Introducing the Hybrid Access Publication Model for Plastic Surgery

Scientific journals are periodical publications in which academic scholarship is published. They serve as a forum for the presentation, scrutiny and discussion of research. They almost universally require peer review from contemporaries who are competent and established in the field. The first English scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, was published in 1665 to allow scientists to share their work with a wider audience. ¹ Though it used a different form of peer review than today's version, this journal published manuscripts from Newton, Faraday, Darwin and other famous scientists, ¹ marking the dawn of scientific information dissemination through peer-reviewed publication. There has been an evolution in the manner in which peer-reviewed publications are accessible to the scientific community and a number of models exist today, mainly: traditional, open access and hybrid access. With the aim of ensuring fair and equitable access to scientific research, this editorial explains the current models and why the journal Plastic Surgery has selected the hybrid access model.

Traditional Publication Model

Many academic journals are subsidized by universities or medical societies and do not exist to make a profit – rather, they generate revenue from advertisers and subscription fees to pay for production costs and ensure the long-term survival of the journal. This medical publishing model has been the dominant approach for over 100 years ² and is known as the traditional publication model. Unfortunately, this has resulted in journals being available only to members of the medical society or those able to pay for an expensive subscription.

Open Access Publication Model

The advent of the internet and digital publication formats disrupted the status quo, and in 2002, the Declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative ³ was the first formal call for peer-reviewed research literature to be distributed online and free of access charges or other barriers, a publishing model known as open access. This provides a considerable number of advantages to the scientific community. With an open-access journal authors expand their readership to a theoretically worldwide audience, increasing the visibility and impact of their work. Open access enhances a reader's reach and retrieval power, providing barrier-free access to the literature that may be helpful for their patients or research. Open access improves the visibility and discoverability of a journal's articles, which can potentially attract advertising, an expanded readership base, increased citations and exposure to potential future authors of submissions to the journal. Finally, many granting agencies require recipients to publish open access.

There are 3 main concerns with the open-access publication model. First, is the associated article processing (or publication) charge (APC). This fee was supposed to represent the approximate cost to publish a single article in the journal under its current model of being available in print and online. Unfortunately, across the industry, APCs have been increasing at a rate that significantly outpaces inflation ⁴ with most open-access journals charging a fee of US$2000 ⁵ or more. Given the prohibitive cost, many journals are working to reduce the burden of cost, especially for authors from low-income countries.

Second, there is a stigma that open-access journals are not peer-reviewed, are of low quality, have a low impact factor and promise a high acceptance rate if an APC is paid. Open-access journals, just like any other journal, can be peer-reviewed or not, it depends on the journal's policy. It is also important to remember that most open-access surgical journals are relatively new, and it will take time for them to receive their first impact factor (IF) and for their IF to increase. On the other hand, there are several open-access surgical journals associated with a mainstream traditional journal that will publish articles that were deemed “not good enough” to be published in the traditional journal, suggesting quality standards are lower for open-access journals.

The third concern around open-access publishing is the possibility of an author falling into the trap of submitting their article to a predatory journal. Distinguishing a legitimate online journal from a predatory journal is not easy, but fortunately, articles have been published to assist potential authors to make this distinction.^6,7 Predatory journals can be problematic for any investigator but particularly for academic surgeons who rely on publications for academic promotion. These exploitative open-access journals may impersonate well-known journals, by using a similar name and sometimes will hold a researcher's work ransom in exchange for a processing fee. These are for-profit enterprises that guarantee publication upon payment but do not undertake the editorial and peer-review process that legitimate academic journals provide. Predatory journals have become increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to deceive potential contributors and we recommend independently verifying any open access journal sending an unsolicited email rather than following the links provided to avoid predatory journal deception tactics or to use the Modified Rohrich and Weinstein Criteria^6,7 checklist to assess the likelihood of a journal being predatory.

Hybrid Access Publication Model

A hybrid access journal is a subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access. Access to the journal requires a subscription, unless a publication fee (APC) has been paid to publish a specific article as open access. These journals are sometimes referred to as “hybrid open access,” however, this is misleading, as it could just as easily be labelled a “hybrid subscription” journal. An advantage of traditional journals converting to the hybrid access model is that authors who wish to publish their work in the open access format have more journals from which to choose to submit their work. Furthermore, authors who may not have the funds to pay the APC can still submit to the journal where it can be published in the traditional format.

The Plastic Surgery Journal is a Hybrid Access Journal

Plastic Surgery has become a hybrid access journal, offering both a traditional publishing pathway as well as an optional open-access publishing. When the journal partnered with SAGE Publishing in 2017, it immediately became eligible for its SAGE Choice program supporting hybrid access (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/sage-choice). For their manuscript to be published as an open-access article, authors would voluntarily exercise the option to pay the APC, which is set at US$3750. These manuscripts undergo the same peer-review process as traditional submissions and choosing open access does not exclude print publication. SAGE, the publisher of Plastic Surgery, has an agreement with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) which allows corresponding authors affiliated with major Canadian Universities to publish open access free of charge. All Canadian Universities with a plastic surgery training program are members of the CRKN. SAGE also has open access agreements with more than 20 countries and consortia, details of which can be found online (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-agreements).

The move to provide unrestricted free online access to articles published in peer-reviewed journals is progressing rapidly and may be inevitable. The volume of published knowledge is growing exponentially and will grow faster than university and researcher budgets. In that sense, open access scales with the growth of knowledge, while traditional access does not. ⁸ Plastic Surgery publishing as a hybrid access journal is a major step towards expediting research advances and ensuring the availability of scholarly literature for current and future research and teaching.