Why we're no longer funding journal publications
Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough
Why we're no longer funding journal publications
science funding and the cherry picking problem
Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…
The Drain of Scientific Publishing
The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.
The strain on scientific publishing
Scientists are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of articles being published. Total articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have grown exponentially in recent years; in 2022 the article total was approximately ~47% higher than in 2016, which has outpaced the limited growth - if any - in the number of practising scientists. Thus, publication workload per scientist (writing, reviewing, editing) has increased dramatically. We define this problem as the strain on scientific publishing. To analyse this strain, we present five data-driven metrics showing publisher growth, processing times, and citation behaviours. We draw these data from web scrapes, requests for data from publishers, and material that is freely available through publisher websites. Our findings are based on millions of papers produced by leading academic publishers. We find specific groups have disproportionately grown in their articles published per year, contributing to this strain. Some publishers enabled this growth by adopting a strategy of hosting special issues, which publish articles with reduced turnaround times. Given pressures on researchers to publish or perish to be competitive for funding applications, this strain was likely amplified by these offers to publish more articles. We also observed widespread year-over-year inflation of journal impact factors coinciding with this strain, which risks confusing quality signals. Such exponential growth cannot be sustained. The metrics we define here should enable this evolving conversation to reach actionable solutions to address the strain on scientific publishing.
Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work
Abstract The Stockholm Declaration calls for a moral reformation of scientific publishing—replacing commercial publishers with scholar-led journals, rewarding quality over quantity and instituting independent oversight. While noble in spirit, it fundamentally misdiagnoses the disease. The crisis of science stems not from paper mills or profit motives but from systemic incentives that reward volume, novelty and prestige over validity and reliability. Non-profit ownership will not neutralize the prestige economy, sleuth-led policing cannot scale, and ‘integrity registries’ would merely replace metrics with surveillance. True reform requires rebuilding the publishing infrastructure as a public utility: publicly funded, free to publish and read, and stripped of hierarchy and financial incentives.
Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration
Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies. The result is editor and reviewer fatigue, irreproducible experiments, misguided experiments, disinformation and escalating costs that devour funding from taxpayers intended for research. It is high time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan to stop this unhealthy development. A conference was therefore organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to draft an action plan with specific recommendations, as follows. (i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). (ii) Adjust incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, in a reputation economy where the gaming of publication numbers and citation metrics distorts the perception of academic excellence. (iii) Implement mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud which are independent of publishers. (iv) Draft and implement legislations, regulations and policies to increase publishing quality and integrity. This is a call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort.
Landing — Open Journals Collective
We're a collective of libraries, university presses, and non-profit publishers reshaping academic research.
The Journal Article Is Not the Job - The Scholarly Kitchen
There is more and more skepticism toward the role of publishers, a steady commoditization of publishing services, and growing fragmentation across the research ecosystem. If that is the case, the question is no longer what publishers do, but how that value is understood and extended.
Reclaiming scientific publishing: Our duty to make science freely accessible to all
When we (Camille Thomas and Romain Vaucher speaking) entered academia as graduate students in France and Switzerland, we were enthusiastic about the vast amount of research available with a simple click on our university computers. However, we also quickly felt disheartened by the significant amount of research work we couldn’t access when wrapping up our theses from home. Luckily, pirates existed. Empowered by Aaron Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, Alexandra Elbakyan created Sci-Hub in 2011, the greatest leak of scientific knowledge of the century. We felt right in the middle of an Open Access (OA) revolution that would finally make all scientific articles, old and new, accessible to everyone. Fifteen years later, our hopes as idealistic early-career researchers have been crushed by the oligopolistic model of scientific publishing and the subtle pressures of the “publish or perish” culture that reigns over our career development. In the meantime, publishers like Frontiers, MDPI and Springer Nature, to name a few, have exponentially expanded their number of titles. They have become increasingly exploitative of scholarly manpower, moving far away from the genuine accessibility they allegedly promised under the guise of this OA transformation. Open Access is to be praised, but the way it has been implemented through the mainstream Gold and Green OA models now primarily serves the status quo of large for-profit publishers. These entities hijack public money and voluntary editorial labour for their own profit and that of their shareholders (Butler et al., 2023; Shu and Larivière, 2024). In a nutshell, to offer reader accessibility, the Gold OA model requires authors to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC; around 2,000 $/€, rarely less, and often much more) covered by individual research funds, funding agencies or university library deals. The Green OA model allows authors to upload their accepted, non-formatted manuscripts to repositories after an embargo period. While both models allow compliance with funding agency mandates, true equity and accessibility are ultimately left behind. In an article we recently published (Vaucher and Thomas, 2026), we describe the mechanisms through which we, as researchers, inadvertently contribute to keeping research exclusive while driving the publishing model down an unsustainable path. Just like our broader economy, our publishing model and the ways science is evaluated fuelled a predatory system that demands more papers, funding and prestige at an ever-faster rate (Walter and Mullins, 2019), likely at the expense of quality, diversity and ethics (Frank et al., 2023; Heen and Vogt, 2024). These concerns aren’t entirely new. What is new, however, is the growing realisation among societies, universities and funding bodies that we must move away from this system. Initiatives like the European Diamond Capacity Hub, ALMASI and craft-OA are actively paving a way forward that we, as scientists, have yet to fully embrace. In the geosciences, a collective and concerted effort is currently being made by researchers to provide fairer, more sustainable alternatives through community-driven Diamond OA journals (which feature no APCs and completely free access to published articles). Volcanica (Farquharson and Wadsworth, 2018), Sedimentologika (Thomas et al., 2023), Tektonika (Fernández-Blanco et al., 2023), Seismica (Rowe et al., 2022), Geomorphica (Lefebvre et al., 2025), Open Paleontology (Drage et al., 2024), Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry (Pourret et al., 2025), Geodynamica, jSEDI and Planetary Research are all recently created, scholarly-run journals funded by university library investments to promote better ways of publishing. Their articles are peer-reviewed, free for readers to access, and free for authors to publish. They rely entirely on the voluntary involvement of scientists running open-source editorial platforms (such as Open Journal Systems), transparent workflows, copyediting, production and final dissemination. Diamond OA journals offer an alternative path for all of us to transform our broken publishing system and reclaim ownership of our own science. These efforts go hand in hand with greater involvement in our academic societies and non-profit publishing initiatives. Ultimately, real transformation can only happen if all of us as researchers realise how inherently unfair and exclusive the current system is to labs and institutions that cannot afford steep Gold OA APCs or paywalled journal subscriptions. It also means we must collectively stop evaluating science based on journal prestige and the flawed metrics they own (Posada and Chen, 2018; Sabel and Larhammar, 2025; Simons, 2008). Only by breaking these habits can we truly make knowledge accessible to all. References Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., and Haustein, S.: The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges, Quantitative Science Studies, 4, 778–799, https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272, 2023. Drage, H. B., Keating, J. N., Nielsen, M. L., Saleh, F., and Hearing, T. W. W.: Open Palaeontology: a new model of diamond open access journal for palaeontology, Open Palaeontology, 1, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.26034/la.opal.2024.6223, 2024. Farquharson, J. I. and Wadsworth, F. B.: Introducing Volcanica: The first diamond open-access journal for volcanology, Volcanica, 1, I–IX, https://doi.org/10.30909/vol.01.01.i-ix, 2018. Fernández-Blanco, D., Lacassin, R., Gouiza, M., Perez-Diaz, L., Magee, C., McCarthy, D., Doré, T., Péron-Pinvidic, G., Kavanagh, J., Bond, C., and Schmitt, R.: Tektonika: The Community-Led Diamond Open-Access Journal for Tectonics and Structural Geology, τeκτoniκa, 1, I–XIII, https://doi.org/10.55575/tektonika2023.1.1.56, 2023. Frank, J., Foster, R., and Pagliari, C.: Open access publishing – noble intention, flawed reality, Social Science & Medicine, 317, 115592, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115592, 2023. Heen, E. and Vogt, H.: Scientific rot: Unsustainable publishing practices threatens trust in medicine, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 30, 941–944, https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13989, 2024. Lefebvre, A., Bosch, R., Burrows, K., Giaime, M., Goodwin, G., Lai, L. S.