Publishers

Universities have largely been advocating for a just scholarly publishing ecosystem that is transparent, diverse, economically affordable and sustainable, technically interoperable, and steered by the research community (EUA Open Science Agenda 2025). However, despite all the progress made to date, open access is yet to become ubiquitous, and universities still perceive themselves to be locked into commercial systems and solutions that are not beneficial to them in the long run, a situation that is also happening with other commercial providers.

The complexity of the scholarly publication system and the costs involved in making scholarly outputs openly available for universities and other stakeholders are among the biggest challenges in the transition to universal and perpetual open access. Universities are still struggling with the high cost of increasingly expensive publishers’ contracts and the costs of open access infrastructure and services. New types of commercial publishing contracts created to address the growing demand for open access solutions, such as transformative agreements, are still highly onerous for universities. As defined by Plan S, transformative agreements are “contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services”. Disproportionate, soaring costs for research-intensive institutions are not sustainable. The high profit margins enjoyed by commercial publishers also indicate that institutions are spending much more on contracts than the actual costs incurred in the service provision.

Recently, more attention has been paid towards the open access of academic books, which represent an important share of scholarly publications, particularly in the field of social sciences and humanities. Open access requirements put in place in national and institutional policies are usually directed to scientific articles published in journals, with academic books frequently remaining outside their scope. This situation is allowing scholarly publishers to maintain an influential position in the sector. The EU-funded PALOMERA project is currently analysing challenges, bottlenecks and opportunities related to the open access of academic books. The project will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science.

Supporting the transition towards Open Access publishing at institutional level will also require a transformation of the current scholarly reward and incentive system, which is still heavily based on the Journal Impact Factor. More responsible, transparent and sustainable assessment practices must be developed for research activities and career development.

Financial unsustainability and lack of transparency in the negotiation with publishers are not the only criticalities affecting today’s scholarly publishing landscape. Recently, the research community has increasingly put the focus on the need to reclaim the academic ownership of the scholarly publishing system. When manuscripts are accepted for publication, authors and institutions relinquish their rights to commercial publishers, which have made copyright the mainstay.

Initiatives such as Plan S Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) are instead empowering universities and their researchers to retain their intellectual property rights, enabling authors to retain sufficient intellectual ownership rights of their work to make the Author Accepted Manuscript openly available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence or equivalent, without any embargo. Supporting the Rights Retention Strategy is therefore a powerful tool for universities to address the predominance of commercial publishers, maintain control over their research outputs and support the transition towards open access.

At the European level, strong support for the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem came in May 2023, when the Council of the European Union adopted the Conclusions on high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing. The document acknowledged how the increasing costs of paywalls for access to scientific publications and scholarly publishing are becoming unsustainable for public research funders and institutions accountable for the spending of public funds, causing a decrease in funding available for research. To counter this, new initiatives should be further promoted to support diversity and ensure equity in scholarly publishing. The Council Conclusions also recognised that the digital transition, while bringing new challenges, can also be a means to develop new methods of efficient and effective scholarly publishing.

Some initiatives called for in the Council Conclusions are already being pursued by the sector. The increasing digitalisation of universities, together with the push for open access, has, in fact, brought new opportunities for universities and other research performing organisations to develop community-driven open access initiatives, with the creation of not-for-profit open access journals and publishing platforms. This is known as the Diamond institutional Open Access scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to authors or readers.

While such initiatives are increasingly becoming widespread across Europe, several challenges are hindering the establishment of institutional open access as a strong alternative to commercial publishers, such as lack of technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability of journals and platforms. Furthermore, EU regulations such as the Digital Services Act might present new compliance requirements for the development of institutional open access publishing.

The EU-funded DIAMAS project is currently working to address such challenges, supporting the creation of an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional open access scholarly publication ecosystem for the European Research Area.