Is open access a sustainable solution

Is Open Access a Sustainable Solution for All?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The open access movement, with its foundational belief that scholarly research should be free to read and reuse, represents a seismic shift in the world of publishing. It emerged as a radical counterpoint to the traditional, subscription-based model, which critics often lambasted as the “serials crisis,” a system where publicly funded research was locked behind increasingly exorbitant paywalls, primarily benefiting a handful of commercial publishers. 

The democratization of knowledge is the seductive promise of open access, ensuring that researchers in developing nations, independent scholars, policymakers, and the general public can access vital information without institutional or financial barriers. This goal is undeniably noble and aligns perfectly with the public-good mission often ascribed to academic work.

However, the question of whether open access is a truly sustainable solution for all is significantly more complex than the simple declaration of an ideal. Sustainability, in this context, must be viewed through a triple lens: financial, disciplinary, and equitable. 

Financially, how do we pay for the rigorous processes of peer review, editing, production, and long-term archiving if not through subscriptions? Disciplinarily, can a single model cater to the wildly varying publishing cultures, funding mechanisms, and content types across the Sciences, Humanities, and Social Sciences? And most critically, equitably, does the most common open access funding mechanism merely shift the financial barrier from the reader to the author, creating a new, insidious form of exclusion? 

The enthusiasm for open science is palpable, but a clear-eyed look at its current structure reveals a system still grappling with fundamental issues of economic viability and global fairness.

The Financial Flip: From Subscription Walls to APC Gates

The most prevalent and, arguably, the most contested open access model is Gold Open Access (OA), which is often funded through Article Processing Charges (APCs). In this model, the reader accesses the final published article for free, but the author (or their funding body or institution) pays a fee to the publisher upon acceptance. This represents the central financial flip: the cost of publication is moved from the consumer of the content (the library/subscriber) to the producer (the author/funder).

This transition has been championed by major commercial publishers, who have, in many cases, successfully converted large portions of their subscription journals to hybrid or full Gold OA. For a publisher, this model is remarkably efficient. They retain their profit margins, often substantial, by extracting funds directly from the research grants or institutional budgets that fund the research in the first place. 

The problem is that these APCs are not cheap. While prices vary wildly, the APC for a top-tier journal can easily run from a modest $1,500 to an eye-watering $10,000 USD. For an academic in a high-income country with a substantial grant, this is a line item. For a researcher in the Global South, or one in a discipline like the Humanities with little to no external research funding, it becomes an insurmountable wall. 

The issue is further exacerbated by the rise of “Transformative Agreements” (TAs), often called “Read and Publish” deals. Libraries, seeking to accelerate the transition to open access, pay a single fee to a large publisher that covers both their researchers’ ability to read the subscription content and their institutional authors’ ability to publish open access (with APCs) in that publisher’s journals. 

While TAs alleviate the financial burden on individual authors within those subscribing institutions, they essentially funnel the massive, consolidated library subscription budgets directly into the APC model. This risks entrenching the financial dominance of the largest publishing houses, rather than fostering a truly diverse and competitive open access ecosystem. TAs, while pragmatic in the short term, represent a shift in the way library money is spent, not a fundamental disruption of the publisher’s business model.

The Disciplinary Divide

One of the greatest challenges to the notion of a universally sustainable open access solution is the vast difference in publishing culture and funding across academic disciplines. The world of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM) is structurally better suited to the APC-based Gold OA model than the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).

In STEM fields, research is typically funded by large external grants from government agencies (like the NIH or NSF) or major philanthropic organizations. These grants often explicitly include line items for publication costs, making the payment of an APC a planned expense. Furthermore, rapid dissemination of findings is often crucial in fast-moving scientific fields, making the immediate, open availability of an article a valuable commodity. This culture has made the Gold OA and the self-archiving (Green OA) models relatively well-adopted in these areas.

In contrast, the Humanities and many Social Sciences operate on fundamentally different economic principles. HSS research is often conducted by a single scholar, is far less grant-dependent, and, when grants are secured, they are typically smaller, focusing on things like travel, archival access, or stipends, rather than publication fees. The primary scholarly output in HSS is often the monograph or book, not the short journal article, and Book Processing Charges (BPCs) can be astronomically high, sometimes exceeding $15,000. 

Without a grant infrastructure designed to pay these fees, the imposition of an APC or BPC simply shifts the cost directly onto the individual scholar or their under-resourced departmental budget, making the whole system unsustainable for them. It is therefore no surprise that open access uptake has historically been slower and less uniform in HSS, where scholars rely more heavily on institutional repositories (Green OA) or a collective, subsidized model to publish their work. The scholarly book, a slow-moving, meticulously researched work, simply does not fit the high-volume, quick-turnaround economics of the APC model that has dominated journal publishing.

The Infrastructure Imperative: Beyond Funding Models

Sustainability for open access does not stop at financial models; it requires a robust, globally accessible open infrastructure. The current reality is that much of the non-APC open access content relies on a patchwork of repositories, scholar-led platforms, and institutional funding that often lacks the longevity, visibility, and professional standardization of large commercial systems. The core issue here is not a lack of content, but a lack of coordinated, long-term support for the non-profit, open-source tools and services that underpin truly equitable open access.

