From Open Access Articles to Open Science: The Need to Transform Scholarly Publishing

Rising costs and the concentration of control over scholarly publishing in the hands of a limited number of major publishers are among the reasons why the future of Open Access is increasingly being addressed at a strategic level.

While earlier debates on Open Access focused primarily on making scholarly articles freely accessible to readers, attention is now shifting towards a broader strategic challenge: building a scholarly communication system that is economically sustainable, accessible to all researchers, and capable of supporting the long-term advancement of scientific knowledge.

The solution lies not merely in changing who pays, but in a fundamental structural transformation. This includes not only Diamond Open Access, which we have previously discussed here, but also the development of decentralised, community-governed publishing models and robust open infrastructures that strengthen the data sovereignty and resilience of Czech and European research.

The European Union Advocates a More Open and Equitable System 

An important policy signal came in May 2023, when the Council of the European Union adopted its conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing.

According to the Council, immediate Open Access should become the standard for publicly funded research. At the same time, the Council highlighted the increasingly unsustainable costs associated with accessing and publishing scholarly literature and called for greater support for non-profit publishing models that impose no financial barriers on either readers or authors.

This represents a significant shift. In European research policy, Open Access is no longer viewed solely in terms of whether an article can be read free of charge. Increasing attention is also being paid to who owns scholarly publishing infrastructure, who governs it, and how it is financed. 

Research Infrastructure as a Fundamental Pillar of Science, Not a Private Monopoly

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science provides another important contribution to this debate. It identifies open research infrastructures as one of the fundamental pillars of the scientific ecosystem, alongside scientific knowledge and research data.

UNESCO emphasises the importance of ensuring that scientific tools, repositories, persistent identifiers (PIDs), metrics, and computing resources remain primarily non-commercial, governed by the research community, and based on open-source software and principles such as FAIR and CARE.

At stake is the independence of the research community itself. If control over critical digital infrastructure is left to commercial publishers, the scientific community risks losing influence over its own expertise, research processes, and the criteria by which researchers are evaluated.

Secure and open research infrastructure is as important to science as roads and energy networks are to a state. It constitutes a strategic public good, and transferring control over it to private entities entails significant risks.

Publish, Review, Curate: How the Rules of Scholarly Publishing Are Changing

Part of this transformation involves moving beyond the century-old publishing model in which the fate of a research study is determined primarily by a closed, often lengthy editorial process within a single journal.

An increasingly prominent alternative is the more flexible Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model, which separates the dissemination of research findings from their evaluation and curation.

• Publish: Researchers make their findings immediately available as preprints in open repositories. New research results can therefore be disseminated within hours rather than months.
• Review: Open peer review follows publication. Instead of remaining confined to an opaque editorial process, reviews can become independent, citable scholarly outputs with their own persistent identifiers, such as DOIs. This approach also creates opportunities to recognize and reward reviewers' contributions more fairly in academic career evaluation.
• Curate: Research communities, learned societies, and so-called overlay journals evaluate peer-reviewed outputs, provide additional context, and organise them into thematic collections or recommendations.

The PRC model separates the rapid dissemination of research from the certification of its quality. It allows the same research output to be assessed independently by different scholarly communities, potentially reducing publishing costs and dependence on dominant journal publishers.

Why Are CERIT-SC and e-Infrastructures Involved in Scholarly Publishing?

A scientific publication is no longer – or at least should no longer be – merely a static PDF document intended for printing. It is increasingly a digital research object connected to underlying research data, source code, software containers, and analytical tools.

Supporting this modern form of scholarly communication requires appropriately scaled computing and storage capacities, secure and sustainable repositories, standardized metadata ensuring interoperability and integration with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as well as technological infrastructure capable of supporting non-commercial publishing tools and open peer-review platforms.

Connecting academic publishing services with advanced IT infrastructure is therefore a logical step towards integrating scholarly communication into the national research infrastructure.

Managed Openness and Data Sovereignty: Strengthening the Resilience of Czech Research

The transition towards greater openness also requires strategic governance. Open Science does not aim to make all research data and outputs universally accessible without restriction. Rather, it calls for responsible decisions about what should be shared, with whom, and under which conditions.

This approach, often described as managed openness or controlled sharing, follows the well-established principle of making research outputs “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.”

Managed openness combines academic freedom with an emphasis on data and digital sovereignty – the research community's ability to retain control over its own data and processes without becoming dependent on dominant commercial providers.

Research metadata should, wherever possible, remain open and accessible rather than being locked behind paywalls. Nevertheless, exceptions are sometimes necessary, particularly in research contexts where even the disclosure of metadata could present security, ethical, or confidentiality risks.

Equally important are security and the protection of intellectual property, including safeguarding sensitive data, potentially patentable methods, and strategically important research against unintended disclosure or misuse.

Another essential dimension is institutional and systemic resilience. This involves developing a scholarly communication environment capable of withstanding geopolitical crises, disruptions to commercial services, and disproportionate price increases.

Decentralized platforms, independent repositories, and community-developed tools can strengthen the long-term stability of the academic environment while reducing dependence on individual service providers.

A Call to the Research Community

Transforming scholarly publishing is a necessary response to the challenges of trustworthiness, sustainability, and rising costs within the current publishing system.

The establishment of the Czech National Center for Diamond Open Access at Masaryk University (diamantove.cz), participation in European projects such as CRAFT-OA and AEGIS-OA, and closer integration with the national e-infrastructure point towards a future in which scholarly communication is increasingly supported by open, community-governed services.

These developments must go hand in hand with research assessment reform, in line with the principles promoted by CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment), and with the active involvement of Czech research institutions, universities, and research funding organizations.

Our goal is to build a scholarly communication environment in which research outputs remain under the stewardship of their producers, supported by a robust foundation that safeguards academic freedom, research quality, and long-term resilience.