In August of 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memo announcing major changes to how federally funded scholarly research is shared with the public. Starting in 2025, all federal funding agencies will require investigators to make their research articles and associated data openly available immediately upon publication, without an embargo by the authors or the publisher. For those already familiar with sharing research in PubMed Central, this isn’t entirely news. However, the requirements have sparked discussions about the state of open access publishing and its role in the scholarly ecosystem.
What is open access?
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and practices established by academic researchers to make scholarly literature available online without the barrier of journal subscription costs or restrictive licensing. It is closely related but not synonymous with U.S. government public access, which the OSTP Memo requires. OA is a larger global movement to promote greater equity of access to knowledge across disciplines.
OA has become tethered to article processing charges (APCs)
When the first open access journals were founded in the early to mid-2000s, they used author-facing fees exclusively to fund their operations—without the subscriptions libraries pay for access to their journals. This allowed them to make all their articles freely available. But “free” for readers meant the author paid, which created another cost barrier, if flipped to the author rather than consumer.
As the benefits of publishing OA—such as higher readership and citations, as well as compliance with federal guidelines—became apparent, commercial publishers entered the scene, creating their own OA offshoot journals or allowing authors to pay a fee to make an article in a closed-access journal OA. Prices per article rose with the number of journals, increasing the cost barrier. Today, authors are too often confronted with such a high price tag for OA in their favorite Wiley or Elsevier journals (those with the impact tenure committees demand) that the thought of open access puts a sour taste in their mouths.
Openness can still be low-cost or free
Article processing charges (APCs) are now so entrenched in the scholarly publishing system that one might think they’re the only avenue to open access. Fortunately, that’s not the case for NIH-funded authors, who can skip the APC and put a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central. This repository of scholarship is meant to be a no-cost avenue to OA. Readers can still access the article, though maybe without the publisher’s logo in the corner, and the authors do not pay an APC.
The Duke Libraries also maintain an open access repository for all authors at the university. DukeSpace is a hosting platform for articles Duke authors wish to make openly available. It was created in tandem with the adoption of the Policy on Open Access to Research by Academic Council in 2010. The policy grants Duke a non-exclusive license to distribute faculty scholarship, should they choose to upload it to DukeSpace. The repository provides a stable handle link similar to a DOI and includes the citation to the published version of the paper, so that even if it is accessed through DukeSpace, readers will cite the published version.
All Duke faculty have the ability to deposit to DukeSpace via the Elements publication system, which doubles as the source of data for public-facing Scholars@Duke profiles. With just a few clicks, you can upload a copy of your article openly on a Duke platform.
Duke Libraries is investing in open access infrastructure beyond APCs
The Libraries recognize the challenges that author-facing costs of openness present to the Duke community, and we have made some strategic investments with publishers to help cover these costs. In keeping with our values that knowledge should be as freely accessible as possible, we chose only publishers who have made a demonstrable commitment to converting their entire catalog of journals to OA or are already fully open. The APC system working in tandem with the subscription system creates two parallel barriers to access that limit the innovative exchange of information and the academic freedom of authors to choose where they publish their research.
While the Libraries will continue to pay for and sponsor access to the research our faculty, students, and staff require, we are looking to other funding models and initiatives that will be more open and more equitable long-term. We maintain a list of Duke-Supported Open Access Initiatives and welcome questions about using them and how the library is making these investments.
Library resources for scholarly publishing
If you would like to learn more about sharing your scholarship in DukeSpace, see our full guide or contact open-access@duke.edu.
The ScholarWorks Center supports Duke community publishing efforts, advising on open access, digital scholarship, open education, and copyright.
For data management questions and planning as we move into a new era of public access for government-funded research, contact the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences.