There are two main ways to fund the publication of a scientific article.
In a subscription-based model, the journal owns the copyright, and the article is placed behind a paywall. To read the article, you need to pay, either via subscription or a one-off fee. The subscription-based model was the predominant financial model for scientific publishing for many years.
In about 2010, the open access model, although not new, gained popularity as research funders insisted that the results of the research they funded should be freely accessible. In this model, the author pays to publish the article.
Although open access is often described as the “author pays” model, the fees are usually paid by a research grant, the university itself or another stakeholder. These fees will often come from the public purse as Malaysia, like many other countries, provides research funding via tax revenue and funds its public universities through the same mechanism.
One of the perhaps unintended consequences of open access is that publishers are more financially motivated compared to a subscription-based model.
Both models are underpinned by peer review (i.e. experts will assess whether an article is good enough to be published in a journal) but open access may lead to a lowering of standards as the journal wishes to collect a fee from the author.
This financial incentive does not exist in the subscription-based model as the publisher does not financially benefit from publishing any single article.
Some publishers, so called predatory publishers, have taken this to extreme levels. These publishers accept most, if not all, articles and will publish the article, if the author pays a fee. In many cases, no peer review, or very little, is undertaken.
In October last year, the Higher Education Ministry decided not to pay the open access article processing charges for three publishers that operate on an open access model and publish many articles which typically cost the author (and therefore the taxpayer) about US$2,000 (RM9,478) to publish.
The reasons for excluding these publishers were not given. Although none of these publishers have been proven to be predatory, the reasons could include high fees, concerns about the quality of their peer review or the fact that other countries had also raised issues.
These three publishers do have high-quality journals which are indexed in bibliographic databases that are used by ranking mechanisms. Some of their journals, however, have been delisted from these indexes and there are reports expressing concern over the way these publishers operate.
Malaysian authors, who include those at our public universities, published 230 articles in these journals from January to March this year.
The 2024 articles may not have been funded from ministry research grants but could some of them have been paid for using public funds? And, indeed, is it right that Malaysia’s universities, whether public or private, continue to publish in journals that the Higher Education Ministry has refused to fund?
PROF GRAHAM KENDALL
Deputy vice-chancellor MILA University