-H., Stammler, M., and Fernández, R.: Geomorphica: The most accessible journal for the geomorphology community, Geomorphica, 1, https://doi.org/10.59236/geomorphica.v1i1.54, 2025. Posada, A. and Chen, G.: Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers, in: ELPUB 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/proceedings.elpub.2018.30, 2018. Pourret, O., Millet, M.-A., Marin-Carbonne, J., Mallik, A., Tierney, J. E., Darling, J. R., Kiseeva, E. S., Torres, M. A., Fonseca, R. O. C., Tartèse, R., Namur, O., Klöcking, M., Matthews, S. W., Dahrén, B., Ickert, R. B., and Board, the inaugural A. in G. and C. editorial: Equitable Access, Open Science, and the Future of Publishing in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, 1, https://doi.org/10.33063/agc.v1i1.770, 2025. Rowe, C., Agius, M., Convers, J., Funning, G., Galasso, C., Hicks, S., Huynh, T., Lange, J., Lecocq, T., Mark, H., Okuwaki, R., Ragon, T., Rychert, C., Teplitzky, S., and Van den Ende, M.: The launch of Seismica: a seismic shift in publishing, Seismica, 1, https://doi.org/10.26443/seismica.v1i1.255, 2022. Sabel, B. and Larhammar, D.: Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration, R Soc Open Sci., 12, 251805, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251805, 2025. Shu, F. and Larivière, V.: The oligopoly of open access publishing, Scientometrics, 129, 519–536, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04876-2, 2024. Simons, K.: The Misused Impact Factor, Science, 322, 165–165, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1165316, 2008. Thomas, C., Privat, A., Vaucher, R., Spychala, Y., Zuchuat, V., Marchegiano, M., Poyatos-Moré, M., Kane, I., and Chiarella, D.: Sedimentologika: a community-driven diamond open access journal in sedimentology, Sedimentologika, 2023. Vaucher, R. and Thomas, C.: Diamond is the new Green—Why Green Open Access is not a sustainable long-term model for scientific publishing, Sedimentologika, 4, https://doi.org/10.57035/journals/sdk.2026.e41.2397, 2026. Walter, P. and Mullins, D.: From symbiont to parasite: the evolution of for-profit science publishing, Molecular Biology of the Cell, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E19-03-0147, 2019.
Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons
<I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> argues that the move to open access should focus less on the free accessibility of research outputs and more on who controls the publications and infrastructures for scholarly communication. By deploying theoretical literature on science and technology studies, care ethics, and the commons, the book critically interrogates open access and reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing. A case study of Plan S—the multifunder European policy for open access publishing—explores its tendency to rehearse all the failures of commercialisation. Through critical engagement with the open access landscape, the book reveals the shortcomings of market-centric and policy-based approaches to open access book and journal publishing, particularly their tendency to reinforce conservatism, commercialism, and private control of publishing.<BR /><BR /> Going forward, <I>Publishing Beyond the Market</I> explores the importance of collectivity and democratic governance within the transition to open access publishing. It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through a series of presses that are each managed by working academics could offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access and subscription publishing. In weaving themselves together in order to "scale small" these publishing initiatives would act as a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care. By illustrating how these projects build toward a commons-based publishing future, and how they may complement other approaches to publishing within university presses and libraries, the book culminates in an argument for the infrastructures, policies, and forms of governance needed to nurture such a collective vision.
Tobacco funded research: how even journals with bans find it hard to stem the tide of publications
A Science Funding System Beyond the Linear Model
Research funders should embrace a new ontology of scientific work to improve the relationship between science and the public.
Single-Source Publishing Community
Join the Single-Source Publishing Community for open, interoperable, and sustainable scholarly publishing workflows.
Current market rates for scholarly publishing services
For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. These results appear uncontroversial as they not only match previous data using different methodologies, but also conform to the costs that many publishers have openly or privately shared. We discuss the numerous additional non-publication items that make up the difference between these publication costs and final price at the more expensive, legacy publishers.
Current market rates for scholarly publishing services
For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. These results appear uncontroversial as they not only match previous data using different methodologies, but also conform to the costs that many publishers have openly or privately shared. We discuss the numerous additional non-publication items that make up the difference between these publication costs and final price at the more expensive, legacy publishers.