A cross-disciplinary group of library staff, researchers, and academic administrative faculty, from early career to full professors and senior professionals, gathered at Universität Zürich (UZH), Switzerland, on 20^th February, 2025, to discuss challenges and opportunities in scientific publishing. Bringing their diverse perspectives, and centered on emerging topics in open science, a panel and audience were asked to address the over-arching question: “Are community-driven initiatives the key to better publishing?”

Among the topics discussed were: What are the major problems in publishing today? Could Open Access (OA) publishing address those problems? Might different models of OA (see below for definitions) have different merits? What are the (dis)advantages of open peer-review? How are the costs of open access justified? How can we effect real change? These are questions we might all ask ourselves.

Among those in the room, there was consensus that the current publishing ecosystem does not serve academia well; that it has not done so for years; that the situation is getting worse. The large majority of mainstream scientific publishing is unaffordable for all academic parties — i.e. students, researchers, institutions — irrespective of provenance. Scientific publishing drains vast public resources from investment in the development of students, of human potential, knowledge, and skills, reducing potential public goods while instead heavily subsidizing highly-profitable companies. To protect academia and public benefit there is urgent need for dramatic change. While participants were sanguine about academia’s limited and transient successes in past decades to negotiate sustainable change and the need for novel solutions, there also was a tangible sense that such solutions may now be within reach.

Importantly for scaling solutions, issues are similar across disciplines, though they may differ in degree or in the stage of development (e.g. percentage of authors publishing OA, using preprints; whether a field has academically-led diamond OA journals). This heterogeneity means opinions vary on ways forward, but also that our collective experience is vast and provides rich material for a tapestry of solutions.

Major take-home messages from the meeting included:

• Lasting solutions require reform of the publishing ecosystem and also reform of the reward system, i.e. how we evaluate researchers’ papers during hiring, tenure, and promotion.
• Early career researchers are particularly vulnerable in the current system and also least empowered to enact change, therefore senior researchers and administrators must act to safeguard their futures, which are the future of research itself.
• The publishing model (including the colour of OA) is less important than the owner of a journal and their policies (e.g. as an imperfect rule-of-thumb, non-profit academic societies vs for-profit corporations).
• Community-led diamond open access journals currently offer the most promising model for sustainable publishing.
• Academic faculty, institutions, societies, and funding agencies should collaborate on independent academically-led publishing, re-emphasizing the role of research expertise — which often is absent from corporate leadership — in journals’ strategic development.
• For-profit publishers should only be included after they have adopted policies and practices  that demonstrate they are committed to being part of research communities’ solutions.
• Whatever our current concerns, finding common ground and a shared path forward is key to effecting change; some will lead, others will follow, we need not travel together but must move in the same direction.
• Mechanisms to promulgate change are needed urgently.

It will take commitment and a strong community to effect meaningful change, such as establishing a portfolio of diamond Open Access journals.  Libraries and universities provide important support, for example with open access platforms. One challenge is sustainable funding, which various institutions are beginning to explore, reallocating some funds in favor of diamond open access. 

Overall, there is strong support for change among members of our community. Next steps include to bring these matters to the attention of the persons in charge of the universities, financially and in regard of recognition and hiring, to effect institutional change.

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Coda

While our cross-disciplinary group of partners were discussing opportunities in scientific publishing at Universität Zürich (UZH), the universities in Switzerland (swissuniversities) were in their tenth month of negotiations with Wiley for a Read & Publish contract beyond 2024. After swissuniversities submitted a compromise offer, which was not accepted by Wiley, the negotiations were discontinued in March 2025, an outcome repeated from other institutions and countries. swissuniversities’ announcement can be read at https://www.swissuniversities.ch/en/topics/open-science/publisher-negotiations/wiley. It is an unfortunate but fitting coda to our discussions within the university community about the need for community-driven initiatives for better publishing.

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Additional Information

• Swiss National Open Access Strategy (revised 2024)
• Costs of Read&Publish Agreements between Libraries and Publishers: https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry/ 
• Quantum, the open journal for quantum science, https://quantum-journal.org/ 
• Biogeography, a new journal aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of diamond open access collaborations between researchers, academic publishers, open source platforms, and university libraries
• Platform of Diamond OA Journals for UZH editors www.hope.uzh.ch
• Zurich Open Repository and Archive www.zora.uzh.ch
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Support by the University Library Zurich: Publishing in Open Access

Contributors to the panel discussion and this blog post: Michael N Dawson (Lead Author), Lídia del Rio, Margit Dellatorre, Monika Kriemler, Samuel Nussbaum, Milo Puhan, Gary Seitz, Bernhard Spingler, Anna C. Véron.