The theme of the upcoming International Open Access Week (19–23 October 2026), “The Cost of Knowledge”, invites us to think beyond the obvious monetary costs of publishing. For example, who pays to produce and disseminate scientific knowledge? Whose time and labour sustain the publishing system? Who is able to participate in it, and who is excluded?

These questions expose an important problem: “Open Access” is still often understood mainly as making articles freely available to read. Yet this can obscure major differences among Open Access (OA) publishing models. In some cases, costs have simply shifted from readers to authors through Article Processing Charges (APCs), particularly in Gold Open Access models. Such APC-based models have allowed already highly profitable commercial publishing models to persist—and often expand—under the banner of Open Access, leveraging unpaid academic labour to generate private revenue with profit margins exceeding 30%; at the same time, they exacerbate the inequalities of paying to publish already publicly funded research, creating barriers to publication for scientists in low-income countries and underfunded research groups. Other models, particularly Diamond Open Access, seek to remove direct charges from both authors and readers and place greater emphasis on community engagement and scholarly ownership, while the costs are met through funds/grants from multiple stakeholders, including libraries, academic/research institutions and nonprofit funding agencies.

This distinction matters because Open Access has not solved the structural problems of scholarly publishing. Yet the economic viability of OA journals has often been ignored. Running OA academic journals requires a significant investment of time and resources, from the work of editors and reviewers to copyediting and layout, plus the development and maintenance of secure servers and complex editorial systems that provide innovative tools to deal with ever-changing challenges such as plagiarism or AI. These costs clash with the pervasive underfunding of scientific infrastructures, so the worthy goal of free access to the final article does not by itself address questions of equity, editorial independence, ownership, transparency, or control over publishing infrastructure.

A simple and essential contribution of initiatives such as Open Access Week is to bring these distinctions into a wider audience. By increasing attention on publishing models and their consequences, OA Week makes alternative approaches more visible and creates opportunities for researchers and institutions to reflect on assumptions that often remain unquestioned. 

For PEEER, imagining those alternatives is closely connected to its own origins. PEEER developed as an interaction between a “community of thought” and a “community of practice”. The community of thought came first: researchers reflecting on how the publishing ecosystem could change, informed in part by experiences attempting to introduce reforms within established commercial journals, and on how to share a new vision with colleagues through conversation, publishing, symposia, training, and workshops. An outcome of these efforts is reflected in PEEER’s principles, which emphasise scholarly integrity, editorial independence, transparency, equitable access, affordable publishing, and greater support for journals owned by learned societies rather than for-profit publishers. These ideas and experiences raised a central question: if there are limits to how far researchers and academic editors can reshape commercial publishing structures from within, even while raising awareness of their shortcomings, can more be achieved by building alternatives outside those structures? This was where our community of practice became necessary. If Diamond OA offered a more desirable direction, how does one actually build and sustain a journal under that model? Which infrastructure is required? Who performs the work? Who pays for what cannot be provided voluntarily? And how can that experience be made useful to others? The development of Biogeography Research, the journal of the Free Association of Biogeographers, became in part an attempt to answer those questions through practice. A demonstration project. Rather than simply advocating for an alternative model, the idea was to implement one—to learn what worked, what proved difficult, and what could later be shared with other scholarly communities interested in similar paths.

Our experience illustrates the idea of “The Cost of Knowledge”. Diamond Open Access is sometimes casually understood as publishing “for free”, but removing charges for authors and readers does not remove the costs of publishing. Journals still depend on technical infrastructure, administration, preservation, and coordination, beyond the traditional academic labour related to the editorial and peer review processes that relies exclusively on time contributed by researchers alongside their regular academic responsibilities.

The more revealing questions, then, are not whether publishing costs money, but how much it costs, how those costs are distributed, whose labour sustains the system (and how are they compensated), who controls the system, and where do the benefits ultimately accrue. PEEER’s view is that organizations of scholars (e.g. societies) should own independent journals, that academics (and others) should sustain the system and be rewarded through public recognition and career review, and that the benefits should accrue to all individuals: scientific publishing is a public good. Society journals could be complemented by journals maintained by public research institutions, libraries, governmental bodies or non-profit organizations, who could develop and benefit from open source online publishing systems. Within such a diverse publishing landscape, private academic publishers could also play a beneficial role by contributing innovation and alternative approaches, provided that they do not dominate the publishing market. Consistent with this emphasis on openness and scholarly control, we also encourage the use of CC BY-NC licenses. 

We cannot yet provide definitive answers to the preceding questions but trying to construct an alternative makes the underlying work of publishing more visible. We look forward to sharing our experience via several events during Open Access Week, for example the “No paywalls, no publishing fees. Is it possible?” discussion panel hosted by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, UK; the “All that Glitters is not Gold” hosted by Charles Sturt University, Australia, and an in-person workshop for early career researchers.

Open Access Week provides an opportunity to connect these smaller experiments with a broader conversation. It is doing the important work of not simply encouraging more publications to carry an “Open Access” label, but in asking what kind of openness we want, who controls the systems through which knowledge is shared, and whether those systems primarily serve scholarly communities or commercial interests. The Cost of Knowledge is not only something we pay; it is also something we decide how to distribute.

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Authorship: This post is based on a discussion between André V Liz, Mike N Dawson, Fabricio Villalobos, Joaquín Hortal, Emma de Moll that was transcribed by Zoom, summarised using AI (ChatGPT), and subsequently edited and rewritten by the participants.

Future topics: We plan to continue holding open discussions every two months, which anyone can join (email us at peeeresearch@gmail.com) to ensure a platform for the community to share ideas and opinions. We welcome suggestions for future topics.