WHEN 43 editors resigned from two Elsevier journals in April they not only transferred smoothly to a new title at a new publisher, they also successfully highlighted growing concerns about the profits of the largest commercial publishers from open access publishing.

The recently-resigned Editor in Chief of NeuroImage, Stephen Smith, is now EiC of recently-launched Imaging Neuroscience at MIT Press. Stephen (pictured above), a professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford, listed three factors that enabled the move.

• a clear motive;
• support from stakeholders;
• a realistic destination.

This article is an attempt to understand the extent to which other journals are in a position to follow and if so, when.

Motive

NeuroImage is one of 2,800 journals published by Elsevier. Unlike the majority of Elsevier’s journals, NeuroImage is open access so readers don’t pay to access articles. Instead, the costs are covered by the authors, or the institutions they work for, through Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid to Elsevier. NeuroImage’s APC is currently $3450 (£2760), a price which NeuroImage editors asked Elsevier to reduce to under $2000 arguing that “estimates of direct article costs at relevant journals are generally around $1,000 or lower” but it became clear, after a year, that Elsevier wasn’t going to.

“Scientists and funders increasingly feel that it is wrong for publishers to make such high profits,” Stephen says, “particularly given that the publishers do not fund the original science, or the writing of articles, or payments to reviewers, and pay minimal editorial stipends. As a result, authors and reviewers are increasingly refusing to work with high-profit journals.”

Support

Editors can’t do this without the support of the academics in their specific field. “This was really the result of a build-up of such strength of feeling in the field that the current status quo is unacceptable,” Stephen said, adding that some research areas are more ready for change than others. “In our case the editors at NeuroImage and NeuroImage:Reports had so much input from people in our area of imaging neuroscience – including many researchers refusing to review for Elsevier journals, or refusing to submit their own work.”

This level of support is vital for a new journal to be successful. “It’s hard to break that cycle, because you have to start from scratch with a new journal, building up a reputation – and it takes a few years for a new journal to be given an impact factor. Fortunately, people are starting to pay less attention to this simplistic ‘impact factor’ rating. Also, in our case, in our field of imaging neuroscience, there has built up such a strong feeling that this change needed to happen. By taking the entire set of 43 academic editors across to start the new journal, with the same aims and scope, we are taking the reputation with us. Indeed, more generally – enough is enough – academics from all disciplines can make such changes with their own journals.”

Destinations

When NeuroImage editors looked at their choices the path was not immediately clear: “Several options had been suggested to us very early” Stephen said, adding that they were pointed towards MIT Press by colleagues who had set up journals there before. He said it became “the clear choice in terms of the balance of cost, ability to set up the new journal in a short timeline, and quality/robustness.”

Another key factor was transparency, that the new APC is demonstrably based on costs and not on what authors might be prepared to pay: “MIT Press reports transparently on their costs, which we have seen in detail. The current APC will cover actual costs, as well as helping cover costs associated with fee-waived publications from less well-funded countries.”

Speed of change

Does any of this herald a new momentum for other journals to make similar moves? Stephen said: “We’re seeing lots of comments, for example on Twitter, suggesting this should happen, and hopefully editors at other journals are indeed thinking about making a similar move away from high-profit publishers. But it does take some time to move forwards like this, starting with lots of discussions amongst a given editorial board, and then discussions with the publisher.”

The new journal’s publisher, MIT Press, confirms that there is interest in these routes but not on a grand scale yet. Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at the MIT Press, said: “I am often meeting with journal editors and sponsors who want to learn more about the publishing program at MIT Press, or what a shift to open access publishing might look like, or how to lower costs for their authors and subscribers... Others may well follow and we have had early discussions with a small number of other titles interested in making a similar move.”

Slow and steady

For publishers to offer sustainable publishing models, the business case for each journal has to be sustainable. Nick says: “Our focus is really to identify the best possible journal partnerships for the MIT Press, regardless of where they are publishing now. We are thinking about what type of content can we successfully bring out to the world in an impactful way.”

The key is enabling journals to find publishers that align with their mission and values. MIT Press’s shift+OPEN programme, which is “designed to flip existing subscription-based journals to a diamond open access publishing model” is an example. “We received a good number of applications from highly qualified and interesting journals,” Nick said, adding: “There is clearly a lot of interest from the journals side and it will be difficult to select just one journal to flip to open access.”

Advocacy

It is a slow process now but could pick up momentum if supported by funders and policy makers. Nick said: “As more and more funders and government make it clear that open access is a requirement, we will see greater and greater need for publishers like the MIT Press.”

