Audrey Smith and co-authors, in a study published in MIT's Quantitative Science Studies late last year, with still more evidence that APCs exclude authors from the Global South:

We found that for the overwhelming majority of articles published in the Mirror-Parent ecosystem, the Author Geographic Diversity of articles requiring APCs was significantly lower than that of articles requiring no fee. This was true regardless of whether the OA articles were published in the established Parent journals or the Gold OA Mirrors. The overwhelming majority of these OA articles also had lead authors based in high-income countries. Despite being based in countries nominally eligible for APC waivers, authors from middle-income countries published proportionately few OA articles, but authors in low-income countries published almost entirely subscription-only articles in Parent journals. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that APCs are a barrier to OA publication by scientists from the low-income countries of the Global South.

The paper's research design is deliciously clever: Smith et al. probe Elsevier's own, deeply cynical use of so-called “mirror” journals—whereby a hybrid journal is cloned, complete with editorial board, in order to create a sham, Plan S-compliant gold OA title. (To its credit, Coalition S has slapped down the shameless ploy.) The paper's authors are, in effect, turning OA lemons into methodological lemonade, by using the mirror-parent journal pairing as a kind of natural experiment:

[…] the ability to compare OA articles published in Mirror and Parent journals means that we can control for many of the factors influencing these decisions. Most notably, the journals in a Mirror-Parent pair have identical editorial boards, editorial philosophy, and publication priorities.

The article processing charge (APC)—and its stealthy cousin, the read-and-publish deal—are finally coming under the ferocious assault that they deserve. This last year, both the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation and the Budapest Open Access Initiative came out strong against the author-excluding APC.

And consider the last month alone:

July 12

Emilio Delgado Lopez-Cozar and Ramon Feentsra, writing in World.edu on the “refusal to pay to publish”:

the publishing business is based on a great paradox: scientists must pay to publish articles based on research that consumes enormous economic resources financed by the universities and research centers where they work or by public funding agencies. […] Public capital at the service of private interests.

July 15

The University of Nigeria’s Oluchi Ojinamma Okere, writing in Research Information:

With an average annual salary of about €4,200 ($4,500), considering publishing a single article in even a moderately priced journal at about €1,220 ($1,510) is almost preposterous for an African academic. […] [H]ighly priced publication fees are another form of discrimination perpetuated by many gold, open access APC-based journals against disadvantaged researchers in an era that prides itself with openness, globalisation, diversity and sustainability.

July 18

MIT’s Katharine Dunn, in an Open Interview:

APCs and “read and publish” agreements are arguably a kind of commercial open access that exclude a lot of people, and, as we all know, there are other ways to go about opening up scholarship.

August 1

Pilar Santidrián Tomillo and colleagues, writing in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on how OA “perpetuates differences between higher- and lower-income countries”:

Unfortunately, scientists who lack adequate funding, especially those based in lower-income countries, have been and continue to be largely restricted from OA publishing. […] If the OA movement had – from the beginning – included the perspective of scientists from lower-income countries, such inequity might have been anticipated and avoided.

August 6

Leigh-Ann Butler and her University of Ottawa colleagues, in a conference proceedings:

Instead of making scholarly publishing sustainable and accessible for all, exorbitant APCs (and more recently transformative agreements) preserve the status quo of the academic publishing market. The author-pays model excludes large parts of the academic community from publishing, giving preference to well-funded authorsand institutions, those at a later career stage, disciplines, countries, and excludes marginalized communities. Instead of removing barriers from academic publishing, OA APCs have shifted inequities from readers to authors, often affecting those same individuals.

August 8

From the press release announcing Arcadia’s $3.6 million grant to the Redalyc and AmeliCA:

There is no need of commercial negotiations or “transformative agreements” in a non-profit Acceso Abierto [Open Access] environment since research findings are communicated in Open Access without economic restrictions. Diamond Acceso Abierto works against the inflationary market caused by APC charges. […] By supporting open infrastructures for diamond Acceso Abierto, an economically more sustainable and more inclusive model is being strengthened. One, that doesn’t exclude less-favoured societal sectors.

August 9

COAR’s Kathleen Shearer, writing in Times Higher Education on commercial publishers' “huge financial stake in transitioning the system to a pay-to-publish model to maintain their significant profits”:

Of course, we could quickly get to universal open access if we paid publishers the vast sums in open access fees they demand. But, in a system where the actual costs of publishing represent a small portion of the per article fees charged, wouldn’t this money be better spent if it were invested back into research itself?

August 11 (today)

And Gunnar Sivertsen and Lin Zhang, writing in the LSE Impact blog on APCs as the “new enclosure of research”:

[W]e consider the mainstreaming of APCs as a ‘paywall’ to perform research, using the same term as is used to characterise the subscription model in publishing from a reader’s perspective. […] While intended to make the scientific literature more accessible, it is now reported that OA publishing fees deter researchers in the global south from performing research and our own study has already raised the same concern from an African perspective. […] [T]his new paywall for performing research is at odds with fundamental norms of equal opportunities and sharing in scientific work.

COPIM's Judith Fathallah, in an excellent Liber Quarterly overview of funding models for OA monographs:

Book Processing Charges [BPCs] may have their place in the publishing landscape, and no doubt will be used across a range of models for the foreseeable future. But they are not particularly sustainable – or reliable, or indeed equitable. They privilege funded researchers, wealthy institutions, and established academics on permanent contracts. In other words, they penalise those researchers and institutions least able to bear the burden.

