open access journals: a sustainable and scalable solution in social and political sciences?

Openness is central to scientific enquiry and can enable faster and more effective return on investment in research. Open access is linked to innovation in research communication and can help increase the reliability and reproducibility of published research. Growth of open access journal publishing in the social sciences and humanities is second only to life sciences. Surveys show researchers are interested in open access publishing, but some researchers perceive that there is a lack of quality journals offering open access. However, a number of established publishers have recently launched fully open access journals for political and social scientists, such as Palgrave Communications and Research & Politics. Open access journals often operate an article processing charge (APC) or ‘author pays’ business model, to support making articles freely available without charging readers. The APC model could provide financial benefits to society in the long term, but can present challenges for researchers without access to grant funding in the short term.

The emergence ofand transition toincreased accessibility of research online is merely an evolution of this fundamental role of journals, facilitated by twentiethand twenty-first-century technology. Moreover, the mission statements of most learned societies include words to the effect of making high-quality research available to a wide audience. But openness itself is not the goal of open access publishing. Rather, openness is a means to conduct and publish more reliable and reusable research, and to do so more efficiently.
One cannot ignore the detailsin particular, financialof the challenges presented by implementing open access in the political and social sciences, but equally one should keep in mind the panoply of benefits unfettered access to peerreviewed research can bring to research, and society (see Table 1).
'But openness itself is not the goal of open access publishing'. Researchers can focus on research rather than obtaining access to knowledge, such as requesting inter-library loans. Online, open access platforms can generally coordinate the peer review and publication process more rapidly, without print restrictions. Increased visibility and understanding of research outside the research community There is a strong incentive for political and social sciences researchresearch that should affect evidence-based government policyto be accessible outside academia. Better return on investment (ROI) in research Enabling maximum visibility and reuse in perpetuity through open access provides better ROI. For every $1 invested in the Human Genome Projectan exemplar of open access to research information -$16 is reported to have been returned (Grueber and Tripp, 2011 (Roberts, 2001).

Driving innovation in scholarly communication
Open access publishing was born out of the web and is closely linked to innovation in, for example, bibliometrics, data publication and integration, and efforts to improve scientific reproducibility. its standardised metadata and persistent identification, makes it more discoverable by search enginesparticularly when the full text of an article is freely available.
The first commercial open access publisher -BioMed Central, a publisher of peer-reviewed biomedical journalswas launched in 2000. Commercial (and sustainable) open access publishing was initially driven by the life and medical sciences but is becoming more established in other areas of research ( Figure 1). While biomedicine has produced the most open access articles of all disciplines by some margin, social sciences, arts and humanities follow. All major scholarly publishers now provide some form of open access publishing option. A 2013 Outsell report found publishers' open access revenues grew 34 per cent in 2012 compared with 2011 (Ricci and Kreisman, 2013). A so-called 'sting' on open access journals' peer-review standards was reported in Science in 2013 (Bohannon, 2013), although its methodology has been discredited (Eisen, 2013) for lacking controls and objectivity. The Bohannon article did highlight, however, that issues with editorial standards and the quality of peer review exist, as do 'predatory publishers'. However, inadequacies in the effectiveness of peer review in filtering out poor research (Smith, 2010)   publishing technology and lower costsand the removal of the need to sell subscriptions in advance of launch to become sustainablemakes launching a new journal under an open access model a more logical option for many publishers and scholarly societies. Established journal, publisher and society brands will likely continue to provide proxies for reliability or quality of information for readers when they discover new open access journal articles. However, there is growing recognition of the need to assess the quality of research at the level of the article rather than the journaland its Impact Factor (Bladek, 2014). For open access journals, other measures of quality include: whether the journal is included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); whether the journal's publisher is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association (OASPA); and, for all journals (subscription and open access), whether the journal or publisher is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The ability to assess individual article qualityvia citations, downloads and social media mentionsis also increasing with freely available tools such as Google Scholar and article-level metrics or Altmetrics data (https://www.altmetric .com/article-level-metrics.php).

