OA fee waivers must be offered by hybrid journals, too

Making scientific research accessible to as many people as possible who might benefit from it is a priority for the scholarly publishing industry. That’s why publishers have been introducing new open access (OA) journals, flipping subscription journals, encouraging the sharing of open data and growing the number of transformative agreements. All this has led to annual growth of 25 per cent in the number of physical science papers published with open access over the past decade, compared with 2 per cent for physics papers overall, according to the Dimensions database.

As another international open access week comes around, the advantages of publishing OA are clearer than ever to publishers, funders, librarians and researchers alike. Our own data shows that freely available papers are downloaded 80 per cent more than paywalled content and cited 30 per cent more.

For all its benefits, though, OA publication must be funded adequately and sustainably. The fact is that good publishing costs money. It takes a significant investment in time and resources to ensure rigorous and timely peer review processes, defend research integrity, maximise article visibility and preserve the scholarly record. For learned societies such as the Institute of Physics, the income we make from publishing activities is also critical to the charitable work we undertake to support science; 100 per cent of our funds go back into physics.

Where policies and funding are more established, we see OA becoming the norm. In Western Europe, for example, almost three-quarters of the articles we publish are now unpaywalled. However, the fact that OA publication remains predominantly paid for by article publication charges (APCs) presents a challenge to those not adequately funded by research grants, their institutions or institutional agreements. In South, Central and Latin America, as well as in India and Pakistan, approximately 80 per cent of physical science researchers cite a lack of funds as the main reason they have not published OA.

Many publishers offer support in the form of APC discounts and waivers. At IOP Publishing, our focus is on making this as simple as possible and on protecting author choice. Researchers from low-income economies can publish OA in our journals for free, with the fee waiver applied automatically. And researchers from lower-middle-income economies can publish OA for a flat charge of £500 in any IOPP journal. 

Importantly, both fully gold OA and hybrid journals are included in our APC waiver and discount programme. We do this because we firmly believe that our authors should be able to publish OA in the journal that best meets their needs. While fully gold OA journals are on the rise, there is not yet the breadth of sufficiently recognised, high-quality journals to serve the scale and range of demand from researchers, at least in many specialist fields of physics.

Last year, for example, only slightly less than one-third of articles in the physical sciences were published in fully OA journals. Hence, if APC discounts and waivers are only applied to such journals, that significantly limits the number of accessible OA publishing options for those who rely on financial support.

Currently, we are one of the few publishers to include hybrid journals in our discount and waiver programme, and it seems to be making a difference. Since we extended the policy to our entire journal portfolio in July 2022, we’ve seen a 96 per cent increase in OA articles in our hybrid journals from authors from lower- and middle-income economies.

We recognise that waivers and discounts alone are unlikely to provide the whole solution to creating an equitable fully OA publishing system in the longer term. But, at the moment, they are vital to assuring that published work represents the diversity of the scientific community and that papers are published in the journal that represents the best fit. 

Daniel Keirs is head of journal strategy and performance at IOP Publishing.