Starting in January, authors of Science papers will be allowed to post accepted manuscripts to a public repository of their choice without delay.Credit: Getty
The publisher of the prestigious journal Science will soon allow the authors of its research papers to submit a near-final version of their manuscript in a repository of their choice immediately upon publication, at no charge.
This approach differs from that of the publishers of similar impact journals Cell and Nature, which charge most authors fees called article processing costs (APCs) to make their articles open access. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)
Science announced its new approach in a September 9 editorial written by senior officials at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. Since then, Bill Moran, publisher of Science Journals at AAAS, told Nature that Science’s policy will take effect in January 2023 and will apply to all five subscription journals in the Science family. (The AAAS already has a full open-access title, Science Advances, in which authors pay publication fees; the new policy will not extend to that journal.)
He also said that the conditions under which authors will be able to share their manuscripts have yet to be finalized, as a custom reuse license for non-commercial use is still being developed. Open-access scholars say this raises questions about how liberal researchers are able to share their work.
Currently, most authors who publish in the Science family of journals are allowed to post their accepted manuscripts only in an institutional repository or on a personal website. They must wait six months after publication before adding the paper to other repositories, such as the life science database PubMed. There are exceptions to this rule, including for some authors supported by funders who participate in the European-led Open Access Initiative cOAlition S.
Shifting policies
The new approach to Science comes hot on the heels of a major policy shift by the US government regarding access to federally funded research. An announcement in August stated that by the end of 2025, the results of research funded by federal agencies should be read for free as soon as they are published – scrapping existing rules that allowed a year-long wait before the work was made public.
It is significant that the AAAS is looking for alternatives to APCs, says Juan Pablo Alperin, who studies publishing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Read also : Video Games and the Cake Promise. “Article processing fees have become popular because they preserve the business of publishing, but this does not mean that they are what best serves the academic community,” he adds.
The Science editorial argues that charging APCs works well for well-funded senior scientists in secure positions, who tend to be “overwhelmingly male and white,” but does not serve early career researchers. “Also disadvantaged are scholars at smaller schools, including historically Black colleges and universities, and in underfunded disciplines such as mathematics and the social sciences,” the authors write.
AAAS’s approach is “a step in the right direction and a better step than has been taken by some commercial publishers,” says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London. Other non-profit publishers have introduced alternative open-access business models, such as PLOS’s Community Action Publishing scheme and the journal eLife’s “preprint first” model.
Alperin and Curry await with interest the terms of the AAAS license, which will dictate exactly how the work can be shared. An important question is whether the material can be used for teaching at universities, says Curry.
It’s not clear that Science’s approach will work for other journals, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Science has almost 130,000 subscribers to their print edition. So it’s unclear to me if this model is generalizable to the typical scientific journal,” she says.
