US scientists wary of author publication fees under Biden order

US scientists are wary of the cost and equity implications of the Biden administration’s transformative order earlier this year to make the published results of federally funded research immediately and freely available to all readers, a nationwide survey has found.

Most researchers do not currently have money to pay their own publishing costs and aren’t sure how easily they can find it, with the risks especially high for female and younger scholars, according to the survey of 422 scientists conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society, and it’s also a publisher of one of the most prestigious research journals, Science. Science itself has refrained from criticising President Joe Biden’s move, though the industry’s leading trade group, the Association of American Publishers, has complained that Mr Biden announced the plan in August without thoroughly consulting affected parties.

The Biden order requires federal agencies to set up rules so that, by the end of 2025, some version of any published description of taxpayer-funded science is simultaneously made freely available to the public, followed by a prompt release of the underlying data.

That would largely override the current decade-old federal policy allowing journals to hold their published papers behind subscription paywalls for up to a year.

The Biden policy prescribes no specific method for compliance, although the AAAS survey was predicated on the widespread expectation that journals would use the model of article processing charges in which authors pay a fee to the journals to cover the cost of reviewing, editing and publishing. Biden administration officials, in announcing the new requirement, specifically noted the possible use of APCs and suggested that scientists could use money from federal research grants to cover those costs.

But the AAAS, in outlining its survey results, warned of risks from that approach. “While open access has tremendous benefits,” the AAAS said, the expected reliance on APCs “has created concerning unintended consequences”.

Among its key findings, the AAAS survey showed that about two-thirds of researchers already had paid an APC. Of those who had paid APCs and answered a question about where the money came from, 70 per cent said they used grant money. Yet among those who had paid an APC, a slight majority described the experience as difficult or very difficult, with the problem more pronounced at smaller institutions, the AAAS said.

Also, large majorities of the researchers using APCs made sacrifices that included foregoing purchases of materials, equipment or tools, and not attending workshops or conferences relevant to their work, the AAAS said.

Women were more than twice as likely as men not to attend workshops and conferences to afford their APCs, it said. Among 89 institutions represented in the survey by librarians and administrators, only about a third said they had money to cover APC payments by students and other authors needing it. A full 15 per cent of those researchers said they paid APCs out of their own personal funds.

Such findings potentially add to the concerns already raised by publishers that they cannot maintain their operations without subscription revenue. Academics have been particularly concerned for the fate of small non-profit scientific societies that use the revenue to finance scholarly activities.

Many others inside academia and beyond, however, have cited a fundamental inequity and harm to scientific progress from perpetuating a status quo where US taxpayers spend tens of billions a year on research but then cannot see and share the published outcomes.

The AAAS findings do point out legitimate concern with a system that complies with the Biden order by relying heavily on APCs, said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a longstanding advocate of open access in science.

“In particular, the data shows that employment opportunities for early career folks – undergrads, grad students and postdocs – take a significant hit in favour of paying for publication,” Ms Joseph said. “That’s extremely problematic – as is the indication that women’s opportunities for professional development seem to be more adversely affected than men’s.”

A clear solution allowed under the Biden policy, she said, would be for authors to keep working with subscription-based journals if they prefer them, and to then post a copy of their paper in an online repository that’s freely accessible to all readers.

That development could end up costing traditional journals their subscribers, Ms Joseph acknowledged. But, she said, “since very few – if any – journals publish only articles resulting from US federal funding, libraries are unlikely to drop their subscriptions, particularly to journals published by non-profits that are still relatively affordable”.

“There’s a real challenge to who can pay these article processing charges,” Sudip Parikh, the chief executive of the AAAS and executive publisher of Science, told the AAAS’ annual Forum on Science & Technology Policy, where the society issued the survey findings.

Dr Parikh warned that other publishers with for-profit models have set up families of journals so that they can lure scientists into paying the APC with the hope of getting published in their top-tier journal, but then keep the APC and publish the paper in one of their smaller journals.

That system also creates an “unholy alliance with the tenure-track process”, by fuelling the incentives for scientists to publish more papers, Dr Parikh said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com