The problem mainly concerns old, prestigious journals having to adapt to the demands of funders to offer the opportunity to make individual articles openly accessible and starting to provide open access in exchange of payment, so-called hybrid Open Access. Furthermore, the publishers charge universities an additional time through costly subscriptions, so-called “double dipping”.
“The individual researcher is forced to pay up to SEK 30,000 in order to publish an article at a very late stage. Many researchers are unaware of the Open Access requirement, and that being published in prestigious journals is very expensive”, says Aron Lindhagen, who works in research support at the libraries of the Faculties of Humanities and Theology.
All Swedish public funding bodies require research results to be published with Open Access, and also in the rest of Europe and the United States, Open Access is often a requirement.
“Researchers get squeezed between the funders who require Open Access and the research publishers who make a lot of money. High academic impact can make a researcher’s career, which gives the reputable scientific journals a monopoly position.”
It is possible to apply for funding for Open Access publication, but this must usually be included in the initial application for research funding, and then it can be difficult to predict how many articles the project will generate and which journals will want to publish your work.
The publishers will later implement an additional charge. Universities have to subscribe to the journals, and a subscription to the most prestigious journals can cost up to SEK 350,000 per year in order to provide the contents to the university’s staff and students. Lund University pays SEK 1.4 million for an annual subscription to Nature that includes approximately 60 journals, in which Nature is the most important but also the most expensive. An annual subscription to Science costs SEK 150,000. The major publishing houses are like any other business, but with exceptionally large profit margins. One example is the publishing house Elsevier, which includes journals such as The Lancet and Cell. The company is praised in the Financial Times for its profit margin of 34 per cent. The growing dissatisfaction with the publishing houses has resulted in universities coming together to pursue the issue collectively.
“LERU has now issued a petition against scientific publishers making so much money at the universities’ expense. In Europe, it is a matter of hundreds of millions of euros in tax money intended for research or education”, says Aron Lindhagen.
LU takes an active part in LERU, which is a European collaboration between research-intensive universities. Back in 2012, Harvard University protested against the publishers’ exorbitant subscription and Open Access fees, arguing that it was an unsustainable exploitation of universities.
“The public is forced to pay double – so-called double dipping – as subscriptions are soaring at the same time as researchers are forced to pay to make their article openly accessible”, says Aron Lindhagen.
Text: Jenny Loftrup
Photo: Gunnar Menander
