The future of science publishing

In 2015, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable research foundations in the world, introduced a new publication policy that promised to pay publication charges for papers its grantees write as long as the content of the final version of the study was freely available to read somewhere online.

The policy stated that the foundation “would pay reasonable fees required by a publisher to effect publication on these terms.” In 2021, the foundation narrowed that support, clarifying that going forward it would pay only for research published in fully open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available to read.

In March, the Gates Foundation surprised many by backtracking on these policies. It announced that starting Jan. 1, 2025, it would no longer cover publishing costs. The decision is causing anxiety among researchers and publishing experts, who wonder how the open-access model can be maintained if funders don’t foot the publishing bill.

The open-access movement started in the 1990s in a bid to make taxpayer- funded research freely available. Before then, subscription journals were the norm. Researchers typically had access to these journals through their institutional libraries, though cash-strapped universities in emerging-market countries often couldn’t afford the subscriptions. Some publishers introduced waivers for certain universities and libraries in such nations.

The proponents of open access argued that making research freely available to everyone would accelerate scientific advancement, spur innovation, and make academic publishing more equitable.

Many models of open access have emerged since the 1990s. One of the most common is gold open access (OA), under which scholarly publishers charge a one-off article processing charge (APC) and make the manuscript free to read immediately upon publication. But critics say that a side effect of gold OA is that some for-profit publishers now prioritize article quantity over quality in order to generate revenue.

Many research funders, including the Gates Foundation, support open access and introduced policies to influence where their grantees publish. The foundation’s earlier stance that it would cover APCs meant that researchers could use their grant money to publish in scholarly journals. Scientists liked this approach, in part because some studies suggest that research papers that are freely accessible attract a higher number of citations, a figure that is often used to measure the impact of research.

But in its recent announcement, the foundation has changed tack. It notes that open access in its current form has resulted in “some unsavory publishing practices,” including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills—people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, ‘Oh, what beast have we created?’ ” says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. “It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it’s all about scale.”

Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies.

Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn’t increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a “very rapid rise” in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade.

The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts—near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited—and then publish in whichever journals they like.

The foundation has partnered with the publisher F1000—which is known for carrying out postpublication peer review—to launch VeriXiv, a new platform of verified preprints. VeriXiv promises to conduct 20 ethics and integrity checks to ensure that papers meet basic quality requirements.

Supporting the Gates Foundation’s concern that APCs are too high, recent data suggest that prices are rising by an average of around 4% per year. This creates inequities between authors who do and don’t have funding to cover APCs, Rooryck says.

Ever-higher APCs at journals are genuinely worrying, according to Aneta Pazik-Aybar, senior open science officer at the National Science Center in Kraków, Poland. “It’s not always clear or transparent whether these growing costs cover the actual efforts needed to publish the article,” she says. Pazik-Aybar thinks every country and funder should analyze and monitor how much taxpayer money is going toward fees for subscription journals and how much is going toward APCs for open-access journals.

It remains unclear after the change at the Gates Foundation whether authors will return to publishing predominantly in subscription journals, making near-final versions of their papers available on preprint servers and in online repositories, or if they will prioritize other open-access models deemed fairer than gold OA and less prone to gaming and manipulation.

The new Gates policy is in line with what some academics call Plan U and the “publish, review, curate” model. Under those models, papers are first published as preprints and are then peer-reviewed, preferably with the reviewer reports posted online.

Not all preprints need to be reviewed, Rooryck says, and not all papers need to end up in a journal. “Publication in the journal comes last and is almost an afterthought,” he says. “What is more emphasized in this model is that research results are published as fast as possible and are controlled by the author themselves.”

But Butcher says the evidence indicates that academics generally don’t want to publish preprints, have them reviewed separately, then submit them to a journal afterward. Referring to a publisher that conducts postpublication peer review, “the article volumes are tiny,” he says. “It doesn’t mean to say it won’t happen in the future, but at the moment, the signals aren’t there. And a lot of it is around the academic reward and incentive system, as academics are rewarded for publishing in journals.”

