By Peter Kucia
Wide adoption of the Internet is the greatest improvement in people’s access to knowledge since the printing press.
However, in this world where almost any information can be accessed instantaneously there is one sector that has been holding out from this revolution.
I am talking about the sector of academic research publishing.
For general population access to largely taxpayer funded research publications is restricted by prohibitively expensive paywalls imposed by privately owned academic publishing houses.
This system is particularly unfair, as publishing companies do not contribute to the research process in any meaningful way beyond profiteering from putting a paywall behind work produced by universities which in case of most EU countries are largely public, taxpayer funded institutions.
This inequitable system calls for a comprehensive reform of how results of scientific research is disseminated.
Here I will propose that establishment of a publicly accessible, EU-funded server ecosystem acting as a repository for scientific reports as a potential solution.
The strategic ambition of this reform is to fundamentally transform scientific dissemination in Europe.
Beyond access and efficiency, the goal is the achievement of digital sovereignty, epistemic autonomy, and strategic positioning in a global knowledge economy currently dominated by American tech and publishing giants.
Outline of a systemic reform
The general objective of the proposed reform is to establish a publicly funded European infrastructure for scientific dissemination that replaces commercial publishers, guarantees open access, and functions as a collaborative, transparent, and structuring tool for academic research, from project inception through to final publication.
This initiative also responds to the strategic need for European digital sovereignty by embedding scientific knowledge within digital infrastructures that serve the public interest, rather than private or extra-European profit.
This reform would be built around a system of public servers, financed and managed at the EU level. It would mandate the deposit of research reports for all projects funded through national or European public funds. The peer-review process would be open and transparent, free from editorial gatekeeping based on perceived novelty.
The platform would support continuous tracking of research projects, starting with registration at launch, followed by intermediate milestone reporting, and culminating in the final research publication. An interactive space for scientific commentary would be available, restricted to qualified researchers to ensure the quality of discussion.
Most importantly, the platform would serve as an active coordination tool, allowing scientific communities to monitor, document, and collectively align their ongoing work.
This infrastructure must be hosted on a sovereign European cloud, ensuring that research data and publications remain under EU jurisdiction and are protected from extra-territorial claims, particularly those originating from US law.
This also lays the groundwork for sovereign AI training based on European datasets and scientific outputs, avoiding the current dependency on American platforms that extract value from open access knowledge produced in Europe.
The system should allow for the development of a European public digital interface that decouples the EU from extractive digital ecosystems and reinforces technological self-determination.
Building on these, the EU must also work toward the creation of European indicators of academic excellence that reflect values of transparency, openness, reproducibility, and societal impact, rather than conforming to metrics defined by American ranking agencies or commercial publishers.
Part of the reform should then be overhaul of research assessment, including the adoption of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which rejects journal impact factor as a measure of scientific quality.
To implement this reform, several legal and organizational adjustments will be necessary. A harmonized European framework for researcher and institutional evaluation is needed to ensure that deposits in the new platform are fully recognized as legitimate scientific output.
Legal safeguards must also be introduced to protect data and intellectual property, especially in the context of AI-driven content extraction.
Origins of Scientific Periodicals
The origins of scientific periodicals reaches 17th century, however it wasn’t until early 19th century where this method of communicating results of scientific experiments started to become a commonplace .
Until the post World War 2 era these journals would usually be published by either universities or scientific societies.
Only the post WW2 era saw massive growth of commercialized publishing companies such as Pergamon, Elsevier or Springer.
Taking advantage of expanding science expenses , these companies took strategy of multiplying their research journals into more plentiful and narrow specializations to increase number of subscription payments.
Because academia doesn’t quite work on free market incentives due to its largely public financing this model has worked very well with academic publishing sector profit margins reaching up to 40%, which is much higher than even the most profitable software companies such as Google or Microsoft.
Knowledge dissemination and Liberal thought
Within liberal thought, a persistent economic tension exists between proprietarism—which views lucrativity and intellectual property as vital incentives for innovation—and open access, which champions the free market of ideas as essential to progress and democracy.
