In recent years, the debate surrounding Open Access has become one of the central issues in international research. As the European Youth Think Tank (EYTT), a non-profit organization that connects young researchers from across Europe and promotes interdisciplinary research, innovation, and international scientific collaboration, we have often reflected on the future of scientific communication and on how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated.
This debate matters because it touches upon one of the fundamental principles of science: the free circulation of ideas. Scientific research generates knowledge that contributes to the economic, social, and technological progress of our societies. For this reason, many scholars argue that access to scientific knowledge should not be restricted only to those who can afford university subscriptions or journal paywalls.
It is from this conviction that the Open Access movement emerged.
The Origins of Open Access
Among the symbolic figures of this movement is Aaron Swartz, the American programmer and activist who devoted part of his work to promoting free access to scientific knowledge. Swartz argued that research findings, particularly those funded by public money, should be accessible to everyone, not only those who can afford journal subscriptions. Swartz was also one of the technical architects behind Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that builds open legal and technical tools — most notably the CC licenses — used worldwide to share knowledge openly. Today, tens of billions of works, spanning research, art and culture, carry a CC license, making it part of the internet's core infrastructure for sharing knowledge as a global public good.
Before Open Access became a widely adopted publishing form, government agencies and scientific communities had already begun building open alternatives to the subscription model. ArXiv launched in 1991, then BioMed Central and PubMed Central opened access to biomedical research in the late nineties, and in 2002 the Budapest Open Access Initiative gave these efforts a set of shared principles, shortly before PLOS launched its first journals, proving that peer-reviewed research could reach readers without a paywall.
The debate surrounding Open Access expanded further through the rise of pirating platforms such as Sci-Hub. Founded in 2011 by the Kazakh researcher Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub is a shadow library that bypasses publisher paywalls to give free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright. Sci-Hub remains legally controversial and strongly opposed by publishers, yet its widespread use demonstrates a global demand for unrestricted access to knowledge.
Beyond the legal disputes, both Swartz's activism and Elbakyan's initiative raised a fundamental question: should scientific knowledge be treated as a private good or as a public good?
From our perspective, the principles that inspired the Open Access movement retain strong ethical legitimacy. A society that restricts access to knowledge inevitably limits opportunities for innovation, growth, and development. This restriction also deepens existing inequalities: researchers in low- and middle-income countries are disproportionately locked out by paywalls, as a 2014 study reported that institutional-level subscriptions could cost up to $2.1 million per publisher. Unequal access to knowledge does not just slow science down: it determines who gets to participate in it at all.
From Open Access to Publication Costs
Over the last decade, many scientific journals — from for-profit publishers like Springer Nature and Cell Press to non-profits like AAAS and eLife — have embraced Open Access publishing. However, the problem has not disappeared. If readers previously paid to access research, authors are now increasingly asked to pay to publish it.
This payment, known as an Article Processing Charge (APC), can reach several thousand euros or dollars per paper: a 2024 study put the global average at $1,626, with prestigious journals charging up to $12,000 per article.
Describing these fees simply as "publication costs" can be misleading: in many cases they do not merely cover journals' operational expenses but form part of business models that generate substantial profits for large international publishing groups — profits ultimately funded by authors, research projects, universities, or, indirectly, taxpayers. Much of this system also exploits the academic community's unpaid labor: researchers write and peer-review articles, and editorial boards contribute significant time with little compensation, even as private actors capture much of that value. This does not deny journals' valuable role, built over decades, but it is legitimate to ask whether alternative models exist.
Several reputable journals have instead adopted green or diamond Open Access, neither of which charges authors additional fees. Green Open Access allows authors to self-archive their manuscript in a repository; diamond Open Access relies on institutional, governmental, or non-profit funding, so neither readers nor authors pay. These new models suggest a possible alternative to the current cost barrier in Open Access.
The Role and Limits of Transformative Agreements
To address prohibitive publication costs, many countries and universities have adopted transformative agreements: contracts between institutions and publishers that merge the cost of reading journals with the cost of publishing in them, replacing separate subscription and APC payments with a single, often multi-year deal. Through these arrangements, affiliated researchers can publish Open Access without personally paying APCs. Italy's CRUI-CARE consortium and Germany's Project DEAL are examples of such national agreements, replicated elsewhere in Europe.
These agreements have undoubtedly facilitated the expansion of Open Access. However, they do not solve the structural problem: costs are simply shifted from researchers to universities and, ultimately, public budgets, which continue to transfer substantial resources to a small number of large commercial publishers. Furthermore, wealthier universities generally possess greater bargaining power than smaller institutions, risking new inequalities between public and private universities.
Rethinking Peer Review and Research Dissemination
One possibility concerns the growing role of working papers and preprints, versions of a study shared publicly before, or independently of, formal peer review and journal publication. In fields such as physics, economics, and mathematics, working papers already represent a fundamental mechanism for disseminating knowledge. ArXiv now hosts over 2 million preprints in physics, mathematics and computer science; in social sciences and economics, researchers rely on SSRN and the NBER Working Paper series, while bioRxiv and medRxiv have extended the same model to the life and health sciences since 2013. However, preprints and working papers have their own limits: because they have not undergone peer review and their findings have not yet been vetted for methodological soundness, readers must exercise a greater degree of caution when interpreting or citing them.
Despite these limits, the model has clear advantages: it allows for faster dissemination of results and enables a much larger number of scholars to examine, discuss, and improve research. At the same time, it opens the possibility of experimenting with more transparent forms of open peer review, where manuscripts can receive comments and constructive feedback from a broad community of scholars through shared academic platforms.
What’s next for Open Access?
Building on this idea, another possible development would be the creation of public or semi-public scientific evaluation platforms, organized by disciplinary fields and supported by universities, research institutions, or public bodies. This approach would not necessarily replace the established journal peer-review system. A more open evaluation system could evolve as a complementary mechanism, or in some contexts as an alternative one, broadening participation, increasing transparency, and accelerating scientific debate while preserving rigorous standards of quality.
In our view, a high-quality public publishing infrastructure operating under rigorous peer-review standards and transparent governance is a potential solution to the current disparity in Open Access academic publishing. Such a system would give researchers a credible, free alternative, introducing genuine competition that would encourage publishers to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and strengthen quality. We envision a future with a positive feedback loop, where more authors will turn to the public model and publish their work for free, which will in turn prompt commercial publishers to reduce publishing costs.
Concluding Remarks
Open Access has achieved something extraordinary: it has democratized access to knowledge. The challenge of the next decade will be to democratize the dissemination of knowledge as well.
This means reducing the economic barriers to publication, ensuring equal opportunities for researchers regardless of their institutional affiliation, and developing evaluation systems that are increasingly transparent, inclusive, and efficient.
If knowledge is truly a public good, then the debate cannot be limited to who can read scientific articles. It must also concern who can write them, publish them, and contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge.
In our view, that is the next frontier of Open Access.
About the authors
Luigi Capoani is an economist, researcher, and lecturer in International Economics at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Salerno through an international joint-supervision program with the University of Birmingham. He is the founder and president of the European Youth Think Tank (EYTT), a non-profit organization and independent platform that connects young researchers from across Europe and promotes interdisciplinary projects in research, innovation, and international scientific collaboration.
Linda Rotondo is a policy analyst at the European Youth Think Tank (EYTT), where she focuses on international security, international relations, and European strategic affairs. Her research interests include geopolitics, defence, terrorism, and global governance, with particular attention to emerging challenges affecting European security and international stability.
Image by EYTT.