A new report by The Australia Institute reveals that last year, Australian universities and research institutions spent over $322 million on journal subscriptions and a total of $1 billion on academic publishers. Access to a single article can cost up to $500 and profits for the industry have reached 40%.
Dr Kristen Scicluna, a researcher at The Australia Institute, said that, “Publishers do not pay researchers or peer reviewers, charge excessive open access publication fees, and impose unjustifiable subscription and access fees on research institutions and individuals.”
The industry is heavily consolidated with five companies — Elsevier, Black & Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature and SAGE — controlling 50% of the market. The largest, Elsevier, claims to publish 18% of the world’s scientific papers.
Researchers depend on academic publishing companies to print their articles in order to maintain their positions and get future grant funding.
Public money indirectly subsidises academic publishing houses. Grant money given to academics is used to pay for Article Processing Charges (APCs), subscription fees, and sometimes the academics who peer review for the publisher.
To make research more accessible, the Australian Research Council (ARC) has developed an open access policy which states that “any research outputs arising from ARC Funded Research must be made openly accessible within a twelve-month period from the date of publication.” This can come in the form of institutional repository or in an openly accessible public digital archive.
A model proposed by Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley would go further. The plan, currently under departmental consideration, would be to create a national agreement with all publishers using the collective bargaining power of all Australian research institutions to lower prices.
A centralised repository would be created for all published research accessible under the agreements that Australian citizens could access through their myGov account.
Other countries have adopted similar plans. The Biden Administration has now mandated that by 2025 all federally funded research must be made available to the public.
Currently, in an effort to lower prices and avoid paying ACPs, Australian universities collectively negotiate ‘Read and Publish’ agreements with publishers. A University of Sydney spokesperson told Honi Soit that these agreements “enable price transparency with consistent criteria” and that the cost “is based on the number of staff and students.”
The University of Sydney is a member of The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), which according to the spokesperson “collectively negotiates sector-wide subscription prices and licence conditions of major electronic packages such as Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SpringerNature and SAGE on behalf of academic libraries in Australia and New Zealand.”
The University currently has 25 agreements that allow academics and HDR students to publish their research free of APCs. According to the Library’s Collections Framework “Some agreements have publishing caps, or a limit on the number of articles that can be published open access under an agreement. There still may be some page and colour charges.”
Dr Scicluna said that “Open science grants, modified lotteries, and institutional repositories” would take pressure off institutions and lower costs across the industry.
According to a review of National Health and Medical Research Council grants, the prestige of the publications the academic has previously published accounts for 35% of the overall score of the application. Researchers, therefore, have a heavy incentive to prioritise publishing in them as much as possible.
Heavily prestigious journals charge the highest APCs and almost none are open access. Nature, published by Springer, charges around $19,000 for a single article exclusive of other costs.
Deciding who gets government grants using a modified lottery system, according to The Australia Institute, would better allow researchers to publish in open access journals without losing out on future grants.
The system would award grants to projects that pass minimum requirements on a random basis without looking at the personal record of the researcher or the institution they come from. This could mean researchers who choose to publish in open access journals don’t suffer in future grant applications.
The expansion of institutional repositories, which are online archives that contain original works created by academics of a specific research institution, would allow researchers to bypass all the fees charged by academic publishers.
These repositories, usually run by universities, are not for profit and are usually open access. The University spokesperson told Honi that “The Library is an active champion for open access and manages the Sydney eScholarship Repository which enables our researchers to deposit their work and provide free access to research outputs by University of Sydney authors.”
The University spokesperson said the total annual collections budget of the Library was around $30 million plus any money donated by alumni and donors who “provide additional funds for rare books and special collections.”
The spokesperson did not disclose the specific amount the University paid to academic publishers based on its agreements.
A recent review into ARC did not contain any recommendations to expand the open access policy or implement a modified grant system.