What If Open Access Publishing Was The Norm?

The Actual History

The academic publishing industry as we know it today emerged in the aftermath of World War II, with commercial publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley expanding significantly during the scientific research boom of the Cold War era. These publishers established a business model that has proven remarkably resilient: scientists conduct research (typically funded by governments or non-profit institutions), write papers about their findings, and submit them to journals for peer review. Other scientists review these papers without compensation, after which publishers format the accepted papers and sell access back to the same institutions that funded the research in the first place.

This business model became particularly lucrative in the digital age. In the 1990s, as academic journals transitioned from print to digital formats, publishers bundled their offerings into subscription packages that libraries felt compelled to purchase. Rather than reducing prices as distribution costs fell, major academic publishers increased subscription fees dramatically. Between 1986 and 2006, journal subscription prices rose by 302%, while inflation during this period was only 80%.

The open access movement emerged as a response to this situation. In 2001, the Budapest Open Access Initiative articulated the principles of open access publishing, advocating for the free availability of research papers online. In 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing further formalized these principles.

Despite these initiatives, the traditional subscription model remained dominant. By 2019, the academic publishing industry generated approximately $25 billion in revenue annually, with profit margins for major publishers like Elsevier reaching 30-40%, higher than those of companies like Apple, Google, or Amazon.

The open access movement has made significant progress, particularly in the last decade. The creation of open access repositories like arXiv (established in 1991) and platforms like PLOS ONE (launched in 2006) provided alternatives to traditional publishing. Various governments and funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health in the US and the European Research Council, began mandating that research they fund be made openly accessible.

In 2018, a coalition of European research funders launched Plan S, requiring that from 2021, scientific publications resulting from research funded by public grants must be published in open access journals or platforms. Major publishers have adapted by offering "hybrid" journals and "article processing charges" (APCs), where authors (or their institutions) pay upfront for their work to be freely available.

However, as of 2025, the transition to open access remains incomplete. Approximately 50-60% of new research articles are published with some form of open access, but millions of older papers remain behind paywalls. The APC model has been criticized for shifting costs rather than reducing them, creating new financial barriers for researchers from less wealthy institutions or countries. Most importantly, the fundamental power structures of academic publishing remain largely intact, with a handful of commercial publishers controlling the most prestigious journals and maintaining significant influence over the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

The Point of Divergence

What if open access publishing had become the norm at the dawn of the digital age? In this alternate timeline, we explore a scenario where the principles of open access were embraced much earlier and more comprehensively, fundamentally altering how scientific knowledge is shared and accessed worldwide.

The point of divergence occurs in 1991, when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. In our timeline, physicist Paul Ginsparg created arXiv.org, a repository for physics preprints, at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This pioneering effort demonstrated that research could be shared freely and efficiently online, but its influence remained largely limited to physics and related fields.

In our alternate timeline, several key developments coincide to create a more dramatic shift:

First, Ginsparg's vision extends beyond physics. Through collaborations with visionaries in other disciplines, similar repositories are rapidly established for biology, medicine, chemistry, and social sciences between 1992 and 1994.

Second, in this alternate timeline, a coalition of major research universities, led by Stanford, MIT, and Oxford, makes a bold declaration in 1993: all research produced at their institutions will be freely available online. This "Cambridge Declaration" (signed in Cambridge, Massachusetts) quickly attracts dozens of additional signatories from prestigious institutions worldwide.

Third, major funding bodies adopt this ethos earlier. The U.S. National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, along with European counterparts, announce in 1994 that all research they fund must be freely accessible online—fifteen years before similar mandates began to appear in our timeline.

Fourth, a technological breakthrough occurs: A group of university libraries collaborates to create a unified, user-friendly interface for accessing research across disciplines, predating Google Scholar by over a decade and establishing open infrastructure controlled by academic institutions rather than commercial entities.

This confluence of events creates a world where, as the internet grows throughout the 1990s, academic publishing develops along a fundamentally different trajectory—one where open access is the default rather than the exception.

Immediate Aftermath

The Publishing Industry's Reaction

The immediate reaction from established academic publishers was a mixture of opposition and adaptation. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and other major players initially attempted to resist the open access movement through legal challenges and lobbying efforts. They argued that their services added essential value through quality control, editing, and distribution—services that would be compromised under an open access model.

However, the unified stance of prestigious research institutions and funding bodies created unprecedented pressure. By 1996, facing the prospect of losing their most valuable content and authors, most publishers began pivoting toward new business models:

Service-Based Models: Publishers repositioned themselves as service providers to the academic community, charging reasonable fees for peer review management, editing, formatting, and hosting, rather than for access to content.
Value-Added Platforms: Some publishers developed sophisticated analytical tools and discovery platforms that operated on top of the freely available content, creating new revenue streams.
Institutional Partnerships: Publishers formed partnerships with university consortia, offering bundled services at negotiated rates that were significantly lower than the subscription packages of our timeline.

While initially painful for publishers—several smaller publishing houses merged or disappeared—by 1998, a new equilibrium began to emerge. Overall industry profits decreased, but the business remained viable with more reasonable margins of 10-15%, comparable to other media industries.

