The future of Europe's scientific publishing

The Future of Europe’s Scientific Publishing: A Revolution in Openness and Technology

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Table of Contents

Introduction

A shift is underway in Europe’s scientific publishing landscape, driven by political mandate, technological innovation, and a scholarly push for openness. The days of research (mostly funded by public money) being locked behind exorbitant paywalls are officially numbered. This isn’t just about switching from print to digital. It’s a re-engineering of how knowledge is shared, evaluated, and used. For researchers, institutions, and publishers across Europe, the future of science communication looks radically different and a whole lot more exciting.

The European Union and its affiliated bodies have drawn a line in the sand, proclaiming that publicly funded research is a public good. This principle is not a gentle suggestion. Rather, it’s an imperative. The move toward open access is the driving force of this revolution, forcing a confrontation with entrenched business models that have served large commercial publishers extremely well for decades. 

We are witnessing the evolution of scholarly communication from a closed, subscription-based commodity to an open, digitally-driven ecosystem. Europe is not just participating in this global trend. It’s setting the agenda, making it a dynamic and fascinating place to observe the future of scientific publishing in action. It’s a turbulent but essential transition, promising greater equity, transparency, and a much faster pace for scientific progress.

Open Access: From Principle to Policy

The most significant shift in European scientific publishing is undoubtedly the open access mandate. This isn’t merely an aspirational goal but a hard-and-fast requirement, enshrined in major funding programs like Horizon Europe. The core philosophy is beautifully simple. If the public purse pays for the research, the public should have free, immediate access to the results. No more embargo periods, no more paywalls, just science for everyone, everywhere.

Plan S and the Power of the Funders

The poster child for this hard-line approach is Plan S, spearheaded by cOAlition S, a group of national research funding organizations and charitable foundations across Europe and beyond. Plan S mandates that, with effect from 2021, all scholarly publications resulting from research funded by its members must be published in open access journals or platforms, or immediately deposited in an open access repository (the Green Open Access route) with no embargo. 

This is where things get interesting, and a little controversial. Plan S specifically discourages the use of ‘hybrid’ journals, i.e., subscription journals where authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make their individual article open, unless they are covered by a transformative agreement that commits the publisher to a full transition to open access. This direct attack on a lucrative revenue stream for major commercial publishers is the most aggressive move yet to disrupt the old model.

The sheer leverage of this coordinated group of funders is staggering. While early analyses suggested that the initial Plan S funders only accounted for a relatively small percentage (around 6%) of all papers indexed in the Web of Science, their influence is disproportionate. They hold the purse strings for a massive chunk of high-impact European research, and where they lead, others follow. 

By dictating the terms of publication, cOAlition S has effectively forced publishers to negotiate ‘transformative agreements’ with institutions and consortia, such as those led by national library groups. These agreements shift payment from subscriptions (reading) to publication services (APCs), accelerating the transition away from the subscription model.

Horizon Europe and the Green Light for Repositories

The European Commission’s flagship funding programs, like Horizon Europe, have reinforced this open access commitment. For beneficiaries, the rules are clear: peer-reviewed publications must be made open access immediately upon publication by depositing the final peer-reviewed manuscript (the ‘postprint’) or the final published article in a trusted repository. This is the Green Open Access route, and it comes with non-negotiable terms: the deposit must be released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, allowing for maximum reuse.

The Commission has also backed its own publishing infrastructure with Open Research Europe (ORE). This platform offers a high-speed, no-cost open access publishing venue for all Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries. ORE utilizes a post-publication, invited open peer review model, meaning articles are published rapidly as preprints, followed by open review reports attached to the article, embracing transparency. This move demonstrates that Europe is not content to simply regulate the existing publishing system; it is actively building a new, public-good infrastructure to compete with commercial offerings. This is a game-changer, showing that an alternative, publicly-owned publishing venue is not only feasible but actively supported.

Technological Underpinnings and Disruptive Models

The shift to open access wouldn’t be possible without a simultaneous revolution in publishing technologies. The old system was analogue-centric and designed for scarcity; the new system is digital-first and designed for abundance and interconnectedness.

Preprint servers, where researchers post their work before formal peer review, have been around for a while, but their acceptance and integration into the European publishing workflow have accelerated dramatically. Platforms like bioRxiv and medRxiv have become essential for the rapid dissemination of scientific findings, a necessity starkly highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Europe’s approach is to weave these preprints into the formal review process. The ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ model, adopted by journals like eLife, is gaining traction, where a paper is published immediately as a preprint-like record, followed by an open, transparent peer review process that leads to a curated, high-quality version.

Furthermore, the concept of open peer review is increasingly seen as a mechanism for greater transparency and quality control. Reviewer reports and, sometimes, the reviewers’ identities are published alongside the article. While still facing some cultural resistance (researchers remain nervous about critiquing the work of senior colleagues publicly), the trend is undeniable. Open peer review turns a traditionally opaque gatekeeping process into a public, scholarly conversation, making the entire scientific record more robust and accountable.

Decentralized and Modular Publishing

Beyond simply digitizing the journal, new models are challenging the very concept of the ‘article’ and the ‘journal brand.’ Initiatives like Octopus (funded by UK Research & Innovation) break down the research process into eight distinct, citable publication types: Hypothesis, Method, Protocol, Data, Analysis, Interpretation, Research Output, and Application. 

