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The Price of Openness: Who Pays, What It Buys and the Alternatives

Open access moved the cost of publishing from readers to authors, funders and libraries, but who should pay, and for what, remains unsettled.

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The Case for Openness

Journals have traditionally validated the articles they choose to publish through editorial oversight and peer review, often acquiring authors’ copyright to keep content behind a subscription barrier. Pressure against that model built through the 1990s, driven by rising subscription prices (the “serials crisis”) and by the free culture and open-source software movements. The emergence of freely accessible infrastructure, such as the preprint server arXiv in 1991 and free public access to Medline through PubMed in 1997, demonstrated that research could circulate at scale without a paywall.


In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative gave the term “open access” (OA) its first public definition, and subsequent declarations drafted in the Global North extended it to reuse rights and cultural heritage. The perspective from the Global South came next, framing OA as a matter of equity, criticizing author fees, resisting commercial reuse and treating publicly funded knowledge as a common good. In 2021, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science placed OA within one of its key pillars (see interactive timeline). Funders and governments pursued the same goal through mandates requiring that publicly funded research be made openly available, typically through repositories, and by late 2025 more than 1,100 such policies had been recorded (explore the ROARMAP registry).



Defining Open Access

From the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 to UNESCO's Recommendation on Open Science in 2021, these declarations, initiatives and recommendations set out what open access should mean and whom it should serve.

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February 14, 2002

Budapest Open Access Initiative

Noting that open access had so far been limited to small portions of the journal literature, the Budapest Open Access Initiative gave the term its first public definition: free availability of peer-reviewed articles on the public internet, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than gaining access to the internet itself. It recommended self-archiving in open electronic archives and a new generation of open access journals. In 2012, it set the goal of making open access the default for new peer-reviewed research within ten years, and in 2022 it described open access as "a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research," recommending a move away from article processing charges and read-and-publish agreements.

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

Drafted at a meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community, the Bethesda Statement defined an open access publication as one whose authors and copyright holders grant all users the right to copy, use, distribute and make derivative works, and which is deposited in an online repository immediately upon initial publication. Its working groups recognized publishing costs as part of the cost of doing research, and publishers proposed that open access models requiring author fees lower barriers for financially disadvantaged researchers, particularly those from developing countries.

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Drafted in the spirit of the Budapest Initiative and the Bethesda Statement, the Berlin Declaration defined open access as "a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community," with contributions including research results, raw data, metadata, source materials and scholarly multimedia. Its signatories intended to encourage holders of cultural heritage to provide their resources on the internet and to advocate that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation.

Salvador Declaration on Open Access

At a seminar held in parallel with the 9th World Congress on Health Information and Libraries in Salvador, Brazil, participants set out "the developing world perspective," stating that open access promotes equity and that access should be considered a universal right, independent of any region. They urged governments to require open access for publicly funded research, to consider publication costs part of research costs and to strengthen local open access journals and repositories.

CLACSO Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge Managed as a Common Good

Meeting in Medellín, Colombia, the General Assembly of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) warned that international commercial publishers were replacing "pay to read" with "pay to publish" at market prices bearing little relation to usual research budgets in developing countries, risking a new enclosure of knowledge. It called for publicly funded research and data to be openly available and for access to knowledge to be supported as a right and managed as a common good.

Mexico Declaration

Latindex, Redalyc, CLACSO and the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology adopted the Mexico Declaration, warning that the CC BY license allows commercial systems to take, modify and resell open content, and that paying to publish in open access had added to the rising cost of accessing commercial databases. Holding that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, is a common good and access to it a human right, they recommended that journals use the non-commercial CC BY-NC-SA license.

Plan S

With the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, a group of national research funders announced cOAlition S and its Plan S, requiring that from 2021 publications from research they funded be published in open access journals or platforms, or made immediately available in repositories without embargo, preferably under a CC BY license. The funders stated that publication fees should be covered by funders or institutions rather than individual researchers, and supported the hybrid model only as a transitional pathway within transformative arrangements. In November 2025, cOAlition S published a strategy recognizing that the rise of article processing charges had created new inequities, and began a formal review of the Plan S principles with reinforced attention to equity.

