Will open access die eventually

Will Open Access Die Eventually?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The question of whether open access, the movement advocating for free and immediate access to scholarly research, will eventually “die” can be one a provocative debate in academic publishing. It’s a bit like asking if the internet will die: the underlying technology and fundamental human desire for knowledge sharing aren’t going anywhere, but the models and mechanisms we use to support them are constantly in flux. 

Open access is no longer a fringe movement. It’s a dominant force, driven by mandates from major funding bodies and governments, and embraced by a large segment of the research community. Its philosophy is intuitively appealing and hard to argue against on a purely ethical basis. The journey of open access has been marked by triumphs and persistent challenges. From the early days of institutional repositories (green open access) to the rise of Article Processing Charges (APCs), the system has constantly morphed in an attempt to find an equilibrium between accessibility and financial sustainability. 

Despite its moral high ground and demonstrated ability to increase citations and broaden the reach of scholarship, open access faces pressures from all sides. These encompass the financial strain of the author-pays model, the proliferation of predatory journals, and the entrenched interests of legacy publishers to adapt, often through complex and costly “transformative agreements.” The simple answer to the title question is that the idea of open access will not die, but the specific, flawed implementations we see today might.

The Genesis and Triumph of the Open Access Ideal

Open access didn’t just pop up overnight. It’s the culmination of decades of frustration over the spiraling costs of journal subscriptions, a phenomenon often called the “serials crisis.” Libraries, particularly those in less-affluent institutions, found themselves paying exorbitant fees, often thousands of dollars for a single journal title, to access research that their faculty and publicly funded grants had produced. It was a ludicrous system, a form of double-dipping that ultimately restricted the dissemination of knowledge. The rise of the internet provided the perfect counter-tool, creating a mechanism to bypass physical and paywall barriers instantaneously.

The movement solidified with key declarations, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002, which laid out the core strategy of using either self-archiving (green open access) or open-access journals (gold open access). These declarations weren’t just philosophical; they were a battle cry. Suddenly, the academic community had a unifying, globally resonant goal. 

This momentum, combined with the power of digital platforms, quickly established open access as a legitimate alternative to the traditional subscription model. In fact, some data points suggest that in terms of sheer volume, open access articles surpassed subscription-based publishing in certain years, a powerful indicator of their current dominance. This surge was not coincidental but the direct result of a global shift in scholarly values.

The key advantage of open access, and the reason it won’t vanish entirely, is the demonstrable “citation advantage.” Studies have shown that open access articles are cited more frequently than their paywalled counterparts. This is simple logic. If more people can read your work, more people can use and cite your work. For a researcher whose career progression hinges on their publication metrics, this is a massive incentive. 

Major funding bodies such as the European Union, the US National Institutes of Health, and organizations involved in Plan S have increasingly mandated that research funded by their grants be made openly available, often immediately upon publication. When the people holding the purse strings demand open access, publishers have little choice but to comply, proving that the structural power behind OA is immense and growing.

The Great Sustainability Conundrum: The APC Model’s Flaw

If open access is so great, why does the question of its death even come up? The core problem lies not in the access part but in the sustainable funding model. The most common solution, the gold open access model, relies on the Article Processing Charge (APC). This is a fee, often ranging from $1,000 to over $11,000 in some high-impact journals, paid by the author, their institution, or their funder to cover the costs of publication, including peer review, editing, and hosting. The APC model was intended to “flip” the financial burden from the reader to the producer.

However, the APC model has introduced a new form of inequity: the “author-side paywall.” Instead of a financial barrier to reading, we now have a financial barrier to publishing. For researchers in the Global South, early-career researchers without substantial grant funding, or those in less-affluent institutions, a high APC is just as prohibitive as a high subscription fee. It creates a perverse incentive where research funding becomes implicitly tied to publishing fees, potentially skewing research agendas toward topics that can attract funding that covers APCs, rather than purely merit-based publishing.

Furthermore, the APC model has ironically enabled commercial publishers to maintain their dominance and sometimes even increase their profits. By shifting from a subscription fee to an APC, they simply changed the payment stream, often without significantly lowering the total cost to the academic system. They can charge premium APCs based on their established Impact Factor, essentially capitalizing on the reputation they built under the old paywall model. 

The result is that institutions are now paying twice: once through costly “Big Deal” subscription bundles that may contain APC discounts, and again through direct APC payments, or through complex transformative agreements that essentially package the two together. This financial merry-go-round is not a long-term solution and is the most likely reason a purely APC-based system might collapse or be reformed beyond recognition.

The Dark Side: Predatory Publishing and Quality Erosion

The existence of APCs has attracted opportunistic players. The rise of predatory journals is arguably the greatest ethical and qualitative threat to open access publishing. These journals, which exploded onto the scene in the 2010s, operate by mimicking legitimate academic publishers, offering rapid, guaranteed publication in exchange for an APC, but skipping or providing only minimal, illegitimate peer review.

