Should I publish in an open access journal?

Locked behind paywalls

About 75% of published science articles are locked behind paywalls.4 This restricts access for researchers on the basis of wealth. More fundamentally, it deprives taxpayers and patients, who help pay for and participate in research. If you’re at a privileged institution you may have access through a journal subscription. Alternatively, you may be fortunate enough to afford the articles yourself. But you may be less fortunate if you’re in a low or middle income country, where healthcare, and the knowledge underpinning it, are needed most. Programmes such as the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) support access in poorer countries, but researchers from poorer countries tend to cite research in subscription journals less often.5

Paywalls obstruct the universality of science, depriving the scientific community and global society of research.6 This has ethical, academic, economic, and societal consequences.14 Societal benefits may seem trivial when considering whether to publish individual work with open access; however, equity of access is a fundamental tenet in healthcare, and it should apply to information too.

Academic impact can be assessed in several ways, including citation counts, and open access articles tend to be cited more often.4 In medicine, our recent study of gastroenterology journals suggested a citation advantage for open access versus traditional publication (median citation rate 38.5 v 33.0 per research paper).7 Confounders may account for this apparent advantage: for example, authors might select only the best articles to submit for open access publication. Other metrics including social media engagement, mentions in the media, and social bookmarking also show this advantage.8

Despite these findings, researchers continue to pursue publication in closed access, high impact journals. This is often driven by a misdirected reward system that emphasises the wrong indicators, such as a journal’s impact factor.

The upfront cost of author fees is a potential deterrent to open access publishing. Although most researchers would value reading articles free of charge and without restrictions, charging individual researchers to publish through open access is inequitable. For these reasons, cOAlition S is pushing for revision of the whole system of incentive and reward in science.6

Mushrooming predatory publishers

A counterargument to open access publishing is the mushrooming of predatory publishers who allow publication to be bought: this damages the open access movement and undermines the quality and integrity of science. Researchers should be wise to these publishers and judiciously choose publication in open access journals with established reputations and respected editorial boards.

Improvements in patient outcomes and advances in medical practice depend on sharing scholarly communication openly. Researchers have a collective responsibility to ensure transparency while maintaining standards. Having demonstrated the benefits of open access to researchers and society, we now encourage all researchers to go forth and set their work free.

Bias towards commercially funded work

Open access publication suits researchers funded by industry or by bodies such as the National Institute for Health Research and the Medical Research Council, as they can pay the fees. However, these fees are a hurdle for researchers with limited funds or from developing countries. Publishing quality improvement projects, clinical reviews, or evidence based guidance without academic or commercial funding can prove difficult. This runs counter to efforts to share knowledge globally.

Preferentially disseminating industry funded work risks biasing the evidence base towards commercially driven results, distorting practice and causing avoidable harm.1011

The Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, owned by BMJ, is a “hybrid” subscription journal whose authors can choose to pay to make their work open access. Jakobsen and colleagues found a significant open access bias in the journal towards studies with industry funding (12/71; 17%) when compared with studies without (11/145; 8%).12 And, in general, the number of open access papers funded by big pharma recently exceeded open access work that wasn’t industry funded.11

Researchers who publish with open access may also inadvertently benefit at the expense of others: these publications receive 2-3 times more citations.13 This higher impact can help authors raise funding, potentially reducing the funding available to equally worthy researchers and stopping them achieving their potential.14

Financial incentives to publish more

Publishers also have an interest in the quantity of open access articles they publish. For example, the open access journal PLOS One accepts 70% of submissions, compared with 8% at subscription based or hybrid Nature journals.15 Hybrid journals create an additional conflict: if all research articles are open access readers have no need to pay to read them—which may lead to fewer subscribers and to increases in subscription fees.16 Thus, open access publication changes a publisher’s incentive to publish: authors and industry may be able to manipulate the system. The dangers include financially motivated publications, reduced quality, and biased published research.11

High quality peer review is important for publishing robust science, both in open access and subscription journals. If open access journals do peer review submissions some review only for accuracy, not for relevance. Even if peer review processes are strong enough to spot fake science, financial incentives to publish could leave the open access literature swamped with methodologically sound articles of questionable value or priority.17

Clinicians and researchers focus their reading on journals specific to their specialty. To apply evidence, integrating research into practice, they need articles that are relevant to their needs. Subscription journals can prioritise the most relevant findings for their readers, with accompanying interpretation. Open access publishing makes it harder to distinguish relevant, high quality findings because of a lack of assessment of priority. And the challenge of accurately relaying science to the public becomes harder when media outlets easily pick up and misinterpret open access research.18

Opening up research and the potential loss of the subscription model means that, although access to research will increase, content could be less regulated and dominated by those who can afford to publish. To tackle these problems open access publishing must be subject to high quality peer review and editorial judgment on the relevance of research, and it must include systems for equitable payment of fees. How this could become sustainable in the near future is difficult to envisage.