AmeliCA

Redalyc, CLACSO and other institutions launched AmeliCA to maintain the non-commercial nature of Latin America's scholar-led open access publishing, whose regional tradition included no fees for authors or readers. Its principles held that knowledge generated with public funds is a common good and access to it a right; that open access must be legally protected against appropriation for profit; and that the Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin declarations homogenized conditions for developing science that differ between South and North.

Declaration of Researcher Rights in Negotiating the Future of Scholarly Communication

The Declaration of Researcher Rights set out ten articles for agreements with publishers, covering immediate, free and open access to scholarly works and data, open licenses and repository deposit at no added expense, long-term preservation, open access to metrics and dissemination without article processing charges. It also called for contracts with publishers to be fully transparent and free of non-disclosure agreements.

UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

Unanimously adopted by 193 countries, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science was the first international standard-setting instrument on open science. Its values included collective benefit, recognizing science as "a global public good that belongs to all of humanity," and equity and fairness, ensuring "equitable, fair and reciprocal access to science for all producers and consumers of knowledge." It also acknowledged that access may sometimes need to be restricted, for example to protect "sacred and secret indigenous knowledge."




What Openness Costs

Publishers met the demand for openness with new business models, typically charging a pre-publication fee known as the article processing charge (APC) to make an article publicly accessible in a fully OA journal or within an otherwise closed issue of a subscription journal. The latter, called hybrid, raised concerns about double dipping, in which a publisher collects both APCs and subscription fees, increasing its total income from the same customer. A recent preprint estimated that USD 15.08 billion was committed in APCs to 14 publishers between 2019 and 2025, USD 3.74 billion of it in 2025 alone. Nonetheless, subscriptions remain the higher cost in a journals market estimated in 2024 at around USD 11 billion a year, of which OA accounts for only about a fifth. Prices for both models have been rising, with subscriptions up 6% in 2026 and APC list prices up 6.8% for fully OA and 5.3% for hybrid journals.


According to data from the Registry of Open Publishing Agreements, agreements between publishers and institutions to pay for OA publishing grew from two in force in 2014 to 687 in 2025, with fewer than one in 10 new ones since 2020 costing less than the previous agreement with the same publisher (see graph below). Most agreements currently in force are transformative, meaning contracts envisioned as a temporary step toward full OA publishing that redirect subscription spending to cover both reading and publishing. Although UK data for 2020 to 2022 show that this combined approach avoided costs for the sector as a whole, a recent review of 18 library consortia found reports of higher costs in Sweden, Switzerland and Finland.





These figures show the direction of costs but not the amounts paid, which are not transparently reported – for this reason, the global preprint estimate relies on list prices. The registry dataset has no field for the amount paid either, and the agreement document is public for only 38% of the 1,715 agreements recorded. Even in the UK, where these agreements have been reviewed in depth, most were found to disclose little about costs. Openness has a cost even when no reading or publishing fees are charged, as in diamond OA (see sidebar). A European project surveying institutional publishers and service providers found that 56% published only diamond outputs and 79% monitored their income and expenses, but this information was often not made public: of 517 publisher websites checked by the project, 48% said nothing about where their revenue came from.



The Colors of Open Access

A widely used classification subdivides OA articles by where a free copy is held and whether it carries an open license: gold (fully OA journals); hybrid (open license in subscription journals); bronze (free on the publisher’s page without a license); green (paywalled at the publisher but free in a repository). A fifth category, diamond, is recorded alongside them to identify articles in fully OA journals that charge neither readers nor authors. In July 2026, a draft report released for community consultation by the OpenAlex Colors Working Group recommended replacing these categories with a classification based on access, location and license. Critics responded that this treats research outputs as commodities and overlooks who owns and governs publishing and who is able to take part, which has been considered central to diamond OA.




What the Money Buys

Journal publication is commonly treated as a signal that an article has passed peer review, a process expected both to keep flawed work out of the scientific record and to improve the quality of what gets published. However, evidence to support either role is difficult to obtain, mainly because review reports, editorial decisions and the data linking them to submissions are rarely made public. The peer review process itself is also considered hard to test through rigorous study designs due to problems of consent and participation, low generalizability and resistance to auditing in some scientific circles. Ultimately, there is little agreement on what peer review is meant to achieve, which adds complexity to judging its success.


A comparison of 10,000 review reports across 1,644 medical and life sciences journals found reports from titles with higher impact factors – where effective gatekeeping is expected to be the norm – only modestly more thorough than those from lower-ranked journals, and so variable that the impact factor could not predict the review any given submission would receive. Tracking how a submission (or preprint) changes on its way to publication is another way of inferring the value of peer review, but it is challenged by the difficulty in disentangling changes triggered by reviewers from those implemented by authors without a direct request. In one of the few attempts able to match reviewer reports with successive drafts, a gain in statistical content was seen across four Royal Society journals, although those leading that investigation cautioned that their approach (counting statistical terms) is “only an approximation” of rigor. Even when reviewers do flag problems, they are not always fixed: at five BMJ journals, authors of submissions that were eventually published adequately addressed only about half of the reporting problems raised during peer review. Another fundamental limitation of evaluating peer review based on the trajectory of articles from submission (or preprinting) to publication is that it cannot account for rejected work revised and published elsewhere, or preprints that are never published. Of about 145,000 bioRxiv preprints posted in 2016–2018 and 2020–2022, a quarter had no traceable journal version and another 13% only an unconfirmed match.


Despite this uncertainty, the APC that journals charge to open a single article after “validating” it can reach USD 12,850, the listed APC in October 2026 for Nature, a hybrid journal that also charges for subscriptions. By contrast, some OA routes involve no APCs (see sidebar on page 33) while still offering peer review in the traditional sense. A 2021 estimate put total publication costs at about USD 1,000 per article at most for highly selective journals and USD 600 for a typical journal with full editorial services. Although peer review took more than 130 million hours in 2020, worth more than USD 1.5 billion for US-based reviewers alone, it remains predominantly unpaid work, so such estimates cover only its management by journal staff and leave out the reviewing itself.


What is paid for validation is kept even when validation fails. Among reviews shared on Publons for 160 papers later retracted, about half recommended acceptance or only minor revision. An estimated USD 42 million in APCs, probably an underestimate, was paid for articles retracted between 2009 and 2024, and the policies of major publishers such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley allow them to keep APCs when articles are retracted. Whether authors pay for validation of their work also says little about how often it fails. Low quality is the perception most often cited in the literature against OA publishing, and publishers’ income tied to each accepted article has been argued to corrupt science by rewarding volume over selectivity. Yet in the same retraction analysis, of the two categories funded by APCs, only articles in fully OA journals were retracted more often than closed access articles (0.31% against 0.06%). Articles made open in hybrid journals, which collect both subscriptions and APCs, were retracted less often than closed ones (0.05%), and articles in diamond OA journals, which charge neither authors nor readers, least often of all (0.007%).


What peer review in its current form delivers for what it costs therefore remains hard to measure. Authors of a 2025 perspective piece, including prominent researchers of peer review and research practice, concluded that the research community may need to revisit “what is peer review for, and for whom?” Every proposed alternative to the current arrangement must answer the same question.



The Alternatives and Their Limitations

Funders, governments and library consortia around the world now differ on whether and how openness should be paid for. Some pay publishers nationally for both reading and publishing, others rely on immediate repository deposit, often backed by rights retention under which authors license their accepted manuscript openly before submitting it to a journal, and a third group is limiting what it pays publishers by restricting, withdrawing or capping APC funding (explore examples below). However, these limits may not work as intended, as many of the journals researchers use most charge more than a cap would pay and bans on paying APCs can be worked around with money from elsewhere, including library deals.