Fathallah's paper is focused on the UK context, with special attention to the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) policy—in formation when Fathallah was writing, but now issued.

UKRI may be listening. From their explanation document [pdf]:

We also sought to understand the potential for the policy to cause or contribute to disadvantages or inequalities, including in relation to early career researchers and researchers in low- and middle-income countries.

They have, however, punted (until November) on the key question: whether their OA monograph fund, set to open in 2024, will support non-BPCs funding models:

From January 2024, approximately £3.5 million will be dedicated to supporting open access for long-form outputs via a separate ring-fenced fund. The fund will be centrally held by UKRI and research organisations will apply to UKRI to access it. The process, and definition of eligible costs, for the long-form outputs fund are currently being developed. [… ] We will provide further information in November 2022.

The prospects for COPIM's forthcoming mission-aligned funding exchange, the Open Book Collective, hinge in part on UKRI honoring its commitment—provisionally proffered—to support just alternatives to the BPC.

I wrote a [short piece](https://elephantinthelab.org/the-case-for-pubpub/) for Elephant in the Lab on the virtues of [PubPub](https://www.pubpub.org):

> In its early days, PubPub was proudly sui generis. The team ignored most scholarly publishing conventions by design. Among many other things, there was no real support for submission or review. The ambitious point was to rethink what scholarly communication might look like—built around the atomic Pub unit, HTML-first, and unburdened by the dead weight of tradition. That blank-slate radicalism, admirable as it was, made it hard to implement even defensible conventions, like citation formatting. What has happened, over the last few years, is that the team has made thoughtful concessions to the inherited reality: support for formatted PDFs, for example, or more book-specific metadata fields. PubPub may have razed the house of scholarly publishing, but its tacit goal since has been to build back the rooms worth having.

An interesting, rarely surfaced point, in a [reflection post](https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/) from the University of Cambridge's working group on open research in the humanities, on the drawbacks of the "green," accepted-manuscript repository route to OA. For arts and humanities (A&H), self-archiving might be

> … problematic because it neglects the import of the editing process in A&H research. Without undergoing this process, ‘accepted manuscripts’ are very vulnerable to errors, especially in the case of the very many scholars who regularly work in languages that are not their first, or in the case of early career scholars who are less familiar with critical processes and how to evidence them, or in the case of colleagues with various kinds of disabilities such as dyslexia.

And:

> In cases where scholars receive an acceptance that is subject to improvement, the final ‘date of acceptance’ is ambiguous for legal purposes. And in cases where the work in question uses copyrighted material, further legal issues emerge about when and how it may be possible to circulate this. In all these senses, then, many A&H colleagues simply dislike the thought of their ‘accepted manuscript’ circulating. In the case of institutional repositories, there seems to be a direct and obvious tension between the goals of open research and quality control.  

There's a lot of [exciting momentum](https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/coar-welcomes-significant-funding-for-the-notify-project/) around swapping out the journal system for an interwoven repository infrastructure—with various publish-then-review schemes intended to sidestep the prestige lock-in propping up the current publishing oligopoly. In broad terms, the idea is that repositories could serve as an article's iterative resting place, rather than as a "green" way station. The repository solution, if that's what it is, seems to address most of the [Cambridge group's questions](https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/)—and even the copyrighted-material concern could be answered with a culture of aggressive fair dealing/fair use invocation.

From June: A jaw-dropping paper, based on FOIA documents, that tracks the foundation-boring grip that for-profit Online Program Management (OPM) firms like 2U have on public universities. The authors combed through hundreds of private contracts, documenting widespread predation—like targeting marginalized students:

For example, the 30-year agreement between Purdue Global and private-equity-backed Kaplan states that the intent of the contract is to “create a new U.S. degree-granting online institution designed specifically to serve non-traditional students” and to “expand access to higher education for adult learner and other nontraditional students.” Zovio’s website, describing the University of Arizona-Ashford conversion, similarly notes that the partnership “will focus on serving underrepresented and non-traditional students.” Other contracts use similar terms—e.g., “non-traditional,” “working adult,” and “diverse populations.” […] the University of Texas at El Paso-Pearson contract notes that “UTEP agrees to provide Pearson with the following information for the purpose of promoting and marketing of the e-Learning Programs: Prospective students who applied for admission to UTEP but were not admitted.” Universities can even sell contact information for students who did not qualify for their online program to for-profit providers, who will then recruit those students for other partner university programs with open admission or very low requirements. The University of California, Berkeley-2U contract includes $4.2 million dollars in financial “compensation” to UC-Berkeley for such a provision: 2U can recruit students for lower-ranked partner school Southern Methodist University, if the students are those whom “UC Berkeley reasonably predict[s] are not otherwise academically qualified” or appear to “have disengaged with 2U” as is stated in the program criteria.

The research team identified four other "predatory processes" that characterize OPMs: revenue extraction, privatization by obfuscation, for-profit creep, and university lock-in. The paper—which deserves a much wider readership—is marinated in the damning words of the contracts themselves.

The authors drive at the fundamental misalignment of nonprofit higher-ed and the OPM profiteers. Indeed, the problems they document are worse, across the board, for firms financed by private equity and/or VCs.