By signing up for the initiative Collective Action In Science Diamond researchers in the field of cognitive science commit themselves to publish (at least) one diamond open access article in the next five years. 

Diamond open access journals or publication platforms do not charge subscriptions fees, nor publication fees to authors. They are free to access and free to publish in, i.e. no Article Processing Charges or Book Processing Charges. These initiatives are usually non-profit, run by and for academics.

In this interview, one of the founders of Collective Action In Science Diamond Mihaela Cimpian (PhD candidate in Orthopedagogy at Radboud University) tells us more about the pledge and what prompted the initiative. 

What does the pledge entail? 

The pledge asks researchers who identify as working within cognitive sciences - a loosely defined interdisciplinary research community - to commit to publishing one paper in a diamond open access journal. The pledge activates when a critical mass of 500 signatures have been achieved. From that point on, researchers have 5 years to fulfill their commitment.

What stimulated you to launch this initiative? What is the problem you are addressing? 

We are addressing a type of social dilemma problem, or a type of catch-22 problem, if you will. We know that the insanely profitable publishing models upheld by big for-profit publishers are damaging for both the quality of research and for researchers themselves. Yet, researchers cannot change their behavior without hurting their career, as it would mean publishing with (currently) less prestigious and well-known alternative journals. The catch-22 is that we could all collectively decide to publish our papers with non-commercial journals, which would increase the prestige of those journals at the expense of big for-profit ones. However, researchers are not going to because alternative journal outlets do not have the same prestige or credibility at this moment. This means that the publishing business also is not price sensitive leading to such excessive profiting that even the most staunch believer in the free market would be tempted to intervene.

The issues arising from for-profit publishing run deeper than just excessive profiting and price insensitivity. It directly affects the scientific process. Consider that charging to publish incentivises journals to increase their turnover rates, ie. rejecting less, which for example finds its expression in the rise of special issues where it is often easier to publish. Or it results in big open access publishers like Frontiers, which make it difficult for reviewers and editors to reject papers. This increases profits at the expense of scientific quality (Hanson et. al, 2023). 

Then, of course, the issue is the dissemination of research findings. Open Science that relies on article processing charges (or APCs) can create disparity between researchers based on the resources that they have access to, as outlined by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD (Houghton & Vickery, 2005, pp. 63-65). Underprivileged researchers will have a harder time publishing their work as they don’t have the funds to publish. For these individuals, APCs might have an even more negative impact than subscription fees, since they are effectively ousted from academia, excluded from sharing their research in respected outlets. Now, if we consider this, we can see that it is dangerous to incentivize open access publishing so blindly without considering the increasing inequalities that they can create between researchers. Indeed, this goes for the entire open science movement. To whom have we opened science to exactly?

This all sounds rather bleak. But we can do something about it if we indeed do act collectively. Our pledge supports collective action when you are ensured you will not act on your own.This is what our diamond open access initiative stands for.

How many signatories do you have so far? 

So far we have 138 signatories.

Why aim for 500 to activate the pledge? 

We chose the number of 500 signatories as we believe that this constitutes a minimal but critical mass for cognitive science to start noticing that collective action is possible. The problem of course with coming up with a number, is that if we aim too high, the pledge will not activate, but if we aim too low, researchers will not sign up.

The pledge is targeted to researchers in the field of cognitive science. If the pledge is successful, will you expand beyond this field? 

Yes, we would love to attract more fields toward this movement! We chose cognitive science to start with because we think it is an ideal population as a loose-knit interdisciplinary community, with many connections to other fields. But we want this pledge to be a stepping stone for further initiatives in other fields. 

What feedback have you received from the research community so far? 

We are consistently seeing particular types of responses. There are many researchers who feel that this is the type of action that is needed on the researcher’s side, but they emphasize that things need to change in how researchers are evaluated as well. So policy and collective action need to go hand in hand. We could not agree more.

Then there are the researchers who seem completely fatalistic, assuming that this for-profit machine cannot be stopped without some radical change on the policy side. They find collective action pointless as a result. You would hope that these researchers are then especially active in lobbying for change at the policy side. But sometimes it also seems that people feel comfortable doing nothing and accepting the status quo, while waiting for a revolution to emerge out of nowhere.

Regardless of the differences in responses, it’s clear that we all seem to agree that there is a problem. If we all try to work towards a certain solution we believe in, we are confident that we can change things for the good. We can take collective action in our own way.

How are you going to monitor the pledges? What will happen if signatories don’t live up to their pledge? 

There will be no personal consequences if signatories don't manage to fulfill the pledge, but of course the names are public at that point, so we can all see who is committing and who is not.

References 

Houghton, J. W., & Vickery, G. (2005). Digital broadband content scientific publishing. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

Hanson MA, Barreiro PG, Crosetto P, Brockington D (2023) The strain on scientific publishing. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.15884