Table of Contents
Summary
The current academic publishing system bottlenecks innovation-led productivity growth by imposing red tape and delays, driving down quality and discouraging ambition. This system wastes taxpayers’ money, constrains the commercialisation of university research and slows down innovation by the private sector in R&D intensive industries.
Initiatives led by academics to reform the publishing system are being undermined by indirect government subsidies which uphold the status quo.
Philanthropic research funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are already taking steps to increase the return on their research investments. While Britain has long been a pioneer at academic publishing reform, we are now falling behind the frontier, with nations like Japan pulling ahead.
Reforms could immediately reduce DSIT’s costs, increase the impact of academic research and improve the quality of private R&D investment, unlocking productivity growth.
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should implement “Plan U”, mandating the publication of all taxpayer-funded research as “preprints” before they are submitted to academic journals. The Minister should also lead collective bargaining with academic publishers on behalf of universities to reduce costs and encourage reform. UK Research and Innovation’s “open access” policy should be modified to accept the publication of preprints as compliance.
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should instruct UKRI to immediately stop supporting “open access block grants” to universities, which are currently costing £40 million annually and are used to pay “article processing charges” to academic publishers. £10 million of this funding should be diverted annually to provide direct support to not-for-profit preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms. The remaining £30 million annually should be used to realise cost-savings for DSIT.
The Challenge
The academic publishing system is broken. And it is constraining innovation-led growth.
Currently, most research is disseminated via a “pre-publication peer review” system. Instead of publishing their work independently, academics submit their research to journals, where it undergoes a peer review process managed by volunteer academics. These volunteers, often preoccupied with their own research, are slow to provide feedback. This system leads to considerable delays in research dissemination – one-third of researchers have waited for more than a year for their work to be published following submission to a journal.
This pre-publication peer review system is rooted in tradition rather than evidence of its efficacy. A Cochrane review found no evidence that peer review improves research quality. Instead, it introduces inefficiencies that waste researchers’ time and taxpayers’ money. For example, formatting requirements differ across journals, forcing researchers to spend considerable time repeatedly reformatting and resubmitting their work after inevitable rejections.
Beyond delays in research dissemination which compromise innovation, the pre-publication peer review system fosters harmful incentives that degrade research quality. Publication bias—the tendency to favour statistically significant (‘positive’) findings—encourages “questionable research practices” that compromise scientific rigour. This phenomena not only misleads subsequent research efforts but also squanders taxpayer funds. In extreme cases, this bias can even lead to outright fraud, as seen in Alzheimer’s research, where fabricated results have potentially misallocated millions in investments, jeopardising the government’s dementia mission.
Moreover, prestigious journals rarely publish research that attempts to replicate or reproduce previous findings. The disincentivisation of replication studies contributes to the “reproducibility crisis”. When research results cannot be reliably reproduced by different teams, the integrity of the entire scientific process is undermined. This crisis is particularly troubling for the private sector, where poor reproducibility hampers innovation and slows the development of new products and services. For example, pharmaceutical companies have expressed concerns about poor reproducibility in academic research. The resulting unrigorous research also means that fewer projects are spun out into start-ups and scale-ups to drive growth, since products and services based on unrigorous research are unlikely to function as hoped.
The current system also discourages ambitious, high-impact research. Because research with statistically significant results is more likely to be published by journals, researchers are incentivised to simply minimise failure risk, instead of pursuing maximum impact on society or their research field. The pressure to produce statistically significant results drives researchers toward "incremental" studies with a higher likelihood of success, rather than "disruptive" research that challenges existing scientific paradigms but carries greater risk of statistically insignificant outcomes.
Taxpayers bear the burden of this flawed system at every stage—funding research, submission fees, and the peer review process—only to pay again to make this research available to other researchers and to the taxpayers themselves. Meanwhile, academic publishers, operating with profit margins higher than many Big Tech companies, continue to profit from a system that actively hinders innovation.
Despite widespread criticisms of the existing system, reforms at for-profit academic publishing companies have been too slow. Meanwhile, article processing charges (APCs), which researchers must pay for their work to be published “open access”, continue to rise. (“Open access” publication allows readers to access research articles without a subscription to the relevant academic journal). The median APC for submitting research—often taxpayer-funded—to a for-profit journal is £2,178 and can reach up to £9,351.
Instead of strengthening incentives for reform, existing government intervention upholds the status quo. For example, UKRI’s “open access block grant” acts as a £40 million indirect subsidy to academic publishers, rewarding failure and undermining attempts to improve the system. This funding was made available in response to a mandate for all UKRI-funded research to be published open access, and is used by researchers to pay expensive APCs to academic publishers. Meanwhile, a lack of political leadership in negotiations with academic publishers for better subscription deals leads to poor value for universities and the taxpayer, and presents a missed opportunity to demand improvements to the publishing system.