Proprietarism argues that financial rewards and exclusive rights drive research and creativity, sustaining private investment in knowledge production. In contrast, the open access perspective sees intellectual monopolies as barriers to freedom of inquiry and public empowerment, advocating instead for dismantling these restrictions to foster collective intelligence, broaden participation, and promote innovation through unrestricted information exchange.
This tension reflects a deeper philosophical divide between individual profit and collective benefit in the pursuit of knowledge.
The choice between a proprietarist and an open approach fundamentally shapes the design of academic publishing policies.
A policy guided by proprietarism favors privatized models, in which commercial scientific journals retain ownership rights over publications. This model is based on the idea that scarcity and profitability are essential drivers of innovation.
It results in expensive subscriptions, restricted access rights, and high publication fees (such as Article Processing Charges in commercial open access journals). It gives publishers a central role in the validation and dissemination of knowledge, reinforcing dominant positions in specific academic fields.
Conversely, a policy grounded in the principles of open access conceives research as a common good. It promotes publication models funded by public or institutional resources, in which articles are freely accessible without financial barriers for readers or authors.
This approach supports the development of institutional repositories, public dissemination platforms, and research evaluation criteria independent of editorial prestige. Its goals are to maximize the circulation of ideas, reduce inequalities in access to knowledge, and enhance the transparency of the scientific process.
Ultimately, the choice between these two approaches determines not only who can access knowledge, but also who controls it—and to what end.
Scientific Publishing is a business of restricting access to knowledge
Today scientific publishing companies provide little to no contribution to the scientific process except of gatekeeping access to the published results from general public.
They do not contribute financially to research programs, as this is mostly done by either government sector, non-profit organizations or private industry. Scientists who perform the research are employed and paid by their respective institutions.
Upon submission of a manuscript to the publisher, he is responsible for inviting scientist for peer-review of the manuscript, however reviewers are not financially compensated for this work.
Publishing companies don’t even provide editing service to make the manuscript more attractive to read, instead putting this responsibility on its authors. In exchange, they have sole right to put the article on their website charging prohibitively expensive fees to unlock it.
Taking an example of high impact Nature Reviews: Bioengineering a single article can cost 40€, while an annual subscription 111€. Given that it is estimated that there are over 30,000 scientific journals in the world, with dozens or even hundreds covering a single field it is clear that these costs are far from affordable for non-institutional clients.
Exploitation of the University system
On the other hand, most of revenues of publishing companies comes from subscriptions purchased by university libraries.
They typically buy these subscriptions in “bundles” which prices are negotiated directly with publishing houses, and therefore this expenditure varies considerably between institutions. According to an American study from 2014, this number can be from $168,000 per year on a lower end up to $2,000,000 per year on the higher end .
Another investigation from 2022 established that total expenditures on journal subscription by consortium of French universities to be 87,000,000€ per year. One of the highest estimated values was reported by inquiry into expenditures of Australian universities, which was1bln$ per year.
These numbers certainly depend on many factors, such us size of the university or differences in number of fields of research pursued at particular institution and no doubt as any non-transparent deal involving public funds leaves plenty of space for corruption.
Moreover, this creates a system where publishing companies not only take advantage of research infrastructure financed by the governments,charging extremally high fees to access sciencepublications created because of this infrastructure.
Even worse, they make most of their profit by selling access to this research back to the institutions that developed it in the first place. It is very clear that this system is unfair, inefficient and downright extractive in nature.
Promotion of non-meritocratic measures of scientific excellence
Last, somewhat less obvious problem with current research publishing system is that it hands over significant amount of power into hands of editors of “prestigious” journals such as Nature or Science.
Career progression within academia is mostly dependent on 3 metrics of researchers work, that is: number of publications, number of citations and number of publications in high impact factor journals.
Even though the first 2 metrics have their share of problems, they are generally somewhat objective in assessing researchers’ scientific output.
However, publishing in high impact factor journals is not an objective metric, as articles are selected based on how interesting they are to the editors.
One important effect of that is a problem with underreporting of negative or null research results, that are usually deemed by journal editors as “uninteresting”, even though they still can contribute to collective scientific knowledge.
