7. Access Mechanisms
7.1. We have identified three core mechanisms through which access to research publications can be increased: open access publishing, extensions to current licensing arrangements, and repositories. Each of them has a number of variations in nature and scope, and we discuss those variations, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the three mechanisms in this section.
Open access journals
7.2. The key features of the current open access publishing landscape have been outlined earlier in Sections 3 and 4:
- i. the launch of open access journals published by new entrants to the market such as PLoS and BioMedCentral
- ii. the response of established publishers, with the launch of their own open access journals and, more commonly, of ‘hybrid’ journals operating on a mix of subscriptions and APCs for open access publication
- iii. take-up which currently runs at between c5% and c8% of the global total of peer-reviewed articles published each year, with higher levels in science, technology and medicine, and lower levels in social sciences and humanities
- iv. the relatively low levels of take-up until now of the open access option offered in most hybrid journals
- v. the large open access publishers funding their journals through APCs which currently average between £1k and £2k, alongside a long tail of small publishers which publish one or two journals, many of which charge no APCs at all
- vi. the recent growth of ‘repository’ journals which publish any articles which pass a peer review test of methodological rigour, regardless of the significance of the results
- vii. the ability of open access journals, since they receive the bulk of their revenues before publication, to be less restrictive than subscription journals about rights of use and re-use of their contents.
7.3. For open access and hybrid journals, as for all journals, unit costs depend on a number of factors, including the rejection rate, frequency of publication, the average length of articles, and the amount of editorial material they provide in addition to research articles. All these factors therefore have an influence on the level of APCs; and journals considering a move from subscription-based to open access publishing, have to take careful account of them. The rejection rate is the most important influence in most cases, but for many journals, the amount of commissioned content that they provide—review articles, book reviews and so on which would not attract revenues in the form of APCs—will also be an important
