This conceptual exploration identifies safeguards against value extraction in open access publishing, suggesting important reforms.
Safeguards are needed at institutional, publisher, and systemic levels, including procedural firewalls between APC decisions and authorship documentation, publisher-level monitoring of authorship patterns, and reform of evaluation frameworks to decouple infrastructural access from academic credit. Future research should investigate the prevalence of value extraction using bibliometric and network-based screening approaches.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Spitale et al. (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: