Open Access (OA) agreements were introduced to remove financial barriers to scientific dissemination and to promote equity in access to knowledge. However, as OA publishing costs have shifted from individual authors to institutions, we argue that institutional OA agreements can be used as leverage to obtain authorship or corresponding authorship without proportional intellectual contribution, a phenomenon that we describe as ‘value extraction’ in OA. We argue that such practices constitute a distinct class of integrity risk in scientific publishing, in which access to publishing infrastructure is converted into academic credit through metric-driven evaluation systems. Here we discuss how OA agreements, when coupled with traditional performance metrics such as publication counts, journal prestige, and corresponding authorship, can exacerbate global and institutional asymmetries, while remaining insufficiently addressed by existing research integrity frameworks. We propose concrete institutional-, publisher-, and system-level safeguards to prevent the misuse of OA mechanisms while preserving their emancipatory intent.
Spitale et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: