Higher education leaders in South Africa are looking to move to a
European model for open access (OA) publishing of scholarly articles as
soon as possible, according to the body that coordinates the country’s
public universities.
Under the plan, an estimated ZAR500 to ZAR600 million, which is
currently being spent on journal subscriptions, would be funneled into
new “transformative” agreements with the big five academic publishers –
Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage –
as the country’s universities move to a pay-to-publish model for
funding the dissemination of research.
However, the plan would be fatally undermined if any of the country’s
leading research universities, which would contribute the lion’s share
to a common pot for funding the new transformative agreements, were to
withdraw their support.
“If those universities pull out and decide to go it alone, that would
simply kill the project,” said Universities South Africa (USAf) Chief
Executive Ahmed Bawa, who is leading the national drive to transform the
funding basis for academic publishing.
The plan to move to the new model has been slammed as unduly expensive
by some experts. At a meeting held at the end of last year by the
Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), critics said only those with
deep pockets would be able to pay the article processing charges (APCs)
levied by many of the most widely read journals under the proposed new
framework.
Bawa dismissed the claims, emphasising the open-access benefits of the
proposed model which follows in the footsteps of the Plan S framework
launched last year by the European Union with the goal of making
scholarly reports freely available.
No additional costs
He stressed that the new framework, which would require authors rather
than readers to pay for publication, would not come at any additional
cost either to the national research project or to the individual
researchers.
“What we are saying to the publishers is: ‘Please, don’t ask us for more
money. What we are prepared to pay is what we are currently paying for
subscriptions and we will negotiate on that basis – and anything on top
of that is out of the question.’
“And once the transformative agreements come to an end, we will be negotiating downwards,” said Bawa.
All the existing contracts with the big-five publishers come up for
renegotiation within the next two years. The goal will be to replace
these with the transformative agreements which in turn will give way,
after a teething period of about three years, to even cheaper
pay-to-publish deals, said Bawa.
The new plan was hatched, according to Bawa, at a discussion held among
the country’s 26 vice-chancellors who belong to USAf’s board.
It was agreed at the meeting that the current model for academic
publishing was unsustainable, in part because of its mounting cost,
which had risen significantly as the value of the rand had dropped.
Dealing with inequities
It was also felt that deep inequities within the higher education
system, in which some universities enjoyed sufficient access to
published research while others had relatively little, should be
addressed.
“The idea was to develop a system that would ensure equal access among all the universities,” said Bawa.
In addition, there was consensus on the importance of open access. The
potential benefits of openness to scientific integrity and innovation in
the public interest, as well as to the democratisation of the research
cycle and regional development, have been widely acknowledged, including
by the United Nations.
In South Africa, the Department of Science and Innovation also promotes
this view. “The department has adopted an open science approach that
indicates with vigour that publicly funded research should find its way
to public domains and not be located behind a paywall,” said Bawa.
Accordingly, after considering a number of alternative ways of ensuring
open access – including a national site licence for journals, which
proved prohibitively expensive – the universities; science councils
including ASSAf; National Research Foundation; and relevant government
departments reached the view that the Plan S framework represented a
feasible model for South Africa.
Plan S, due to come into effect in 2021, was forged by a number of major
international research funders, including from the philanthropic and
international governance sectors, which came together with national
research councils and the EU to create pressure to dismantle the
paywalls erected by the main academic publishing houses.
Open access
The funders behind Plan S also work closely with OA 2020, a global
alliance forged by researchers to accelerate the transition to open
access.
In this regard, USAf is proposing a researcher-driven model in the vein
of OA 2020, rather than Plan S, which has not yet been approved by
research funders in South Africa.
The USAf board has established a task team to implement this model,
which, in turn, has appointed an interim negotiating group which
includes Director of the South Africa National Library and Information
Consortium (SANLiC) Glenn Turan, two university deputy vice chancellors,
the chief financial officer of a leading university, and one external
business person.
The plan is to negotiate transformative agreements with the main
academic publishers on a national basis, once the current contracts with
these large journal houses expire. According to Bawa, the fundamental
principles underpinning these talks will be that:
• Once payment for publication has been made, the research will be
available for anyone, anywhere to read, including if the material has
been published in a high-impact-factor journal;
• Copyright over the published text resides with the author and must be
acknowledged under a creative commons licence by anyone else referencing
the material; and
• The new publishing arrangements will cost no more than the previous subscription-based deals.
