The growth of open access publishing in geochemistry

In this communication, we look at Open Access (OA) publishing practices in geochemistry. We examine a list of 56 journals and assess whether Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) appear to influence publication or not. More than 40% of articles in 2018-2019 were published OA, and about 70% of that portion in fully OA journals. These had a mean APC of US$ 900, whereas the remaining were published in hybrid journals with a higher mean APC of more than $US 1,800. A moderate and positive correlation is found between the number of OA articles published in hybrids journals and their JIF, whereas there is a stronger positive relationship between the number of OA articles published in fully OA journals and the APC. For OA articles published in hybrid journals, it seems that the proportion of OA articles tends to increase in journals with higher JIF.


Introduction
Throughout history, the scholarly community has increasingly made various cases for wider and easier public access to published research, which in the early 2000s became known broadly as Open Access (OA) [1]. Over the last two decades, scholarly publishing has undergone a major and global transformation, with the move to system-wide OA marking a radical shift in the financial models of major publishers away from journal subscriptions [2]. This has now opened up an enormous diversity in publishing paths for authors and research institutes, raising further issues around publishing ethics. For example, a key element of this transition is that virtually all stakeholders have recognized the importance of ensuring that researchers and their institutes should not have to pay even more to read articles than they already do [3]. With total revenue across the English language Scientific, Technical and Medical publishing sectors estimated to be around US$ 10 billion in 2017 [4].
As recently outlined by Pourret et al. [5], OA publication is often conflated with the author-facing business model of Article Processing Charges (APCs), whereby authors (or their institutions) pay a pre-specified fee to cover the publication cost. However, OA publishing was already widespread many years before the advent of APCs, which became popular as OA publishing became increasingly commercialized. When publishers such as BioMed Central and PLOS demonstrated the feasibility of APC-based business models, the larger and traditionally subscription-based publishing houses began to recognize OA publishing as complimentary to rather than a threat to their business model, and began to adopt it through APC-driven 'transitional' hybrid journals.
However, in their overview of OA practices in geochemistry, Pourret et al. [6] highlighted some discrepancies within this seemingly dominant perspective. Critically, the majority of these journals also have self-archiving policies that allow authors to share their peer reviewed work in parallel via 'green' OA routes and without charge (i.e. APC-free options). The journals with the highest APCs are typically those of the major commercial publishers, rather than journals from geochemical societies [6]. Together, these observations indicate that, in our view, significant control on how we communicate and evaluate our research as a global research community has been ceded to third-party commercial vendors. To our knowledge, no report has been presented on the impact on the geochemical community of differences in Article Processing Charge (APC) and differences between fully-OA and hybrid journals (i.e. partial-OA). This work comes at an important time, as supra-national initiatives such as Plan S (supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders: https://www.coalition-s.org/) are seemingly showing a strong financial preference towards APCdriven 'gold' (OA within journal) models, while simultaneously appearing to neglect more equitable and financially sustainable 'green' (self-archived OA) and 'diamond' ('gold', but no-APC) routes [7]. However, while this article was under review, cOAlition S announced that they were looking more into non-commercial forms of OA publishing, following wider consultation Here, we present an overview of OA practices in geochemistry based on articles published in 2018 and 2019 and whether APC levels seem to correspond with OA publication preferences or not. We expect this analysis to be useful in helping the geochemistry community to make more informed and sustainable choices in their future publishing activities, especially those elements which are publicly-funded and for which the geochemistry community has an increasing responsibility to provide public access to their research.

Material and methods
We applied the same method as described in Tennant and Lomax [9] for analyzing paleontology journals. The full dataset from Pourret et al. [6] was updated to include APC and publication rates for OA articles in 2018 and 2019. We only analyze two years because of the dynamic nature of the data (especially for APC). Information for these APCs, rates for OA publication were sourced Revised version submitted to Results in Geochemistry 5 from the Web of Science, Scopus and journal web pages in January 2020. Key data are available in Table 1 and the full data are available as electronic Supplementary Information and from this online repository (https://zenodo.org/record/3659528).

Results and discussion
The number of 'gold' OA articles started to increase in the early 2000's and continued rapidly over the last 10 years (Figure 1a). A shift occurred 5 years ago with a decrease of OA articles from hybrid journals (i.e. mixed, OA and non OA articles) towards an apparent preference for articles in fully OA journals (i.e. journals that publish 100% OA articles). Indeed, the first fully OA journal do not yet offer an OA option (   scale. This approach tends to increase the revenue-making capacity of the large commercial publishers [11], while simultaneously providing authors, institutes, and nations with relatively fewer financial privileges, as well as concentrating the publishing market in a few established groups and restricting the ability of smaller or more innovative groups to develop [15]. The European Commission themselves have acknowledged that this market dysfunction is a problem that they are monitoring, and one that Plan S could address in the future [16]. In the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, alternative routes that are more equitable are required for the communication of scholarship with wider society. Such a function has recently been highlighted through the impact of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, with a clear role for the wider geoscience community to play [17]. This could include exploring alternative publishing Revised version submitted to Results in Geochemistry 9 models whereby research outputs are more accessible to benefit society rather than as commercial commodities [18].
Regardless of any potential waiver or discount systems being in place (including through negotiations between universities and publishers), the total APC paid by the geochemistry  Table 2). We note that the dataset is not normally distributed ( Table 2). Publishing in a fully OA journal is substantially less-expensive than publishing in a hybrid journal, on average around half the cost for an equivalent output. In this context, Results in Geochemistry has proposed an APC of US$ 800. Such an APC is still relatively high when compared with US$ 400 estimated by Grossmann and Brembs [19] for the true costs of article production, and there are journals where the production costs are up to two orders of magnitude lower than this, such as the Journal of Open Source Software or Journal of Machine Learning Research [20].  All  2018  2019  2018  2019  2018  2019  articles  2846  3240  1197  952  4043  4192  mean  1259  1328  3111  3183  1779  1727  median  1000  1400  3200  3500  1400  1400  minimum  0  0  800  800  0  0  maximum  2490  2490  4000  4000  4000  4000  quartile 1  1000  1000  3140  3150  1000  1000  quartile 3 [21]. The highest APCs are typically those leveraged by the large commercial publishers (see Pourret et al. [6] for details relevant to geochemistry), with annual profit margins in excess of 20-30% [20]. 2018/2019. The slightly higher number of articles in journals with a higher JIF is because there may be an inherent bias for researchers to prefer to publish in a journal with a higher JIF, while academic assessment systems continue to favor the 'publish or perish' approach [22]. Conversely (Figure 2c and 2d  If we look further at OA articles published in hybrid journals (i.e. the majority of historical journals in geochemistry), it seems that the proportion of OA articles tends to increase in journals with a higher JIF (Figure 3a; Pearson's r=0.4136). This relationship is weaker for APCs (Figure 3b; Pearson's r=0.3356).

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During the OA transitional phase, publishing can become more difficult when an APC-based system without appropriate and commensurate additional financial support, especially when authors feel that this is the only route available to them. Thus, the APC-driven elements of OA can restrain journal choice for those individuals who want to or have to publish OA, but have restricted funding, and feel this is the only potential pathway to achieving OA publication and meet relevant OA policies. This is further complicated by constraints often indirectly imposed by publicationbased evaluation systems, which it could be argued already restrict choice of how to disseminate research. Consequently, where funding is restricted the only option for some researchers to publish in a high impact journal, is to place their paper behind a subscription paywall.
This APC-dominated philosophy has created a complex system and hierarchy of financial privilege around OA publishing [5]. In this situation, those researchers who can afford to publish in OA journals, and in particular those which have a high JIF and charge high APCs are given an advantage over those who do not benefit from such financial security and are restricted in choice imposed by their inability to afford APCs. A third group can also be considered who are more ambivalent about making their work OA, stating that it is not their "job" (https://ministeresuprecherche.github.io/bso/). It would be of interest to also evaluate the demographic context of constraints on APCs on publication choice and the potential impact this can have on the visibility and re-use of geochemical research. Given that we know OA publishing tends to lead to increased 'impact' for researchers [23], the inherent bias of current APC-based OA publishing perpetuates this through the 'Matthew Effect' (i.e. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer), ultimately reinforcing the journal-coupled prestige economy that currently governs so much of our global research systems.
Revised version submitted to Results in Geochemistry

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As illustrated in Figure 4, 'gold' OA is now mostly funded by institutions through 'Read and Publish' agreements or direct support from research funding agencies, and in some cases through researchers themselves. The non-OA and 'green' self-archiving routes are typically only funded by institutions and funding agencies (i.e. because there are no author-facing charges). If a researcher happens to be within an institution that can afford to pay both APC and journal subscriptions, this does not seem to be a big issue; the cost is supported externally, and thus there is no incentive for authors to publish in less-expensive venues which might be seen as having a lower 'value'. However, for other institutions (with lower budgets) and for their individuals, cost certainly remains a problem.

Figure 4
The academic publication route: a schematic representation of OA decision steps highlighting financial burden and benefit/reward for different stakeholders (adapted from Irawan et al. [24]).
To help resolve this inequity, there is a clear role for self-archiving of peer reviewed and accepted manuscripts (i.e. postprints), the 'green' way, in parallel to traditional, subscription-based journal publication. The 'green' OA route is cost-free for authors, and in terms of time usually only takes a matter of minutes to share articles online [25]. Often, it seems that awareness and understanding of 'green' OA are among the biggest barriers to more frequently engage with this practice. To pursue 'green' OA, numerous stable, long-term platforms are available such as institutional repositories and collaborative services such as EarthArXiv (https://eartharxiv.org/). It is unfortunate that the latter is infrequently used by the geochemical community relative to the scale of the total research outputs produced [6,26], and its sustainability remains uncertain. Evidently, the current APC model imposed by many journals used be the geochemical community can have deleterious effects on researchers who have no funding, especially from lower income countries with a temptation to publish in 'predatory journals' that might have lower APC [27].
Overall, the Open Access landscape has become more complicated in the last decade, and not just for the geochemistry community. As highlighted by Mellor et al. [28], there is a "Conflict between Open Access and Open Science" and "APCs are a key part of the problem, preprints are a key part of the solution". For all of us, getting the right information about optimal practice and available publication options can be time-consuming, and it is our hope is that the geochemical community can move towards a more reliable, equitable, and transparent system of scholarly communication. Key first steps would be to ensure journals clarify their preprint/peer review/postprint policies [29], research datasets need to be FAIR (i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) [30], and underlying data mining software should be free and open source, to the greatest extent possible. It is evident that FAIR data is already becoming widely adopted in the Earth Sciences [31] and Geochemistry communities [32], but further engagement Revised version submitted to Results in Geochemistry 16 is required. We feel that there is a strong connection between geochemical research and protecting our global environment, and we must ensure future research is being performed and subsequently communicated with this in mind.