A global-local strategy for global open access

Main text

The scholarly outputs from mainland China have surged at an unprecedented speed in the past three decades,¹ causing not only the reshaping of the publication landscape but also concern regarding China’s building of its own publishing realm,² especially under the current situation where the open access (OA) movement has reached the critical half-way point. This editorial/commentary aims to suggest a global-local strategy for OA to facilitate the eastward (or southward) adjustment of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publications, observe integrity for both researchers and OA journals, and transform STM publications by making OA affordable for the Global South. The global-local strategy refers to a more geographically balanced strategy that concerns not only global scientific excellence but also the diversity of the local culture. The STM publication network should have a T-shaped architecture composed of global platforms and local hubs so as to be recognized and trusted by researchers everywhere in the world.

Global-local strategy in “geographical balance”: Eastward adjustment of STM publications

A geographical balance would facilitate a complete transformation of OA in a global sense so that the situation of double dipping can be solved. We are witnessing a geographic separation between the cradles of STM achievements and their carriers, the journals. On one hand, more and more scientific contributions are made in the East, with the indicative trend shown in Figure 1A; on the other hand, the majority of such scientific contributions are released on journal publishing platforms based in the West. According to the statistics of Scopus/SciVal, the Asian-Pacific region has become the largest scholarly contributing region in the world, surpassing Europe and North America. However, with the top 20 STM platforms all in the West, top-level STM journals are absent in the Asian-Pacific region, and their humanity features (e.g., language) are not appropriately represented in first-class STM journals. The continuous merging of publishing platforms, as well as the expansion of mega-journals and journal hierarchies in recent years, has widened this East-West, or contribution-publication, gap. The geographical separation between the contributors and distributors of scholarly output may hinder the progress of innovation and separate science from society.

Figure 1.

Pursuing a global-local strategy for open access

(A) Steady growth in scholarly output percentiles in the Asia-Pacific region in the past 28 years now accounts for over 40% of the global share (data from Scopus/SciVal).

(B) The percentage of SCI articles (contributed by Chinese authors and published in STM journals affiliated with Chinese institutions) has declined from 41% in 2000 to a staggering low of 5% in 2023 (courtesy of the data from Professor Ren and partly from Ren et al.³).

(C) Regional distribution of the world’s top 20% publishers from 2007 to 2023, classified by Asia, Europe, North America, and other regions (data are from the online annual report “Global Publishing Top 50: An Analytical Report”).

(D) The journals whose coordinates (APC and Impact) fall in the strip-belt in the figure are reasonable ones, while whose coordinates are much above the strip-belt may have questions.(figure from the tool APCheck conducted by the author’s team, Rui et al.⁴).

Take, for example, the SCI-indexed articles from mainland China. In 1999, China published 19,936 SCI articles, 38.36% of which were published in journals based in China. In 2023, China published 740,776 SCI articles, 37,561 (or only 5.07%) of which were published in journals owned by Chinese institutions, as shown in Figure 1B. Both the journal titles and the number of publications in the SCI journals from mainland China grew far more slowly than SCI journal articles that came from mainland China. In addition, among the 29,000+ journals collected by Scopus, only about 1,300 titles come from mainland China, accounting for about 4.7%, which is much less than the 25% contributions from mainland China to the database last year.

With a more geographically balanced STM publication network, researchers in different parts of the world, eastern or western, Global North or Global South, can view OA as an endeavor shared by everyone, regardless of economic, societal, political, and cultural differences. The geophysical separation between the knowledge source and the knowledge hub has been recognized by various parties (Figure 1C). The scale of regional offices in Asia, and especially in the zone of Greater China, is progressing. The China-based editorial teams of Elsevier and Springer-Nature have expanded from dozens to hundreds of employees. In a more direct way, it comes as no surprise when China or India begins “building its own publishing realm.”² The international STM journal community may regard these moves as ways to bridge the gap between the knowledge source and knowledge hub, complement the geographical imbalance of the West and the East in publications, and enrich the cultural diversity of the STM community.