In addition, although the new system would place the onus for funding
academic publishing on authors rather than readers, a national approach
would mean no requirement on individual researchers to find the money to
pay to publish, said Bawa.
Under the pay-to-publish model, journals levy APCs which are generally
paid on behalf of the particular author by the funder or institution
supporting the research. In return, these publications make the articles
freely available to readers. The new model replaces the old reader-pays
model of subscribing to journals in order to access content.
However, the success of the approach being promoted by USAf depends to a
large extent on developments in Europe, China, India, Japan, Brazil and
California where unified efforts have forced the large publishing
houses to strike transformative and pay-to-publish deals.
In this regard, South Africa, which accounts for only about 1% of
published global research, is riding on the coat-tails of agreements
concluded elsewhere.
“We need to work as a global community of scholars, as a global system,
to put pressure on these publishers,” said Bawa, noting that it would be
“very difficult” for the big publishers to revert to earlier kinds of
deals having now agreed transformative agreements with a number of
national higher education systems.
Unity of purpose
The success of the proposed approach also depends on the unity of
purpose among institutions within the domestic research system.
A central pooling of all resources spent on subscriptions is required to
push the main academic publishing houses into accepting new
transformative agreements and to pay for these deals.
The costs of the new approach will also be disproportionately borne by
the historically advantaged, research-intensive universities. “The model
that we are proposing really depends upon us thinking of all knowledge
producers as belonging to a common system,” said Bawa.
But the model has its risks, as Bawa acknowledged. Although there is an
agreement among vice-chancellors that they will not withdraw funds they
are currently spending on subscriptions, without that central pool, “it
would be impossible to forge a set of agreements with the publishers”.
However, at the same time, research universities would soon be paying as
much, if not more, for publishing their research if they opted out of
the national approach and went it alone, Bawa said.
Pragmatic solution
More broadly, the decision to adopt an OA 2020 model is, Bawa noted,
borne of necessity and represents a pragmatic solution that offers open
access while enabling researchers to continue to try and publish in the
high-impact-factor journals they tend to favour. Authors should be in a
position to choose the journals in which they prefer to publish, he
said.
As alternative models for open access publishing become increasingly
practicable and popular, the relatively expensive commercial model
promoted by Plan S may in fact fall away.
These alternatives include the production of more “diamond” open-access
journals (free-to-read and free-to-publish) that become increasingly
relevant and improve in quality over time; the establishment of more
not-for-profit academic publishing houses; and the development and
promotion of “green” open access, that is, depositing of articles in
publicly available repositories.
However, a new model for open access publishing based on such steps
“will not happen overnight”, said Bawa. A particular obstacle is the
extent to which researchers’ academic identities are shaped by their
sense of belonging to a discipline and their desire to communicate with
each other in international journals that serve their fields of study.
In addition, Bawa was philosophical about the possible negative impact
of a pay-to-publish approach on smaller, in-house peer-reviewed journals
produced by university presses or scholarly societies.
“One of the questions we need to ask ourselves as a national system is:
to what extent are we supporting a whole myriad of journals with a
subscription model where the quality and integrity of those journals are
not necessarily at the best level?
“So, for example, we have journals that currently reside in institutions
where the bulk of the publishing comes from those institutions. And
that seems to me to be really problematic.”
Meanwhile, at national level, discussions to convert the existing
subscription-based deals into transformative agreements are at an early
stage. “We have talked with Taylor & Francis, Elsevier and Springer
Nature, but our contracts with them have not yet come up, so we are
preparing to renegotiate those deals.”
SANLiC is taking a lead role in the talks to promote and negotiate the
transformative agreements, which include read-and-publish and
publish-and-read deals, with the major commercial publishers.
However, it is also acknowledged that, as a national project, a new
governance structure is likely which will involve representatives from
the government, universities, and science councils including ASSAf, as
well as institutions such as SANLiC. This governance structure will be
responsible for oversight.
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