Introduction
Research libraries endeavour to maintain and increase bibliodiversity in our collections. Bibliodiversity can be understood as cultural diversity in publishing, or through a wider lens that also includes editorial and discoverability practices, publishing infrastructure and affordability and sustainability.1 This wider lens, especially as it refers to open access and equitable publishing, is the one we are talking about here. Though we do not always succeed, we work with publishers of all stripes to create deep, diverse collections where staffing and resources permit. Academic journal publishing has undergone a radical transformation in the past few decades that created an environment full of threats to bibliodiversity.
From the serials crisis of the 1970s, to the more recent emergence of big deals and open access (OA) big deals (also known as transformative agreements (TAs), read and publish, etc.), there have been a few constants.2 The largest publishers have tightened their grip on journal publishing.3 A recent study, focused on journals that are assigned an impact factor (IF), found that, for titles included in the 2021 Journal Citation Reports™, the top five publishers accounted for 59% of all journals.4 A new study by van Bellen et al. found that updated bibliometric analysis using Web of Science (WoS), OpenAlex and Dimensions confirms the composition of a new group of major publishers: RELX (Elsevier), Springer Nature, Wiley, MDPI and Taylor & Francis.5 While WoS data indicate a continuing strong concentration of publishing with these publishers (59% in 2021),6 OpenAlex and Dimensions, which both have much larger record sets, show a decreasing proportion of publishing in their indices, from 54–55% in 1997 to 37–38% in 2021.7 That decrease is somewhat deceptive as the authors note that in some areas (Western Europe, North America and China) and some fields (natural sciences and medicine) the largest publishers are still dominant. Traditional metrics for success for academics have persisted, maintaining an ecosystem where academics are often pressured to publish in journals that are considered prestigious in their field, and that have an IF or some other measure of importance assigned to them. These academics are expected to publish high volumes of research in order to attain tenure or other rewards like research funding, promotion or other recognition. Smaller, mostly society publishers, continue to sign publishing agreements with the larger publishers as they try to compete in an increasingly difficult landscape.
The market consolidation to the largest publishers, the continued investment of public research funding in private for-profit corporations and the continued prevalence of OA big deals that have proven to not be as transformative, nor as temporary, as was first anticipated, are all concerns that have brought us here.8 In this article we will briefly discuss the major threats to bibliodiversity that we have identified through our work as academic librarians over the past decade, and then discuss some concrete actions libraries and their consortia can take to mitigate some of these environmental threats.
Rewards and unintended consequences
The problematic nature of academic reward structures is well understood by those in academia. Despite the emergence of initiatives like the Declaration on Research Assessment,9 universities remain deeply conservative places where change happens slowly, and the prestige economy persists. The rewards of tenure, promotion, grant funding and sometimes other incentives often flow (though not always explicitly) from publishing in high prestige journals. These journals are almost uniformly English language and based in the Global North, which reinforces the advantages of traditional research powerhouses and focuses attention on a narrower set of researchers and problems.10
Libraries have no choice but to service the reward structures by maintaining subscriptions to as many of the high-impact titles as our budgets allow. This has been accomplished mostly through consortial purchasing of big deals from the largest publishers that have consumed a progressively greater portion of our acquisitions’ budgets11 – often at the expense of titles from smaller, more specialized presses. As open access mandates have been promulgated, libraries and their consortia have taken on the task – with or without additional funding – of moving the needle towards a full OA transition in as painless a manner as possible to researchers. This has led to the widespread adoption of OA big deals, adding coverage of article processing charges (APCs)12 to the standard reading rights of the big deal. We expect these deals will consume even greater resources and will be harder to extricate ourselves from going forward.
