The mirage of Open Access: articles free of charge for citizens are strangling universities

Alberto Caselli, librarian at the European University Institute, often reminds me of the phrase from the novel The Cattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change."

When the publication was made in 2002, Budapest Open Access Initiative, Many librarians felt that a new era had begun for scholarly communication. The goal seemed unquestionable: to make publicly funded research accessible to all of society, without barriers. Librarians and researchers embraced Open Access as an alternative to the multimillion-dollar subscription model, convinced that the internet could democratize knowledge and reduce the financial pressure on academic libraries.

More than twenty years later, the situation is far from those expectations. It's true that there are more articles freely accessible than ever before, but it's also true that academic libraries continue to bear a growing financial burden, under new contractual arrangements that keep them prisoners of the publishers themselves. If before, people paid to read, now they pay to publish. This is the beginning of the so-called golden model (Gold Open Access), which has spread through the so-called transformative agreements, that the only thing they have transformed is the accounting.

From paying to access to paying to publish

The data confirms this. In Germany, the consortium through which negotiations are held with scientific information providers, Projekt DEAL, established a fee of €2,750 per article with the publisher Wiley. This means that authors must pay Wiley €2,750 to publish their article in a journal. With Springer Nature, the fee is €2,600 per article. Instead of paying for access, authors pay for publication, but the final amounts do not represent any savings.

The Swedish National Library, for its part, reported that spending on scientific publishing in 2022 amounted to €65 million, a 3.7% increase compared to the previous year. It also acknowledges that costs have continued to rise since 2016.

In the UK, JISC, a non-profit organisation, has said that the outcome of its negotiations has led to such an unsustainable model that it has begun to design an exit strategy. transformative agreements, seeking more flexible ways.

At a global level, the outlook is even more striking. The market for pay to publish It was valued at around $1.6 billion in 2021 and was already expected to exceed $2 billion in 2024. In other words, the new model has not reduced spending, but rather created a parallel market of equivalent magnitude to the previous one.

The model impoverishes the role of libraries

These dynamics have diminished the role of libraries, guarantors of access to and preservation of knowledge, to become billing agencies. Instead of negotiating subscriptions, they negotiate article rates. Instead of defending the university communities' right to read, they manage their researchers' publishing opportunities.

The model also doesn't favor researchers; high costs can determine where to publish, favoring journals from large publishers over other options. This further reinforces market concentration and hinders the emergence of alternative models. Academic evaluation criteria, which continue to give excessive weight to prestigious journals controlled by commercial publishers, act as an incentive for researchers to follow the monopolistic trend, even if it entails increasing costs for their own institutions.

Some may argue that the result has been positive for readers: a greater number of articles can now be accessed. free of chargeKnowledge seems free for citizens, but it entails growing and unsustainable bills for universities. The new model favors monopolistic and opaque practices, and citizens still pay the price for what has already been financed with public money.

Turn the situation around

To reverse this situation, we must rethink the mechanisms for evaluating research. As long as academic advancement remains tied to high-impact journals owned by a few publishing conglomerates, any alternative will struggle to establish itself. Universities and evaluation and funding agencies have an enormous responsibility here: to recognize and value publication in non-commercial channels, promote diversity of models, and reduce the power of traditional journals. Otherwise, we will continue with a flawed and biased system.

There are alternatives; the green model (green Open Access), based on institutional repositories, is an economically sustainable path that allows for visibility and access to research results without transferring huge amounts of money to intermediaries with little added value. However, it must be admitted that neither universities nor evaluation or funding agencies have worked on evaluation mechanisms. We are way behind schedule.

If we want science to be truly open and at the service of society, we will have to commit decisively to ambitious paths. Knowledge cannot be just another commodity in the hands of an oligopoly. It must be a common good, managed collectively and funded fairly. Libraries, which have always been guardians of knowledge, deserve a system that liberates them, not one that turns them into the checkout counter of a market disguised as a revolution.