Academic Career Incentives

The open access revolution prompted an immediate reconsideration of how academic impact was measured. Without journal prestige serving as the primary proxy for quality, institutions developed more nuanced evaluation metrics:

Citation Democratization: Without paywalls limiting readership, citation patterns became less influenced by institutional wealth and more by genuine scientific relevance.
Peer Review Innovation: Open peer review systems emerged earlier, with commentary and evaluation becoming visible parts of the scientific record.
Collaborative Metrics: By 1997, new impact measurements incorporated not only citations but also practical applications, public engagement, and interdisciplinary influence.

Young researchers entering academia between 1995-2000 experienced a fundamentally different incentive structure than in our timeline. Rather than targeting publication in high-impact journals regardless of readership, they focused on producing work that would be widely read, applied, and built upon.

Global Knowledge Equity

Perhaps the most immediate and dramatic effect was on researchers and students in developing countries:

Accelerated Participation: Universities in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia gained immediate access to cutting-edge research without prohibitive subscription costs.
Reverse Brain Drain: By 1999, countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa began reporting that more of their scientists were choosing to build careers at home institutions, as access to literature was no longer a limiting factor.
Regional Research Priorities: With better access to global knowledge, researchers in developing regions could more effectively address local challenges, leading to expanded research programs on tropical diseases, sustainable agriculture for specific climates, and locally-relevant technologies.

In our timeline, initiatives like Research4Life attempted to address this inequity by providing limited access to developing countries, but the open access revolution of the alternate timeline eliminated these disparities at a structural level.

Early Internet Culture and Norms

The academic commitment to openness influenced broader internet culture during its formative years:

Information Ethics: As the World Wide Web expanded beyond academia in the mid-1990s, the norm of free access to knowledge influenced discussions about copyright, intellectual property, and information sharing.
Search Engine Development: Early search engines developed with greater attention to scholarly content and citation relationships, leading to more sophisticated knowledge discovery tools for the general public.
Knowledge Platforms: Wikipedia, launching in 2001 (as in our timeline), emerged into an environment already accustomed to collaborative knowledge creation and open access, allowing it to mature more rapidly with greater academic participation.

By 2000, these immediate effects had already created a noticeably different information landscape, setting the stage for more profound long-term transformations.

Long-term Impact

Transformation of Scientific Communication

By the early 2010s, scientific communication in this alternate timeline had evolved far beyond the static PDF research papers of our timeline:

Living Documents: Research outputs became dynamic, continuously updated "living papers" that evolved as new evidence emerged, with version control systems tracking changes and attributing contributions.
Modular Publishing: The conventional research paper disaggregated into modular components—methods, data, analysis, interpretation—each published as they were ready and linked through persistent identifiers.
Rich Media Integration: Scientific communication routinely incorporated interactive visualizations, video demonstrations, computational notebooks with executable code, and direct links to raw data sets.
AI-Enabled Synthesis: With all research openly available in machine-readable formats, AI systems developed in the 2010s could analyze entire fields of literature, identify patterns, inconsistencies, and opportunities invisible to individual researchers.

This evolution dramatically accelerated the pace of scientific discovery. In fields like climate science, drug discovery, and materials engineering, research cycles that took decades in our timeline were compressed to years.

Economic Restructuring of Knowledge Industries

The academic publishing industry of 2025 in this alternate timeline bears little resemblance to our own:

Diversified Ecosystem: Rather than being dominated by a handful of publishers, the scholarly communication landscape includes hundreds of specialized service providers, many operated as non-profits or consortia owned by academic institutions.
Sustainable Funding Models: Infrastructure costs are shared across institutions globally through collective funding mechanisms, with sliding scales based on GDP and research output.
Value Migration: The estimated $25 billion that academic institutions spend annually on subscriptions in our timeline is instead directed toward research itself, supporting infrastructure for data sharing, and services that enhance the usability of knowledge.
Public-Private Partnerships: Commercial entities still participate in the scholarly ecosystem but as service providers enhancing the value of open content rather than as gatekeepers controlling access.

Perhaps most significantly, the trend toward consolidation and monopolization seen in our digital economy was tempered in this alternate timeline. The open values of academia influenced tech development broadly, leading to more open standards, interoperability, and distributed ownership of digital infrastructure.

Democratization of Innovation

With thirty years of open access as the norm, the geography of innovation in 2025 looks strikingly different:

Distributed Research Excellence: Research-intensive institutions emerged across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia much earlier than in our timeline. By 2025, the global distribution of highly-cited research more closely matches population distribution.
Citizen Science Revolution: Without paywalls separating professional researchers from interested amateurs, citizen science initiatives flourished. In fields from astronomy to biodiversity monitoring to public health, millions of non-professional contributors make significant contributions to formal scientific knowledge.
DIY Innovation Communities: Access to cutting-edge research enabled grassroots innovation movements. Communities in countries like Kenya, Indonesia, and Peru developed locally-appropriate technologies based on leading research, often improving upon designs developed in traditional R&D centers.
SME Research Utilization: Small and medium enterprises gained the ability to directly access and apply research findings without expensive subscription services, leading to more distributed innovation ecosystems across diverse economies.

