Possible Inadverted Consequences of Open Access Policies on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Gunnar Sivertsen asked in his presentation, is APC a paywall to perform research and how can we maintain equity, diversity and inclusion in research? I want to comment on Gunnar’s presentation by highlighting some potential inadverted consequences of the outcomes of open access transition to language diversity and inclusion of the social sciences and humanities.

1. I begin by introducing the perspective of the Helsinki Initiative on multilingualism in Scholarly Communication. One of the main arguments of this Initiative (highlighted in blue) is that non-profit scholarly publishers, typically national scholarly societies and research organisations, make publishing in local languages possible. Their scholar-led journals need sufficient resources to maintain high standards of scholarly publishing, and to make a sustainable transition to open access publishing.
2. Gunnar showed us a picture, in which we could see how publishing in DOAJ indexed journals has vastly increased in Norway and Finland during the past decade, however, we also saw that this growth is mainly in the APC-based journals (especially MDPI and Frontiers). A more detailed analysis of the publication languages in the Finnish data 2018-2020 shows that practically all articles published in the APC-based journals are in English in both STEM fields and the SSH. This is in a stark contrast to the articles from Finland published in the Diamond OA journals, of which 5% in STEM fields and 27% in the SSH are in Finland’s national languages – Finnish and Swedish. In addition, 5% of the articles in Diamond OA journals are in languages other than English, Finnish or Swedish. The same degree of multilingualism is visible also in the output published outside DOAJ, which is of course remains the vast majority of the Finnish output.
3. Secondly, I address equity, diversity and inclusion from the perspective of equality between fields. In the figure on the left we can see that using the Finnish publication data from 2018-2020, APC-based Gold OA journals in DOAJ serve mainly STEM fields: 86 % of the article output from STEM fields but only 35 % from the SSH fields goes to APC-based journals. Another important aspect is that (if you look at the figure on the right) DOAJ-indexed journals serve fields very differently. The SSH fields have been for decades disadvantaged in assessment and funding procedures across the world due to internationalization policies, which have identified excellence as articles published in English language journals indexed in the Web of Science or Scopus. Now there is a threat that the SSH fields in general, and certain disciplines in particular (e.g. law), find themselves marginalized again if Gold OA or DOAJ indexing would be used as criterion in evaluation and funding procedures. Part of the problem is of course that in the SSH fields, publishing in books and languages other than English remains important.

So, to return to Gunnar’s questions, my simple answers are that

• yes, APC is a paywall at least to publishing for researchers from less resourceful countries, institutions and fields, and it seems to decrease rather than increase language diversity and fair representation of different fields in the open access publishing environment.  
• and we can only maintain equity, diversity and inclusion by investing strongly in the development of the non-profit Diamond OA publishing sector.