OPEN ACCESS AND QUALITY
In addition, more journals, of all access models, are now utilising email marketing to invite submission of papers. Common to both many open access and subscription journals are rigorous standards of peer review, high editorial and ethical standards, indexing in major databases (such as the Web of Knowledge and Scopus), and the involvement of professional editors and prestigious Editorial Boards. As far back as 2004, Thomson Reuters, who produce the Journal Impact Factor, found that in every field of science there was at least one open access title ranked at or near the top of its field in terms of citation impact (Suber, 2013). Communications (http://www.palgravejournals.com/palcomms/). Palgrave Communications was established as the first selective open access journal for original peer-reviewed research across all areas of the humanities, the social sciences and business (HSS). The journal published its first edition in January 2015 (Hrynaszkiewicz and Acuto, 2015), including a contribution from the political sciences (Shaw, 2015).
In the journal, peer reviewers are asked to consider not just whether methods used were sound but also that strong evidence is provided for the conclusions, whether the results are novel, and whether the manuscript is important to specific fields and/or is important in interdisciplinary terms (http://www.palgravejournals.com/palcomms/referees). Providing a venue for, and promoting and enabling, interdisciplinary research is another goal of Palgrave Communications. Interdisciplinary research is crucial in helping to solveinherently multidisciplinaryglobal social, environmental and economic problems and can potentially enable a higher order of research (van Eeden, 2011). Traditional research assessmentfor promotion and tenurecriteria for academics can also perpetuate traditional disciplinary approaches by, for example, valuing more highly particular discipline-specific journals or particular orders of authorship on a paper.
The 2014 Nature Publishing Group author insights survey (NPG, 2014b) found that reputation and relevance continue to be the most important factors for authors when choosing a target journal. Journals are also judged on the service they provide to authors, particularly under an open access model where authors and their funding agencies are arguably a journal's customers more directly than with subscription journals' publishers, who deal more with librarians. The quality and speed of the peer review and publishing service a journal provides to its authors and readers, as well as the quality of the publisher, are important reasons for journal choice (Solomon, 2014). The potential for increased citations was another area quoted by respondents to the 2011 Palgrave Macmillan survey (NPG, 2014a) as a reason for choosing open access. By publishing on online-only, open access platforms, born digital publications should be well placed to deliver a good service to authors on speed, presentation/format of content, quality and visibility of work. Publication times tend to be reduced as articles are not subject to print or page budgets or constraints. Articles that have been accepted and edited can be published as soon as they are ready, making submission to publication, including peer review, possible in an open access journal typically within 3-4 months. Given there are often several journals, including open access journals, for an author to choose from when selecting a target journal in terms of scope, author service becomes a differentiator for journalsalong with the cost of the APC for the service provided.

THE APC MODEL AND PAYMENT
Several analysesconducted in several different yearshave come to a similar conclusion with regard to the typical revenue that publishers gain from an article published under a subscription model: US $5,000 (Van Noorden, 2013). This figure has been calculated from the consulting firm Outsell in Burlingame, California, based on the revenue generated by the science-publishing industryof $9.4 billion in revenue in 2011based on 1.8 million English-language articles being published. This equates to roughly $5,000 per article (Van Noorden, 2013 2009). Although the per-article revenues in each model are not supporting the same activities or profit margins, and thus may not be directly comparable, a UK economic analysis has found that a wholesale shift to open access publishing under an APC model would result in substantial savings to academia (Houghton and Swan, 2013), potentially by more than £800 ($1,230 approximately) per article (Houghton et al, 2009). For the publication of primary, grant-funded research, the APC model offers several advantages over subscriptions in addition to the high visibility of the published article. Under the APC model costs are more transparent and represent the costs associated with providing publishing services, such as organizing peer review, copy editing, typesetting, archiving and indexing, promotion of content, and website maintenance and development. As the costs and charges are largely based on individual articles, they provide economies of scale with increasing numbers of articles published. While overheads of different publishers vary widely, another economic analysis, the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) study (PEER Economics Report, 2011), provides a cross-publisher analysis of the costs associated with each article submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The costs associated with administration of peer review, in the PEER study, were $250 per submitted article. Formatting, editing and typesetting (publication costs) were $170-$400. Note that peer review administration costs are per submitted rather than published article, meaning higher rejection rates increased the cost per published article. A journal rejecting 50 per cent of its submissions would equate to $500 per published article for administration of peer review, according to these data.
While there are potential savings and other benefits with the APC model, there are, recognisably, also challenges. The availability of grant funding in political and social sciences for research and for the funding of APCs is highly variable. Less social science research receives grant funding than life sciences research, but an increasing number of institutions have open access policies and some of these provide central funds for the payment of APCs ('Open access funding', nd). Some publishers waive or discount APCs for authors -including those in HSS disciplines -who lack access to funding to pay APCs (http://www.nature.com/openresearch/about-open-access/policiesjournals/). Solomon's analysis found that social scientists were more likely to pay APCs out of their own funds (Solomon, 2014

BEYOND OPEN ACCESS
The next decade will present numerous opportunities for political and social science researchers and their learned societies as open access publishing and the APC model becomes more common. There are also challenges, for publishers, who may operate legacy systems designed and built to deliver subscription content. Author education is also important, in relation to matters such as the availability of funding for APCs from institutions and the implications of Creative Commons licences, as well as what this means for reuse of third-party material.
Beyond the many benefits of open access described earlier, onlinepredominantly open accesspublishing is a driver for innovation in tackling even more fundamental issues in science and science communication. Journals such as Palgrave Communications (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/palcomms/about/ editorial-policies#Availability), Research & Politics (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/ researchandpolitics/default.htm#replica tion) and Nature and Scientific Data are also innovating in accessibility and reproducibility of research data. Journal collaborations with online tools for researchers such as the data repositories figshare and Dataverse may also enable more reproducible and transparent research. Reproducibility and bias are issues affecting all fields of science, and in the political and social sciences are being prominently debated (Pepinsky et al, 2014). While problems of reproducibility begin in the field, lab or clinic, publishers should help the research community derive the most benefit from their research, which means enabling reproducibility in a variety of ways (Hrynaszkiewicz et al, 2014). Content licensing (to enable efficient sharing and reuse), content format (to present methodology in sufficient detail to be reproduced) and incentives (through editorial policy, publication types and citations to and integration of underlying research data) are all enablers of reproducibility that publishers can influenceand are all better enabled by publishers able to embrace, fully, open access.