The Future of Science Publishing

A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in 'some unsavory publishing practices,' including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. 'Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'' says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. 'It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale.'

Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a 'very rapid rise' in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.

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