International moves to stop researchers from publishing in major free-to-read journals suggest a collapse in political support for the costly “gold” open-access model amid concerns over publishers’ profits, say experts.

Earlier this month Cancer Research UK (CRUK) became the latest high-profile research funder to withdraw support for open-access publishing, stating it would no longer fund the article processing charges (APCs) for its researchers. That , explained the charity’s director of research operations, Dan Burkwood, who criticised the “unsustainable costs and structure of the current publishing model”.

Noting how “some of the big publishing houses have profit margins approaching 40 per cent”, Burkwood argued that the charity’s funds were used to pay researchers’ APCs yet their universities also paid a second time via institutional transformative agreements. “The publishers are – so to speak – having their cake whilst also eating it,” he concluded.

That break from supporting “gold” open access (CRUK-funded studies must still be made freely available in a repository ) echoes similar moves to push researchers in the US and China away from high-profile but expensive open-access publications.

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In China, a draft policy circulated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences would stop scientists using academy funds to pay APCs for more than 30 journals that charge more than $5,000 (£3,701) per paper, has reported, although it is unclear when the change might take effect. Meanwhile, in the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is considering similar caps on APCs, with limits of between $2,000 and $3,000, or $6,000, among the  – far below the publication fees of more than $12,000 charged by many top journals.

A by the House Committee on Science into scientific publishing, held on 14 April, illustrated growing hostility towards the commercial model of gold open access that has, until recently, been backed by scientific funders across the world, said Samuel Moore, a scholarly communications specialist at Cambridge University Library who researches open-access practices.

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“I was surprised at how much they criticised commercial publishers. They supported open access but said ‘we cannot have the profiteering of private companies that we’ve seen’,” explained Moore on how US politicians had characterised open access as the “shovelling of money into the profits of commercial publishers”.

That scepticism regarding the gold open-access model could increasingly push funders into supporting different forms of free-to-read publishing, such as not-for-profit diamond journals or institutional repositories, rather than relying on the world’s largest commercial publishers to make content immediately free to read, said Moore.

“We’ve funded open access in a commercial way and hoped authors might start making price-sensitive decisions about where to publish. Maybe funders will start taking a different approach with more focus on green open access and capacity-building for repositories,” he said.

Campus resource: Three ways libraries are championing the open access movement

Rick Anderson, librarian at Brigham Young University, in Utah, said it was increasingly clear that support for the gold open-access model had “dropped quite a bit both in the US and Europe” amid tightened budgets.

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“That support has fallen both among funding agencies, which increasingly refuse to let their funds be used to pay APCs, and among libraries,” explained Anderson.

“The reasons, I think, are pretty simple: first, it’s become clear that commercial publishers are thriving under the APC model, and driving commercial publishers out of the scholarly publishing space was always one of the unspoken, or at least only quietly spoken, goals of the open-access movement,” he said.

"And, second, a critical mass of open-access supporters has finally come to the realisation that APCs are just another form of toll access,” Anderson continued.

Even though “virtually no one thinks open access is a bad idea in principle”, said Anderson, it is “becoming clear that the APC model creates more problems than it solves, and that non-APC models tend to be unsustainable”.

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“As this becomes clearer and clearer to decision-makers who aren’t ideologically committed to the open-access project, [many of them] are becoming increasingly willing to say that maybe everything doesn’t have to be open access after all,” he said.

“The number of people who support the idea of open access has not, to my knowledge, decreased in recent years. But support does indeed seem to be declining both for the APC funding model and for the idea that we must have a mandatory and global transition to open access,” said Anderson.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com