Where Open Access Collections Meet the Publishing Integrity Crisis, an Opportunity for Libraries

This is the first installment in a three-part series about how libraries can respond to publishing integrity problems in the context of open access (OA) agreement management. Part One describes the role libraries could play and discusses strategies for managing OA agreements in light of these problems. Part Two will drill down into specific practices through which libraries can identify and respond to publishing integrity problems and explore the significant challenges ahead. Part Three will review several online tools being developed to assist such efforts.

The last ten years have seen the fruition of the idea that academic librarians can do more for open access than simply advocate for it. By allocating library collections expenditures to fund open access publishing, academic libraries have been one of the main drivers of its significant growth. While there are many ways to support open access publishing, libraries have done so primarily through the mechanism of “read and publish” or “transformative” agreements (TAs), whereby a library funds both licensed access to content and open access publishing services for its institutional researchers.

At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that an inundation of falsified or fabricated research could irredeemably pollute the scholarly communication ecosystem (Brundy & Thornton, 2024; Van Noorden, 2023a). Awareness of this possibility has intensified in the wake of the 2023 Hindawi paper mill debacle, which resulted in the end of the Hindawi imprint after it issued over 8,000 article retractions (Van Noorden, 2023b), an unprecedented number across the whole of academic publishing, let alone from a single publisher (see also Hindawi, 2023).

This series will focus on the practical opportunities and threats that emerge from the intersection of these two important trends. What opportunities to contribute to publishing integrity efforts are created through the processes of open access agreement management? How might academic librarians respond to the threats to our work posed by widespread research malpractice—threats that most obviously implicate our open access initiatives, but that could turn out to be much broader?

To begin to address these questions, we draw on our years of experience implementing open access agreements at Iowa State University Library, which has been a leader in open access funding among North American academic libraries (Goddard & Brundy, 2024). We suggest concrete steps library staff implementing open access agreements can take to support publishing integrity. Some of these steps we currently take within our organization; others are more speculative.

While there are many ways of supporting open access publishing beyond “pay-to-publish” models—for example Subscribe to Open and “diamond” OA publishing—we will focus on agreements designed to fully fund the open access publishing of an institution’s research, including agreements with fully OA publishers as well as “transformative agreements” with hybrid publishers that pay for both read access and open publishing for institutional research. These agreements position library staff to directly support broader efforts to preserve the integrity of the scholarly record.

The Opportunity

Why should academic libraries facing budget pressures and limited staffing consider spending time on publishing integrity? As agents of readers (that is, in our traditional role providing access to content), we have a strong incentive to ensure that our collections only contain what is worth the reader’s time. As agents of authors (that is, in our role funding institutional open access), we also have an incentive: to ensure that the editorial oversight included in the broader suite of publishing services paid for by open access article processing charges (APCs) functions sufficiently well to ensure accepted articles are worthy of publication.

It seems clear that the stakes are higher when we act in support of publishing than when we act in support of reading. This is true both financially (since the library is paying, theoretically, all of the costs associated with publishing a single article, typically thousands of dollars) and reputationally, as the library now bears a greater responsibility for that article than it would if it were only one subscriber out of many. The financial risk is essentially that scarce budget funds will be wasted on junk science. The reputational risk, which of course impacts budget, is skepticism from institutional leadership toward a library’s open initiatives, or even the library as a whole.

Reputational risks extend beyond the library to the broader institution—if it is true that open access articles have a much wider reach, then fraudulent articles that are open pose a proportionally greater threat to the institution, or to a particular college or department, than those that are not. We must also consider the reputation among the public of scholarly communication itself. In many circles, headlines like “Fake Scientific Papers Are Alarmingly Common” (Brainard, 2023) only confirm what some people already suspect about the widespread corruption of cultural elites, scientists not excepted.

Viewed through that wide lens, the challenge at hand can seem unmanageable. The article referenced above cites galling statistics implicating tens of thousands of papers. It can be difficult to see how library staff, already stretched thin, might make a dent in such sums.

But one of the ways in which open access agreement management naturally provides a useful lens for this work is that it narrows our focus to only those articles published (or submitted) under the library’s open access agreements. At most U.S. institutions, the number of articles involved will be relatively small. But the logic of the transformative agreement, which supposes a gradual increase in open access publishing as a growing number of research institutions sign up, then provides a path toward relatively comprehensive coverage of open access articles over time.

