New publication: The phenomenon of ‘value extraction’ in Open Access
A new paper by Giovanni Spitale, Federico Germani, and Nikola Biller-Andorno, published in Accountability in Research, introduces and systematically analyses a novel research integrity risk enabled by Open Access publishing agreements.
Building on a short correspondence published in Nature earlier this year, the paper provides a full conceptual and normative account of what the authors call value extraction in Open Access: the use of institutional APC (Article Processing Charge) coverage as leverage to obtain authorship — or corresponding authorship — without proportional intellectual contribution.
As transformative OA agreements have shifted publication costs from individual researchers to institutions, access to OA publishing has become an institutional asset, unevenly distributed across institutions, countries, and career stages. The paper argues that this structural shift creates a mechanism of authorship abuse distinct from previously described forms (gift authorship, coercive authorship): in value extraction, what is leveraged is not hierarchy or prestige, but control over publishing infrastructure.
The paper identifies three structural drivers — centralized APC management, metric-driven evaluation systems that reward publication output and corresponding authorship positions, and integrity frameworks that treat publishing infrastructure as an ethically neutral background condition — and documents the distributional consequences: early-career researchers, scholars at less-resourced institutions, and colleagues in the Global South face heightened vulnerability.
Proposed safeguards operate at institutional level (procedural firewalls between APC approval and authorship documentation; early CRediT-based contribution recording), publisher level (monitoring of authorship patterns linked to OA agreements), and systemic level (reform of evaluation frameworks to decouple infrastructural access from academic credit).
Read the article here.