Publisher ownership of research infrastructure could erode academic rights, says open-access adviser
An expert on open-access publishing has warned that commercial publishers are increasingly seeking to control the means of distribution of a growing range of research outputs, and that this could result in a loss of control for researchers.
Sally Rumsey, Plan S expert for the UK digital academic services organisation Jisc, wrote in a blogpost published by Plan S on 10 November: “Major publishers’ control and ownership of research publication and dissemination services and their content can, and is, creeping up on the research community.”
Under Plan S, international funders are requiring the researchers they support to make resulting papers openly available immediately and under certain conditions, including that authors must retain rights over their papers.
But Rumsey said in her post that “some major publishers are already making a grab for authors’ rights for articles” by asking researchers to sign up to restrictive contractual terms when they submit their papers. She warned that the “market dominance and control that such major publishers” have over articles “could be extended, indeed is being extended”, to other research outputs.
Preprint services
In particular, Rumsey highlighted the growing ownership by commercial publishers of platforms for hosting preprints, which are early versions of research papers, published prior to peer review and acceptance by a journal. She warned that the moves she said such publishers were making to control rights over papers could equally be made for preprints and “for any research output” publishers hosted.
“Commercial publishers owning preprint services control the content deposited in these services. Preprints could be seamlessly integrated into their full suite of services, providing full service—and maintaining full control—from preprint to peer-reviewed publication,” Rumsey said. “Needless to say, such a scenario would negatively affect the use of community-owned preprint services, increasing the dominance of a handful of major players over the entire research process from inception to publication.”
Preprint servers are growing in popularity as research transitions towards open-access publishing under requirements including those of Plan S. The majority of preprint servers are owned by universities, funding bodies, charities and other not-for-profit organisations, but in recent years major publishers have taken control of a growing share of such servers, the blogpost states.
The post comes amid tense debate in the publishing industry around the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy for articles. Publishers have complained that the strategy unfairly disregards the value added by editors during the publication process.
But the blogpost warns: “As one means towards retaining the freedom to use their own work as they choose, researchers would be well advised to get into the habit of retaining their rights.”