PubliMentor
Open access didn't fail. The invoice arrived.
And while the West argues over who pays it, someone else has started writing the next chapter.
For most of my working life I've defended open access. I've spent many years editing for different Open Access Journals, sat through the Plan S arguments, and watched the movement go from heresy to orthodoxy. So, I didn't take it lightly when, this spring, Cancer Research UK, a charity that helped underwrite the whole experiment, announced it would stop paying open-access fees altogether.
CRUK was careful to say it still believes in the principle. What it no longer believes in is the bill. The charity reckons it will save £5.2 million over three years and put the money into actual research, and its language was unusually blunt for a funder: the dominant publishing model, it said, has stopped delivering a fair and efficient system for sharing science.
Read the comments under that announcement to have a sense of the reactions. Some mention that you can't expect a service to keep running if nobody pays for it, and so on. They're not wrong. But they're answering the wrong question.
Here is the truth of the matter. Open access was sold on two promises: that anyone could read the science, and that the system would cost less. The first has largely been kept. The second has been quietly abandoned. Global spending on article-processing charges roughly tripled in four years, from around $910 million in 2019 to about $2.5 billion by 2023, on one widely cited estimate. The paywall didn't vanish. It moved. Instead of billing the reader at the end, we now bill the author at the front, and for the most selective titles that bill runs to five figures. A single open-access article in Nature costs $12,850. That is sometimes a significant chunk of what many groups receive to do the work in the first place.
While Western funders argue about who should pay, China has done something more interesting. It changed the question.
In February the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the largest research organisation on earth, with more than fifty thousand scientists across roughly a hundred institutes, told its people it would no longer use central funds to publish in around thirty of the most expensive open-access journals. The list includes many established OA journal: Nature Communications at $7,350, Cell Reports at $5,790, Science Advances at $5,450. A further hundred-odd titles are restricted on research-integrity grounds. CAS didn't frame any of this as anti-openness. It framed it as refusing to overpay.
What makes this more than a cost-cutting memo is what sits behind it. Since 2019, China has run an "Excellence Action Plan" to build home-grown alternatives to the Western incumbents, an effort it has since scaled into an openly stated target of roughly 1,000 world-class journals by 2035. That groundwork is now surfacing.
This spring, a consortium led by Westlake University and Higher Education Press launches Vita, a flagship life-sciences journal that charges authors nothing at all, at least to begin with. It is backed by an alliance that now spans 33 institutions, including Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan, Zhejiang and Hong Kong, and it debuts with a hundred-strong advisory board, a print issue due in June, and a series of specialty titles alongside it. Tsinghua University Press, meanwhile, now runs close to sixty journals on its own platform, SciOpen, several of them launched in the past eighteen months. And in March, a Chinese scholarly body issued its own tiered "high-quality journal list" for medicine and the life sciences, an explicit attempt to evaluate research on its own terms rather than borrow ours.
If you hadn't heard most of that, you're in good company. Almost all of it was announced in Chinese outlets and barely travelled west. That's partly why I'm setting it down here. The visibility gap is real, and it flatters us to assume that what we can't see isn't happening.
So: will these journals rise to the challenge? I'd be a poor editor if I pretended the answer was obvious. China's publishing system carries real baggage: paper mills, citation cartels, the same impact-factor worship it now claims to be escaping. And prestige is sticky. The physicist who wants a job still wants a Nature paper. Building a journal people trust takes a decade of saying no, not a launch event.
But strip away the geopolitics and look at the model on its merits. No author fees at least in the first stages of development. Quality judged by the article, not the masthead. Paid for by institutions rather than extracted from grants. That is, almost word for word, what open access was supposed to be before the publishers learned to charge for it. The people now trying to build it happen to be in Hangzhou and Beijing rather than London or Boston.
The real story of the next few years isn't whether open access "failed." It's who gets to define what replaces it. And for the first time in my career, the initiative on that question has shifted east.
I've started talking to some of the people building these journals about why they're doing it, and why now. More on that soon.