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Planet of the APCs: A decade of progress and setbacks in open access
It has been ten years since the JLSC’s publication “Bottlenecks in the Open Access System: Voices from Around the Globe,” which provided a forum for researchers on four continents and of various disciplinary, political, and economic circumstances to share perspectives on open access (OA) funded by article processing charges (APCs). The authors of “Bottlenecks…,” of which we are a subset (we organized the article, sought and collated coauthor input, and led analysis and drafting of discussion and conclusions), supported OA, but raised issues with APC “gold” OA, which excludes many of them from authorship opportunities. Then, and now, we propose that “diamond” (or “platinum”) OA models (no payment for reading or authoring) are more equitable and appropriate. In the intervening years, however, scholarly publishing and OA have been highly dynamic, changing both for better and for worse. For example, the rhetorical arguments for OA have clearly prevailed, yet significant challenges remain, both among those observed in 2014 and newly arisen. A significant shift has occurred to APC-funded OA, which is now a deeply entrenched model. Many research funders have taken increasingly strong (and shifting) roles to promote, shape, and reform OA, and there has been a proliferation of business models and experimentation. Piracy and extra-legal solutions to access remain the elephant in the room. These evolutions take place in a context of corporate capitalism and neoliberalism. We have seen that major changes can be made in relatively short time spans (e.g., Plan S and its uptake by major publishers), and we see a dire need to consider broad impacts, especially for scholars and publishers on the peripheries of conventional scholarly publishing. In this article, we outline major events and shifts in the interconnected academic, funding, and publishing landscapes and their impacts; we identify major hurdles that readers and authors now face; we use the Adaptive Leadership Framework to briefly examine paths that we see as the most promising; and we provide a foundation for the contributions from our peers that follow in this special issue.
