Open Access Week: Fee Waivers

As a librarian, I am primarily focused on helping users find and access full-text research literature. As such, when I think of the advantages of Open Access, it is mainly from the consumer's perspective.  But being able to publish in Open Access mechanisms is equally important. OA research gets read and downloaded more often and has been shown to have a citation advantage. Research that is published immediately means that new findings are shared earlier and circulated more quickly, and an article is available to be cited for that much longer. Research that is posted online is also indexed by Google Scholar which enhances its discoverability.

As this previous post noted, academics from the Global South may be able to access and read more research freely when it is OA, but the rising costs of APCs are making it more difficult for them to participate in the global scholarly communication process and to ensure that their research is visible to an international audience.

The CFPs posted yesterday included references to fee waiver programs. Is this another potential solution to the publishing barriers presented by APCs? This study found that most of the large journal publishers do have some kind of waiver policy in place, but this applies principally to APCs for Gold Open Access journals; hybrid journals are generally excluded. The reasoning is that authors with limited financial means can simply publish their articles in a subscription-based journal in the usual way at no cost, and then use the Green route to make their article OA. (Note: For a while, Oxford Journals was the exception to this rule; however, as of this year, they no longer provide reduced rate developing country charges for hybrid OA.)

Here is waiver information for some of the more well-known Gold OA publishers that forced migration authors have published with:

BioMed Central/Springer [info]
- Offers full waivers to authors based in certain low-income countries and a 50% discount to authors based in other lower-middle-income countries. Authors can also apply for discretionary waivers.

Frontiers [info]
- "In cases where authors do not have the means to pay the APCs, they can apply for full or partial waivers. Please complete our Waiver Application form online, and allow up to two weeks for Frontiers to review and reply to your request."

Medknow [info]
- Offers full waivers to authors based in certain low-income countries and a 50% discount to authors based in other lower-middle-income countries. Authors can also apply for discretionary waivers.

MDPI [info]
- "Waivers may be granted at the Publisher's discretion and should be discussed with the editorial office when submitting the article."

PLOS [info]
- Offers 1) a Global Participation Initiative whereby authors whose research is funded by institutions in Group 1 will automatically not be charged a fee; those in Group 2 will be charged $500; and 2) a Publication Fee Assistance (PFA) program for authors unable to pay all or part of their  publication fees and who can demonstrate financial need (this includes authors who fell into group 2 above).

Judging from this brief list, even though most publishers have a waiver policy in place, not all of them offer automatic waivers to authors based in low-income countries. This means there is no guarantee that APCs will be reduced or eliminated for many Global South researchers. Moreover, as this researcher notes, the process for securing a waiver is not a straightforward one:

"The consortium then had to enter into lengthy correspondences with several journals to, firstly, prove that the majority of their authors were from LMICs (and therefore automatically entitled to a waiver), and secondly, to secure the waiver in writing. This back and forth to secure waivers is not uncommon for authors based in LMICs. In short, authors continually have to prove how ‘poor’ they are."

In the end, waivers are only a partial solution.  The risk remains that valuable research goes unpublished and unseen when financial hurdles cannot be overcome.