Abstract
AbstractWith the growth of open access (OA), the financial flows in scholarly journal publishing have become increasingly complex, but comprehensive data on and transparency of these flows are still lacking. The opacity is especially concerning for hybrid OA, where subscription‐based journals publish individual articles as OA if an optional fee is paid. This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher‐level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing. Our results show that Elsevier's hybrid OA uptake has grown steadily but slowly from 2015 to 2019, doubling the number of hybrid OA articles published per year and increasing the share of OA articles in Elsevier's hybrid journals from 2.6 to 3.7% of all articles. Further, we find that most hybrid OA articles were invoiced directly to authors, followed by articles invoiced through agreements with research funders, institutions, or consortia, with only a few funding bodies driving hybrid OA uptake. As such, our findings point to the role of publishing agreements and OA policies in hybrid OA publishing. Our results further demonstrate the value of publisher‐provided metadata to improve the transparency in scholarly publishing.
Highlights
The rise of open access (OA) has added complexity to scholarly publishing, concerning transparency of economic dimensions
From 2015 to 2019, Elsevier recorded growth in the uptake of hybrid OA: The number of hybrid OA articles published per year doubled, the number of hybrid journals with at least one OA article grew by 21%, and the share of hybrid OA articles relative to closed-accessed articles in these journals increased from 2.6% to 3.7%
Our results indicate that the number of hybrid OA articles has increased over time, its uptake has remained low
Summary
The rise of open access (OA) has added complexity to scholarly publishing, concerning transparency of economic dimensions. The distributed payment processes to access and publish scholarly articles add to the opacity of the financial flows of scholarly publishing (Lawson et al, 2016) as they can involve several actors simultaneously, including authors, research institutions, libraries, and funders. The problem with this lack of transparency becomes more apparent in the case of hybrid OA. In this OA business model, individual articles can be made openly available by paying an article processing charge (APC), while the journal as a whole remains subscriptionaccess. Hybrid OA was originally introduced as a low-risk transitional model that allows journals to gradually convert to full OA and reduce subscription wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/asi
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