Beyond Open Access: Researchers Are Building the Publishing Infrastructure That Science Actually Deserves

The Concession That Open Access Represents

Open access was supposed to be the revolution. The argument was straightforward and compelling: research funded by public money should be freely readable by the public, and the internet had eliminated any technical justification for restricting that access. After two decades of advocacy, policy mandates, and institutional negotiation, open access has achieved genuine, measurable gains. The NIH's public access policy, strengthened by the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memo requiring immediate open access for all federally funded research, represents a significant structural shift. Paywalls are coming down in ways they were not a generation ago.

And yet, a significant and vocal segment of the scientific community has arrived at a disquieting conclusion: open access, as it has been implemented, is not a revolution. It is a concession. It has made research readable without making the publishing system equitable, efficient, or structurally accountable to the researchers who produce the work that sustains it. The commercial publishing apparatus remains largely intact. Article processing charges—the fees researchers pay to make their work open access—have simply replaced subscription revenue as the mechanism by which large publishers extract value from publicly funded science. The gatekeepers have not been displaced. They have been paid differently.

For a growing number of researchers, that is not good enough.

What Frustration Looks Like When It Builds Infrastructure

The movement to build genuinely independent publishing infrastructure is not monolithic, and it would be a mistake to characterize it as purely reactive. Certainly, frustration is a fuel. Peer review timelines that stretch to eighteen months or more. Rejection rates at elite journals that exceed ninety percent, with decisions that frequently reflect prestige signaling rather than methodological rigor. Editorial boards populated by scholars who hold their positions indefinitely, accountable to publishers rather than to the scientific communities they nominally serve. These are not abstract grievances—they are structural features of a system that slows the dissemination of knowledge and concentrates power in ways that serve commercial interests more reliably than scientific ones.

But frustration alone does not build software. The researchers now constructing alternative platforms are motivated as much by a positive vision of what scientific communication could be as by dissatisfaction with what it is. That vision centers on a few core principles: transparency of process, community governance, elimination of artificial scarcity, and speed of dissemination commensurate with the actual urgency of scientific knowledge.

Decentralization as a Design Philosophy

The most architecturally ambitious experiments in this space are drawing on blockchain technology—not for the speculative financial associations that term has acquired, but for its functional properties as a transparent, distributed, and tamper-resistant ledger. Several research teams, including the DeSci (Decentralized Science) movement that has attracted participation from researchers at institutions including MIT, Stanford, and the University of California system, are developing publishing protocols in which the peer review record, editorial decisions, version histories, and author contributions are recorded on a public blockchain.

The implications of this design choice are significant. In the current system, peer review is anonymous and invisible. Reviewers are not credited for their labor, and their assessments disappear into an opaque editorial process. Blockchain-based publishing makes the entire process auditable. Reviewer identities can remain confidential while their contributions are permanently recorded and—crucially—can be recognized and rewarded. Some platforms in this space are experimenting with token-based incentive structures in which peer reviewers receive compensation proportional to the quality and timeliness of their assessments, as evaluated by the community of researchers in a given field.

This is not a trivial innovation. The peer review system currently operates on the extraction of uncompensated expert labor, with that labor flowing upward to commercial publishers who monetize it without acknowledgment. A system that compensates reviewers changes the incentive structure in ways that could meaningfully accelerate the review timeline and improve its quality.

Researcher-Governed Cooperatives and the Return of Community Control

Not every alternative platform involves blockchain architecture. Some of the most promising experiments are considerably more straightforward: scholarly societies and research communities simply reclaiming direct control over journals that had previously been licensed to commercial publishers.

The most prominent recent example is the mass resignation of the entire editorial board of the journal Neuroimage in 2023, followed by the founding of Imaging Neuroscience—a fully open-access journal governed by researchers, hosted by MIT Press, and charging no article processing fees. This pattern—editorial exodus followed by community-governed reconstruction—has now repeated itself across multiple disciplines. In each instance, the precipitating cause has been some combination of rising APCs, publisher interference with editorial independence, or the simple recognition that the labor sustaining a journal's reputation was being performed by the academic community while the financial returns flowed elsewhere.

These cooperatives represent a reassertion of a principle that predates commercial academic publishing: that scientific communication is fundamentally a community function, and that community should govern it.

Speed, Preprints, and the Emerging Overlay Model

The preprint ecosystem—in which researchers post manuscripts to open servers like bioRxiv, medRxiv, and SSRN before formal peer review—has normalized a faster cadence of scientific communication that traditional journals are structurally incapable of matching. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints provided the scientific community and policymakers with access to emerging research weeks or months before the same findings would have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. That experience accelerated an existing shift in how researchers think about publication sequence and priority.

Building on this foundation, a growing number of platforms are experimenting with the overlay journal model, in which peer review is conducted on preprints after they have already been publicly posted. The review process becomes a quality signal layered onto work that is already accessible, rather than a gatekeeping mechanism that determines whether the public ever sees it. Journals operating on this model—including Discrete Analysis in mathematics and several emerging platforms in the life sciences—have demonstrated that rigorous peer review is compatible with immediate public access.

The Infrastructure Question Is a Values Question

The conversation about who builds and governs scientific publishing infrastructure is, at its core, a conversation about who science is for. The current system reflects a set of historical contingencies—the economics of print production, the prestige hierarchies of mid-twentieth-century academia, the consolidation strategies of a handful of large commercial publishers—that have no inherent claim on the future of knowledge dissemination.

Researchers building independent platforms are making an argument with code and governance structures rather than manifestos: that scientific communication should be fast, transparent, equitably governed, and structurally accountable to the communities that produce and consume research. These are not radical propositions. They are, in fact, the propositions that the scientific community has always claimed to hold. The work now underway is simply the project of building infrastructure that matches those stated values—infrastructure that does not merely open the door to scientific knowledge, but reconceives who holds the key.