The open access mandate: Be careful what you wish for

Recently, a large group of funding institutions denominated Science Europe released a bold and controversial initiative. Plan S, as it has been called (S standing for science, shock or speed, according to one of its supporters), was launched on September 2018 and is an initial movement towards fully open-access scientific publications. The plan mandates that by 2021 researchers that benefit from grant funds must publish their papers exclusively in open-access journals, making publications freely available to everyone immediately. It is a revolutionary approach and its main advocate, Dr Robert-Jan Smits, explains that the aim is to increase accessibility to scientific data, on the premise that public funding should result in public domain and accessibility. Mr Smits states that people must think of this process as a ‘chess game’ (‘3 moves ahead’) but it is unclear whether there is a simple or agreed vision of where we will be three moves ahead (Else, 2018).

In its opening move, Plan S describes 10 principles on how it plans to run. Some are vague and open to interpretation, while others are straightforward, like the unpopular measure banishing grantees from publishing in hybrid journals, which already provide the opportunity for open-access publishing. The decision is controversial, and the debate is heated. Recently, more than 1,500 researchers, among them two Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter arguing against the plan, the way it is now designed. Their concerns range from academic freedom to the future quality of a total open-access model (Haug, 2019). As written, the plan will stop researchers from publishing in at least 80% of journals including the most prestigious ones, like Nature, Science, The Lancet or The New England Journal of Medicine, known for their scientific integrity and rigorous peer-review process that together have acted as a foundation for generations of solid science.

Quantity/quality

One of the main concerns regarding a fully open-access model is the quality of open-access journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists 13,505 journals, with numbers increasing fast. While some are undoubtedly excellent, a massive majority and growing number are anything but. The precise proportions of quality and predatory categories are hard to determine, but a disturbingly large number compromise the scientific endeavour. While exemplar exceptions exist, the open-access business model is incentivised to prioritise quantity over quality.

The dangers of predatory journals for the scientific world cannot be underestimated (Moher et al., 2017). Scientific integrity, quality and trustworthiness must be a sin ne qua non condition for editors and publishers everywhere. With the speed and reach of information spread in the online world, poor-quality research or wrong interpretations (whether by mistake or veiled interests) can create waves of dangerous misinformation with profound consequences, like in the recent case of vaccine scepticism. This initiative from some of the largest European funding agencies, and from the biggest funding agencies in the world if progressed, might embolden existing predatory publishers and create a new wave of mercenary and mediocre open-access journals, with the potential to severely damage the integrity of the scientific publishing process.

Costs

The very best journals are very expensive to operate – as an exemplar, The New England Journal of Medicine (excluding editors) lists 77 people on its staff. Were a journal like this to be funded through open-access publication fees alone, costs would be stratospheric and unaffordable for all but the richest research organisations, potentially transforming scientific publishing into a luxury goods auction. This means that funders everywhere (if the model progresses) would have to destine extra funding for publication fees, which is unlikely and adds another level of internal competition among grantees. Once Plan S is out, it is not difficult to imagine prices for publication in big journals increasing, not only because of maintenance costs, but because high impact factors and market dominance will allow it. While editors now have freedom to judge works impartially by the quality of studies and the solidity of their methodology, in the future open-access business models might drive (consciously or not) decisions towards financial incentives.

Segregation, diversity and isolationism

A large portion of the world’s best science is already produced by a few players (i.e. the United States, China, Japan, France, Germany and the United Kingdom). This initiative is likely to maintain this scenario for longer and hinder publication access to emerging scientific nations struggling for their space in the competitive scientific world. Barriers to publication for early career and developing nations researchers impoverish the scientific enterprise. As an example, Africa lately increased its scientific production significantly, but mainly by the 2% of researchers that receive funding from international organisations, while more than 50% of its scientists do not receive any funding at all. Interestingly, some of the major funding agencies for this continent are the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (the major ‘inspiration’ for Plan S) and the Welcome Trust (UK) who just signed to be part of the European plan, both with a combined investment of US$11.2 billion in research last year.