Efforts to move subscription journals to full OA have also fallen short, with 68% of the 2,326 titles in the cOAlition S Transformative Journals program missing their 2022 growth targets and only 1% flipping in January 2023, which the coalition said supported its decision to end the program in 2024. Subscribe-to-open, a model first piloted in 2020, also starts with subscription journals but repurposes subscriptions instead of replacing them, making new content open to all each year as long as enough libraries keep subscribing. Although it avoids APCs, critics question its sustainability because a library risks little by no longer paying, as the content stays open if enough others pay and the library can resubscribe if the journal returns to a paywall. One of the model’s early adopters has also called it “currently precarious” for a fast-growing journal.


Diamond journals have proved fragile too, especially when run by professional publishers, with at least 440 abandoning the model since 2009, most after 2020 and nearly all to start charging APCs. Meanwhile, collectively funded non-commercial diamond models seem to be growing: the Open Library of Humanities has expanded from seven journals in 2015 to 39 in 2026, supported by more than 340 libraries; the Open Journals Collective raised USD 2.6 million from libraries to fund 278 diamond journals in the first year of its program and announced in September 2026 a Gates Foundation grant of nearly USD 712,000 to scale up in 2027 and 2028; and Open Research Europe, founded by the European Commission in 2021, is expanding in autumn 2026 to researchers in 11 countries under a consortium of 15 funders.



Open access policies around the world

Funders, governments and library consortia pay for openness in different ways, from national publisher agreements to immediate repository deposit and limits on paying article processing charges (APCs). The selection shown on the map ranges across regions and types of funder and is not a complete survey. Each entry reflects the most recent version of each source we found as of October 2026, and planned or proposed measures are described as such.

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Australia

Under its 2026 policy, which applies to grants whose guidelines name it, the Australian Research Council requires journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers to be immediately open under a CC BY license, through the publisher (with or without an APC) or a repository. Research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities may use a more restrictive Creative Commons license.


The council supports institutional rights retention policies and recommends that the institutions administering its grants consider adopting one.

Since January 2026, transformative agreements signed by the national agency CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) have let researchers at up to 452 institutions, including graduate students, publish without APCs in 1,738 Springer Nature and 1,619 Elsevier hybrid journals, with no limit on the number of articles. The number of eligible institutions varies by publisher, and the agreements cover only the processing charge, so authors still pay extras such as color figures or additional pages.


Together with a similar agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the agreements are expected to cost BRL 1 billion over three years, BRL 70 million a year more than the earlier read-only contracts.

For grants awarded from January 2027, peer-reviewed articles funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) or the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) must be free on publication in a Canadian institutional repository or trusted Canadian platform, with no embargo, even if already open on the publisher’s site. Grants awarded from May 2015 through 2026 remain under the 2015 policy.


Authors must keep enough rights to place the deposited version under an open license, preferably CC BY, and must do so. Every eligible institution must publish an OA strategy, and the agencies recognize diamond and community-led publishing.

In a 2014 statement, the National Natural Science Foundation of China asked funded authors to deposit their accepted manuscripts in its repository and make them open within 12 months, or immediately, as the published version, where the article is in an OA journal or the publisher allows it.


In February 2026, a Chinese financial news outlet reported that researchers at several institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the academy planned to stop paying APCs for more than 30 international OA journals, including Nature Communications and Science Advances. The academy had not commented at the time.

The science ministry’s 2022–2031 policy sets a target for publicly funded publications to be open where possible from 2023, with access rising 20% a year from a baseline to reach 100% in 2027. For publicly funded research data, it sets a 10% yearly rise from 2024 to reach 100% in 2034, although its action table gives 2031. These are targets, not reported results.


From 2023, open science is to count in research evaluation and in rating researchers, research groups and journals. The policy’s own diagnosis finds that research assessment privileges only the impact factor.


In a 2021 survey of Colombian researchers carried out to inform the policy, 53% cited lack of funds for OA publishing as an obstacle to adopting open science practices.

Horizon Europe grant holders must deposit each peer-reviewed publication, as the published version or accepted manuscript, in a trusted repository by publication, and make it immediately free under CC BY or an equivalent license. Monographs and other long texts may use licenses barring commercial use, adaptations or both. Authors may publish in closed, hybrid or fully OA venues but must still deposit a copy in a trusted repository, even for articles in OA journals. Academic social networking sites, personal websites and publisher websites do not count as repositories.


