Who gets to publish?

The first time I heard about the idea of 'open access' (OA) publications was in 2004. I was a post-doctoral scholar and had gone to a research conference. This was a time when university libraries and large labs would get hard copies of journals, and PDFs of published papers were not nearly as common as they are now. At the conference that I went to, I was inspired by the idea of having unfettered access to knowledge, research and discovery, regardless of one's financial ability. I was sold on the idea that someone in Boston, Bogota or Bahawalpur could read a paper, whether or not that person was affiliated with a rich institution.

Some twenty years later, that promise has not lived up to its promise. In fact, it has increased inequity between the rich and the poor institutions, the haves and the have-nots. Open access publications - which have become quite common in my discipline and many others - rely on the researchers having to pay 'article processing charges' or APC to the journals. The journals argue that this cost is necessary to make the publication available to anyone who wants it. For some prestigious journals like Nature this cost can be as much as $12,000 for a single article. For many others, the number may not be as high, but it is often in several thousand dollars. There are some discounts and waivers available, but applying for waiver is not straightforward and the process is often opaque. For many middle-income countries, only a 50% waiver is available, meaning that the researcher needs to cough up several thousand dollars if he or she wants to publish a couple of papers a year. This amount may be more than their entire research budget for a year or more. To add insult to injury, it is worth noting that some of the leading journal publishing companies made hundreds of millions of US dollars in profits (mind you I am talking about profit, not revenue here) last year alone. A couple were raking in close to a billion US dollars. The business model for journals in open access is both simple and deeply problematic: charge extremely high fees that climb from year to year to the researchers (who do the work) and pay nothing to the reviewers (who carry the next biggest share of the process by evaluating the work of the researchers).

What this has meant is that if a researcher does not have money to publish, they will not be able to get their paper in many journals that are only open access now. I have been extremely fortunate to have decent research funding, but my own ability to publish is not simply based on whether I have something interesting to share, but whether I have an insane amount to spare to pay the open access fees. For others, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, it is a choice between whether to spend already dwindling funding on research expenses (consumables, salaries, travel, field work) or publishing. At the same time, in a world where there is pressure to publish is even greater, new journals with a pay-to-publish model, but dubious quality have proliferated.

At a recent conference on human rights and higher education, I heard from university administrators in low-income countries pleading for a new model, arguing that the current open access system is exploitative and unfair. Journals in high-income countries charge exorbitant fees and local journals in low- and middle-income countries struggle with limited resources to publish regularly, hire editors or staff to ensure quality control, or fight the inherent bias that exists against them. They may not even be listed in international databases. A key issue, in my opinion, is that while access has increased with open access, the opportunity to publish has become more constrained. A fairer and more open world does not simply depend on whether anyone can access knowledge, but also on whether with appropriate quality controls and robust review that ensure rigour and ethics, anyone can also publish. Right now, we are far from that world.