2020, then it could start invoicing APCs. Under no circumstances would UC have anything to pay, but authors could be solicited:

Should Springer Nature implement the Multi-payer Model before January 1, 2021, Springer Nature may begin collecting the APC Remainder under the terms of the model […]. If the corresponding author does not have research funds available to cover the APC Remainder, then Springer Nature shall not collect an APC for those articles. No UC Fully OA or Hybrid Spend payments will be charged during this time (article 3.8.2).

It is hard to imagine a corresponding author who can get free APC deciding to pay, unless their grant is nearing completion and they cannot spend it otherwise. But this provision does indeed support the idea of two decoupled payers, as the rules applying to them may differ, the first (UC) not paying in 2020 before being obliged to contribute, the second remaining in a logic of choice throughout the contract. But what exactly are the amounts to be paid?

Price, Volume, Participation :
an equation to determine an Hybrid bill

The price calculation formulas are not yet complete, since the agreement is not signed, but the foreseeable variations are known throughout the contract. For full OA journals, there will be a base price in 2020, with a maximum increase of 3.5% per year. This base price is certainly not the catalog price, since it is specified that ” If at any time during the agreement the then-current list price APC is lower than the APC to be charged under the agreement, the current, lower APC will be charged instead” (art. 3.3). The issue of prices and volumes is most complex when it comes to hybrids APC. First of all, unit pricing is almost constant with the same prices in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and a maximum increase of 2% in 2023. But while the paid volume published in full OA appears unlimited, the paid volume published in Hybrid journals is very constrained.

First the number of articles published in Hybrid by the corresponding authors in 2019 and 2020 is calculated, and the smallest of the values is taken, which becomes the Base article number. The minimum volume of articles is then simply defined as 85% of this number, over time. On the other hand, the maximum number depends on two variables: first, an “inflation” of the authorized volume, of 5% per year, then a calculation that depends on the effective participation of the authors in the publication scheme. Indeed, the parties expect that between 30% and 40% of the authors of articles will choose to publish in hybrid AO rather than revert to a paywalled publication. (orange curve) If the program is successful, more than 60% of the authors adhere, then the red curve defines the maximum number of articles; symmetrically, in case of failure – less than 30% – it is the yellow curve that defines this maximum number.

In a close fashion to the agreement with DEAL, Springer defines a volume control on Hybrid, which can lead up to a third more articles published than the current Hybrid APC. But the consequences of going over this limit are very different than the German counterpart : UC is not anymore paying its 1000$ above the maximum, but authors – if they chose so, must pay the APC remainder. On the other end, if the minimum is not reached, UC shall pay “the average hybrid APC for UC corresponding authors from the previous year for the number of articles necessary to bring the total to the minimum. In 2021, the average hybrid APC from 2019 ($3208) shall be used.” So Springer Nature is sure to have (almost) its money back and UC has a control mechanism which prevents a high rise of its Hybrid spend by volume control.

Hard capping the total costs.
Will UC pay less in the end?

Until now, it seems that we analyse another “cost-neutral” agreement that in practice could absolutely become a high rise contract : APC individual price inflation, unlimited payment for full OA articles, controlled max rise of hybrid OA would contribute to a larger bill for UC. Then comes the most original point of the UC/SN contract : a hard cap on the sum of fluctuating bills. In fact, some agreements, typically the JISC ones, include a price control that says “we will pay this, period”. Of course, the trade off is most often a defined, limited volume. Here, as we read it in article 3.6.

In each year of the contract, the Total UC Spend shall be subject to a fee control mechanism, as set out below. All fee control mechanisms are computed in relation to the license fees paid by UC for Springer journals, Adis Journals, Palgrave journals, andacademic journals on nature.com in 2020 (“UC 2020 Spend”).