Each can be published and peer-reviewed independently, with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), allowing researchers to get credit for every part of the research lifecycle, not just the final paper. This modular approach is perfectly suited for a digital-first ecosystem and incentivizes the sharing of components like datasets and code, a key requirement of Horizon Europe’s focus on FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

The idea of a decentralized network, perhaps utilizing blockchain or other distributed web technologies, is also bubbling up. DeSci Labs, for instance, is leveraging decentralized web technologies to assign DOIs and linkable citations to individual figures, tables, and datasets within a research work. The goal is to move the publishing infrastructure out of the hands of a few commercial entities and place it within the scholarly community itself. This is a long-term, ambitious vision, but the conversation is happening right now in Europe, driven by the desire to eliminate the substantial market power currently held by a handful of large publishers.

The Economics of Openness: The Battle Over APCs and Equity

One of the greatest paradoxes of the open access revolution is that while it removes paywalls for readers, it often introduces new costs for authors. This has led to the rise of the Article Processing Charge (APC) model, where the author (or their funder/institution) pays a fee for the article to be published open access. This Gold Open Access route, while providing immediate, free access, has sparked significant criticism for potentially introducing a new form of access inequity, where publishing in high-impact journals becomes a luxury affordable only to well-funded researchers in wealthy institutions.

The Problem with Price

Publishers, having lost the subscription revenue, have simply pivoted to charging APCs, sometimes at price points that seem utterly disconnected from the actual cost of editorial and production services. Plan S specifically aims to tackle this by requiring fair and reasonable prices for publishing services and implementing price caps if costs are deemed unreasonable. However, determining a ‘fair’ price for a service that includes editorial work, peer review management, indexing, and archiving remains a complex economic challenge. The market power of high-prestige journals, which provide valuable filtering and certification services to researchers, allows them to command higher fees.

This economic pressure disproportionately affects early-career researchers and scholars from less-funded or developing European countries. While transformative agreements might cover the APCs for researchers in the subscribing institutions, the costs are simply shuffled from a library budget line item to a grant budget line item, and the total cost to the research system hasn’t necessarily dropped.

Diamond Open Access: The True Non-Commercial Ideal

The hopeful alternative to the APC model is Diamond Open Access. These are journals and platforms that charge neither authors nor readers, relying instead on institutional funding, grants, government subsidies, or scholarly volunteerism. Diamond Open Access is community-driven, often academic-led, and embodies the principle of bibliodiversity, supporting smaller, multilingual, and discipline-specific scholarly communities.

Science Europe, a major proponent of open access, is actively working to strengthen the Diamond Open Access ecosystem. Their efforts are focused on providing infrastructure, best practices, and visibility to these non-commercial venues. For many in the European scholarly community, Diamond Open Access represents the true, equitable, and sustainable future of scientific publishing, upholding the core belief that research dissemination should not be a profit-generating enterprise.

The Cultural and Systemic Challenges Ahead

The policy and technology are moving fast, but cultural change in academia is notoriously slow, ponderous, and requires a lot of foresight. The future of European scientific publishing hinges not just on new rules, but on new norms.

The single biggest roadblock to widespread cultural adoption of new publishing models is the continued reliance on journal brands and Impact Factors (IFs) for research assessment, hiring, and promotion. Researchers still feel immense pressure to publish in high-IF, often subscription-based or high-APC journals, because those publications are what their institutions and funding bodies use to measure their ‘quality.’ As one might imagine, a shiny new Diamond Open Access journal, no matter how rigorous its peer review, has to fight years of ingrained prestige.

This is precisely why there is a coordinated European effort to align research assessment with Open Science principles. The DORA Declaration (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), which advocates for judging research based on its intrinsic value rather than the journal in which it is published, has gained significant traction. Funders and institutions are being urged to revise their evaluation criteria to reward a broader range of research outputs (including datasets, code, methods, and public engagement) and to move away from using journal metrics as a proxy for quality. Until the incentive system is truly reformed, the move to open access will remain a tug-of-war between researcher compliance and deeply rooted career pressures.

Preserving Scholarly Independence

The consolidation of the academic publishing market in the hands of a few major commercial players remains a major concern. The transition to open access, if not carefully managed, could inadvertently solidify this market power by simply shifting it from subscription monopolies to APC monopolies. If the highest-impact journals, which are often owned by these large corporations, command the highest APCs, they maintain their grip on the scholarly communication system.

Europe’s strategy is a two-pronged attack: one, regulate and negotiate hard with the big players (Plan S, transformative agreements); and two, invest heavily in the non-commercial, community-led alternatives (Diamond Open Access, ORE). The goal is to foster a genuinely diverse and equitable publishing ecosystem that supports research integrity over corporate profit. The success of this transition will define whether Europe’s scientific future is truly open or just a slightly different shade of proprietary.

Conclusion

The future of Europe’s scientific publishing is not just open access. It is a vision of Open Science where all components of the research cycle, from data to code to publication, are as open and transparent as possible. Driven by the uncompromising political will of the European Union and cOAlition S, and enabled by new digital technologies, this movement is fundamentally reshaping the relationship between scholars, publishers, and the public. We are moving away from the expensive, gated community of the past toward a vast, interconnected, public square of knowledge.

The road ahead is certainly not smooth. There are significant challenges in achieving true equity and in overcoming the cultural inertia of entrenched research assessment practices. Yet, the momentum is undeniable. With over half of European universities now having an Open Science policy, and deadlines for full open access implementation set firmly within the next few years for many institutions, the change is happening now. Europe is making a confident, authoritative bet that an open scholarly ecosystem will not only be fairer but will also accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and innovation, ultimately strengthening its position in a globalized knowledge economy.

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