Matthew Hono
(full video interview and transcript at the end of page)
I learned fairly quickly in my academic career that knowledge is guarded against the prying eyes of the un-privileged. Like many freshmen experience, my first writing class opened my eyes to the world of academic literature and scholarly work. I sifted through a plethora of sources to find ones that were even remotely related to my topic. Sometimes access to these sources was easy— a simple click. Some articles were mysteriously out of my grasp, however. Many click and read research adventures ended in a pay-wall. Some journals were guarded against my curiosity. I accepted this as an unavoidable feature of academic research. I did not question it, nor wonder if it had to be this way. Overwhelmed with the simple goal of finishing a paper, I hardly thought about or questioned the big business of academic journal publishing. I never considered the privilege of having a giant university database at my disposal.
When I gained my balance in college and the idea of a five-page research paper stopped filling me with overwhelming dread, I started to get curious. The structure I never questioned did not seem as infallible. I started wondering: Where does the scholarship come from? Do the professors and graduate students get paid for their work? How does the journal publishing model work? What are the issues? Is there an alternative to the way things have always been done? What is this “open-access” thing I’ve been hearing a lot about? Mona Ramonetti, Head of Scholarly Communication, and Christine Fena, Undergraduate Success Librarian, had some of the answers to my questions. They are both familiar faces for those who are acquainted with the library liaisons program. I picked their brains in an hour-long interview that you can watch or read below.
I started simple and asked if they could walk me through the traditional journal publishing model. I learned that the process of profit-driven academic publishing starts with an unlikely candidate: the taxpayer. Mona explained that research is often funded with public funds. According to the National Science Board, the government is the “largest funder of academic R&D, providing more than half (53%, or around $42 billion) of total funds in 2018” Publicly funded grants that eager researchers compete for are the backbone of academic scholarship. This is especially true at public universities, such as Stony Brook. With these grants, faculty complete their work and get their results. Knowledge, however, is useless without it being spread and taught; this is where publishers come in. Researchers agree to work with publishers to share their work and in return, publishers make a profit by charging for access. These publishers do not underestimate the value of this work, however, and charge expensive access fees. Mona estimates that “billions of dollars within the SUNY system” are spent on access to these journals. Access to these journals is also often a “package deal with various publishers.” It is a booming business for these publishers who often have a “20%-30% profit margin.” In 2011, it was estimated that the “science-publishing industry generated $9.4 billion in revenue.” Part of the reason for these soaring profits is that publishers can keep costs low in an online world, charging for the submission of articles themselves and not bearing the costs of peer review, which often is work done for free. The individuals who have to handle the burden of paying these publishers and allow them to profit handsomely are the same people who paid for the research in the first place—the taxpayers. According to Mona, “every year the taxpayer dollars are funding twice,” a model that is by design “unsustainable.”
According to Scientific America, the model was created during the 17th century, when scientific knowledge was largely spreading through letters, books, or scholarly society meetings, such as the British Royal Society, founded in 1660. Journals started being published in this particular environment, at a time when printing costs were high and distribution was burdensome. Mona explained that it was at a time when “scholarship was for the privileged” and education was only reserved for the elite. However, in the current digital world, many of the costs associated with publishing are no longer relevant, or much less so. Many journals are in online-only formats. Many professors also have begun sharing their results through platforms like Twitter. Does it still make sense to pay journals large sums for essentially the distribution of a pdf? As Mona stated, “the publishers are not suffering in any way, shape, or form,” due to digitalization. Yet, they have continuously stressed the costs of supporting online publishing, such as website maintenance, to justify their prices. The publishers recognize that institutions need the knowledge in their journals and can continue to raise prices, regardless of whether or not such costs are justified.
The requirement to buy into these humongously expensive journal bundles has obvious implications for institutions in lower-income regions, as well as smaller colleges within high-income nations, such as the United States. Many institutions simply do not have the funds to buy access. While there are workarounds to these cost barriers, this still remains a significant concern. For example, within the SUNY system, Mona explained that community colleges are “able to get access to a lot of things that they cannot afford” through collaboration with other SUNY institutions, a process called interlibrary loan. Students and faculty can send requests for materials that are at other participating libraries but not their own. But what about universities that do not benefit from a large public endowment and an established collaboration network, such as SUNY? What happens to the institutions in low-income nations? Should we simply accept that large portions of the world cannot access this caliber of information? The open access movement firmly says no we cannot.
The open-access movement rejects elitism and seeks to address these issues that plague traditional publishing. Open access is a broad movement where research outputs are distributed online, free of charge, and with fewer or no access barriers. Mona describes the movement as “social justice driven,” aiming to allow access to lower-income institutions so they can gain “access to the new, relevant, and the most up-to-date information” in all fields, from STEM to humanities.
Open access also allows for easier collaboration between researchers and helps science progress. In a world where most articles were freely available, researchers would be able to use code to find relationships between different articles and results. It would help researchers find out what is already done more easily and then build off that scholarship. The process of negotiating rights between various publishers would prove burdensome when trying to mine a large number of articles. Christine pointed out that having freely available datasets and articles was of particular benefit during the development of COVID vaccines and other therapeutics. In times of global emergency, open access helps ensure that the international community of researchers knows the most up-to-date findings, and understands how they can build off this work.
It is important to note that there are varying degrees of open access. The information is sometimes not entirely free but has significantly reduced access barriers. The two main open-access categories, “green” and “gold” open access, are explained on the library’s website. Green Open Access involves the author of the peer-reviewed material providing free access, while in Gold Open Access the journal itself provides access to the materials. In Gold Open Access, the journal supports itself through a variety of funding sources. Regardless of the specific form the open access movement takes, the principle of abolishing the barriers to scholarship underpins the movement.
