Where will the OA, AI, and DEI trifecta take us next?

Since the Great Recession, librarians have learned as best they can to manage an annual serials subscription model that inevitably outpaced flat or declining collection budgets. Many librarians lauded the development of Open Access (OA) publishing models, which offered, at least initially, to help solve the problem of an unsustainable and inequitable scholarly communications ecosystem while simultaneously addressing a growing interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In the past year, the idea that, with appropriate guardrails, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can also play a role in changing scholarly communications has risen to the fore.

But can OA, DEI, and AI ever live up to their promise of an affordable, equitable and sustainable publishing ecosystem? While the serials market is quickly shifting to Open Access, the long-term sustainability of all current OA models remains questionable, at least in the United States. And the largest journal publishers now hold a greater share of the market than ever before, as the Read & Publish and Article Processing Charge (APC) sales models for OA have swept to dominance.

Meanwhile, in the face of sociopolitical challenges, the surge of DEI initiatives that began in 2020 is beginning to wane at many institutions. The Supreme Court’s decision in 2023 to strike down affirmative action in college admissions, coupled with legislation in Florida to ban higher education institutions from using state or federal funds on DEI programs, policies, or activities, means that many institutions may have to rethink how they purchase or provide access to DEI-related resources. And while AI tools will surely improve how we retrieve and analyze information, there are no certain answers yet as to how these new tools will deal with concerns surrounding accuracy, bias, and copyright.

ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Despite high interest rates and persistent inflation, U.S. economic performance remained strong and unemployment low, with the stock market, in the words of some experts, “defying gravity.” According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the real gross domestic product increased 2.5 percent in 2023, while the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers increased 3.4 percent. The National Association of State Budget Officers noted that while 46 states reported fiscal 2023 general fund revenue collections exceeding original estimates, most states are expecting slowing revenue and expenditure growth overall in fiscal 2024. However, the war in Ukraine, turmoil in the Middle East, slow growth in China, and key elections in 2024 covering nearly 40 percent of the world’s population all linger as dark clouds that could dampen American economic stability. And while the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) reports that state higher education funding rose nearly 5 percent in FY22, total enrollment at public institutions dropped for the 11th consecutive year in a row. Consequently, those libraries seeing funding levels finally make up for ground lost since the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic may remain hesitant to release new funds for ongoing purchase commitments like serials subscriptions.

THE BIG GET BIGGER

One unintended consequence of OA initiatives is that five large academic publishers continue to dominate the world of publishing. Funder and author-pay models reward volume, allowing these big players to continue to grow. Not surprisingly, these publishers are also now aggressively beginning to both position themselves as leaders in AI offerings and address equity concerns regarding publishing support for authors in the global south and for non–English speaking researchers.

OA market leader Springer Nature has rolled out multiple AI initiatives. The publishing giant acquired software startup Slimmer AI’s Science division, with an aim of expediting the overall publishing process through better identification of appropriate editors and reviewers, as well as detecting potential problems with papers, such as plagiarism. The company introduced Snapp (Springer Nature’s Article Processing Platform), a new manuscript submission platform with built-in AI integrity checks, as well as Curie, an AI-powered writing support assistant. Springer Nature’s expanding Research Solutions business acquired protocols.io, a platform for developing and sharing reproducible methods, in order to bolster its suite of tools and services available to researchers, and signed its first transformative agreement in the China region.

In January 2024, Elsevier announced a full release of Scopus AI, a generative AI product that allows users to quickly generate research summaries with references pulled from Scopus metadata and abstracts. Less than a month later, it announced the release of ClinicalKey AI, an add-on module that integrates conversational search into its ClinicalKey product. In an effort to reduce publishing barriers for researchers in lower- and middle-income countries, Elsevier also initiated a pilot whereby APC pricing structures would be adjusted to the country’s Gross National Income per capita.

Sage began a partnership with Spanish-language publisher FIA (Fundación Infancia y Aprendizaje) Journals, with the goal of making research more accessible by maintaining scientific discourse in multiple languages. Sage also increased its scientific offerings by acquiring previously independent IOS Press.

Informa subsidiary Taylor & Francis expanded its portfolio of medical/pharma journals with the purchase of Future Science Group. The publisher also sought to address researcher concerns about the peer review process by joining the Directory of Open Access Books’ peer review transparency initiative PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs), and piloted a transparent peer review model with its European Journal of Higher Education.

While Wiley landed both a landmark deal with SCELC (Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium) and a new five-year transformative agreement with Germany’s DEAL consortium, that news was overshadowed by concerns about article integrity and paper mills at Wiley’s OA publishing subsidiary, Hindawi. After closing four Hindawi journals and retracting more than 8,000 articles from other journals due to concerns about citation fraud and plagiarism, Wiley announced it would eliminate the Hindawi name and merge the operations into its main portfolio. By the end of the year, the company had lost millions in publishing revenue.

Of note: Nipping at the heels of the Big Five are purely OA publishers Frontiers and MDPI, the latter now consistently publishing more OA articles annually than any other publisher. While both have so far escaped the scandal that hit Hindawi, the speed at which they publish large numbers of articles and special issues has heightened concerns about overall quality control in a marketplace which increasingly rewards larger volumes with larger profits. Also not to be overlooked is China’s growing influence and rise in scholarly research output; the country is now the biggest contributor to natural and hard sciences journals, with the United States retaining the lead only in the life sciences.