So the starting “subscription” – ie Read & Publish – set price caps the whole price of the contract, once again in a very precise and shall I write, twisted way. Starting from the “UC 2020 spend”, in 2021 you can not exceed 95% of that sum: if it is the case, then UC gets some reading fee part, and if it is not enough, refunding from SN. So the max is clear and -5% compared to the starting year. But in 2022 and 2023, you can not exceed 98% of that sum ; if it is the case you get only the Reading fee back and nothing else. In other words, there is in fact no fixed maximum payment, and certainly not a garantuee that UC would pay less in 2022 and 2023 than in 2020, and as we don’t know what were the different bills, even more less than 20193. The UC part is very confident on the result as the associate executive director of the California Digital Library, Ivy Anderson, stated : “The new agreement is expected to save the system money overall, but the exact cost will depend on the number of articles UC researchers publish”.

Whatever the final outcome, and one can think, given the complexity of the provisions that the UC part has run many simulations on its final bill, there are three lessons to be learned from this MoU. First, in the absence of price transparency, it is difficult for outsiders to determine whether an agreement is really financially interesting or whether it mechanically leads, as with subscription formulas, to higher prices paid by higher education institutions. Secondly, this agreement builds a link between the payment of authors and that of the university: it therefore allows the direct inclusion of research funders, while ensuring traceability and monitoring of flows for each of the parties. It also contains incentives on the behaviour of authors, who would benefit from using the UC workflow to partially or totally reduce their own payment. But it is the ability to capture money from funders, third parties to the contract, that is striking, with certainly Coalition S members in mind.

Consequently, thirdly, it is the de facto guarantee of Springer’s revenues by encouraging new spending in the form of APC in subsidizing them. Making new provisions to turn the Nature journals into a hybrid goes in the same direction. In a similar way to “Pure Publish” agreements that goes with a discount on APC, the UC agreement is a transformative one as it explicitly changes universities from fund providers to fund collectors for publishers, with the hope of a diminishing or stable bill in exchange for that service.

  1. We saw on the Dutch case that there could be quite significant differences between an MoU and the actual contract []
  2. See this piece on Impact of Social Sciences LSE Blog []
  3. I previously wrongly tweeted that they would pay less, as I thought the reference was UC 2019 spending []

Making a transformative deal with DEAL or… How 51 pages of contract are needed to replace subscriptions

This post should not have come into existence. In fact, for a long time, “contracts” and “agreements” between publishers and higher education and research consortia have not only been proprietary texts, but filled with confidentiality clauses that prevented them to be disclosed. This culture of secrecy is still there, as the agreement between Springer and DEAL states this on its 45th page1.

Disclosure of agreement
It is Publisher’s position that the terms of this Agreement are proprietary, however the Parties have agreed in this case that the Agreement is placed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-ND 4.0 license and may be made public under this license.

Indeed, the pursuit of transparency accompanying the open access movement has led in recent years to disclosing these contracts, highlighting the very large financial sums involved in accessing scientific literature2. But beyond the figures, the nature of the contracts and their concrete provisions are little discussed, outside of limited circles, notably in library & information sciences3.

The purpose of this post is therefore to propose a first analysis of the structure of this agreement before focusing on its financial part, the most original one, which is supposed to drive the transition to open access. But first we need to describe the two partners of the agreement. On the publisher side, we have Springer, or rather Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH. In practice, this means an entity that covers not only Springer and Nature publications, but also BioMed Central and Palgrave McMillan, i.e. more than 2,800 journals. On the customer side, it’s a bit more complicated: the negotiator is an intermediary, MPDL Services GmbH , which acts on behalf of the Projekt Deal, which is a consoritum initiated by the Alliance of German Science Organizations to negotiate nationwide transformative “publish and read” agreements with the largest commercial publishers of scholarly journals. The consortium structure therefore complicates the terms of the agreement with Eligible Institutions that can become Members with associated rights and duties.

Before entering into the agreement, it is important to add how much the writing itself shows the intensive interpretative work on its terms. As in any contract the key terms are of course defined: “eligible articles” “publishing services” or “open access license” among many others. But one also finds in the agreement no less than 18 occurrences of “For the avoidance of doubt” and 48 of “For clarity”, redundancies aimed at limiting the ambivalence of written proposals and injunctions and hints of the carefulness of both parties to limit the risks generated by the agreement.

From a simple preamble
to a complex folded agreement

At first, things seem really simple, as the preamble states the common aim of the two organizations. In fact, they share the rise of Open Access publications in the BOAI meaning, with its known advantages and underline the scope of this agreement, compared to previous ones.

