VU Amsterdam and many other scientific institutions, including NWO, promote the (gold) open-access policy. This means that not the readers, but the authors or their employers pay the costs of publishing scientific work. To an outsider this may seem like a marginal issue. But in fact it is a substantial aspect of the national and global scientific enterprise. For the sake of brevity I will limit myself to the publication of scientific articles, even though open access for books is at least as problematic.
For big pub, the large international publishers, this system is simply another business model. It guarantees them the continuation of their often excessive profits, made possible in part by the many contributions of academics subsidized by taxpayers. But policymakers often praise open access as “liberating” and “emancipatory”. Good for science and good for society, says NWO. In reality, however, this publication system has major disadvantages for poorer and less affluent scholars and societies.
As an example I discuss Springer’s policy, but the other major publishers (such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis and Sage) use a similar system. The price that authors must pay for an article in a given journal (Author Processing Charge, APC) depends on the country of the lead author. To calculate that price, they use the World Bank’s annual income data (GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) | Data). Countries are grouped into four categories: 1) low, 2) lower-middle, 3) upper-middle and 4) high (gross) incomes. The starting point of this system is that first the norm, the maximum APC, is set for wealthy countries. The APC for less affluent and poorer countries is then derived from that.
Researchers in group 1 receive a full APC waiver. That seems like a nice gesture. But in fact it means nothing, because these are countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen, from which hardly any scientific articles originate. Group 2 consists of countries such as Angola and Zimbabwe. Researchers in these countries qualify for a 50 percent APC discount. But these countries are still quite poor, relatively speaking. For most researchers the APC (which can range from 1250 to 2500 euros or more) is still completely unaffordable. From group 3 onward, Springer no longer offers discounts. This means that scientists in those countries (e.g., Albania and Turkmenistan) pay the same as researchers from the wealthiest countries. The result is that scientists in groups 2 and 3 can read all open-access articles, but they cannot themselves contribute, at a high level and with optimal reach, to the further development of the sciences.
Even if we stay within the framework of the gold open-access policy, there is a more just and practically feasible alternative: determine the APC for a country directly on the basis of its relative income compared to that of the U.S. (as the most important, wealthy scientific nation). Then Angola would get an APC discount of about 97 percent (instead of 50 percent), Albania 89 percent (instead of 0 percent), and even the Netherlands still 25 percent (instead of 0 percent)!
Conclusions
The supposedly liberating and emancipatory publication system of big pub actively contributes to global inequality in science.
The missions and ethical codes of universities and research funders are often full of fine moral principles. But even a start with good principles is only half the job. Without further analysis of the actual use of these principles, the hidden structural problems remain unmentioned and this use is in fact legitimised.