Imagine being a STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math) student at a small teaching university, working on your senior thesis at 2 am. Searching through Google Scholar, you click on a journal article title to read through the abstract. You smile. It’s the perfect addition. You click the “download PDF” button, excited to finally finish off your paragraph. Then your face falls. You’ve received this pop-up in red lettering: “Get access to the full version of this article. View access options below.” You’ve hit a paywall.
I am, unfortunately, intimately familiar with this experience.
For my undergraduate senior thesis, I conducted and later published a 41-page literature review, citing around 70 references. After joining the master’s program, my classwork shifted from didactic lectures to 6000-level student-led seminar courses, in which primary literature articles are reviewed and presented by students weekly and followed by guided discussion. Furthermore, in preparation for my master’s capstone project, I wrote and submitted a 13-page grant proposal with around 20 references, subsequently receiving grant funds to support my research.
Evidently, I frequently search for and read journal articles. And at a non-R1 research institution, this job becomes incredibly hair-pulling when there is a limited information resources budget and, consequently, restricted subscriptions to journal databases.
There’s nothing more joyous than discovering that “perfect abstract” I mentioned above, only to find that the full article exists behind a $30 paywall in a journal to which my institution is not subscribed.
Thirty dollars? For a solitary journal article?
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This problem is not limited to me or my university. Students attending community colleges, universities with limited funding, and even high school students—not to mention researchers in low-income countries—struggle to access journal articles, particularly those from prestigious journals such as Science and Nature. At journals such as these, the paywall exists to cover the publishing costs and facilitate quality control, as well as to maintain integrity through the establishment of exclusiveness.
However, there is also a valid argument that monetary greed may play a part in the exorbitant costs. Critics of paywalled journal articles note that large publishing companies hold a monopoly over journals due to the consolidation of small companies, which allows the journals to charge high prices to both individual readers and subscribing institutions.
Consequently, although well-funded research institutions can afford the costs, smaller institutions and individuals struggle, leading to an unfair disparity in both the quality and quantity of research that can be accessed and read by students.
Fortunately, some headway has been made in the United States’s science policy to reduce journal article paywalls and allow for more equal public access. Two core memorandums were issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in an effort towards ensuring public access to all publications associated with federally funded research.
In 2013, the memorandum from then director John P. Holdren required each government agency with a research and development (R&D) budget greater than $100 million—Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), etc.—to, among other things, create a plan for allowing public viewership without a paywall. The details of said plan were as follows:
a) Ensure that the public can read, download, and analyze in digital form final peerreviewed manuscripts or final published documents within a timeframe that is appropriate for each type of research conducted or sponsored by the agency. Specifically, each agency:
i) shall use a twelve-month post-publication embargo period as a guideline for making research papers publicly available; however, an agency may tailor its plan as necessary to address the objectives articulated in this memorandum, as well as the challenges and public interests that are unique to each field and mission combination, and
ii) shall also provide a mechanism for stakeholders to petition for changing the embargo period for a specific field by presenting evidence demonstrating that the plan would be inconsistent with the objectives articulated in this memorandum;
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In other words, the government agencies would be asked to create a plan in which all research generated from their program would become available to the public after a temporary restriction period of around 12 months.
The responsibility would not be on the journals to provide access, but rather a twofold responsibility of the grant funding agency alongside the authors. The agency would be responsible for laying out the action plan, including the restriction period, which the authors would follow. The authors would then be responsible for either having the manuscript published as open access by the journal to which they choose to submit it, or they can have it released from a repository as an Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM).
The drawback of publishing open access is the hefty fees—i.e., article processing charges (APCs)—collected by the journals to cover copy editing, peer review, and other publication fees.
Enter AAMs.
These include all content that would appear in the final publication, minus the style and formatting of the journal to which the article has been submitted. These documents are released to the public at no charge to the author when deposited in a designated repository—i.e., PubMed Central (PMC) for the National Institute of Health (NIH).
Although they may not be as aesthetically pleasing as the official journal’s publication, they are the most cost-effective method of releasing the complete article to the public.
In 2022, a revision memorandum of the 2013 policy was released by the White House OSTP, which made fundamental changes to the public release policy. The most significant line from the memorandum provides the following requirement for all federal funding agencies:
Update their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31st, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release.
Meaning, the agencies releasing the journal articles will now be required to revise their public access policies to allow for immediate access to all article content, including supporting data, from the time of publication. This, therefore, removes the year-long waiting period. In addition to this, all federal funding agencies, regardless of R&D expenditures, will be expected to comply.
What does not change under this revision is the method of public release, which will remain in the hands of the individual authors and will still include either open access publication from the main journal or release of the AAM in its respective repository.
For students and researchers at smaller institutions, the 2022 memorandum serves as a significant step toward reducing reliance on costly journal subscriptions, allowing federally funded science to become more equally accessible.
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But is this enough to fix the imbalance driven by paywalls?
It is essential to consider that this ruling only covers federally funded research and does not include research sponsored by private institutions, pharmaceutical companies, nonprofit organizations, and other funding sources. Articles produced through those means, therefore, do not fall under the memorandum and are not required to be publicly accessible.
This means a significant amount of research will remain inaccessible if the author chooses not to pay the large APCs for open access.
Ultimately, although the OSTP memorandums are major victories for federally funded research, they serve as only one piece in the large research access puzzle. True equal access will require pressure on publishers to reduce the monopoly, as well as the development of creative solutions for privately funded research.
Until then, students and researchers at smaller institutions will continue to navigate the frustrating reality of paywalls, at least until the pursuit of knowledge is limited only by curiosity and not by cost.
See more by Hannah Hutchins on Muck Rack.
Image by happle on Adobe Stock; Asset ID# 1071727171
