In July of last year, Canada’s three research-funding agencies set out to improve public and academic access to the studies they sponsor. Open access to research and scholarship is proving to be the digital era’s great gift to science, and all the more so, following open access’ contributions to Covid vaccine development during the pandemic. The plan for Canada’s Tri-Agency, as it is known, was to review and revise its Open Access Policy by identifying “the key features of an effective, comprehensive, sustainable and equitable immediate OA Policy for peer-reviewed articles, and the incentives and supports required for the Policy’s successful implementation.” To this end, the Tri-Agency engaged in a consultation of researchers, library organizations, Indigenous advisors, and publishers, both large and small. For my part, I responded to the call with an “open letter,” which I shared in my January 12, 2024 Slaw column.
A year later, on August 7, 2024, the Tri-Agency issued “What We Heard,” a document summarizing the results of these consultations. I can attest, for example, that my recommendations for reforming copyright to achieve the Tri-Agency’s goals for open access were heard. In this column, however, I want to consider what the Tri-Agency heard from others.
At the top of the list is researcher, librarian and funder unhappiness over the cost of open access. There is “widespread concern” over “(increasing) Article Processing Charges (APCs).” These are the fees that the large corporate publishers require of authors to enable open access publication of their work. These publishers also offer libraries a combination of library subscriptions to their closed content, along with open access publishing options, that is proving a profitable but slow path to making research widely available.
Now, in complaining about the APCs, it’s not that researchers can’t use their Tri-Agency grants to pay these charges, nor is it that there’s no alternate route to open access publication. Thousands of non-commercial journals are providing authors with open access free of APCs (diamond OA) thanks to institutional and library support. But these APC-free journals may not (yet) be the leaders in their field, which largely come from corporate publishers (think of Nature at the top: APC $12,290 USD per open access article). So researchers feel compelled to pay APCs at the expense of their studies (with references made to reduced student support). There is an open access alternative for these journals, thanks to the Tri-Agency policy, with authors depositing their unpublished (if still peer-reviewed) final draft in a library repository. For the academic community, open access with the large corporate publishers is proving to be either a financial burden or a second-class path to circulating their work.
So what, then, did the Tri-Agency hear from the corporate publishers when it was their turn to speak? It was rather the opposite of all that went before. The publishers declared APCs “key enablers” of open access (where libraries and researchers challenged their sustainability). The publishers questioned whether open access journals without APCs could survive (where others held that Diamond OA is “the preferred model by the research community” if still “viewed as an aspirational goal”). And the publishers held that APCs are “key to maintaining the integrity of the publishing system” (where others called APCs a questionable incentive to increase publication, with 2023, I would add, a record year for 10,000 article retractions and the closing of 19 journals based on research fraud mostly associated with Wiley from the corporate sector).
In the face of these contradictory differences, what is the Tri-Agency likely to do with its current policy? It is most likely to take a small incremental policy step. Following the example set by the White House’s 2022 Nelson Memo, the Tri-Agency will probably end the embargo period it has allowed publishers to impose on authors before they are allowed to freely share the final draft of federally funded work.
Now, this is still a significant gain for a small proportion of work, given the first 12 months following publication are the most vital for biomedical research, if not so much for historical scholarship and philosophical inquiry. Yet if the Tri-Agency does no more than eliminate the embargo, it will be a disappointing outcome of a year-long listening exercise. It does nothing to address the publishers’ monopoly pricing of access to research and the threats APCs pose to research integrity. It continues to make open access, for those publishing in corporate journals, a financial burden or a secondary path for unpublished work.
Having feared that this might be the outcome, in light of the influential Nelson Memo, my proposal to the Tri-Agency included a request (as its report notes) that it use its convening powers to hold talks among academic, funder, and publishing communities on how to implement and sustain universal open access as a global standard. Now that there’s widespread agreement that open access is what’s best for humankind, it’s time for something more than an incremental improvement of a decade-old policy.
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