Open Access publishing as an ostensible solution
One of the most widely discussed improvements in academic publishing system is the rise of open access journals.
They are available to the public free of charge, however this solution only transfers high fees from potential reader to the author of the publication.
Open access journals charge very high Article Processing Charges that have to be paid to publish ones work on their platform. In most cases these APCs are paid either by institutions employing scientists wanting to publish their work or from the research grants.
Although this model is clearly superior to standard “close access” publishing, it doesn’t address the core issue of companies profiteering from publicly funded research. Instead, the charge is just “switched” from access stage to publishing stage.
EU funded repository server ecosystem as a solution
It is clear that science dissemination has to be comprehensively reformed, in order to ensure scientific reports are hosted by an institution without a profit motive and with free access to general public.
I therefore postulate an EU funded repository server ecosystem for hosting academic papers as a viable solution.
In this system every research institution within the EU would be required to put reports summarizing outcomes of conducted scientific projects in this repository, where it would be freely available to thepublic, and completely cut-out publishing houses from the process.
Moreover, to increase transparency of the scientific process research labs would register their running projects on this server and put articles as a way of summing up and reporting important milestones achieved, which would streamline their evaluation.
Before submission the reports would be subjected to same peer-review process as in scientific journals, however without judging if a particular research article is “interesting” enough to be published.
As a result, reporting negative and null findings would not be penalized as it is the case for commercial publishers.
In the context of clinical trials, there also should be a requirement of pre-registering of the trial with description of experimental methodology and expected outcomes, in order to prevent post-hoc results fishing practices such as p-hacking.
An option that can be added is also possibility to comment on the articles, but this feature should be restricted to other professional academics to ensure high standard of discussion.
What needs to be done to succeed
For this initiative to be successful it is important that it has to be introduced at EU level.
No single university can just stop publishing in a research journals on its own, as it would result in difficulties in obtaining funding and fall in academic rankings.
The reform can only work if it is introduced collectively by a substantial number ofleading scientific institutions. European countries taken together produce more scientific papers than any single country, hence any research dissemination reform on EU level would surely inspire similar initiatives in the rest of the world.
Currently there are examples of similar government-run databases of research publications, such as PubMed run by US National Library of Medicine, SciElo initiative from Brazil or French HAL archive, although they are not hosting full articles but rather catalogue them.
Another interesting example is bioRxiv which hosts free-access manuscripts awaiting peer-review and publishing in a journal. Its yearly budget is $3million per year, which shows how inexpensive it is to maintain this sort of server compared with fees charged by the publishing houses.
Open Research Europe
Currently there are also some early stage initiative from European Commission to promote Open Science.
Open Research Europe is a publication server for manuscripts funded by Horizon Europe that is free to access and has implemented novel, fully transparent peer-review system .
This is a good start; however it needs to be combined with a wider reform of science dissemination.
Right now, Open Research Europe has to compete for publications with established and reputed scientific journals, hence either top-down requirement or increasing benefits for scientists to publish their works there should be introduced.
Also, restriction to research programs funded by Horizon Europe limits the scope of this repository.
Benefits of the reform
Introducing EU wide repository of research papers would have numerous benefits.
First of all, the budget necessary for the maintenance of this ecosystem will be lower than amount universities spend on journal subscriptions or APCs.
This will be very beneficial especially for universities in less wealthy European countries that will be able to invest more of their funding into their scientific and educational infrastructure instead of putting it into publishing houses pockets.
Secondly, it would improve transparency of research projects conducted by European universities.
This could further increase public trust in science, as well as make research process more accountable to the public.
Open access to research works has also potential to accelerate innovation in the private sector, as technology and engineering startups could freely translate academic research into commercially viable businesses.
Roadblocks and challenges
There are some potential obstacles to this initiative.
First of all, it has to be conducted in full cooperation with universities, which might be challenging given that it will include institutions from 27 different countries, each with different model of higher education.
In particular, there needs to be full alignment with changing criteria for evaluation of scientific achievements, so that impact factor of journals is no longer considered.
This is fortunately already happening with some European universities adopting San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which postulates exactly that.