Grant holders (or authors) must keep enough rights to comply, and the Commission’s guidance states that the OA obligation “precedes any subsequent publishing agreement.” Publication fees are eligible only in fully OA venues, including OA “mirror” and “sister” journals, and may include peer review fees for first-round reviewers only.


Open Research Europe, launched in 2021 for EU-funded research, charges authors no fees, reviews articles openly after publication and had published more than 1,200 articles by more than 6,300 authors by March 2026. From autumn 2026, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is due to run the platform on a 2026–2031 budget of nearly EUR 17 million, up to EUR 10 million of it from the Commission. National research organizations from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland will drive it, and researchers from those countries will be able to publish there without fees.

The One Nation One Subscription scheme, approved in November 2024, has since January 2025 given higher education institutions run by the central and state governments, and research institutions run by the central government, national access to more than 13,000 journals from 32 international publishers. More than 6,500 institutions take part, phase I runs from 2025 to 2027 with INR 60 billion allocated, and users downloaded more than 114 million full-text articles in 2025.


The scheme also centrally funds APCs for authors at participating institutions who publish in selected gold OA journals from its publishers, currently those in the top 5% on CiteScore, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) or SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), with INR 1.5 billion a year announced for this, and by October 2026 the portal showed 243 applications submitted. An agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) lets authors at participating institutions publish unlimited OA articles in its journals and proceedings without APCs.


Five of its publishers also offer APC reductions of 25% to 80% on selected journals, several as pilots: discounts from Elsevier, Springer, Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis, and a flat 50% “APC support” from Wolters Kluwer Lippincott. Eligibility differs: Elsevier’s discount covers researchers from India and other eligible low- and middle-income countries, while Oxford University Press’s covers corresponding authors based in India.

Under a Basic Policy decided in February 2024 by the Integrated Innovation Strategy Promotion Council, and Specific Measures agreed by the relevant ministries and revised in October 2024, researchers in four competitive grant programs, including the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI), must make their articles openly available with no embargo for calls opened from fiscal 2025. No fixed deposit period is set, but public availability within about three months of publication is described as desirable. The rule also covers data the journal requires to be made public to support the article.

 

Deposit in the researcher’s institutional repository, or another repository searchable on the National Institute of Informatics (NII) Research Data Cloud, meets the rule, as does immediate OA on the publisher’s site if the identifier is entered in the annual progress report to the funder. Where this is not possible, for example because of a publisher embargo, researchers must explain why in that report and deposit the article once the obstacle is removed.

 

The Basic Policy cites rising subscription and APC costs under the market dominance of global publishers, and supports university-led collective negotiation.

The 2026 open science policy states OA shall be required for publications from publicly funded research, subject to “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” and co-funders’ requirements, with possible adjustment to disciplinary publishing norms. It assigns many implementation steps to an Open Science Advisory Board, with dates left for the board or the science department to set.

 

The policy calls for a carefully planned shift from an institutional to a national approach, and from paying to read to paying to publish, while stating that “barriers to readership must not be replaced with barriers to authorship.” It says validated figures on current spending should be reviewed before negotiating any transformative agreement.

 

It also says open science in South Africa cannot succeed without a scheme that covers APCs at no cost to authors, with an advisory board to advise on a national publication funding scheme, and that non-commercial publishing without APCs should be supported. It recommends the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) as the basis for research assessment and warns against penalizing fields whose trusted journals are not OA.

Through the Bibsam Consortium, the National Library of Sweden negotiates electronic resource and publishing agreements for 97 institutions. The consortium’s turnover in 2025 was about EUR 61 million, around 75% of it from the ten largest universities. That year Swedish universities and university colleges spent about SEK 819 million on scholarly publishing, including subscriptions, SEK 501 million of it on transformative agreements negotiated through Bibsam.