SIGNS OF CHANGE?

Although it seems unlikely that a single European or North American not-for-profit open access platform will ever come into being, there are signs that policymakers are beginning to recognize that the existing OA publishing trajectory needs to be nudged in a more sustainable direction. In May, the European Union released a position paper backing immediate open access to publicly funded research with no author or reader fees, preferably in a bloc-wide open-source platform. The paper also encouraged member states to include secondary publication rights in national copyright legislation. In the United States, Invest in Open Infrastructure announced it would be using a grant from the National Science Foundation to study what could be considered reasonable costs associated with the creation, publication, and dissemination of public access to U.S. federally funded research and scientific data. Both announcements can be interpreted as putting commercial publishers on notice that pricing for their publication services needs to be more transparent, and that more needs to be done to address concerns that “open at any cost” presents a serious threat to the integrity of the scholarly record. The growing number of paper mills and article retractions is, in fact, a reflection of a scholarly communications system that both encourages researchers to publish for the sake of publishing and pays publishers by the piece.

There are fears that AI will, through the creation of AI-generated texts and images, further damage trust in a publishing ecosystem where, in some disciplines, up to 25 percent of published papers may be plagiarized or fake. However, it’s equally possible that AI will assist players in rooting out submissions that included previously copyrighted material or manipulated images. Clarivate, for example, is developing an AI tool to assist with identifying journals that may no longer meet their quality criteria for inclusion in Web of Science. Similarly, the publisher association STM is taking steps to address concerns around integrity with the integration of Manuscript Manager, PubPeer, and a paper mill detection tool into its STM Solutions Integrity Hub. And while AI tools will continue to face scrutiny for evidence of bias, many ethics guidelines for AI are emerging, including guidelines for DEI principles and practices.

THE 2025 FORECAST

The 5 percent price increase seen in 2024 is expected to tick up slightly, with a 5.5 to 6 percent increase predicted for 2025, well above the overall inflation rate but in line with what the market has historically tolerated in non-recession years.

For comparison purposes, the rate of price increase was also analyzed for 8,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO Information Services. Packages are a large part of the periodicals marketplace and remain a common subscription model for publishers, so the rate of price increase for these resources is important data. For 2023, the average rate of increase was 5.08 percent, compared to 3.76 percent in 2022. A Read & Publish subset of 400 packages processed by EBSCO Information Services show a slightly lower average price increase of 4.11 percent. The percentage suggests that the industry may be continuing to price these packages more favorably as an incentive to move to a Read & Publish model.

We can expect that all players will continue to recalibrate publishing and purchasing expectations as the marketplace continues to seek out the most efficient, sustainable, and equitable model for scholarly communications. Librarians and funders will increasingly lean into their roles as guarantors of transparency, trust, and reproducibility in the serials ecosystem.

THE VALUE OF JOURNALS

Tables 9 and 10 examine the relationship between price and value. While journal price data is important for budget management processes, price alone is rarely the sole factor determining value. Metrics such as impact factor and Eigenfactor are also important in assessing value, and while there are flaws in the impact factor, nothing else has arisen to replace it. Local usage statistics, including COUNTER 5 data, as well relevance to local curricula, are also important in determining values as libraries actively manage their information resources.

For Table 9, titles in the Scopus index were combined with data from the Clarivate and EBSCO indexes for 2024 and then divided into broad price band categories. The selection of price band categories was based on median prices with standard deviations. The average for impact factor and Eigenfactor, for all titles in a price band range, was compared to the averages in the other price bands. Although there were increases in the metrics for impact factor and Eigenfactor, the increases were not comparable to the increase in price. The average price ($10,177) for the most expensive journals was 34 times higher than the average price for the least expensive journals ($287), while the impact factor only increased 56 percent. The chart accompanying Table 9 shows how the rise in average price (represented by the blue line) is not accompanied by a corresponding rise in impact factor (represented by the burgundy line). We are also seeing the impact of Open Access, as the cost for the least expensive titles decreased while the impact factor increased as more journals moved to OA. The price increases for the more moderately priced titles were consistent with price increases for the more expensive titles, which showed close to a 6 percent increase.

In Table 10, the ratio of citations to serial costs by subject is reviewed. For STM journals, average prices tend to be high in comparison to other subjects. This scenario changes if the costs are divided by the numbers of citations. Chemistry has the highest average price by category, but the 11th lowest cost per citation. If citations are considered an indicator of value, then chemistry journals, despite high average prices, are relatively high-value journals. Conversely, journals in philosophy, music, and history are relatively inexpensive but less frequently cited, so journals in those areas show the highest cost per citation. But, as with price, cost per citation is rarely the only determining factor when considering whether to subscribe or cancel a journal subscription. Unsurprisingly, commercial publishers have higher per citation costs than other types of publishers. Commercial publishers showed a cost per citation of 29¢ and an average price of $2,551, while university presses showed 11¢ and an average price of $754, and societal publishers showed 7¢ and an average price of $1,417. Content from the five major publishers—Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—continue to represent over half the titles (58 percent) of all serials but makes up close to 75 percent of the dollar value.

Also included in Table 10 is the percentage of gold OA articles in each subject area. When the percentage of OA gold articles was then compared against publisher type, results showed that approximately 24 percent of articles from both commercial publishers and university presses were gold OA, compared to 19 percent for society publishers.