Ecography's flip to a pay‐to‐publish model

The Nordic Society Oikos (NSO) has decided to flip Ecography from a pay-to-read model to a pay-to-publish model. All papers published after the flip, in January 2020, will become open access immediately. As a bonus, all published papers since 1997 will be also free to read. According to NSO, the main reason for the flip is that the subscription income of Ecography is insufficient to cover the costs of publication. NSO has decided that, given the current changes in the publication landscape, the best strategy to guarantee the future of Ecography is to change its funding model. As senior editors of Ecography (i.e. Editor-in-Chief and Deputy-Editors-in-Chief ), we witness these changes with mixed feelings. On the one hand we acknowledge that there is little justification for limiting readers’ access to the scientific literature under a pay-to-read model. Most of the research published by journals is funded by taxpayers’ money and the general public should have the right to access it freely from any Internet terminal. In an information-driven society, it is also disingenuous to allow fake news to roam freely on the Internet, while keeping the highest-standard information ever created by humankind behind paywalls. A better world will no doubt emerge from open science. On the other hand, we share with many others the concern that a pay-to-publish system will increase inequality among authors by creating new barriers to publication of high quality science and excluding from mainstream publishing those authors with limited economical resources (McGill et al. 2018, Peterson et al. 2019a, b). Some argue that Open Access fees are often excessive and much lower fees should be possible (Solomon and Björk 2012). Although society-owned journals tend to reinvest any profit they might make back into the scientific community (Ecography does so in a number of ways), the argument raises questions about the need of greater transparency regarding publishing costs and revenues. This is important because a great deal of publication costs are indirectly subsidised by governments that fund the research and scientists whose gracious support as reviewers and editors guarantees high publication standards. We would have preferred to postpone the flip from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish model to after the European Union’s policy regarding open science – the so called Plan S (Else 2018) – has been finally agreed and implemented by member states. Our reasons are twofold. Firstly, Plan S might lead to imposition of caps on Open Access fees, Ecography’s flip to a pay-to-publish model