Green OA is a model where papers are published in both journals and digital repositories concurrently. Rooryck says green OA is a great way to provide access to research while academia transitions to a more open system and allows access to content that has already been published in a paywalled journal.

“Green OA is a solution but certainly not the solution,” especially if publishers continue to insist on embargo periods of 6–12 months, Rooryck says. Under green OA, the final version of the research may sit behind a paywall while author-accepted versions are available online but can be difficult to find. “We have to look for different solutions for immediate full and immediate open access,” Rooryck says.

Another alternative model is diamond OA, in which all research papers and their associated peer-reviewed reports are published without fees for the author or the reader and are also freely available to read and reuse. In October, Rooryck and colleagues announced a plan arguing for widespread adoption of diamond OA, but a road map of how diamond OA could be implemented at scale and paid for is still being drawn up.

Under diamond OA, publishers are no longer gatekeepers of research. Instead, they become service providers that handle manuscript submissions, typesetting, and copyediting. This is in contrast to the current publishing system, in which the publisher controls everything from the copyright to the production process, Rooryck says.

The ultimate aim of diamond OA is for the publishing ecosystem to be owned and controlled by the academic community and not by for-profit publishers, Rooryck says. That ownership includes the papers, copyright, peer reviews, journal titles, and any underlying data or code, he adds.

“It is the model that existed before commercial publishers took over academic publishing,” says Rooryck, who is also the editor in chief of the diamond OA linguistics journal Glossa. “It has a long tradition, but it has been sort of neglected in the last 20–30 years in favor of more commercial options, and we think that it has the potential of being revived.”

Rooryck and many of his colleagues are now participating in the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance—officially announced July 10 at a UNESCO event—a collaboration of communities that organize and align different diamond OA policies and efforts. “The advantage of diamond is that you take out any financial incentive, so you take out the incentive of publishing a lot,” he says.

Butcher cautions that implementing diamond OA widely would require major investment. He notes that publishers are dealing with obstacles such as paper mills and generative artificial intelligence—problems they didn’t have to worry about a decade ago—that make quality control and the performing of ethical checks and balances more difficult.

“There is so much more to do now than there used to be,” Butcher says. “Publishing is hard and expensive.”

In May, the publishing giant Wiley announced that it would shut 19 journals tainted by submissions of fake studies associated with paper mills. “Publishers have to invest in all of the tools and the people needed to catch the bad content, because if they don’t, they’re not going to have a brand anymore and the company can literally disappear overnight,” Butcher says.

AI can help monitor research integrity, but it has also raised issues for scholarly publishers. For example, generative AI has been used to produce journal articles and conduct peer review, usually without disclosure about its use.

While the Gates Foundation has pinpointed some important issues with current publishing practices, it’s unclear what the long-term solutions will look like.

Open access was initially introduced to make scholarly publishing more equitable, but Butcher worries that pay-to-publish models, which remain the most implemented form of OA, will continue to benefit big corporate publishers to the detriment of small society publishers, especially as the former are already in a better financial position to invest in the software and people needed for better gatekeeping.

Another advantage for large, for-profit publishers is that their sales teams can negotiate complex, transformative agreements with national governments and research institutions. These agreements often take years to establish.

“All the evidence suggests that researchers are likely to submit to journals where the APC is covered by their funders,” Butcher says. For instance, France has signed an agreement with Elsevier that doesn’t require all papers to be freely available immediately. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if in the future more French researchers submit to Elsevier journals” because publishing in them is “free” for the authors, he says.

As for diamond OA, the open-access publishing group Coalition S, which Rooryck leads, is conducting a global survey—outlined in the Towards Responsible Publishing document—to get an idea of how popular such a model would be.

Even among experts, there is little consensus on what lies ahead for scholarly publishing. “I think anyone who says they know what the future is lying or wrong,” Butcher says. “It’s a complicated time, and reading the tea leaves, in terms of the direction of travel, I don’t think is actually that straightforward.”

Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.