Overlay journals and online archives: the future of scientific publishing

Julkaistu kirjoittanut Syksy Räsänen

”There is no reason why the combination of online archives and overlay journals cannot be extended to all disciplines, saving billions of euros a year. This would free up vast resources for research that are currently wasted on commercial publishers’ profits”, writes cosmologist Syksy Räsänen in his article. The path to a more sustainable publishing culture goes through awareness of the current situation and practical solutions. According to Räsänen, non-profit diamond open access publishing – open access with no APCs (article processing charges) – represents a return to the roots of the open access movement.

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Text: Syksy Räsänen (University of Helsinki, Department of Physics)
Syksy Räsänen says that the open access movement has failed in its aim to bring down the cost of publishing.

More than 20 years have passed since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). Paul Ayris, a veteran of the open access movement at the University College London Library, has said that the initiative has failed in its main objective – reducing the cost of scientific publishing.

This failure is due to the fact that many open access projects have not started from the needs of the academic community and sought to meet them in a cost-effective way independently of the publishing market, contrary to the BOAI declaration.

For example Plan S, the flagship project of open science in Europe, has focused on changing the business model of scientific publishing. As Ayris points out, this has led to Plan S baking the pricing regime of commercial journals into the landscape of open access publishing.

Many open access projects have not started from the needs of the scientific community and sought to meet them in a cost-effective way independently of the publishing market.

The scientific community pays billions of euros every year for scientific journals – for estimates, see my article here. This is because the majority of research articles are published by corporations with the aim of making as much profit as possible. The scientific community, on the other hand, aims to carry out scientific publishing in a way that maximises access to scientific results and minimises costs.

The objectives of commercial publishers and the scientific community are contradictory, which makes it reconciling them difficult. Fortunately, it is also unnecessary: the scientific community can abandon the business model of scientific publishing. (At least as far as journals are concerned; scientific books are a topic of their own, which I won’t go into here.)

A decades old solution

Sometimes the open access debate focuses on how to publish articles cheaply and openly. However, the online archive arXiv has solved this problem more than 30 years ago. arXiv is an archive for physics, mathematics, computer science and related fields. Articles can be submitted to arXiv free of charge and appear on the next working day. Articles are free for all to read forever. Authors can update their articles freely, but all previous versions remain available; authors cannot delete articles. arXiv has published more than 2.3 million scientific articles since 1991.

In 2022, a total of 185 692 scientific articles appeared on arXiv, and the total costs were $2 203 389. This makes $12 per article, but the figure is slightly misleading, because a large part of the cost of arXiv is fixed and does not increase with the number of articles. By comparison, commercial publishers charge on average €3500–€5000 per article.

At least in particle physics and cosmology, the registration, publication and permanent archiving of scientific results have been globally done through arXiv for decades. arXiv also makes possible the dissemination of short scientific commentaries in a fast but structured way that is not suited to journals. Unlike with journals, there is no concern that articles would someday become unavailable because a publisher decides to shut down a journal’s pages.

Paying a 100 times less

arXiv only superficially checks articles for compliance with scientific practice. Peer review and providing a quality stamp are the only tasks left for journals. Once an article has been published in a journal, the publication details can be appended to it on arXiv.

However, peer review does not require traditional journals, it can be done via overlay journals that use arXiv. Once an article has appeared on arXiv, the author informs the overlay journal that they want to publish the article there. The journal handles peer review in the usual way. If changes are made to the article, a new version will be published on arXiv, marked with publication details like for other journals. The overlay journal can compile the articles it has published on its own website, linked to arXiv.

There is no reason why a combination of online archive and overlay journals cannot be extended to all disciplines and save billions of euros a year. This would free up vast resources for research, resources that are currently wasted on the profits of commercial publishers.

There is specialised software developed for overlay journals (e.g in the RIOJA project in 2008), and today you can buy a package off the shelf at least from Scholastica. The cost is $350 per year, plus $10 per article submitted to the journal. Obtaining a DOI from Crossref costs $275 per year plus $1 per published article. If a journal publishes 100 articles a year and rejects two out of three, the cost is $37 per article. Together with the cost of arXiv, this is about 100 times less than the cost of commercial publishers.