The Opportunity
The flaws in the current academic publishing system are well-recognized, sparking researcher-led community initiatives and non-profit organisations that aim to increase the return on taxpayer-funded investments in research. Initiatives like Plan U, bioxRiv, medxRiv, SocArXiv, the Center for Open Science, the UK Reproducibility Network and eLife are leading the charge.
However, the continuation of huge indirect subsidies from the government to for-profit academic publishers undermines these efforts and continues to bottleneck economic growth. Meanwhile, these community-led efforts alone lack the scale to address systemic issues across the entire sector. To deliver greater value for money from UKRI’s £9 billion annual investments, political leadership is needed.
Philanthropic foundations which support academic research are reforming how they interact with the academic publishing industry. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative has adopted “Plan U”, mandating the use of “preprint servers”. Preprints are early versions of research articles shared before submission to a journal or formal peer review. These are hosted on preprint servers at minimal cost to researchers. In 2022, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative announced £4.5 million of direct funding to bioRxiv and medRxiv, two widely used preprint servers, to support operations until 2024. Similarly, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation adopted Plan U in March 2024, and also stopped providing funding towards article processing charges for open access publication. But the publication of research as preprints means that this “open access” effect is achieved at the preprint stage, before the research article is submitted to a journal.
Preprints increase the impact of research because of increased accessibility, and a survey of 8000 researchers by Coalition S demonstrates that preprints are viewed by 92% of researchers as effective at improving transparency, by 96% as effective at improving research visibility and by 94% as effective at accelerating academic discourse.
Britain has historically been a pioneer in academic publishing reform, mandating since 2013 that publicly funded research be published with open access. But this approach enables journals to impose expensive APCs for open access publication, which increases costs to DSIT. Not only do researchers show no preference to publish in journals with cheaper APCs, they actually demonstrate a preference to publish in journals with more expensive APCs.
We are now falling behind the frontier. In Japan, all researchers who receive public funding will need to publish their research articles as preprints from April 2025, backed by a £50 million investment in digital infrastructure supporting preprints. Britain must make similar reforms to maintain its leadership in research and innovation, realise cost-savings, and unblock innovation.
Plan of Action
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should announce the immediate implementation of Plan U, mandating the publication of a preprint for all taxpayer-funded research prior to journal submission.
In addition to Plan U, the mandate should require that preprints are published in not-for-profit, international servers to reduce the market power of for-profit publishers and prevent the geographic fragmentation of research, which could compromise the ability of British researchers to collaborate internationally. UKRI should be instructed to immediately amend its open access policy to accept preprint publication as meeting open access requirements.
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should instruct UKRI to end its support for “open access block awards” immediately, worth £40 million annually.
Of this budget, £10 million annually should be diverted to directly supporting not-for-profit preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms. The remaining £30 million can be used to realise cost-savings for DSIT.
The Minister for Science, Research and Innovation should work with Jisc to oversee collective bargaining between British universities and academic publishers, demanding reforms to publisher behaviour and greater value for the taxpayer as part of negotiations.
Jisc oversees sector-wide deals with academic publishers, but direct political support could help achieve better value in these deals. The mandatory publication of publicly funded research as preprints will strengthen Jisc’s negotiating power, since journal subscriptions will not be required to access this research in the future.
Any agreements should require publishers to implement “post-acceptance” formatting to cut red-tape for British researchers. In 2014, universities paid upwards of £93 million for researchers and students to access paywalled academic research. Driving down these costs could help support struggling university finances.
FAQs
How does the academic publishing market work, and why have alternative academic publishers failed to displace incumbents?
Academic knowledge is a public good which academic publishers have privatised. Academic publishers exclude researchers and the general public from accessing large swathes of academic research via paywalls, converting a public good (academic knowledge) into a private good (paywalled academic research papers), from which they can extract economic rents in the forms of subscriptions or article processing charges, which overcome these paywalls.
The academic publishing industry is characterised by an oligopoly. Market concentration leads to weak competition and allows a few publishers to operate at higher profit margins than Big Tech companies.
Demand for a journal’s services (demand from researchers for article processing, and demand from libraries for access to published articles) is primarily determined by its prestige. Journal prestige is self-perpetuating and disconnected from both service quality and price.
Barriers to entry are high in any market where demand is determined by historical prestige. New competitors offering higher quality services or lower prices fail to compete, as they lack the historical prestige of established journals, and researchers must publish in prestigious journals to progress their careers. Market leaders also engage in anti-competitive behaviour, routinely acquiring competitors which offer better quality services.
