'Chaos is coming for scholarly publishing' - Research Professional News https://share.google/EZ9H7LFS5mLpza507
(with thanks to Jonathan Parker, HIFA steering group member)
Extracts
'What’s certain is that the Big Five will no longer reap the obscene profit margins they’ve enjoyed for decades. Their multimillion-dollar agreements with artificial intelligence companies may be the last windfall.'
'The financial crisis at UK universities has left librarians needing to save hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. An obvious thing to cut is commercial publishers’ journal packages—university libraries spend up to 60 per cent of their budgets on subscriptions and licensing agreements with the Big Five commercial publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and Sage...
'Diamond open access, where journals charge neither readers nor authors, has equity baked in. The international Plan S initiative defines it as “community-driven, academic-led, and academic-owned”...
'A growing number of high-profile journals have flipped to diamond open access...
'January 2026 will see a major step towards mainstreaming diamond open access, in the shape of the Open Journals Collective. This initiative replaces transformative agreements with a non-profit, community-led research infrastructure, collectively raising funds to support diamond journals.
'More than a dozen participating publishers in the UK, US and continental Europe have been announced so far. By investing in OJC-supported journals, libraries get more control over how their funding is spent and can collectively design an exit ramp from commercial big deals...
'At the Open Library of Humanities, which I co-founded in 2015, our average annual library membership of about £1,600 per year—which supports the publishing costs of more than 30 journals—wouldn’t cover a single article processing charge at most commercially run journals...
'We can confront loss of access to expensive commercial journals by working together to move to a non-profit, community-governed publishing system.'
Caroline Edwards is professor of contemporary literature and culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She is co-founder and executive director of the Open Library of Humanities and a director of the Open Journals Collective.
COMMENTS (NPW): I watched a presentation by Caroline Edwards about Open Journals Collective here: https://vimeo.com/1090554632
What I understood:
It is led by 'academics, librarians, publishers'
'we stand united against commercialisation of research communication. We refuse to see our work exploited for profit'. 'Transformative Agreements (between academic institutions and top 5 publishers' are inequitable
The OJC appears to identify journals that are unhappy with their current arrangements with commercial publishers, and invite them into a new arrangement with OJC where academics can run their own journals
The funding model is still unclear to me. It is run on a non-profit basis and it seems that people will be able to become members by providing an annual fee. It's expected that operation would be funded by 'libraries and funding councils'.
It's interesting that the OJC explicitly describes itself as political. It is also anti-commercial and appears to be a reaction against the profits of commercial publishers.
The presenter did not discuss the role of preprints at all - they were not even mentioned. And despite embracing library and information professionals, there was no perspective on whether and how this approach might strengthen (or weaken) the quality of journal publishing and the global evidence ecosystem. It did feel that it was largely being done for the benefit of acadamics and librarians who are unhappy about some aspects of commercial publishing among the 'big 5'.
I think it will be challenging to get people to invest sustainably in such a way that this model would approach the size and operations of the big 5 publishers.
Capping of APCs still seems to be to be the easiest way forward, although I take on board Ginny Barbour's comment that we need a diversity of approaches.
I look forward to your comments.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org