Nicola Armaroli and Gianfranco Pacchioni say that we must acknowledge the downsides of open-access publishing to make sure it has a sustainable future
At the turn of the 21st century the open access (OA) movement proposed an inspiring idea: to make scientific knowledge freely available to everyone, everywhere. In what became known as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the movement aimed to challenge scientific publishers who continued to raise subscription prices, sometimes without justification. This, OA proponents suggested, was increasingly undermining poorer countries and institutions, who often could not afford the subscriptions.
A quarter of a century on, numerous institutions – both national and international – have strongly promoted the transition from the subscription-based model to OA. But to what extent has this transition actually taken place?
In a recent post on his Journalology blog, publishing consultant James Butcher showed that while open-access publishing increased rapidly from 2000 to 2023, by 2024 it had stagnated if not reversed, with papers in subscription-based journals increasing. Gold OA – where an article processing charge (APC) is paid by the author to make the paper immediately freely available to read – showed a decline compared to hybrid OA, in which a traditional, subscription-based journal makes individual articles freely available to the public.
Butcher offers China as a possible explanation for the trend. The country now has the fastest-growing scientific output, accounting for roughly 25% of all research articles published annually – up from about 13% a decade ago. This rapid expansion of Chinese research activity is influencing the pace of the global OA transition. Data indicate that Chinese researchers rarely publish OA in hybrid journals, tending instead to publish either in fully OA journals or, more commonly, in subscription-based journals.
The data clearly show that the global transition to OA is only feasible once Chinese researchers significantly change their publishing practices. However, this shift entails a major financial challenge for China.
Historically, China has paid considerably less in institutional subscription fees than Europe, Japan or the US. As China’s research output continues to grow, publishing a greater share of papers as OA would impose increasingly high costs, making traditional subscription journals a financially attractive alternative for many researchers.
The reassessment of the open-access model is not limited to China. In 2018 cOAlition S – a consortium of national research agencies and funders from 12 European countries – launched Plan S, which proposes that publicly funded research is made immediately available in full OA without embargo. The consortium has now released a new strategy for 2026–2030 that adopts a more flexible approach, supporting alternatives to paywalled journals without explicitly aiming to replace them.
If these trends consolidate, the OA model may face additional, often overlooked obstacles: coexistence of different publication traditions and the unequal distribution of publication costs across countries and institutions. Both factors hinder progress toward a fully OA system.
Access all areas
OA is a noble concept but, unfortunately, what works in theory does not always withstand the complexity of the real world. APCs today can exceed $10,000 and are paid by the authors’ own research funds. It is worth emphasizing that a good journal has far more readers than authors, so distributing costs among readers is much more equitable than placing them on authors.
We are also in a paradoxical situation where publishers could be collecting both APC revenues and subscription fees. Many publishers are now signing Transformative Agreements with institutions, designed to eliminate this “double dipping” by bundling reading fees and open-access publishing costs into a single contract.
In practice, we have moved from a system of “free to publish, pay to read” to one of “free to read, pay to publish” where the burden of cost has shifted from institutions to individuals. This radical transformation has not eliminated inequality. On the contrary, it paradoxically risks deepening it, producing effects that run counter to the original goals of the OA movement.
OA has also inadvertently promoted the rise of predatory journals, which continue to prosper, while, in the meantime, an entirely different major challenge has emerged: artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI systems are trained on massive volumes of text, including OA scientific articles. In other words, the scientific community is providing free data to large tech companies, which use them to develop proprietary models that generate large profits.
OA articles are often published under Creative Commons licenses that allow reuse, even for commercial purposes. Yet AI models often do not cite their sources or attribute authorship. Thus, publicly funded knowledge is exploited for private profit, but academic institutions, researchers and publishers often do not receive any recognition in return, not even symbolic.
If AI tools can be properly regulated, however, they can help accelerate scientific progress by using open, high-quality data. Still, the question of whether the benefits of OA outweigh the drawbacks remains largely unanswered.
Taking responsibility
OA has not been a total failure, but neither has it lived up to the high hopes it once inspired. With OA we have gained broader access, but at the cost of new imbalances. We have often sacrificed quality for quantity. And above all, we have largely forgotten that science is not just about sharing, but also about recognition, responsibility and fairness.
OA remains an idea with remarkable potential but only if we resist its most rigid and dogmatic interpretations, which consider it as an unquestionable good. Initially, only the advantages were acknowledged but now, after a quarter of a century, we are beginning to recognize its downsides.
Identifying problems is the only way to develop solutions: without a proper diagnosis, there is no effective cure. Resolving the persistent and emerging challenges of OA is now urgent, especially as the expanding role of Chinese research introduces new and unexpected dynamics into global publishing given their fondness for the subscription model.
There is no magic solution. Improving OA in scientific publishing requires shared responsibility across the research community. Researchers should engage responsibly in publishing and peer review, develop a better understanding of the complexity of the editorial process, and reject unethical practices.
Universities must reform evaluation systems by prioritizing research quality over publication volume, remove perverse financial incentives, and strengthen training in publishing ethics at the earliest stages of scientific careers.
Publishers should ensure fair and institutionally supported publication costs, enhance editorial and peer review standards, and actively counter predatory publishing.
At the policy level, funding agencies and governing bodies can foster greater accountability by supporting ethics training, and develop traceability and compensation mechanisms for AI use of OA content. Agencies could also invest in sustainable community-led models such as diamond OA platforms, in which research articles are published free to read and free to publish, with publishing costs subsidized by universities or government grants.
No-one wants to go back. But if we truly aspire to a science that is open, fair and sustainable, scientists must acknowledge the problem and take responsibility for addressing it.