That is not to say that library staff are in any position to take on the bulk of the integrity-related vetting that is primarily the responsibility of editors and publishers. But the scale of the problem is so significant that it requires every human being involved in the process, from submission to post-publication, to apply their informed scrutiny. Open access agreement management workflows give librarians the opportunity to “touch” each article; they also give us the responsibility to help identify red flags.

What can library staff add to this process? It may be less a matter of expertise or resources than incentive. A complete diagnosis of the factors driving fraudulent research could fill volumes, but among them is surely that pay-to-publish OA models align both authors and publishers with a “publish-or-perish” strategy. Of course, the tenure system has long placed pressure on scientists and scholars to publish (though this pressure has always been tempered by considerations like quality and reputation). What is new is the orientation of publishers in this direction as well, where each article published contributes directly to their bottom line. Traditionally editors have been expected to accept the highest quality content to fill the pages of a journal issue and to reject the rest. But with each article generating APC revenue and the internet transforming the nature of publishing, publishers’ incentives have shifted away from selectivity. When journal editorial boards resign en masse, the reasons often include pressure to accept more papers (see “The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List”). Some publishers have even introduced what’s been termed the “journal cascade” (Davis, 2018; Wood, 2018), where articles not good enough for one journal are passed along to a less selective one, to keep the revenue generated by those articles in-house.

What may be getting lost in these developments is the role of readers, who seek high-quality sources that are worth their time. An emphasis on this role may be the only thing that can prevent academic journal publishing from becoming a total “promotion and tenure machine” driven entirely by authors and publishers. It hardly needs to be said that serving the needs of readers is what libraries do. In the context of publishing integrity, the portion of our budgets that supports open access publishing could be one of the most powerful checks on these trends, as we ask ourselves whether our expenditures are serving the needs of readers well in addition to enhancing curricula vitae.

In other words, a library’s need to be a responsible steward of its budget, oriented as ever around its readers, provides a structural incentive to protect the scholarly record that is nearly unique within the scholarly communication ecosystem. Our position as institutional open access funders gives academic libraries both the opportunity and the responsibility to act.

Open Access Agreement Management for Publishing Integrity

Research misconduct can take many forms: falsified or fabricated data, fake peer reviews, the buying and selling of citations and authorships. Problems with authorship have special relevance to those managing open access agreements. To avoid APC payments, bad actors may attempt to take advantage of these agreements, for example, by impersonating an institutional corresponding author or even recruiting one to be listed as a co-corresponding author.

When libraries determine how to manage open access agreements, several important considerations come into play, including how they will comply with the terms of the contract, how they will communicate with researchers, what reporting will be available about articles published under the agreement, and what the overall value of the arrangement is.

What if publishing integrity were also a key consideration? Some suggestions for what that might look like:

Publishing integrity contacts. To establish a clear line of communication in the event of suspected problems, Lisa Hinchliffe (2024) advocates for the identification of publishing integrity contacts from each party in the agreement. While it is likely already the case that, even within large publishers and universities, the librarians and account representatives who are the standard contacts for these agreements could effectively route such issues within their organizations, given the sensitive nature of these communications, it would be valuable to designate contacts from whom confidentiality can be expected.

Refunding APCs for retracted articles. One of the misaligned incentives of APC-based open access publishing is that publishers profit from each additional article published but face no direct economic penalty for retracted articles: a journal might retract an article, but the publisher keeps the APC. Brundy and Thornton (2024) approvingly cite the policy of IOP Publishing, which announced in 2023 that it would donate APCs of retracted articles to Research4Life (Research4Life, 2023), a nonprofit that provides “institutions in low-and middle-income countries with online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content” (Research4Life, n.d.). They point out that this practice “adds a new incentive for publishers to do the right thing, since it imposes a financial penalty on top of the reputational penalty that comes from an article retraction.”

In some circumstances, it might make sense for these fees to be refunded to the funding institution instead. If APC fees are meant to ensure that a worthwhile article is made open access, then a refund could redirect the money toward that purpose.

Incentives can cut both ways, however, and it may also be the case that such penalties would make publishers less likely to vigorously pursue potential retractions. This is an area where more research and experimentation are welcome.

Article funding approvals. Article funding approval is the main “touch point” that provides libraries the opportunity to play a role in this work. It’s true that many libraries skip this step and grant approvals automatically, especially for “uncapped” agreements that cover an unlimited number of articles during a given term. Staff time is a scarce resource, after all.