Overlay journals already exist, such as Open Journal of Astrophysics and Discrete Analysis. They are not the only ones, but so far overlay journals are still the exception. However, it is easy to set up more of them and they can replace commercial publications, with some exceptions such as coffee table journals like Nature and Science.

Online repositories on the arXiv model have already been set up in other fields, for example bioRxiv in biology. There is no reason why the combination of online archives and overlay journals cannot be extended to all disciplines, saving billions of euros a year. This would free up vast resources for research that are currently wasted on commercial publishers’ profits.

Diamond bridge over the chasm

The main reason why even in particle physics and cosmology researchers have not complete switched to overlay journals is that researchers want the quality stamp of well-known journals, and since they don’t pay for the publication of articles with their own money, they have no need to change anything.

The charm between the researchers who write and read the articles, and the institutions that pay to publish them, is an obstacle to fixing the situation. Researchers often don’t even know how much money goes into publishing, and the payers are not always aware of how easily publishing could be organised by researchers.

However, the situation seems to be improving. The open access movement is partially returning to its roots by putting the scientific community at the centre and seeking to promote non-profit open access publishing. In the terminology of the movement, this is known as diamond open access.

In Europe, the DIAMAS project was launched in 2022 to map and strengthen diamond open access. The DIAMAS Action Plan highlights the key issues of financial sustainability and communication between the different actors, which are a prerequisite for the transition to diamond open access. The EUA cooperation body of European Universities, Research Council of Finland and Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) are involved in DIAMAS. Johan Rooryck, Executive Director of cOAlition S (Plan S), has identified good principles of diamond open access, emphasising that non-profit publishing must originate from and be controlled by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, even in the context of the diamond open access, online archives are sometimes treated only as repositories of articles published elsewhere, without seeing their potential, when combined with overlay journals, to completely replace commercial journals.

Publishing all research in overlay journals is only possible if researchers establish them and value articles published in them in the same way as articles in traditional journals. This will be encouraged if those who pay for scientific publishing also tell researchers about funding problems.

Publishing all research in overlay journals is possible only if researchers establish them and value articles published in them equally as articles in traditional journals. This will be encouraged by those who pay for scientific publishing explaning the funding problems to researchers, urging them not to work for commercial publishers (as the Harvard University Library did with regard to paywalls back in 2012), and supporting the creation of online archives and overlay journals.

This in turn requires that the institutions that pay for publications know that online archives and overlay journals are a cost-effective, tried and tested way of organising the publication of new scientific articles. The only remaining issue will then be the availability of scientific articles published in older journals. At the moment many researchers use the sci.hub website, but the scientific community has to come up with a better solution. One option is to pay publishers a lump sum for giving up the copyright of old articles and making them openly available; another is to force them to do so by law.

What can the University of Helsinki do?

As Sami Niinimäki from the Ministry of Education and Culture has noted, declarations alone will not bring change. Active intervention is needed. The University of Helsinki can help to establish overlay journals and promote the creation of new discipline-specific global online archives in cooperation with other actors. arXiv is exploring the possibilities of overlay journals and how arXiv can promote them, and the Helsinki University Library could cooperate in this.

Funding for this can be found by cancelling subscriptions from commercial publishers when it is convenient for each discipline, although the way publishers bundle subscriptions can make this difficult. For example, the subscriptions and open access payments to all commercial journals in particle physics and cosmology can be ended immediately, as everything is available on arXiv.

Often, the words ’efficiency’ and ’cost-cutting’ refer to measures that reduce efficiency and undermine the conditions for doing research. But it is actually possible to make scientific publishing more efficient in a way that saves huge amounts of money both in Finland and globally and improves the scientific infrastructure. The University of Helsinki can be a pioneer in this.

Syksy Räsänen (TUHAT, ORCID, @SyksyRasanen) is a cosmologist. He is a docent of theoretical physics at the University of Helsinki and a senior researcher in the department of particle physics and astrophysics.