The consortium’s action plan says that from 2026 it should not sign reading-and-publishing agreements for hybrid journals and should negotiate only for publishing in OA journals, whatever the publisher. It also calls for supporting researcher-driven journals that want to move from traditional publishers to other platforms, and for exploring copyright conditions such as secondary publication rights. The plan follows a 2023 recommendation from the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, which warned that costs had risen while systemic change had been modest, with a risk of being “trapped in a permanent transformation” that favors large commercial publishers, and named joining Open Research Europe as one possible option.

For articles submitted from January 2027, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) will cover APCs only up to CHF 3,500, paying nothing toward higher fees, which it says affects about 20% of the articles it funds. It cites federal savings and notes most Swiss higher education institutions already set limits. For applications from January 2027, it will fund only books arising directly from SNSF-funded projects, plus doctoral theses and habilitations defended and accepted at a Swiss higher education institution, for which the publisher must organize an independent external review of the full manuscript. It will pay up to CHF 12,000 for the basic module and up to CHF 32,000 in total with additional modules.


Through the SNSF’s participation, all researchers in Switzerland will be able to publish free of charge on Open Research Europe, which will accept submissions from autumn 2026. In December 2025, the SNSF reported that the Swiss Open Access Monitor showed a 70% OA share and that as many as 80% of new publications from SNSF-funded research were OA.

For articles submitted since April 1, 2022, UK Research and Innovation has required funded articles to be immediately open, under CC BY or another permitted license, through the journal or a repository. Its block grant pays APCs only in fully OA journals, or in hybrid journals under an approved transitional agreement (one meeting Jisc OA requirements) to which the author’s research organization is party. It has committed to phase out hybrid funding, even under such agreements, which it expects in 2028–29, with the exact date not yet confirmed.


Under a revised policy announced on April 1, 2026, Cancer Research UK stopped funding OA publishing costs from October 1, 2026, and expects to save GBP 5.2 million over three years. Open access remains a requirement, but articles may now stay behind a paywall for up to six months before a CC BY copy appears in Europe PMC. One critic, Samuel Moore, wrote that the move “seems to be a case of austerity dressed up as ethical decision-making.”


Since January 2025, Wellcome’s policy has been to fund reasonable APCs only in fully OA journals or platforms indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals that, under its funding guidance, have an agreement with the National Library of Medicine to deposit the published version in PubMed Central and allow it to be shared with Europe PMC. It does not cover OA costs in subscription journals, and its block grants cannot fund contributions to transformative or read-and-publish agreements, even for fully OA titles in them, but can support collective publishing initiatives, preprint servers and institutional presses. Articles must be free in Europe PMC on publication under CC BY (or CC BY-ND by exception).

Following 2022 White House guidance, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requires peer-reviewed manuscripts from NIH-funded research accepted from July 1, 2025, to be free in PubMed Central upon publication, replacing its 2008 policy, which allowed embargoes of up to 12 months. Complying requires no OA fee to a journal.

 

In July 2025, the NIH sought comment on five ways to limit publication costs: disallowing them entirely; a cap of USD 2,000 per article; up to USD 3,000 per article in journals that pay peer reviewers and publish all reviews; a per-award publishing cap of 0.8% of direct costs or USD 20,000, whichever is greater; or that award cap plus a USD 6,000 per-article limit.

 

In May 2026, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and federal grant-making agencies jointly proposed making publication costs, including page charges, APCs and OA fees, unallowable under federal awards such as grants and cooperative agreements, unless specifically required by federal statute or approved by the agency in advance, case by case. A general requirement to make results public would not justify them, and the proposal argues that publishing may in many cases serve institutional, professional or reputational interests rather than a program’s goals. Comments closed July 13, 2026. OMB aimed for a final rule effective by October 1, 2026, but a stopgap funding law (Public Law 119-103) barred issuing or finalizing it, or any substantially similar rule, through December 11, 2026.

Australia: Australian Research Council, Open Access Policy 2026.

Brazil: Pesquisa FAPESP report on the expansion of CAPES agreements with publishers, 2026.

Canada: CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC, Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (2026).

