Scholarly publishing is big business, with an oligopoly of major commercial publishers dominating the market. As research funders (including the Canadian Tri-Agency) started requiring open access (OA) for peer-reviewed articles resulting from funded research, publishers introduced more OA options. Although there are innovative OA funding models that do not charge fees to authors, many profit-driven publishers have elected to use the article processing charge (APC) model since it ensures they are able to maintain or increase revenues. The APC model is inequitable and unsustainable.
Leigh-Ann Butler, a researcher and librarian at the University of Ottawa, and her collaborators have found that Canadian researchers have spent at least $27.6 million USD on APCs related to Tri-Agency funded work from 2015 to 2018. They estimated that globally authors paid $1.06 billion in publication fees to the five largest commercial publishers in the same period, and an estimated total of $8.349 billion were spent on APCs between 2019 and 2023 to six large publishers (see figure).
But what about USask researchers? We have done some estimates of our own based on Scopus data downloaded in September 2024 (for USask-authored articles published in 2020-2023) and the APC figures collected by Leigh-Ann Butler’s team and posted in an open dataset:
| Publisher | # of gold or hybrid OA articles | Estimated APC spend (USD) |
| Elsevier | 534 | $1,342,630 |
| Springshare Nature | 640 | $1,937,572 |
| Wiley | 336 | $999,394 |
| Total | 1,510 | $4,279,596 |
These are rough estimates because this data is very difficult to collect. The dataset relies on the list price of APCs as publicly posted by these publishers, and we also have no way of knowing if the APC was waived or reduced, or which author from a multi-authored paper paid.
Some have argued that globally there are enough library acquisitions funds invested in conventional subscriptions to fund a complete “transformation” of the system to support OA publishing services instead – without authors needing to pay APCs from their own funds. This idea has resulted in the development of new OA funding models known as Transformative Agreements (TAs) (or “Read & Publish” agreements), where the library pays APCs on behalf of the authors at their institutions while also receiving the conventional “read” access to the non-OA journal content from the publisher. The University Library is participating in several of these agreements. This may seem like a promising solution, but TAs have received criticism from librarians and others who predict that they will perpetuate the power imbalance in the current system, further entrenching and enriching profit-driven legacy publishers while excluding poorer institutions (and their authors) who cannot afford to subscribe to these deals. They are not a financially sustainable or equitable path forward for universities.
The University Library also invests collections funds in supporting high-quality, sustainable, and ethical open publishing and infrastructure initiatives that align with the values and missions of the academic community. We support scholar-led diamond open access journals (no fees for readers or authors) through our instance of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software. And we maintain USask’s open online repository, HARVEST, which facilitates “green” open access, better discovery, and long-term preservation for research, scholarly, and artistic work. Green OA is a free and legal way that authors can comply with funder mandates for open access by self-archiving manuscripts of their articles. But this process can be confusing and cumbersome for researchers, so the library is initiating a new HARVEST Upload Service that reduces this administrative burden – let us do it for you instead!
See more of what the library is doing in our Open Scholarship Position Statement.
Many of the topics in this post will be discussed at a special event next week. Please join us for a free lecture with guest speaker Leigh-Ann Butler from the University of Ottawa on November 4, 2024: Open Access Publishing: Challenges, Costs, and Ethical Models for the Future
D. Dawson, Open Scholarship Librarian
J. McLean, eResources Librarian