September 6, 2018 Preprint Open Access

We're still failing to deliver open access and solve the serials crisis: to succeed we need a digital transformation of scholarly communication using internet-era principles.

Green, Toby

A year ago, I concluded that we had failed in our quest to make scholarship open access (OA): the race had been won by pirates like SciHub (Green, 2017). Twelve months on, how do things look?

Key points:

• We’re still failing to deliver open access (OA): around a fifth of new articles will be born free in 2018, roughly the same as in 2017.
• Librarians, funders and negotiators are getting tougher with publishers but offsetting, ‘Publish and Read’, deals based on APCs won’t deliver OA for all or solve the serials crisis.
• The authors of Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin OA declarations foresaw three changes with the coming of the internet. Flipping to a barrier to publish (APCs) from a barrier to read (subscriptions) wasn’t one of them.
• By itself, OA won’t reduce costs to solve the serials crisis: a digital transformation of scholarly communications based on internet-era principles is needed. 
• Following the internet-era principle of ‘fail-fast’, what if papers are first posted as preprints and only if they succeed in gaining attention will editors invite submission to their journal
• In clinging onto traditional journals to advance the careers of the few (authors), OA is delayed for the many (readers): rebuilding the reputation economy to accept preprints could be the catalyst to deliver OA, solve the serials crisis and drive out predatory journals