Open Access

Kairos has been an open-access (OA) journal since its inception (indeed, it was open-access before the term itself was coined). Open Access often refers to readers’ ability to freely access scholarly research online. According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),

“Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.”

The founding editors of Kairos wanted to replicate the ethos of the web at the time, which hadn't yet become quite so commercialized as it is now. Most journals were not accessible on the web at all, and even web-access to publishing databases hadn't yet been fully developed. Now, of course, many publications are paywalled, requiring a subscription of a la carte purchases for individual articles or issues. 

To be honest, we don't believe much consideration was given to the economic model of the journal at its outset. It initially relied on institutional support to provide web hosting (first at Texas Tech University and later at Michigan State) and none of the original editors were compensated for their work. This volunteer labor model has continued to this day. 

But since then, we've given quite a bit of thought to our model, especially since it is not particularly sustainable. We would advise any new journal to ensure a strong and sustainable model, which means finding long-term institutional support (which may be from a school or from a disciplinary organization). In some cases, a subscription model may be appropriate, but from our perspective, we prefer to champion open-access as we believe the world is better off when more people in it can access and use the research we publish. We have been known to refer to this level of access as an ethical mandate for researchers and scholarly publishers.

A Brief Overview of OA History and Development

OA has become a much more acceptable approach to publishing since it was first defined and promoted in 2001. Rather the rewrite the history and implications of OA, much of what follows is drawn directly from pages 16-21 of the Library Publishing Curriculum Introduction, authored by LPC Editorial Board members Cheryl E. Ball, Harrison W. Inefuku, Johanna Meetz, Joshua Neds-Fox, Reggie Raju, Celia Rosa, Chelcie Rowell, Kate Shuttleworth, John W. Warren, and Sarah Wipperman.

The full curriculum is available for use under a Creative Commons license, and we've taken advantage of that license to engage it as its own OA document, reusing and reworking it for the purposes of this post (2 of the 5 Rs listed below).

As noted in the LPC Introduction, “Open Access” was first used to describe aspects of free, online scholarly literature at a meeting in Budapest in December 2001, sponsored by the Open Society Institute (Hagemann, 2012). Participants issued a statement known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, or BOAI. The BOAI has come to be regarded as foundational to the open-access movement. (This initiative began in 2001, and Kairos began in 1996, which is why we often say Kairos was OA before OA was a thing.)

The initial statement was further refined at Bethesda and Berlin in 2003, to define open access as the copyright holder’s pre-consent to let users copy, use, distribute, transmit and publicly display a work, and to make and distribute derivative works, “in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution” (as cited in Suber, 2012, p. 8).

One proposed framework for conceptualizing open access (or open content) which encapsulates the above is a suite of activities summarized as “the five Rs,” consisting of the ability to:

• Reuse
• Rework (alter or transform)
• Remix (combine with other works)
• Redistribute (share the above), and 
• Retain

We will talk more about the five Rs in a different post.

Because of the all-digital nature of open-access publications, open-access venues run the risk of being associated with predatory publishing—in short, publishers soliciting manuscripts from authors in a pay-to-publish scenario that don't offer legitimate peer review. (We have a follow-up post to this where we discuss predatory publishing in more depth.)

In recent years, however, open access has become the norm in many countries as government-funded work is often required to be made available in open-access journals or repositories. In the European Union, where research is more directly funded by governments, funders have begun to leverage requirements to demand open access to resulting publications, an initiative known as Plan S. U.S. government funders in the sciences employ similar tactics to require that funded research be made openly available through federal repositories like PubMed Central.

We strongly believe in the moral imperative for open access as a justice movement: knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, is a public good and should be free to the public. As noted in the Library Publishing Curriculum section on Open Access,

 the implementation of open access can either relieve or exacerbate current inequities in global access to research, depending on the approach. When open access is filtered through existing commercial and economic processes, controlled and determined by U.S. and Euro-centric institutions (for lack of a better term, the “global north”), it can perpetuate a lack of access in other parts of the global research community, and exclude perspectives from geographies not already participating in the existing systems. Funding priorities from institutions in the global north put pressure on researchers in other parts of the world to align their interests with colonial powers or risk their research agendas being rejected. 

Whenever writing researchers post article links to print-based journals published by colonialist data conglomerates like Elsevier (whose parent company Relx—pronounced ... wait for it... Relics—earned $2.26 billion in profit in 2023 alone), we respond by encouraging authors to publish the post-print version of their article on their website or institutional repository so that everyone around the world with Internet access can read their research for free. You can choose to circumvent or not participate in these racist systems of publishing and go green, gold, or diamond open access. Don't know what that means? Read on.

