Moving away from APCs: a multi-stakeholder working group convened by cOAlition S, Jisc and PLOS

The push to include the cost of publication in research budgets was intended to reduce the overall cost of access to published research.1 Twenty years on, what we see is that: ● APCs are established as the predominant OA business model in those countries /regions/ disciplines where this economic argument worked but also where they create barriers to participation for those with limited funds. [...] The current model, firmly centred on the event of publication of an article’s Version of Record (VoR) as the desired outcome of research and marker of scientific achievement, exacerbates this problem. [...] In this current system, the majority of scholarly publishers operate, in the words of Uli Dirnagl,2 as ‘an industry mining the currency of the academic reputation economy’ and, as such, ‘a lifeline for those who want to keep the status quo.’ Publishers defend themselves from this criticism by positioning themselves to be in the service of the research community, unable to move until researchers ch. [...] 1 As the PLOS founders stated: ‘Because publishing is an integral part of the research process, a natural alternative to the subscription model is to consider the significant but relatively small costs of open-access publication as one of the fundamental costs of doing research… If these research sponsors also paid the essential costs of publication—amounting, by most estimates, to less than 1% of. [...] Potential questions for the group to consider ● What other stakeholder groups might need to be involved in the discussion? ● What does an equitable business model look like? ● How can each stakeholder group facilitate business models that move “beyond the article” and “beyond APCs?” ● What are the costs to each stakeholder group of swimming against the current tide of an APC/article-based economy?.