Additionally, management and funding of the initiative must be considered. The repository might be maintained European Research Council or Horizon Europe.
Another option would be a sort of EU “national” library- apparatus that at current moment doesn’t exist. However such a repository would be the most appropriate body for the job of maintaining and archiving academic works. In any case, an appropriate funding will have to be allocated to whichever body is selected for this job.
Other aspect that has to be considered is data and intellectual property protection aspects.
Especially now in the age of AI there is a potential danger of open access research papers being used in AI training datasets, giving an unfair advantage to mostly US and China based tech companies, especially that from IP law standpoint AI training datasets are still a grey area.
This issue is also why I am not postulating here for making raw data from research labs public, as it would be even easier to take an unfair advantage of it.
There are certain measures that might be rolled out to protect the data from AI web crawlers, such as Nepenthes software which traps them in a never-ending trap of circular links until it is manually interrupted, and no doubt in the future more anti-AI tools will appear.
Concluding remarks
Based on the conceptual framework opposing proprietarism and open access, the article describes a European academic publishing system still largely dominated by a proprietarist logic, while outlining a desirable—and necessary—shift toward a structured, publicly supported open access model.
Currently, the European system, as portrayed in the article, relies heavily on a publishing infrastructure controlled by commercial private publishers (such as Elsevier, Springer, Nature), who extract the value of research largely funded by public money.
This dynamic reflects the core principles of proprietarism: researchers surrender their rights to publishers, who then restrict access through paywalls; knowledge is artificially scarce and monetized, creating economic barriers for citizens, smaller institutions, and lower-income countries; The high profitability of major publishing houses is sustained by extremely high margins, exceeding those of many tech companies; and academic recognition is strongly tied to publication in high-impact journals, often controlled by the same publishers.
While this system maintains a certain academic order, it contradicts the ideals of a free knowledge market and reinforces structural inequalities in access and recognition.
My proposal advocates for a transition toward an institutional, collaborative, and non-profit model aligned with the principles of open access.
It envisions the creation of a publicly funded European infrastructure for research dissemination, where results would be freely deposited and accessible to all.
It calls for by passing private publishers entirely, using a public channel for peer-reviewed dissemination without editorial gatekeeping based on subjective interest.
At a fundamental philosophical level, this reform aligns more closely with a liberal vision of open access inspired by the thought of J.S. Mill than with proprietary models of knowledge control.
It reflects a belief in the European public sector’s capacity to create the conditions for the broad dissemination of knowledge—a core liberal value—by designing a public, non-extractive model that can break existing monopolies.
Rather than relying on market concentration and private rent-seeking, it champions an open, pluralistic, and transparent system where scientific progress is treated as a public good, accessible to all and governed collectively in the public interest.
Transparency would be increased through project registration, traceable reporting, and the inclusion of negative or null results. Evaluation criteria would shift from journal prestige to objective and qualitative assessments of scientific contribution, following initiatives like DORA.
This model also promotes equity by reducing financial barriers for both authors and readers, which would particularly benefit underfunded institutions across Europe. It reflects the ideal of a collective European intelligence, where knowledge is understood as a common good serving society as a whole.
In conclusion, this analysis reveals a clear gap between a current system driven by rent-seeking and control of information, and a desirable future grounded in the free circulation of knowledge, public accountability, and democratized access to research.
Bridging this divide requires strong political will, pan-European institutional coordination, and a redefinition of academic recognition standards. It marks a strategic turning point for positioning Europe as a leader in a new scientific paradigm.
The proposed reform of research dissemination would be a major improvement to Europe’s academic landscape, widening access to knowledge generated by our universities, eliminating academic publishing industry unfairly profiting from government and non-profit sponsored science and improving evaluation of progress and achievements of research projects.
European public research repository system can further become a model for other countries to introduce similar measures, or join the EU system, which can streamline exchange of scientific ideas between the EU and partner countries.
Lastly, it would reaffirm Europe’s post-Enlightenment identity as a global leader in rational inquiry, democratic access to information, and the pursuit of knowledge as a public good rather than a privatized commodity.
