“The future of open research policy should be evidence based”
Phillip A. Sharp, William B. Bonvillian, Amy Brand, Michael Stebbins
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 30, 2024
Q&A with Phillip Sharp and Amy Brand on the Future of Open Access Publishing
MIT News, November 30, 2023
The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:
Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors
Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies
A dramatic increase in the number of “predatory” journals with substandard peer review
Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing.
The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.