These developments dramatically expanded who could participate in knowledge creation and application. In our timeline, various "appropriate technology" movements have attempted to address global innovation inequities, but the structural barrier of knowledge access limited their impact. In this alternate timeline, these efforts were supercharged by open knowledge flows.

Health and Medical Advances

The impact on global health has been particularly profound:

Accelerated Pandemic Response: When COVID-19 emerged in late 2019, thirty years of open science practices meant that research sharing was instantaneous and comprehensive. Vaccine development, which was impressively fast in our timeline at about 11 months, occurred in just 7 months in this alternate timeline.
Neglected Disease Progress: Diseases primarily affecting populations in lower-income countries received much greater research attention as scientists in affected regions could fully participate in global research conversations.
Clinical Practice Harmonization: With all medical evidence freely accessible worldwide, the gap between best practices in wealthy and resource-limited settings narrowed significantly. Clinicians everywhere could access the latest evidence, adapt it to local contexts, and contribute their experiences back to the global knowledge base.
Patient Empowerment: Direct access to medical literature empowered patient advocacy groups and individuals with chronic conditions to better understand their health and participate more actively in treatment decisions.

By 2025 in this alternate timeline, the health disparities between wealthy and developing regions, while still present due to resource differences, have narrowed by approximately 30% compared to our world.

Educational Transformation

The open access revolution fundamentally reshaped education at all levels:

Curriculum Modernization: With teachers and professors having unlimited access to research literature, educational content remained much closer to the cutting edge of knowledge across disciplines.
Textbook Revolution: Traditional textbooks were largely replaced by openly licensed, continuously updated educational resources tailored to different learning contexts and flexibly adaptable by teachers.
Research-Education Integration: The boundary between consuming and producing knowledge blurred, with even high school students able to engage with primary research literature and, in some cases, contribute to real research projects.
Lifelong Learning Infrastructure: By 2025, approximately 65% of adults globally participate in some form of continuing education or self-directed learning, supported by open knowledge resources—nearly double the rate in our timeline.

These educational changes have had compounding effects on innovation, economic development, and social mobility, creating a more knowledge-engaged global population.

Cultural Attitudes Toward Expertise and Evidence

Perhaps the most subtle but far-reaching impact has been on public engagement with science and evidence:

Trust in Scientific Institutions: Transparency in the scientific process, including open peer review and access to full research methods and data, increased public trust in scientific findings. By 2025, surveys show confidence in scientific institutions approximately 40% higher than in our timeline.
Media Coverage of Science: Journalists could directly access research rather than relying on press releases, resulting in more accurate and nuanced science reporting.
Policy-Research Connection: Evidence-based policymaking became more feasible as policymakers and civil servants gained direct access to research findings, leading to more technically informed governance.
Misinformation Resilience: While misinformation still exists in this alternate 2025, the combination of greater public scientific literacy and transparent access to evidence created stronger societal immunity to false claims.

These cultural shifts have been particularly consequential for collective action on challenges like climate change, where the alternate timeline has seen earlier and more coordinated global responses based on shared understanding of the scientific evidence.

Expert Opinions

Dr. Kamila Okonjo, Director of the Global Knowledge Commons Initiative at the University of Cape Town, offers this perspective: "The early establishment of open access as the default in academic publishing fundamentally altered power relationships in global knowledge production. In our timeline, researchers across the Global South can participate as full equals in worldwide scientific conversations, uninhibited by the financial barriers that blocked their colleagues in the other timeline. Perhaps most significantly, research priorities have been transformed—with scientific attention more equitably distributed across global challenges rather than concentrated on the problems of wealthy nations. The acceleration we've seen in areas like tropical medicine, drought-resistant agriculture, and affordable clean energy technologies stems directly from this more democratic knowledge ecosystem."

Professor Richard Zhang, Information Economics Chair at MIT's Sloan School of Management, provides an economic analysis: "What's fascinating about this alternate timeline is how it challenges conventional wisdom about innovation incentives. Traditional economic theory might have predicted that removing direct financial rewards from publishing would reduce quality or productivity. Instead, we've seen that when knowledge is treated as a public good rather than a private commodity, the overall innovation system becomes more efficient. The resources previously captured as excessive profits by publishers were redirected to research itself, while competition shifted from access control to providing value-added services on top of openly available content. The resulting ecosystem is both more economically efficient and more equitable, producing more innovation with better distribution of benefits."

Dr. Elena Reyes, historian of science at Oxford University, contextualizes these changes: "We should recognize that this alternate timeline didn't eliminate all problems in scientific communication—issues of rigor, replicability, and biases in what questions get studied all still exist. However, these challenges are more visible and addressable in a transparent system. What's particularly striking to me as a historian is how this early divergence in scientific communication rippled outward to influence broader social norms around information sharing, collaborative work, and the relationship between expertise and democracy. The culture of openness that began in academia ultimately tempered some of the more troubling aspects of the internet age we see in the other timeline, particularly around misinformation and the commodification of attention. It suggests that seemingly technical decisions about knowledge infrastructure can have profound consequences for democratic culture."