What's next for open access

What’s Next for Open Access?

by

Table of Contents

Introduction

Open access was born to democratize knowledge. Fueled by the power of the internet, it fundamentally challenged the traditional subscription-based model. For years, the fight has been about tearing down paywalls guarding publicly funded research from the public itself. In recent times, the surge of open access articles has been tremendous, already passing the 50% landmark of all publications. 

However, the very success of open access has also unveiled its systemic limitations, particularly around equity, sustainability, and the fundamental structure of scholarly communication. The initial triumph of opening up content has led to new, complex financial barriers, primarily through the Article Processing Charge (APC) model. It’s a classic case of solving one problem only to create a slightly different, equally vexing one. 

The current conversation isn’t about if we should have open research, but how we achieve it in a way that is truly fair, financially viable for all parties, and genuinely innovative. Open access, in its current form, has served its purpose as the great disruptor, but the path to a truly open and equitable research ecosystem demands that we look beyond it. The next generation of publishing models must address the unintended consequences of the open access revolution and push the boundaries of what scholarly communication can be.

The Open Access Revolution: A Retrospective

The open access movement was a necessary and disruptive force that came to prominence in the early 2000s, crystallized by landmark declarations like the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002. The core philosophy was simple and profound: research (primarily funded by taxpayers) should be made freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The alternative was a deeply flawed system where university libraries were crushed under the weight of the “serials crisis,” paying exorbitant, ever-increasing subscription fees to a handful of oligopolistic publishers just to access the work their faculty produced. It was a financially perverse, morally questionable arrangement that demanded to be broken.

The primary solution that emerged was the classification of open access into various models. Gold open access journals make all articles immediately free, often funded by APCs paid by the authors, their institutions, or funders. Green open access involves authors self-archiving a version of their manuscript in an institutional or subject repository, typically after an embargo period. Both routes have contributed significantly to the democratization of knowledge, providing a massive boost to research visibility, especially for scholars in resource-poor regions. 

Today, over half of all academic articles have some form of open access, which is a monumental achievement. This shift hasn’t just been a win for accessibility. An academic review reports that about half of studies find higher citations for freely available articles, though results depend on discipline, open access route, and study quality, and causality remains debated. 

The proliferation of open access has reshaped the market, forcing even the largest, most traditional publishers to adapt. They couldn’t simply ignore the mandate from key funding bodies and governments that began requiring open access publication for grant recipients. This pressure led to the rise of “Transformative Agreements,” often referred to as “read and publish” deals. Under a transformative agreement, institutions pay a single, consolidated fee that covers both the cost of subscribing to the publisher’s paywalled content (the “read” part) and the cost for their affiliated authors to publish open access in the publisher’s journals (the “publish” part, replacing individual APCs). 

These agreements, while controversial, represent a major transition mechanism, effectively reallocating subscription money to fund gold open access publication. However, the complexity and high cost of transformative agreements remain significant points of contention, leading many to question if they merely solidify the power of the major publishing houses under a new financial structure. 

The New Barriers: The APC Conundrum

The shift to open access, particularly the popular gold open access model, has introduced a significant, unintended barrier: the APC. While the paywall between the reader and the content has largely been dismantled, a new financial obstacle has been erected between the author and publication. Instead of libraries paying to read, authors and their institutions are now expected to pay to publish. These fees are often substantial, ranging from hundreds to several thousands of dollars, making publication in certain high-impact journals unaffordable for many researchers worldwide.

This APC model is inherently inequitable. It creates a tiered system where the ability to publish in a prestigious, fully open access journal becomes contingent on the financial resources of the author’s institution, their funder, or their personal wealth. Researchers in the Global South, early-career researchers without significant grant funding, and those working in under-resourced disciplines are disproportionately affected. 

With APC, authors are forced to either pay the high fee, which they cannot afford, or relegate their work to less visible, non-APC journals or green open access repositories, potentially limiting its reach and impact. The irony is that a movement intended to democratize knowledge has inadvertently created a new form of publishing elitism, effectively substituting a reader-pays barrier with an author-pays barrier.

Furthermore, the APC model creates a worrying conflict of interest for publishers. A publisher whose revenue is directly tied to the number of articles it accepts and publishes has a financial incentive to increase volume, which can sometimes come at the expense of rigorous peer review and editorial standards. This vulnerability has been ruthlessly exploited by the rise of predatory journals that charge APCs with little or no actual peer review or editorial service. 