The parties enter this contract with the goal to enable open access publishing of articles from German- funded researches in Springer Nature journals, to make these articles available to the public worldwide, and to provide access for German-funded researchers to most of Springer Nature content. At time of signing, the contract becomes the world’s largest transformative open access agreement, making it possible for over 13,000 articles annually from German-funded researchers to be made immediately available Open Access for use and reuse from the moment of publication, bringing the benefits of maximum visibility, increased usage and citations, and greater and broader impact to researchers across Germany.

Yet, the summary of the agreement depicts a complex set of successive services, which highlights the concrete constraints of a “Publish and Read” agreement for such a large consortium. The actual starting date of the agreement is far away, since the institutions have in practice several months to adhere to the terms of the contract and to put in place the necessary infastructures to carry it out. It is only from August 2020 that centralized funding for open access publishing will really kick in. However, researchers from affiliated institutions can already access Springer content from now on. This paradox is resolved if one considers that the R&P agreement is in fact one contract which overlays four contracts between the parties, named as follows :

  1. Fully Open Access Publishing
  2. Hybrid Publishing
  3. DEAL Journal Archives
  4. Reading Access

Let’s start by looking at the last two, which are the simplest in financial terms. Reading access (p. 31-41) defines the conditions of access to Springer’s content, provides for cases in which this service is discontinued – in particular non-payment in connection with the other components, but does not itself contain any financial elements. Reading is therefore provided free of charge for researchers at the member institutions of the DEAL project, as this deal is really a “Publish & Read“. The “DEAL journal archives” (p. 27-30) is charged, but for a fixed sum of €3,75 million. It allows the “upgrading” of all the institutions on the journal legacy, a little over 3 million articles, and the constitution of a “dark archive” that can be used during and after the contract.

Still, there are some interesting articles in these parts, for example the fact that DEAL can tell Springer to cease reading access to Member institutions if these institutions fail to pay the DEAL operating entity (p. 32). We can also read that the English-language agreement is the one that prevails (p. 40) ; considering that both parties are German and that German Law in Heidelberg applies in case of disagreement, it is very intriguing. Finally, at the opposite of the philosophy of Open Access, there are very strong limitations to the uses of the Archive or current content : access, download and very strict usage in academic courses. In particular, text and data mining for a given Member institution should only be authorized after an addendum is signed (p. 34). It is therefore clear that the already closed content remains paywalled and that the transformational will only applies to future publications.

Controlled Gambling
on future open access publishing

But how can this transformational aspect be translated into a contract? As we shall see, there is a form of gambling – with certain limits – carried out by both parties in the two contracts at the heart of the scheme, the Fully Open Access Publishing (p. 7-14) and the Hybrid Publishing (p. 15-26). The first has become quite standard – and very close to the contract signed by DEAL with Wiley at the beginning of 2019. It is a centralized payment system with corresponding author recognition and verification, sharing of metadata and financial reporting, all in exchange for some deduction on the price of APCs (p. 14).

For the purposes of calculation of the APC Rates, the list price increases for any Article Processing Charges under these Product Terms will not exceed 3.5% per journal title per year (“Cap”); increases will be calculated based on the 2020 list price.
For BMC and certain other Springer titles which are included in the Open Access Journals, Publisher will apply in addition to the Cap a 20% discount, the journals being eligible for such discount will be identified accordingly in the DEAL Journal List.

Price control is therefore very limited: although the reduction on the ‘public price’ is not negligible, it can quickly be offset by the foreseeable inflation of full OA APC costs charged by Springer. On the one hand, price rise at the 3.5% limit is almost certain, given the “natural” evolution of APCs prices; on the other hand, the current APC price insensitivity pushes us to predict that the number of articles published in full OA APCs will increase4. But this is precisely Springer’s gamble in signing this type of deal, by quickly making up for the quantity of articles in exchange for a limited reduction in the unit price. And this gamble is all the bigger here, given that its other source of income, under the Hybrid Publishing agreement, may fall in 2021, 2022, or 2023.

