I had the honor and profound pleasure to attend the Royal Society’s Future of Scientific Publishing conference in London this year. The invite-only gathering took place on 14 and 15 July and was chaired by Sir Mark Walport, Vice President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, and former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, a fitting host for a rare, once-a-decade science policy event. It felt especially significant given that the Royal Society’s landmark journal, the Philosophical Transactions, celebrated its 350th anniversary at the previous meeting in 2015.
A centuries-old legacy, and the pressures of publishing today
This anniversary marked more than time passing. It commemorated the invention of the scientific journal itself. The Philosophical Transactions set a precedent for the tens of thousands of academic journals that have followed since 1665. Fast-forward to 2025: at the conference, the conversations were set to focus on the future of scientific publishing. However, they mostly dealt with the immense pressures the academic publishing system is under today.
Sir Mark Walport opened the conference with a warning that scholarly publishing is facing a perfect storm: journals are buckling under the pressure of the volume of submissions and the unpaid and undervalued labor of peer reviewers, editorial boards and editors-in-chief alike. At the same time, publishers continue to increase their already astronomical profits by cashing in on open access (OA) mandates and the central role that journals play in academic careers and evaluation. By moving paywalls from subscription to article processing charges (APCs), publishers simply shifted barriers from readers to authors, entrenching rather than resolving inequities between authors from well vs underfunded regions, institutions or disciplines.
While I was deeply impressed to see the very first issue of the Philosophical Transactions from March 1665 in person (it was much smaller than I had imagined), it was impossible to forget that most of today’s prestigious journals remain inaccessible to many scholars as well as members of the public. Celebrating the legacy of journals is one thing; recognising that they have become both cash cows for commercial publishers and increasingly threatened by AI-driven nonsense from LLM-generated literature reviews with tortured phrases to illustrations of rats with enormous genitalia produced under the relentless pressure to publish, is another.
APCs and Read & Publish agreements
Just a day prior to the Royal Society meeting, The Guardianpublished an article that brought up similar arguments, which colleagues and I responded to with letters to the editor. As highlighted in our letter, our research shows that globally researchers have paid around an estimated US $9 billion in APCs between 2019 and 2023, distributed across just five major publishers, whose profit margins approach 38%. These fees were meant to democratize access but instead funnel public money into corporate and shareholder pockets at unsustainable scale.
Another deceptive mechanism are the Read & Publish (R&P) agreements which bundle subscription access and APCs into one contract with the library or consortia such as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), which negotiates on behalf of Canadian academic libraries. R&Ps function like “Big Deals,” locking libraries in with publishers even deeper under the guise of openness. Though touted as simplifying OA and removing author fees, these agreements obscure APC costs by billing the institution, lock institutions into long-term, escalating contracts and, most importantly, reinforce the oligopolistic market structure of for-profit publishers, while crowding out investments in community-led publishing such as diamond OA.
Recent debates about capping APCs, such as those announced by the NIH, highlight similar risks: while intended to limit grant spending on publication fees, such caps could further incentivize reliance on R&P agreements by the largest commercial publishers, thereby reinforcing market concentration and disadvantaging smaller and not-for-profit gold OA journals that cannot cross-subsidize costs in the same way.
Community-led and community-run journals
Diamond OA journals are fully OA journals that are free to both authors and readers, therefore not excluding anyone from participating in scholarly discourse on financial grounds. Diamond journals typically operate on free open infrastructure such as Open Journal Systems (OJS) run by Vancouver-based Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Journal production costs, which are usually much lower than current APC rates suggest, are financed by academic stakeholders such as universities, academic societies, funders or governments. Canada can be proud of a rich diamond journal landscape, particularly with its social sciences and humanities journals hosted on Érudit. Many of these journals are financially supported by SSHRC’s Aid to Scholarly Journals program and prove that equitable and sustainable publishing can thrive without paywalls.
