As researchers, aren’t you concerned that important studies and research findings will effectively reach the wider public with a six-month delay under this model?

The first months after publication are often when a paper has the greatest visibility and impact — through media coverage, conferences, and social media discussions. If access for those without subscriptions only becomes available after an embargo, doesn’t that risk slowing down the dissemination of knowledge, especially for clinicians, researchers in less well-funded institutions, or the public who ultimately support much of this research through donations and taxes?

This is a cost cutting measure masquerading as a moral stand. As noted by Gunther Eysenbach, you’re ignoring all full open access journals. If hybrid journals were really the issue, you would just refuse to pay fees for hybrid journals instead of refusing all APCs outright.
If you aren’t happy with the state of open access (who is?) that’s fine, but you can’t just expect a service, in this case open access, to continue to be delivered without paying for it. Forcing research to be sat behind a paywall for six months is not true open access. When a paper first comes out is the period when a paper is most commonly read- thanks to social media, media engagement etc. Instead you propose readers, including those who donate to CRUK to wait for 6m. There are many issues with OA and publishing in general, but this is clearly a move driven by finances- not improving how we share research.

This is devastating news for full open access publishers like PLoS or JMIR Publications (which you failed to mention, even though we came before PLoS). JMIR Publications (https://www.jmir.org) is a small independent scholar-led full open access publisher and we have published many studies of your grantees in the past. Our APCs are reasonable (median $2000) and are the only source of revenue because we do not sell subscriptions or license our content to AI firms. We share your frustration and scepticism of the big publishers which is exactly why we stayed independent and scholar-led, but you seem to forget that there is a long tail of publishers – the big 8 only publish 40% of research – and many of them don’t have the profit margins you are mentioning. We employ highly qualified MDs and PhDs as editors who are paid fair salaries. We cannot work for free. As such the decision is devastating for us and other full open access publishers (not many remain!), especially if other funders follow. If you only support “green” this means you demand publication in subscription journals. This would mean that full open access publishers would have to switch to subscription models or cease to exist. I believe you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater with this misguided policy. If you are concerned about double-dipping then ban publication in hybrid OA journals. If you are concerned about APCs being too high then set an APC cap. But don’t destroy the basis of existence for full open access publishers.

Your criticism primarily focuses on a dislike of hybrid journals which have some subscription-only content and some open access content. But it appears your policy also targets fully open access journals. Removal of funding for open access journals and an emphasis on green open access, if carried through to its logical conclusion, would see the end of immediate open access to the results of research, and a return to subscription journals as a primary model with delayed access to unofficial self-archived copies as the scraps from the table available to those without subscriptions. This doesn’t seem like progress.

Open access journals and immediate open access policies have made a huge positive difference to the public availability of research results. Let’s not return to embargo periods.

The focus should be on creating mechanisms to ensure that open access publishing is done cost-effectively, and fixing the broken reward mechanisms which have incentivised the growth of “predatory publishers”. But don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

This compounds the problem of accessing journals that we have been having in the global south particularly in Africa. Most of our universities in Africa do not pay for journal access and scholars left with junk or predatory journals. This is not just double tragedy for us, it is now triple.

I think this is a sensible approach. Open access has not fulfilled the hopes for it: asking the writer to pay rather than the readers (through their institutions) opened the door to vanity publishing, and launched a model where every paper rejected is a financial loss while every paper accepted is a profit. An indirect consequence of open access has been a general decline in the standards of post- acceptance production, meaning that paradoxically while papers have been more widely accessible, they have become less readable as well as less worth reading. The avarice of ommercial publishers is an enduring problem -but Society-owned journals are a very different beast; they still value rigor and scholarship on not-for-profit models (where profits are returned to the community). But Cancer Research UK might go further – by requiring that those funded do not publish in commercial journals that take a high profit without investing in the science, and by asking those it funds not to join their editorial boards and not to act as referees for them.

When publishing houses were established, public dissemination of data by any other means would have been challenging. That’s certainly not so now! So, really the only thing that the publishing houses offer is expert peer review to validate the work’s content, and appropriate deposition of the work in the permanent record. The latter can probably be achieved by other means now, e.g., via institute / university archives. Hence, it’s really the peer validation that’s sought, and which has so many implications for a person’s career development and progression. Is this something that the academic societies might address? After all, many ran (and some still run) highly regarded peer-reviewed journals, in which truly transformational papers can be found. Perhaps CRUK and other funders should actively engage the societies at a global level. At minimum, it would bring more voices to the table because for sure the current system is utterly unfit for purpose.

Well done. I 100% suport this decision. Imagine you were a company whose products are sold at Sainbury’s. Now imagine that instead of paying the company for that product, Sainsbury’s instead charged them to sell it. Meanwhile, all Sainsbury’s staff are expected to work for free and, to cap it all off, the company is not allowed to enter the store and browse any of Sainsbury’s other products, unless it pays another, very large fee. Ludicrous, right? Yet, this is exactly how the academic publishing model ‘works’. Bottom line: there should never be a fee to publish. Axiomatic to academic norms should be the ability to publish, unhindered, subject to peer review. Access to knowledge beyond universities is an important consideration too, but it should not be the tail that not only wags but also breaks the dog.

Pretty bad decision. While you have not elaborated how this decision will affect the access to new studies I fear it will be even more restrictive for “normal” people. If this is true, this will block the average joe to follow up on innovation – for some it is a vital (and some times the only) source of news about innovation that will now even more restricted than before. (not that it was great in the past)
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