That is the biggest surprise of this Springer-DEAL agreement. Reading the announcement of the agreement on January 9, 2020, one would have thought that this part of the deal would once again be a copy of the Wiley agreement. Indeed, the fee5 of €2,750 for any research article in a hybrid journal published by Springer, signed without limit with Wiley, was communicated6. However, it is a very different expenditure scheme that was accepted by both parties (p. 25), represented in the following image.

For the year 2020, the amount is based on a “Reference Value » (RF) as the product of the number of articles estimated to be published by €2750, that is €26,125,0007. The RF does not move during the contract and so very much look like a “subscription price” from the point of view of Springer. Nevertheless, there is a complex real price paid that only partly takes into account the actual number of articles published. In 2020, the minimum invoice is the RF, if more articles are published, the price can go up to 5% more. In 2021, it is a minimum 95% of the RF and up to 10% more than the RF; then, 2022, it is 85% and up to 20% and finally, at DEAL’s option, for 2023, it is 75% and up to 30%.

On the upper side of the RF, from Springer’s point of view, the risk is to publish “too many” Hybrid OA articles. In such a situation, they would “miss” some revenue which would have hypothetically been generated by individual “Open Choice” APC. From DEAL’s point of view, it is litteraly an insurance against a growing cost generated by the capture of publications by Springer journals8.

For the avoidance of doubt , Publisher will continue to publish Eligible articles even if the Upper Threshold is met or exceeded. Publisher will never charge any part of the Calculated Total PAR Fee exceeding the Upper Threshold, irrespective of the actual Calculated Total PAR Fee and/or number of Published Articles.

If we now look on the other side of the RF, roles are reversed: the minimum invoice is an insurance for Springer if, for whatever reason, German authors don’t use the agreement to go on Hybrid OA, that it gets some value back now that reading is free of direct charge. From DEAL’s point of view, there is the risk to “pay for nothing” and it could be an incentive to push researchers to use Hybrid OA as it is “already charged”, rather than choosing the Full OA road, discounted but limitless as far as costs are concerned.

How transformative is the DEAL deal?

We can point to four potential or actual transformations from the agreement which runs until the end of 2022 with an option at the discretion of DEAL for 2023. First, obviously, it is the construction of a demanding workflow to regulate all the exchanges of authorship, institutionnal and financial information not only between Springer and DEAL, but also between DEAL operating entity and the Member institutions. Indeed, as with other Publish & Read type contracts, the sums actually paid by the research intensive institutions will be much higher than in the past. and conversely, more teaching or practice-oriented institutions would pay less. What is the cost of such a workflow for both entities? Is it easily scalable for other publishers/consoria? How would some institution react to their growing costs?

Second, this agreement raises the issue of researchers’ enrolment to open access publishing, even if the money does not seem to come from their own pockets or grants in this case9. Will they agree to publish in hybrid OA? Will they, on the other hand, remain insensitive to the total cost of APCs? Will they assume the position of correspondent author more than their foreign colleagues? What will be the associated institutional policies: more obligation to publish in open access or, on the contrary, a logic of individual choice? Answering these questions will make it possible to observe whether, indeed, open access is becoming the norm for German researchers in their publications at Springer.

Third, in direct connection with the previous transformation, the parties took calculated risks by signing this agreement. Springer may see its sales fall by between 15% and 20% in 2022 (APC discount at constant volume, minimum Hybrid Publishing price) in the event of failure with researchers, workflow problems or major disagreements within DEAL. Symmetrically, DEAL members risk a significant increase in the total price with a maximum of 20% Hybrid Publishing price and an explosion of full APC OA if production is moved to these journals. Transformative action at constant cost, because there is “enough money in the system”as OA2020 stated in 2015, is therefore not at all guaranteed.

Finally remains the question of the state of things at the end of the contract. If all goes well in their view, DEAL will validate the 2023 option, but what happens beyond that? And if they don’t, what will be their negotiating power? Will Springer be happy if both OA deals don’t have enough success to maintain their currents profits? Will the use of the “flagship journal” listed in the Wiley agreement to put some competition on Springer? Will Springer journals still be predominantly hybrid journals? Will the coalition S ultimatum on the lack of funding for APCs for this type of journals in 2024 be credible? There is nothing in the agreement to give answers to those questions, and in particular there is no commitment from Springer to flip its journals then. So, contrary to the recent ACM Open Model , this agreement does not constitute an irreversible transformation to open access. If things go south, subscriptions could be back at the very heart of the next agreement..

