Since the early 2010s, more than half of peer-reviewed journal articles have been published by the so-called oligopoly of academic publishers: Elsevier, SAGE, Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. These companies make immense profits from publishing scholarly journals, traditionally through subscriptions from academic libraries, the reader pays model. With more and more libraries cancelling so-called ‘Big Deals’, these publishers have expanded their revenues by making authors pay article processing charges (APCs) for open access (OA) publishing. The author-pays model creates inequities and barriers that exclude many from publishing, such as underrepresented groups or researchers from less-resourced countries. This presentation demonstrates the growth of gold and hybrid OA articles published in oligopoly journals indexed in the Web of Science and provides evidence of the amount of APCs paid in Canada and globally. It highlights the inequities of the author-pays model and discusses alternative routes to OA.
This event is a public lecture component of the Knowledge Equity and Justice Spring Seminar.
Speakers
Stefanie Haustein is associate professor at the School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) at University of Ottawa. She also co-directs the Scholarly Communications Lab (ScholCommLab), an interdisciplinary team of researchers based in Ottawa and Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on scholarly communication, bibliometrics, and open scholarship.
Leigh-Ann Butler is a Master’s student at ÉSIS and member of the ScholCommLab, conducting thesis work on article processing charges paid for gold and hybrid open access articles by Canadian researchers to the oligopoly of academic publishers. Leigh-Ann is also a policy analyst at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).