Understanding Open Access Publishing

NEW: On July 1, the NIH started requiring that all agency-funded research be made freely, immediately available. And in response, some academic publishers are giving scientists no choice but to pay thousands in open-access fees in order to publish their research and comply with the NIH mandate. In a year when federal funding has been exceptionally unreliable, scientists say they are stressed about spending grant dollars on unexpected and questionable #openaccess charges. Things don’t have to be this way, open-science experts say: These fees are imposed entirely by publishers. The most prominent examples are Springer Nature and Elsevier, for-profit enterprises that generate billions in revenue. “They’re responsible to shareholders, and not to the research community,” said Christopher Steven Marcum, who helped draft the federal government’s open-science data policy during the Biden administration. These policies are affecting researchers like Stephanie Rolin, who's been charged nearly $4,400 to publish her latest paper. “I think it is important that people have access to science,” she said. But she can't currently tap into her NIH grant, and even if she could, the open-access fee would eat into the $50,000 she’s allocated to annual #research costs. “If every paper that I publish is going to be 10 percent of my budget,” she said, “there’s only so many papers I’m going to be able to publish.” Read my latest for The Chronicle of Higher Education. And get in touch if you've got a story about how article-processing charges are affecting you! stephanie.lee@chronicle.com https://lnkd.in/gV_3RTdm

Interesting and exciting developments in open science! A recent Nature article highlights an innovative initiative from CERN to financially incentivize publishers that adopt open science practices. Under the new Open Science Mechanism, journals can earn higher payments by embracing practices like transparent peer review, linking research to datasets, and making content more accessible. This is a bold step forward, recognizing the values of openness and transparency in advancing research. As Kamran Naim, PhD of CERN aptly said, “Openness is the only really effective way of practicing science” in complex, global disciplines like particle physics. CERN’s model is a game-changer: it’s tying financial rewards to measurable progress in open science, and working with publishers who, are the gate keepers of quality, and can make interventions with authors at the right time in the publication workflows. This actually resonates deeply with what we’re doing at DataSeerAI and our Snapshot product — helping publishers, funders and institutions take meaningful steps towards publishing transparent, open and reproducible research. As the open science movement grows, initiatives like CERN’s—and tools like DataSeer—are paving the way for a more equitable and collaborative research ecosystem. #OpenScience #OpenData #ScholarlyPublishing #CERN https://lnkd.in/ecJAFE_v

$3,000 open-access fee isn't just steep - it's creating a new form of academic inequality in 2025. In the AI era, if your research isn’t open access, it may not even exist. Not to AI. Not to the next generation of researchers. Not to anyone relying on tools like Elicit, Scite, or Scispace to surface the literature. That’s the reality we’re heading into. And we’re not fully ready for it. Here’s what’s happening 👇 AI tools mostly read what’s publicly available online. They prioritize open access by default—not by principle, but because that’s what they can see. Closed-access papers? Many of them are invisible to AI. Sure, newer agentic AI (like Deep Research) now bypass paywalls or access shady archives. But those tools aren’t mainstream (yet). Most don’t have access to them. And that creates a quiet split in visibility: → Those who can afford open access = more citations, more AI reads, more impact. → Those who can’t = invisible. That’s the part that worries me. We’ve seen this before. Visibility tied to privilege. Access tied to resources. And now, AI might amplify that divide. 7 strategies to tip the balance in smart, ethical ways: 1️⃣ Preprint Servers (Gold Standard for AI Access) 2️⃣ Conference Archives That Host Full Papers 3️⃣ Institutional Repositories 4️⃣ Government-Funded Collaborations 5️⃣ Attach Full PDFs to Research Profiles 6️⃣ Publish in Smarter OA Journals 7️⃣ Use Structured Metadata Will AI finally push the big journals to go fully open access? Maybe. But until then, we’re in a transition phase. And in this phase, discoverability isn’t just about what you write. It’s about where and how you publish it. So make it count. Because in the AI world, being invisible isn’t a reflection of your work’s value—it’s just a technicality. One you can control. What are some other strategies you use for increasing visibility?- --- P.S. Join my inner circle of 5000+ researchers for exclusive, actionable advice you won’t find anywhere else HERE: https://lnkd.in/e39x8W_P BONUS: When you subscribe, you instantly unlock my Research Idea GPT and Manuscript Outline Blueprint. Please reshare 🔄 if you got some value out of this...

