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Scientific knowledge is a public good
Science and scholarship are about sharing and advancing knowledge, and many open access policies have been diligently designed in order to ensure that all their funded researchers are able to comply with them, even if they do not have the funds to pay to publish their articles. This means many funders’ policies and institutional mandates permit the sharing of the peer-reviewed, unformatted version of an article – referred to as the author accepted manuscript (AAM) – through an open access repository.
Regrettably, some publishers have begun to apply a fee to authors who want to make their AAM open access challenging a long-established practice of authors sharing manuscripts through open repositories. As noted by Coalition S, these publishers are audaciously seeking to monetize funder mandates making it more difficult and expensive for authors to share their articles through repositories. This practice first came to COAR’s attention when the American Chemical Society (ACS) implemented an article development charge for AAM deposit in 2023, and more recently, with another publisher, the IEEE.
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An author’s right to disseminate and use their work as they choose is a fundamental principle of scholarship
Publishers must not be allowed to overreach
COAR and many others strongly object to this practice for a number of reasons:
- The charges applied are completely arbitrary and not based on any real service provision (for example, IEEE applies a fee to authors who want to apply a CC-BY licence to their AAM; and ACS applies a fee for removing the embargo period). They are just another funding stream for publishers that are already making huge profits.
- Deposit fees disadvantage authors who do not have funding to pay
- These fees amount to double dipping since the final published version of the AAM is made available behind a paywall with no discount
- This practice prevents universities and research organisations from creating an accessible record of their scholarly output.
Authors: Retain your rights!
These unscrupulous practices that apply fees to the deposit of an AAM into a repository illustrates the critical need for authors to retain their rights.
The content of an article belongs to the author who should not be duped into paying a fee to exercise a right they already have. COAR, therefore, joined by many others in the scholarly community, urges authors to exercise their rights and never sign over the copyright for their author accepted manuscript.
What can you do?
Authors: Attach a rights retention statement upon submission of your article to a publisher
Funders: Require all funded authors to retain the rights to their author accepted manuscripts as part of the grant agreement
Institutions: Adopt rights retention policies and urge your faculty to comply with them
Libraries: Support your faculty in pushing back on bad publisher practices
Developing an alternative to the current profit oriented system
Not only do these kind of practices highlight the need for rights retention, but they provide further rational and motivation for increasing our collective investments in an alternative diamond open access publishing system that is accessible to all researchers, cost effective, and supports innovation and bibliodiversity.
Related Statements
Should we boycott the IEEE learned society? The CNRS condemns the creation of the Repository License Fee. Original French version – English translation