Open Access & Open Science: failure is not an option for any party

For LERU, it is important that the upcoming Council Conclusions recognize that the increasing costs for scholarly publishing associated with certain business models may cause inequalities in communities and actually prove to be unsustainable for research funders and universities. Many people are now aware of the increase in publishing prices and the spread of transformative agreements, a result of which is a consolidation of the oligopoly in the publishing system.

The essential problem occurs when there are no reductions in price but increases, and where the resulting coverage is low. The threat is what will happen if everything is flipped to Open Access with high APC charges, both individual and under an agreement.

A further result is that Open Access publishers find it increasingly difficult to agree financial contracts. This causes inequity in the system – between those countries which can afford to pay and those who cannot. A problem for fully Open Access publishers with regard to research funders is how to claim eligible costs. Publishers provide flat rate agreements, but funders require individual "payments". It is not easy to deal with this problem unless funders are included in the agreement.

The Council Conclusions should however do more to underline the importance of recognition and reward for researchers who follow Open Access/Open Science practices. This is an important way of embedding Open Access into research culture. This echoes current developments, such as the 2022 European Commission agreement on research assessment, to which LERU is a signatory.

The draft conclusions stipulate further that ORE – Open Research Europe – should be developed into a collective, non-profit, large-scale publishing service for the public good; along with advocacy for related national and subject-specific publishing services. In itself, this is a solution to the challenges identified above, but the scale of the undertakings is massive.

LERU is all too conscious that there is currently a lack of evidence for successful and sustainable not-for-profit publishing generally. ORE contains only a limited number of publications (under 500). The experience of some LERU members is that it has limited awareness of the EU research environment and is not well connected. ORE has made a start through providing an alternative publishing platform, but there are still challenges to be addressed before the platform becomes embedded in the European research infrastructures.

LERU suggests that what Europe may really need is the development of an open, inter-connected, publicly-owned infrastructure where all parts are inter-connected and speak to the rest. A single pan-European system is not likely to work successfully. LERU advocates that all interested bodies come together to examine possible rules of engagement for the construction of, and collaboration in, such new pan-European infrastructures and networks. The proposed agenda for the development of an open, inter-connected, publicly-owned infrastructure should be thought through and validated, with particular reference to costs and sustainability. LERU stresses that the next step should be to examine and build the case for such a development.

The draft conclusions are challenging where they advocate the development of public infrastructures which are connected to the EOSC – the European Open Science Cloud. LERU feels strongly that more needs to be done, by research-performing organisations themselves and by the EOSC, to develop the kinds of collaborations these draft conclusions wishes to see. The level of engagement between these partners is currently too low. LERU advocates that the Commission establish funding programmes and bidding calls specifically to attract universities into closer EOSC engagement. In this way the goals of FAIR and Open Data can be reached through creating an explicit programme of incentives.

The draft conclusions also emphasize the importance of skills development amongst researchers in areas such as licensing and copyright, Open Science and Open Data. LERU supports these suggestions. They place the researcher at the heart of the issue, and they help to embed skills and knowledge into the research landscape.

The need to tackle the issue of predatory publishing is strongly emphasized in the draft conclusions. LERU fully agrees with this statement. In the current ‘publish or perish’ culture, predatory publishers encourage the publication of as many outputs as possible, thereby gaining money from author-pays fees. The problem lies with such publishers, but the solution is one for research performing organisations and research funders. Quantity of publication is not the same as its intrinsic quality. There needs to be a change in research culture which recognises this.

A serious gap in the draft conclusions is the lack of any mention of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is perfectly possible for such automated systems to produce papers, with bibliographies and footnotes. It has been shown that some of these references are simply wrong and manufactured. This is not good for research or for society seeking solutions to the challenges it faces. There are ethical guidelines on the use of AI, produced by an EC High Level Expert Group at https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai in 2019. However, the development of AI technology is fast growing and threatens to outpace legislative frameworks, guidelines and the ability of research organisations to understand their implications. The omission of AI in this document on ‘high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing’ is an omission, as relevant materials need to be regularly updated and their presence widely publicised across Europe.

So, LERU welcomes the upcoming Council Conclusions on Open Access and Open Science. They take these issues to the next step by turning vision into practice and actively engage with Europe’s researchers. As the Conclusions are implemented at European and national level, the publishing and scholarly landscape should change further in the direction of Open Science, helping to alleviate the inequity which currently exists in this space.

[1] These comments are based on the draft of 20 April 2023, as embedded in https://sciencebusiness.net/news/Universities/eu-governments-rein-unfair-academic-publishers-and-unsustainable-fees .