Benefits of Open Access Publishing

by | Aug 1, 2025 | Open Science

The image shows a person typing on a laptop, with the text "Benefits of Open Access Publishing" overlaid in bold white letters. The background has a soft orange hue, giving the image a warm tone.

Open access allows anyone to access academic or scientific content without economic or legal restrictions. It is one of the pillars of open science, and aims to democratize knowledge while promoting transparency, collaboration, and innovation across disciplines. Removing paywalls and licensing barriers offers several benefits for both authors and the general public. Let’s explore them!

Key benefits for authors of Open Access publishing

The main benefit of open access is that it makes scientific work easily accessible. This allows authors to reach a much wider audience. Their scientific publications become more accessible for researchers from countries or areas “where research is limited or less available” but also for other stakeholders like students, journalists, politicians or even regular citizens just interested in science.

For some authors, this visibility can also lead to a greater number of citations. In other words, open access might help authors to gain greater impact. There are several studies that conclude that there is an open-access citation advantage. For example, , found that open-access articles receive 18% more citations than expected. However, point out that there are also many studies that have found that this citation advantage has still yet to occur. In the end, “it is naïve to consider that valuable non-OA publications will be less cited”. .

Also, open access is a way to justify the scientist’s work to taxpayers and make accessible the work they have financed. It seems somewhat unfair for society to pay twice for access to the results of research it has funded itself. , but that still happens because a large amount of publications are published in subscription based journals. 

Another important benefit of open access is that it supports reproducibility in science. When research and data are freely available, other scientists can verify results, replicate studies, and build on previous work more easily. 

Finally, copyright is another important topic when we talk about open access. Traditionally, copyright was “seen as the instrument publishers use to exercise control over the circulation of knowledge, enabling them to prevent access” . In practice, many subscription-based journals ask authors to transfer the copyright to them when the paper is accepted. This usually happens through a Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA). In this case, the publisher becomes the legal owner of the article. Authors can still keep some limited rights, like using the article for teaching, including it in a thesis, or sharing a preprint or postprint in certain cases. This is called the green road to open access, where the author is allowed to upload a version of the paper to an institutional or subject repository. However, this is not always allowed and “the open access paradigm has emerged with the advent of the internet as a reaction against this model” .

A poster with the text: "STOP Restricted Access"

“Open Access” by bagaball in flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Consultation date: 21/03/2025

We could see the key benefits of open access for authors and society in general during the COVID-19 pandemic, where more than 30 leading publishers like Elsevier or PeerJ committed to make all their COVID-19 and related publications free and accessible to spread the knowledge and to foster the cooperation between researchers .

Open Access is also beneficial for citizens

What is completely clear is that open access promotes fairness in the way that science is more accessible to regular citizens. That’s also why altmetrics have appeared, to measure the societal impact of research that traditional scientometrics cannot .

Nowadays, many citizens are completely disconnected from science  and the only contact they have with it is through the media. Promoting open access is precisely a way to bring science closer to society. For example, thanks to open access, people can access articles without any restriction, or journalists can access papers (without copyright) to reuse and curate them to create news about scientific advancements, written in simpler language and translated or adapted for a particular country. However, this must go hand in hand with proper information literacy, as there is no point in making open access the norm if people still do not know how to access scientific information.

This openness is crucial for building a literate society. When knowledge is free and easy to access, people can learn more, ask better questions, and take part in important conversations. It helps everyone better understand the world around them and make smart decisions. In a time when science and information move fast, open access gives everyone a chance to keep up and grow together.

Moreover, open access lays the foundation for citizen science initiatives, where “the general public participate in scientific research tasks” . This engagement not only democratizes science further but also enriches research with diverse perspectives and real-world insights, strengthening the connection between science and society.

Diagram with Open Access benefits

Taken from Recommendations for the Transition to Open Access in Austria in Zenodo licensed under CC By License 4.0 / cropped. Consultation date: 19/05/2025

The other side of Open Access: How publishers are Staining the model

We’ve seen all the benefits that Open Access offers to authors and society, but there is also a darker side to this model that has sparked controversy: Article Processing Charges (APCs). This funding model has been adopted by many academic journals to cover the costs of publishing articles in open access. However, what seemed like a democratic solution has been exploited by some publishers, who, instead of removing economic barriers to research, have shifted them onto the authors themselves.

APCs are fees that authors must pay to have their work published in some open access journals (or even to retain the rights if yoy want an article to be open!). While the concept of Open Access is designed to remove economic barriers for readers, the financial burden is now placed on the authors. These fees can be substantial and vary depending on the journal, creating a new form of inequality, especially among researchers with limited funding. Although some funding bodies or universities cover these costs, not all authors have access to these funds, which can exclude many from participating in science.

Despite these criticisms, it is crucial to emphasize that the Open Access model remains a necessary and just solution for democratizing access to science. The benefits of unrestricted and free access continue to be fundamental in moving toward a more open, collaborative, and transparent science.

The problem lies in how some publishers have managed to exploit this situation, instead of working towards greater accessibility and transparency in the publishing process. As the Open Access model continues to evolve, it is essential to seek solutions that eliminate both the barriers for authors and readers, and ensure that access to science is not conditioned by financial means.

References

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