The impact of this scam is devastating. It not only defrauds unsuspecting authors, particularly those less experienced or working under tight ‘publish or perish’ pressures, but it also floods the scholarly record with unvetted, low-quality, or outright fraudulent research. This erosion of quality control gives ammunition to the critics of open access who claim that “free” equals “junk.” 

Though legitimate, high-quality open access journals exist and adhere to rigorous standards, the taint of the predatory model is a persistent public relations disaster for the movement as a whole. The necessity to educate researchers on how to spot a predatory journal is a constant, exhausting battle that distracts from the fundamental mission of open access.

The Diamond Standard and Institutional Power

To counteract the flaws of the gold open access model, an alternative, arguably purer, model has gained increasing attention: diamond open access. This model is entirely free for both the reader and the author. It is typically supported by grants, institutional funding, scholarly societies, or volunteer labor. The diamond model embodies the original, true spirit of open access, where the communication of research is a communal good, not a commercial enterprise.

The challenge for diamond open access is scalability and sustainability. Relying on grants and volunteer work is noble but often precarious. It’s hard for small, independent diamond journals to compete with the massive marketing and indexing power of the big commercial publishers. However, institutions are starting to realize their collective power. If universities and research libraries were to redirect the immense funds currently spent on subscription fees and transformative agreements toward supporting local diamond journals, institutional repositories, and other non-profit publishing infrastructure, the entire ecosystem could shift. 

This realization is leading to new consortia and funding initiatives specifically aimed at bolstering the non-commercial open access infrastructure. The concept is simple: take the $10 billion or so the world spends on journal access and spend it differently, focusing on community-owned platforms. This strategic reinvestment is the biggest threat to the legacy model and the best hope for a sustainable open access future.

The Transformative Agreements Tightrope

Perhaps the most visible and controversial trend in the current open access landscape is the rise of Transformative Agreements (TAs), often referred to as “Publish and Read” deals. These are massive contracts negotiated primarily between large subscription publishers (like Elsevier or Springer Nature) and national consortia of universities or entire countries (like Germany’s DEAL project). 

The goal of a TA is to transition subscription spending into open access publishing capacity over a set period. Essentially, the university pays a single, consolidated fee that covers both the cost of reading the publisher’s paywalled content and the APCs for their faculty to publish open access in that publisher’s journals.

Advocates argue that TAs are a pragmatic, necessary step to accelerate the transition to open access, leveraging the existing infrastructure of major publishers. They’ve successfully pushed millions of articles into an open status. However, critics, and they are numerous, argue that TAs are a colossal financial gift to the very publishers open access was intended to sideline. They contend that the agreements simply lock in the high costs of the old subscription system, effectively replacing one massive bundled bill with another, equally massive bundled bill. 

There is a deep, cynical worry that TAs aren’t truly transformative but merely transitional. It is a clever way for entrenched commercial players to maintain market share and profit margins in the new open-access reality. The debate isn’t over whether they’re effective, but whether they are ethically or financially sustainable in the long term, especially if the total cost of research communication under TAs continues to exceed the old subscription price.

Technology and the Unstoppable Flow of Information

Beyond business models, the fundamental reason open access won’t die is technology. The tools for self-archiving, disseminating, and discovering research are now trivial to use and nearly impossible to control. Platforms like institutional repositories, preprint servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv, and academic social networks act as an unstoppable flood of information, providing a legitimate “green open access path for authors to share their work, often the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM).

Preprint servers, in particular, are fundamentally changing the pace of scientific communication. They allow researchers to share their findings almost instantly, receiving feedback and establishing priority for their discoveries long before a formal, months-long peer review process concludes. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical importance of this immediate, free dissemination, demonstrating that the public good sometimes outweighs the traditional, slower gatekeeping of established journals. 

While preprints lack formal peer review, their widespread use has put enormous pressure on the traditional journal model to speed up and embrace open science principles, including open data and open peer review. The technological capability for open access is not a constraint. Rather, the constraints are purely social, political, and financial.

Conclusion

So, will open access die eventually? Absolutely not. The ideal of free, universal access to human knowledge is too powerful, too ethically sound, and too technologically supported to ever truly vanish. It is now a permanent, irreversible fixture of the scholarly landscape.

However, the current dominant financial model is facing an existential crisis. Its twin flaws of introducing an author-side paywall and providing an engine for predatory publishers make it unstable and morally compromised. This model may very well be transformed, phased out, or ultimately marginalized by more equitable, institutionally driven initiatives. 

The future likely belongs to a hybrid ecosystem: a rise in diamond open access supported by institutional redirecting of subscription funds; continued strong use of green open access via institutional and disciplinary repositories; and more complex, scrutinized Transformative Agreements that are pressured to genuinely lower costs and lead to an open environment. The core principle of open access is the future of publishing. We’re just haggling over the price and the mechanism to pay it. The paywalled past is the model that is truly on life support.

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