the early 2000s, the United States developed and ultimately mobilized open access to health information. The famous National Institute of Health (NIH), a government agency directly dependent on the Department of Health, was a major player and in 2004 adopted a policy in favor of Open Access, supported by the PubMed Central database, essential for researchers in the field. Researchers were invited to archive a copy of their published article on PubMed Central no later than 6 months after its publication [ZER 04]. Four years later, in 2004, this incentive became mandatory, with a 12-month period. As Moorhead et al. [MOO 15] point out,
As a policy leader and major funder of health research, the NIH has, through its Public Access Policy, placed health literature at the forefront of the move toward open access to research.
In fact, unlike fields such as high-energy physics, where communities have mobilized around the principles of Open Access and have set up Open Repositories [GIN 97], in Health, it is public policies that, in light of the public health issue, have placed Open Access at the heart of thinking behind models for the dissemination of validated scientific information. Peter Suber [SUB 08] emphasizes the unprecedented nature of the approach, which was initiated by United States legislation and implemented by funding agencies.
The pioneering approach of the NIH spread like wildfire and saw other repository mandates and similar policies develop around the world [PIW 18]; the National Science Foundation (NSF), the European Commission (EC), the Wellcome Trust and, even more recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [BUT 17] to name just a few of the funding agencies embracing the same Open Access policy principles for the researchers they fund.
A few months after the launch of the compulsory mandate of the NIH, the European Commission launched its own Open Access pilot project as part of the 7th European Framework Program5. This pilot project – which accounted for 20% of the total budget of the framework program – was allocated to seven research themes considered priorities in the context of the construction of the European Research Area, including Health. Researchers receiving European funds had to:
Strive to provide open access to these articles within six or twelve months – set according to the field of research – after publication.
In the framework of Horizon 2020 where Health is a major strategic focus, Open Access to research results (publications and data) has become the new standard for scientific and technical information (STI) dissemination. Commission Recommendation (EU) 2018/790 of April 25, 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information6 asked member states to:
Define and implement clear policies […] for the dissemination of and open access to scientific publications resulting from publicly funded research.
The success of these aligned policies can be measured by the 5.9 million articles published worldwide. And as has been pointed out [TEN 16], the cumulative number of Open Access articles has increased far more than the number of non-full-text articles. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, downloads of articles indexed with the keyword “Covid-19” were in the millions [KOU 20] and were not generated by researchers alone. Members of the general population, wanting to be informed, accessed these articles using search engines.
1.3. Gold Open Access or the “Author-Pays” principle
Building on the policies that promote Open Access in Health and aiming to speed up access to information, BioMed Central (BMC) is a new player making its way onto the digital scientific publishing scene. In the early 2000s, it developed an offer of digital journals ex nihilo that published articles in Open Access. To do so, it relies on the Gold model (characterized by publications with free, open and immediate access for the author and the reader) and is included in the Berlin Declaration for Open Access. However, BMC “adapted” the original Gold model by asking the author (or their institution) to pay to publish, in order to find the resources to develop its platform and model. BMC thus introduced the article processing charge (APC), a publication fee that allows the publisher to finance the publication, which is in fact distributed under a Creative Commons License. This is an ingenious reversal of the subscription business model: payment is no longer made by the reader (or their library) but by the author (their institution or research project). The Gold Author-Pays model is born [TEN 16]. This transformation led to more precise terminology: the original Gold model was renamed the Gold Diamond model, to emphasize the difference. The need for immediate access to validated scientific information in the field of health has thus given rise to a business model that is now at the center of structural changes in scientific communication in Health.
In 2006, PloS (Public Library of Science), another Gold publisher, launched a range of journals under the Gold Author-Pays model using the same arguments [BAR 06],
The potential benefits of such a change are vast. No longer will physicians have to base their practice on half-truths. Instead, everyone from patients to policy-makers can read for themselves the evidence on which crucial science and health policy decisions are made.
The success of Gold Author-Pays publishing was still in its early stages: BMC, which became the spearhead of the young anthill of Gold publishers in the field of Health, was acquired by Springer in 20087. It thus proved its success and, at the same time, transferred its expertise to the number 2 in scientific publishing. The SpringerNature group, which is today one of the major players in Open Access publishing,8 capitalized on BMC’s experience to develop its Gold journal offer and the Read & Publish9 agreements to libraries and their institutions, as part of the “transformative agreements”. It is intended to replace subscriptions to digital journal packages [OLS 20]. BMC’s success story will be emulated by others, and this is how scientific publishing will welcome a new category of Gold publishers, with technological and economic expertise in the distribution of digital scientific information on Health.
However, the Gold Author-Pays model raises questions about APC funding. The inequality of researchers in terms of access to information is now transformed into inequality in relation to publishing [BOU 17c]. Even though the Open Access model advocates access to knowledge, publishers are seizing on it to make it a new source of funding for their economic model. This is confirmed by the fact that the policies of some countries with a tradition of research and publication, such as the UK, officially opt for Gold Open Access as a strategic policy for the dissemination of scientific publications and provide, as a corollary, grants that allow researchers to publish according to this Gold Author-Pays model [FIN 12]. Since then, the major historical groups of scientific publishing (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, etc.), the Gold publishers (PloS, Copernicus, etc.) and the international databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, etc.) have set out to work on the development of Gold journals and their indexing, and thus on their economic valuation.
The evolution of the scientific publishing sector in the field of Health, subject to policy requirements, has therefore encouraged the development of the Gold model, and particularly the Gold Author-Pays model. According to Piwowar et al. [PIW 18], Health fields (biomedical research, clinical medicine, health, biology) are the disciplines in which there are the most Open Access scientific articles. Many studies have highlighted the strong growth of Open Access journals in the biomedical sciences since the beginning of 2002 [BOU 17a]. For example, more than half of all published scientific articles are available in Open Access [PIW 18].
1.4. Predatory journals: the “price” of change
It is no longer possible to address Gold Open Access journals without the phenomenon of predatory journals [COB 18] being included in the debate. Designated as such by Jeffrey Beall’s blog in 201210, predatory