  1. The agreement is availabe on the Projekt Deal dedcated webpage with its own DOI. Announced at the beginning of the year by both parties, the full agreement was discreetly added in mid-February. Thanks to Quentin Dufour for flagging this document []
  2. According to this presentation by the European University Association, more than one billion euros a year for its members, including 700 millions for journals []
  3. Typically the section “business models” of the Scholarly Kitchen website. []
  4. On these two points, see the remarkable article by Shaun Yong-Seng Khoo, “Article processing charge hyperinflation and price insensitivity: An open access sequel to the serials crisis.” Liber Quarterly 29.1 (2019). []
  5. Technically, it is not an APC as stated in the FAQ page: “different from an Article Processing Charge (APC), the PAR fee, paid centrally by participating institutions for each article to appear under the DEAL agreement, covers the cost of the open access publishing services rendered and, to a lesser degree, reading access in Springer Nature subscription journals.” []
  6. In the Wiley deal, if I understood it correctly, the baseline payment is guaranted, unless it is shown that Wiley technically limits the actual publication of Hybrid OA ; but there is no max limit for the payment of €2,750. per article []
  7. I do not go into detail here about the type of article and in particular “Non Research Articles”, the price of which is €917 []
  8. Notably by the shift of corresponding author from a foreign researcher to a German one. []
  9. The actual source of money for APCs is not addressed at all in the contract, it is probably part of DEAL’s internal financial mechanics which are not public to my knowledge []

The Coming of Age of Open Access (I) or… Where are the alternative journals 18 years after the BOAI?

For most of us, February 14th is Valentine’s Day; for open access activists and lovers, It is also the celebration of the BOAI anniversary. It was 18 years ago, they were sixteen, meeting in Budapest in December 2001. Far from agreeing on everything, yet they co-signed a landmark declaration published on February 14th, 2002. 18 years later, it is the coming of age for Open Access, a time to look at what has been changed, redifined, gained and missed. To start with, we have to remember that the BOAI really defined open access, as a virtually unlimited re-use of academic documents:

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited ((BOAI, 14th February 2002)).”

They also put together what was largely separated before, the soon named “green road” and “gold road”. Nevertheless, contrary to the popular belief, the supposed “original version” of the BOAI reproduced in lots of copies on the web, they were not calling them “self-archiving” and “open access journals”. Indeed, the reference above is not the true original version, but one slightly changed in the summer of 2002. The former one, which can be seen on the Web Archive, stated : “Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the goal. Self-archiving (I.) and a new generation of open-access alternative journals (II.) are the ways to attain this goal. So following BOAI, we will deal with this coming of age in two successive posts : this first one will focus on alternative journals, the second one on the triumph of organized archives over self-archiving.

A revolution with no defined business model

How are described these alternative journals? Why and how are they alternative and to what? The main answer is given in a long paragraph of the BOAI: it is our actual starting point, from which the history of these journals shall be analyzed. To ease the reading, we have divided it in three parts.

Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of alternative journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access.

The two ways for journals to commit were already happening at the beginning of the century. On the one hand, very early electronic journals, often without publisher but what we now call a platform, didn’t go the subscription way and were established as free for readers. On the other, the 2001 PLOS letter/petition pushed publishers to change their ways and open their content, with lots of signees but few positive answers apart from BMC. So the BOAI reminds them that they could still “filp” to open access. But what does it mean exactly?

Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses.”

The alternativeness doesn’t come from the way journals should be run (editorial boards, scope, peer review) but from their economic model. Journals are qualified as “alternative” because they shouldn’t anymore rely on the property of content and subscription as the main route to pay for journal expenses (and profit). More than that, they would have extra costs as they have to maintain open access through time. With the vanishing of current and future revenues, on what shall the new business model rest?

There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.