If the open-access model progresses to the elimination of subscription (i.e. free to publish) journals, many conceptual papers and reviews (not covered by grants), as well as younger investigators (especially those in developing countries), would be hardest hit by this change. The need to publish in fully open-access journals would severely compromise the budgets of these underfunded research units, and it is most unlikely that universities in developing countries could allocate enough resources to pay for several publication fees, especially for the less renowned authors. Inequality in science is already an issue for individual countries and globally. Diversity and collaboration is vital for the scientific endeavour.

Peer review

Behavioural economics suggests that a pure open-access model would severely compromise peer review, the bedrock of scientific quality and integrity. The rationale is straightforward: people (as well as animals) have intrinsic ‘inequity aversion’. In other words, they consistently react emotionally and forego possible rewards if they perceive unfairness in an interaction. In this case, if one publishes for free, one is more tempted to review for free. Finding willing free reviewers for costly open-access journals will probably become increasingly difficult, an ongoing issue that has paralleled the rise of the open-access movement to date and is likely to get worse as a consequence of the proposed model. There is already a declining engagement with peer review, with many journals increasingly struggling to find quality reviewers. This is in all likelihood driven (at least in part) by the behavioural consequences of the rise of the open-access movement, something that one can predict will worsen. The fracture of the quid pro quo agreement that one provides one’s services to peer review willingly and for free in exchange for free publication and review of one’s own work can have severe consequences. If in the future journals have to move to paid reviewers (a predictable consequence of having to pay for publishing), this will further shift costs to authors and add another whole level of bias into the system.

The reproducibility crisis

The so-called ‘reproducibility crisis’ is an ongoing issue in medical and psychological research and one of its causes is the pressing need to ‘publish or perish’. Publishing is facilitated by open-access journals (with generally lower thresholds to publishing mediocre or frankly poor research). However, scientific publishing is (and should be) the final step in a long and rigorous process, especially when information can be easily distorted for personal or commercial benefits. Recent evidence suggests that Big Pharma has already embraced the open-access model (Warren, 2019). Not that the present model is perfect or immune to their influence, which research shows it is definitely not the case (Heneghan et al., 2017), but a pure open-access model is likely to make it easier to publish potentially favourable reports and disseminate them more widely. Compromise of the scientific process of publishing and the alienation of the most prestigious journals in medicine risks leaving the public and health workers, especially those unfamiliar with the complexity of the scientific process, lost and adrift in a world where information is increasingly accessible, but decreasingly accurate and more easily manipulated. The commitment to integrity and veracity of information in research should fall upon scientists, reviewers, editors and publishers, not upon the usually less trained (and thus more vulnerable) reader.

Conclusion

In post-modern times, science has lost ground, not because science is not out there, but because of the large availability of bad and pseudoscience, distributed massively in social media and pop culture. Falsehoods and spectacular claims spread faster and easier than facts in online environments, and simple messages faster than the complex ones (which much science, especially in psychiatry, is). In times of liquid and personal truths, where everyone consumes and produces information in large scale, the world’s leading scientific countries should strive for quality science, global collaboration, rigorous peer review, solid methodology and the maintenance of its historic meritocratically consecrated journals and institutions, tested throughout years and years of scientific integrity. This is especially important in these opaque information times, where people struggle to discern true from fake news and ‘real’ news from advertising. In this sense, the integrity of old and reliable journals is the new ‘candle in the dark’, as famously put by Carl Sagan.

Plan S is a noble initiative, but fails to foresee some of its possible undesired, yet predictable, outcomes. The precautionary principle must be followed in all areas of science, especially in medicine (primum non nocere). The rush to implement untested ideas, with foreseeable and probably deleterious effects, must not be embraced without serious consideration of the consequences. Science is built gradually upon tested and retested ideas. Plan S seems to be missing a vision of the next dominos to fall, the unintended consequences, as well as any risk mitigation strategy for its brave and rushed approach.