Removal of paywalls on scientific research risks turning into “fashion of the year”, conference hears
Research leaders have warned that scientific publishers could walk back their pandemic-driven actions to open up research outputs once the immediate threat of Covid-19 wanes.
Early in the pandemic, many publishers removed paywalls on related content. Researchers and open-access proponents hailed the move as a win for open science, with many hoping it would be the tipping point for the traditionally subscription-based publishing sector.
But speakers at a June 23 panel of the European Commission’s Research and Innovation Days conference expressed reservations over the certainty of long-term change.
‘Enthusiasm might fade’
Robert Terry, a manager at the World Health Organization’s special programme for research and training in tropical diseases, said many publishers had indicated that any changes to make content free would be limited to the length of the pandemic.
“Already we have this kind of caveat…that when this pandemic finishes, a lot of this material will go back behind the paywall—that is a concern that I think we need to start thinking about,” said Terry.
Niklas Blomberg, founder of Elixir, an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources, warned that “a lot of the enthusiasm might fade” among publishers who opened up papers and data when Covid-19 began.
“It would be a pity” if such progress was not “cascaded out” into other scientific domains, he said.
Marion Koopmans, head of virology at the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands, said there is a risk that advances in open science will be sustained in only a narrow subsection of scientific activity.
“The demand for open sharing of publications has been specific for [aspects of the pandemic], not for all sorts of other things,” she said.
Koopmans said that without concerted efforts, the move to take down paywalls “runs the risk of being the fashion of the year”.
Other crises
The Commission’s top R&D official Jean-Eric Paquet, who moderated the panel, said open science had proven its worth in tackling Covid-19 and must be extended to other areas, such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
“The timelines are slightly longer,” he said, but “the urgency is exactly the same”.