The funding barrier to open-access publishing, in IOP Publishing’s survey, is unevenly shared in terms of geography and more.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also:
Wiley Survey: Society Members on Diversity, Sustainability
Cengage’s Gale and Bodleian Libraries: Asia-Pacific Fellowships
Wiley Reports Providing Knowledge Unlatched ‘Oable’ to 34 Customers: Europe and North America

Concern for Early Career Researchers and Others

As our readership will recall, IOP Publishing is based in Bristol, in the West Country of England, and describes itself as a society-owned scientific publisher. It takes its name from its parent company, the Institute of Physics, and it operates in a nonprofit format, any “financial surplus” going to the institute.

In its new study, released to the news media today (August 22), the company provides data points collected from a 3,000-respondent survey of internationally based physical-science researchers between December and January.

While it’s hardly the sort of conclusion that’s going to threaten your balance if you’re not sitting down, a majority of responding researchers, reportedly 62 percent, said that lack of adequate funding made it impossible for them to publish open-access, despite the fact that 53 percent said they’d like to publish open-access.

IOP Publishing produced the study in coordination with three other companies,  AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society, and Optica Publishing Group.

Among top-line assertions from the survey’s authors:

• Fourteen percent of respondents said they’d never published open-access in five years; some might argue that they idea that 86 percent said they had is news in itself
• In those five years, more than 50 percent of the respondents said they’d published only one open-access article
• Some 80 percent of researchers most concerned with funding shortfalls and open access, the study indicates, are in Latin America, Indian, and Pakistani, respondents saying that a lack of funds needed to pay for open access is their main reason for not publishing that way
• Around 47 percent of those reporting funding shortfalls for open access are in Africa and the Middle East
• Among responding European researchers surveyed, 61 percent said that obtaining grants needed to pay for open access is a “significant barrier”
• And overall, 30 percent of the respondents reported that they’d been unable to publish in a specific journal because they lacked access to the grant funding needed to pay for open access

One interesting comment from an American respondent indicated that there could be an issue of optics, as well:

The field of scholarly publishing and open access is choked with acronyms. “ECR” refers to early career researchers, and one of the concluding concerns highlighted in the study is that early career researchers believe that open access is more important than having the ability to choose where to publish, and they want to be able to reap the benefits of unrestricted access to research. In other words, they get it–but they can’t afford it.

“Supporters of open access or not, article publishing charges are a concern for early career researchers because of a lack of access to funds, or lack of awareness of the existence of funding sources.”

And other observation of note: “To make open access an easy option for researchers, funders need not only to provide access to funds, but also to increase researcher engagement. There remain pockets of doubt about the requirement for open access, and in many cases the burden is still on the individual to understand what is expected of them.”

You can read the white paper IOP Publishing has produced here.

---

More from Publishing Perspectives on scholarly and research publishing is here, more on open access is here, and more on industry statistics is here.

More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here