Make Open Access Publishing Fair and Transparent!

The scientific publication landscape has dramatically changed in environmental sciences (and beyond) since the onset of this millennium by two closely interconnected trends: the widespread emergence of online-only journals that drastically reduced the costs for scientific publishers (Van Noorden 2013) and the increasing success of open access (OA) publishing journals (Tennant et al. 2016)—that is, journals that have reversed the revenue generation from a reader-pays to an author-pays approach. In principle, there are four avenues of OA publishing (table 1): An increasing number of journals have been established that solely publish OA (gold OA); the vast majority of these journals are online only. Currently, in ecology and evolutionary biology, 25 of 189 journals included in the 2017 Journal Citation Report by Clarivate Analytics are gold OA journals. A second possibility is to publish an article in a conventional toll-access journal and additionally provide an OA version without journal layout—for example, in a repository (green OA). Third, the authors of many subscription journals can opt to publish an individual article OA (hybrid OA). Finally, anarchistic OA publishing through platforms such as ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net), Sci-Hub (https://sci-hub.tw), or authors’ personal webpages that provide free access to a large fraction of scientific output (including non-OA publications), a practice that is often illegal but that has so far been largely tolerated by publishers. In total, it has been estimated that 29% of the publications in environmental sciences archived in the World Wide Web are available OA (Khabsa and Giles 2014).