What ISSP members can do right now
In my opinion, ISSP stands uniquely positioned at the intersection of research, policy, and public engagement. Whether you are a graduate student or a full professor, there is a role you can play by taking back control of academic journals or making publishing more transparent and sustainable. Here is a list of suggested actions, broken down by career stage and potential risk level to your career advancement. Which of these 13 items are you already practising and which ones are you ready to tackle today?
| Action | Description | Risk level | Suitable for: | |
| 1 | Post preprints | Accelerate scholarly communication by posting manuscripts on preprint servers (e.g., arXiv, SocArXiv, Zenodo) when or before you submit to a journal. Add the preprint link to your CV for easy access. | Low | All career stages |
| 2 | Self-archive via green OA | Deposit accepted manuscripts in repositories for free access. Add the repository link (ideally a DOI) to your CV for easy access. | Low | All career stages (w/ support from the library) |
| 3 | Refuse to sign over copyright to publishers | Practice rights retention strategies such as the Canadian Author Addendumto retain non-exclusive rights to your work such as self-archiving, reuse in teaching, and deposits in repositories. | Low | All career stages |
| 4 | Submit to non-profit journals | Choose diamond OA and/or society or university-led venues that are built on transparent and equitable publishing models | Medium | Mid-career, senior faculty |
| 5 | Decline invitations to review for exploitative publishers | Refuse to review for journals run by publishers that do not align with your community values. Make this decision public. | Low | All career stages |
| 6 | Push for transparency in peer review | Support journals practicing or experimenting with open peer review models and publish peer review reports when possible. | Low– Medium | All career stages, but easier for mid-career, senior faculty |
| 7 | Decline invitations or resign from editorial boards for exploitative publishers | Refuse to serve on editorial boards of journals run by publishers that do not align with your community values or resign if you are already a member. Make this decision public. | Medium- High | Tenured mid-career, senior faculty |
| 8 | Support or launch new journals | Volunteer for community-governed publishing models, such as diamond OA. | High | Mid-career, senior faculty |
| 9 | Declare journal independence | Discuss with your Editor in Chief and fellow board members how to take back control of your journal and declare independence from exploitative publishers | Medium | Mid-career, senior faculty on editorial boards |
| 10 | Push for APC, R&P and subscription deals reform | Use institutional channels (i.e., library and consortia like CRKN) and leadership (e.g., research office, faculties) to demand reform in investment strategies for OA. Ask your library to submit their data to OpenAPC. | High | Senior faculty, admin |
| 11 | Disclose APC costs | Make public what amount of grant funding went into APCs or other publishing costs instead of research. Be transparent about waivers or reduced fees. Ask your library to submit to OpenAPC. | Low | All career stages |
| 12 | Mentor on ethical publishing | Teach early career researchers how to navigate sustainable, trustworthy publishing. | Low | All career stages (w/ support from the library) |
| 13 | Advocate for research assessment reform | Advocate for changes in hiring, promotion, and tenure to reduce dependence on journal prestige, in line with DORA, CoARA and HELIOS Open principles. | High | Senior faculty, admin |
How do we create a better future for scientific publishing?
The economics of scholarly publishing are not set in stone: they are the result of deliberate choices, contracts, and incentives, both academic and financial. Those choices might have been reasonable in times when journals were printed on paper and peer review had to be organized via snail mail. Today they only serve to deepen inequities and channel billions into corporate profits.
At the same time, a publish-or-perish culture drives researchers to cut corners in pursuit of perceived productivity and impact, most recently with the help of generative AI. These shortcuts take many forms from self-plagiarism and salami publishing to selective reporting, honorary or ghost authorship and citation cartels. Add to that paper-mills, hijacked journals, or reviews, manuscripts or entire analyses fabricated by LLMs, and the result is the same: an erosion of trust in research.
In today’s political climate marked by efforts to curb university autonomy and severe funding cut-offs when research clashes with government agendas as seen in Argentina and the United States the dependence of academic careers on journal publishing, coupled with commercial exploitation, poses a profound threat to research integrity.
I would urge that as ISSP members we should lead by example: making deliberate publishing choices, refusing to subsidize exploitative models with unpaid labor, and advocating for research assessment processes that put quality, accessibility, and equity first. The next chapter in scientific publishing will be written by those who choose to act. I would like to see us at ISSP act towards a future of equitable, sustainable and community-owned scientific publishing.