Most arguments about open access are still arguments about money: who pays, how much, and whether article processing charges have simply moved the paywall from the reader to the author. Those questions matter, and JCF Media has examined them in detail, from what an APC actually pays for to why researchers end up paying to publish. But treating open access as a pricing problem misses what two decades of policy have actually changed.
Open access has altered who holds the rights to a research article, what libraries buy when they sign a contract with a publisher, and what a funder can demand of its grantees before a manuscript is ever submitted. It has also begun to unsettle the oldest assumption in scholarly communication: that an article becomes "published" at the moment a journal accepts it.
Our position is this. The durable achievement of open access is a shift of control over the research record towards authors, institutions and funders, and the movement's next phase should consolidate that shift rather than continue to buy access article by article. The policies that have worked best are the ones that secure rights and deposit, not the ones that pay for publication. Equity for authors in lower-income countries will not be fixed by waivers, and should stop being treated as though it can be.
Rights, not just readership
The clearest example is rights retention. Under the cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy, funded authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript, typically by stating it in their submission. Because that licence exists before any publisher agreement, cOAlition S argues it takes precedence over a later copyright transfer or licence to publish. The author can then deposit the accepted manuscript in a repository at publication, with no embargo, even if the journal is a subscription title.
That is a quiet but significant inversion. For most of the twentieth century, the default was that authors signed away copyright as the price of publication. Rights retention makes the funder's licence the starting point and the publisher's contract the thing that must accommodate it. It costs nothing per article, it does not depend on a journal's business model, and it leaves authors free to choose where to submit.
The UK Research and Innovation open access policy reflects the same logic. For research articles submitted from 1 April 2022, UKRI requires immediate open access under CC BY, and it explicitly does not permit a publisher embargo on the repository route. UKRI will pay for publication in fully open access journals, and in hybrid journals only where they are covered by an approved transitional agreement. It has also said it intends to phase out funding for hybrid publication, including under those agreements, with timing expected around 2028 to 2029 and the exact date still to be confirmed.
In the United States, the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy public access memorandum, issued on 25 August 2022, asked federal agencies to remove the embargo on publicly funded articles and to make supporting data available. Agencies were to publish updated policies by the end of 2024 and have them in effect by 31 December 2025; later deadlines in 2026 and 2027 cover metadata and persistent identifiers. Crucially, the memo does not require authors to pay for open access: deposit in agency-designated repositories such as PubMed Central satisfies it. That deadline has now passed, and the memo itself looks less secure than it did in 2022: in February 2026 STM reported that the Administration was reviewing its options regarding the memo. The test now is whether agencies enforce their own deposit policies consistently.
What libraries now negotiate
Library negotiations have changed too. Transformative agreements, sometimes called read-and-publish deals, are defined by the OA2020 initiative as contracts in which money previously spent on subscriptions is redirected to pay for open access publishing by an institution's authors. They turned the library into a purchaser of publishing services as well as reading access, and they gave consortia leverage over licensing terms that individual authors never had.
They were also meant to be temporary. cOAlition S announced in January 2023 that its members would no longer financially support transformative arrangements after 2024, warning that continued funding risked entrenching hybrid open access indefinitely, while allowing individual funders to make exceptions within national strategies. That warning was correct. A transitional deal that is renewed every few years without a credible end point is no longer a transition; it is a new and often more expensive form of the big deal, now with publishing volume built into the price. Libraries and consortia that keep signing such agreements should be explicit about what full conversion would look like and when it is expected.
What counts as publication
The more radical change is conceptual. Once an article is free to read, the journal's role as gatekeeper of access disappears, and its remaining functions, such as peer review, editorial judgement, certification and curation, have to justify themselves on their own terms.
Some publishers have accepted that openly. eLife announced in October 2022 that it would stop making accept or reject decisions after review, instead publishing reviewed preprints with public reviews and an editorial assessment of significance and strength of evidence, leaving authors to decide when a version becomes the version of record. cOAlition S's Towards Responsible Publishing proposal, published in late 2023, went further as a statement of direction, sketching a system built around author-led dissemination, preprints and open peer review. Its global consultation drew more than 11,600 respondents, and the findings released in July 2024 showed broad support for principles on preprints, open peer review and open licensing, alongside calls to reform how researchers are recognised and rewarded.
It is worth being precise about the status of that work. The coalition's strategy for 2026 to 2030, released in November 2025, contains no new mandate. It does acknowledge that the growth of author-pays open access has created affordability inequities for researchers at less-resourced institutions and in less-resourced regions. Responsible publishing remains a direction of travel, not a compliance requirement, and journals should not describe it otherwise.
Equity cannot be outsourced to waivers
That acknowledgement brings us to the weakest part of the current system. Many publishers rely on Research4Life country lists to offer APC waivers or discounts, but Research4Life itself leaves policy to individual publishers. A 2021 analysis in The Scholarly Kitchen described the result: some publishers waive fees for all eligible countries, some only for the lowest-income group, some use their own lists entirely, and information is often scattered even within one publisher's portfolio. Springer Nature, for example, now bases its waivers on World Bank income classifications, offering full waivers in low-income economies and 50 per cent discounts in lower-middle-income economies with GDP below a set threshold, and excluding hybrid titles.
Waivers are discretionary, inconsistent and structurally exclusionary. Researchers in large middle-income countries, or at under-funded institutions in wealthy ones, often fall outside them entirely. A system that requires authors to prove they are poor enough to publish has not solved the equity problem; it has administered it. Repository deposit under rights retention, and well-governed no-fee venues of the kind discussed in our analysis of who pays for diamond open access, remove the problem at source rather than mitigating it case by case.
What remains unresolved
Plenty remains open. The long-term status of hybrid funding in the UK is still to be fixed, the post-deadline enforcement of United States agency policies is untested, and the relationship between reviewed preprints and conventional indexing, citation and research assessment is far from settled. Rights retention has met resistance from some publishers, and it depends on funders being willing to back authors when licences conflict.
Conclusion
Open access has already won the argument about whether publicly funded research should be readable. The argument now is about who controls the record and on what terms. Funders and institutions should prioritise policies that secure rights and immediate deposit, set firm end dates for transitional spending, and stop relying on waivers as a substitute for an equitable system. Publishers that want to remain central to scholarly communication should compete on the value of their editorial services, because access alone is no longer something they can sell.