The move to big deals and now to OA big deals have driven considerable consolidation in the publishing market. Many smaller and society publishers decided that they needed greater guaranteed revenue and reach to continue to publish their journals and signed publishing contracts with the largest publishers. These publishers, with their large sales, legal and business intelligence resources, could offer services and revenue opportunities far beyond what the smaller publishers were capable of on their own. Other paths to scale are imaginable. Partnerships between leading scholarly societies, such as the Purpose-Led Publishing partnership between the American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society and IOP Publishing, hold intriguing possibilities as an alternative to partnering with the big publishers.13
Canada, where both of us live, is a small market, and we have limited leverage over global publishing, but we do have some unique bibliodiversity problems. Our biggest problem is the many bilingual English/French publications from a constellation of small publishers and societies that are almost completely dependent on revenue from Canadian post-secondary institutions and provincial and national research funders (primarily the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) who provide small stipends to qualifying journals). As library budgets are squeezed by big deals, OA big deals, and in many cases eroding institutional support, finding money to support these publications and the infrastructure they are using (Érudit, PKP Open Journal Systems, among others) is challenging.
We want an open and diverse scholarly universe and despite all the challenges listed above we do have some ideas on things libraries can do to get what we want.
Putting library knowledge and values first
There are options available to those responsible for library budgets to consider, to help them increase bibliodiversity by taking into account our investment values and questioning the status quo, oligopolistic establishment.
As a first step we need to acknowledge two truths in our current reality. Firstly, in Canada, although our major research funders have adopted an open access policy, academic libraries have not been given any additional resources or any formal mandates to support or advance the policy. The work Canadian libraries have chosen to do to advance OA by signing TAs, paying APCs and building, supporting and maintaining open infrastructure has been using our own initiative and resources. While all these activities have moved the needle towards our glorious open future, they have in many ways done more to further entrench the oligopoly publishers in our researchers’ workflows. Secondly, we need to acknowledge that within our organizations the team that is doing scholarly communication advocacy, education and outreach is not the same team that is building the collection or designing and spending the budget. Both of these truths suggest some paths forward.
Library staff working in collection development and administration can be more outspoken about enacting change in the current system of scholarly publishing. We can advocate on our campuses for significant changes to the processes that continue to support the prestige economy. From the volunteer labour for peer review and editing, to the embeddedness of prestige journals or impact factors as measures of quality in promotion and tenure processes, we can work with our faculty and within the systems of governance to encourage these changes. Our colleagues in scholarly communications have been engaged in this work for many years, but we can add our voices from the collections department and work together. We can advocate with granting agencies to push for stronger OA mandates, rights such as secondary publishing rights, actual enforcement of the mandates and, most critically, funding to ease some of the financial burden libraries have been bearing. These mandates that require OA publishing present a unique opportunity for libraries and funders to create a more diverse publishing ecosystem through the dollars available in our budgets and to look for solutions beyond APC-funded open access.
Canadian libraries have a history of working together to build shared infrastructure. We have built a shared national data repository, Borealis, are launching a national repository for publications, Scholaris, have been supporting a journal dissemination platform, Érudit and the open publishing platforms created by the Public Knowledge Project. We have leveraged our library budgets to build some shared infrastructure that is open and easy to use and gives an alternative to the publishing pipelines and processes that large publishers are currently dominating. Supporting the creation of this infrastructure was a good first step but ensuring that they have the ongoing funds to thrive is a challenge that we need to start thinking through.14 Enhancing these infrastructures directly supports the direction Plan S is taking,15 looking for solutions beyond TAs to transform scholarly publishing. There are other infrastructure investments that we could make to further enhance the publishing ecosystem and a logical next step would be to come together and decide collaboratively where we should be investing our money to ensure that we are providing access to a complete suite of open research tools.
If we want to prioritize bibliodiversity we need to consider how we currently license content. What if instead of speeding the open revolution into existence via the types of licenses available with for-profit publishers that offer incremental OA (predominantly APC-funded OA), libraries focused on our own interests? If we sought out organizations that are closely linked to the mission of the academy and invested with them rather than for-profit corporations, our dollars would help drive change in the ecosystem – much like shopping locally results in more investments in the local economy.16 Organizations like scholarly societies and university presses that are scholar-led or scholar-driven, not-for-profit and reinvest their profits in a way that benefits the community. Supporting organizations like this will help build a more diverse publishing ecosystem and is likely to also incur lower fees, as the purpose is cost recovery and community building rather than shareholder profits.