China: National Natural Science Foundation of China, open access policy, 2014; Yicai Global, report on the Chinese Academy of Sciences and publication fees, 2026.

Colombia: Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, Política Nacional de Ciencia Abierta 2022–2031, July 2022.

European Union: European Commission, EU Grants: Annotated Grant Agreement, version 2.0, April 1, 2025; European Commission, “A new era for Open Research Europe,” March 26, 2026.

India: Government of India, Press Information Bureau, One Nation One Subscription document, January 2025; Times Higher Education, report on the One Nation One Subscription deal and open access.

Japan: Cabinet Office, Basic Policy for Realizing Immediate Open Access to Academic Papers, February 16, 2024, and its Specific Measures, revised October 8, 2024.

South Africa: Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, South African Open Science Policy 2026.

Sweden: National Library of Sweden, Bibsam Consortium action plan, updated April 16, 2026; Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, Recommendation regarding charting Sweden’s path beyond the transformative agreements (REC 2023:7), November 2023.

Switzerland: Swiss National Science Foundation, “SNSF to adapt its open access funding,” December 17, 2025.

United Kingdom: UK Research and Innovation, open access policy guidance; Cancer Research UK, “Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more,” April 1, 2026; Samuel Moore, “Why funders shouldn’t withdraw money from open access publishing,” April 14, 2026; Wellcome, Open Access Policy.

United States: National Institutes of Health, notices NOT-OD-25-047 (2024 Public Access Policy), NOT-OD-25-101 (updated effective date) and NOT-OD-25-138 (consultation on publication costs); Office of Management and Budget, proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, Federal Register, May 29, 2026.





Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) models go further by decoupling publication from peer review and adding a curation step, in which editors assess a work’s strengths and weaknesses, recommend it or select it for themed collections, rather than making a binary accept-or-reject decision. Their proponents argue that each step can be carried out by a different service, with reviews staying attached to the work wherever it is later published; however, in practice, review and curation have so far rarely happened in different venues. MetaROR, a meta-research platform previously featured in REACH, reviews and assesses preprints posted elsewhere at no charge for authors or readers, and its partner journals can take those reviews into account when authors submit to them. Peer Community In also reviews preprints for free across 21 fields, while eLife and F1000Research charge authors. A Howard Hughes Medical Institute proposal would have authors pay each journal that manages peer review of their work (to cover its coordination, not the reviewers), readers pay for curation and funders and institutions sustain repositories, although the proposal itself concedes that author fees risk recreating the “pay-to-play” dynamic of APCs.


With openness now translated into more than 1,100 policies recorded in the ROARMAP registry, it is past time for the conversation to move beyond siloed groups to the wider research community, to discuss who should carry its costs, how openly that cost is reported and what the peer review it pays for is meant to achieve. We invite readers to continue this discussion on HIKE, the Science Integrity Alliance community forum, and especially welcome those who design, run or fund the alternatives described in this article, or others not covered here.


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Disclosures: LM is the Founder and Executive Director of the Science Integrity Alliance (SIA) and Editor-in-Chief of REACH. MM and JAC are independent contractors for SIA. MS and LW are volunteer members of the SIA Editorial Committee. JAC has worked in preprint advocacy for many years, founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Rippling Ideas and is the author of its State of Preprints 2026 report, cited in this article. He also coauthored the ASAPbio brief on the Publish, Review, Curate model cited here, while employed by ASAPbio.


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Maria Machado, Jonathon Alexis Coates, Lucy Walton, Maryam Sayab and Luciana Machado. The Price of Openness: Who Pays, What It Buys and the Alternatives. REACH 2026;5(October):28–36.

REACH is the quarterly digital magazine of the Science Integrity Alliance, a coalition of more than 25 partners working to strengthen research integrity. Editor's Choice articles are open to everyone, and subscribers make that possible. In return, the SIA Subscription brings you together with people committed to improving research culture and transparency: full issues of REACH, discussion and practical advice in HIKE (our expert-led forum), bonus episodes of the SIAcast podcast, and the chance to participate in creating ATLAS, our living encyclopedia of key research concepts.

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