Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director, published today a blog post on the cOAlition S website refuting a number of misleading statements about open access repositories made by some scholarly publishers. It’s likely no accident that these comments are coming now, as Plan S has recently come into effect on January 1, 2021. Plan S requires funded authors to make their published articles available immediately upon publication, either via an open access journal or an open access repository. The publishers comments portray gold open access as the only “legitimate” route for open access, and attempt to diminish the repository (or green) route.

COAR will continue to speak out about any misrepresentations related to repositories and step up our efforts to demonstrate that repositories support equity, diversity and sustainability, and are also key for bringing innovation into the scholarly publishing system. We are especially optimistic about the notification model that will be piloted soon by several platforms and services. This model will enable repositories to interact with other types of service providers, such as peer review , and could be ground breaking for repositories and scholarly communications.

The blog was originally published here – Kathleen Shearer – January 29, 2021

The rhetoric of some scholarly publishers lately has shown a troublesome trend with respect to Open Access repositories (often referred to as Green OA). Most recently, the CEO of Springer Nature, Frank Vrancken Peeters, delivered a presentation to the Academic Publishing in Europe conference in which he mischaracterizes OA repositories in several ways. In that presentation, which I did not attend personally, but has been reported on by Porter Anderson in Publishing Perspectives, Peeters echoes a number of inaccuracies posted in an earlier OASPA guest blog, to which COAR immediately responded with Correcting the Record: The Critical Role of OA Repositories in Open Access and Open Science.

Unfortunately, I must again speak out, to correct the many errors contained in Peeters’ presentation. Contrary to what Peeters states:

• OA repositories support Open Access and Open Science. The original definition of open access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative included two paths: OA journals and OA repositories. Depositing an article in an OA repository without embargo is full open access (and, as such, this route is an option for compliance with Plan S).
• OA repositories most often provide access to the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM), which can be licenced CC-BY and the text contained in the AAM differs very little from the formatted publisher version.
• OA repositories can easily link to related content held elsewhere, including published versions, datasets, and other related materials. They also include open metrics and employ open standards and software.
• Articles in OA repositories are discoverable through major discovery systems including Google Scholar, Unpaywall, OpenAIRE, CORE, LA Referencia and so on. Researchers do not need to search through individual repositories to find the articles contained in repositories.

The great irony is that the themes touched on in Peeters’ presentation were trust, openness, and transparency. But those values are undermined by the misrepresentations in his presentation, not to mention a history of obfuscations by some publishers about open access and the widespread use of non-disclosure agreements.

What is motivating these developments? I can only assume that these publishers are concerned about protecting their revenues in the face of a growing number of policies coming into effect, such as Plan S. It is painfully clear that this is not about quality or trust, but about maintaining control, preserving the traditional publishing paradigm, and protecting profit margins.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this hyperbole comes at the same time as a group of scholarly publishers are proposing to define the repository selection criteria for where their authors’ should deposit research data. These criteria, which are very narrowly conceived, threaten to exclude thousands of national and institutional repositories as options for deposit.

As service providers, scholarly publishers should not be defining the requirements for research communications. Rather, it is the role of the research community, the funders, and research institutions to specify these conditions. The role of scholarly publishers is to develop services that support the needs of the research community.

A mixed, complementary approach to the practice of open access, via OA journals and OA repositories, is both necessary and desirable for the future of open science. This will allow for greater innovation in scholarly publishing, a model which has not markedly evolved over the last 350 years, despite significant flaws. Furthermore, Open Access based on an APC payment model is not achievable, equitable, or sustainable over the long term for some countries and regions. Many researchers around the world simply do not have the means to pay OA publishing fees (APCs), nor do their governments or institutions have money for transformational agreements.

So, let’s not allow the rhetoric to percolate or pass by unchallenged. OA repositories – managed by long-lived and trusted institutions – are critical infrastructures for open science and part and parcel of the foundation for a sustainable and equitable scholarly communication system.