Open-Access Business Models

This entire section is copied and updated with respect to Transformative Agreements and Diamond OA models from the Library Publishing Curriculum Introduction section on Open Access.

Open-access business models have resulted in several different types of open access, including

• Green open access: This refers to scholarship that is published in a traditional subscription journal, but with a version of the work (often the post-print, or the version after peer review but before publisher typesetting) made available through an open-access repository. Subscription journals may enforce an embargo period (typically 12 to 36 months) which delays open access through the green open-access model.
• Gold open access: Gold open-access journals publish work that is fully open access (with no embargo or subscription costs for any work in the journal), but charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) to authors, their institution, or their funders.
• Diamond or platinum open access: Similar to the Gold open-access model, diamond or platinum open-access journals publish work that is fully open access, but in this case they do not charge APCs. Such journals may use an alternative sustainability model, such as association fees, community donations, or volunteerism (Kairos is a diamond OA journal).
• Hybrid open access: This model refers to journals that publish some work behind subscription paywalls, while giving authors the “choice” to make their individual article openly available for a fee. This model can be particularly problematic for institutions who pay once for subscription access to some content, and then again for APCs to make other content openly available. Many libraries and publishers are moving to a similarly problematic model called Transformative Agreements (aka "Read and Publish" or some variation thereof) where individual libraries pay publishers a contractual rate (usually on a three-year rotation) for a combination of subscriptions to bundles of journals and a discount on APCs for authors at that library's institution. The libraries rarely win in these agreements.

Several business models have emerged to support open access to scholarly content and replace revenue previously generated through subscription fees. Many publishers charge Article Processing Charges (APCs), or Book Publishing Charges (BPCs) for open-access books, which are typically paid by the author or their institution prior to publication. These processing charges can range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per article. While these charges are an eligible expense supported by some research funders, APCs and BPCs nevertheless present a barrier for scholars who do not have access to the funds necessary to publish their work in these journals (Jain et al., 2020). These charges may also be problematic for institutions that seek to support their authors through the provision of an open-access fund, which are becoming harder and harder to find given the Read and Publish agreements many libraries and publishers are moving to. Institutions that are already faced with high subscription costs for paywalled resources may find the addition of processing charges difficult to fund. APCs and BPCs effectively shift inequity from a “who-can-read” model, where subscription costs block access to research, to a “who-can-publish” model, where processing charges block access to the press.

Indeed, open-access business models can act as gatekeeping structures to exclude entire knowledge communities. When publishers adopt APCs, they implicate themselves in a host of decisions about which scholarship deserves funding and who deserves to be published—decisions that often work against scholars outside the center of the Eurocentric publishing apparatus. Because open access offers such promise to readers and researchers who cannot afford the cost of scholarly subscription, it is doubly frustrating for those same researchers to find themselves barred from contributing their knowledge to the open record. Establishing alternatives to the APC and providing pathways to publication for a global research community are strategies against the structural harms of APC-based open-access publishing. Diamond OA is the most prominent model for improving access and making scholarly publishing more equitable in all regions of the world, though the process for sustaining a diamond OA journal is still up for debate.

OA Decisions for Digital Journals

For journals that seek to establish themselves as open-access, there are several decisions that need to be made, including the form of OA, whether to charge article processing charges (APCs), and whether to meet the requirements for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (look for a post on this topic soon!). 

The decision to form an OA journal is not simply a question of economics, however; as the Library Publishing Curriculum notes:

What we provide open access to can directly or indirectly harm individuals or communities. One widely used example: Indigenous communities may have cultural understandings and frameworks of knowledge that reserve authority over exactly who can transmit or receive particular kinds of traditional knowledge. Where these kinds of information appear in open scholarship, the mode of access risks violating the imperatives of the community. Open access can also lead to identification of at-risk persons or groups, through de-anonymization of data or other forms of privacy violation. At the very least, open-access publishers bear an increased burden of understanding and mitigating the potential harms inherent in the content they publish.

Two great examples of when open content respects Indigenous protocols can be witnessed in the publishing platform Mukurtu and in Ravenspace, in which elder Elsie Paul's collaborative publication, "As I Remember It" begins with a page on "Respecting Traditional Knowledge." This text requires readers to agree to being a respectful guest of the site before entering.

From our perspective as publishers, the benefits—particularly allowing greater worldwide access (when culturally appropriate)—make OA worth pursuing for new publishing venues. The challenge then is to develop editorial policies that allow for ethical and responsible OA, and thankfully we are starting to see more and more models of this work.

Suber, P. (2012). Open access. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9286.001.0001