This unscrupulous practice, which preys on the “publish or perish” culture of academia, poisons the well of scholarly communication, making it harder for legitimate OA journals to maintain credibility and for readers to discern quality. The APC structure, while simple on paper, has proven to be a Trojan horse, bringing new, complex problems of equity and integrity right into the heart of the open access ecosystem.

Models Beyond the APC: Towards True Equity

If the APC model is the main structural flaw of the current open access landscape, the logical next step is to explore publishing models that completely decouple publication from payment by the author. This transition is already underway, driven by libraries, consortia, and mission-driven presses determined to find truly equitable and sustainable alternatives. These models shift the financial burden away from individual articles and towards a collective, infrastructural contribution.

One of the most promising and rapidly growing alternatives is the diamond open access model. These journals are entirely free for both authors and readers. No APCs and no subscription fees are involved. Diamond open access journals are typically funded through a mosaic of sources: institutional subsidies from universities (research centers), grants from philanthropic foundations or governments, or sometimes, through a collective of libraries or academic societies. The sheer elegance of this model lies in its alignment with the original, pure vision of open access: a truly free exchange of scholarly information.

Another innovative approach is the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model. This concept is beautifully simple and incredibly compelling. A journal that adopts S2O asks its existing subscriber base (mostly libraries) to continue paying their annual subscription fee, but with a crucial twist. If a critical mass of subscribers renews, the journal agrees to drop its paywall and make the current year’s content immediately open access for everyone. If not enough institutions subscribe, the content remains paywalled, and the journal reverts to its traditional model. 

The collective purchasing power of the library community is thus used to fund the open publication for all, shifting the focus from paying for access to paying for infrastructure and support. This model offers a low-risk transition for existing subscription journals and leverages the established library-publisher relationship for an open outcome, exemplified by successful initiatives like the Opening the Future monograph subscription scheme.

Finally, we are seeing the rise of cooperative and consortial funding models, such as the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). OLH is a charitable organization that is funded by an international consortium of libraries. Instead of paying subscriptions for one journal, the libraries pool their resources to support an entire platform of diamond open access journals across the humanities and social sciences. This collective funding model provides stable, non-APC income for publishing services, proving that a non-profit, community-driven approach can effectively manage the administrative and technical costs of high-quality scholarly publishing without ever charging the authors. 

The Open Science Ecosystem: Beyond the Article

The movement past open access isn’t just about changing the financial model of the journal. It’s about a more profound shift in the entire culture and structure of scholarly communication. This larger phenomenon is known as Open Science, and its goal is to open up the entire research lifecycle, not just the final published article. Open Science advocates for the transparent sharing of all research outputs, recognizing that the final paper is only one part of the scientific contribution. This holistic perspective is the real future of publishing.

At its heart, Open Science champions open data which means making the raw datasets generated during research freely and publicly available, often in structured data repositories. This allows other researchers to reproduce the original findings, validate the methodology, and reuse the data for new, creative research questions, maximizing the return on investment for research funding. Similarly, the concept of open methodology and open software encourages the sharing of the protocols, code, and computational tools used in a study. 

This move towards radical transparency is essential for improving research integrity and accelerating scientific progress. By making all these components available, the focus shifts from the journal brand as the proxy for quality to the integrity of the research itself, a necessary cultural change that will take time.

The technological infrastructure to support this full Open Science ecosystem is already evolving. Preprints are a critical component, enabling rapid dissemination and soliciting immediate community feedback. Platforms that integrate the final published article with its underlying data and code are emerging, offering a richer, more verifiable research record. Furthermore, open peer review, where reviewer comments and author responses are published alongside the article, adds another layer of transparency and accountability to the review process. 

The future of publishing isn’t just about the open article. It’s also about creating a hyper-connected, fully transparent, and open-source research object that includes the paper, the data, the code, and the peer review history. This represents a fundamental redesign of the scholarly publishing workflow, which is what we need to truly leverage the digital age.

The Role of Technology: AI and Decentralization

The next evolution of publishing is inextricably linked to emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and decentralized systems. These tools offer the potential to streamline publication, improve research integrity, and even redefine the very nature of the scholarly record, moving beyond the static PDF that has been the industry standard for decades. If the internet facilitated open access, then AI and blockchain technologies are set to facilitate Open Science.

AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), is already being used to assist in the publishing workflow. AI tools can rapidly screen manuscripts for plagiarism, research misconduct, and potential ethical breaches with an efficiency no human editor can match. They can also assist in classifying papers, suggesting appropriate peer reviewers with greater precision, and even auto-generating initial summaries or structured metadata. However, the true game-changer will be AI’s role in data mining and discovery. 

As more content, including data and code, is made open access, AI will be able to read, synthesize, and link research findings across millions of articles to create entirely new insights at a scale previously unimaginable. This is where the power of open data truly comes alive: data that is open and machine-readable becomes the fuel for the next wave of scientific innovation.

Beyond AI, the concept of decentralized publishing is gaining traction, largely inspired by the principles of blockchain technology. The current publishing system is highly centralized: a few large commercial entities control the dissemination and archiving of the majority of scholarly work. Decentralization aims to distribute the ownership and control of the publishing infrastructure across the academic community itself. While a fully blockchain-based journal remains a fringe idea, the principles of decentralization (immutability, transparency, and distributed ownership) are driving the development of new infrastructure. 

This could lead to a system where the scholarly record is archived on a distributed ledger, making it resistant to censorship or loss, and where the peer review process is incentivized and logged transparently. The vision is a future where the academic community, through shared, open-source technology, reclaims ownership and control over the means of scholarly production, ensuring that no single commercial entity can hold knowledge hostage again.

Academic Incentives: The Need for Cultural Change

No matter how perfect the new publishing model is, it will fail unless the underlying academic incentive structure changes. The current, deeply entrenched “publish or perish” culture remains heavily reliant on a few traditional, high-impact journals, which are often subscription-based or charge exorbitant APCs. Researchers are evaluated for tenure, promotion, and funding primarily on where they publish, not what they publish. This obsession with the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the Achilles’ heel of the Open Access movement.

Changing this culture requires a coordinated effort from universities, research funders, and evaluation bodies. Fortunately, initiatives are already attempting to do just this. The DORA Declaration (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) explicitly advocates for moving away from using journal-based metrics, such as the JIF, as a primary measure of research quality. Instead, DORA encourages evaluating research based on its intrinsic merit, its contribution to the field, and the transparent sharing of all research outputs. This means giving credit not just for the final article, but also for producing open data, sharing code, mentoring, and engaging in transparent peer review.

Furthermore, research funders are using their significant financial leverage to drive change. Many national and international funders now mandate that all research they support must be made immediately open access with no embargo, often pushing authors toward diamond or non-APC gold open access options. This direct intervention by funders is arguably the single most effective tool for shifting the needle away from the old models. 

The next frontier in academic incentives will be the formal integration of Open Science practices into hiring, promotion, and grant review rubrics. When a researcher’s open data and publicly available peer review contributions count as much as (or even more than) a publication in a hyper-exclusive journal, that’s when the new publishing models will achieve critical mass and true sustainability. It’s a battle for the soul of academia, and the publishers are only half the story. The other half is what the institutions value.

Conclusion

Open access was a revolutionary first step in correcting a century of financial imbalance and restricted access in scholarly publishing. It successfully pried open the doors to research, a monumental achievement that is changing academic publishing. However, the dominance of the APC model has demonstrated that simply swapping a reader-pays barrier for an author-pays barrier is not the final answer to achieving equitable and sustainable open knowledge. We have merely traded one form of exclusion for another, and this realization is what propels us to move to the next chapter. 

The future of publishing is not a single model, but a diverse ecosystem built on the twin pillars of financial equity and radical transparency. This ecosystem will be led by non-APC models like diamond open access (the purest ideal of free access for all) and Subscribe to Open (which leverages existing library budgets for the greater good). Critically, this shift in financing is inseparable from the broader movement toward Open Science, which demands that we look beyond the final article to include the open sharing of data, code, and methodology. Enabled by technologies like AI for discovery and decentralized systems for resilient archiving, the scholarly record will evolve from a static PDF into a dynamic, interconnected, and verifiable research object. 

The biggest remaining challenge is cultural: we must dismantle the archaic academic incentive structure that prioritizes the prestige of the vessel over the intrinsic quality of the research. When institutions value open practices, data sharing, and transparent review as much as the final publication venue, we will finally have arrived at a truly open and equitable global system of scholarly communication. 

Leave a comment