Mona also explained that Stony Brook University has been at the forefront of the movement as well, providing many guides on how to find open access resources and encouraging researchers to publish in open access journals. In 2017, University Senate adopted a campus-wide “Open Access Policy” that emphasized the University’s commitment to the widespread sharing of research. This policy recognizes how making scholarship widely available helps researchers along with readers, highlighting that open access can increase the readership and citation rate for the researcher. In fact, because of this, it is often in the self-interest of researchers to pursue the open access route.
Mona also highlighted that Stony Brook hosts its own Academic Commons along with “three openly available journals” where anyone researching or creating at Stony Brook can distribute their work. As of April 2022, there are 2,174 papers in the repository, and these papers have been downloaded almost 150,000 times. The library offers a map that tracks the number of downloads in real-time, which emphasizes the global reach these sources have in the academic community.
Navigating through the library’s website, one also finds a list of open-access resources, which includes both familiar sources, like Google Scholar, as well as lesser-known resources such as Unpaywall, a plug-in that allows access to millions of scholarly articles.
While there is growing support for the open-access movement, university promotion systems can sometimes pull faculty in the direction of traditional journal publishing. Mona explained that many faculty feel the pressure to publish their work in “so-called prestigious journals,” such as “Nature, Science, and Lancet,” because attaining tenure is often tied to publishing in these journals due to their ‘prestige’. Mona stresses that “we’re still fighting the stigma” that open-access journals are less prestigious. These perceptions of prestige have a real impact on hindering the open access movement. A 2018 review found that only “28% of all scholarly publications are currently open access,” demonstrating that much knowledge is still locked behind paywalls. While great progress has been made, there remains opposition.
In any discussion of open access, it is also necessary to discuss open-educational resources. Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are in the public domain. These materials celebrate the same principle that open access scholarly articles do, but they are intended for a different audience. Instead of other academics, these resources aim to teach students and help instructors teach students. Increasing and supporting OER has a vast number of benefits, including helping students save money on expensive textbooks, allowing students to learn at their own rate beyond class time, and helping to promote collaboration between faculty of different universities.
The reader may be surprised that many of the websites you have leaned on over your academic career are considered OER, including Khan Academy and edX. OER can include a wide variety of helpful materials, including full courses, textbooks, homework, quizzes, and videos. In our interview, you can watch Mona go through the library’s list of open educational resources in-depth. Knowing where to look for extra-help resources that are free to use is vastly helpful for the next time I’m stumped by a statistics question.
While these resources are widely available, Mona stressed that it is still important to consider copyright when using them. Open access does not mean free of copyright. On the library website, they offer an overview of different licenses, such as CC BY and CC BY NC. These licenses all differ in the accreditation the author expects and the purposes you can use the work for. Mona explained that a main concern of researchers is that their work will be used in a way that goes against their values, such as by corporations seeking profit. Careful consideration of copyright must always be in the minds of students.
Towards the end of our conversation, I asked about what students can do to get involved. I have found that much of the discussion regarding open access and open educational resources are focused on professors and high-level researchers. At first glance, the ability to change a long-standing academic publishing model may appear out of the scope of undergraduate students. Mona, however, stressed that there are many ways that undergraduates can get involved in bringing about change. Firstly, she recognized that there are many students involved in research at the undergraduate level. She stressed that having conversations with your lab’s PI about where they are thinking about publishing this work could help “plant the seed” in their brain about open access. Students can let them know that it’s something they care about. She also stressed that students can actively seek out classes that utilize OER and ask professors if they are using openly available class materials. Students have the right to know, and asking can help apply pressure on professors to start utilizing them more. The more professors use OER, the lower the cost of class materials becomes. Lower material costs would allow higher education as a whole to become more accessible to lower-income students. Mona also pointed out that students can bring open education resources to the attention of their instructor. The instructor might then be inclined to make those materials a part of how they teach the class.
Mona also highlighted that the library hosts an annual Open Access Symposium every October. The event features keynote speaker panels and many undergraduate students attend and give testimonials regarding their experience with open access. Students who support OA and OER have given testimonials about their experiences helping professors create these resources and how they have utilized them.
Outside of university structures, the public can pressure lawmakers to pass legislation on open access. In 2019, there were rumors that the White House was considering an executive order that would require “federally funded research be immediately available to the public upon publication.” The executive order never materialized, but there were still protests from journal publishers. The general public can put this largely unaddressed issue on the agenda of government leaders.
As it stands, there are still barriers holding back open access that need to be overcome, such as prestige stigma, university tenure structure, the influence of publishing giants, and the general change adversity of academia. It is therefore imperative that students get involved in promoting the open access option. As Mona asserted, the goal of the movement is not to“dismantle what is in place,” but instead “supplement.” Recognizing that there is much work to be done in making scholarship more equitable is essential, and students are ultimately the backbone of any university. A united and educated student population can have a large impact on university policy and create the pressure needed to shake up a centuries-old publishing structure. Pressure from both the bottom-up and the top-down is required for change.
Open access and open educational resources have the power to democratize knowledge, ensure equitable knowledge for lower-income universities and regions, reduce the economic burden on taxpayers and students, and increase collaboration throughout academia. The open access movement is a chance to truly break away from the 17th-century mindset that academia and higher education are only for those with wealth. Social justice in research along with equality in housing, healthcare, and employment, needs to be a priority. Artificial barriers and publishing greed must not stand in the way of the education of any student or the steady progression of knowledge.
To learn more about open access, click here (resources provided by Christine Fena).
Full Interview Video:
Transcript here (edited by Matthew Hono, Megha Rao, Lee Cohen):
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