I missed this important statement from cOAlition S back in June:

Scientific publishing is evolving rapidly. A number of initiatives have moved away from the notion that peer-reviewed articles must be published in traditional Open Access journals or platforms. They provide peer review services that are entirely independent from such journals or platforms. These include Peer Community in (PCI), Sciety, Next Generation Repositories, Notify Project, PREreview, and Review Commons, to name a few. These initiatives give the author the freedom to decide how and when to disseminate their peer-reviewed article.

The explicit point is to help break the journal prestige economy:

In light of the accelerating development of these journal-independent peer-review services, cOAlition S would like to explicitly state that ‘peer reviewed publications’ – defined here as scholarly papers that have been subject to a journal-independent standard peer review process with an implicit or explicit validation– are considered by most cOAlition S organisations to be of equivalent merit and status as peer-reviewed publications that are published in a recognised journal or on a platform.

From the department of creeping privatization: EdSurge’s Daniel Mollenkamp on Coursera’s move to sign university deals for industry-friendly certificates in the wake of falling enrollments:

To Coursera, the online learning platform and edtech “unicorn” that went public last year, this may represent an opportunity to serve as an institutional bridge for some of these universities in the struggle to stop the bleeding. The company’s latest attempt, launched today, is its “Career Academy for Institutions,” a program that stitches together the company’s existing career certificates with some new offerings.

Never let an enrollment crisis go to waste.

Patrick Dunleavy, writing for the LSE Impact blog:

Other US-based promoters of open science, like the Centre for Open Science, also cover mainly the quantitative disciplines in social sciences (like psychology and health studies). Yet COS’s somewhat disturbing strategy for accelerating cultural change towards ‘open’ starts with ‘Make it Easy’, goes through ‘Make it Normative (sic)’ and then ‘Make it Rewarding’, but ends up with ‘Make it Required’. No apparent explanation is given of how that last stage would work outside of laboratory or experimental work, some kinds of randomized control trials, or purely computational research. A careful analysis of many psychology journals’ policies by Prosser et al suggests that ‘open science risks becoming a closed door’ for qualitative researchers in the discipline.

The piece is a good primer on the hidden parochialism of “Open Science” as a phrase and, to some extent, a movement. Make room for qualitative social scientists, Dunleavy suggests, and you’ll create space for humanists too:

Valuable as the insights about open science in STEMM disciplines are, a broader and more inclusive approach is needed if ‘open’ is to develop fully across the social sciences – in the process hopefully reshaping not just into crossover disciplines with the humanities (like law, social and political philosophy, contemporary history and the digital humanities), but also spilling over into a wider range of humanities subjects (like older history, philosophy and literature studies).

Marcio Rodrigues and his Brazilian colleagues, in a recent commentary, noting that funded researchers in Brazil have roughly $2,000 a year to conduct their studies:

A median cost of APCs equal to USD 2,600 was recently estimated. However, APCs can cost more than USD 10,000. It is noteworthy mentioning that the funding models discussed herein for the Brazilian system and others are not supposed to cover only APCs, but everything else. In summary, it is virtually impossible to cover APCs under these conditions, although it means exclusion from publishing open access papers.

From the paper:

To be inclusive, the APC system must change, and this is urgent. If not, scientists from low-to-medium income regions will not have their science known by the scientific community and the people in general. This situation strikingly contrasts with the widely accepted concept that science is universal by nature, and enhances the already existence of inequalities in science, negatively impacting the scientific-derived benefits for the people(s).

KU Leuven's Demmy Verbeke and Laura Mesotten, writing in UKSG Insights on their APC-free Fund for Fair Open Access:

We should consider why we strive for OA. If it is only to arrange broader access to the published record, then the easiest approach undoubtedly is to continue working with the traditional partners in scholarly communication and simply accept the rise in costs. But what about the other hopes and expectations for OA?

Verbeke and Mesotten go on to cite the aims and aspirations that the current APC/read-and-publish tragedy sidesteps:

What about the goal to open up participation in scholarship, thus overcoming the exclusivity enjoyed by researchers affiliated with the richest universities in the world – which implies that you cannot trade a barrier to reading for a barrier to publishing (as happens in approaches to OA which make use of author-facing charges)? What about the desire to regain control, as an academic community, of the ecosystem of scholarly communication – which will not happen if authors continue to give up copyright in exchange for access to this ecosystem? And what about the wish to control the cost of scholarly communication – which we abandon if we are willing to pay whatever it takes to be able to publish in OA?

From yesterday's blockbuster White House announcement on immediate OA for federally funded research:

Improving public access policies across the U.S. government to promote the rapid sharing of federally funded research data with appropriate protections and accountability measures will allow for greater validity of research results and more equitable access to data resources aligned with these ideals. To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research.

The no-embargo guidance, to be implemented by federal funding agencies over the next couple of years, is a huge win, full stop. SPARC North America and the ARL are right to celebrate the news. It is, in effect, a single-memo Plan (U.)S.

