October 25th to 31st is International Open Access Week, a weeklong opportunity to celebrate, discuss, and advance the principles of open access and open science. This year’s theme asks us to reflect on many intersections between open access, open science, and equity. Indeed, diversity, equity, and inclusion are concerns that must inform open science practice at all times, and yet often go unrecognized.
Researchers have many options for contributing to open science, such as publishing their articles in open access journals, sharing them in institutional and subject repositories, depositing research data in data repositories, preregistering studies, making their code publicly available, and more! Yet, as the number of tasks researchers are encouraged or required to do increases, issues of equity and labor arise. After all, many researchers are already facing burnout and feel intense pressure to meet tenure requirements, if they are lucky enough to have the option of tenure at all. All faculty are increasingly asked to do more outside of their research agenda, such as service, mentoring, peer review, curriculum revision, online teaching, and more. With so many demands on their time, researchers have increasingly less time to actually do research work, and those that are trying to make time for research may see the ever-increasing list of tasks given to them in the name of open science to be too high of a time cost to bear. Given that the rewards of such work are often undefined and hard to recognize, researchers have little incentive to take on the extra work.
Given this reality, coupled with the steep price of article processing charges (APCs) in many major OA journals, is it no surprise that the authors publishing open access are overwhelmingly male, with higher professorial rank, in prestigious institutions? OA is often heralded as a means of greater equity in society, but does it risk exacerbating the already great divide between tenure-track and contingency faculty in higher education? What implications does that have when women and BIPOC researchers are less likely to be given tenure or be in tenure-track positions?
As we talk about structural equity this Open Access Week, we need to remember that there is no open access or open science without the researchers putting those principles into practice. If we want to truly champion equity in the scholarly publishing landscape, it is imperative that we ensure that open access does not contribute to the existing inequities in higher education, and that open science practices are evaluated on the basis of their equity and sustainability. Building on the ongoing work of others in the field, such as the conversations surrounding open science practices conducted by the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, is the key to building structural equity in open access, creating an improved and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem for everyone.
If you are a researcher interested in open access or open science and would like assistance, please know that you do not have to do it alone. Contact the Researcher Support Team!