A combination of weak competition and inelastic demand ultimately leads to poor quality and high prices. Government intervention is needed to promote reform, but existing government intervention rewards failure, upholds the status quo and wastes taxpayers’ money.
What about peer review and research quality?
Plan U does not replace the peer review system. Under Plan U, peer review occurs after publication (post-publication peer review) rather than before publication, and can be performed en masse via platforms such as PubPeer.
The current pre-publication peer review system is rooted in tradition rather than evidence. A Cochrane review found no evidence that peer review is effective at improving research quality. Meanwhile, the pre-publication peer review system imposes significant delays upon research dissemination and creates perverse incentives which discourage rigour and ambition. There is also evidence of racial bias in the acceptance of research articles by academic journals. Research shows that when research articles which have been published as preprints are also submitted to journals for peer review, a majority do not undergo significant changes.
Some academic publishers are already moving towards the post-publication peer review model. This includes eLife, a non-profit publisher established by Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society. To support post-publication peer review, some cost savings from ending support for UKRI “open access block awards” should be directed towards not-for-profit post-publication peer review platforms (such as PubPeer).
Plan U will reduce the effects of perverse incentives in the pre-publication peer review system which drive down research quality. Additionally, initiatives like the DSIT-UKRI Metascience Unit and the UK Reproducibility Network will continue to improve research quality, without creating red tape or reinforcing perverse incentives for researchers.
In contrast to the peer review system which is rooted in tradition rather than evidence, the DSIT-UKRI Metascience Unit is focused on using rigorous empirical evidence to improve research quality. The scope of its £5 million grants programme includes projects aimed at improving research training and skills, research integrity, research reproducibility and research impact.
The UK Reproducibility Network is a grassroots initiative to tackle the reproducibility crisis. It aims to improve research quality and transparency, for example by promoting the use of the “Registered Report” publication format which discourages questionable research practices. This grassroots approach avoids the red tape and perverse incentives generated by the pre-publication peer review system.
How do researchers feel about preprints?
A survey of 8000 researchers by Coalition S demonstrates that 50% of researchers are dissatisfied with delays in the publication of research under the status quo. Preprints are viewed by 92% as effective at improving transparency, by 96% as effective at improving research visibility and by 94% as effective at accelerating academic discourse.
What are other governments doing about this?
Japan has announced that all researchers who receive public funding will need to publish their research papers as preprints from April 2025. £50 million in funding has also been made available to universities for the development of supporting infrastructure.
The European Council has called on member states to move towards a publishing system which is “not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers”. The European Union directly funds Open Research Europe, which enables researchers to quickly publish their work prior to peer review, with no article processing charges, with open access for other researchers and the public.
In Brazil, the Scientific Online Library (SciELO) is supported by government funding and enables researchers to publish their work with no article processing charges, with open access for other researchers and the public.
By contrast, the UK continues to waste taxpayers’ money via indirect subsidies to for-profit academic publishers which reward failure and undermine initiatives for reform.
How will researchers publish in academic journals without funding for article processing charges?
Article processing charges are only paid to academic journals to publish research under the “gold” open access model.
Open access is a requirement for all UKRI-funded research, but under Plan U this requirement would already be met at the preprint stage. This means researchers could publish in academic journals without paying article processing charges. While readers would require subscriptions to read the journal-version of the research article, they could read the preprint-version for free (however, the preprint-version would not be completely identical to the journal-version, and some journals do not currently accept research which has already been published as a preprint, but this may change). UKRI policy would need to be amended to accept preprints as compliance with their open access policy.
Alternatively, researchers could also publish in academic journals which offer the “diamond” open access model. The “diamond” model does not involve any article processing charges, but still enables readers to access the journal-version of the research article for free. Costs are covered by core funding given to publishers by public or philanthropic funders.
What would the proposed reforms mean for “long form” open access?
To protect researchers in the humanities and arts from losing out on potential publishing opportunities, the proposed reforms would only apply to “shortform” publications such as research articles, and would exclude “longform” publications such as monographs and book chapters.
Sanjush Dalmia is the Science Policy Lead at UK Day One. Previously, he was a Policy Advisor to the Shadow Minister for Science, Research and Innovation. He holds a masters degree in medical research and has published multiple biomedical research papers in academic journals. He is in the process of completing his medical training, and has spent the last two years on NHS wards across West Yorkshire.
Jonny Coates is the Associate Director of ASAPbio, a scientist-driven non-profit promoting transparency and innovation in life science communication. Jonny is a leading advocate for academic reform with over 10 years’ experience in immunology and metascience. He has contributed to pieces in The Economist, The Scientist and Nature on topics from open science to academic culture.