Still: the unintended consequences. Without lots of vigilance and careful policy revision, the edict—to be implemented across many agencies—could end up enthroning the article processing charge (APC).

Here's the basic problem. As a growing number of studies document, most of the world's academic authors (including most humanities and social science authors in the U.S.) can't afford the often-usurious fees. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, is the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls. Thus the prevailing APC regime fixes one barrier to access, for readers, by erecting another, for authors.

The big risk is that the new policy will inadvertently crown the author-excluding APC. Thanks to the aggressive, profit-protecting moves of the big five publishers as well as some friendly fire from the Europeans' Plan S, the APC is already in the pole position. Rich North American universities and well-heeled European nations have been signing so-called “read-and-publish” deals with the publishers for years now—deals that cover APCs for their faculty alone. In the last two years the pace of deal-making has picking up, under the "transformative agreement" euphemism—starving library budgets that could otherwise fund fee-free OA publishing. And since author fees are stitched into the deals, the approach serves to ratify—and secure in place—a scholarly publishing system underwritten by the APC.

So the OA transition is already leaning APC. The new U.S. policy could tip the scales still further—that's the unintended consequence that needs addressing.

It's true that the memo endorses the so-called "green" route, whereby scholars self-archive their accepted, but unformatted papers in nonprofit repositories. The new policy removes publishers' ability to impose an embargo—a very happy development indeed.

Still, the White House memo is alarmingly mute on how its OA mandates will be funded, when scholars take the "gold" route: open access to the formatted version-of-record. The only reference I could find is a single line, five pages into the eight-page guidance:

In consultation with OMB [Office of Budget and Budget], federal agencies should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs and costs associated with submission, curation, management of data, and special handling instructions as allowable expenses in all research budget

Elsevier and Springer Nature will tell you that $3,000 to $12,000 per article is perfectly "reasonable." That word is an invitation for cost-concealing abuse. The rest of the language here, moreover, guides agencies to cover what are, in everything but name, APCs. Author-facing charges, in other words, seem to be baked into the plan—with no mention, as far as I can see, of just alternatives like collective funding.

The problem is potentially worse, since there's no reference to any future ban on publishing in "hybrid" journals—those titles which accept APC-funded OA articles but paywall the rest. Librarians and other funders have rightly accused publishers of double-dipping with their hybrid titles—by charging for APCs and subscriptions. That's one of the reasons the European Plan S is phasing in a hybrid-journal ban—one that isn't telegraphed anywhere in yesterday's U.S. guidance.

There is, however, some reason for optimism. The White House memo includes an additional reference to the funding question—one that calls out, in a single crucial clause, the core issue. It is, alas, buried in a long list of charges to be carried out by a designated federal committee:

consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.

It's this language, apparently, that led SPARC North America's Heather Joseph to downplay the risk of author-excluding fees. She is quoted in today's Chronicle coverage [paywalled]:

Some commentators worried that publishers would raise the article-processing charges, or APCs, associated with open-access publishing in their journals. But [Heather] Joseph, of the academic-resources coalition [SPARC], said she hopes language in the guidance that encourages “measures to reduce inequities in publishing,” particularly among early-career scholars and those from underserved backgrounds, will prevent that.

And:

“Those publishers that try to charge ridiculously high APCs will find it difficult, because ‘inequity in publishing’ means ‘I’m priced out of being able to publish. I can’t afford to contribute my research article to the scientific record,’” Joseph said. The White House’s blog post also noted that it was working to ensure “support for more vulnerable members of the research ecosystem unable to pay rising costs associated with publishing open-access articles.”

I'm far less sanguine. We certainly can't rely on blog-post prose, especially since the actual memo's reference ("…reduce inequities in publishing of…") amounts to a single, obscurely placed clause.

By contrast, Ithaka S+R's Roger Schonfeld, quoted in Inside Higher Ed, cuts to the read-and-publish chase:

“Over all, this is a very important and positive development for openness, but not without second-order consequences,” said Roger Schonfeld, vice president of organizational strategy at Ithaka, a nonprofit focused on improving access to knowledge and education around the world. “The policy guidance provides a route to paying for data set deposit, through researcher grants, which should further stimulate the data repository ecosystem. But it is less clear how the mandate for free publications will be paid for, which may trouble some of the scholarly publishers, particularly those without well-developed U.S. strategy for transformative agreements.”

When it comes to policy, good intentions aren't nearly enough. It's easy to imagine publishers of all kinds scrambling to make read-and-publish deals to ensure that federally funded authors' fees will be covered. In that scenario, the APC model would win new, and perhaps decisive, momentum.

Indeed, that's the most likely scenario—at least without steady pressure for policy revision, to include, for example, APC caps and funding for alternative models. Those of us in the open authorship movement—fighting to keep the author-excluding APC at bay—should welcome the new mandate, but only provisionally. This could easily become a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.