Corporative strategy in academic integrity: Squeezing predatory journals

The OA movement encounters two major obstacles: quality control and financial affordability. Due to the somewhat clouded process of setting up article processing charge (APC) prices, part of the scientific community has reservations on the quality of OA journals and the authors who paid high APC prices to publish in OA journals. Academic integrity should be observed not only by the authors but also by the journals. The appearance of dubious journals under OA model caused the awareness of the STM community. Clarivate, for example, delisted more than 50 journals from its indexes in March 2023 to show its dissociation from such questionable enterprises. In 2019, a clear definition of this predatory behavior was agreed upon by experts in this area: “predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices.”⁵

China, a country whose researchers are troubled constantly, by those predatory journals, should join the fight. Among them, “one particularly influential list is the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Early Warning List, which aims to identify journals that are viewed as having poor management, a lower academic reputation or favoring commercial interests.”² Beside this list, a feasible formula was proposed to identify a plausible range where the academic excellence and effort devoted to the editorship of the journals matched the APC level they charged.⁴ As shown in Figure 1D, a strip-belt criterion was proposed by Rui et al.⁴ to detect questionable OA journals with overpriced APCs. The questionable candidates (journals above the strip line) will be scrutinized to see if they have predatory activities: “launched at the end of 2020, the list evaluates journals based on a number of criteria that have included self-citation rates, retraction rates, the cost of APCs and, most recently in 2024, citation manipulation.”²

The success of an OA journal must result in a win-win situation for both the international journals and the domestic authors. This depends on joint efforts by the scientific community. A global-local strategy is important to squeeze the “gray” journals that collect huge financial gains by requiring unreasonable APCs. Some questionable global publishers should not use the good name of OA to misguide researchers.

Global-local strategy in research outreach: Making OA affordable for the Global South

The second major obstacle for the OA movement comes from the lack of financial affordability, especially for the Global South. Several measures, such as Research4Life, have been adopted to permit affordable access in the least developed countries. However, a realistic effort has yet to come for BRICS countries. An estimate of the APC expenditure in mainland China gives a skyrocketed increase (from 327 million USD in 2019 to 750 million USD in 2023), which dangerously compensates the budget increment of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) to support basic research. Given the untransparent manner in which APCs are set up for various OA journals, scientists and research funding agencies have raised reasonable doubt about improper APC setting by commercial publication firms to maintain unreasonable profits. The subscription fee does not go down while the APC charge raises rapidly. That "double dipping" causes some researchers complain about OA movement. Such resistance comes partially from the low subscription price in the Global South: “if most publishing shifts to gold OA, China might have to spend three to four times more on APCs than it does now, even with some declines in subscription costs.”² Indeed, for an individual author, when the publication model changes to the OA mode, he or she has to pay the APC at the world average level. That huge difference causes many Chinese authors, especially those without sufficient funding, to adhere to the rules of the subscription journals. It comes as no surprise that “just under half of China’s 2022 articles were OA, according to data from Dimensions, compared with 65% for non-China papers.”²

Therefore, to gain further progress in the OA movement, APC transparency and categorized APC price settings are essential. Making OA affordable for the Global South, such as categorizing APC prices according to the World Bank income classifications or per-capita gross national income of different countries, would be a feasible strategy in research outreach.

In conclusion, global OA should adopt a global-local strategy, especially for the Global South. The regional publishing realm should be encouraged to complement the shift for the scholarly outputs. Effort should be made to safeguard the quality of OA journals. Reduced APC costs should be available for the Global South. We are looking for the possibility of reaching a nationwide transformative agreement between China and various publishers, starting from the previous agreements under the subscription mode.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; grant number 2022-X01-B-008), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC; grant number L2124038), and the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST; grant number 2022-KYY-525116-0008). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Published Online: March 3, 2025