Reserve grants for open access researchers, says report

Prior publication of non-paywalled papers should earn Australian researchers brownie points in grant applications, argues a new report that suggests research funding bodies should establish grant schemes exclusively for scientists who only publish in open-access journals.

Report author Kristen Scicluna said such approaches could help break a prestige-driven business model which earned academic publishers “astounding profits” from the public purse.

“If [grant recipients were] only able to publish in open-access journals, that...would increase their impact factor [as] more impactful research gets published in them,” said Dr Scicluna, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australia Institute thinktank. “That would hopefully bring some citations away from Nature, Cell [and] Science…towards some more open-access journals that aren’t charging really crazy fees.

“It’s not going to happen overnight, because…that prestige factor [is] so entrenched. That’s what an academic’s whole career is based on – their promotions and their career success. We need better mechanisms to provide that prestige to academics, instead of having it all hinge on the impact factor of the journals they publish in.”

Dr Scicluna said she had been astounded to discover, as a young medical researcher with a PhD in structural biology, that “we had to pay to get our research published”. Her report estimates that scholarly publishers earn about A$300 million (£154 million) a year from journal subscriptions in Australia alone.

Their Australian earnings rise to about A$1 billion when additional charges, including the “extortionate” fees for making articles open access – which she likened to a “tax on grants” – are factored in.

The report says subscription costs are partly bankrolled through taxpayer-funded schemes such as the Research Support Programme, while article processing charges – which publishers receive for removing articles from paywalls – come from the A$2.4 billion or so allocated each year by the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council and Medical Research Future Fund.

Dr Scicluna said academic publishing was “one of the most profitable industries in the world”, reaping some A$36 billion a year worldwide – roughly as much as the global music industry.

She endorsed initiatives like Australian chief scientist Cathy Foley’s proposal to give every Australian free access to scholarly journals, and Europe’s Plan S crusade to eliminate article paywalls. But some of these schemes conflicted with each other, and none prevented taxpayer funds “ending up in the pockets of academic publishers”.

Rather, some gave the publishers’ business model an unintentional boost, the report says. “Publishing houses retain immense price-setting power as open access policies do nothing to reduce demand for their services,” it says.

Dr Scicluna said she was not aware of any research funder or authority in the world introducing a grant scheme reserved for open-access publishing, or giving open-access outlets the sort of grant assessment weightings normally awarded to high-impact journals.

The closest example she could find was the lottery system used by the Health Research Council of New Zealand to allocate funding from its Explorer Grant scheme.

Her report also recommends more use of lottery-style funding allocations. However, such arrangements would be unlikely to influence the publication habits of researchers funded by universities themselves.

The lion’s share of university research funding, some A$5.7 billion a year, comes from non-government sources – mostly universities’ earnings from international students.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com