There are practical ways available now to move our support from the largest publishers to other actors in the system. The first step is to minimize new spending with the biggest publishers. Not pursuing OA big deals with oligopolistic publishers and instead moving back to read-only agreements that are aggressively negotiated for the paywalled research. Libraries can stay away from APC-discounting arrangements with for-profit OA publishers like MDPI and Frontiers and instead redirect that funding to other initiatives. Libraries can direct funding into open infrastructure that supports smaller publishers having functional, open, up-to-date, interoperable tools to use to further a more equitable publishing landscape. Libraries can also work with societies to help them establish workable payment models that are not author-funded with APCs. We can encourage our consortia to work with smaller publishers and develop partnerships, looking beyond the oligopoly, and to shift focus from APC discounts/waivers to more significant opening of scholarly literature through other methods. The ongoing work between the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), Canada’s national library consortium, and Érudit to develop a sustainable diamond OA alternative can inform future ventures with other partners.
Obstacles to this model
There are significant obstacles to changing scholarly publishing. Changing academic culture is complex and will take a long time. The conservatism of the academy, the prestige economy of academic publishing and the publish or perish nature of the tenure and promotion systems of academic employment are significant barriers. Into this already toxic mess we have in the last 15 years added funders, keen to mandate their funded outputs be open access but less willing, at least in Canada, to provide additional resources to actually make that happen. For libraries, the OA big deal seemed like a decent political bargain – researchers would keep their ways of doing things, funders would get the open outputs they want, and our institutions would not have to lift a finger. As we have moved forward it is obvious that this has been a bad bargain: libraries have gotten no credit or reward (some have seen large budget cuts) and our endorsement of the OA big deal with the largest publishers has further expedited the loss of bibliodiversity as the scale and complexity of these deals makes it even harder for smaller players to compete.
Canada is a small country with limited influence in the larger world of academia, which can be a challenge. However, it could also be a strength – we could leverage our relatively small size and model new publishing norms for open scholarship. Regardless of that, collective action is necessary to make significant impact. So-called measures of quality, like impact factor, need to be discarded as measures of value, or new metrics that measure impact without the gatekeeping nature that prioritizes more established journals published by traditional publishers should be introduced.
National mandates for federally funded research to be published OA by some method (usually not defined, so author-funded APCs are acceptable) are an area to watch. The report from the OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) to the United States Congress in August 2022 calls on all government agencies in the USA to eliminate the current 12-month embargo and publish all publicly-funded research immediately open access, by December 2025.17 This policy change is likely to have significant ramifications in Canada, though we do not know yet what they might be (at the time of writing, the tri-agencies are conducting consultations for updates to their own OA policies). But these kinds of national mandates will have impacts globally, and if enforced, should speed up the transformation of scholarly publishing.
Conclusion
If we want a diverse landscape, we need to support the smaller actors – the for-profit publishers are going to find ways to remain profitable, so if we value bibliodiversity it is incumbent on libraries to do our utmost to support other kinds of actors in the system. The landscape is moving so quickly (e.g. Hindawi,18 Frontiers, Knowledge Unlatched,19 etc.) that we cannot wait for a better time, or for certain aspects of the market to change before we act.
The root of the issue with academic publishing is capitalism. The oligopoly and other for-profit companies are going to find ways to extract value and protect or increase their profits, so we need to purposely direct support to other paths to publishing to create a marketplace that has options beyond just the for-profit traditional publishers.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
A list of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this and other Insights articles can be accessed here – click on the URL below and then select the ‘full list of industry A&As’ link: http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa.
Competing interests
The authors have declared no competing interests.