Arcadia, which supports shift+OPEN and has announced another $10 million grant to help MIT establish a permanent endowment to support open access publishing in perpetuity, has a similar view. Dr Ross Mounce, Arcadia’s Director of Open Access Programmes, said: “There is widespread concern that in some instances governments and universities are overpaying for academic publishing services. I think in this instance the NeuroImage editorial community feels that Elsevier is raising prices, whilst its costs of providing that service have remained flat. The editorial community thinks that the ‘fees don’t reflect direct article costs…’. We predict increasing attention being paid to the amounts that libraries and governments are collectively paying academic publishers.

“We think that academics should pay close attention to the publishers they work with. Scholarly publishing draws on the free labour of millions of researchers as authors, peer-reviewers and editors. Funding for publishing – whether through libraries or research funders – tends to follow where academics choose to pool their labour. If academics chose to give their time (as editors, authors, and reviewers) to well-governed non-profit publishing venues, then in-turn we expect that those publishing venues would receive more support, creating in turn more incentive for others to follow. This won’t happen quickly but an unsustainable level of profit-taking by commercial publishers may accelerate it.”

Resist speed

OA may be evolving more slowly than crises in academia are emerging. But Arcadia, which has awarded more than $146m in grants via its open access programme since 2002, sees no benefit in attempting to match that pace – or the pace at which articles are now being published.

“It is well known that some researchers working at some institutions just need to get publications published in ‘indexed’ journals. The actual substance and value of what they publish becomes secondary. Ethical and equitable open access needs to be seen in the context of an ethical and equitable research culture, in which knowledge and the ways it is created are valued and researchers are not assessed purely on either the quantity of their outputs or the venues in which it is published. We need reform of research assessment (e.g. Tools to Advance Research Assessment (TARA), another of our grants) to underpin a healthier system of disseminating research online for all to read and re-use.”

He said that publishers who see the proliferation of research papers as profit drivers “may be fuelling an unsustainable research culture” and he warns against scaling up open access to meet the current unsustainable level of output: “We would resist the temptation to always ‘scale-up’ as it can lead to homogenization and monopolisation. Instead, a ‘scaling small’ approach might be prudent to retain disciplinary cultures and bibliodiversity.”

Status quo

Despite turmoil in academia, the business case for publishers only improves. In 2022 Elsevier said submissions to its journals had tripled to around 2.6 million per year in the last decade, while the articles it publishes has doubled to 600,000 per year and expects its pay-to-publish (open access) business to be as profitable as pay-to-read.

Claudio Aspesi, an analyst who has watched RELX for 16 years – predicting a tipping point in 2011 - says problems at NeuroImage don’t yet worry investors in $58bn RELX. While 40 per cent of RELX profits come from Elsevier, journals are around half of that business, and it publishes 2,800 of them. “It’s a blip in a blip,” Claudio says, but “if they start to experience widespread defections then there will be problems,” adding that “some of the barriers that boards face to setting up in a more ethical environment may be being lowered by the likes of Arcadia and MIT”.

He said views are changing, but it is behaviour that needs to change. “People are starting to see how OA has been co-opted by publishers and poses other ethical issues. Five years ago people who opposed high APCs were only a handful of activists, that has changed.”

Broken system

Open access can’t escape the complex transformative deals between libraries and publishers. The recently negotiated deal between Elsevier and UK Universities includes a 15 per cent discount on APCs for Elsevier’s open access journals. 

Michael Williams, Head of Collection Development & Management, Associate Director, Cambridge University Libraries, said: “The frustration with the discount is that it is a discount on an opaque figure – there is no transparency on Elsevier’s costs and what the APC is spent on. This lack of transparency does make you question whether the APC is hiked so Elsevier can appear generous with their discounts. It also bakes in the APC cost for the life of the agreement.” 

“I would say that the system is broken. These ‘Read & Publish’ agreements are transitional agreements to enable hybrid titles to transition to fully OA but that change is getting slower and slower. I’d question whether some publishers are committed to making the transition and are instead using the Read & Publish agreement to increase profits. This questioning is inevitable when there is a complete lack of transparency for what the money is being used to pay for in the publication process. As a sector (UK HE) we are now developing our vision for a post-transitional landscape.”

Elsevier response

A spokesperson for Elsevier said: “We uphold the highest standards of quality and integrity at scale to ensure value to our customers... Our overarching principle remains to charge unit prices below the market average while delivering above- average quality, and publicly available data shows this is the case.” He said information about Elsevier pricing policies and APCs were available at www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing and publishing volumes for the whole of Elsevier http://cuts2.com/rpunY