This is probably the most important part of the whole BOAI declaration, besides the open acess definition. Three main points should be retained: firstly, the idea of a diversity of sources of income, in an optimistic vision of the means of financing a journal undoubtedly fuelled by the success of the open source software movement. Secondly, this diversity is reinforced by the final sentence which supports the absence of a “one best way” even when the exploration of possibilities would have fully taken place. Finally, thirdly, the idea of recourse to a payment by authors is tconceived as a last resort (“or even”). In other words, not only does the alternative economic model remained unclear and uncertain, but the paying author’s proposal was not considered a priority at all.

The stories of 11 pioneers

But with such vagueness, who then ventured to go on the alternative and how did they settle their journals once launched? On the George Soros site, funder of the BOAI meeting through the Open Society Institute, a very short list of 11 entities was then available, even if it was supposed to be only examples1.

11 journals

So, a first way to fulfill the promise made by the title of this post is to investigate the trajectory of these 11 journals, or rather publication websites, so great is their diversity. We will treat them in groups, according to their destiny:

  1. Still free of charge mathematicians & computer scientists journals: Algebraic & Geometric Topology and Geometry & Topology were respectively founded in 1997 and 2001, have always published open access articles and are still community-based journals, published by MSP, which puts a very strong anti-APC statement on its website. Document Mathematica is the first journal of the Elibm platform, founded in 1996, which acts as a repository for maths proceedings and journals, free of charge for readers and authors. JMLR was created in 2001 in an independance movement by 40 members of the editorial board of Machine Learning, then owned by Kluwer and is a always hard-to-believe from the outside $10 per article cost kind of journal – thanks to huge volunteer work, Latex, open source software, no fancy website and outsourced micropublishing for paper versions with no financial exchange.
  2. Still owned by societies, but have switched to APC: The New Journal of physics founded in 1998, now published by IOP with an APC of 1630 €. It was a part of some “offset deals” (Austria, UK) and is still one of the journals of the SCOAP3 agreement. The Journal of Insect Science was supported by the University of Arizona, launched in 2001, it changed with the death of its editor-in-chief in 2014, owned by a society but published by Oxford with a 1176 € APC.
  3. Bought by Springer platforms: Living Reviews in Relativity was founded in 1998 by a Max Planck institute, it published only reviews, which were “living” as authors could update them as new literature could be taken into account. It was sold to Springer in 2015, which kept the same formula with, remarkably, no APC . The trajectory of BioMedCentral is probably well-known to readers, let us just remind that it was founded in 2000, cosigned BOAI through Jan Velterop, its then director, was the first “big” publisher to bet on APC and was finally sold by its owner, Vitek Tracz, to Springer in 2008.
  4. Popularizers of APC and inventors of the megajournal: PLOS didn’t really exist as a publishing place at the time of the BOAI. Its call/letter for Open Access the year before as almost only BMC responded positively. But they were already able to secure funds, cosigned BOAI through Michael Eisen and soon lauched PLOS Biology and then, in 2006, PLOS ONE which was the first megajournal, which climbed to more than 30,000 articles a year, invented new forms of peer review and supported article-level metrics againts journal-based metrics . It was also the launch of APC as a standard way to provide Open Access for large communities.
  5. The Platform that used to promote open access among publishers: Highwire has never been a journal nor a platform-journal, but rather a hosting service which develops tools and software for publishers. Founded in 1995 and based at Standford University, it used to be the largest archive of free full-text science on Earth with more than 2,4 million articles. Bought by an equity fund in 2014 (a minority share is still owned by Stanford), this “free texts” webpage stopped its counting on the 25th March, 2015 and the webpage was not maintained after 2018.
  6. Terminated by its learned society: Psycoloquy had been launched and supported by the American Psychological Association, with Stevan Harnad at its helm, who translated some of the features he developed in his previous journal, BBS, notably open peer commentary, into the electronic form. It stopped publishing new articles by 2002.

Other journals or platforms could have been indicated as examples in early 2002. One can notably think of Scielo which was already working very well in South America, Erudit was growing up in Quebec as well as Revues.org in France. But the BOAI was rather focused on STM and English-language journals, and the alternative journals of the BOAI are also located within a world already dominated by an oligopoly of big publishers that was to be changed or at least challenged. Despite these limitations, the 11 stories nevertheless show the diversity of actual trajectories, the adoption of economic models that had yet to be defined and implemented and the adoption of the alternative by some big publishers.

