A global-local strategy for global open access

The scholarly outputs from mainland China have surged at an unprecedented speed in the past three decades,1 causing not only the reshaping of the publication landscape but also concern regarding China’s building of its own publishing realm,2 especially under the current situation where the open access (OA) movement has reached the critical half-way point. This editorial/commentary aims to suggest a global-local strategy for OA to facilitate the eastward (or southward) adjustment of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publications, observe integrity for both researchers and OA journals, and transform STM publications by making OA affordable for the Global South. The global-local strategy refers to a more geographically balanced strategy that concerns not only global scientific excellence but also the diversity of the local culture. The STM publication network should have a T-shaped architecture composed of global platforms and local hubs so as to be recognized and trusted by researchers everywhere in the world.

Global-local strategy in “geographical balance”: Eastward adjustment of STM publications

A geographical balance would facilitate a complete transformation of OA in a global sense so that the situation of double dipping can be solved. We are witnessing a geographic separation between the cradles of STM achievements and their carriers, the journals. On one hand, more and more scientific contributions are made in the East, with the indicative trend shown in Figure 1A; on the other hand, the majority of such scientific contributions are released on journal publishing platforms based in the West. According to the statistics of Scopus/SciVal, the Asian-Pacific region has become the largest scholarly contributing region in the world, surpassing Europe and North America. However, with the top 20 STM platforms all in the West, top-level STM journals are absent in the Asian-Pacific region, and their humanity features (e.g., language) are not appropriately represented in first-class STM journals. The continuous merging of publishing platforms, as well as the expansion of mega-journals and journal hierarchies in recent years, has widened this East-West, or contribution-publication, gap. The geographical separation between the contributors and distributors of scholarly output may hinder the progress of innovation and separate science from society.