But the position of library staff within these workflows provides a unique vantage from which to monitor for problems. Humans reading titles and verifying authors as part of the OA approval process can identify patterns and notice red flags that might be missed by an automated process, an overtaxed editor, or a publisher’s system-level view. Libraries should consider this opportunity when determining whether to automatically approve eligibility.

Autonomous eligibility decisions. In addition to allowing libraries to approve or deny each article funding request, libraries should consider negotiating agreements that allow funding denials for any reason. Some publisher templates stipulate that any article meeting basic eligibility criteria (i.e., the affiliation of the corresponding author) must be approved. Publishers are interested in ensuring predictability for their authors, so this is an understandable requirement. But libraries share those interests, and frivolous or censorious funding denials, which would inevitably cause reputational damage to the library’s initiatives, are unlikely.

There are many reasons why a library would want to secure flexibility on this point. Among these, it may not always be the case that what a publisher deems worthy of publication is something that the library deems worthy of funding. For example, if a paper mill finds a way to exploit an institutional open access agreement, the library’s need to act quickly to avoid costly waste might need to override the sometimes slow-turning gears of publisher research integrity investigations. (It should go without saying that funding decisions should bear no relation to the editorial decisions of the publisher. Publishers rightly maintain organizational separation between their editorial staff’s decisions and their funding sources, and most agreements include a clause reminding institutional funders that the contract does not provide them with any influence in editorial decisions.)

Sharing manuscript at point of funding approval. At the point of institutional funding approval, library staff typically see limited metadata about the submission: the title, the author, the journal, associated dates, etc. What is not shared is the manuscript itself, or even an abstract. While this would represent a significant shift in publisher practices, it would be helpful if the institutional funder was able to also see the draft manuscript. If there were any red flags, having the manuscript would enable the library to collect the additional information necessary to approve funding, or to get a fraudulent submission in front of someone with the ability and incentive to identify the problems.

Use the power of the purse. While the library’s role within publishing integrity is nascent, we have always wielded tremendous influence through our collections budgets. The threat of an unrenewed contract should always be on the table in the event of integrity issues, especially when these are systemic rather than isolated, or when they are not satisfactorily addressed by the publisher.

Conclusion

Some of the practices we’ve suggested, such as identifying research integrity contacts, are uncontroversial and easy to accomplish. Others, such as sharing the manuscript at the point of funding approval, would require significant meaningful change, not only to the practices of individual publishers but to collective expectations around the publication process. These changes would require a broader recognition that library staff managing open access agreements have a role to play in protecting the integrity of the scientific record.

Until we earn that recognition, our role will necessarily be more tentative and limited. The second part of this series will describe specific clues library staff can use to identify possible misconduct and discuss approaches to dealing with the challenges of this new role.

References

Brainard, J. (2023, May 9). Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi6523

Brundy, C., & Thornton, J. B. (2024). The paper mill crisis is a five-alarm fire for science: What can librarians do about it? Insights: The UKSG Journal, 37. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.659

Davis, P. (2018, January 24). Not every publisher can support a cascade journal. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/01/24/not-every-publisher-can-support-a-cascade-journal/

Goddard, M. W., & Brundy, C. (2024). Open access workflows for academic libraries. College & Research Libraries, 85(4). https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/26323/34252

Hinchliffe, L. J. (2024, October 21). Leveraging Transformative Agreements for Research Integrity. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2024/10/21/leveraging-transformative-agreements-for-research-integrity/

Hindawi. (2023). Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing. Wiley. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/network/publishing/research-publishing/open-access/hindawi-publication-manipulation-whitepaper

Research4Life. About Research4Life. (n.d.). Retrieved April 28, 2025, from https://www.research4life.org/about/

Research4Life. (2023, December 11). IOP Publishing donates APC revenue from retracted papers to Research4Life [Press Release]. https://www.research4life.org/news/iop-donates-to-r4l/

Retraction Watch. The Retraction Watch mass resignations list. Retrieved April 28, 2025,from https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-mass-resignations-list/

Van Noorden, R. (2023a, November 6). How big is science’s fake-paper problem? Nature, 623, 466-467. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03464-x

Van Noorden, R. (2023b, December 12). More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 – a new record. Nature, 624, 479-481. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03974-8

Wood, A. (2018, April 1). Cascade journals: What and why? Wiley. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/network/publishing/research-publishing/editors/cascade-journals-what-and-why