This imperative is particularly relevant for Green OA (self-archiving), which often utilizes institutional repositories. While Green OA is free for both author and reader, its sustainability is tied to the long-term commitment of academic institutions to maintain and staff these repositories. A significant challenge lies in the sheer lack of standardization. Different institutions use different repository software, varying metadata standards, and inconsistent rights-retention policies. 

This fragmentation makes it difficult for researchers to discover and reuse content efficiently, diminishing the overall impact of the Green OA model despite its intrinsic equity. A truly sustainable global open access ecosystem needs to invest heavily in shared infrastructure: common repository software, standardized metadata practices, and centralized discovery tools that do not depend on the platforms owned by commercial publishers.

Furthermore, the transition also demands a fundamental rethinking of archiving and preservation. Traditional subscription models implicitly included long-term preservation as part of the journal’s value proposition, backed by stable subscription revenue. In the fractured open access landscape, especially for small Diamond OA journals or institutional repositories, guaranteeing that a piece of scholarship published today will be accessible and readable in fifty years is a non-trivial, costly endeavor. 

Initiatives like the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and other non-profit publishers invest heavily in third-party preservation services, but many smaller, scholar-run operations face an existential dilemma when it comes to maintaining their digital legacy, highlighting a critical point of systemic fragility in the current model.

Alternative Financial Models: Seeking True Equity

The recognition that the APC model is financially inequitable and disciplinarily biased has spurred the development of genuinely innovative, non-APC-based open access models. These alternatives aim for the Diamond Open Access ideal: free for the reader and free for the author.

One promising model is Subscribe to Open (S2O), which cleverly leverages the existing subscription infrastructure. Under S2O, a journal informs its current subscribing libraries that if their collective subscription revenue for the year meets a certain threshold, all content for that year will be published open access for everyone, free of charge to authors. 

If the libraries do not subscribe, the content reverts to being paywalled. This model relies on the continuing collective goodwill and self-interest of the library community, essentially turning a collective subscription fee into a collective open access funding mechanism. It is a brilliant, low-risk way for established journals to “flip” without resorting to APCs. This mechanism is growing, with over 150 journals now successfully using S2O to flip to open access.

Another significant model is the Diamond OA approach, which is often subsidized by institutions, learned societies, or consortia. These journals typically receive funding from a university press, a national research council, or a consortium of libraries, covering all operational costs. For example, some library consortia have created funding pools to support scholar-led, non-profit journals, recognizing that this investment aligns better with their mission to democratize knowledge than paying the high profit margins of commercial publishers. 

These models, which are often smaller-scale and community-driven, are generally considered the most equitable, as they completely eliminate financial barriers for both readers and authors. However, scaling Diamond OA to compete with the sheer volume of output from large commercial publishers remains a considerable logistical challenge. The financial security of Diamond OA relies on stable, recurring institutional commitments, a funding stream that can be vulnerable to university budget cuts or shifting priorities.

The Quality and Credibility Conundrum

A persistent, though often exaggerated, concern about open access has always centered on quality and credibility. When an author pays to publish, does that inherently compromise the integrity of the peer review process? This fear is, unfortunately, lent credence by the emergence of “predatory publishers.”

A predatory journal is an exploitative publishing venue that charges an author-facing fee, often an APC, without providing the expected editorial and publishing services, most notably rigorous peer review. They prey on the “publish or perish” pressures in academia and the confusion surrounding the rapidly expanding OA landscape. The rise of these entities has forced the scholarly community to be much more vigilant. 

While reputable Gold OA publishers adhere to the same stringent peer review standards as their subscription counterparts, the presence of predatory journals has cast a shadow, particularly among senior scholars or those less familiar with open access. This issue has a real-world impact. Studies indicate that these fraudulent operations disproportionately target researchers in developing countries.

In response, institutions have developed checklists and resources to help authors vet journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which lists legitimate, peer-reviewed OA titles, is a critical tool for maintaining trust. It is crucial to underscore that the open access philosophy itself does not equate to a lack of quality control; the best OA journals are as rigorous as any subscription journal. The problem lies with the monetization of the peer review service—the APC—which opens the door to those who would profit without providing the service.

Conclusion

Is open access a sustainable solution for all? The short answer is: not yet, and not in its most dominant form.

Open access, at its core, is a deeply desirable and necessary movement that aims to fulfill the promise of open science. The benefits—increased citation rates, broader societal impact, and equitable access for readers worldwide—are undeniable. 

However, the prevailing Gold OA model, funded by exorbitant Article Processing Charges, is simply not sustainable for the significant segment of the global research community that lacks large grant funding, particularly in the Humanities, many Social Sciences, and the Global South. This model has replaced a reader-side access crisis with an author-side equity crisis, proving to be a sustainable profit model for publishers but an unsustainable barrier for many scholars.

The true path to an equitable and universally sustainable solution lies in the growth and maturation of non-APC models. Innovations like Subscribe to Open (S2O) and the community-supported Diamond OA journals, which are financially supported by institutions, libraries, and funders collectively, offer a route that honors the core value of openness: free to read and free to publish. 

The transition is ongoing and requires a continued, concerted effort from libraries, which must continue to redirect their large subscription budgets, and funding bodies, which must move beyond simply funding APCs and invest in new, infrastructure-based models. Only by decoupling the act of reading and the act of publishing from the financial transaction, and by building and maintaining a resilient, open technical infrastructure, can open access truly live up to its promise of being a sustainable solution for every researcher, in every discipline, across the globe.

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