From Gold to Diamond:
when the alternative remains alternative

Above and beyond these examples, what trends could be drawn from these last 18 years? We have to consider a wide range of moves from public policies, learned societies, universities & libraries, research funders and finally of course publishers in order to give a second answer to the titile of this post. Of course, the first evolution is the invention of a locution, soon after the BOAI : open access journal, which replaced the “alternative” ones.

Then, as with 4 of the 11 listed, we observed a massive rise of the APC model, from BMC and PLOS pioneers. The idea that authors would accept to pay to publish was not to be taken for granted, would it be in principle or in practice with questions about the accounting circuit, the actual source of funding (authors, labs, departments, universities…), the level of price, etc. And still in some disciplines, being forced to pay is putting a low-quality stamp on the output. The Wellcome Trust in the UK and the ERC programs in the European Union played a huge role in experimenting with the possibility of paying APC through grants, which made them a “normal cost”, especially in well-granted disciplines (biomedecine, physics…). The UK official public policy, after the Finch Report in 2012, also injected money to pay for APCs.

It not only fueled the growth of relatively new publishers – BMC, PLOS but also MDPI, Frontiers in, Hindawi – but pushed “traditional” big publishers to adopt APC and make their journals “hybrid”, with a “basic funding” by subscription and “extra funding” through APC. Springer began its “Open Choice Program” in 2007, which name deeply reflects the liberal-market vision of open access. These two evolutions led to very harsh critiques of the whole Gold OA project : on the one hand, it raised the question of the birth of predatory publishing through APC ; on the other hand, hybrids meant double dipping and the deepening of the serial crisis.

Hybrid journals were conceived as transition tools to open access, as the then director of SPARC Europe theorized them2 So these private and public policies of APC funding were conceived as a way to reach a tipping point after which the Open Access, now renamed full open access journal, would happen. How naive wrote Richard Poynder in a recent essay3! Some powerful actors came to the same conclusion, so they recently try to impose new radical changes in the funding of journals, most notably Max Planck Gesellschaft in 2015, then the now famous Coalition S, which aim is to accelerate the transition to open access by in fact killing the subscription model, having a CC-BY license to authors for content. Does this sound familiar?

So it seems to go full circle: almost twenty years later, trying to get rid of the traditional economic modela for journals and to do that, talking with big publishers in order to sign “transformative agreements”. Open access has gone mainstream, Elsevier even now present open access as a standard. If changes happened, it was more on the way journals were run, most notably open peer review4. But wait a minute, if the alternative has gone mainstream, where is the new alternative? In fact, the support and success of the APC modeal made the impression on a lot of commentors and actors that the Gold way was now the equivalent of an author-payor model. That led some activists to coin new names for “no APC journals”. Would it be Diamond or Platinium, it meant that it was also free for authors, and not only readers.

Scielo, Erudit, Open Edition were already mentioned, just as 5 of our 11 pioneers. But we could add Open Library of Humanities or Redalyc as “big platforms” for journals5. They are the majority, as no APC journals still represents more than 70% of entries in the DOAJ, their business models are diverse, from bricolage to strong institutional support, just like the BOAI predicted. So the alternative is still alternative, though it has vastly grown in the last 18 years. Getting to adulthood, we will see whether OA journals coexist into two genres, non-APC and APC, or whether one of them in not sustanaible in the long run. Unless, of course, the other open access road gets us into a post-journal world through preprint servers and open archives. To be continued…

  1. this list didn’t evolve a lot in the next two years, Highwire and PLOS were removed, while two MDPI journals were added []
  2. Prosser, David C. “From here to there: a proposed mechanism for transforming journals from closed to open access.” Learned publishing 16.3 (2003): 163-166. []
  3. Poynder, Richard. “Open access: Could defeat be snatched from the jaws of victory?.” (2019). []
  4. Which means lots of different things, see Ross-Hellauer, Tony. “What is open peer review? A systematic review.F1000Research 6 (2017). []
  5. Not to mention the ones for books which are catalogued into the DOAB. []