Publishing at what cost?
Authors: None The Lancet Planetary Health
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2022)

Academic publishing is rapidly transitioning towards a predominantly open access (OA) business model. The Lancet Planetary Health is a part of that shift, having been OA since its launch in 2017. There are many advantages to making research free to read. Most notably the removal of barriers to access facilitates broader more equitable engagement with published research, improves interdisciplinary dialogue, and can increase overall article use and citations. However, while there are clear positives, open access publishing models are not without their challenges.Publishing takes work and resources and that has a cost; OA publishing models shift the burden of that cost from the reader to the researcher. In many cases these are the same individuals, but how and when people pay, as well as how much, has a number of potential implications. For example, a pay to publish model links publication volume to income, offering an incentive, for some publishers, to turn over a high volume of papers with low, or even no, quality editorial process. With rapid growth in the number of academic journals, distinguishing between legitimate and predatory publishers can be challenging for authors and readers, particularly for those operating outside of a particular established research field.But even when journals are acting in good faith, publishing fees—referred to as article processing charges (APCs)—impose a potential barrier to publication by shifting the pay wall from limiting access to read, to limiting access to publish. Many universities and funders are able to cover APCs, preventing the financial burden falling upon individual researchers, but this is not universal. Such a pay to publish mechanism therefore risks reinforcing existing inequalities when it privileges the work of established and well-funded institutions over those with more limited funds. This is further complicated because high status, high impact journals tend to have higher APC's. For example Nature Publishing group recently made headlines with their APC charges. These price differentials potentially stratify access to more influential outlets. As well as being unfair, exclusions risk impacting intellectual diversity and particularly underrepresentation of scholarship from Low and middle income country (LMIC) researchers. A recent paper, which used a kind of natural experiment to investigate the impact of open access APCs on the diversity of authors found that the geographic diversity of authors in OA journals was significantly lower than that of articles in equivalent free to publish subscription journals. Although we have to be careful in extrapolating these findings too widely, this study does seem to support concerns that author diversity can be diminished by APCs.At The Lancet Planetary Health, as with many OA journals, we have several mechanisms to try to combat the risk that affordability is a barrier to publication. All this information is available on our website, but it is hoped that drawing attention to these mechanisms here will increase awareness and help to prevent authors from being put off from submitting their research because of perceived unaffordability.Authors from counties eligible for Research4Life receive automatic waivers or discounts for their papers. The waiver or discount depends on the location of the authors institution. A 100% waiver is applied when all authors are from a Group A country institution. A 50% APC discount is applied if the corresponding author and co-authors are all from a Group B country institution, or a mix of authors from Group A and B countries.We recognise that Research4life does not cover every situation, so in addition to these automatic discount and waiver criteria if an author cannot afford the APC and can demonstrate they have had no research funding, we will consider individual waiver requests on a case-by-case basis.Finally, Elsevier has a growing catalogue of open access agreements and funding arrangements which mean that a researcher's institution or funder may pay the APC or offer discounts.Many planetary health issues are global in nature and it is vitally important that expertise and experiences from around the world are brought together to understand and address them. OA publishing helps to disseminate research more widely, but this will have limited advantage if key researchers are excluded from publishing their findings. If you have research that you believe offers an important contribution to planetary health but are concerned about the APC, we encourage you to investigate the waiver options on our website and if they don’t cover your situation please get in touch with the editorial office. Academic publishing is rapidly transitioning towards a predominantly open access (OA) business model. The Lancet Planetary Health is a part of that shift, having been OA since its launch in 2017. There are many advantages to making research free to read. Most notably the removal of barriers to access facilitates broader more equitable engagement with published research, improves interdisciplinary dialogue, and can increase overall article use and citations. However, while there are clear positives, open access publishing models are not without their challenges. Publishing takes work and resources and that has a cost; OA publishing models shift the burden of that cost from the reader to the researcher. In many cases these are the same individuals, but how and when people pay, as well as how much, has a number of potential implications. For example, a pay to publish model links publication volume to income, offering an incentive, for some publishers, to turn over a high volume of papers with low, or even no, quality editorial process. With rapid growth in the number of academic journals, distinguishing between legitimate and predatory publishers can be challenging for authors and readers, particularly for those operating outside of a particular established research field. But even when journals are acting in good faith, publishing fees—referred to as article processing charges (APCs)—impose a potential barrier to publication by shifting the pay wall from limiting access to read, to limiting access to publish. Many universities and funders are able to cover APCs, preventing the financial burden falling upon individual researchers, but this is not universal. Such a pay to publish mechanism therefore risks reinforcing existing inequalities when it privileges the work of established and well-funded institutions over those with more limited funds. This is further complicated because high status, high impact journals tend to have higher APC's. For example Nature Publishing group recently made headlines with their APC charges. These price differentials potentially stratify access to more influential outlets. As well as being unfair, exclusions risk impacting intellectual diversity and particularly underrepresentation of scholarship from Low and middle income country (LMIC) researchers. A recent paper, which used a kind of natural experiment to investigate the impact of open access APCs on the diversity of authors found that the geographic diversity of authors in OA journals was significantly lower than that of articles in equivalent free to publish subscription journals. Although we have to be careful in extrapolating these findings too widely, this study does seem to support concerns that author diversity can be diminished by APCs. At The Lancet Planetary Health, as with many OA journals, we have several mechanisms to try to combat the risk that affordability is a barrier to publication. All this information is available on our website, but it is hoped that drawing attention to these mechanisms here will increase awareness and help to prevent authors from being put off from submitting their research because of perceived unaffordability. Authors from counties eligible for Research4Life receive automatic waivers or discounts for their papers. The waiver or discount depends on the location of the authors institution. A 100% waiver is applied when all authors are from a Group A country institution. A 50% APC discount is applied if the corresponding author and co-authors are all from a Group B country institution, or a mix of authors from Group A and B countries. We recognise that Research4life does not cover every situation, so in addition to these automatic discount and waiver criteria if an author cannot afford the APC and can demonstrate they have had no research funding, we will consider individual waiver requests on a case-by-case basis. Finally, Elsevier has a growing catalogue of open access agreements and funding arrangements which mean that a researcher's institution or funder may pay the APC or offer discounts. Many planetary health issues are global in nature and it is vitally important that expertise and experiences from around the world are brought together to understand and address them. OA publishing helps to disseminate research more widely, but this will have limited advantage if key researchers are excluded from publishing their findings. If you have research that you believe offers an important contribution to planetary health but are concerned about the APC, we encourage you to investigate the waiver options on our website and if they don’t cover your situation please get in touch with the editorial office.