Open Access Can Help: Some Confirmation Publishing research openly online is intended to increase access, including internationally. But does open access really do so? A recently published study adds evidence that it does. The study, from Australia and New Zealand, was reported this month in the journal Scientometrics. Titled “Open Access Research Outputs Receive More Diverse Citations,” the article is at https://lnkd.in/gMunhgjZ. (And yes, it is openly accessible.) A major finding, based on analysis of extensive bibliographic data, is that compared with others, publications that are open access receive citations by authors in more countries. The article’s abstract, which summarizes the research, is as follows: “The goal of open access is to allow more people to read and use research outputs. An observed association between highly cited research outputs and open access has been claimed as evidence of increased usage of the research, but this remains controversial. A higher citation count also does not necessarily imply wider usage such as citations by authors from more places. A knowledge gap exists in our understanding of who gets to use open access research outputs and where users are located. Here we address this gap by examining the association between an output’s open access status and the diversity of research outputs that cite it. By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium–low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it.” I learned of this research from a news story about it from Science magazine. The story, which presents highlights of the Scientometrics article and provides context, appears at https://lnkd.in/ggncKcMP. 

Article processing charges remain one of the most pressing issues of open access publishing. The financial burden is problematic for many researchers, especially those in low-income regions or without significant funding. The publishing fees can be prohibitively expensive. This model risks excluding talented individuals from contributing to scientific discourse simply because they cannot afford to pay. While some initiatives offer reduced fees, they often fail to address the systemic barriers that persist. Additionally, reliance on Article processing charges can create a disparity in published research. Institutions with larger budgets can publish more frequently in prestigious journals. In contrast, those with limited resources struggle to gain recognition. This leads to an uneven playing field where only a select few voices are amplified. The stigma around open access publishing can also deter researchers. Concerns about journal reputability often lead to hesitation. Many choose traditional publishing routes that may not be as accessible. This perception hinders the widespread adoption of open access and entrenches existing inequalities. In summary, while open access publishing has great potential, financial barriers must be addressed. Without action, we risk favoring wealth over merit, stifling innovation and diversity in scientific research. We must advocate for solutions that ensure equitable access for all researchers, regardless of their financial circumstances.  Have you published an open access article recently? What’s your experience?  #OpenAccess #ResearchEquity #AcademicPublishing

ArXiv and open access articles are cited much more by AI Like most professors, when I'm not complaining about AI, or writing articles about the problems caused by AI, I'm using AI as part of my work. Recently, I had an interesting experience in attempting to survey a new (to me) research area related to some WiFi implementation issues. I did a series of searchers using the new GPT 5. Of course, I'm also doing a review of the literature in other ways as well. I have found AI based searching to be one of many possible tools to use. During the searching, I asked the AI to give me references that I could cite with appropriate links. All the references I got were to technical preprints that were on the arXiv preprint server, another preprint source like ResearchGate or had appeared as open access often in pay-to-publish MDPI journals. Papers that appeared behind the paywall in IEEE Xplore, where I usually publish, did not appear. I tried to get GPT 5 to give me some links to papers from IEEE Xplore, but it indicated it was blocked from searching there. It did give me some publications from arXiv that may also be found on IEEE Xplore. What does this mean? Publications that appear in what are considered the most prestigious IEEE journals (at least in my research area) are locked behind a paywall. As people increasingly use AI to help in literature reviews, these ``prestigious'' papers will get overlooked in favor of non-peer reviewed papers or open access papers. For researchers who still want visibility, the easiest option is to post preprints on arXiv or a similar online sources. Another possibility is to choose an alternative quality option (if available) that will result in something that gets crawled by the AI engines. A final option is to is to pay the high fees to make a paper open access so that it doesn't live behind the paywall (though I'm not totally sure this will work in all cases). Long term, this is yet another crack in the conventional publishing model. We authors are already asked to pay overlength page-charge fees, despite that submitting a paper less than the maximum length is less likely to be accepted. We are expected to review for free. We have to deal with increasingly noisy or nonsensical reviews and decisions by editors that don't read the paper. Funding is tight (in the US) making it hard to fund additional open access fees on top of the overlength page charge fees. It might be a good time to strategize again about how and where we publish.